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 morning. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. And for those of you who frequents this place, you might notice something a little bit different today. namely that there are two of us navigating the space and sharing an offering with you this morning. My name is Erin Rourke, and I'm here sharing the Dharma seat with Jeannie Lynam, and we'll tell you a little bit more about ourselves as we get into unfolding today's talk. But just very briefly, I'm a priest through San Francisco's Zen Center, and by day, I'm in my 20th year teaching high school. high school teacher.

[01:04]

Hi, everyone. I am Jeannie Lynam, and I met the Buddha right here 20 years ago. I have to say it, and I didn't kill him. And I have been lay ordained for eight years. And before we kind of launch into our exploration today. We very much want to thank Christina Lenhair for both bringing us together and creating the space for us to offer this talk in the practice period, which will kind of center you in and tell you about. And we also want to thank Tonto Tim, who's not here today. Tonto Zachary for helping us out this morning. So many people to thank. And thank all of you very much, whether you're here in person or online, for choosing to show up today. Such a beautiful, bright, sunny day today.

[02:05]

And I can imagine why you've chosen to come here. We'll talk about that a little bit more. But thank you so much for making that choice this morning. Your turn. My turn. So this morning's talk is part of our... 10-week practice period intensive. The theme is Buddha Body, Buddha Mind, and it's led by our dear Christina. And it's recognizing and honoring this human body as a means, as a path, and as a source of wisdom. And so today, we'd like to talk about our body's our human bodies and our earth bodies. And together, we don't think of them as together because in the Western society, we're taught that they're separate. But today we'd like to explore how we can develop practices to more connect our bodies to the earth, to support our own practice, especially in these times.

[03:15]

And to help us shift right away into today's theme, which is earth body, we'd like to offer a guided meditation. You look pretty settled, but if you're feeling a little unsettled, feel free to get more settled if you want to. And you can tune into your body and just notice if it wants you to shift in any way, if you feel comfort and ease, or enough comfort and ease. You can feel free to close your eyes. Often in Zen practice, we don't practice with words guiding us, and this is going to be some words. So if it helps you to listen, you can close your eyes, but you could also just soften your gaze and let all of your senses be open, whatever works best for you. We invite you to notice the weight of your body on your chair or your cushion.

[04:18]

And really allow yourself to just feel that support of the earth beneath you. Find the edges and curves of your body where they meet your clothing. And notice the feeling of air around you. Feel into the movements of your breath and heartbeat. Allow the words of the meditation to seep into the soil of you like a gentle spring rain. Noticing this breath coming in. Noticing this breath going out. There is nothing you need to do right now.

[05:22]

Breathing is already happening. Noticing gravity gently holding you. The same gravity that holds the oceans, the atmosphere, and the spinning earth itself. And bring your attention gently into your body. Everything in your body came from the earth. Every atom in your bones, every drop of water in your blood, every mineral in your cells was once part of soil, stone, ocean, air, or sunlight. Nothing in you is separate from the earth. Bring your attention to your bones. Just imagining the quiet structure holding you upright.

[06:27]

Your legs, your ribs, your spine, and your skull. And you may even want to bring your fingers to your eye sockets and actually feel this amazing skull behind your face. The calcium in these bones were once dissolved in ancient seas, were once in shells and coral reefs, limestone and mountain rock. Your bones are earth, temporarily shaped into a human form. Now notice the pulse of your blood in your body. as your heart is beating, your wrists, your neck. The iron that makes your blood red was born inside a star long before the earth existed.

[07:31]

And when that star exploded, its elements traveled throughout space and now flow quietly through your veins. Your body is not only earth, your body is also earth. the cosmos. Now consider the water inside of you, your body that's mostly water. The water on earth is a closed system. The water in our cells has moved through clouds, rivers, bodies of animals, bodies of our ancestors. oceans, glaciers, plants, animals, and soil for millions of years. And the water we drink was once drunk by your ancestors, by dinosaurs.

