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. Good evening. Allison, would you like some water? I have some right next to you. Is it working? Okay. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. And as is rather a tradition for these talks, I would like to ask if there are any newcomers to the temple this evening, anyone who's coming here for the first time. Great. And just to extend an especially warm welcome to you all, I hope that your experience here this evening supports you and encourages your practice at

[01:02]

whatever level you've arrived with, whether you're just starting out or just kind of testing the waters or you're a seasoned practitioner. And that goes for everyone else here too, all the residents and very seasoned people, people who've been here a long time. I hope that you find something in this talk that might help support your practice. My name is Erin, and I'm a resident here at City Center. and I work outside of the temple as a high school teacher, which means, I'll say this delicately, that I'm in the middle of my summer vacation. Try not to hate me too much. I swear that I work hard during the rest of the year. But anyway, and for this reason, I had no excuse to refuse the opportunity. that our head of practice, Rosalie Curtis, so graciously extended to me to offer this talk this evening.

[02:03]

And it also meant that I had way too much time to prepare and much time to procrastinate and worry and fret about the talk. And so we'll see what actually emerges. Somewhere in the middle of the day today, I was fretting and kind of... feeling as though I couldn't quite put together all the pieces of everything that I'd let unravel. And I remembered this poem that was my favorite poem as a child. And I often say that I don't like poetry and not drawn to it. But suddenly I remembered this poem, which means that I did at one time enjoy poetry. So I thought I'd read it to you, and I'm just going to change one word, which I'm sure you'll recognize. It's called Sick. It's by Shel Silverstein. You might know this poem. Does anybody know this poem? Okay.

[03:04]

I cannot give my Dharma talk today, said little Peggy Ann McKay. I have the measles and the mumps, a gash, a rash, and purple bumps. My mouth is wet, my throat is dry. I'm going blind in my right eye. My tonsils are as big as rocks. I've counted 16 chicken pox, and there's one more. That's 17. And don't you think my face looks green? My leg is cut, my eyes are blue. It might be instamatic flu. I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke. I'm sure that my left leg is broke. My hip hurts when I move my chin, my belly button's caving in. My back is wrenched, my ankles sprained, my appendix pains each time it rains. My nose is cold, my toes are numb. I have a sliver in my thumb. My neck is stiff. My voice is weak. I hardly whisper when I speak. My tongue is filling up my mouth. I think my hair is falling out. My elbow's bent. My spine ain't straight.

[04:05]

My temperature is 108. My brain is shrunk. I cannot hear. There is a hole inside my ear. I have a hangnail, and my heart is, what? What's that? What's that you say? You say today is Saturday? Goodbye. going out to play. So I had that kind of experience today of just thinking, if only it were tomorrow. I didn't have to give a talk, but actually it's so far pretty fun. So last night I had the great privilege to begin a series of classes, teaching a series of classes at Green Gulch, which is one of our sister temples over in Marin. And this is a class that's about Zazen posture. And so I was met by about 26 kind of newish students.

[05:06]

Most of them had been there anywhere from like one day to a couple of years. All very interested in the topic of Zazen posture. believe it or not. And many of them came to the class because I had them go around and kind of talk a little bit about what they were hoping to get. And many of them were trying to sit every single day, period after period at Green Gulch. They sit for an hour and 40 minutes maybe in the morning and then another hour in the afternoon. And finding after some time that it's been a little bit hard to sit down and to not fall into painful patterns, to not have the feet fall asleep, maybe some of this is ringing a bell, to not have your back hurt, to not be overwhelmed by anxiousness or feel kind of depressed, and various reasons why people wanted to explore Zazen posture.

