And we've just finished our first full day of the workshop. So it has a lot more to teach us, I hope. And what I'd like to do is relate to the workshop, sort of like plunge into the heart of it, and then work out from there. Today, for instance, we offered some teachings in... I would say the appropriate equivalent phrase in our literature is, all my ancient tangled karma I now fully avow."

[01:04]

And so what we were trying to do in the workshop today was to ask questions of the participants in the workshop that would help them see, well, here is my conditioning. The first question, and then we offered it in a particular modality. where you repeatedly get asked the question and you repeatedly see what answer comes up. And the first question was, what do you want? If we look at the Four Noble Truths, in many ways the foundation of early Buddhism, what do you want has a resonance with the nature of how we get ourselves into difficulty, how we lose our harmony with being.

[02:12]

And then in a wonderful, blatant way, we avow our karma. We avow what we want and implicit in that is what we don't want. And implicit in both of those is a way in which we're attempting to make our life rewarding, to make our life feel satisfying, to make our life have the quality of being that brings us joy and ease. And then how do we relate to what we want? Can we relate to it with a kind of foolishness, you know, knowing that, allowing that to be

[03:30]

a driving force in our life, just brings us more difficulties to our life. And yet when we can see how the formulations of our own being in terms of what we want, we can start to be educated by them. Sometimes underneath, when we explore underneath what we want, we see the more superficial wanting. It's often the kind of wanting we energize. But as we see in a more thoughtful way, more deeply into the nature of wanting, we can see a deeper kind of wanting.

[04:35]

But in some ways, we could, I think, legitimately say, well, we want to awaken. We want to live in harmony with all being. We want to live in a way that causes less affliction and more joy and ease. So that's one question we asked today. And maybe we'll ask it some more. But probably we'll think up of different ones. And then the other way that we try to take apart the self, as Jonah mentioned, an exercise that he'd done once, which was five aspects of being.

[05:39]

Cultural, familial, expertise, gender, and sexual orientation. And the last one, if I remember correctly, was, apart from those, what's a An aspect of self that's significant and important to you. Did I get that right? Thanks. And then he created this image of removing each one of those from your life. How does that feel? What does that look like? What does that bring up? It reminded me of a saying by young men, a teacher, a mere 1,200 years ago, a Zen teacher.

[06:46]

And he said, body exposed to the golden wind. The more we explore... who we are, not so much as a single identity, but as the product of a certain kind of conditioning. What was the cultural conditioning that's prevalent within you? How does it shape you? And then familial, what came from your family heritage? Your ethnicity? Your indigenous religion? So each of these offering something.

[07:52]

But what I'd like to do in plunging more deeply, I'd like to use a poem that somebody gave me, and I can't even remember who. And the poem is from the Institute of Poetic Medicine, and the author is John Fox. I'd never heard of the Poetic Medicine Institute or John Fox before. The poem is called Listening Is. Listening is the plumb line. Listening is the fulcrum. Listening is the hinge. Listening is the plumb line with which I build the home. What is the intentionality? What is the true line of engagement

[08:59]

It helps you feel at home. You know, there's an old saying that says, wherever you are, there you are. Can you feel at home wherever you are? What is that plumb line? What is that true line? You use a plumb line to get the exact vertical so that when you're building, your building is square. What is the true line of practice? Your engagement in practice in a way that stimulates your capacity to be at home. Glistening is the fulcrum.

[10:06]

With it, I roll away this stone. What helps you? What kind of intentionality helps you relate to your conditioning in a way that it can move, that rather than it being a solid mass, to which you're always compliant, how do you leverage it in a way that it can shift? And I suspect that almost all of us have done that. I suspect that almost none of us, with few exceptions, We're born into a household where we were told as a child, and you should be practicing Zen. You should be down at that Zen center.

[11:13]

We've moved something of the weight of our acculturation, of our familial... embeddedness, the prejudice embedded in the generations of our family. We've learned how to move them. The third listening, listening is the hinge. With it, I open up again. What in you facilitates opening? before the Dharma talk, we do a chant. And in that chant we say, I vow to hear the Dharma. Is that it?

[12:20]

What is the hinge, the pivot point, to use a traditional Zen phrase, that allows... You return from what you grew up as and now find the opening that allows something in you to expand, something in you to be moved by what Yanmen calls the golden wind. The golden wind is just a phrase, a poetic phrase, talking about the virtuous influence of practice and the very practicing of that virtue. And then the poem continues. Listening sings a lullaby.

[13:27]

Listening dances far into the night. Listening writes the language of being present. Listening sings a lullaby, with it I soothe my heart. There's a way in which our struggling becomes a deep part of us. And part of the challenge of skillful practice is how do we soothe our struggling nature? How do we help it to feel at ease? What is the lullaby of allowing the body and the breath and the mind

[14:33]

and the disposition of heart. What is the lullaby that allows them all to find their ease? Is it patience? So within the poem, the poet is shaping the questions. He's shaping and offering images that hopefully, as in the poetic institute, that they will be medicine. How do we enable that for ourselves? You know, it's so easy to think of practice as something we should do. Or maybe we even have a relationship to practice where we think, well, I meditate every morning.

