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. Warning. Please look around a little bit and see who's here and imagine that you are actually absolutely intimately connected to everybody around you. Can you feel that? Even if you can't feel it, it's true. I just want you to entertain that thought that they're all your relatives. So my name is Kiku Kristina Lehnherr. I'm right now a resident here for the duration of the practice period, and then I'll go back to live household life in Mill Valley and be a visitor here, a commuter on Wednesdays.

[01:16]

We are sitting a one-day sitting today, so a lot of us are down in the Zendo till six today, kind of celebrating the life we've been given, not doing anything, but just being still and available to our experiences, whatever they are, however they present themselves. So that means today there will be no tea and cookie, no question and answer after the talk, and also no lunch. but it will all come back next week. And also I want to welcome all the people that are new here, maybe for the first time. I hope you make yourself as comfortable as you can together with everything else. Feel free to move when your body tells you to move, to...

[02:24]

You could even move a little forward if you wanted. There's plenty of space. If it's too crowded behind you, just feel free to do that. And I also want to welcome everybody who is participating online, which can see me. I can't see you, unfortunately, but welcome. So we are here engaged in a 10-week session endeavor to shift the center of our awareness from our thinking mind, which is a relatively small part of our mind, but it takes up basically almost all of our life, which is quite amazing. And to focus that into the body. And we're

[03:27]

just crossing the middle line of the 10 weeks. We're just finishing five weeks, and then there's another half to do this. And the title of the practice period is Awake Body, Awake Mind. And embodying our life, which we could also call the Buddha Way, another name for it. It is an endeavor, or before that, I actually want to acknowledge, because we are all relatives, so is everything that's out there, including all the people that have been and are profoundly affected by the fires, that don't have maybe the luxury to come here, which we all have,

[04:33]

otherwise we wouldn't be here, the privilege to have the time, have the means, have the transportation to be here today. So I want to really keep them in mind so we don't just forget about them, which is so easy, because it's not so right in our face. And, you know, it was kind of eerie that San Francisco was this little island, that had light and electricity and all around. There wasn't, sometimes for five days. And I don't know if currently there are still some that don't have it. Of course, those who lost their houses don't have it. And they have much less than they had before. So I just want us to be kind of keeping that in mind and not forget that. So we are engaging in seeing, can we shift the center of our awareness into this miraculous body?

[05:50]

I mean, that we are alive and have a body is absolutely miraculous. The fact that we are alive today in this world, on this planet, in this room, capable to experience aliveness in ourselves and in everything around us is absolutely amazing and on some level almost unbelievable that this happens on this planet Earth. And with this body and within this particular body we have been given and within every human being of every orientation, culture, color of skin, tradition, lies an inherent human spirituality that has expressed itself in world religions and in Buddhism it's called Buddha nature.

[06:54]

It's also called way-seeking heart, way-seeking mind. And in Chinese, the character for heart and mind are one character. We have... So we think, because we have two words, we think they're two different things. So we endeavor to let the body be the guide and the mind in service of the body, which is, for most of us, contradictory of what we have learned to do. We have learned that the mind is in charge of and that we can control with our mind, and we should control our body. So it's very interesting. I did three prostrations. In a prostration, you actually touch the earth with your forehead. You put your head at the level of your feet.

[07:56]

So you move your mind in service to your body. doesn't stay up there, you know, big on a mountain, in charge of everything. So, and Suzuki Roshi interestingly thought, we here in the U.S. should do nine prostrations, not just three like they do everywhere else in the world. Zen Center is the only place, and maybe some offsprings of Zen Center that are affiliated. Zen Center is the only place where we do nine full prostrations every morning. He thought we needed nine times to put our head to the earth and in service of our body, not just three. So I think that's really worthwhile to kind of keep remembering. Because it is this body, your body, that is the vehicle and the gateway to being fully alive, fully human, fully awake.

[09:18]

It is simultaneously and incomparably, truly beyond comparison, unique individual personal body and simultaneously an inextricably, completely interrelated, interpersonal body that is connected to everything, absolutely everything in this whole universe that we're living in. And that kind of blows our mind. So because it blows our mind and we can conceive of it, we have quite a tendency to think, well, that's not so important. If I can't conceive of it, then I can't dispense with it, which is part of the crux of our human suffering. So during the practice period, we also watch a series of movies.

[10:31]

And one of the movies we watched was, the first one was The Biggest Little Farm, which is a documentary about the farm outside of Los Angeles that two people started with the support of people that gave them money to do it. And an incredible mentor who said that nature has a way of balancing itself. And diversity is the key to that. So they engaged in a crazy endeavor that actually you could maybe dream of, but it wasn't really very practical to think that way, but they did it. And they had enough support, financial support and people support, to actually enter and engage that experiment.

