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. It's good to be here. It's good to be alive again. Oh, no, it might be good to be dead, too. Let's listen to the bell. All the gods are awakened.

[01:28]

The bell has rung. Speak up, okay. Can you hear me? I hear this better? Okay. So I like to just pay homage to Shakyamuni Buddha and his teachings and all of those who were before him and all those who follow. And I like to give thanks to Abbas Fu Shorter for inviting me. And Tonto Jeremy Levy, I don't know where he is, but he's on vacation. Hi, Jeremy, on vacation. Thank you for inviting me to sit here and to share my life and to share my practice. And hopefully later on you'll share with me during our Q&A later on. So who here is new? to Zen Center. Any new people? Welcome.

[02:30]

Welcome. And thank you for being here and to help us who feel we know everything to see that we don't. You know? By your questions and by your presence and your billing. So feel free to ask all your questions you need to ask. Thank you. I've been going around and talking to various communities and around a book that I have written called The Way of Tenderness. And each time I go around and do a talk, I feel like I write another chapter that's not in the book. So I feel like I'm going to do it again today. And I'd like to share with you a story. It's a very short one. So recently, I've been very excited. My nephew, who I think he just turned 40 Saturday, and it's kind of frightening because I remember when he was born, and I was like, oof, you know, how did they get to 40?

[03:40]

And anyway, when he got married to his wife, and they were very young, and they were in their 20s, his wife had bad news for him. And they were already married, and the bad news was that she was not able to have a baby, you know, because of her physical condition and something that ran in their family, her family. And so I remember my nephew telling me that story and looking at me, and I looked at his eyes, and he could see the sadness in mine, and he showed me his sadness, which he rarely does because he likes to be very... you know, machismo and not show any feelings at all, but he really showed me that he was very sad about not having a baby, and he loves children. I've always seen him all along his life loving and caring for children. So it was very sad, but he did get to raise a son that his wife had had before she got married to him.

[04:48]

And he just loves my nephew. And he raised this boy now. He's 14 now. I think 14 or 15. Could be 15. And so then a couple of months ago, we got the news. They called and some more news. And this is like almost 20 years later. And he says, we're having a baby. It's like, whoa. You know, wow. You know, how did this happen? You know, how did... almost 20 years later, she now could have this baby that they said was impossible. And so, of course, I was, like, really happy, and I kept, you know, asking over and over, he's really having a baby? They're really going to have this child? And everybody's just been elated. So this child's name is, she was born July 19th, I'm very happy and celebrating, and her name is Sky Miracle.

[05:51]

Sky Miracle Manuel. So I thought that was kind of nice because I'm Earth, Earth Sky, you know. Earthland is my name I was given, so I think that, wow, she's Sky. So Sky Miracle came into our lives, and it made me think about our incarnations. our spirits coming into embodiment and what that means and what it brings to us, you know, as a path, you know, our embodiment and this child coming almost 20 years later after they said it's impossible. So a couple of days later, Sky had to go back to the hospital and there was this in my mind saying, oh, maybe she's not going to live because she wasn't supposed to come anyway.

[06:51]

You know, maybe she's going to just be here for a moment. You know, so I sat with that for a couple of days and, you know, wondering why she was back in the hospital for two days. And I had to come to this place where that she had come, she had been incarnated And she had come and she had already done her work because she had made us so happy. And she had brought so much love out of our hearts, you know, within the family, you know. So her work, you know, seemed to have been already accomplished, you know, in some ways. And so I sit with that. I made peace with her being in the hospital, having come, you know, so magically, and then in the hospital, so un-magically, you know, in the hospital. And so it was kind of this test not to grab onto the magic as well, you know, grabbing onto magic and trying to hold onto that and making, you know, Skye's gonna be this magical person.

[08:00]

But she's a person, she's a body, she's incarnated. She did leave the hospital, so just so you know, she's fine. and she's well. But the topic I wanted to talk about is making peace with our incarnation, our being peace with our embodiment, with the ways in which we have been incarnated. I have to say that in Zen practice, I haven't heard that word used a lot, and I don't believe it's used a lot in Soto Zen. But I'm using it today to help us meditate and sit with for a moment as to what this incarnation is and are we at peace with it? And is it a peaceful incarnation? And if not, why not? Or what ways in which it isn't a peaceful incarnation?

[09:06]

And so the first thing that came to mind when I thought of incarnation was the kaya, the dharmakaya, nirmanakaya, and sambokaya. The kaya means body. in Buddhist teachings, and these are the three bodies that are taught. You know, so I don't want to go into great detail here because we need at least a year's class to really explore it. But that the fact that this teaching on the different bodies near Monica, and it's going to give you briefly like a physical, the physical aspect of our incarnation And the sambokaya being more of the senses that we are born with. You know, so there's the senses, but it's not quite physical. Like you can't really catch a sight or touch a sight, you know, touch your seeing or catch your hearing.

