Good morning. Start in about a minute. Thank you for coming. Just asking. You can go right ahead. Thank you for asking, Vicki. Okay, so I should start. And shall we spotlight my video? I think I did that already. But I... Okay, so I'll leave the tech part to you. So thank you everybody for coming to Zazen Instruction. I can't see everybody because not everybody has the video on, but I just want to say hi and I appreciate your coming to Zazen Instruction. And if there's someone who's completely new,

[01:29]

and hasn't done zazen instruction before, could you turn on your video and just wave to me or something? I just want to see. Okay, so on this page, one person. Okay, so there's a couple people who are completely new to zazen. And then there's people, how many people are completely old to zazen, like you've been doing zazen for years? Okay. This way, yeah, I see you, okay. And there's several people who have just been doing zazen for years or for decades. And then I assume that everybody else is something in between. So, good, thanks. So great. So today, what I would like to focus on is, I will give the regular zazen instruction, but I also want to look at some common issues that come up in doing a hom zazen practice, and how we would address those using common household objects we have on hand.

[02:34]

How does that sound to you? Is that okay? Should we go there? Okay. Thanks. So we're in the third day of the three-day sashim right now. Sashim is a time to kind of... Purify the mind or cleanse the mind. That's what seshin means, to purify the heart and mind. And the subject of this seshin that's happening at San Francisco Zen Center online for about 100 people is lojong practice. Lojong practice is a kind of purifying practice in and of itself. through the use of 59 slogans that you can look up if you want to. But I'll just tell you the one that we're gonna be working with today. So this slogan goes, liberate yourself by examining and analyzing.

[03:44]

So liberate yourself by having your experience and then studying or understanding what your experience is. So today I'm going to be asking you to pay attention to your doubts and to the limitations that you have when you try to do a seated meditation pose and not think of them as something that only you have to deal with. Because anyone who wants to start a meditation practice has to start with the body and mind that we have. And the point of Zazen practice isn't that we would become physically talented or more beautiful or richer or something, although those things may happen to us. Not usually, but sometimes they happen. But the point is to liberate ourselves. And, you know, if you hear the word Zen in common culture, it has to do with...

[04:49]

You know, some sense of like skill and means or really deep attention and so on. But it also has to do with being yourself and being who you are and letting that matter. And I think this is a good time to do that. This time in our country, this time in our lives is a good time to do that. And so I want you to pay attention. to the things that come up, not to ruminate over them or obsess over them, but to face them and work with them even a little. And if we all do that and can communicate with each other, I believe that the world will be a better place. And if we can do that with the heart and mind that covers the entire universe, that receives the entire universe, then I think that things will go better. We will understand our interconnection and we'll be able to stand up as ourselves with that, without leaving any part of ourselves out.

[05:59]

I think that's important because in this society and in this world, some parts of life are valued and some parts are devalued. The parts that are devalued are killing us as people and as a planet. And so I think it's important to maintain a wide view as we do a specific practice. And we can do that by studying our experience and understanding what it is. So that's what we're going to do as we sit. So the instructions are going to be extremely mundane. They're not going to be anything special. What just happened? Hey, wait a second. What just happened? What just happened to me? Let's pick lower back, hips, and knees today as a theme. Okay? Lower back, hips, and knees. I just picked that out of the millions of themes that we could do.

[07:02]

So what I want to examine and analyze today in this meditation instruction is, am I hurting myself, my lower back, hips, and knees? question? Am I helping myself or nourishing myself lower back, hips and knees? And the work that I'm doing with my lower back, hips and knees, is it, am I spreading it throughout body and mind? Am I registering it as a moral and spiritual good that I'm doing? Conscious of my mistakes and turning them over for the benefit of my own life and everyone's life. So I'm not doing Zazen instruction as physical instruction, but we are using physical instructions to examine an important question of life that Zazen helps us with.

[08:05]

And so this is what we're going to do, okay? So first we're going to look at the various seated positions of Zazen, and you can try them. As I do them, you can try them. And my instructions will be long enough that you can try them and understand what happens to you when you do. Now, I'm not going to ask you to do something that you absolutely know is dangerous for you. Because that would be harmful. But in places where you have a question and can try something for a minute or two, this would be a good opportunity. So here we go. Thanks for listening to the important spiritual message from our sponsor. Soto Zen from Buddha to the present day. Okay, so here we go. So the first posture that we're studying with Zazen has been defined as the Dharma gate of repose and bliss.