[15:38]

And somehow that will ensure us of enlightenment or awakening. But actually, the subtle workings of the self are what appear when we practice awareness, what appear when we sit in uprightness and bear witness to what's happening in the moment. How do we greet that? And the knack is to remind ourselves that awareness is awareness of what's already happening. It's not what we choose to make happen. That's adding something extra. That's adding self-preferences.

[16:42]

And so, bearing witness, listening, being aware of what's happening in the moment is the golden wind of practice. And it's also the lullaby with which we soothe our heart. Listening dances far into the night. With it, I stay as long as you need. We can be over-occupied by the nature of ourself. And sometimes we need to engage someone else's needs, maybe everyone else's needs, that that shift of engagement can let us see a broader spectrum of light, a broader spectrum of what happens

[17:59]

in the human condition than just our own limited version of it. Although there's part of me that wishes he had of written, listening sits Zazen far into the night. But he didn't. Listening writes in the language of being present. With it, you know I am here. I remember many years ago, I read a study where, in this study they were going to see the effects of mindfulness and applied mindfulness on depression.

[19:03]

And so in the study, they taught people how to be mindful, how to be present and aware. And then they discovered that before they moved on to the second part of the study, which was giving them exercises to do, that the very act of being aware alleviate and widen their depression. Listening writes in the language of being present and teaches in the language of being present. And the learning happens. Listening creates holy space.

[20:05]

Listening sets aflame what is no longer needed. Listening preserves what matters to you. Listening creates holy space. With it, there is no silent communion. There is, excuse me, there is silent communion. Listening creates holy space. With it, there is silent communion. Those moments where something in us quiets and we hear and see what's happening in the moment. And something connects. There's a kind of an information exchange that goes beyond our cognitive mind.

[21:07]

And I think it's interesting, as this poem develops, that in the third verse it gets to that holy space. Because I think sometimes we're eager to get beyond the karmic self. And we set it up as the goal. We set it up as the priority. And of course, just as Dogen says, that that very process of setting silence, stillness, presence as the goal. It shifts the open awareness of whatever is going on, and it actually makes it more difficult to be present.

[22:27]

So when we tense into doing and forget the spaciousness of being, we are actually moving away from presence. This is why it's very helpful at the start of every time we sit to remind ourselves of the basic premise That awareness is awareness of what's already happening. That's the nature of it. That's the nature of shikantaza. And to remind ourselves of that and to enact that. Listening creates holy space. Listening sets aflame what is no longer needed. With it, space is renewed with light.

[23:32]

We inherit these wonderful practices of a thousand years, a thousand plus years, and yet they can distract us. It's not so much that we revere what happened in the past as it is we reenact it. We find its relevance in the presence. We find its relevance in our own being. We find its relevance in how we relate to the environment, how we relate to our society. how we relate to all the beings of our conditioned world. So listening deeply, discerning deeply, helps us to not get caught up in trivialities, but to sort of see what's no longer needed.

[24:48]

And then the next line says, listening preserves what matters to you, what matters to life in this codependent world. Listening preserves what matters. With it, respect takes root and flourishes. To take root and to flourish. that we touch something deep in ourselves and we allow it to guide us. We allow it to call forth from our being a nourishing way of being in the world so that we nourish our own being,

[25:54]

and we nourish all being. Listening is touchstone. Listening is a heartbeat. Listening is a pathway. Listening is a touchstone. With it, I remember. It's very helpful when you're meditating to have a touchstone, to have a way that when your mind gets caught up in thinking about something, that there's a way in which you can return to now. Whether it's holding still and noticing, are you in the midst of an inhale or an exhale? Whether it's noticing what's happening in your mind or your state of mind, whether it's noticing how is what you were just caught up in, how has it changed your posture or shifted how you're relating to your body.

[27:12]

All these details act like a touchstone to bring us back to make us available for just being present. Listening is a touchstone. Listening is a heartbeat. With it, you can feel There's something in the body that knew that the first thing it did when it was born was to breathe. Makes me think of the other poem, which I don't think I'm going to get to, but maybe I'll just read it.

[28:13]

And this breath... in this body, able, just as it was in the moment that it first entered the world. Further on in the poem he calls it that first impossible breath that's made with a cry. I think now we're discovering that that cry was because someone slapped us on the butt. I think now we're discovering that such rough treatment, even at the moment of birth, is not a welcome experience. the capacity to breathe, the capacity within our physical being to let something soften and open, to allow the embodied tension of our response to being alive, to allow it to release

[29:51]

find an ease.

[29:53]

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