This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. My name is Shundo, for those who don't know me, which may be quite a few people in the room. It's a beautiful winter's day in California, and I'm glad it's raining, and I'm glad I did not get quite so wet on the way over here. So I'm going to start with a quote from Zelda Fitzgerald, which I've never done in a Dharma talk before. My quote is, nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold. So I lived in this building for about 10 years as part of 15 years of residential practice at Zen Center, and I left about two years ago. And I think this is only the second talk that I've given since then. I wasn't terribly motivated to give a talk last year, and then a few months ago I was reading a book and thought, this would actually make a nice basis for a talk.

[01:09]

So that's kind of what I'm going to talk about. I was actually sitting up on this platform on Saturday, but before the talk, when I was doing the Zazen instruction. And I've also been here recently for... Alison's Shouse ceremony about a month ago and Jana's funeral about a week after that and I'll probably refer to those while I talk. So I went to England in September and I spent a month there and I was partly doing a couple of teaching engagements and also seeing family and friends. And the first place I usually stop when I go to London is at my friend's house. And, you know, I called them up and said, hey, can I come and stay for a few days? He's going, sure, you have to clean out the spare room first before we can put the bed out. And it's like, okay, fair deal. So my friend is a journalist, and she has stacks and stacks of books.

[02:11]

And most of them were celebrity biographies, which I wasn't terribly interested in, but she had a copy of this book, which is Real Love by Sharon Salzberg. So I asked if I could borrow that. during the trip and I read it while I was going around England and so really what I want to say in this talk is read this book better still buy it from Roger if you can Roger was fortunate enough to get a couple of copies in right before Christmas so I could give one to a friend and read one ahead of giving this talk so I asked David who's not here because he's busy doing his Dharma transmission if I could take a slot And he offered me this slot, and I spent the whole week between Christmas and New Year clearing everything off my to-do list and not writing this talk, which is very typical, I think. So why did I want to talk about this book? Well, I opened it up, and you can do this with a lot of Zen books, especially with this, but you can open it up anywhere, and there is something wonderful within it.

[03:16]

And there are so many parts, it just kind of felt very resonant. very striking and really kind of opened me up. And it feels like this aspect, you know, the real love and the subtitle, the art of mindful connection, is, you know, it's kind of where I'm very interested in practicing right now. And, you know, in the years that I lived at Zen Center, it didn't always seem that it was a very explicit part of our training. You know, we do a lot of forms and, you know, sometimes people think we look very severe. And loving kindness and associated practices are not necessarily to the forefront. And for those of you who lived here when I was still in residence, you might think, well, Shundo, he wasn't a very kind person. I remember when he was director, he was pretty harsh. He was pretty severe. And it's true. I was not the kindest director. It was a pretty stressful job for me, and I know that I acted in unskillful ways that cause people pain, and I apologize for anyone who still feels hurt by that.

[04:26]

And I offer a deep bow to those who are filling those temple administration roles now, because it's a lot of work, and it takes a lot out of you. So back to Zelda Fitzgerald. Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold. So me being me, I read this line, which is in the book, and I'm usually thought of Dogen. So, and self-receiving and employing samadhi, and if you don't know what that is, you don't have to worry about it. And if you don't know who Dogen is, I wouldn't worry about it too much either, yet. The last line's going, know that even if all Buddhas, as innumerable as the sands of the Ganges, exert their strength, and with the Buddha's wisdom try to measure the merit of one person's zazen, they will not be able to fully comprehend it. Know that even if all Buddhas of the ten directions, as innumerable as the sands of the Ganges, exert their strength, and with the Buddha's wisdom try to measure the merit of one person's zazen, they will not be able to fully comprehend it.

