This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. So I'm going to read a story, and it's for the children of but the grown-ups might want to listen, too. This is called Betty Bunny Loves Chocolate Cake. Do you know this story? No? Okay. So Betty Bunny was a handful. Your parents ever called you a handful? No? Not yet, anyway, huh? She knew this because her mother always said, Betty Bunny, you are a handful. And her father always said, your mother is sure right about that.

[01:01]

Betty Bunny knew that her mother and father loved her. So being a handful must be very good. One day after a healthy dinner of carrots, potatoes, and peas, mother said, who wants dessert? I have chocolate cake. Betty Bunny, who was not very good at trying new things, announced, I hate chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is yucky. What's chocolate cake? So her mother gave her a piece, and Betty Bunny tried it. It was the yummiest thing she had ever put in her mouth. When I grow up, I'm going to marry chocolate cake, said Betty Bunny. You can't marry a dessert, said her brother Henry. You could marry a baker who makes chocolate cake, added her sister Kate. She must be her older sister. Or you could just buy your cake at the store, and then you don't have to marry anyone, said the oldest brother, Bill.

[02:05]

Betty Bunny thought about it for a while. No, she said, I'm going to marry chocolate cake. Whatever, said Bill, but you're going to have really weird-looking kids. That night, Betty Bunny's mother kissed her and tucked her in. Good night, Betty Bunny. I love you. Betty Bunny looked up into her mother's eyes and said, good night, Mommy. I love chocolate cake. The next day at school, Betty Bunny's teacher said, good morning, Betty Bunny. How are you? Betty Bunny said, I'm a handful. And I love chocolate cake. Her teacher said, A is for apple. B is for ball, C is for cat. Betty Bunny said, A is for chocolate cake, B is for chocolate cake, C is for chocolate cake. She has chocolate cake on her mind, right? During playtime, Betty Bunny tried to make chocolate cake by mixing water and dirt.

[03:10]

It looked a little like chocolate cake, but it didn't taste very much like chocolate cake. Betty Bunny started to cry. I want chocolate cake, she said. Her teacher told her that they had no chocolate cake at school. Betty Bunny said, I hate school. School is yucky. After school, her mother drove her home. How was your day, she asked. I ate mud, Betty Bunny said unhappily. I want chocolate cake. Sometimes, her mother explained, you can't have what you want right away, so you need to wait. And that's called having patience. But I don't want to have patience, Buddy Bunny said. I want to have chocolate cake. That night at dinner, her mother told Buddy Bunny she could not have dessert until she ate a healthy dinner. How many of you have heard that? Right? You have to have a healthy dinner before you can have dessert.

[04:14]

Okay. Not tonight. Tonight, all she wanted was chocolate cake. Her father told her, don't come to me hoping to get a different answer. Henry said, if you were smart, you'd eat some peas. Kate said, you should try some carrots. They make cake out of them too, you know. Bill said, why don't you have some chocolate cake? That's what you really want. Oh, no, wait, you can't. Ha ha. Betty Bunny picked up some peas. She threw them at Henry. Yikes. Yikes. She threw some carrots at cake. Kate, yikes. And worst of all, she threw mashed potatoes at Bill. And they stuck to his forehead. Everyone was shocked. Even Betty Bunny was shocked. She hadn't really meant to do something so awful. Mother was not happy that Bill had teased his sister. She was even less happy with Betty Bunny. She told Betty Bunny...

[05:15]

What's she going to tell her to do? Go straight to bed. There would be no chocolate cake tonight. And Betty Bunny screamed, this family is yucky. Then she remembered she was hungry, so she crammed her mouth full of peas and carrots and mashed potatoes and ran to bed. She is quite a handful, isn't she? When her mother came into her room to kiss her goodnight, she told Betty Bunny, sweetheart, you know that I still love you? Mommy, Betty Bunny said, you know that I still love chocolate cake. Just thinking about the cake she was not eating made her cry. Then it made her scream. Then it made her kick the wall, which hurt her foot, which made her cry all over again. Betty Bunny, her mother, said as she rubbed the little bunny's foot, I'm going to put a piece of chocolate cake on a plate in the refrigerator. It will be your piece of cake, and you can eat it tomorrow after a healthy dinner.