[10:09]

You know, these are things that are not physical, but they are things that are experienced. And so that's the sambokaya. So that's the sensory aspect of our incarnation. And then there's the Dharmakaya. And the Dharmakaya, I just briefly explain to students and also the way I hold it. And I'm going to tell you it's a long study, but briefly it means that everything, everyone is interrelated and we can't see it necessarily. So even though we're in this incarnation, there's this place in which we can't see a particular kind of a body. that exist with us and between us. And so I, so why am I interested in all of this, you know, this incarnation and in the body? And I think for me at this time in this country and with us as these people,

[11:17]

that we are in the greatest opportunity to awaken to how our incarnation can be our path of awakening, that our incarnation is literally the path by which we will awaken. So it's very difficult sometimes. We want the incarnation, our awakening to come from the sky, you know, just drop from the sky or come from someone else. Maybe you might feel I might awaken you today, you know, but rather it is your own life and your own incarnation and your own lived experience that is giving meaning to your life. So it is this body that we walk in that mediates the life we live. And so it's important. I think that incarnation, this is why I'm bringing it to us today to share, is to begin to understand the sacredness of each other, the sacredness of embodiment, period.

[12:32]

The sacredness of having inherited a body. And I've been telling a lot of people, a lot of folks are really worried about their inheritance that's going to the bank. But, you know, we see that that's kind of volatile, right? Could be, could not. But that our inheritance, in fact, is the body that we received. Our inheritance is that we were fortunate enough to become nature. That we were fortunate enough to even be in our magnificence and in our varied nature. existence to be here and to learn and to experience what it means to be in form. So there's always a lot of discussions in practice about form and emptiness and a lot of chanting about it in Heart Sutra.

[13:35]

And of course that could be a study too of decades of studying that as well. But simply I just want to bring it as beginning to understand our incarnation as a sacredness. You know, so what does that mean? You know, so incarnation body. And when I say sacredness, what does that mean? Some people say, well, sacredness may mean to have respect, you know, to be kind, to do our best, you know, come to our highest potential. And then maybe our definition starts falling off. Maybe the experience of sacredness kind of gets fuzzy and we don't understand necessarily what it is that we are trying to experience as nature, as living beings. What is it that we're trying to experience between each other?

[14:36]

And so I put a little thought to it and a little heart to it as well. And because since the body does mediate our lives, and since it does also shape our spiritual path, each one of us are on a spiritual path shaped by how we are incarnated. And so our awakening is also shaped in that way. And also our location of awakening will be in this incarnation, if we should happen to have any awakening at all. So it's important to me to talk a little bit about what I mean, actually, about sacredness. So the first thing, going back to the inheritance of nature. So how sacred is it for all of us to be water? We have it right there. Do you feel your water right here?

[15:37]

There's water right here. you know, to feel that water and to feel that heat, you know, the fire that's in us, you know, water and fire that's making up the earth of us, the matter that we are, and then the breath, and then the air, you know. So how sacred can we be We can't even manufacture that. Some people try to manufacture sacred. Like it was really sacred the way I bowed, but not really. It's just really sacred just being here right now and having all of these elements inside of me reflecting back to you and you reflecting back to me, the same elements of nature, that we are it. And so when we... see ourselves as a collective body of nature, like a collective body of nature, then I think we're more able to see the collective elements and the collective earth, and we are less likely to violate each other and less likely to abuse each other, less likely to mistreat each other, less likely to

[17:05]

think of each other as less than oneself or more than oneself. So if we are walking with that in our hearts and we're walking and some people say, well, let's go out and teach those people who don't understand that. You know, they're out there, you know, hurting people. Well, maybe we can't. The only thing we can do is show them in our own lives exactly the sacredness of incarnation, you know, by how we are and who we are, how we look upon each other or how we don't look upon each other, how we look away when someone's presence or appearance is too hard to take in or you don't understand or they're too different or they're the same, so I'm going to embrace them. So we begin to see how we look at nature, how we do like redwoods more than we like oak trees.

[18:13]

I'll just use that. Or if someone gave you some flowers and you really wanted roses. So when the superiority and the inferiority come into play with our magnificence, we lose the sacredness. the sacredness of our incarnation and the sacredness of us being together as living beings. And so in this inferiority, in superiority, we have a distortion about identities. And so in many cases on a spiritual path, we're told identities are things that we work with and things that we let go. But they're also identities are things that we can look at and see where we carry distortions around them. What are the distortions around embodiments and incarnation?