[05:39]

Now, All you good Zen students know that when you hear the phrase sands of the Ganges, you will immediately be going back from present time through Dogen back to the Diamond Suture, which is one of the original emptiness teachings. It comes from the time of the Buddha, a large part of which is devoted to Buddha trying to blow Subuti's mind to stop him and the assembly imagining that they can measure the amount of merit that you can gain through learning and sharing the teachings. In my favorite passage, the Buddha is saying, If, moreover, Sabuti, I were to teach the heap of merit of those good sons and daughters of good family, and how great a heap of merit they will at that time beget and acquire, beings would become frantic and confused. Since, however, Sabuti, the Tathagata has taught this discourse on Dhamma as unthinkable, so just an unthinkable karma result should be expected from it. If moreover, Sabuti, I were to teach the heap of merit of those good sons and daughters of good family, and how great a heap of merit they will at that time beget and acquire, beings would become frantic and confused.

[06:45]

Since, however, Sabuti, the Tathagata has taught this discourse on Dham as unthinkable, so just an unthinkable karma result should be expected from it. So, so far we've established that our hearts are immeasurable. The merit of Zazen is immeasurable, and the merit gained from the teachings is unthinkable. So this is not so easy when we get up here and give Zazan instruction, because people will become frantic and confused. So I don't think I'd also get very far by saying, well, our practice is how we come to terms with the immeasurable facets of ourselves. So what can we teach? Well, mostly when I'm up here, or when I'm doing zaza instruction or meditation instruction in other places which you know i do in tech companies and i do in the county jail and i do it retreat centers and other places if they ask um i talk a lot about physical posture and the longer i have sat which is getting on for 20 years now the more you know real i feel that the

[07:56]

the practice of Zazen as a physical practice is, you know, really what we have to focus on. I always found interesting that in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the first chapter of the book is devoted to establishing right posture. And often I read this paragraph from Suzuki Roshi, which seems to illuminate the kind of thing I'm talking about. You should not be tilted sideways, backwards or forwards. You should be sitting straight up as if you were supporting the sky with your head. This is not just form or breathing. It expresses the key point of Buddhism. It is a perfect expression of your Buddha nature. If you want true understanding of Buddhism, you should practice this way. These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture itself is the purpose of our practice. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind. So there is no need to try to attain some special state.

[09:00]

When you try to attain something, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else. When you do not try to attain anything, you have your own body and mind right here. So to take this posture itself is the purpose of our practice. So really all we're doing is trying to sit upright. paying attention to our physical posture. And when we do this, we notice how hard it is because our mind is going to jump in and take over. Our brains love being in charge. They're very bossy. But as I often follow up when I'm talking about this, I like to quote Uchiyama Roshi, a contemporary, fairly contemporary Japanese teacher, who reminds us that the brain is just an organ. It's an organ that produces thoughts. Just like the other organs in our bodies have their purpose, We don't necessarily pay so much attention to the liver, the spleen, and the gallbladder on a daily basis unless you're Lucy. But we do pay a lot of attention to our brains because somehow we think that what the brain is producing is more important than what anything else is producing.

[10:07]

So our effort as we sit and get to grips with these immeasurable parts of ourselves is to try to pay a little less attention to what the brain is doing. And going back to Dogen, because we can't stay away from him for long, the first thing he wrote was also about Zazen. In the Fukan Zazengi, the universal recommendation for Zazen, when I first read them, when I first started practicing here, there were a couple of lines that really resonated with me. And the first was, stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. And as we sit, we get to see just how much of our experience is just filtered constantly through value systems and judgments, opinions, prejudices, all the stuff that clutters up our mind. And we also get to notice that we have an experience first, and then the mind is just the processor that makes sense of it all for us. Now, partly this is a good survival technique, because without it, we wouldn't necessarily know where to go or what we'd be doing.

