Welcome, everyone. It's a Saturday morning at San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Kodo. I'm the head of the meditation hall. Very delighted to welcome Dojin Sarah Emerson to speak with us today. Sarah is the guiding teacher at Stone Creek Zen Center in Sebastopol, a longtime San Francisco Zen Center alum, and delighted to have her here in the seat. We'll begin the program chanting the opening verse. sutra opening verse which should appear in the chat window momentarily we'll chat together microphones will be muted and then the talk will begin an unsurpassed penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas.

[01:09]

Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's work. Can you all hear me? Thank you. Thank you for your visible nods.

[02:10]

Again, my name is Dojin Sarah Emerson. Really happy to be here with you all this morning. I lived at San Francisco Zen Center for about nine years, between the years of 19... 98 and 2007. And now I live and teach with my partner, Charlie Pocorny in Sebastopol, California, a place called Stone Creek Zen Center. I wanna start with thanking Henri-Marie Stairs for the invitation to be a part of this practice period and talk. I think that this idea came up when we were, our family was staying at city center during the evacuation Our family was evacuated from our home in October when there were wildfires in the county. And we were warmly received, along with our menagerie of animals, into city center. And so back in October, there was this vision of this practice period.

[03:16]

And would Charlie and I be a part of it? And this was not what anyone was picturing, I think. And I also want to just express my gratitude to Abbott David and Abbott Ed. and also Abbas Fu and Abiding Teacher Leslie James for your leadership of San Francisco Zen Center and for guiding this ship through uncharted waters of this amazing and potent and confusing and unprecedented time that we're all living in. To begin with, I just want to invite you can do with this invitation what you will. I want to invite everyone just to take a minute. If you like, in Zen, we have our eyes down in meditation. We don't close our eyes, but maybe even to close your eyes because the visual stimulus of Zoom and this kind of intake through the computers can be so intense that just to either bring your gaze down if you like or close your eyes and just come into your physical, lived, embodied,

[04:28]

Kind of pull ourselves back from the brain and the eyes that are so often connected to these computer screens lately and feel into, you know, like, what's the ecosystem of your internal experience today? What's the environment in there? What are the sensations that are calling for your attention? And... and your tender regard. And while we're here, feeling our breath and feeling into our physical reality, I just also want to invite that we call in and we kind of ground ourselves and stand together in praise and gratitude for our ancestors. all and like the broadest definition that each of us can conjure of that.

[05:31]

There's our biological ancestors, our familial ancestors, our cultural ancestors, and our ancestors in the tradition of wisdom, the people who have just human beings like us who have endeavored and strived and sustained this practice so that we may be so fortunate as to encounter it. And I also, I want to come in humility, and I wanted to name that. And I realized for myself there are two aspects of humility that correspond very much with the teaching that we're looking at. There's the humility, there's sort of an absolute or ultimate reality version of humility, where for all of us when we encounter the Dharma, just that humility of understanding I don't come here as an isolated individual. There's so many things that support me to be here and to encounter these teachings and to be with you and even to sit calmly and quietly for a few moments.

[06:36]

And so to me, I feel that intensely that this is not something I do on my own. And I feel the support of many, many conditions. And the other piece of humility I want to offer is... corresponds with the relative bodhicitta or the relative what we call conventional reality that I connected as we all are and connected as I am to all things. I live in a particular body and a particular embodiment and my views and my experiences are limited by that. And because of that, No matter how much intention I have to do good and not cause harm, the limitations of my experience engender ignorance. And so my words may cause harm out of that ignorance. And if they do, well, part of me wants to ask for forgiveness, but I also want to offer that I am open to feedback and ask that...

[07:46]

Yeah, if you see that happening, and you would like to, because sometimes that takes more energy than we have, please give me feedback about that. I also want to offer, so this talk is in the context of a multi-week practice intensive at San Francisco Zen Center City Center. We're looking at the Lojong training system. And... This is a training system that comes through the Tibetan tradition, so not traditionally a Zen practice. And I want to offer some humility in that as well. A teacher who's very dear to me, Norman Fisher, who I've done many practice periods with at Tassajara, and I think he's speaking next week, actually, wrote this wonderful book called Training and Compassion, which I really recommend it, which is a Zen take on this Tibetan training system. And I also understand, in part from my Dharma sister, Mary Stairs, that this training system is usually not encountered kind of just off the cuff.

[08:56]

It's something that usually we would practice many, many years before your teacher would give it to you and empower you with it. And Norman has given us this great gift of writing this book that's super accessible and for me puts it in a context that's relatable. And also... And just to honor that usually these teachings were encountered after many, many years of foundational practice. And so that we have to have that in mind as we encounter these teachings. And for those of you, I know not everyone here today is part of the practice period. So just to kind of give some foundational bits to what I'd like to talk about is the third point of these five points. And there's 59 slogans and they're divided into these five points. And As Henri and Mary Stairs was saying, there's like, there are these two, the first points, points one and two are like the bedrock of this training system. And I'm jumping to number three. And I've been thinking about how important it is to know what these first two points are.

