One-day Sitting Lecture

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attention
ah today's the to the to target those words

good morning

today's the vernal equinox the spring equinox
and
this was the time of year and or the day of the year really when there's equal light an equal darkness
it's imbalance the dark and alive
and then we turn towards a delight with the days
becoming longer and longer so this is considered the first day of spring i think

and in mythology this is ah the day that per seventy came back from the underworld and was reunited with her mother
shit
depending on which story there's the earliest strata of this myth where she on her own tells her mother she has to go to the underworld she wants to
see for herself and help beings actually
and her mother can't stop her
that's the earliest version of the story and then the one we're most familiar with this that she was taken to the underworld by hades p m god with the underworld
and her mother ah in either case her mother
is in despair
diameter
and she doesn't know where her daughter is and she
tears her hair and stops doing all her regular activities she's in such deep mourning and nothing gross
the land becomes barren in the
grasses and fruits and trees and put everything shrivels up for want of
her care and the whole earth is our goes into morning with her and she's frantic

anyway as you know ah there's an intervention and per seventy is able to come back but because she ate
of the pomegranate
which is food of the underworld she has to go back six months out of the year so she she spends half the year with her husband haiti's and half the here on earth where she and her mother are reunited in and the earth
is the david she can she comes back

so everything's in balance and to tonight for evening service i don't know if in mentioned this already but will be having our traditional equinox service and we make an altar out on the deck and we chant we do bows and chant and then there's
is a chance to offer words of the season either your own
i'm feeling about spring equinox or a poem something you'd like to say not everybody says something that would be take us far into the night probably but if you feel so moved please please do say something
during that time of the ceremony and it will be for evening service which is the evening out of the day
ah
in traditionally we we have had the ah equinox ceremony in the evening

