This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness. It took me years to understand this too was a gift. Good morning to San Francisco Zen Center on this gorgeous spring day. Red bud, ceanothus, jasmine. It's crazy out there. And here we are.

[01:00]

Here we are. Something brought us here this morning. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Mary, for inviting me to speak. Thank you to all my teachers. Thank you to all our teachers. I want to acknowledge them all this morning. And I guess I'm here this morning to remind us that Buddhist practice is not for the faint of heart. And hopefully also to give some encouragement for all of us along the way. Norman Fisher, a former abbot of Zen Center, a poetry teacher, a high school teacher, speaks a lot. used to say that when people would come up to him, knowing that he was a Zen teacher, and say, oh, you know, I really want to study Buddhism, he would say to them, actually, no, you don't.

[02:15]

It's not what you think. So, actually, to study Buddhism is to study the self, It's to study our life. It's to study our karma. It's actually to look honestly at the stories that we tell ourselves, to look at all of our conditioning, to look at our habitual ways of responding. To look at the ways that we close down so quickly to life. To what is right in front of us each moment. It's to look at our blaming.

[03:23]

And it's to look at our cries of, why me? Arlene told me the other day that Norman used to say to people, why not you? So the problem with blaming and with looking outward, outside ourselves to explain our lives and to escape from this suffering, is that it actually keeps us in a very small situation. what we think is comfortable, but actually isn't a very comfortable place. And it perpetuates the suffering that we are actually hoping to escape from. So before we get ahead of ourselves, what is this karma that I am referring to? So karma is the basic law of cause and effect.

[04:29]

It is the volition, will, choice behind each action that perpetuates it, that moves it into either fortunate or unfortunate material for us to work with in the future. So each morning here in this Buddha hall, we come up for service after sitting in the morning, after sitting zazen. And there's bowing, there's chanting, there's chanting of sutras, offerings of fragrance to the Buddhas, to the ancestors. And the first chant that we chant in the morning, the first actually spoken words in the morning are turning towards, are acknowledging our ancient twisted karma.

[05:42]

So for all of you who know it and all of you who don't, we come up and we sing, we chant, all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion. Born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. And we chant that three times. Avowing. Confessing. Admitting. Opening to. Turning towards. taking full responsibility for. Beginningless. Ancient. Twisted. You know, upside down, thinking each time I responded from a wrong view, out of fear.

[06:51]

Greed. Each time I responded, I closed down and I responded with greed. I was afraid I wasn't going to get enough. anger, hatred. Each time I responded angrily, I just couldn't let that vulnerable soft place be exposed. I responded with anger. So we carry that forward in Buddhist practice, in Buddhist thought. We carry that forward from ancient, from beginningless time. When I was a student at Green Gulch and this first started dawning on me, you know, what have I gotten myself into? I was in practice discussion, I was in Dokusan with Reb Anderson, one of our senior Dharma teachers. I was like, you know, how can this be? Like each time I missed, each time I wasn't present, each time I didn't meet what was coming since from forever,

[07:59]

I am responsible for that. I have to take care of that. And I thought he was going to say no. And he said yes. And I could feel the enormity of that, you know. And he said, however, you can think of that as job security. And he was kind of gleeful about it, you know. And then he said, what else are you going to do with this life? So I think the enormity or the heaviness of it for me comes from my conditioning of having been raised in this lifetime that I know of, maybe in others, as having been raised Catholic and taking responsibility and guilt and feeling bad about everything all the time. And from the time I was very little, And how do you work with that? Linda Ruth told me recently that guilt is like this spinning wheel.

[09:05]

There's no inroads. You just keep spinning it. And also confession. So there's confession in Buddhism. And I wasn't so happy about that when I heard that. Because again, my experience of what confession was growing up Catholic was very... It was very shaming. You know, I'd go into this little, this dark room and there was a man on the other, an old man on the other side of the screen. And even if I was, you know, very, like I loved Dr. Father Donsworth. Loved him on the schoolyard. But then when he was behind that screen, it was very scary, you know. And if I didn't confess everything God knew, and that's even worse. So then I would mix things up, you know. So, you know, my... this confession, my experience of confession in Buddhism is, you know, I bring something that is just so hard for me to admit to myself.