[10:01]

And the analogy that came to my mind was, I don't know if other people have played this game when you were a child of like, it's like a car ride game or something. You're on a field trip or something where you, go through the alphabet and you do like A is for alligator, B is for bobcat, C is for chameleon. And then, you know, even if you're at llama, L is for llama, you have to go back and do all the A, B, C, D. Is this familiar to people? This childhood game of, it's a memory game. It's a mind training game, actually. You have to go back and do all the ones that came before to get to your next one. I kind of think of the Lojang system this way. Sometimes when in my experience, when I've worked with these training slogans and they're really around and alive in my life, they'll just sometimes pop into a given situation in my daily life, which is this great gift. And in those moments, if it's possible to remember to go back and like ground in those foundational first two points before we kind of move into the teaching that's being offered of that later slogan popping in,

[11:14]

Basically, these first two points are a foundation and a safeguard against a misapprehension of these later slogans. And I want to mention that because these points in point three are potentially dangerous, actually, if they're misapprehended. So just to review, the first point is also the first slogan, and it says train in the preliminaries. This is like a good 20 years, but we can, you know, we can still work with these and play with them. We're training. So that's foundational grounding and meditation practice, grounding in a relationship with a teacher, grounding in relationship to the Sangha. And there's also grounding in the daily practice of the contemplation of four things, the rarity and preciousness of human birth, the inevitability of death, Potency and kind of indelibility of karmic action and the inescapability of suffering.

[12:17]

And point three really works with how to live in the world where there's a certainty of suffering. You know, in Buddhism, the first noble truth that the Buddha teaches is there is suffering. We live in this human realm. There is suffering. There will be. And point three is these. Here are these tools for how to live in this world and walk the path of awakening. So that's point one. The second layer of the bedrock is training an absolute and relative bodhicitta. And I recommend, if these are unfamiliar to you, you can go back and see the earlier talks on this, or you can study the lojang in different ways. These are really beautiful, super profound. And again, like maybe another 20 years, you know, we get to 0.3 after 40 years. But essentially grounding in absolute bodhicitta is grounding in that sense of not exactly a knowing, but grounding in a trust and a faith in the way that we're connected to all things.

[13:25]

When we're going to engage compassion in this world, If we try to do it as in the delusion of being a separate and isolated individual, we will become very quickly overwhelmed and turn away pretty fast out of self-protection. If we can kind of have this really clear image, actually, of absolute bodhicitta, like taking our tiny human self and like resting ourselves in the gigantic heart of Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, the bodhisattva of compassion, like nestle yourself in that great being with. for a thousand hands and thousand eyes, now move forward into the world as one of those hands and eyes, as a part of that body. We donate ourselves to being part of the body of compassion that extends far beyond this. So that's grounding in absolute bodhicitta. We ground in the ultimate reality. And then we're also asked to ground in the relative reality, ground in the particularity of this body and this person,

[14:26]

And interestingly, and so profoundly, that teaching is rooted in Tongvaipractice, which I know will be the subject of the sashin that everyone will do together in this practice break at the end of this training session together. But again, these are the essential part here is that we root down in impermanence, in gratitude for our life, in appreciation of karma, in the reality of suffering, and we root down into non-duality, the balance between ultimate and conventional reality, now we move forward into these other teachings. And sometimes we have to do kind of a micro-grounding. Because I said we're in some situation and the slogan is there to help us. But if we take it sort of at face value and we don't pause and ground in meditation, and ground in these other teachings, we might wield it in a way that causes harm.

[15:31]

And we can look at some examples of that. The second really fundamental point I think of dealing with or working with the Lojang training slogans is to understand that the DNA of all of these teachings is this is teaching us how to train in compassion. And I mentioned that because some of them are when you first read them, you're like, what is that? And what are they pointing to? And when we spend time with them, these are teachings like many Buddhist teachings that just unfold endlessly, you know, like maybe at first we think we know what it means and then it just keeps unfolding and unfold. I'll give the example of, well, actually I think sometimes, so if they're confusing, one of the things I recommend is flip them around. and consider them from the other vantage point. So like the last slogan, slogan 59, which we won't get into today, is don't expect applause, which I think is, that always just makes me chuckle.

[16:36]

But it's such a good one. It's such a deep one. But at first I was like, I don't get it. Like, what does that have to do with compassion? But if I flip it around and I think about, well, when I'm moving in the world expecting applause, The teaching here is if I'm living in the world expecting applause, I am actually in a stance that is a hindrance to the cultivation of wisdom, compassion, and skillful action. Then it makes sense to me, actually, quite a bit. I'm expecting applause. I'm cut off from understanding how all things are supporting me to do anything and sharing that kind of sense of gratitude. And many of them are like this, like, don't go so fast. Flip it around. When I'm moving fast, when I'm being hasty, I am... in a stance that is a hindrance to cultivating compassion and enacting skillful action. So I just want to offer that. The DNA of all of these slogans is, this is a teaching on how to deepen our compassion. So point three is slogans 11 through 16.