[09:09]

The first posture we're starting is called sitting in a chair. Here's the chair. So sitting here, I'm bowing to the chair and away from the chair. You can just see my torso because this could be you. And just sitting down on the chair. And I'm moving myself towards the front of the chair so that I can sit up. So this is the attitude with which we sit, zazen. Sitting here is just like Buddha, sitting on Buddha's seat to become a Buddha. And then as I sit down, instead of sitting back in the chair like this, I sit forward in the chair like this so that I can have a sense of balance from my buttocks to my ribs to my shoulders.

[10:13]

To the knobby bones under my ears that are the top of the spine. So this is sitting in a chair. But how about for the hips, lower back, and knees? Am I doing myself good or am I doing myself harm? Okay, suppose I'm a very tall person. And I know that there's very tall people in the internet room here. I happen to know some of these tall people. So I'm going to simulate being tall, which I'm not, by putting something under my heels. And look at the shape of my body if I'm not a very tall person or if I am a very tall person. So you see that having my knees above my hips sends my lower back backwards. So it's harder to sit up.

[11:15]

Well, if that happens to me and a very tall person, all I have to do is to raise the seat of the chair so that I can sit and my lower back can balance. Okay, suppose I'm a very short person and I'll simulate being a very short person. by increasing the height of the chair to a ridiculous amount. Well, if I'm a very short person, the height of the chair is way above my hips. And you can see that my lower back is thrown forward. Well, what do I need to do at that moment? If I put something under my heels as a very short person, I'm in my range. Okay, I'm in the range where I can balance and sit upright.

[12:20]

So you can try this exercise with the seat of your chair. And it's not just a question of whether you're very tall or short. You can study, well, are my hamstrings very short? If my hamstrings... which go from here to here are very short, then my body will have a prejudice of being pulled this way. But if my muscles at the front of the body are weak and the hamstrings are relatively long, then my body will have this prejudice. So in general, in our society, Men tend to have this physical prejudice. And women tend to have this physical prejudice. So you can adjust the seat of the chair so that you can balance and your lower back can balance effectively above your hips.

[13:34]

Okay, so that's sitting in a chair. but it's also true of every single other posture that you do. Let's look at it in a different posture and see if it's really true or if it's not true. So test it out in your own experience. And I'm going to show you another posture, which is called Seiza. And in Seiza, you start by sitting with your knees together, and your feet apart, and then you sit down between your heels. Now, in Japan, if you do tea ceremony or sit in a temple, you may find this variation of Seiza in which the toes go over each other like this. You can't see it. I'm not going to take my socks off right now, but take my word for it. But in the U.S., usually people don't sit on their shins a lot.

[14:38]

And so we tend to use a cushion and sit down on the cushion to bring our hips to a good place. But I want to show you something. I'm sitting with black clothes against a white wall so that you can see the silhouette. And when I sit down, okay, see the curve of my low back? And when I sit down, see how the low back goes down with a minimum amount of height. So with the minimum support, my low back can be long. And if I support myself up, then it helps with the stiffness of the hips. But I have to make sure that the height is not too much. So if the height is a lot, my lower back will be thrown forward.

[15:43]

If the height is too little, I run into leg stiffness, but the lower back is thrown back. So you have to, again, come to a place where you're balanced and like Goldilocks and the three bears, you're just right. Okay? So you can try that if you want. It's the same principle. as sitting in a chair. How about the safety, the back safety of a simple cross-legged pose? Well, sitting up on a cushion and just putting one leg in front with the heel under the opposite knee. And it's not a wide posture. It's not a narrow posture. It's something in between. I can feel that the posture is a little bit tippy in my hips and low back.

[16:44]

I don't quite know where to be. When you're a more experienced practitioner, that tippiness is an asset because it keeps you awake. But if you're a more beginning practitioner or if you have a physical issue that you're working with, then you might want to put support between your ankle and your opposite. And that takes away the tippiness and protects your hips and low back by keeping them in the middle of their range. It's worth noticing that a lot of people experience deep problems when you begin to sit seiza or sit cross-legged. But there are ways to support them. So if you look at the back of your knee, like if you stood up or if you put a leg in front of you and you stood up, you would find and sat down with the leg in front of you, you could find that there are hard tendons on the inner and outer of the back of the knee.