[11:36]

And the movie is showing that. The movie is showing how they have like 70 different kind of apple trees. I mean, they have diversity in variety, in animals, in everything. And they encounter that... It leads to problems. So then the bird comes and eats the fruit. But it keeps going. And what is really, for me, I'm talking today about it, it's a worthwhile movie to watch. What struck me thinking about today was that in that movie, life is complete. And it is complete because death is part of it. And our culture has... manufactured a situation where death is actually absent. And we try to have it absent with all possible means.

[12:40]

We just, you don't see it in that movie, you see it, they experience it. Coyote comes and kills 200 chickens, and they have to collect them, and so on. And the snails eat all the fruit, and so on. the leaves of the trees, so they can't bear fruit. So then the ducks come and eat the snails. But it takes a while for that to get, and the gophers eat the roots of the trees, so they lose a lot of trees. And then the owls, which they put up houses for, move in, and the eagles move in, and other... Predators move in and eat the gophers. But it's life and death. It's not only life, only life, only production, only production. It's a cycle. And it's so close. And when we watch the movie, I think everybody who watched it, your body starts breathing and expanding and feeling that this is reality.

[13:45]

This is really real, much more real than us humans. doing facelifts, dyeing our hair, fixing up our bodies, exercising till our bodies fall apart to keep a certain shape, because we have completely disembodied ourselves and made it an object. And death is not possible. And I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to be in the presence of somebody who is actually... in the process or knows they're gonna die relatively soon. And that person being the presence of a person who has surrendered to that fact, who is not in a state of fighting, fighting, not believing it, not wanting it to be true, but has surrendered, not collapsed, surrendered to that reality. when you're in the presence of such a person, they're radiant.

[14:51]

There is light coming off them. There is a peacefulness in the space. And there's a fullness of life where there is laughter and memories and tears and sadness, everything. And life is fully living itself into dying. It's not... the last few hours the person has to retreat to be able to leave here. So it's calming down. But a while before that, and that is also such a profoundly moving experience because we get a chance to feel how it is when we are capable to meet reality on its terms. not on our imagined ideas about it. So in that movie, that is just part of life.

[15:54]

And how they find their way through all these ups and downs and basically catastrophes, because they're losing this and they're losing that, but they keep going. And then it becomes a self, in some ways, self-sustaining cycle. now maybe nine years into it or ten years, and we'll see how it goes on. It's a really worthwhile thing. So, we have bodies that are a part of this cycle. And we are connected to the natural world, to rivers, mountains, the sky, the stars, to everything. but this shift is not easy for us. So we're in week five, and I think everybody who is in the practice period has maybe some struggles with, you know, it was interesting to listen to for two weeks, three weeks, and now can we do something else?

[17:04]

And that's when the rubber hits the road, when it really depends on do we really engage. And because we have been so trained and our culture is so much based on dominating, controlling, manipulating, that what we are experiencing with the fires, with racism, with cruelty and inequity, just to name a few, has something to do with that we have... disconnected ourselves from that big interconnection in order to control, to amass wealth, to own privacy, which comes from privare, which comes from exclusion, not inclusion, and continuous growth, corporate growth is the big credo.

[18:12]

So we're experiencing what that does to... actually the world we live in. So we have that in us. We do the same thing internally. So I'm, for example, I'm talking about something and I'm offering an experiment or a practice to do. And if we watch our mind, it goes, well... this is hokey, this is silly, this is stupid, this is too simple, I can't do it, too difficult, not for me. It might undo what I have so hard earned and strived for. Because we all created our own little ideas about ourselves and the world we live in and how we can live in that safely. and how we can manipulate and arrange it to stay safe.

[19:18]

And we don't notice that we actually created a little prison in which we are trapped and everybody else. So all these, do we enter something? Do we allow ourselves to experiment and find out something foreign, new, that we never thought of? Well, maybe not, because it might take us out of that safe world. So I have talked for the last four weeks, I've talked about enough, safe enough container, creating that, the window of tolerance, because what's too much doesn't really work, what's too little doesn't really work. So now we have a little window of tolerance, and now are we going to stay in there? Are we going to put up a sofa and just not move anymore because it's... It's tolerable. Or are we willing out of that to go and experiment something that we don't know what the outcome is going to be?

[20:19]

Because actually it's about going beyond. Going beyond our ideas. Going beyond what we've learned. Going beyond what we've thought. Going beyond what somebody else is telling us. Are we willing to become explorers? To be fully alive, fully human, and fully awake, fully present. And it's scary because then we meet the impermanence of everything. We will see that meetings end in separations. We will get old and die. Our friends are dying. A fire can take everything we have. We can lose a child, which is probably one of the worst things that can happen to a parent.

