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. Morning. So wonderful to hear the big bell. Beloved community, venerables, teachers, thank you for this opportunity to be together. I'm Peggy. My pronouns are she and her. I'm in the land of the Kumaya people in Southern California. We thought we'd begin with a guided meditation connected to our topic this morning. So I invite you just to, it's okay to wiggle. You're in your own space. You can move around a little bit, get comfortable. It's going to be a short meditation, but meet your body today. How are you doing? I mean, really, how are you doing? It can be helpful to do what's called the orienting response and look to the left, look to the right, above you, below you, behind you, and just to really orient yourself that you are in a safe place.

[01:19]

There is safety all around you. This is an important reminder that Because every day we're getting alert, alert, alert messages. So to know I am safe in this moment. So take a breath with that. Aware of your body settling into your cushion or chair. Your body settling into being right here. of the vertical line of energy that runs through the midline from the earth to sky. Inviting your body to relax and settle in to this moment. Nothing to do and no place to go. Aware of the horizontal energy that runs through you from your sides.

[02:28]

Buddhist teachings were reminded, ah, there is a body here. And tipping back into your back body just a little bit to feel the whole backside of your body. And notice what you notice as you settle. this body, this moment, this day in September, this week of the equinox. Each breath just settling in.

[03:40]

relaxing even more. And every cell of our body has light. Every single cell I invite you in this moment just to check in on any place you might experience light within your body in this moment. And bring your kind attention to that light.

[04:47]

that radiates without any effort. Breathing in, know that you are breathing in. Breathing out, know that you are breathing out. I invite you to bring to your heart and mind a resource, a resource of well-being, a resource of love and self-care. It might be a person, a place, a pet, a song, an activity.

[05:54]

Pick one, bring it to your heart and mind, a resource of care, of love. And as you rest even more, imagining this resource, feeling it with your body, bring it into your body. If it was a positive memory, it's alive in this moment. If it's an activity, imagine your body doing the activity, singing the chant, seeing the smile. Very good. Suddenly even more.

[07:02]

And drop even further into the resource. Whole body. Front, back, sides. each breath brightening up the colors and the sounds. Each breath aware of any sensations that are pleasant or neutral. And whether you can see it or know it, just know that you're soaking and settling in to this energy, this resource of well-being.

[08:17]

Helping it come alive in your body with your breath. Noticing what you notice. Are your toes resourced? Continue to drop into this energy of self-care, of nourishment.

[10:04]

Belly soft. Heart relaxed. just with the next few breaths, just really take a few moments to savor what we call my work, saving it to the hard drive of our body. So we have a kinesthetic memory, a felt experience of well-being. Close this short meditation.

[11:24]

I invite you to put a hand on your heart and a hand on your belly if that's okay. This is a posture of self-care, self-cherishing. Notice what you notice with your hand on your heart and hand in your belly. With the miracle of the breath. Miracle of this moment and this precious body. And at this moment, name to yourself what you're noticing within.

[12:37]

Name it. In this moment, I'm experiencing great solidity. My feet, my legs. chest. I'm experiencing easy breath. And I'm experiencing the presence of my teacher and the joy of being in community. So gently come on back and I'll slide away and put Larry up front.

[13:39]

Thank you for the practice of resourcing. Larry will say more about it, but thank you. Hello, dear people. My name is Larry Ward. My pronouns are he, him, and his. I also live with my beloved wife, Peggy, in the land of the Kumeyaay people, North County of San Diego. I have a poem for you. We are not mad because something is wrong with us. We are mad because we are awake. I see we have forgotten how to evolve. We have been taught that reality is alive only in pieces of things we have names and we can profit from.

[14:47]

But this is not so. We are created by millions of interactions of history, persons, places, and mysteries of the living cosmos. We are a dance of energy and matter of evolution potential now wandering and wondering what is to become of us. Our constructed labels for self and society float like clouds in the wind of chaos. But within this discontent, a wellspring of living wholeness is not waiting. pulsing in our veins, whispering in our hearts to live deeper than the echoes of uncertainty we experience or the conditioning that has been handed to us. Come back to living in your precious body that has been overridden by an anxious mind. Come back to the miracle of your aliveness on a miraculous planet with amazing people

[15:56]

and beings upon it. Use your tears to put out the fires scorching the earth and your breath to redirect the waters of your heart toward wellness, justice, and harmony. How am I understanding karma of self-care? a few minutes, I'll share that. Well, first, I want to begin with the word karma. It's so popular now. Dog foods are named after it. Bars, clothes, people, individuals. So I think it's important to at least say how I'm viewing that word. For me, karma, is still best understood in its original translation of action, but it's a particular kind of action.