[17:43]

They are rooted, really, so the DNA of 0.3, the slogans of 0.3 then is, or maybe, I don't know, can you like secondary DNA? The fundamental DNA is compassion. For this section, there's also kind of this running through theme of patience or the paramita of kushanti. It's really shanti, but there's a silent K there. And patience practice is fundamentally... Asking us to stay put. So 11 through 16, and we'll do kind of a quick survey of them. But that's another thing, again, like if we start to think like, wait, what does this have to do with anything? I think it's helpful to ground in understanding. These slogans are an encouragement for me to stay put when things are difficult. To stay in my experience. to stay in my body, to stay in my emotional reactions, to stay in the pain that's arising when there is suffering in my life.

[18:49]

And Mary talked about these same slogans on Wednesday night in her class and said this great teaching that I had never heard before, that impatience comes from not knowing the whole story. And again, if we invert that, then we can understand patience then comes from creating spaciousness. So for me, I've been working with these six slogans in that way that these are actually spaciousness cultivating slogans. And that spaciousness is essential for compassionate action in the world. When we think about the opposite of spaciousness is like constriction, tightening, clamping down, clenching, digging in, limiting. So that tightness, spaciousness, opening, considering the wider view, widening the lens, opening. And then I hope it makes sense to all of us, like how that joins with staying put and not moving.

[19:53]

And now all that together is kind of the cultivation of patience. So... It's a lot to kind of go through the slogans. There's a bunch of information there, especially for folks who are just encounter... I don't know if there's anyone that's the first Zen talk. But just listen and let it wash over and take what you will. And for those in the practice period, I did just want to offer some other thoughts about these slogans just to kind of add to what Mary has already offered. So the first... of this section is slogan 11, turn all mishaps into the path. Zen, so Soto Zen Buddhism, the Buddhism that's practiced at San Francisco Zen Center and at the center where I teach also at Stone Creek is a Bodhisattva school of Buddhism. It's kind of known in traditionally as a Mahayana school of Buddhism, but essentially what it means is that

[21:00]

Our practice is rooted in the bodhisattva vow that it's not really an altruistic idea of like, I want everybody to cross over to liberation before me. But it can be heard that way if we see it dualistically. But the bodhisattva vow is essentially the vow that's rooted in understanding there is no such thing as my liberation without the liberation of all beings. And because of that, any bodhisattva... vows to continue to return to this realm of suffering, this human realm of suffering, where suffering is guaranteed until all beings are liberated. And in being that, when we are struggling with pain, when we are struggling with difficulty, sometimes, not always, certainly not always, but every now and then it can be helpful to know That any human experience I have is teaching me about the human condition. And the bodhisattva in me can get really into that.

[22:04]

So we call forth the bodhisattva that lives in us, that resonates with this vow. And it's like, you know what, even this pain is deepening my capacity to resonate in compassion with other living beings. Because surely whatever I'm experiencing, other beings have and will experience. And so that lived experience of suffering actually becomes, you know, when we can, and again, like this is super important to know, we need to stabilize in relationship. We need to stabilize in Sangha with teachers. We need to stabilize in meditation. And when we can do that, our suffering becomes a root of knowing into the hearts of other living beings. And as bodhisattvas, this is something we strongly value. The second of this section, slogan 12, and also this is true of slogan 13, I think these two next slogans are extremely dynamic and also super dangerous.

[23:07]

So I just want to say that to me. I think they're really vibrant ones to practice with, and I really, really caution misapprehending them. The first of slogan 12 is drive all blames into one. I got upset, actually, the first time I heard this. And I've been working for a number of years on why I was upset. And here's what I've come up with that I offer to you. There is a really very clear but sometimes very subtle distinction between blame and holding people accountable for harmful action. And... And again, like as far as in my investigation, as I can tell, the blame is when actually the responsibility truly is ours. But we're projecting the responsibility outward onto someone else. Holding people accountable for harmful action is not blame.

[24:09]

It is like a very clear and I would say essential bodhisattva activity. And I have seen teachers conflate them. So when people have come and have said, I'm in pain from something that's happening. I've experienced, actually, and I've seen and I've heard from many other people the stories of teachers saying, well, how are you working with them? It's not a bad idea to root down in our experience of how are we working with something and what is our experience of something. But if our pain is coming from a place of somebody else's harm, It's not blame. And I say this because a lot of times, or a number of the examples that I know of are a person, a student is coming and they're in pain and their pain is coming from systemic or institutional oppression.