[21:19]

So I haven't experienced it, but I've been around people who have. So it's a huge challenge because what it means is to just be ourselves, not... what we think about ourselves, what we have been told about ourselves, but just a life moment by moment ourselves. So it's going beyond concepts, beyond words. Dogen calls it in the Fukan Sazengi, he says, for the instruction for Sazen, Think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Non-thinking. This is instruction. This in itself is the essential art of Sase.

[22:22]

It's being present in the space that is not occupied and dominated by... concepts and thoughts and labels and names. So this morning in the Zendo, I said, let the sounds just be the sounds. Let the feelings just be the feelings. Let the sensations just be the sensations. And when we pay attention, that's almost impossible. So there's a horn honking out there, and our mind very often, very quickly, makes a story about it. It must be angry, what's going on out there? This is a car honking. That's already, that's not letting the sound just be the sound. Or this morning in the Zazen, it was really wonderfully quiet.

[23:25]

It was wonderful how everybody's sitting in there. really quiet. And then there's a motorcycle and then it goes off. And if it's just a sound, it actually wakes us up. And I felt like for a little moment, it was just the sound. It wasn't, oh, this is a motorcycle. It was just the sound. But I also had a sense I could feel the enjoyment of the person on that motorcycle. He was having a good time. Or she. So that is so hard for us because we have so been trained and train ourselves to live in a world of stories about ourselves and about our loved ones and about the other people we see, what they look like and what that means. It's such a limiting world and to get to direct experiences and

[24:28]

it really takes application, takes the willingness to be curious about it and to engage in finding out for yourself. And that's what I feel like now, half time through, we have five more weeks, we can try that, we can engage that, or we can drop it, and everybody's free to do what is right for them, what is right for them. Dogen talks about it, about direct experience and the interconnection of everything in self-employment and self-receiving samadhi. He says, When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body and mind, you grasp things directly.

[25:31]

There's no intermediate. There's no name in between. And it's not, we don't have a mind. We have to leave our mind. Everything, body and mind are one thing. We just have to leave that narrow strip that's the thinking mind, which has only functions between polarities, between good and bad, and light and dark. And it makes sentences, and the sentence has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a line. But our life is not a line. Our life is a 360-degree holographic, simultaneous, dynamic event that can't be put in a line. So can we step out of that part of our mind? When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body and mind, you grasp things directly. And then he says, when you find your place where you are, which is here and now, it's always where you are is here and now.

[26:45]

You are never anywhere else than here and now. Here and now is your place continuously arising location. You cannot be there and then. You exist only here and now, and here and now, and here and now, wherever you go. It's here and now. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs. Actualizing the fundamental point. When you find your way at this moment, here and now, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past and is not merely arising now.

[27:50]

here is the place, here the way unfolds. And then somewhere else he says, grass, trees, walls and pebbles all expound the Dharma. They are our relatives. They are sharing with us and they're expounding it, they're helping us see it if we don't step forward and don't trap them in ideas we have about them. So he says, in grass, trees and lands radiate the great light and endlessly expound the inconceivable... profound dharma, the inconceivable profound dharma.

[28:53]

Reality is not conceivable. It's not a concept. Every name, every word, every idea about reality falls incredibly short of its reality. It's not graspable. Grass, trees, and lands radiate a great light and endlessly expound the inconceivable profound dharma. They bring forth the teaching for all beings. Rumi says it differently. Rumi and Hafez talk about this too. And Rumi has a poem that goes... Can you feel the vibration in your body from that sound? It massages our internal organs.

[29:58]

It's a friend. It helps us be in our body and connect it to its sensations. Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.

[31:10]

And Hafez has a poem that goes, has a title, and love says, and love says, I will, I will take care of you to everything that is near. I will, I will take care of you to everything that is near. no preference, no to you but not to you, everything, everything, everything that appears. I will take care of you. And to take care of something, we have to be willing to get to know it on its own terms, not what we think of it. And that is the process we're engaging.

[32:21]

Can we get to know our bodies on its own terms, not looking at it through all the ideas that we have constructed around it, which we have. We all have. That's what David White says so beautifully in what I read at the last... I think was the last talk or the first talk here, that he says, as human beings, we are the one corner of creation that can refuse to be itself. We are the only ones. Animals can't refuse to be themselves. We can. And he has this wonderful thing. The kingfisher is not saying, oh God, another day of kingfisher. And he never says, God, I am just deeply tired of this whole Kingfisher trip. Every time I want a bite to eat, I have to get completely and utterly wringing wet.

[33:23]

Can I just have one day as a crow? We do that all the time. And we laugh because we can recognize. But we don't have to do that. We can get beyond that. then we still have our thinking mind that can plan and organize things, but we're not trapped in it. It's not running our life, which is actually running, separated from the life that is running through us, that is living itself through this body. Isn't that amazing that the whole life lives itself through this body? This one has a name and that one has a name, but that's just a name and we can recognize you, but the name is not your life. Your life is way, way more than a name. So, as human beings, we are the one corner of creation that can refuse to be itself.