[11:09]

But really, the mind has just taken this and filtered existence down to such a limited part. We're always putting things in boxes. And when we sit, we get to experience what it's like not to be in a box sometimes. And then later he says, do not doubt the true dragon. So what does a true dragon look like? Well, it may be one of those other immeasurable things. And I want to bring Blanche into the conversation because I lived here for many years in the temple with her when she was the abbess and then when she was retired senior teacher and learned an awful lot from her and not just from... how she was up in the Dharma seat, but how she was living her day-to-day life in the building and the kind of things that she did and the way she comported herself. And especially in her final years when she was single-mindedly devoted to loving kindness, which I am finding, especially now, more and more inspirational. So in her book, Seeds for a Boundless Life, she says, in the ongoing kaleidoscopic chaos of our life, there is nothing substantial to hold on to.

[12:19]

Our lives arise moment after moment after moment, and we can't identify with any of it because it arises and passes away. In the midst of the openness of this question, what, what, what, when you touch that really open place, let it enlarge, let it expand, let it explode your limited view of a substantial separate self and allow you to experience the boundlessness of your being. So again, through our sitting, passing through this separateness that we feel into boundlessness. And here, to a certain extent, we have to trust the process because I can't teach you how to do that. But I trust that by sitting, we have a chance to experience that. And so as we sit, we pay close attention. letting go of expectations, outcomes, and staying with curiosity for the present moment.

[13:24]

So right now, what does your curiosity for the present moment feel like? What is it you're paying attention to? How are we feeling about the traffic outside in your own state of being? And then when we continue to do this, hopefully we can start moving away from the three poisons, they're called the greed, hate, and delusion, and start accepting the reality that Buddha talked about with impermanence and interdependence. And eventually, because I think attention and concentration are like muscles that we can develop, we can start paying steady attention. And rather than clinging and averting to things, clinging to things and averting from things, just making a choice not to suffer. So back to Sharon Salzberg and one of the lines that really jumped at me when I read this book. When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear.

[14:33]

So again, just listening to that phrase and seeing if it lands in your body somewhere. When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear. So what is it that we fear? I think most of us, most of the time, fear that we're not good enough, that we're not perfect. And eventually, hopefully, we can learn that the only thing that's telling us we need to be perfect is this little voice in our heads that we're learning to identify and listen to without believing. We can hear it and say, oh yeah, that voice in my head. but we're not clinging to it in the same way. So we don't have to be perfect. We just have to be human. We have to be ourselves. And the wonderful thing about this Yusou ceremony, as all of us who were here got to see, Alison completely getting to be herself. And then I went down to Tassahara and I saw Yuki completely getting to be herself.

[15:40]

And this is a wonderful thing. I appreciate coming back several times a year to see peers and friends and colleagues taking on this position. But what they're really doing is they've experienced and are demonstrating how to be themselves. And Sylvia Borstein has this lovely quote, maybe the whole of spiritual practice rests on remembering over and over again that we are, after all, human beings. And over and over again, because we keep forgetting this stuff, our brains keep tricking us into thinking we want to do something differently. And again, I can't teach you how to be you and I can't teach you how to be me. This is your path and something you have to discover. You have to find a way to make that discovery for yourself. But I have a feeling and I trust that Zazen is a wonderful way to do that.

[16:42]

Another quote from Sharon Salzberg on a different book of hers that I have on loving kindness talks about some of the processes that we can start to investigate as we said. She says, see what motivating factor is strongest in you prior to an action and explore it without judgment. Does it seem to have a nature that will incline the mind towards suffering or or toward the end of suffering, toward contraction, attachment or anger, or toward love, compassion, sympathetic joy or equanimity. Notice that the decision to follow or not follow an intention into action is a separate and distinct moment from perceiving the nature of intention itself. Notice that the more fully aware you are of the nature of the motivation, the more you truly have a choice as to whether to act on it or not.