[18:02]

And in a position that's healthy, those tendons are soft. If the tendons are hard, they pull on the knees in unexpected ways when you turn your hips and legs. So I want to show you some variations of SESA that are good for tight ankles or tight knees now that we know how the hips go. Okay, suppose you have tight ankles. I'm sure that anyone who's been sitting at a computer for 12 weeks now, has tight ankles. Okay? So what I'm going to do is use blankets to create a stair step for my ankles. So I've taken one blanket, two blankets, three blankets. I want about a good number of blankets because I want my feet to be able to trail off the edge.

[19:07]

And then I come down so that my shins are supporting me, not my knees. This is important. You see how my ankles are over the edge of the blanket? Let's define the edge of the blanket. Okay. This is the edge of the blanket. And my ankles are on the edge of the blanket with my feet behind the blanket. And that immediately, I hope you can see that, it immediately relieves pressure on the ankles. But suppose the problem is my knees.

[20:10]

Well, you can combine ankle support with a spacer behind the knees. So now you see me leaning forward and putting something behind my knees and I'm pulling it forward and then sitting down. And then I just fill in like I'm building a sandcastle. I fill in so that I have something to sit on. And suddenly, oh, this is interesting. My hips and low back are completely comfortable. My ankles are not torturing me. And my knees feel cool and light inside. So not only have I stopped doing harm, but that coolness and that lightness is telling me that I'm doing good. Because my knees, my hips... My ankles, my feet all feel good.

[21:12]

It's not a big, huge, good feeling. It's a mild sense of coolness and lightness. That's the signal that they're happy. They're not thrilled. They're just happy and nourished, well-fed. So anyway, that's Seiza. But how do you protect yourself when you're in any of the cross-legged poses? Well, I'll show you. So not doing harm of the knees will use the same approach. And so what I'm going to do here is I'm hitting a race and just putting the cushion down and I am going to sit without harming my knees. So what I'm going to do to do that is to support the knee where it bends. Okay?

[22:16]

So I'm using a strap, but I could also use a cloth of any sort, a handkerchief or whatever, to support those tendons so they stay soft. And as I sit down, I can support those knees and support my hips in the middle of their range of movements. So I'm taking the strap. I'm bending my leg in the direction that knees bend, which is straight, not twisted. And then I'm maintaining that bend so that the thigh and the calf, thigh and the shin, are in line with each other to protect the knee. Okay? Suppose you don't have a strap. You can still cross your legs, respecting the way that the knee's bent.

[23:20]

So you can sit going straight forward and just put your hands under a knee and hold the knee. It will bend the way it's supposed to. And then you can close that joint and then move from the hip. Did you see my whole body move? when I took the leg to the side. So that's true of simple cross-legged position, where you can also support between the shin and the calf. But it's also true that if you've bent those legs in that respectful way, that you can do siddhasana with the knees very wide, and the soles of the feet turned up. This is known as Burmese pose in our lineage. Or you can tuck the toe in between the thigh and the calf of the opposite leg.

[24:21]

This is what's known as quarter lotus in our tradition. Or if the knee is completely bent the way it's supposed to, you can even swing the leg from the hip and put it up in half or full lotus without paining the knee. And then to come out of the pose, scoop the outer leg and lift the outer knee. So that's protection. And you might notice if you're following along that if you do that and you can respect the way the knee bends, Then the issues in the hip are then revealed. They're open for view and open for developmental work.

[25:22]

When the hip and leg are healthy, the lower back will smile. When the hip and leg deteriorate, the lower back will bear the brunt. form a symphony of which every instrument has to be heard. In our own zazen, often we think that one part of the body is important and another part is unimportant, but they're all important. Another thing that you can do, suppose you have those same ankles, then You don't just have to be satisfied because you're at home. You can do anything, right? You don't just have to be satisfied with supporting your knee, although you can. You can support anywhere. Suppose I have a sprained or hurt ankle. Oh, I'll just put something under the ankle, and now my foot is completely light.