[17:05]

It is an action with intention, with energy driving it, whether that energy driving it is subtle or more pronounced. And many have misperceived karma, in my view, as a linear process. waiting on judgment, condemnation, what have you, in this kind of paradigm of, for some people, an actual two-story or universe. And where we will be rewarded for what we have done and not done. What I have learned... through a practice called the five remembrances, which I do every morning before I get out of bed. The fifth remembrance is my action is the ground on which I stand. I cannot escape the consequences of my action.

[18:08]

And so I've had a lot of doubt around that phrase, that mantra, that verse, and I've practiced it for over 30 years. And i finally came to the conclusion that to really understand it means i understand karma to mean a non-linear reality a non-dual reality and that my action takes place in the present moment And actually, from a neurological point of view, so does the consequences. And so I want to spend a few minutes getting our understanding of mindfulness of the body to get really tiny down to our very large nervous system. And it is our nervous system as human beings that is the reciprocal of our parents.

[19:14]

whatever activities we are doing, whatever actions we are taking with ourselves, with others, at work, at home, in community, and in our relationships. To me, it means I am the author and the result of the three powers described in Buddhism, the power of the body, the power of the mind, and the power of speech. Immediately, I realized when I was growing up in the civil rights movement, that if someone was hating me, I had to find a place in myself of hate to hate them back. And I decided a long time ago that I wasn't going to live there because I realized that action is my choice in my mind, in what I do with my body, in how I speak. And I learned that from life prior to knowing anything about Buddhism, which is a wonderful kind of thing. Another way to describe karma here for me is based on the principle of neuroplasticity.

[20:21]

That simply means our brains are flexible, adaptable, and the nerve neurons that circulate and communicate for every action to take place creates patterns and connections that form habits. And so this is one of the reasons it's so difficult to change a habit, whether it's an individual habit or, as we can see right quite clearly, a social habit. Because our nervous system has been wired naturally to respond to threat, fear, anxiety, harm as a part of our evolutionary gift. Learning how to pay mindful attention to our nervous system is, for me, one of the keys to self-care. There's many forms of self-care.

[21:24]

There's exercise, there's nutrition, there's the four nutriments that are discussed in Buddhism, edible food, sensory impressions, what environment we live in, the images, the sounds we hear, the pictures on the wall, our altars. Those kinds of things, our volition is a nutriment. Our intention feeds our mind and wires our brains in certain directions, releases our energy in certain directions. And that release of energy and that wiring in the present moment is our karma because however I wired myself today, I have to deal with tomorrow as well as today. And so there's a lot of work we are in the midst of as practitioners in unwiring ourselves. Now, intuitively, I'd like to think the Buddha understood neuroplasticity of the mind thousands of years ago.

[22:24]

So we're just continuing an understanding of that if we understand the practice is simply not cognitive. The practice is somatic. And this is why... Mindfulness of the body is the first foundation in my understanding and my practice. In fact, I think the present crisis we have on the whole planet is our accumulated conditioning, as we would describe it in the Buddhist tradition, of how we have been wired to think. And many people, I realize this can be depressing, but I thought, but I'm going to say it because I know it's in your mind. Many people do not believe the world can be any different than it is now. And for me, this is urgent and a meaningful way to understand what the practice can offer people in terms of self-care.

[23:27]

so that we can unwire our belief structures and systems that we now see create suffering, are no longer needed, are destroying the planet. Well, our behaviors won't change unless we change ourselves. We all know this, which is why we are practitioners. So it's not just cognitive awareness that comes that's important. It is somatic awareness. Because without somatic awareness, I can't carry my insight with me in my body. So I can go, I've had this experience early in my retreat life. I'd go on a retreat, I'd come out, I'd be really blissful. And before I got out of the parking lot, I'd be, I've lost my equanimity. Because of the way somebody was driving. And so what I realized over time was I have to get equanimity in my bones. in my breath, in my veins, in my blood, in my eyes, so that it can be present with me even when I am not present with it.

[24:34]

This is deep self-care. It's why our practice is so very important. So I know that the idea of self-care as a topic in Buddhism is a little bit funny. And what I mean by it is a little bit tongue-in-cheek because there's no self to care for in one way of understanding things. And then if we look deeply at the no self to care for, we see a large body of consciousness of which we are a part, a large body of energy of which we are a part. And so that every part of our body is made, of course, of non-self elements. And for me to practice self-care is to care for both self and non-self elements of our experience as practitioners. My practices that I do every day have one aim, and that is to touch the wonders of life.

[25:44]

to touch the miracle of life and be touched by the miracle of life, so that I have the sense of wonder and equanimity to bring into the world of suffering and chaos. I begin with the five remembrances. When I open my eyes, before I even get out of bed, I do those practices, and then in silence, and then I go outside slowly walking and I spend time in silence, just listening to the sounds of the world in the morning. The hummingbirds, the hawk, the doves, the wind in the palm trees, the blue sky, the sun. I practice to forget about myself. And what I discover is I am rewarded by realizing what a wonder I live in, in the midst of suffering.