[06:08]

So I've been preparing, I taught the class once before a couple years ago, and I've been reviewing the materials and having a chance to immerse myself in the topic again and find fresh ideas and things like that. So I thought I would share some of what I've been studying a little bit with you. And I realized after reading what I've come up with tonight, it's not very practical. So hopefully, if you're interested in something more practical, you're welcome to talk to me later. Or we don't have a question and answer period tonight, but you're welcome to contact me if you... kind of want more practical information about zazen posture. So when I say the word posture, no doubt something happens to your body and mind. I'm not sure what it is. So you can just feel for a moment posture. What comes up in your mind? What comes up in your body? What kind of image do you have or kind of flavor do you have from hearing that word?

[07:15]

For many of us, posture might conjure an image of some kind of stiff, artificial, very effortful, upright posture in the upper body. Many of us might have been told year after year kind of how we should stand or how we should hold ourselves to have good posture. And so sometimes just by saying the word already, for example, if I say the word just even, say the word posture among my 14-year-olds who I teach, instantly the room kind of gets into this forceful, upright position, not breathing, before they can settle down. So if we kind of apply or have that idea of posture in mind when we're exploring zazen posture, it can be really difficult and challenging to find home, to find peace, to find a place, a real authentic place for ourselves in this practice, in the practice of sitting meditation.

[08:29]

And so, excuse me, for those of you who've just walked in, one of the main practices that we offer here as a community and that you can join us for is called Zazen, and it means... Seated meditation has a lot of meanings, but for tonight, let's just say it means seated meditation. So, one of the beautiful ideas, I have many books and various materials that I've been looking into and working with and different teachers around posture, and one of the beautiful ideas that I have found is really enlivening my own posture and has... brought a lot of kind of different quality, very relaxed, more relaxed quality to my own feeling of zazen posture, is the idea, the important idea, the important truth, that as humans we are actually creatures of movement. From the instant that we are conceived, which you can't find it, we're already in motion.

[09:37]

We're born out of motion. the interaction of beings, and we're already moving before we even have a shape, before we're even anything yet. And our movement is the sign, it's the process through which we actually take form and are eventually able to be born. We can't live, we can't actually not move while we're alive. And you might be able to feel that right now. You could close your eyes if you want to. Sometimes that creates a little bit more of a container. And just see if you can find that deep inner movement right in the middle of your relaxed, We tend to recognize two distinct categories of movement in our lives as humans.

[10:56]

Perhaps the kind of movement we're tuning into right now, we're able to tune into, is what we call involuntary movement, the movement of our heart, of our body breathing, us, all the little signals, neurons firing, various secretions being secreted, various places, fluids moving through the body. We don't have to make this happen. In fact, we can't make it happen. We probably wish we could sometimes, but we can't make this happen. It's just happening. We're kind of right in the middle of it. And then, as we're When we're born and helpless and still kind of a little blobby figure, eventually we start to respond and interact with the world around us, which brings us into our musculature and the realm of voluntary movement and mind movement, volitional action.

[11:59]

So we're constantly holding these two kinds of movement and working with these two kinds of movement within this posture, this thing that we call posture, to create ourselves and to move through life as humans. And by the way, in Buddhist practice, you might hear, and it kind of depends what tradition you're a part of, but here you might hear the idea of volitional action as actions of body, speech, and mind. And so it's kind of like, intentional actions of body, speech, and mind, rather than this underlying actions, movements of body that we don't have much control over, but we do have an effect on. So first, we're moving creatures. That's the first idea that I find really interesting in relation to this tendency to think of posture as something very still and stiff, and maybe even

[13:09]

dead or imposed. The next thing, because we are in constant motion, what we think of and experience as posture, so what you're experiencing right now, however you've landed, however you're sitting, however you're choosing to sit and hold your body, is entirely shaped by how we move through the world. So a lot of times when people come to a class, about Zazen posture, kind of want to know, like, how can I sit so that it's right, so that it's the right posture? What can I do in Zazen to make it right, to make it feel right? And there are things. Of course, there are ways to support the body that probably might make it more comfortable. But actually, to work on Zazen posture, we really have to work on the rest of our life. And Zazen isn't about working. It's about being.