[25:11]

And the teacher is often a person that's not in that marginalized group when this situation has been harmful and doesn't understand. that this person isn't blaming, they're actually asking for accountability. And I've seen it actually drive people away from practice. So I wanna name that. And so in ourselves, we can do this really important work of discernment of like, what is the distinction? I think for myself, I've found like, If I follow the feeling, if I'm feeling some distress and I think that the source of it is external and I follow that feeling and it leads me to a feeling of helplessness or disengagement or overwhelm, I need to look again and see if actually that I need to look for some accountability.

[26:13]

If I look into it and I see someplace where there's something for me to work with and I have a feeling of agency, there's a good chance that at least there's some portion of it that is my responsibility and I can work with that. So I would say we know that we're skillfully using this slogan when we have a feeling of agency and there's something we can work with. And if it doesn't feel like that, then we need to consider, you know, how to get support to hold. Usually it's people in power accountable for their misuse of power. that makes sense. Another thing I think is really important about drag all blames into one is that when we're in a state of blaming, we are pretty young. We're like occupying a very young part of ourselves that is vulnerable and really would like to put agency outside.

[27:14]

And just to know that if we're really If it really is blame, you know, if really we're upset, but but it's but we're not kind of taking care of or we're not accompanying that younger part of ourself with the elder in us that says. What part of this is yours? And what isn't, you know, so that I feel like for me, that's the image of engaging this slogan. Drive all blames into one. Traditionally, it means like drive all blames into one. But in in in this. society in the United States, I feel like it needs this refinement of making this distinction between accountability and blame. And then in our enactment of it, we need to kind of let that younger one who's really upset and wants to project her responsibility outward have her voice and just be accompanied by the elder one that says, okay, and what can you do here?

[28:18]

And that that and again, like and then to remember, again, that that is asking us to open to spaciousness and patience and that that all of that is asking us to train in compassion or is putting us is sort of setting us up to deepen our compassion. So the next slogan, slogan 13 is be grateful to everyone. You know, does anyone else have this feeling of like, no. Thank you for that. Like, no, I'm not going to be grateful to everyone. I'm not going to be grateful to the people who are deliberately harming. And so then again, like make the discernment between holding those people accountable and actually in a real, in the deepest heart of a bodhisattva to hold people who are deliberately causing harm accountable is like the most loving thing we can do. if we really like going back to those preliminary teachings, if we're really standing in the indelibility of karma, it's not hard to feel compassion for people who are deliberately causing harm because they are really kind of screwed in the karmic overview of things.

[29:35]

We can have compassion. And in that compassion, one of the things we can do to aid those human beings that we may be able to generate some compassion for, even like the super bad guys, is hold them accountable for their actions. And in there, we can be grateful for the immense kind of stretching of the human heart that all that activity requires. We do not have to be grateful for harmful action. We shouldn't be. We should actually resist and try to prevent harmful action at all costs, I would say, as bodhisattvas. But we can be grateful for every experience that tempers and softens and tenderizes and stretches our heart. It's like in metta practice. For those of you who know about loving kindness practice, it's another kind of cultivation like the lojong series where we begin with sending love. Actually, we're supposed to start with ourselves.

[30:36]

That's very tricky for a lot of people. And then we begin by cultivating it for someone we treasure and cherish. There's no... difficulty, then we go to someone neutral, then we go to someone who we really despise, eventually. We start off with somebody who we just find annoying, but we work up to someone who we consider somebody who deliberately causes harm, you know, and in that we really are, we are cultivating a bodhisattva heart. Because one of the things, too, again, we can ground an absolute reality. We can ground an absolute bodhicitta and understand people who are deliberately causing harm. There's a bunch of conditions that have led them to that very dangerous and horrible state. And they are. But again, don't be grateful for their actions. Slogan 14 is see confusion as the four bodies of Buddha, as the Dharma, as the.

[31:38]

the the dharmakayas so this word like i i think in the terms of the situation we're all in right now i don't know how it is for you confusion is like a daily multiple times a day situation you know there's so much uncertainty there's so much confusion This also could be, the same word that we use for confusion here could be delusion. So this is also a, this is a slogan that's encouraging us again to kind of root in non-duality. Don't reject the mind of confusion. Don't reject the mind of delusion. Understand that this is the ground upon which we wake up. There's another later slogan, you know, if you can practice while you're distracted. I'm paraphrasing, but it basically says you're doing really well. So understand. So I think I don't know how it is for other people. For me, confusion is the more I've committed myself to really going, paying attention to the somatic experience of my embodied life, the more I can say for certain that confusion is viscerally painful for me.

[32:55]

It is a very uncomfortable state to be in. It's very akin to uncertainty. I would like to leave that place. And I can watch my mind conjure ideas of certainty or fantasies of how things will be. Oh, I'm going to figure this out. But if I can catch with this slogan, the support of the slogan is if I can catch myself right in the midst of that, the pain of it and the wanting to run away from it and just abide and like imagine the bodies of Buddha right there. Again, it's a kind of spaciousness. It's a kind of opening. It's a kind of support to stay put in that experience. Slogan 15 is the four practices are the best of methods. And Norman does his own spin on some things, and this is one of the places where he does his own spin. He calls this one, do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, and pray for help.