[08:38]

The water in your body now is the same water moving through the earth. Now notice your breath. This oxygen you're breathing in now was released by plants, by forests, by algae in the oceans. Each breath in and each breath out of the trees and of us is part of a shared cycle connecting you with trees, oceans, soil, and sky. You are not a human. separate from nature. You are not a human in nature. You are kin with nature, the same as redwood trees, as ladybugs, as stones. You belong here. The same earth that grows forests, that shapes mountains is also

[09:49]

carrying you. Take one slow breath and carry this quiet remembering you are earth. You are nature. You are cosmos. The cosmos expressing itself here as a living body, breathing and sensing For a moment, simply feel that. And this body is the earth feeling itself. So take a few deeper breaths. You can allow your eyes to gently open if you've had it closed. And feel free to

[10:51]

wiggle or move your body in any way that you need to. Kind of bring yourself back into the space. So for those of you here in the room, we wanted to invite you to share a little bit about your experience with someone close by. If you're online, we invite you if you feel comfortable to share your experience a little bit in the chat. Not required, but just a way to get your voice out there. And then we'll just open up to maybe three comments just to hear what that was like for you. Okay, so our question is, what happened in your body, in your mind, in your sense of self as you listened to the words? How did the words and phrases land for you? Where did they hit you? What did you feel? What sensations or emotions arose? So any of those questions are ways to get into sharing your experience.

[11:54]

Okay, so take a moment and just look around you. Maybe there's someone close by that you could just easily scoot around and look at. We're just gonna give you one minute each. I know it's short. One minute each, and then we... All right, thank you. Thank you, Doan. Just curious if there might be two or three people who want to share something with the larger crowd. I know it can be intimidating, but also if you enjoy, enjoy it. I see one person here. Thank you. Can you hear me? Thank you. For me, the experience was... I always have a problem with this microphone, which is why I sometimes share so I can get used to it. For me, the experience was feeling the vastness of our human body, my human body, and the interconnectedness of it all.

[13:01]

And because we've had here conversations about the war outside, which is a reflection of the war inside, And as somebody that loves nature, it made me think about how we treat nature is how we treat ourselves. Thank you. I found the reminders very powerful of the interconnectedness of everything in our body. to everyone else. But I think I was also really struggling with this push and pull of the ego in separating, for one moment, connecting with that, like, oh wow, I am all of the universe mind showing up in this way.

[14:06]

But then almost instantly getting pulled back into I have all of these life experiences and it's like, this is me. And it's like, it felt like almost like there's a sprint that is like forcing you back to the same position. Again, that felt like the mental force of like separating. I had very milliseconds of feeling I could let go of it. before I maybe hold back in. Thank you for sharing. Maybe one more person, if you want to. Our triad had a bit of similar thoughts on the awareness itself, the parts that you didn't mention, not the physical parts, but the physical parts.

[15:10]

but that our awareness exists as part of this also. And whether that's an individual or shared phenomena is difficult to narrow down. Thank you all so much for sharing. It really does seem like that. that helped you get into your earth bodies a little bit more. That's so lovely to see. I thought I would share what called me a few years ago to really get more into my earth body with a few stories. I'm moving in here for this practice period. I've lived here 20 years ago and I I remembered that it was here when I first heard that the United States with 4% of our population had generated 39% of the world's historic emissions.

[16:22]

And that was the first time I ever got that my lifestyle and my daily choices could actually impact someone else on the other side of the world. It was such a lightning bolt for me. And I thought about being raised in a family culture where, I mean, if you got a shot at the doctor, we stopped at this 7-Eleven and got an IC on the way home. If you were sad, We were having a bad day. We went to the mall. Our consumption was built in to regulate our feelings, to avoid things. And I dropped everything. I also want to notice that now all the malls and all the stores all over the world are right here.

[17:28]

I mean, you don't have to drive anymore to be distracted. It's so easy, right? To consume instead of feeling and being what is really present in our bodies. So I went and decided I would become an expert in sustainability and got a master's degree in sustainable business management. And fast forward 12 years ahead, I was working in sustainability and leading climate action at a global corporation here in the Bay Area. And doing things that I thought were really tremendous, really tremendous work. And that was great. But also, I was holding such fear for the climate and the future. I was holding such sadness and grief, seeing all the impacts around the world.

[18:33]

And there's no place to share that. In a corporation, being vulnerable or showing that you don't feel resilient is a weakness. So you have to hold it in. And in our busy lives, we're so busy, we don't even know what we're feeling. We don't even slow down. At least I didn't. I couldn't even slow down to sense all that grief and suffering. I just kept being busier and busier. Does that sound familiar to any of you? So I was burning out and then two years ago, I got this invitation I got an invitation from the woman at the United Nations who helped orchestrate the historical Paris Agreement. That's when all the countries in the world came together in the first time to agree on a way to release our missions collectively.

[19:39]

And she was holding a retreat at Plum Village, which is Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery for the 100 global climate leaders. I could not believe it. This was my practice and my job and my community all coming together in one place. And being there, we were able to finally share our grief, share our despair, share our joy, open to everything, open to joy, open to earth. I mean, not open to earth, but... open to touch the earth. And I realized that the earth could help hold the grief. I just poured my grief into the earth, bowing. It's a practice we can all do. And the earth can help hold it for us.