[14:11]

And so we inherit, we receive the information of what we've been doing, of how we've moved through the world, of how we've interacted in the experience of sitting still. So when we feel discomfort, when we feel extreme relaxation or ease, we are receiving directly the effect or the karma of all the movements that we've made until that moment, until this moment. I've been reading one of the books that I've really been enjoying, and I'm going to share a couple of words from this book, is called The New Rules of Posture, which doesn't sound very exciting. It's by I think she's an Alexander Technique practitioner named Mary Bond. And Here's what she says about this idea of being shaped by movement.

[15:12]

Your posture emerges from your interactions with the world around you. It emerges out of how you orient yourself to the events of your life, how those events feel in your body, and how you move toward or away from the people or things involved. In time, your responses program the way you stand and move. in addition to being shaped by your personal history, posture is also influenced by cultural and religious standards, by geographical features, such as crowded streets or open terrain, by weather and clothing, and by media images that dictate what is attractive. And so, as you can imagine, and as is embedded in that description of our lives moving through the world shape us and give rise to this thing that we call posture, to this experience of sitting still, necessarily we are also shaping other beings.

[16:22]

So because we're relational creatures, because we're completely interdependent, interactive, we need people, we're social, we also have a lot of power conscious or unconscious, to affect other people's experiences, to affect how other people hold themselves, whether other people feel safe or open, how another person might feel in their body when around us. You can think of this on kind of a small everyday level, such as how your posture changes when you're around various people during your day. Here at Zen Center, many of the residents also work here. So all day long, there's kind of no escape. And it's really considered part of the practice to be tumbling around together, studying in action these interactions to study what comes up as we interact with people and to obviously...

[17:34]

as we watch ourselves to try to nurture relationships that are actually meaningful, authentic, and beneficial. And this is sometimes hard to do. So sometimes we'll encounter, in one day, the same person might be someone we feel really open around, and then someone we feel really threatened by, and then open, and then threatened. And we can watch ourselves do this all day long. It's quite a strong practice that people are engaged in. And I'm sure everybody out there, too, also has this experience at work. And so as we encounter beings, our posture, the way that we hold ourselves in relation to them, gives them some clue as to how we feel about them. Even if we're not thinking directly, I don't like him or I don't like her, there might be something unconscious, there might be something in our bodies that gives some impression of what we think.

[18:47]

So how we're carrying ourselves through the world is not a very small thing. And I think, I'm going to get to this later, but I think this is why our practice of sitting down is actually so powerful. Because usually we're in... We're in motion all the time, and we're in volitional motion. So we often don't know what we're doing until it's already been done. And so we're constantly trying to look at what we just did, and it's a little bit hard to keep track or to allow for some kind of shift or transformation to occur when we're completely in action all the time. The third... completely creatures of movement, always in motion, where our posture, what we think of as this posture, is totally dependent on how we've moved through the world, all of our interactions, all of our experiences, until now.

[19:49]

And the third piece is because we live in a gravity field and we are made of matter, we are inherently unstable creatures. We are constantly negotiating the pull of gravity, constantly, most likely, trying our best not to fall, although some people actually make careers out of falling. They fall beautifully. And a long time ago, I used to be a dancer, and I remember this one teacher who I studied with was famous for saying that you're not really a dancer until you've fallen some number of times really well. You have to learn how to fall. So that's kind of interesting. And because we are always on the verge of falling, maybe right now it's not so apparent because we've kind of got ourselves plunked down in a way that gives us some feeling of stability.

[20:54]

How we stabilize ourselves becomes really important in terms of what we're up to, what kinds of values we're holding, what we're expressing, how we're living, what our living is actually grounded in. And I'll talk about this a little bit more, too. A little bit more from Mary Bond, our bodies are inherently unstable because they are designed for mobility. The skeleton, which is basically an assemblage of struts, stilts, and levers, has hundreds of mobile joints. The muscles and other tissues that bind the skeleton together and the organs contained within it are nearly 70% water, making them even more mobile.