[06:18]

Maybe if you know it's there waiting for you, it will be easier to be patient. Betty Bunny stopped crying, so that was a good idea her mother did, right? She liked this idea, so she wanted to say something especially nice to her mother. Mommy, she said, you are a handful. The next morning, Betty Bunny wanted to say goodbye to her chocolate cake before she left for school. So she opened the refrigerator and saw her piece of cake sitting on its plate. It looked so lonely. Betty Bunny knew that the cake would miss her all day while she was at school. So she picked it up and put it in her pocket. At school, her teacher said, Betty Bunny, you seem very happy today. Betty Bunny giggled. There was chocolate cake in her pocket and no one knew but her. As Betty Bunny finished munching her last carrot at dinner that night, her mother smiled.

[07:24]

Betty Bunny, she said, you were patient and waited all day for your cake. You ate a good dinner. I am very proud of you. Would you like to get your cake now? Betty Bunny reached into her pocket. Her cake was gone. Instead of cake, her pocket was filled with a brown, goopy mess. My cake! See? See how upset she is? She's really, really, really, really upset. You want to see Linda? Yeah. Okay. Henry said, I can't believe you put cake in your pocket. Kate said, Betty Bunny, food doesn't go in your pocket. She's the proper sister, right? And Bill said, guess you can't marry that piece of cake now. Her mother got her a new piece of cake, and she explained that putting cake in your pocket is not really the same as being patient. Betty Bunny finally understood.

[08:24]

She promised from now on she would be patient. And so, the next morning... When Betty Bunny opened the refrigerator to say goodbye to her new piece of cake, she remembered that she couldn't put it in her pocket. And that's why she stuffed it very carefully into her sock. So this is a story of a chocolate cake. And about patience. And so now that you've heard the story, go on out and play and enjoy your day. And I'm going to talk to your parents a little bit more about patience. Okay? Thank you. All right, everybody. Let's put our kitty cat feet on. Kitty cat feet. Okay. Go put our shoes back on. And we'll meet up back when we had our song circle.

[09:25]

Can we do that? Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you. I want what I want when I want it.

[10:38]

I don't want what I don't want when I don't want it. This is the very definition of suffering. The Buddha, who lived more than 2,500 years ago in his youth, was completely protected from wanting anything. His wish was anticipated before it arose. He lived in complete pleasure. And one day he walked outside and saw the life that the rest of us live and determined that he was going to find the root of what he now saw was suffering. And so he did. He sat down, made a tremendous effort, sat still, and reaffirmed the existence of suffering.

[11:46]

He saw that there was a cause of suffering, which today I'm going to call resistance to what is. And because there's a cause, there's an end, a potential end, by studying and understanding what that resistance is and working with it. And then he proposed a path that has eight factors in it to help us accomplish the end of suffering. There are eight elements to that path, but I'm going to focus on one of them today. And that element is called, it's called right effort. And often I get asked that question, what does that mean? How much effort is that, right effort? And I would say it's the effort, it's patient effort. Patient effort. So this

[12:57]

I want what I want when I want it or I don't want what I don't want when I don't want it are loud complaints that come from our desire for pleasure and our intolerance for and resistance to any physical or emotional discomfort. And the belief that there's something wrong with the way things are right now if the moment includes discomfort. And even if the moment doesn't overtly include any discomfort, we still want things to be different so they can be better. And even though in our experience we know this isn't true, we are sure in both cases that by doing something to alter our situation, things will be permanently good. In other words, we are delusional. And by stubbornly or habitually sticking to this delusion, we're robbing ourselves of the opportunity to see the cause of suffering and thereby to experience its release.