so i was recently talking with someone who gives dharma talks and she had been talking with another person who gives dharma talks and sheep the person i was speaking with prepares for weeks and weeks she knows the date shall be speaking and she really researchers and thinks about rates it
down and and she asked this other person about when they started preparing for their dharma talks and they said oh and i begin to fall my robes i sit down and i thought wow
ah
but it feels a little bit like that today for me too
ah
i wanted to talk about balance balance in are sitting posture and balance in our
this as a practice
we've been studying number of us have been setting the food kansas zang yi the universal ammunitions for thousand and or general instructions for the promotion of zazi and a dog and geez
universal meditation text and in the middle section there's some very detailed instructions which are traditional for the sitting posture and since will be spending the day sitting i thought i would
look at those with you and
and then during the day if you want to you can review or reflect on your sitting posture and ah
see if you're in balance
so the word balance means a by links or to the or double scales it it comes from mom scales and
to be in balance
ah it's equilibrium were opposing forces are equalizing each other and
ah but to be in balance a few pictures someone on a balance beam
they're constantly going in and out of balance as they do the slight corrections course if their been on the olympics or something you don't see that particularly because they're sometimes you do but there so
adept at it so you don't see what it takes to stay in balance but if you see someone who's just starting out or walking on a curb as a kid you know
how various in me
so you're constantly going in and out of balance and opposing
slightly opposing on one side or another which is another way of talking about negotiating the way where there's the way or the balance beam and or always falling off a little bit here at a little bit they are sometimes more than others
and in our posture
it's like that as well there's there's a balance point but to find that balance point
we
i'd like to recommend and it's recommended in the for cancer mg to
rock your body right and left and settle into a steady immobile sitting posture and this rocking your body
and an earlier meditation text by jury he says to shake your body but i think that's the translation of maybe someone's translation of rocking your body to shake your body seven or eight times said i'm i just don't think it means doing this
so this kind of rocking your body right and left and i'd like to recommend and i do it myself every time i sits as in part of
taking my place is rocking my body right and left in an arc they get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until it's not even noticeable the rocky could be down to a slight pressure on one sitting bone slight pressure and the other sittingbourne
left right left right after it
center so
if we kind of whip into our posture too quickly we may actually notice about halfway through the period that we're kind of
not imbalance and you can feel that different places in your body your shoulders of party or back your lower your hip so when you do this rocking to actually bring your attention to your body
and really feel
was was very helpful for me is to really feel you're sitting bones as if they were two little feet standing on your cushion if you can imagine your body this your feet where you're sitting bonds will feet and as iraq you can feel just like if you're standing on your two feet
you can feel pressure little bit and one little bit on the other until you're even and you might notice i'm really not on the cushion quite even so then you can take time right in the beginning to resettle yourself move a little bit here a little bit there because it's
it's tiny we're talking about inches or quarter inches of being off but that makes a big difference with
your vertebrae and your muscles and nerves and so this wracking
i think the mind of rocking is not any different than size and mine it's just completely paying attention to what's happening and to skip that point and kind of
zip into your posture that we think we have a conception of oh i know my posture is such as such so folding your legs the way you fold them are sitting and sais or even on a chair however you'd think you usually said isn't it is a conception that kind of mental conception of you're sitting posture so
ah
actually what i'm talking about his mental conception as well but it's kind of fresh mental conception based on new information of where your body actually is in space and on the cushion
so rock your body right and left and settle and also forward and backward in terms of finding your bounds forward and backward
is a part of finding this balance in you're sitting so don't neglect that let's not neglect the forward and backward access
so once you found that center been the spine ah is actually in a more healthy
a position with the vertebrae stacked on top of each other like a stupor sometimes spoken about as as as a stupor and the nick
comes right up from the back of the vertebrae up
rather than hanging forward if if the vertebrae were coming up and then the network hanging forward that's very hard on your
back shoulders
ah and also kind of crunches down your internal organs to have your head hanging for you because you collapse forward as well and to have it hanging back
you know pulled back is a very rigid and that's also very difficult for your body so the head
remember once getting a birthday card you probably know this job want to cut off ten pounds of ugly fat no want to lose ten pounds of i we've had cut off your head a year but your head is very heavy you know if it's hanging forward or hanging backward or off to the side you know it
especially over time can
ah
affect your whole posture whether you're sitting or not a and
various discomforts can be created just by having your head hanging forward or hanging back now
when i was doing alexander technique the tendency for americans but maybe all people but it for sure americans and westerners is to pull the head back is see people they're walking like this and he my teacher was where he was me to give the head forward
which was really in alignment but there's a feeling like if you go to forty are going to fall especially during kenyan or walking around we pull back a little bit too much and it's a very young it has original to it but to forward you feel you're going to fall forward so one way this is during kenyan and walking that you can
and feel if your head is in the right place meaning right up from your spine is if your feet now you have feet on the floor if they feel
if your feet feel evenly balance meeting pret there's not too much pressure on the ball of a foot or too much pressure on the heel where you feel in evenness an evening of the pressure all along your actual foot on the floor that will say a lot about where your head is and your approach
torso so for kenyan for walking meditation especially as you
do these half steps you lift up and placed down and completely you can feel the shift of the weight all across your foot
so these are this is the kind of day where you can
put your full attention into these kinds of concerns it's hard to do it when you're
reading around and after work and it's hard to notice that but today we have a whole day to do this kind of wow
close attention
so balancing your sit sitting bones balancing on your feet and balancing
front and back side to side

and i just wanted to say something about your neck that than your neck is coming up from your backbone your vertebrae and then the feeling of the neck is a kind of wide
whiteness going out and forward and back having your neck fuel wide rather than tight and rigid so that the postures it does not have rigidity in it it has
there's some effort to stay upright and you don't want to be too tight about that but you don't want to be too relaxed or too loose or you'll fall over ah
so finding that balance between rigidity and
loose looseness like well this is for your mind as well the image show that the buddha used of tightening the strings of an instrument if it's too tight if your to tighten down on your stringed instrument you can't get sound beautiful sound and you break a string if it's too late
use is just flabby and and you can't get beautiful sound so it's take me it just right this imbalance
so i think sometimes when we we have a lot of 'em
feeling of wanting to achieve something i get to the bottom of something or
find out something we may be add too much tension in our posture in our mind and body and
this is a kind of stress actually on the body a strain and stress that can bring
it said it can bring an unhappiness in of which we don't need any anymore and also illness to by by city with too tightly tightened down strings of your instrument
so you might ask yourself is this am i being too dressed and by being too strained or to loose