[21:55]

The instability of this design renders our bodies plastic enough to adapt to the internal fluctuations of breathing, digestion, and other life processes, as well as to the variety of positions we assume as we move about. However, without some means of securing such a mobile arrangement against gravity's downward pull, it would be impossible to take a single step. We cannot separate posture from movement or activity from how we stabilize our bodies in order to act. How we stabilize ourselves determines our posture and the freedom, efficiency, and grace with which we move. The essence of posture, then, is the unique way in which each of us negotiates between moving and holding still in relationship to gravity. So with these particular... features of our lives as human beings in mind, being interdependent, relational, mobile, unstable, karmic creatures, bumping around the world together, experiencing the effects of our collective dance with one another, and trying to figure out how to live without hurting each other too much.

[23:20]

It's kind of hard not to hurt each other at all quite difficult, it's probably no surprise that along the way, we've developed practices to help us navigate. And here, at Zen Center, we've received a rather unusual practice, I would say, an unusual ritual for an inherently unstable, unreliable, moving, acting, karmic creature, which is the ritual of zazen, or seated meditation. So how does this ritual practice of zazen interact with these three features of reality that we negotiate as human beings? So, as mentioned, in this case, when I say zazen, I mean seated meditation. Seated meditation is really just one element of our practice body that we work with here.

[24:27]

And the other two, there are lots of different ways to think about it, but one simple way is the other two kinds of arms of the practice, it's a three-armed practice, are ethics and wisdom. And we tend to separate them just so that we can talk about them because that's the way our minds work. tend to like to work, but actually you can't separate them. And so while I'm talking about zazen posture, you can imagine how the other two practices, the other two expressions interdependently penetrate and exist and flow. So in our ritual of zazen, especially for those of you who haven't, who just walked in and haven't experienced that before, we voluntarily sit down, sometimes on a chair, sometimes on a cushion, sometimes we might not be able to sit, so perhaps we lie down.

[25:34]

And we allow our bodies and minds to rest in stillness for a stretch of time. And in our particular tradition, There isn't a technique. Aside from taking very detailed care and offering big attention to posture, we aren't doing a lot of activity with the mind, necessarily. Some people may have practices that they bring with them that help. again, to kind of create some kind of structure or stability. But technically speaking, the instructions passed down to us about zazen from our teachers. It's very open, just kind of sitting in presence, which is actually quite simple and quite difficult to do. One reason it's so difficult is because

[26:42]

As mentioned, we're so used to having some kind of agenda, something to do, some way in which we're engaging in what we consider action, that actually being fully, completely engaged in sitting still, being present, allowing our inner layers of movement to come forth and just be is quite, can be quite unsettling actually, can be quite hard to stay with. People often struggle with falling asleep, with having the mind go off into something like planning, fantasy, running stories, All of these things come up as you try to just sit there and be.

[27:45]

It's kind of amazing what can happen in a short period of time when you're just sitting still. So we engage in this practice for a half hour, an hour, two hours, a whole day, a week, however much time we've allotted or committed to practice. And then a bell rings usually, and we bow. We get up, and off we go, back into the world of action, back into the world where we walk, move, affect, are affected, are living and being lived in a certain kind of way. And in this lineage, we're strongly encouraged to engage in this practice every day, over and over, kind of relentlessly, no matter what, forever and ever.

[28:48]

There isn't a point, even whatever you might experience that might seem like, now I get it, still the next day back to sit down and just be there, be present again. So it can feel kind of, when you first start, I don't know how you feel, but I remember feeling very excited about this sitting down. It felt so unusual. I really couldn't, I don't think I attended Zazen instruction. I just went to a period of Zazen, and I couldn't really believe that a whole room full of adults would do something so odd. as just sit there and kind of face a wall for a whole hour. And not to mention the bowing and the things going on. I just thought it was very odd.