[33:58]

which I feel like that's pretty good. I don't even know if we need to pick it apart. But for me, it's helpful to know the traditional understanding of these. Do good is also or accumulate good merit. This is, again, like ground in the preliminaries and understand the intensity with which karmic action unfolds, understand the complexity of karma conditions that we each are, and then move in the world in an attempt to be of benefit. Avoiding harm is, you know, on the kind of obvious plane, is like, don't be hurtful. Don't deliberately cause harm. I would say also, I've been thinking about how, I've been thinking about, I think often actually about my cultural, conditioning and where I'm at and how I got here and how the way I was trained in the cultures I was trained in as a young person and that formative stuff and the wider culture.

[35:12]

Really, there's a few things that were really deep. And one of them was you are an individual. It's a super strong message in my life. And I would say that that is delusion. That's pretty fundamental delusion, actually, this idea of being a separate self. So if you, like me, were trained in that, and then there were some other things that are super likely to cause harm. One of the ones was not spoken out loud, but a lot of evidence toward white people are better. That happened. And that's the conditioning I had, for sure. Men are better. Straight people are better. People that fit in are better. People with able bodies are better. This was the training I received throughout my developmental years. And unlearning all of that, so it's not just like, oh, okay, I see that, and then I move in the world and try not to cause harm.

[36:15]

Actually noticing that, addressing that, working on that, and undoing the impacts of that on my... you know, deep into my psyche, deep into my unconscious, deep into like the places where my biases come from and my language comes from. And I think that's our responsibility. So to really engage with this slogan, to really do these four practices in avoiding harm, I would say one of the things we are called to do is to work with our conditioning so that we don't unconsciously cause harm. And then a Norman's version is appreciate your lunacy. The traditional version is pointing towards make offerings to hungry ghosts. In Tibetan, I don't know how to pronounce it, but the word is written D-O-N-S, so I would imagine something like dons. For those who have practiced in Zen centers, and if you have seen the Sajiki ceremony, we do ceremonies where we welcome in the hungry ghosts and we feed them.

[37:22]

I love these ceremonies. You could wonder about whether you need to think of these hungry ghosts as external or internal. I would recommend that don't do either. Understand them in both ways. We have aspects internally that are unsatiable, longing, isolated, banished to the shadows, not wanted. can never get enough, can never be fed, so that we have those within us. I also think there are beings in the world, sometimes in human form, but sometimes not, that have all these characteristics. Those are the characteristics of hungry ghosts. And the recommendation, again, to cultivate patience, to cultivate compassion, is to nourish these beings. Do whatever it takes to call these beings out into the light and feed them. When we do that ceremony formally, we cover up the altar.

[38:24]

Sometimes you even turn the whole altar around. You understand that these beings don't like that much light. And you put sweet things, and you put colorful things, and you kind of have to work hard at enticing them out. We can do that in a ceremony together in a ritual that's embodied externally. We can do that with ourselves internally. We can make the effort to call forth these beings and then feed them what they need. And the last part of the four practices that Norman calls pray for help is making offerings to Dhammapalas, make offerings to the guardians of the Dharma. And in the Tibetan tradition, these are very distinct beings who have, they have safeguarded and they have, they are the beings that are responsible for ferrying the Dharma through the world. I remember a teacher at Tassara, Reb Anderson, I think it was him who recommended, like, just say help. Just ask for help sometimes.

[39:27]

Like, just say help. And when we do that, you know, whatever our relationship is to prayer, praying for help is always an acknowledgement that we're not alone. Even if we're, like, totally by ourselves somewhere and we say help, We're calling forth this understanding that we're not isolated and we're not cut off and we're not disconnected. And I recommend it. If you're ever in a state of desperation, I recommend saying it out loud, actually. It's helped me. And it's very humbling. Often I get myself into a place of desperation because of a certainty that I'm isolated. And if I just say, help! I find so much relationship there. People don't have to be embodied to be helping me. And they don't have to be embodied to be helping you.

[40:29]

But I also really love this image. So again, if it needs to be more kind of literal, this image of making offerings to the beings that secure and safeguard the Dharma, that the ones who make it possible for us in any given moment, You know, when we're about to lose it and then like we take a breath, you know, those moments when you don't lose it for whatever reason, that grace that comes, you know, that helps us to not blow up at somebody in a situation where we might have before we started practicing. Right there, that's an offering to the Dhammapalas. That's an offering to the guardians of the Dharma. And we can understand ourselves and our efforts to be offerings to the Dhammapalas. And When we have those moments of understanding like, oh, I can do this skillful behavior because all these people have passed this thing down to me. Take a minute and offer the merit of anything good that's happening right there to all the beings that have come before you and to all the beings to whom you will be an ancestor.