[26:27]

Okay? What if I have two sprained ankles? I can support both of them. What if I have two ankles in the knee? These are washcloths. I can put something as a spacer in the knee. What if I have two knees? Oh, here you go. What if my outer hips are not supporting me well? Well, I can put a little prop under each upper thigh. And where it is is right under the outer thigh bone. And what it does is it gives a solidity and a stability to the low back. And then the posture begins to build in such a way that the lower body is happy. Of course, if you're just beginning, I'm going to go back to my beginners here. If you're just beginning, basically what I want you to do is forget everything I just said until you need it.

[27:33]

And instead, just try these poses. And it can be this simple. Let's see. What's a good pose for me? Shall I sit in the chair? Oh, that's kind of okay. Or shall I sit seiza? Oh, let's see. I'm not sure. That works, but I'm not sure. Or can I sit cross-legged? Oh, let's see. That feels kind of comfortable, especially if I sit close to my couch so that I have a little bit of low back support. Or Siddhasana. Well, you know, I'm really interested in sitting full lotus one day. Maybe I'll try some of these interesting poses, but... Oh, no, when I jerk my leg up, my knee hurts.

[28:36]

Oh, no, what am I going to do? I'm going to get help. So that's the level at which someone who's starting needs to avoid harm and do good. You know, you do your best at that moment. And you stay within the range of what you can do. But how do you make it meditative? Well, the physical meditation comes when you stop doing harm at any part of your body and you're nourishing more parts of your body. Then the body and mind begin to come together in an easeful way that respects who you are, who you were born as, who you have come to be, and the things that have happened to you in life. physical ills arise. And our job is to handle not only the physical ills that have arisen as part of human life, but to avoid creating new physical harms if we can.

[29:44]

And when we do that, we'll feel a sense of consonance or harmony between our intention and our life. So what we need to examine and analyze is all the places where we feel dissonance. Now let's look a little bit at the emotional body in sitting, because a lot of times our dissonance isn't in the physical leg posture. That's more something that comes up. For a lot of people, when they go to a monastery and they feel like social pressure to sit for 40 minutes. Then the knee and back pain begins because people, oh no, the bell hasn't rung. Do I dare move? And the Zendo and, you know, all these people in black and, oh no. And okay, I'll just sit here. Ow. So that's the thing that happens to a lot of people because of the social situation.

[30:47]

But at home, we get to really work with all of those pressures, knowing that it's just us and our conscience. You know? So we get to actually be realistic about what we can and can't do. And we get to work to find out about those limitations and work on them if we take responsibility for our needs. So what are they at this time? of sheltering in place. Well, I can list some things, and then if they're not true for you, you don't have to listen to that part, or you can suggest more, and Koda will interrupt and transmit them to me if I don't read the chat. But as I understand it, some of the things that we face are loneliness, distraction, Kind of a mental TV for the protests and a concern about people who we're not with.

[31:53]

And, you know, boredom and frustration of not being able to do the things that we usually do. The difficulty of having to restructure our work lives or have them gone. So that's the sort of thing that we're facing right now. So how do we sit dozen with that? Well, again, the first thing that we can do is turn towards it without going into overwhelm. So we can understand that the zazen posture exists specifically to create a safe container in which who we are can arise. One of the ways that we do that, once we've established the lower body posture, is by creating a Buddha mudra. a seal of awakening of the entire torso and the sense organs so that we have a safe container within which any experience can arise.

[32:58]

So once we've understood the leg posture, then the next job is to try to understand the stability and ease of the torso from the hips all the way up. And so this torso has to be tall, open, and deep. So it has to exist in all of its dimensions. So what does tallness feel like? So I'm just gonna show you physically, so I don't have to just keep explaining and explaining. So what I suggest you do is hold your elbows with your hands, And then take your elbows above your head and put pressure between your hands and your elbows. And then just push the elbows up and you'll feel tallness on the sides of the body. Okay, you'll also feel any place in your upper body that's squished because of computer time.

[34:04]

Then you can bring your arms down, switch the grip of the hands and go back up. Okay, and this time, Be specific that between the hips and the waist, you're going to make yourself taller. You might need to lift up one side or the other side before you lift up both sides. That's tallness. And now your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to maintain that tallness of the body. Transfer responsibility from your arms to your torso as you... Bring your hands to your lap. So that's tallness. Okay, the second dimension is openness. So sit on your buttock bones and use your hands to press your outer hips in.