[19:16]

You know, what ways in which... Do we see something less or something more of a particular living being? And how does that come to play out in our living as an experience of life? In what ways? And so I always say that it's not so much the identities that we're struggling with as much as it's the distortions upon the identity. that we struggle with. There's a lot of distortions about each other, about ourselves, about our society, everything. You know, there's so much distortion based on superiority and inferiority. And so these things I'm bringing to you in the context of the Dharma, I could bring these things to you in the context of politics or sociology or psychology or many places.

[20:18]

But right here in this Sin Center at Green Gulch, I am using Dharma. So it might not sound the same as what you hear when you're out in the world, in the ways we have learned to talk about our incarnation and our embodiments and our differences. We've learned to talk about them from so many different places, so many trainings, so many this, so many that. And so I'm more interested in what can this practice of meditation, this practice of sitting still, this practice of walking with meditation inside our hearts and how that affects who we are and affects our incarnation. I have this quote I wanted to read. When we do not see our bodies as all bodies, we become more prone to hatred. So when we do not see our bodies as all bodies, we become more prone to hatred.

[21:19]

We turn away from our ever-present true interrelationship. We turn away from our ever-present true interrelationship. And to me, that's the core of the teachings, the core of Buddhist teachings, the core of the love is interrelationship. So we like to think that we got it all together and we know how to do it, but I think we're all learning still. We're all learning how to live a life in that way where our bodies are all bodies and we come and not become prone to hatred within our own humanity. One of the things in practicing Zen, when I came into the practice, I, of course, felt myself to be very different than most of the people that were practicing at the time.

[22:25]

And that's not to say some people might have come before I even was there, or now they're there and I'm not. So it doesn't mean that there weren't other people that were like me that were there. And so I remember coming into this practice and wondering, you know, why I was here. And experiencing a lot of suffering around my particular embodiment and around race, sexuality, and gender. And what I felt, some of the things that felt like painful to me, that in my interactions and what was I going to do with this as, you know, could this be my spiritual path? It hurts so much, you know, so... It was quite the journey to, you know, sit with and to continue to sit with this lived experience inside the Zen center, having come from, I had come from another Buddhist practice as well, but I also had come from church.

[23:30]

the black church, and was raised in the black church where everything was, everybody's like a tribe, and everybody knows when you're born, like somebody can tell my Sky Miracle Manual story in that church, you know, but not in the Zen Center because that story is not part of the lived experience. So how was I going to live, you know, and practice that? And was I going to practice was the first question, you know. So as soon as we come into, you know, a spiritual path, you know, the first thing we find is something we don't like. Right away. Right away. It's something we don't like. And that very thing becomes the anchor. Or it could become the weight, you know, the chain involved to your foot. Or it could become light. it could become a light. And of course, for me, it didn't feel like a light at first, you know, at all.

[24:37]

But when I decided I would stay because, you know, no doors are locked at Zen Center. They're not locked. You know, you can walk out anytime, anytime you wish. You can leave. And I wasn't leaving. And so I began to understand that there was a light coming on in the midst of even all what I experienced as suffering and pain. And, you know, oh, I don't know if I want to do that or not. It could be just as simple as getting up every morning at 5.30, you know, at 5 o'clock. Did I want to do even that? You know, so we get up late at City Center. So... So it was really that practice and that light. What was that light? What light was it? Did it come from the outside? Did that awakening, you know, did a Dharma talk awaken me?

[25:40]

Was I sitting and suddenly, you know, I was blasted with bliss? You know, not the ice creams, not that. but just really what hit me, what came to me, what happened, what was that light? And when I discovered that that light was me, my own life was the light, you know, then I said, I have to sit a little longer in this light because I hadn't seen this light before, you know, that the light was right here, you know, and it had come on, and it was painful, seeing out with that light and seeing in with that light. The cave that I was living in had been very dark, and I was used to that darkness and enjoyed the discovery in the darkness, but when the light came on for me, not in my mind, it came on somewhere in this incarnation, somewhere in this body

[26:51]

decided to stick around for this light to stay and to see what this incarnation was going to bring in this context, in this environment. And so I began to, you know, to me, Zen practice is very much a body practice. You have to use your body a lot. So in the beginning, it was very difficult for me, you know, because I have a lot of pain, chronic pain, arthritis. And so it was very difficult. And but I saw that as a light, too. Oh, you can't bend your knees. Have you noticed that lately? Well, yeah, maybe for about a decade, you know. And what have you been doing? Oh, just telling people I can't bend my knees. You know, so eventually I was able to. And then my body has changed again since then. Your body continues to change and continues to evolve.