[14:10]

So, patient effort. Patience is defined as the acceptance of things as they are. And I would say patient effort, as offered in this kind of eightfold path as a support for us, is patience that is both wise and compassionate and persistent. So how do we develop it? I would propose it can start by developing its younger sister, which I call And then deepen by stopping and examining what is. And in that stillness, being kind and warm-hearted towards ourself, through that we can move to equanimity, which watches discomfort come and go.

[15:30]

without interfering. Because equanimity arises when the truth of the nature of suffering is deeply understood and embodied. So that's a pathway. Tolerance, stopping and examining, warming up what is with compassion, and then studying more deeply the essence of desire. So the breeze of emotional or physical pain is blowing. What do we do? We can feel the pressure on our body to move away from it and the kind of yearning to be in a different state. So there's a physical sensation when discomfort arises.

[16:35]

If we don't move away, we can feel something in our body. There's signals happening. But there's also a yearning, the habit of moving away to something better. How do we tolerate the discomfort? energy of patience to stay present. Because patience, the way we're talking about it in our practice, is not passive. It's motivated by an active intolerance of and compassion for suffering rather than a desire to eradicate it. It's not very often we stop and do this. We stop and actually, might I say, welcome the discomfort, or at least acknowledge the discomfort.

[17:45]

We move so quickly off of discomfort. But once we adjust our urge to move away from the tension and make an effort to pay attention to the tension, So can you see that difference? You're paying attention to the tension. And what happens when we do that is that it actually opens up a little bit. Because the tension, much of the tension, is coming from resisting it. Not all, but much is the resistance to the smallest discomfort. So turning towards it, in my experience... softens it. So in that possibility of turning towards the discomfort, tolerating it, I'm not saying loving it yet, I'm saying tolerating it. It's kind of a neutral state in a way, toleration.

[18:50]

It allows us to maybe stop and examine which is the next kind of of the recipe for patience. Toleration and then examination. Toleration slows us down and keeps us from vectoring away. And then we can focus on the sensations and the emotions and the nature of the discomfort and the desire to change it. Instead of trying to block desire or feed it, which is chocolate cake, we can simply examine it. We can focus our attention on the desire to change the situation rather than on its object.

[19:58]

We can do this. This is a human possibility. So does the desire have color or shape? Where does it come from? Where does it live? Where does it go when it vanishes? Because it does vanish, you will see. It alters, it changes shape. Sometimes it completely goes away. Sometimes it comes back right away. Sometimes not for a long time. Is it burning? Is it a burning feeling? Or is it a tug? Is it pulling us towards something? Are we backing away because it's unpleasant? Or are we being pulled away? These are all things that I've noticed.

[21:02]

And you may notice other things, too. You may find a way to study this in your own body and mind if you're willing to stop and tolerate not a big discomfort. Don't start with that. If it's the fourth day of a meditation retreat and your knee is screaming, don't start there. Start on day two when there's a slight crick right back here. It kind of bugs you, and you'd really like to move. Well, don't move. How radical is that? Don't move. And ask, what is it? So I have a personal example, which many people in this community might appreciate. I've been... going through some health issues, and then I took a nice long vacation. I went to Costa Rica. My brother lives there. I spent three weeks in the sun.

[22:06]

I got used to sleeping in. I came back, and I walked up to the head of practice at the city center, and I said, I'll be there tomorrow in the Zendo. She said, great, it'll be good to see you. Here's your chair. So the next morning, as I was laying in bed, and the alarm went off, the resistance was way bigger than I thought it was going to be. It was like screaming at me, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, stay in bed, stay in bed, stay in bed. It was really strong. And I didn't get up. I wasn't prepared for the strength of the resistance. I just thought, oh, I... You know, I told her I'd be there. That'll help. You know, accountability helps. I'll be there. It'll be too embarrassing to not be there. Whatever. You know, those little things that help us do what we say we want to do. But I wasn't prepared for the strength.