[41:33]

To all the beings in the future that will follow in this lineage because of the efforts that you make. The last slogan of this section, slogan 16. Whatever you meet, unexpectedly join with meditation. Again, I think the situation that we're all living in together is rife with uncertainty. We are collectively like I know people I know there have been pandemics in the past. I'm understanding that. But we've never had a pandemic where we've had this level of global communication and connection and this like understanding of how. of how it's happening globally, and even this moment of moving from such a rapidly moving world to suddenly stopping. It's super disorienting for human beings. We're routinized kind of creatures. We like our habits, even when our habits are horrible. I think it's fair to say our collective habits have been horrible. And this pause is not all bad, even with its devastation.

[42:39]

And And any time we meet something unexpectedly, I think it's important to know there is loss in that. Our expectations have a kind of weight to them. Even if we're practitioners and we're like, oh, I'm all into not knowing. For those Zen students who are like, not knowing is most intimate. That's my thing. Yeah, and. Human beings like to know. We like to have certainty. We invest in our expectations, whether we like it or not. And every time our expectations are not met, there is always loss. There's always grief. And there's always a lot of effort to digest that. So I think part of what is happening to us collectively is this kind of, you know, many, many people I talk to are having trouble focusing. They're having trouble remembering things. They're having trouble sleeping.

[43:41]

This is because all of us are trying to process all this uncertainty and confusion. And in that, we're doing this work of working with the unexpected. We're actually doing this Bodhisattva work of what happens when things do not turn out the way I thought they should. This is a huge, huge practice of wisdom. The world actually is always not happening the way we expected it. And we do a lot of kind of fancy footwork to imagine that it is happening the way that, oh, yeah, that's exactly how I thought it would happen. We're leaving out like 90% of the content of what we expected or 90% of the content of what's happening, you know, to make it look like, oh, yeah, that's what I planned that. But here we are together in this terrible situation. It's got its strange gifts in it, you know. I don't want to jump over the tremendous suffering that the pandemic is bringing into this world.

[44:47]

You know, I really, I can't, I can't minimize that. The death and like loss of life and loss of loved ones and loss of income, loss of stability. Even for some of the young people I see around me, just the loss of their normal, you call them like rites of passage. It's huge. It's completely disorienting, let alone for those who are losing jobs and livelihoods and people they love and people losing their own lives. It's a tremendously high cost that we're all paying. And still, it is a gift. There is this gift of slowing down that is being requested of us, I think. And I think these slogans are actually support us to meet this situation. There's another slogan further on, slogan 35, that says, don't go so fast. I think these are all meeting this moment.

[45:50]

I don't know how it is in the city, although I guess I do know because our Dharma brother, Greg Fain, keeps... He sent us a couple of pictures from Twin Peaks and like just the clarity of the air in the city. I've walked out of my house a number of times lately. And my feeling is this is like the spring in the 70s when I was a child. Or like this is this is what spring smelled like when I was a kid. And I'm not even really registering what I'm registering, you know. And then I realized, oh, the air is so much cleaner. And if only that, you know, there's there's something in this moment that we're in that's. It's asking us to stop for a second and notice, like, what are we noticing? So it's asking us to do this practice of stop, stay, and be patient enough to take in what's here. What is essential to me? What can I live without? Maybe short-term, maybe long-term. What are the things I thought I needed long-term that actually I'm starting to realize I don't? I guess I didn't need to travel as much as I thought I did.

[46:56]

That one is pretty clear for me. So I just want to encourage us to utilize these amazing gifts of the Dharma in these slogans to meet this moment that we're all in and really see if we can pause. It may not be possible. Lots of people are speeding up. I recommend listening to slogan 35 as well that says, don't go so fast. Slow down for a minute if you can, even if it's just in our mind and see what's here. Can we smell it? Can we taste it? Can we feel what we're being asked to learn right now? And remembering that what's being offered to us in these slogans and also literally in our lives and literally in our collective experience right now is to take this pain and difficulty and turn it into the path of awakening. So what is it that we're waking up to right now?

[47:57]

Thank you. Thanks so much, Sarah. Now we have an opportunity for questions, comments. If you would like to participate, you can open your participants pane, and there should be a button there to raise your hand. When we see a hand come up, I'll call it a name, and we will unmute you, and then we can continue the conversation. I see Miguel first. Can you hear me? So my question is, by the way, thank you very much for this talk. It's been very informative and it's helped a lot. I appreciate slogans 12 and 13 and what you said about them, especially about blame versus accountability. And how to be more or less grateful for the experiences that open you up, but not grateful for the

[49:06]

harm that was done unto you. And I appreciate the entire point of accountability, especially in terms of privilege. It's something that's been very difficult for me to deal with as of late, where I'm trying my absolute hardest to hold compassion for people who go out and do these violent demonstrations at the state capitals with assault rifles. I'm trying to view them with an open heart, but there's a resentment that bores out in the in at the end of all that and i'm wondering how how do you deal with that while working with these slogans when you hit those points where you're like i feel that my compassion is uh getting taken advantage of and accountability is being tossed to the side yeah I'm just thinking of, I saw an image of these men armed to the teeth.