[20:44]

The earth is a resource that is there for us. And at Plum Village, and since then, I've been studying. I'd love to share a few of the things I learned just like that. I learned that the way I was seeing the crisis and relating to the crisis is something to fix, something that was wrong, something that needed a silver bullet, something that a hero needed to come in and solve was part of the problem. something that we had filled with fear, filled with urgency, that was just responding from the way that was actually causing the climate crisis already. Maybe it was still in the same paradigm. So what I realized, well, I wanted to see that the climate crisis was a relational rupture

[21:50]

And the climate crisis was an invitation to be in a new way of being, in a new way of relating to the earth, to other people, to not other, and to not even, to not, to be in new relationship with ourselves. So my invitation was to act from the love that I have for the Earth, the love that I have for this precious human impermanent body, and the love that I have for all of humanity. Because how we act is more important than what we do.

[22:51]

So acting from fear with just bringing the fear in to what we were doing. But when we can act in a way that creates trust, hope, and belonging, which is the world we want to see. So embodying the way we want the future to be in the world we want to see now, then transformation is possible. And so over the last few years, being in earth, I'll speak louder. So over the last few years, I've taken time to really be in earth and immerse myself in nature. And there's a trick to doing it. The trick when you're in nature is not to be trying to get your steps in. It's not to be talking to people and lost in what happened wrong that day.

[23:54]

It's really about being in your body. Earth is out there. Earth is out there constantly waving its leaves, the grasses in the breeze, and the smells of the flowers, the song of the birds. It's all calling us, calling us into our senses to be in our bodies. And when we're in our bodies, that's when we get our insights. Our insights of our internal wisdom and then our insights from Earth. So in order to listen to Earth, I realized that I need to go out in nature with no agenda. And this could be a practice you all do. It's called meandering or aimlessness. So you go out in nature.

[24:57]

Hopefully you can give yourself a little while so you don't have to be back for anything. When you go out in nature without books, maybe your phone if you get lost in your back pocket, but you don't, you turn it off. And you let your senses lead you. You look back. for what delights you. You let it take you down paths. You just walk out of your house. You don't have to go somewhere fancy or far away. Just open to the wonder that's outside. And when you're in wonder, and you see things differently, and you see nature differently, and there becomes, it's amazing what is just a tree, becomes this tree saying, waving, saying, hello, kin, to you. It's, you see that nature is actually radiating love.

[25:58]

I'm gonna break up here. It's really radiating love to us all the time. And you can just spend time to just delight and drop down and let nature in. What I got was that I really belong. We all belong. We all belong just like every other creature. No more, no less. I don't know about you, but were you taught you had to earn your place here? Were you taught you had to earn your happiness? Or achieve something to earn? So this is a critical practice for us to know that we belong without having to be different. And the earth is there for us. And the earth wants us to wake up. The earth is calling us to wake up.

[26:58]

The earth is our sangha. Last thing. When I came home one day, I realized I'd never introduced myself to the trees in my yard and the squirrels. Never occurred to me. But now we feel like Kent. When I come home, I feel like the trees know that I have arrived, and it's like, yay, genie's home. As crazy as that sounds. Shall I turn it over to you? I'd love to. Just intulate that. I'll end with the gift of recognizing our interconnectedness with nature and everyone is how our life in our paradigm shifts. Okay.

[28:10]

Thank you. So when I first met with Jeannie, we were... We actually just met this fall, this past fall, and we met at the Ferry Building to talk about our connections and kind of what we might be able to come up with together. And she was telling me about some of the really deep, intense nature experiences that she had, being out there by herself in a plod of land for days and days. And as I was listening, I noticed a feeling of, like, combined feeling of longing, but also recognition that I am an urban dweller. And I don't know about you all, you're here at city center, but raise your hand if you live in a city. Okay, yes. And so we might not always have what seems like abundant time to be out in a sort of not urban version of nature. And so My part in this talk today is to be a cheerleader for you don't have to wait.

[29:11]

Of course, I have on my bucket list to try something like that, but also as a city dweller, part of my daily practice can be touching into the wild spaces that are here around us. And you might notice in this very city center, it's everywhere, there are trees, We're surrounded by trees, including in the courtyard. This building, which was recently renovated and unearthed and dug up, is built around giant rocks. So we have this energy and this vibration of rock coming through the ground, which is part of what you feel when you walk into this space. It's very grounding. So we actually don't have to wait. You know, cities, I think especially this city and in the Bay Area, unfortunately, we've been sprinkled with this ethos of move fast and break things.