so the other
posture point i just wanted to say something about was will actually to the eyes in south in the eyes are
open but cast down and there's many people who have meditation tradition where the eyes are closed different traditions have a closed i
ha
teaching or way your and raging duggan's angie's teacher said if you're an accomplished enough sitter and don't get drowsy it might be okay to have your eyes closed so this is someone whose
doesn't have difficulty with sleepiness mind wandering and so forth in that case may be that person could try that but the basic admonition in the universal recommendation is that eyes remain open
but they're half open and cast down and there's in terms of stress and strain around the eyes the eyes have a kind of gentle feeling there's not a lot of you're not looking and staring at the wall they're just cast down and resting gentle feeling around the eyes
and the other point is the hands
which is really the whole upper body the am
the the murderers is called the cosmic mudra the universe samudra is ah left-hand on top of right usually which goes with the left leg and top of right although if you have your right on top you can switch usually you see
left on top of right and
the the hands are pulled close right up against your belly so that the thumbs are even with your navel and the baby fingers about two inches or so below
your navel and touching your belly actually grazing your belly so they're your hands i think there's a tendency to drop the hands in the lap thinking that this is arresting not too strenuous not too straining or stressing out you don't want to
but what happens when you drop your hands in your lap and they go low is that your whole upper body is drawn forward and the muscles of your arms and shoulders and lower back especially are are pulled out of alignment actually so it's important to have
in this mudra
in this position which will if you have back pain this may alleviate back pain in the middle back and lower back the shoulders are completely relaxed so you're not holding your hands up in the air
they're relaxed your scapula are down and going down in the shoulders are down and then the arms come around in this very natural circular shape
which i'm
i've been told that when the astronauts are in zero gravity their arms do that their arms naturally just go to do they also when they fall asleep fly up in the air
find very respect
so this this rounded shape is a natural shape for human arms so i think we often think why i can't hold my hands up here my shoulders are going to get to crunched a tight because have to hold em up but you don't have to hold them up they will just naturally
go right there
and when you look down at your thumbs a edge your pans your thumbs block your vision from your middle finger so there's a a rotation forward and backward for your hands as well as up and down so that that some raw
rule of thumb to to look down and seabury thumbs are for your putra
so please make an effort during the day too often if you are drowsy or sleepy the hands fall apart and drop into your lap or
if you're i'm daydreaming thinking a lot in your head comes forward your hands
actually i i've been down
i've read where if you're having a lot of pain your your hands turn into a flame shape you can push push on your hands push on your thumbs and then if your tooth sleepy drowsy than they fall away so how can we what is it to keep this balanced round
each each moment as and or when when you notice your out of bounds to replace them
make the custard audra ah refresh it with your attention