[17:50]

So that's kind of dense, and I want to read this one part again. Notice that the decision to follow or not follow an intention into action is a separate and distinct moment from perceiving the nature of the intention itself. So the way this made sense to me is like thinking I'd love to have an ice cream, but not actually going and getting the ice cream. Those are two separate things. So the noticing between the intention and the action, what there is and what space is and what that intention is leading you towards. And I had a very specific example of this when I first came to practice here in the temple. And I found at the time a wonderful quote that encapsulated it for me from Kyogen Carlson. He says, many of our feelings come from karmic conditioning, like the tendency to sarcasm. It is a deeply significant bodhisattva act not to pass on the unfortunate karma we have inherited from the limitless past.

[18:52]

We can see that at every moment, as we choose either to train or indulge ourselves, we are choosing to transmit something. So this resonated for me because I grew up in a very judgmental family where opinions were expressed pretty freely and not always very kindly. And so I had a great training in how to do this for myself. I had a great facility at it. And then when I came to live in this temple, I found that people weren't doing that. People were actually speaking kindly to each other. And I noticed that I still had the judging thoughts coming up. I still had the ready quip or the ready put down coming to mind pretty quickly. It was very easy not to indulge in those because it would have been very out of place in the conversations that were taking place here in the temple. So I got to see exactly, oh, this is my karmic upbringing. This is my karmic conditioning.

[19:54]

It's unfortunate, but it is a part of myself. So I can choose, as Sharon Salzberg says, whether to go towards suffering or towards the end of suffering, towards contraction, Attachment or anger. Or in this case, I think a lot of it is to do with separation. Thinking, I'm kind of clever and I'm going to put you down here because that keeps you at a nice distance. Or toward love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. Now, I'm not going to pretend that those thoughts didn't keep coming up. And the thoughts sometimes still do come up. And it's kind of entertaining. Like, oh, look at that thought. Better not say that one. But there really is, there's a very measurable, you know, and I have a pretty good reign on this now. very easy for me to have that thought and say, oh, okay, juicy thought, not going there. So that was one particular practice for me that talked about really getting to pay attention to our intentions and really seeing how our actions can or cannot follow from that.

[20:55]

So I encourage you to think of something in your own way, maybe, or in your own life that you can do that with. Sounds like rain again. Is it raining again, Vicky? Oh, it's gorgeous. Thank you. Wonderful. So I was sitting on my trip to England, I was sitting one day, it was a half day sitting, I was doing with a group, and I had this image come into my mind that we were sitting to clear the brambles from around our heart. And the picture I had around that was I don't know if you have Lady Bird books here in the States. Do you have Lady Bird books for kids? Anyway, it was a kid's storybook, a picture storybook with a fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty and the Prince. It was hacking through the brambles around the castle to get to the princess, which obviously, you know, we don't do that kind of thing anymore.

[21:57]

But there was a picture I had, but just the idea of clearing the brambles from around our heart. And I think that this is something that reading this book, the real love book, was kind of helping to... bring forward for me. So I want to read another quote from that. Real love allows for failure and suffering. All of us have made mistakes and some of those mistakes were consequential. But you can find a way to relate to them with kindness. No matter what troubles have befallen you or what difficulties you have caused yourself or others, with love for yourself you can change, grow, make amends and learn. Real love is not about letting yourself off the hook. Real love does not encourage you to ignore your problems or deny your mistakes and imperfections. You see them clearly and still opt to love. So this is the practice of letting go of trying to be perfect and just allowing ourselves to be human.

[23:02]

So with love for yourself, you can change, grow, make amends, and learn. And again, with the upbringing I had, this is not something that comes naturally to me, which is why I'm, after 20 years of practice, I'm still trying to figure out how to do this. But I do think it's an amazingly valuable thing, because I can feel the difference in myself, especially when I'm sitting Zazen, but also at other times, and feel the difference between acting out of a place of self-criticism, and obviously when you grow up in surrounded by judgmental voices, there's a lot of internal judgmental voices too. I can feel the difference between moving and acting in that kind of frame of reference and moving and acting from a place of learning to love. And there are a few occasions recently when I've said something which I knew to be true, knew to be like deeply true, even though it seemed like