[26:56]

So I greet the elements of the earth. I greet all the flowers on our patio, check in with everyone, see how they're doing, tell them how beautiful they are. And as I do that, I am rewiring my brain. to learn how to live more deeply in what the indigenous folks of this land call the beauty way. And our modern society has actually conditioned us and trained us to live in the opposite of beauty. But to live in cruelty, to live in disrespect, to live in uncaring, meanness is rewarded. And so our practice is not just individual. It is the practice to transform our collective consciousness at its very basis. That can happen, as you already know, if we don't continue to do the work of healing and transforming our own basis of consciousness.

[27:59]

Neuroscientifically, through these morning exercises, for example, I open my body to the ventral vega state. It is a state in which I experience safety, like Peggy led us through with the resourcing exercise. Every morning throughout the day, it's important to keep resourcing yourself. So you live out of generativity. So you live out of the profound aliveness that is your life. That is my life. And when we are in this state, we experience homeostasis, balance. Our body experiences a kind of balance. And that means whatever challenges we face, we feel more capable of responding. But when we're not in that state, we easily become victims to either fighting or running away from reality. And so that state is very important to cultivate. And meditation is one of the primary ways of cultivating that state.

[29:07]

if we're willing to go deeper than just being relaxed, if we're willing to get calm. And then if we're willing to go deeper than getting calm, if we're willing to fall into equanimity, then we have a state in which we can handle our fears, our anxiety, and our difficulties with one another. So befriending your nervous system, learn everything you can about that. There's a lot of things online and teachers who are very skillful in training us based on the latest scientific information about ourselves. A second skill to develop for yourself is tracking. This is learning how to read the sensations of your own body. And what's really important here, and you've been doing this intuitively your whole life where you would be alive now. None of us... What have evolved this far in history if our ancestors and ourselves haven't learned to do this?

[30:11]

But we have to up our game here. We have to, in this sense, not of willfulness, but of surrender into how non-superficial practice is, how deep practice is. And so learning to recognize what my body is sending me as messages. It's about how I'm doing in the world, not just who I think I am in the world. And we've been conditioned to think of ourselves as a who. And we have not much education in understanding how we recognize how we are. So how to handle, how to deal with our anger, how to deal with our fear when that is up. Whatever identity it may be masked in. Tracking, learning, and creating your own language to know if, oh, my right knee at this moment is feeling stiff.

[31:14]

What happens in my body when I remember my grandmother in the kitchen teaching me how to cook collard greens? Well, my whole body starts to get happy. And it doesn't take long. So every day I try to add to my list of what nourishes my art, nourishes my mind. so that my access to the ventral vega state of the nervous system that we have is capable of living in this moment in peace with COVID, with uncertainty, with political chaos, with deconstruction, with the change, with the planetary circumstance, so that we can be clear and access our wisdom. What we've learned in neuroscience about the ventral vega system and the other secondary system of mobilization where our energy goes into fighting or fleeing and in the lower level of our natural systems of survival is immobilization.

[32:26]

So we either are immobilized or we're mobilized into fighting or fleeing. And what we've learned neuroscientifically is unless we can reach, whether it's up, down, or sideways, the ventral vega state, we are trapped. We cannot even hear each other. We cannot change unless we find peace within. But it's not just cognitive peace. It is somatic peace. so that I have learned now how to drive out of a parking lot after a retreat without being disturbed. And if I get disturbed, I know how to let it go in seconds, and still clinging to it and building a life story around something that disappointed or interrupted my train of things. So meditation, resourcing, and tracking are three of the fundamental things of self-care, and that gives us the capacity to be conscious of the karma or the pattern of habit we are creating for ourselves.

[33:39]

And whatever pattern of habit we create spills out into history. Thich Nhat Hanh also reminds us that our work with our body is connected to seven other bodies in his language. Our human body, of course, which is what I've been talking about, but our human body is also connected with our Buddha body, our awakened body, which is also connected to the body of our spiritual practice, the body of our lineage, or lineages as the case may be. Our Sangha body is another body that we are a part of. I've been especially practicing with the next body, which is the body outside of my body. I've been spending time meditating on how my body is the tree as it provides oxygen back and how my body is the rain which nourishes the food that I'm eating.

[34:48]

So I'm learning how not to be so clingy to the idea of this small body as me. Our continuation body, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about. Our cosmic body and our ultimate body. And there isn't time in this talk to go into that, but I wanted to point to self-care as care for all those bodies because all those bodies are manifested through our physical body. And I think we're out of time for my section. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[35:53]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[35:56]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.54