[27:52]

Because, yeah, I got really good. I could sit down really well. I could sit down really still. And then things change. And then I couldn't. So now what? Now what? So this is why I feel like the making peace with this incarnation, this body that changes when it wants to. It also suffers and it gets hurt. It has feelings, a lot of feelings. It has a lot of perceptions about things, you know, a lot of sensing and not understanding. So what am I to do with it but be peace with it? To be peace with it. You know, because that is the struggle I had was right here. And when I began to meet that struggle, to meet it and say, this is what it is.

[28:58]

This is what it is. I didn't like it at first. I didn't like the idea that this is what it is. You know, I remember one of the teachers, I was talking about my suffering, and they said, congratulations. You know, and I was like, wait a minute, I'm suffering. Yeah, you're supposed to help me, you know. And he said, well, what is it that you want, expect of life? This just means you're alive. You know, did you expect it all to go, like, perfectly smoothly? And yes, I did. And yes, I still do. I still do sometimes. I still do because then I'm very shocked when it doesn't. I go, oh, there's that incarnation again. There's that life again that's showing me to be right here with this right now. So I learned not to go further with it. So yes, I'm suffering, but then sometimes I would go further with it.

[30:00]

So let me go and the Zen don't work this out. in my mind. And of course, it didn't work out because it's in my mind. Or let me go and work this out with my mother or my father or my sister. Well, that's not how it worked out. None of it worked out that way. Life doesn't work out outside that way. It didn't work out. And so that meant the incarnation that I was dealing with. the some of the harmful acts that I have experienced in my life and discrimination and learnings were going to have to come into this particular light that I had I honed and I'm still honing this light that It shows me not only something about myself, but something about others and something about life and something about culture and society and everything, not just me, not just about myself.

[31:04]

So being peace with one's incarnation, I feel a lot of us come to practice kind of with that goal in mind, in the back of our minds. There's a way we want to be peaceful. We want to be at ease with the things that come in our lives. And I think that that is possible because peace is there. Peace is in my life. It is possible for me to be right now in peace even though I am in a terrible grief around what's happening to many people, many black people right now and the police. There's a lot of grief around that and trying to understand it and understanding it kind of beyond the people, beyond the brutality, beyond the obvious, because there's an obvious layer, but there's something else as well.

[32:11]

And so I sit with that in peace Now how do I sit with that in peace, you know, with the various things that are happening in our world? You know, and I sit with that because peace is there. And the more I sit with the peace, the more I begin to understand the larger picture of incarnation. I begin to see that... that what's happening is beyond police brutality is being played out through the police. The hatred we have is being played out through those who have weapons or those who don't have weapons is being played out by people who are being used to, are being presented and used, their lives are being, you know, victimized. And I think that if we look away from what's going on or we shut down from it, I think at this point we all should be weeping.

[33:22]

We should all be weeping and screaming, whatever it is. And if that hasn't come up for you, then practicing the sacredness of our incarnation would be a good beginning. you know, to begin to feel what is going on. And so that if we begin to feel this, not in an apologetic way or not in a way that, you know, we've got to hurry up and end it, you know, get to the solution, that if we begin to really have an intimacy with what is going on now, I believe that we will awaken. I believe that spiritual awakening is social justice, that spiritual awakening is activism. Because if we don't have an intimacy with what we are feeling right now as a people and as a country, as a world, we're not feeling it.

[34:27]

I don't know if we're going to get there. I don't know. And maybe there's no there to get, but can we get to the next moment together? Can we pause right now and mourn together. And so I ask you to pause right now and feel something. Just have a morning, you know, put your feet down on the ground and feel how frightening it is. And if it's not frightening, if you can't feel, feel how you can't feel. Just feel that. And this way we can be together. In this way, we can be together. Just feeling it.

[35:49]

Feeling into what is possible or impossible. Can a child be born 20 years after they say the child cannot be born? This child cannot be born. You do not have a body for a baby. What is possible? What is possible? And I believe we come and gather like this because we're all looking for what's possible. And deep down, we know there's something possible. I hope so. Otherwise, we could all just be at the beach somewhere. I think we're all here for something together. And it feels good to be joined in this way. I don't know what time I bring along.

[37:04]

Okay, good. Good time. So I'm going to just invoke Sky Miracle Manual's name. And that you hold that name as one who came on July 19th to once again show us what's possible. Just know that that breath came and that incarnation came. And I share her with you, you know. And that everything else that you have seen and know to be was impossible that is possible. So... We're very fortunate. Please hold your precious lives. Care for them by caring for others.

[38:06]

Look upon each other with undeniable love. Look upon each other with undeniable love, even if you don't know what it is. Just do it. Just do it. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:55]

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