[23:06]

So was I moving away from the discomfort or towards the pleasure of the warm bed? I didn't stop to study it. So I just capitulated, actually. And yes, the discomfort was gone for the moment, but I missed the opportunity to tolerate this. It didn't seem like a small discomfort at the time, but it really was comparatively a small discomfort. And I was impatient with the discomfort. So I went to the head of practice in the city and I told her what had happened. You know, acknowledging, we make mistakes, I make mistakes. And that, it's a necessary part of the process. So by making that mistake, being aware of the strength of that, the next morning, I was prepared. It's like, okay, all right, it's going to be strong.

[24:09]

It's going to be really strong, and I'm going to really want to stay in bed, and I'm not going to stay in bed, I'm not going to stay in bed. And it wasn't as strong. I don't know why. You know, who knows why, right? Maybe I went to bed earlier. I don't know the causes and conditions of the change of the strength of the discomfort. But I was prepared and I was re... My intention was re-upped because of having made what I would call a mistake. It's not a big mistake, but it was not in line with my intention. So appreciation for mistakes... is part of this process. The practice is to stay with the tension and to tolerate it and study it. Don't elaborate. Don't even name it. It's possible sitting in a meditation retreat when a pain arises, physical pain, let's say, to not even

[25:16]

call it pain. It's a subtle practice because we're going to feel it and we're going to want to control it by naming it. But it's possible to relax and appreciate not having a name for what's arising. And I want to point out this is not about having sheer will. I've tried that. There is an end to that ability. There will be something that comes, even if you're very willful and have used that successfully for a long time in many situations. And I brought this up before. I was in a sashim, Linda Ruth was leading, And I was using extreme kind of willpower to get over some physical pain I was in.

[26:17]

And in maybe, I don't know, day three or four, I reached the end of my stamina. I ran out of energy. And it was pretty amazing to me because I'm a pretty determined person. And I ran out of my stamina. And it was such a relief. The effort fell away. and I relaxed. It was a great gift, but as in many lessons, we have to learn the hard way, right? So it's not about sheer will. It's about not resisting the discomfort. It's a soft acceptance of the tension. And in this practice of examination, we can see if there's a way to turn down the stress response that's arising. Probably just being aware of the breath is the most basic and perhaps one of the most efficacious practices.

[27:28]

Turning towards the handy, always there, up and down, and life of breathing. moves our attention away from the fear that the discomfort is going to get worse or it's going to keep happening. So we stress. So we turn our attention away from that and turn towards the breath. It lessens the stress in a couple of different ways. The breath signals the rest of the body to relax. When we do satisfy a desire, like I did by staying in bed. Philip Moffitt, a teacher who writes very interestingly about emotions, says, the problem with merely satisfying a desire is that we set into motion a self-perpetuating mechanism. The more salty water we drink, the thirstier we feel.

[28:32]

This is how we become addicted to the causes of suffering. That wheel of satisfying. satisfying, satisfying, but it's never permanently satisfying, right? That practice satisfies, satisfies, satisfies, just makes the desire more entrenched. The pattern of satisfying desire gets more entrenched. So this is hard, this is difficult, and compassion is essential. Generosity, and intention and compassion are necessary parts of patience, because we're often not patient. How many times have you put chocolate cake in your sock? Can we do this practice of examining and be nonjudgmental?

[29:35]

Because the nonjudgmentalness helps us relax. This is something I read in the Philip Moffat kind of lecture that I was studying before this talk. And he said, when the need for discomfort, when the need for relief from discomfort arises, feed the need with acknowledgement and kindness rather than feeding the desire. Feed the need with kindness. Again, these are subtle, subtle practices, but they make sense. It short-circuits it if we turn our attention in a different direction. So a few months back, I gave a talk here, and I had just been in a process of doing a radiation treatment for breast cancer.

[30:45]

And I talked about a mistake that I thought at the time I made about working with this kind of discomfort. I had this type of radiation where they put a catheter in you and you go back twice a day for a week and they do the radiation quickly, but you have to have this catheter in you the whole time. And when that first happened to me, when they put that in my body, panic, panic started to come from like behind my head. And I could, you know, I can still like see it almost. It was coming this way. It got to about my ears. And it felt like, you know, something, I want what I don't want, what I don't want when I don't want it. I don't want this in me. It was a very strong kind of panic response. And one thing I could have done is turned towards it and turned my attention towards the panic itself.