[10:08]

And I bring it into this safe place with a Dharma friend, with a teacher. And we turn this together. You know, my experience is that it's been met over and over with compassion, you know. They've studied their lives. They've been there too. They can relate. It's relating. They're not on the other side of the screen. They're right here by my side looking at this, looking at this together. So actually the good news is I later found out we don't go back to take care of this ancient twisted karma. We need it in this moment. And that's one of the beautiful things about practice, is that each moment presents itself, moment after moment.

[11:11]

I mean, there really isn't a moment, but this ongoing, this ongoing, this breath, there is a next breath for all of us right now, how fortunate we are. to meet this breath, to meet what is coming, what is here, with this breath. How simple is that? So after we take refuge in the morning, well, after we say, okay, karma, here's a new day, bring it on, we take refuge. because we actually can't bring it on alone. So in our practice, we take refuge in Buddha, we take refuge in Dharma, and we take refuge in Sangha. We take refuge in Buddha, in this very mind, in this awakened, deluded human.

[12:22]

We take refuge in Dharma. We stand in the truth of Buddha's teachings that we are not separate from anything. And we take refuge in Sangha. We take refuge in each other. Everyone in this room right now, we are taking refuge in each other. We decided to come here this morning to be with like-minded fellow, fella, practitioners. We can't do this alone. It's too scary. We scare ourselves out of it. So we take refuge. We turn towards our karma. We take refuge in ourself, in the teaching, in each other.

[13:24]

and we peel away. We keep peeling and peeling. So, first I'd just like to say a little bit about meeting this moment and then something about karmic tangles. So, as I said, our tendency, our deep, deep, deep conditioning is to turn away or to get in and fix. It's so tempting to just get in there and fix it. It's so tempting to just lean back and just let things continue. In one of the sutras that we chant weekly, the Song of the Jewel Mir Samadhi, which dates back to China in the 1100s, something like that. The date and the author aren't quite clear, but this has been passed by

[14:27]

from teacher to student over many, many, many centuries. And, you know, we chant these sutras and, you know, all of a sudden just something will kind of like pop up into your consciousness, you know, just one line. Or even as you're chanting it, you know, one line will pop out and it's like, ooh, what is that? So one of the lines in the Jewel Mirror Samadhi says that turning away and touching are both wrong. For it is like a massive fire. Turning away and touching are both wrong. When I first heard that and I was like, oh, you know, there's something there to explore, to study. It was kind of like, okay, well then what is there? You know, I didn't see any other options.

[15:28]

And what I've come to learn is that this is the other option. Sitting still. Staying with. Staying with. So in each moment, there is the opportunity to stay with our experience. Senior Dharma teacher Paul Howler likes to say, to experience the experience that is being experienced. So it's being experienced. And yet, with the slightest discomfort, We close down. We're such sensitive creatures. We want to protect that soft, vulnerable place.

[16:37]

So we blame, we make up stories. It's so quick, our minds are so quick. And then we believe the stories, and then we carry them around for years. So with practice, with sitting meditation, we have the opportunity to practice this turning towards the breath, this letting go of the thought before it becomes a story, before it gets glued on to another story that I've already been curating for years. So with this practice of returning to each moment over and over again, something begins to build, some kind of trust begins to build.

[18:10]

Sometimes knowingly or not knowingly, we find ourselves standing in a bigger pasture, there's a little more room. There's a little more space. There's a little bit more time before we start with our stories or we start closing down. Sometimes we notice this in ourselves. Sometimes we notice it in our fellow practitioners, in our friends. We see this change. And that builds a trust. It also builds compassion. The root of compassion, of the word compassion, is to stay with. To stay with. So as we do this, as we stay with, as we cultivate or work with this patience practice. Patience practice is the hardest practice.

[19:15]

Defending something that's insulted us. Not believing the story that I am right. Actually letting something else in. And staying with that feeling. But if I don't, what's going to happen? That fear that's right there. You know, that we justify protecting ourselves. What is that righteous story? But I'm right. I am right. You know, and what does holding on to that story of how I am right really close our heart? I was listening the other day to Mary Oliver, the poet, passed away this year, recently, and there was a podcast from the On Being archive.