so one of the most
ah
known parts of the for kansas mg is the line where it says
learn the backwards step that turns the light and shines at inward this is recommendation is a meditation instruction
it actually comes before all these posture points of how to fold your legs and
rocking right and left in the hands and so forth before that
it says learned the backward step that turns your light and shines it inward body and mind of themselves will drop away
and we've been studying this in the for kansas saggy class that what is this turning the light back or the backward step that turns the light shines it inward
and in japanese that's it's called eco henshaw turn the light back or return the light
so
this is another balance ah
admonition or a recommendation or instruction usually the light of our awareness and attention and
sensory perceptions is turned outward this is the forward step where we're looking out at objects and our ears are tuned out to sounds and our eyes are out to visit bulls in our hands are out to touch a bulls
and and our thoughts the cook are out to the cognizable is thinking about things out and about and
this is outflow or a shraddha in sanskrit the the outflows the the externals
so what we're in many ways you could say that we're usually out of balance because we're so outwardly
involved
and along with this outward involved in this drawing of the sense organs out
in the mind oregon as the sixth oregon
or or kind of tipped forward leaning forward in an inner zazi an instruction you know we want to be upright and not leaning forward or backward or right or left right or left but we are often tuned in to what we understand is
out there
now we're often to didn't out there because we are protecting ourselves you've gotta be really alert this day and age gonna watch out
you know you've gotta have street smarts and savvy because anything can happen so that's a kind of
ah
we do we do have to know what is a safe situation and to be really aware about what's going on but this is often
so i'm constantly
activated that
and believed in completely that it's hard to understand what do you mean turn the light inward when it puts that all about learn the backward step hindering step in shine the light inward
i'm doing that all the time it doesn't are and i mean
well
our habitual way is this forward step and so the this turning a new way turning the light back are turning the wheel backwards you might say even so what is this referring to how do you practice the backwards step
because it feels so natural that are mine is going in this direction going out the sound of my voice
you feel like that sound is coming from over here this part of the room in your face the so it's over there or you see me and that visible is over there
ah
so this is their usual way of thinking this is our ah some sarah regular
belief system which is suffering
there's a lot of suffering in that because when things are out there and we're over here this separation there's anxiety there's what are they going to do to me there's i hope they like me there's
they don't understand me or care about me or i really care about them and i'm jealous and they don't have anything to do with being all that stuff is born of this belief in
ah self and others as separate and the out there and over here outside over there i think it's a book by maurice sendak outside over there so this meditation instruction is let's do something different let's turn the light back learn the back
awkward step and turn the light back but then we hear that we see what what does this talking about what are they talking about i don't get it
so
bodhidharma in talking to quaker bodhidharma his disciple wake up
he gave waker
an instruction a meditation instruction he said to wake up or it said that he said to wake
cece involvements outwardly cease involvements or cease involvements in the external
outwardly cease involvement and inwardly know coughing or sighing
in the mind
have inwardly have no coughing or sighing in the mind with the mind like a wall you can enter the way
so this is a are great ancestor bodhi dharma who was an indian yogi age indian
master who came to china
he was
called the blue eyed barbarian
suppose they had red hair to and he came to china and set
supposedly says in the for kansas mg nine years in front of a wall of story says so
it says wall gazing or like a wall this is mind like a wall he didn't necessarily it when we say like a wall it doesn't mean mindless like a wall or with no
life force but with mind like a wall is
no involvements in externals cease outwardly involving yourself with externals and inwardly know coughing have no coughing or sighing in the mind with that's mind like a wall so how is a wall when externals
come like birds common land and poop on the wall or rain or the wall is just sitting there
allowing whatever happens to happen
ah totally blocked in resolute stability says in the for cancer saying his mind like a wall that's not
upset by
the slings and arrows you know of our daily life with the irritations the annoyances or if there is upset that it's not upset at the upset this is mind like a wall and not wanting to manipulate ribs as manipulate metal
get involved and entangled in externals and in the internal realm
to not be on the coughing and sighing and complaining and lamenting and
you know cursing one's fate but inwardly know coughing or sign mind with mind like a wall you can enter the way so this is this is a m
meditation instruction from bodhi dharma to wake up
and
the turning the light back the aiko henshaw is
understanding that
that which we see hear smell taste and touch
although there is something physical their meaning when we hear the bird
the the redwing blackbirds debt is beginning to now that spring serious back and joyfully singing
the redwood red winged blackbird it's not that there isn't a physical red winged blackbird but are