[24:03]

that it was kind of going against my own interests. And by that, I think I mean that my ego's interests. But there was an opening in the heart that I could feel just from saying that, like a real softness that came through. It's like, wow, that really must be true because I can feel how my heart is responding to that. So that's a wonderful, for me, it's a wonderful thing to experience. And I kind of trust when that happens. And in at least one particular case, the other person that was saying that too was very struck like, wow, you really mean that, don't you? And I think that is not being suspicious of the true dragon. And so part of that for me is learning to be honest and authentic. Again, not listening to critical voices because critical voices aren't honest and authentic. They're just loud and not always very helpful.

[25:05]

So when we get to be loving, honest and authentic, we get to be ourselves, our boundless selves. And we notice how people respond to that. And so thinking of Jana's funeral, you know, the people that were here in the room, her colleagues, friends, students, friends, lovers, people who'd lived here in the temple with her, all spoke of who she was. And Jana was sometimes a spiky person. You know, she was no angel. But she used her experience. She used her practice. She used her years of interesting experiences to help others through her teaching. It's her big heart of experience. And this is how we remembered her. Her big heart. There's a quote from Enkyo O'Hara, in her book, Most Intimate, and again, Zen students, Most Intimate. Not knowing is most intimate. We know this.

[26:06]

Trusting this place where we don't know exactly what's going on. We try to stay close to that curiosity of what, what, what. So Enkyo O'Hara says, through the quiet awareness of meditation, I began to realize the freedom of experiencing myself as relationship. rather than as an entity, a separate being. The courage meditation gave me is the courage of my wholeness. I'm seeing how much I still have to do here. I also want to have time for questions, and I want everyone to go to bed early, so... I was going to talk about the Brahm and Vaharas, but I'm just going to mention them in the fact that they're also called the four immeasurables. More things we cannot measure.

[27:07]

And they are wonderful practices about how we relate to others. Compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. And those of you who are thinking about the Metta Sutta, which Blanche liked to offer every time she gave a talk. There are some pretty tall orders in there. suffusing love over the entire world above, below, and all around without limit. So let us cultivate an infinite goodwill toward the whole world. It doesn't sound so easy to do. But there are easier practices. And I'm going to come back to Dogen. And another quartet of behaviors that can help us along the path, which is from one of his lesser-known pieces, the Bodhisattva's four methods of guidance. And the four methods of guidance are giving, kind speech, beneficial action, and identity action.

[28:09]

And some of it's very dense, but I just want to give a little snippets to maybe speak to this theme. He says, giving means non-greed. Non-greed means not to covet. So giving and generosity is also the first of the six perfections. And greed means It's the first of the three poisons. So these are very key words or concepts in Buddhist thought. And what is it that we give? We can give time. We can give money. We can give material possessions or objects. We can give attention. And these days, you know, we notice that our time and attention is being grabbed by social media because it's a big currency. People want it. So what can we give attention to instead? And what can we give instead that feels more connecting and beneficial? So I was remembering that as bodhisattvas, as people who are helping others to stop suffering, we can give the gift of fearlessness.

[29:12]

And again, remembering that love is the energetic opposite of fear. So we're giving love. And we can give our attention with love. So these days I read a lot about health pitfalls of social isolation and how damaging it is not to have connections on a kind of like a physiological level. And I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute. The second of the four methods of guidance is kind speech. Now, the abbots and abbesses have been writing and talking a lot about this, so I would direct you towards what they've been saying on the website. But this is work that we can all do. What Dogen says about it I found astonishingly relevant, considering it was written 800 years ago. It is kind speech to speak to sentient beings as you would to a baby. If kind speech is offered little by little, kind speech expands.