[50:14]

They're all white. Like, one of them has a rocket launcher. And he's standing unmolested in line at a Starbucks. And it was breathtaking. It was like, I think maybe, actually, I think maybe the thing to do in those moments of like, especially feeling that your compassion is being taken advantage of because that is super important to guard that, right? Like compassion, yeah, it shouldn't be, we have to offer it in a way with our good boundaries, right? With our loving bodhisattva boundaries so that it can't be. And I think in those moments where you see that level of privilege where it's like, oh my God. we root in those preliminaries and if we, and we start in relative compassion with ourselves. So with Tonglin practice, we always start with ourselves. So we, we actually root there and it's like, I'll get to that guy later, but I'm going to go back to why this is making, this is making, this made me lose my breath.

[51:21]

And, and I'm a white person, right? Like I, I can't imagine how that looks to people of color that the audacity of walking around fully armed and no response. I, I can't, I can't, I don't know. But I can feel that rage in me of like, this is untenable. So we start here. We start with ourselves. Thank you. Thank you. Next I see Yanir. Okay. Thank you. My question – it's shifting gears a lot from the previous one. I'm a little emotionally stirred from just the previous question. But thank you for that question, Miguel, and thank you for the talk.

[52:26]

So my question had to do with slowing down and not moving so fast. Just a more practical day-to-day usage of that. When you're living with partner and kids and homeschooling under these circumstances, it's challenging to say the least, and you've got your work that needs to be done too. And sometimes you're not in sync with your partner. So how can you, when they're... I find that I'm, through just regular practice, I'm becoming, I'm happy to say, more skillful at just slowing down myself. But not everyone around you, like you said, is going to slow down. So how do you maintain your spaciousness and slow down amongst the pressure to speed up?

[53:34]

Effortfully. I don't mean to be blind, but for myself, because I also have kids at home, and the first few weeks I was like, why can't I get anything done? I can't get anything done. There have been a few times this week where I was like, I'm going to cry. I'm going to cry right now with overwhelm. So I can either see, I either have the energy or So spaciousness, which sounds like relaxing, it isn't. It's effortful. And spaciousness in this world of suffering and craziness is effortful. And so I think sometimes I'm either like, I don't have the energy to be a grounded, decent person right now. I'm snapping at my son or I'm snapping at my daughter. And I'm like, okay, I see that. And I literally like move myself out of the room for a second. Or one of the things I have to do is like let some stuff go.

[54:43]

And that's painful too and effortful. It's like, okay, this thing that actually I needed to get done right now, I'm not going to get done. One of the antidotes for me anyway has been lately, my son is eight and a half, looking at him and making eye contact. It just sounds ridiculously small. But it just stops the frenzy thing, the feeling that something has to happen right now. And when I do that, one of the things that's really alive for me in this time of all of us being kind of in this crucible together is how fleeting human life is. So do you have children? Yes. How old are they? Nine and six. Yeah. So, you know, like you can literally see them growing. And it's so fleeting that it almost like then I realized like, oh, a lot of the busyness is to get me away from understanding from this like almost intolerable tenderness in my heart about their mortality and my mortality in this whole situation.

[55:51]

And suddenly that the frenzy really loses its power. Yeah. Because I see it for what it is. It's an actually collectively cultivated delusion that's trying to get us away from reality. And the reality is our life is precious. It isn't permanent. Death is inevitable. You know, those four reminders in the beginning. And those help us focus. They help us in any given moment. It can help to be like, look at the child. Oh my gosh. They are so extraordinary. It's amazing they survived this long. And And they will not last forever. And it helps just bring us back into the right alignment with our priorities. And that, at least for me, is something I just want to offer is it can ground me in what really matters. Thank you. Yeah, that makes sense. Terry Baum.

[56:52]

Thank you so much for your talk and I'm especially sort of opened up with the idea that holding people accountable for the harm they've done is the action of a bodhisattva. I don't really think I've ever heard that before. And I've been wondering how I've actually really been always wondering about how Buddhist practice connects with social justice. And that gives a very, very clear channel. And I've also been wondering personally, I've been trying to figure out what kind of activism do I want to do that I can do at this time?