[35:06]

When you do, you'll feel that your lower abdomen gets wider. Do you feel that? Do you feel that? So if the outer hips go this way, the lower abdomen will spread this way. It won't be the inside of the abdomen. It'll be the abdominal skin. But you can spread that width. So what I'm going to ask you to do is to bend your arms and put your fingertips in front of your chest and then just make a circle. And open your arms out with the palms facing down. And from your left collarbone to your left index finger, get wider. From your right collarbone to your right index finger, get wider. And from your left shoulder blade to your left ring finger, get wider. From your right shoulder blade to your right ring finger, get wider.

[36:10]

And now here's for a physical memory. Can you act without moving your arms as if you are pressing them down to reestablish the height of the sides of the body? Keeping the height, find the width, and then keeping the width, place your hands in your lap. And that's the second dimension of the zazen posture to study. Now, how about depth? Depth is from back to front and from front to back. Well, you already started doing it when you began to look at how your lower back and abdomen were in relation to each other. Okay? So when the lower back is back, the back of the body is deep, but the front of the body is shallow.

[37:12]

It's contracted. When the buttocks are back and the body is forward, the front of the body has dimension, but the back of the body is contracted. And so our mission is to balance those so that the depth is just right. Okay? And then to create that depth all the way up the body is the challenge because this area right here, at this level, the level of the sternum is where most of us don't feel death. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is just to put your hands on your chest right here, right here. So this is the sternum and I have my hands on my sternum right at the outer sternum.

[38:13]

And what I'm gonna ask you to do here is to sit with tallness, openness, and depth of the lower body and just fill your fingertips with chest without pushing. So see if you can fill yourself up to your fingertips instead of pushing yourself to your fingertips. So that's depth. From the back ribs to the place where your fingertips are right now, lower back ribs, to the upper sternum, get deep. And then with that tallness, that width and that depth, you might feel that the mental zigzags are beginning to lower. Okay, because you've established a container that's stable enough to hold them. Okay, so sit with that. And of course, if you're a beginner, you're not gonna mess with all that. All you're gonna do is...

[39:15]

Lean to one side. That gets long. Lean to the other side. That gets long. And then just to the side to side, front to back until you feel balanced. And then eventually the breath will come up and go away. Same thing, simpler way. Right? And do you feel how everything just feels better? when you have that container within which it can occur. That's what Zazen posture is for. You have created Buddha mudra, not just with your hands, mudras are usually hands, but the entire body and mind is Buddha mudra. The entire body and mind is the seal of awakening in Zazen. You might not feel that way. but eventually you do. Let's look a little bit at the mudra, the hand mudra that seals the rest of the pose. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is just to put your hands on the outer tips of the shoulders.

[40:24]

And these bones from the collarbone to the outer tips of the shoulders get wide. You can feel how when you turn your arms in, they get narrow. The front of them gets narrow. When you turn your arms way out, the back of them gets narrow. But how in COVID-19, we tend to turn front more than we turn back. So just sit with them neutral and open. And you can practice turning your arms in or out a little bit as you need to help make that happen, to support that. Then what I'm going to ask you to do is to just sit up on your support and put one hand, palm up, Put the other hand on top of it so two joints of the middle finger overlap. And then bring your thumb tips together. And so it's a nice kind of oval. It's an oval in which you can feel the touch of the air along the inner side of the palm.

[41:29]

And the skin of the palm is receptive to that touch without pulling in that touch. Dogen Zenji says, put the mind in the palm of the hand. You'll notice that if you stick your thumbs forward, the mind spills forward. And if you stick your thumbs way back, the mind spills back. Okay, the physical posture gets weird and the mind spills. So put them someplace in the middle. Support yourself through your torso posture that's balanced on your hips. your legs and your lower back. And the thighs down. Allow the inhalation to arise. And then maintaining the posture, let the exhalation rise. And just sit here with your ears centered over your torso. Then we'll look a little bit at the sense organ.

[42:30]

Again, if you're a beginner, don't worry about this detail. It's not worth it to obsess. So sitting tall, wide, and deep with a physical position of the legs, hips, and lower back that is not harmful and that is nourishing. With the dimensions reestablished to refine that nourishment, into the emotional life, into the nervous system and brain. Begin to adjust the senses. So you can check the skin all over your body. And if there's tension, you can use an exhalation to wash it. Like you would wash the skin of a baby. The skin is the biggest sense organ. So... Over time, let the sensation on the skin become more even.