[30:14]

Know that kind speech arises from kind heart, and kind heart from the seeds of the compassionate heart. Ponder the fact that kind speech is not just praising the merit of others. It has the power to turn the destiny of the nation. So how much do we need that as a nation right now? And just little by little. So sometimes we think we need to know all the answers. We need to have like a plan action on how to go ahead and sort everything out. But the suggestion is just start with what we can do. Little by little. Kind speech wherever we can. Now, I'm not much of an activist, but if you are more interested in that, I would point you in the direction of the inspiring Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams and her radical Dharma team. But I do remember her saying right after the last election, we don't have to figure out our entire strategy as activists right now. Just start where we are, and we'll figure out what we can do and what might work.

[31:19]

So little by little. It has the power to turn the destiny of the nation. So beneficial action, Dogen says, foolish people think that if they help others first, their own benefit will be lost. But this is not so. Beneficial action is an act of oneness, benefiting self and others together. Now he also talks about this in his Tenzo Kyokun, The Instructions to the Cook. And it's something that when you get to work in the temple, I think you get to experience a lot. So we're giving ourselves and giving our time and energy and our work for the benefit of the community. And yet, it comes back and benefits us. And as we read again in these kind of studies, these sociological studies that keep happening, where people keep measuring things that they can measure, service, offering this kind of service, gives people meaning in their life. Or to put it more poetically, as Rabindranath Tagore says, and I want to give a name check to Judith Randall who first gave me this poem.

[32:25]

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. And I'm a big fan of Barbara Fredrickson who talks about micro moments of positivity resonance. So she talks about love not as being this kind of romantic state or this passionate state, but she says love as connection characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person, any other person whom you happen to connect with in the course of the day. You can experience these micro moments with your romantic partner, child or close friend, but you can also fall in love. However, momentarily with less likely candidates like a stranger on the street, colleague at work or an attendant at a grocery store. And I had an example of that this morning when I was riding to the BART. I was rolling down 17th Street, turning into Valencia.

[33:28]

Traffic was clear, so I made this nice fast left turn. And right ahead of me on Valencia, this truck doing a U-turn, so I had to pull up at a stop. But the truck driver had seen me coming and gave this very sweet little wave out the window and a smile. And when I caught up with him at the lights, I was going, wow, yeah, I just wasn't expecting that. And he said, yeah, I'm sorry. That was, you know, that was a little tricky. And he smiled and waved again. And I smiled and we wished each other a good day. And my heart was lifted for the next stage of the day. And that's all it takes, just a little moment like that. And then I got on the bar and everyone had their nose down on their phone. So it's a very different experience. But that, again, is worth paying attention to. The difference between going around the world with your nose and the phone and going around, you know, He wasn't doing anything dangerous, but he was inconveniencing me, but he was ready to acknowledge that and smile. And that made me smile. And we had a good moment out of it. And I'm not going to go into that, but there's also how research and how face-to-face contact all the physiological effects it has.

[34:34]

And Susan Pinkery, the psychologist, says, making eye contact, shaking someone's hand, giving someone a high five, lowers your cortisone levels, releases dopamine, makes you less stressed, giving you a little high. She says she showed two images of the brain, one of someone conversing in person and one of someone watching a video of a person discussing the same subject. In the brain of the person interacting, regions associated with social intelligence and emotional reward lit up. So again, these are things that people are measuring. And it might seem a long way from zazen. But I think that it's really not hard to do. Certainly not as hard as cultivating an infinite goodwill toward the whole world. But it's how we start. It's the little by little. So I move through the city as much as I can looking for these moments with my eyes up, ready to smile. Most of the time. Not all the time. Most of the time. I try to practice that. And I know that when you live in the temple, you get a lot of opportunities to practice that because you're always surrounded by other people.