[34:28]

We are the only corner of creation that knows what it means to live in exile. He calls it an exile. And therefore, it is an absolute triumph for a human being just to be themselves. And that's what Suzuki Roshi also says. I have to find out again. He says, Paul, do you remember how he says that just to be yourself is... Yeah, but there is another one. It's okay. But he encourages us often to just be the being we are in a given moment. People said they were coming down the stairs with cigarettes in their hands. It was in the late 60s or what. And he just didn't judge that. And that made them feel connected to themselves. His way of meeting people was a gateway for other people to drop the ideas they had about themselves and what they should and shouldn't be doing.

[35:37]

and experience themselves fully. And they're so touched that he keeps encouraging them through their life. He's long not there in person, but he's still there in energy and in effect. And then he says, you know, We are creatures who live half in exile and half at home, and that's why we can really appreciate, celebrate, and perhaps experience more than any other creature in creation the full gift of what it means to actually be there or here, to actually be present and to be fully appreciative of everything that you have around you and that's being given to you and that everything, Everything, everything has its own life.

[36:41]

It's a subject with its own life. And then he says, if you base your life on revelation, on the fact, and revelation can only happen when you step in the unknown. Revelation never happens when you move. within your known world that you have definitions about. There's no revelation. There's repetition. There's actually boring, you know, Groundhog Day. Whereas if you base your life on revelation, which takes courage, because we have to leave all the homes behind we have built so assiduously and to feel safe. Whereas when you base your life on revelation, on the fact that everything actually has its own essence and is speaking to you in its own voice, there is an astonishing beauty in the world which is a revelation and a healing revelation

[37:59]

in and of itself. If we were there, there wouldn't be people at the border being separated from their children. There wouldn't be people without water. There wouldn't be people who own 99 point whatever percent of all the world's money. It wouldn't be possible. So can we wake up, can we find out, can we step in and just try to find our way out of our enclosed worlds? Can we get to the place where we say, I will take care of you to everything that is near? That is changing the world.

[38:59]

What's near, not I will take care of you what's far away, but what's right in front of us, right on our doorsteps. How do we do that? We can only find out how to do that when we can hear them speak in their own voice, when we actually want to hear them speak. We want to learn their language. When we understand that they are... so connected to us that there is no separation. So that's what we're trying to do with very simple things we can start. So, for example, people who have engaged have said one suggestion I had was keep a little corner in your space with leaving no trace. Maybe you do the dishes or you... clean up the corner of your desk, and one person says, I'm making my bed every day, and I start enjoying making my bed every day.

[40:06]

And then I found myself going to the living room, and my boots were in the middle of the living room. And the impulse arose to put the shoes where they belong. not in the middle of the living room, but by the door. So those little things actually permeate everything because everything is interrelated. So, and, you know, Buddhism has, I brought the picture down because I wanted to show you that, because also Buddha started out thinking the mind had to control and dominate and overcome overcome the body and its needs, which are then viewed as bad desires, right? Desire is not the problem. Only when we get attached to them become their problem. And this is a beautiful depiction of Buddha when he tried to not take care of his body, but viewed his body as a hindrance to waking up.

[41:16]

You know, he found out it's not working. He tried it. So try everything. Really try because you will find out. He started to eat. He found a middle way. He didn't starve his body any longer. He found a way to take care of his body in enough way. Not indulge in it. That's too much. Not starve it. That's too little. Just the right way allowed him to then really wake up. And when he woke up, he touched the earth as his witness, which is everything that's living on this planet. He didn't ascend to heaven and live amongst the gods. He touched the earth. He was a human being that was fully awake. That's why we don't bow to a God. We don't bow to an idea. We bow to our own capacity to wake up and be fully, completely, and very simply just ourselves.

[42:40]

So, I think it's time, yes? Can I give this to you so it's not falling down? I want to close with a poem by Wendell Berry because I just find it kind of speaking in poetic language. The peace of wild things. When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound. in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be. I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief.

[43:48]

I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free. When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

[44:51]

For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free. Please take good care when you go home. You can pick up a little embodiment practice. You can try out to slow down a fraction when you do something and see what happens. You can try to set down things, whatever you have in your hands, when it's time to set it down as quietly as possible. You can take a few minutes at the beginning of a meal just seeing the food, what's on your plate, and then tasting every... aspect of your food in your mouth for a while before you talk or before you play a game while you're eating or watch TV or read the paper with horrible news which are undigestible while you're eating.

[45:58]

So you can make little excursions in which help you just engage the body and let it be for a while in the forefront of your awareness. Thank you for coming. Be well. Take care of yourself and everybody around you, please. 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 Domo.

[46:46]

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