[43:35]

You might notice that unconscious tension sometimes hardening the skin. Unconscious weaknesses sometimes make it very slack in certain areas. And this is where you can make an adjustment to your posture or to your sense of your breath. Your eyes. Let the eyes rest in the eye socket so that you have a sense of the round eye organ in the smooth eye socket. Let the inner eye be deep. And let the skin container of the eyes spread from inside corner to the outside corner without losing the sense of depth. At the back of the eye, there's a little window. for the nerve to go through. You can remove the tension or pressure there with an exhalation. Let the eyes rest deeply.

[44:39]

And let the ears rest deeply as well. So starting with the skin of the outer ears, go all around that skin and breathe away that tension. And let the inner opening of the ears be round and smooth and receptive. to sound without going out after it. Same with the nose. You can let the skin around the nose release from the center to the sides and from the outside to the inside. Then you can let the inner membrane of the nose be soft to receive the air and not to pull it in or push it away. The same with the oral cavity in the throat. You can let the whole inner column of the throat be soft and tall. You can let it spread.

[45:40]

And you can let the tongue be wide and flat in your mouth. The tip may need to come up a little. That's okay. But don't hold it there. Just let it be its shape. Let the whole depth of the tongue rest. the whole inner surface of the oral cavity, the cheekbones, all the way back to the sinuses, which affect the eyes and ears. Let that be quiet. Let your sense of taste rest. Let your sense of smell rest. And now let's just sit for a moment or two with peace. having avoided harm, having done good. Let the peace that you've created spread throughout body and mind.

[46:45]

Let the awareness of that peace be settled, open, deep, without pursuing it. Thank you very much. If you have any questions, this would be a good time to ask them.

[47:53]

Kodo can facilitate. If you're not ready to stop, just disobey me. For heaven's sake, it's your own meditation moment here. Okay. I'm here to help, not to take over. Okay. So Jonathan has a question. Kodo, can you unmute Jonathan? Hello. Clary also does too. Yeah. In your video before the retreat, you showed one more position that I've actually been using during the retreat, and that is laying down and having the legs on a chair. Yes. I wonder if you could discover that in a little bit more detail, because I found that... Absolutely. Okay. So, yeah, you can try this if you want. You can even listen to questions. So what I've done is I've taken a chair, taken a pillow. I'm going to put my whole lower back on the floor.

[48:55]

And doing meditation with standing or lying down or walking is all fine. And that is relief for the knees and hips. So I have my lower back on the floor. My arms are out wide. my back body spread on the floor with the whole outer edges of the back body on the floor. And let's say I want to work further on the hips, the legs and the lower back and let them relax. Then I just put something on the thighs. And you can see how the whole lower leg is supported on a chair. If I were very short and my heels were up like this, it wouldn't help so much. So then you have to find something lower to put your legs on. So for instance, let's say instead of five, three and a half, four foot nine, I might use some combination of bolsters instead or a small coffee table or something like that.

[50:00]

Okay, there's other lying down positions, but the one on your back is very useful. Suppose it's breathing issues that you have. Suppose you were in a demonstration and there was smoke. So then you can support your back on a support. With a pillow for the head. And just use like a sofa pillow or something. I hope you can see this. I'm just lying down with my legs on the floor and my upper body supported. But that's more for the breathing. The other one was more for resting the low back. Does that cover it, Jonathan? Is that good? Yes, thank you.

[51:01]

That's very helpful. The last question, When you had your legs on the chair and I'm in the chair position, I can have the legs at like a 45 degree angle. So I don't know it in this way kind of mimics the chair or it can be slightly. Go back until your lower legs are really resting. No, no, no, not towards the cushion. Go away from the support until the whole lower leg from the back of the knee to the heel is resting. That's your maximum lower back. rest right there. You feel what I'm saying? Yeah, no, it feels great. It feels very supportive. You could even use a strap around your outer knees, not tight, but just something for your legs to rest in. Then you'll feel that inner lower back rest too. Okay. So we have questions. Thanks. We also have questions from Terry and there was somebody else who had a question, I think, but let's start with Terry's.