[30:13]

And we don't have to choose that. We can also move fast and love things, move fast and be connected to things, move slow and mend things. And so one of my practices Jeannie recently called me one of the busiest people she knows, because we were trying to arrange some times to chat, and this was a very kind of intense season at the school where I teach. It's just a lot of, difficult to find openings in my schedule. And so I've found that the time that I can really drop in and create a space, a daily sort of nature immersion, is in the early mornings. And I'm fortunate to live close to Golden Gate Park, but we have so many beautiful parks, including up the street, down the street, in San Francisco, even if you don't live near Golden Gate Park. But I have the opportunity every morning to step into the park while it's still dark out.

[31:18]

And a beautiful thing about many of our parks is there aren't a lot of, what do you call them, light posts? So it's truly dark. And over the winter, I started to do this practice of walking into the darkness of the park and looking up and seeing the stars, even in the middle of this city park that is completely created from, it's not a, there are no native plants in Golden Gate Park. It used to be sand dunes, but still the aroma of earth. the feeling and sound of trees, there are owls, there are coyotes, there are raccoons and other things that I don't even know what they are, but they're definitely walking by me. It's incredible. And so I noticed that when I, as Jeannie's pointing out, when I kind of shift my mind or shift my perspective, and as you were pointing out too, I think there's a tension, there's kind of a pull that you can actually choose to

[32:26]

towards that earth body and move into that earth body and kind of put on or step into that earth body wherever you move, wherever you're moving in the world. Don't have to necessarily wait for a big nature opportunity. And I was thinking about this I was thinking about the kind of centrality of nature and the support of trees and the support of wild things in our very own practice. I'm teaching this class to my high school students right now called Zen in the Bay. And recently we took a docent tour of the Asian art museum to look at the life of the Buddha in particular. And our docent was incredible. And by the way, it's free for educators. I didn't actually know this, but you can have a free tour with a docent if you are an educator.

[33:32]

But he showed us all these different figures of the Buddha that symbolize different moments in his life to give us the kind of code for what we're looking at. And the one that the kids were most drawn to, these are actually not kids, they're 18 years old, most of them, Buddha's moment of enlightenment. And in his moment of enlightenment, he's touching the earth. It's the touching the earth mudra, which you can actually try if you want to. And I think it's so important to remember and consider as we are part of this practice that all of our teachers have this, and our lineage have this direct connection and support right there, even in their iconography of having the support of the earth. And so it's accessible to us, it's presented to us, it's in all of our figures, in our beautiful statues, in our space, in our beautiful practice space.

[34:41]

And all we have to do is remember, which is kind of hard actually, but to remember. And so we can remind each other too. So what else can you do to help develop your relationship with nature and the Buddha, your Buddha body? How can you let Earth, an intimate relationship with Earth into your life? One way is to introduce yourself to your trees and your squirrels and introduce yourself to your tree and thank it for hosting all the birds, for providing nutrients to so many creatures and sheltering so many things.

[35:46]

That opens up your heart to receive. You can also remember that when you are feeling ungrounded and unsettled, you can ground yourself in everything that is grounded. This morning I went out and really touched the tree out there. It's really a resource there to remember for you. Remember that Mother Earth can hold our grief and fear too big to hold. You can actually take your meditation cushion outside and open your heart to your nature. It's beautiful. Thich Nhat Hanh has the classic where whenever you are walking, envision that your feet are kissing the earth with every step.

[36:55]

That is such a beautiful practice. So as we were waiting up in the hallway, you know, with Hanh, or yes, the bell going, we actually, a poem dropped down into our space is the ideal poem for today. And if you'd like to close with it, this is a poem by the founder of our temple, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He says, nature is a true teacher of Zen, but not all who enter the mountains see them as they really are. Only those who know themselves can see the true nature of mountains. We should live and practice Zen at this site of great nature until we appreciate the 13th century Zen master Dogen's poem.

[38:01]

The color of the mountains is Buddha's pure body. The sound of running water is Buddha's great speech. We have time to read it one more time. Yeah. Nature is a true teacher of Zen. but not all who enter the mountains see them as they really are. Only those who know themselves can see the true nature of mountains. We should live and practice Zen at this site of great nature until the color of the mountains is Buddha's pure body. The sound of running water is Buddha's great speech. So as we close today, we really invite you to tap into your own earth body as you move through your day today. We have so much more that we can share and exchange with you all during our Q&A, but it's a good time for us to close right on time.

[39:09]

And... Oh. just to remind you that we can choose to be interconnected nodes in Indra's net, interconnected nodes that are collaborative, full of belonging and trust, acting on our love of this earth and all beings. Thank you so much. 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:04]

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