experience of red winged blackbird is in the realm of conception of mental representation when we see the red winged blackbird we see a visible
this is
this is i consciousness this is
but i organ with a visible and that to come together and make the third thing which is i consciousness this is consciousness this is a mental representation it's not that there is nothing out there meaning
things in the physical realm or the heat in terms of a sound we hear that sound
and it's a mental representation it's a concept it's year consciousness the ear and the here a bull
and the and the third thing is ear consciousness so
that which is before our eyes or that which is before our ears or before our nose or our hands and before our mind is concepts are concepts and mental representation this is the way the physical world this is the way the world is delivered to us this is the way were made up
two one experienced the world through the scandalous through so it says in a co on that which is before the mind
ah is
meaning there is meaning
before the eyes and ears
it's beyond the reach of eyes and ears you can actually hear sounds other than through your consciousness which is conceptual mental concepts so when we hear sounds this is if we understand it as concept or mental representation this is are very
three own ear consciousness which is turning the light back
learn the backward step that turns the light and shines a inward this is ear consciousness now we think oh but that's redwood blackbird that's red winged blackbird sound
which is a kind of getting involved in the external this is involvement in the external all red winged blackbird or were so gladys back i loved them i hope they're getting their nesting and
that's getting involved in the external if you can stay with this is imbalance if you because we usually do forward step just like that and if we try the backward step then it's just your consciousness and you can say red-winged blackbird that's that's a kind of van that's a concept to have names
ing
but that's all that's all you need
because actually then the next object of consciousness the next mental representation
is right there you've missed
the next whatever be it a thought that's come through or another sound to your neighbors coffer
so you turn the light back and think of the mind that thinks you think about the mine nets thinking rather than the object that's
that we usually believe is are out there
this is think not thinking how do you think not thinking non thinking this is also from for kansas mg
so when we turn the light back and think back to the mind that things on each occasion of consciousness be it
sound smell taste touch feeling or a touch of 'em eye ear nose tongue body and mind these thought thoughts concepts that are pure mental not occasioned by
ah form
the the first eye ear nose tongue and body are part of rupa skanda or the form
forms can do they all those are taught those are thought of as material
and then there's mental pure mental which doesn't have a m
form it's a
two occasion it
so
so it's not that there is no material it's just that it's beyond the reach of our eyes and ears because of our delivery system i
it comes through as concept mental representation
so while we're sitting today
the the it said that the buddha said
just the sound within the sound
just the scene within the scene just the smelled within the smell meaning smell comes
just turn the light back and think of mine that thinks smell that's all
you don't there's no it's not necessary to do the forward step to distinguish what's it all about she that reminds me of data data data
try
this practice of thinking of the mainnet thinks smell and if you think oh that smell as external that's lunch then think of the mind that thinks oh that smells external that's lunch think of that mine because that's mental consumption and the
the
body and mind will have themselves drop away and your original faced will be manifest that's that's the next part of the the instruction and this is what's called gum
this is part of teaching around calming practices or tranquility
ah shah schumpeter calming the mind tranquilizing battery equipment
i'm making tranquil
finding the tranquillity that's there because the way or mind works is actually each object the the mind actually just there's just room for one object at a time
and the mine rests the mind doesn't
the mind can think external or can think that it's not external doesn't matter the mind doesn't really care the mind meaning like a big
open sky it doesn't matter if it thinks external or internal it can think either way
but if you think of the by net things and our with that mind object after object after object concept after concept after concept there is a resting that the mind feels because this kind of external this outflow is a disruptive kind
ah agitating quality to be
constantly ah
a flowing out a shrub mean some
well sometimes this translated as hate or you know like the oozing of a wound it has a
the mind has there's some pain there in this constant flowing out and agitation and disease so when we turn the light back and think of the mind that thinks there's a resting and a lightness and appliance he pressure up d in sanskrit this
pliant
subtle flexible lightness
and calm feeling because the mine actually functions that way only one object at a time without
really caring whether it's internal or external the way the mind operates so it's coming into congruity with how the mine actually operates
we usually are going in some ways you might say against the grain with this outflow

so this is
what they say his mind like a wall
balanced
so outwardly cease involvements inwardly know coughing your sighing
you can enter the way
so my understanding of this i'm working on this as well so i feel like to have the day to practice turning the light back thinking of the mind that
thanks what is that what am i talking about
ah
thinking back to the mine that says what am i talk about

thank you very much
me