[29:54]

But I liked it, being a person who I'm kind of drawn to sort of odd things. I thought it was just great. And when I actually sat down, even though what I got was a very... racing mind and pain and agitation and anxiety and all kinds of things. There was something about it that felt very nourishing. And I actually remember my first time sitting through a whole period of zazen. Victoria was the tanto at Tassajara. And at some point, I was just kind of getting used to the sounds, the... different things going on, and all of a sudden this pair of hands landed on my shoulders, because sometimes the teacher kind of leading the session of Zazen will come and offer some feedback or just some touch to help you see if you're still there, because it's a very challenging practice, and I just felt like, like, thank you, thank you.

[31:05]

So... Just the idea that also that this practice, and traditionally in Zen, you'll encounter many traditions where people practice by themselves or kind of wander off. And part of the idea is to really find out on your own, find out by yourself. And here in Zen, we are constantly with other people. And we kind of move around together from the Nendo to the here, to the there, to the there. So that this idea that we're actually doing this practice, sitting there, not doing anything karmic, supposedly, but with other people, is sort of amazing. So what is this sitting practice about? And you might have this question just because you just got here, but you also might have this question because you've been here a really long time, and you're kind of like, what am I doing?

[32:17]

What am I doing? So when we, as these volitional creatures of motion, choose to sit down and surrender to our present moment body-mind unfolding, What are we actually doing? What's happening there? When we sit down, we hear that when we sit down, awake, which is hard, and surrendered, actually all things, because we're interdependent, because we shape ourselves, The world and the world shapes us. When we sit down awake, all things sit down awake with us. Awake and surrender. Our volition comes to rest.

[33:18]

All things have a chance to rest. Resting occurs. After that I wrote, actualizing the fundamental point which comes from one of the the camps that we chant. And so I think in this dynamic, in this space where we choose, we have an intention to come and sit down in this ritual way and release ourselves, release. Here is this potential that we can't actually quite, we can't grasp it. We can't find it, really. And it's... quite difficult to talk about, but I think it's key, it's really central to living life in a way that where we don't just day after day find ourselves in postures that hurt, where we don't day after day find ourselves wonder, how did I get here?

[34:25]

How did this happen? Why am I so... hurt or lost or confused. The very shape of our zazen posture, this intentional pause that we make, offers some stability to our truly unstable condition. Seated, planted, upright, unmoving, we're deeply moved. Our ordinary way as humans is to speed through our lives, stabilizing ourselves with ideas and actions that seem to be solid and true. Like, I'm Aaron. I have a shelter. I have a job. I have companionship. I have a strong body. I have practice. Here are the people I like.

[35:27]

Here are the people I don't like. Here's what I am. Here's what I'm not. And on and on and on. In reality, I can't actually fathom what or who I am. I am going to die. I am going to be separated from everything and everyone that I love. And truly, my actions, what flows when I get up from that seat after my bow is the only thing that I belong. And these are traditional remembrances. the remembrances. So I really strongly feel that without this intentional pause, how can our other two practice legs that we really care about when we're in action, how can they emerge? How can they manifest? From this pause, being instead of doing, bearing witness to, feeling the edges

[36:34]

The lines, the circles, pulsating, the fear, desire, sleepiness, escape. Sitting, awake, right in the middle of our life unfolding, neither leaning forward nor backward. Ethics emerge. How we will act in the next moment and the next. This pause grows. The possibilities of this pause, this openness, open space, grow. Wisdom digests us. Wisdom emerges. In the pause, recollecting, non-volitioning, wisdom and ethics emerge and shape each other. In turn, they shape what we find in the pause. We find their traces there. So I really have faith that this sitting down really devoting ourselves to this way of practicing, this way of pausing, is critical towards nurturing a sound, ethical pulse, towards chewing, digesting, releasing wisdom into our marrow.

[37:47]

And this process is ongoing. As long as we're alive, there isn't an end. Perfect timing. Thank you very much. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:24]

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