[58:05]

Because I feel very compelled to do something. And that's the idea that it is a very loving thing to do. hold people responsible for the harm they've done, it really opens things up for me. That what I'm doing is still part of my practice because it's about love. It is love to do this. So I just want to, I don't really have a question. I don't think I want to thank you so much for that. Because that is something new to me. Yeah, it makes me think of the precept of don't harbor ill will. I think if we are going to lovingly hold people accountable for their actions, we have to investigate how there's a part of us that actually kind of loves to see other people be bad and feel righteous about it and feel different from it.

[59:14]

And then we hold ourselves accountable for that, really investigate that. And then in relationship, we hold people accountable for their harmful action. Thank you. I see Miles' name and Nancy's face. Hi, Sarah. Yes. I just want to... Your talk today is so rich and full of wisdom and experience and profundity and slogans. But I want to appreciate your response, your reply to Guineer and that moment when you said, and then I just cried. You know, it's like I'm balancing work. I'm balancing the kids. I'm trying to, like, make this all work so we all have a room to Zoom in so we can, like, keep sane, you know.

[60:19]

And then there just comes this moment when you just have to cry, you know. And there's something so profound about that. It's the letting go. It's not the crying of sadness, but it's just a release, you know. So I just want to appreciate that. Yeah, if I had taken myself to the bathroom maybe and had a cry instead of doing it like at my son, it might have been better and a little more skillful. Oh, Nance, let's see, you're frozen. Let's see, are other people frozen? Am I frozen? Can people hear me? Okay, somehow we just lost Miles slash Nancy. Thank you, Nance. Kodo, are you there somewhere?

[61:32]

Kodo just got logged out of Zoom. Oh, I see him. I see him somewhere. Sorry for the bump. I'm back. Matt, thank you very much. I don't see any hands up. That may be a function of my being sent out of the room. So if there are any... Oh, cool. Great. The old-fashioned way, just like... Hi, Sarah. Thank you so much for your talk. I found so much of it resonating and helpful. And I just wanted to appreciate the way you wove awareness of the impact of our conditioning on how we are responding or how we can cause harm inadvertently in many cases, and particularly your bringing in awareness of our privilege as white people.

[62:38]

And I know this is something you often talk about. And I just really appreciate you bringing it into today's talk in a subtle way. But it's so relevant and seeing how that relates to the practice of these slogans. And it also relates to, I think, to Terry's comment about how we care deeply about social justice, which I think is most people that, for some of us, it's more of a central part of our practice. Perhaps how these practicing with these slogans isn't separate from that. It's connected to that. So just thank you very much. Thank you for the question, but you might have a comment. Well, just appreciating your efforts in this realm. And I think that idea that social justice and practice are separate is a delusion.

[63:46]

Thank you. Sarah, I think we have time for one more question. And I see Barbara's hand. I can't see anything right now. I hear you, Barbara. Okay. I see you, actually. Yeah. Hi, Sarah. Hi. Thank you so much for your talk. And the one thing that you didn't mention, and I just feel it's so big in my life, is the loss and grief of what's happening with our democracy. And, you know, really quickly, right before our eyes, we're in the process of all the things we relied on that we expected to be the way things should be and the way things would be in the future. This is a big earthquake happening for me.

[64:51]

And realizing that... Not alone. Hello? Oh. Are you still there? You are not alone with that. Oh, okay. Yeah. I think it was great. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I wanted to... to share that and yeah. Yeah. The loss of ground is so painful. And I think I just want to also offer the view that the power structures of our country, including our democracy, have been broken. for a super long time. They've kind of been broken from their inception, actually. And I am totally in this camp with you of, like, they didn't look broken to me. They didn't look broken when I was growing up. They look, like, fair and beautiful and, like, everybody together.

[65:52]

But this time, we're in this evolution of these things showing up. that actually it's rotten to the core, and it kind of always has been. People have been excluded from the power, for example, of voting from the get-go. It was part of the idea in the original forming of this country to exclude women, people of color, and immigrants. There was all this exclusion written in, and now it's almost like it's reached a breaking point where the lid can't be kept on that story anymore. And we do have, and there is grief, you know, and there's also tremendous possibility for renewal. So I recommend, actually, I feel like it's super important to do the work of grief. Don't jump to the renewal. I can't, for myself, don't leap to the renewal. Feel the deep pain of the grief.

[66:54]

Abide in that. And from the strength of that move into how do we move forward? Thank you very much. Thank you. Sarah, that looks like about our time. Would you like to make any closing comment before we chant the closing verse together? Just wanting to deeply appreciate everyone that offered the gift of your time and attention and your practice. May anything harmful, again, please let me know. And anything helpful may be of benefit to all these. Thanks so much. If you'd like to join in the closing chant, the words should be showing up in the chat box just now.

[67:56]

May our intention equally extend to every being and place with a true merit of God's way. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Illusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sarah.

[69:05]

Thank you very much. Thank you, Koto. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Zen Center. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Koto. Thank you, Sarah. We appreciate it. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Sarah. Deep, deep thank you to you, Sarah, and great to get to know you. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Sarah.

[69:45]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.61