[35:46]

As an introvert, that's kind of hard. And I certainly found the amount of interactions I got when I lived here rather a lot. But it also showed me amazing examples of spiritual friendship, which is an amazingly wonderful thing to be able to cultivate. Having mentors, people who showed me what I wanted to be when I grew old. and friends just to reflect back like sometimes I was being a bit of a pain in the butt. And so the sense of community that we can get through here is healthy and beneficial, I think. So even though it might seem like a struggle when you live here sometimes, and I know that it can be a struggle, I know, even as an introvert, how healthy it was for me to be hanging out in a community like this. And the last of the four methods of guidance is identity action. which means right form, dignity, correct manner. This means that you cause yourself to be in identity with others. However, the relationship of self and others varies limitlessly according to circumstances.

[36:52]

So this for me is knowing that we're all human. We're all trying to be happy. We're all struggling and suffering. And acknowledging that each of us has their own path, their own lens and their own experience. And I was thinking, as I was writing that out, I spent so much time and energy wishing that other people were more like me so it'd be easier for me to get on with them. And that's such a waste of time. It really is. Imagine what a dull world that would be. So really allowing ourselves to be ourselves, allowing other people to be other people. And I think Dogen's talk of identity action is like his harmony of difference and equality. We are all in the same boat, and we all have our own different experience. And one last quote from Sharon Salzberg. Because, you know, if we say, oh, we should love everybody, that seems kind of tough. I mean, I loved everybody that I did a Tassajara practice with. And it doesn't mean that I like them. But it means you have space in your heart for them.

[37:58]

And Sharon Salzberg puts this much more wisely than I could, of course. Loving all others asks us to open our hearts and embrace our shared humanity with people we don't know well or at all. However, It does not require getting personally involved with everyone we meet. It does not require us to agree with their actions and views. It never requires that we sacrifice our principles or cease standing up for what we believe. The primary work is done internally as we cultivate love and compassion in our own hearts. So anyway, I wanted to talk about this book because for me, a lot of my deepest realizations during my years of practice have been about love. Because growing up, sometimes it felt like a scarce commodity, something that I had to go reaching out for.

[39:01]

And it's been one of the more solitary experiences in my life to understand that love is abundant and everywhere. But it needs a certain amount of silence and a certain amount of sitting quietly and a certain amount of paying attention to really get a sense of that. And when I do zaza instruction, I talk about the posture. I talk about crossing the legs. I talk about bringing the breath down to the base of the belly. And then, because this was a large part of the experience I had at Tassajara when I did several years of a lot of sitting, I talk about opening this area up. And the difference between sitting like this and sitting like this, as you can see my hands, there's a big energetic difference. The sitting upright for me means opening a space around the heart, opening up the ribcage. And sometimes when I do that, I can feel how vulnerable it feels. Because usually we're moving through the world, locking this part up and protecting it.

[40:04]

But through the safe space of the meditation hall, we can try opening that up, giving that a little space. So the last time I came and sat at a formal retreat here was in August when I sat at the Genzaway Dogen Study Retreat at Shohaku Okamura, and it was wonderful. And a lot of the uncoverings I had were around love. I had these phrases that came up of love as awakening, love as ground. I could feel it in the body. Love is awakening right here. Love is ground right here down the base of the belly. And also letting go of this idea of the scarcity of level. You need to hold on to it. And that's right there in the solar plexus. Again, where you can kind of notice that connection. So this is our physical practice of Zazen. I know it's New Year and maybe people have resolutions or intentions, whatever. Mine is I'm watching myself talk.

[41:06]

How I talk to myself. Noticing when I'm talking to myself in a slightly more critical voice. And noticing if I'm talking to myself in a slightly more relaxed voice. And if anyone doesn't have an intention and would like me to suggest one, I would suggest put your phone in your pocket when you're out. And look at people. Look around you. And sit with your heart. Feel it. Let it open. and let it break. Those of you with long memories might remember Barent sitting here and giving an amazing talk about the value of a broken heart. And if you haven't heard that, I would recommend looking it up. But nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold. So I wish you a practice of love for the new year. And I know that was the clock striking half past, but maybe if anyone has a burning question before we go to bed.

[42:10]

Or that's good. If you have a burning question, you want to ask me outside, that's okay too. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:52]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.23