[31:55]

And probably that would have lessened it, but I didn't do it. Again, it was stronger than I think I was prepared for. So what I did was I used kind of a concentration practice in to take my mind and kind of, I remember, I kind of moved it over to this side and encompassed it in a kind of a protective shield so that it couldn't look back and see the panic. I created this little kind of room for my mind. And I stayed within that room for seven days. So, in retrospect, I can see that what was happening is I was acknowledging the physical sensation or the emotional sensation or the endocrine sensation of panic. And I was finding a way to tolerate it. The turning towards it might have been a more advanced practice, but I wasn't up for it.

[33:01]

So I mitigated the panic. so that I was less likely to do harm to myself or to others. And I think that was okay now. I'm feeling compassionate towards that response and humbled, humbled by how hard these things are. And again, thinking of it as a mistake is helpful because then I re-examined it. and I could understand better the situation. So the last aspect of this practice of patience that I want to bring up is part of examining patience is asking very deep questions like what is ultimately true. Patience is not repression.

[34:10]

It's gentle forbearance. It's calm endurance of hardship. And it is acceptance of the truth with a capitalty. And that truth includes the teachings of everything changes. And that suffering... is to be expected, and that thoughts are empty of reality, and that there's no permanent person to please. These are the ultimate teachings of Zen, and I actually think it's necessary to in order to really develop the kind of patience that will help us in the most difficult times, the understanding of these truths, the examination of how the mind actually works, I'm going to say it's essential.

[35:21]

We really want these practices that we learn through coming to Zen Center, going to meditation groups, reading, listening. We really want these practices practices to be practical. We want them to help us in our everyday life, and they do. But are we also interested in more than just being helped in our everyday life? Are we committed to the deeper truths, to really trying to understand the deeper truths? So here's another example that came out of this. I went from having radiation treatments to then having some chemotherapy treatments. And near the end of the kind of the fourth treatment, the round, fourth round of treatments, I had this thought arise, really strong thought that said, and I was feeling quite...

[36:27]

the feeling. The digestive system had been quite changed over that period of time, and I was quite tired. So the thought that came up was, it will always be like this. It will never get better. So that thought, and I can almost recreate the kind of progression that happened when that thought arose. It was heavy, it was deeply disturbing, and it was unpleasant. But I studied it for just that nanosecond. It's like, well, what is this? Because to fall into it, to actually buy into it, would have been

[37:35]

It would have prolonged the horribleness of the thought. So through the grace of being exposed to these teachings, a thought came up right afterwards. And that thought was, that was just a thought. And it may be that things will never get better, or it may be that they will get better. In either case, the effort of resisting a negative thought or grabbing a positive one is extra. And with that understanding, I was released back into the steady stream of change, which is actually quite pleasant. As Leonard Cohen once said, if you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick all the time.

[38:37]

So that steady stream of change. Oh, I have more to say, because the story lasted longer than I thought. So I'm going to end with a grown-up story for you about patience. And this is written by Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet. It's called Kevin and the Blackbird. And then there was Saint Kevin and the Blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out inside his cell, but the cell is so narrow, so one upturned palm is out the window, stiff as a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands and lays in it and settles down to nest.

[39:43]

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked, neat head and claws, and finding himself linked into the network of eternal life is moved to pity. Now he must hold his hand like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks until the young are hatched and fledged and flown. And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, imagine being Kevin. Which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time from the neck on out down through his hurting forearms? Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees? Or has the shut-eyed blank of under earth crept up through him?

[40:46]

I'm going to say that again. Has the shut-eyed blank of under earth crept up through him? Is there a distance in his head, alone and mirrored? in love's deep river, to labor and not seek reward, he prays, a prayer his body makes entirely, for he has forgotten self, forgotten bird, and on the river bank, forgotten the river's name. Thank you very much. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[41:52]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:55]

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