[20:24]

And it was Krista Tippett in conversation with Mary Oliver some time ago. Mary Oliver didn't normally give interviews. And Krista Tippett was reading from a book that Mary Oliver had written for young poets for writers. And she said, this is Krista Tippett speaking from Mary Oliver's book. So Mary Oliver is saying to these young poets, I promise, oh, this is one. She's telling them to write daily, to take up a daily writing practice, preferably in the early morning hours. And she says, when you do this, you create space. You create space for magical things to happen. She says, I promise it learns quickly what sort of courtship it's going to be.

[21:33]

She says that the writer has to be in a kind of courtship with this essential but elusive, cautious part. And if you turn up every day, it will learn to trust you. So yes, it is hard to sit. It is hard to practice patience and be with an experience that feels like it needs protecting. And yet, when we protect ourselves with our righteous stories, when we build these walls of how we've been wronged, of how we are right, we're holding down something that actually wants to be seen, that wants to be folded into the fabric of our life.

[22:46]

So when you keep showing up you allow something else to also show up. So I'd like to just pause here for a moment and to let each of us have a little space. If something hasn't come up for you already, is there a karmic tangle? that you live with? Is there a relationship that you kind of are just okay with? Best to just let it be. Because they were wrong anyway and they're never going to see your point of view. In Norman Fisher's group, one of the things that they chant is, may all our relationships be complete.

[24:03]

You know, is there a relationship that actually isn't complete? And are you brave enough to admit it? Maybe it's just too scary to put that story down of how you were wronged. So a couple of weeks ago, I woke from a dream. I was still sleeping. And I've shared this with a few of you. And I was asleep, but actually I was waking up. But I was still completely in my dream. And what was happening was my, it's not that I was singing.

[25:10]

It's like the song was being sung in me. My whole body was just in this beautiful song, just in this love. And it was, it was Whitney Houston. And we were singing. My body had her voice. It was the song. And I will always love you. It was just love. No protecting.

[26:13]

So sweet. And I knew still when I was in that, I knew exactly who my body was singing to. It came from pure love. devotion to that person in this lifetime and then i remembered my story and it was gone but my heart had opened beautiful i was so you know i hadn't been able to connect with the grief and the loss because i'm so right about what happened so

[27:31]

I was so grateful for that dream because I can viscerally, I can physically feel that again. My heart is open to that love. That channel is open again. And so I went and I found a picture. I went in and I found a picture of us before I had been given that box of darkness. And I put it on my altar. Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness. It took years to realize, no, it took years to understand. This too was a gift. Do I see it as a gift? No. Do I vow to continue to practice with this? Yes. So is there something that you would like to vow to take care of in this lifetime?

[28:42]

To keep turning towards? You know, it's still too scary for me to put down my story. And I vow to not bring this into my next lifetime with me. So I continued to turn it and to practice. When I worked at the farm at Green Gulch years ago, when you work on a farm, you realize that farming has a lot to do with soil. Soil's an amazing thing. I'm realizing a lot of people in the room maybe either are relating or not. to how amazing soil is. So soil is amazing. Farming, it's all about, it's not about the plants. Yeah, they're beautiful, but it's really about the soil. And so we would do a lot of digging in the kitchen garden.

[29:49]

And the soil has to be just right in order to dig. If the soil is too wet and you dig it, you'll leave this... like you'll create a wall where the shovel went in when it dries. You'll ruin the soil structure. And if the soil is too hard, likewise, you ruin the soil structure. So if the soil was too hard and we needed to dig a garden bed, we would deeply water the soil and let it sit overnight. And then in the morning, Many times, not always. You have to stay in relationship to these things. When the soil is just right, it just crumbles. It's the most beautiful thing, soil structure. As you can see, this is a very physical relationship that develops with soil. And I guess I'm

[30:59]

likening this to how working with a closed heart feels to me like this way. And with our practice, with this practice of confessing, bringing something out into the light, something very tender, Do this with caution. It's our cautious part. Do this with someone you trust. Do this first with yourself. See if you can trust yourself. And then with a trusted friend, a trusted Dharma friend. And then perhaps with a teacher, with a practice leader. Let the water, let the light, let the inroads to your heart open even if it's just a little bit, you know.

[32:11]

Have someone hold the Dharma flashlight while you dig, you know. So perhaps that's enough I'm so happy to be here with all of you in this lifetime, with all our karmic tangles. What else would we practice with? And may all our relationships be as complete as possible. For there is forgiveness There is forgiveness too. We're probably not going to take care of all of it in this lifetime. Thank you.

[33:22]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[33:46]

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