[52:03]

Kodo, could you unmute Terry? Yeah, thanks. Thank you for the washcloth idea. I've always wondered why I had all these washcloths and what I was going to do with them. And now I know. When I sit cross-layed, like my knees are way up in the air. Yeah. Okay. So... How supported, maybe really, really supported? Yeah, look, Terry, for you, it's a hip issue. Having seen your posture, there's hips and there's leg stiffness. Okay. So Terry's talking about having her knees way up here when she's in a cross-legged pose. So... Terry, have you ever been to those Japanese restaurants where they have the well for your legs?

[53:08]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to make one. So here I've taken the height of the support and I'm putting extra blankets on it. Okay. I'm making it quite high. I'm making it so high. that when I sit up on it, my legs go, oh, yeah, okay. You have to wait for that, oh, yeah, okay kind of feeling to arise in the legs. And then you can cross your legs, and you can put anything in there that you need. There could be something in here. There could be something here. Just use anything that you need to fill in. And I suggest, like, sofa pillows. And be shameless. Okay.

[54:09]

Okay. Now, what about when I come to Zen Center? Just get there early and collect all the little... Just bring a blanket. Yeah, if you need to bring a blanket. And you can also collect extra Zafus. So you could sit on two Zafus for your butt. and one zafu each under your legs. But you can also bring a blanket. And anyway, if you come just, we can do practice discussions sometime and I can show you the extent of possible shamelessnesses that are still kind of socially appropriate in the Zendo. Okay? We need to be shameless. Okay, thank you. I think we've got one more question. Thank you. Thank you so much, Vicky. Thanks. May I have a question as well, please? What's that? What is the proper height of cosmic ultra during the Zazen meditation?

[55:14]

That's an excellent question. You know? So, really excellent question. So, most people think that... You just take your mudra and rest it in your lap. But when you do that, if you rest your hands down, see what happens to the shoulders, right? Other people try to prevent that by lifting the mudra up. And when that happens, the arms get tired and the body tends to lean back. But what I suggest you do There are various places on the body, various chakras or energy points. And in the lower body, there's three relevant ones you want to consider. One is all the way down here. That's the very lowest point of the body. That's called the root chakra.

[56:15]

The second chakra is here between the belly button and the pubic bone. That relates to nourishment and intimacy. So we often think of it as the sexual chakra, but it's actually also right by the navel is where our earliest nourishment was received inside the womb. So it's nourishment and intimacy. There's interconnection feelings that arise when we focus here. And then this one up here is for will, will or intention. And there's another different mudra for this solar plexus one. It's called Shashu. And this mudra of one hand over the other that we use for walking meditation in the Zen temple is called treasure holding mudra. That is for the will or the intention.

[57:17]

That's the treasure that you're holding. But in the seated meditation pose, Once you've sat down and you have a good place to sit, then make your mudra and then just begin to explore, going a little bit down, going a little bit up. And you'll find a place where the energy fills the entire inner surface of the hand. And it's like the energy goes this way, this way, okay? So it takes time to feel this. Most people can't feel it for a while. And then after some experience with sitting, you begin to be able to feel the more subtle energy messages of body and mind.

[58:19]

But if you put your hands around that energy center, and you make your little finger bone firm against your belly and ever so slightly lift the skin, then the energy of the body will hold up the mudra and you don't have to do anything to hold up the mudra. But of course, if you exceed your endurance, your arms and hands will get tired. And then in that case, what I suggest is that you just take at home, you're at home, that you just take blankets and put them over your lap and put your mudra there. Okay? But the place that I found, this is my 50th year of practice, the place that I found that's the best for the mudra is to circle the energy of the hara or tanda or the nourishment, interconnection, generative energy section of the body.

[59:22]

I hope that answers. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks. Now, I'm sorry, but I think we're at time. Is that true, Kodo? It's true, Vicki. Thank you. So, yeah, I think you might need the Zoom link for Zaza. So I think we're going to have to stop now, but the questions only begin today. But the whole point of today is to encourage you to be in your own life and to be in what gives life for you, to understand what that is by being willing to use your obstacles as things learning devices to become more intimate with how you're built, how you've come to be, what's happened to you, and to accept it as part of the containment of Zazen, part of the container of Zazen.

[60:35]

We're all given one body and mind in this life, right? It transforms, but it doesn't go away. So just use the body and mind that we have. to create the container for everything, in which everything can arise. This and everything in a constant dialogue is Sazen. Okay? So. Tata.

[61:08]

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