okay we're recording and good go awesome welcome everyone welcome to zazen instruction um so zazen is the word that we use that's normally translated as meditation. The relationship between zazen and meditation, as people traditionally think about it, is a little bit complicated, but we'll start with that as a provisional definition. I guess I should introduce myself a little bit.

[01:12]

My name is Zachary. I'm a Zen priest at, in air quotes, San Francisco Zen Center. I don't actually live at San Francisco Zen Center. And under the current circumstances, I don't get over there very much, actually. But nonetheless, here I am, connected via the miracle of the internet, and various kinds of technologies to Zen Center. And I get to teach a lot of that instruction, which is great. So thank you, Zen Center. Thank you, technologies. Thank you, internet. I've been practicing for something like 27 years. I've been a priest for the last, wow, seven or so of those, and a teacher for a little bit longer, essentially.

[02:32]

So what about the sadden stuff? I guess the first thing I'm prompted to ask whenever I think about zazen is why anyone would want to do it. And interestingly, the instructions for zazen, they were written down in the 13th century by the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, which is the school that Zen Center is descended from, essentially, started out that way, too. It's a pretty short document, but it starts with a little explanation of why Zazen might be useful. And in some ways, that explanation is also intended as a counter to other ideas about the nature of Buddhist practice that were sort of floating around at the time in Japan, but we don't have to worry about those.

[03:54]

Here's the difficulty that zazen is intended to address. The problem is that we're human. That's kind of it. And the ramifications of that are many and varied. And some of them are kind of awesome. If you look at what makes humans human, so let's look at whales, cheetahs, and euglena.

[05:08]

So whales are awesome. hold their breath for a really long time. And they're gigantic. And they can communicate over vast distances by making these marvelous sounds underwater and so on. Kitty, don't do that. The cat is trying to type on my keyboard. Let me just make sure that my keyboard is turned off. Silly cat, don't do that. No, see, it wasn't. OK. Ridiculous animal. So whales are awesome. Cheetahs are awesome. They can run, I don't know, 70 miles an hour. Pretty great. They can't do it for very long, but they could do it over and over again.

[06:13]

And they're beautiful and sleek. Euglena are not beautiful and sleek, but they can both absorb other food from the environment. And they can make their own because they can do photosynthesis pretty great. If only we could make our own food by photosynthesis, the world would be a very different place. So what have humans got to show for themselves in this sort of vast lottery of evolution? What we're kind of good at is language and long-range planning. And maybe something related to those two, which is the ability to use language in a social or tribal framework to talk about those clans and convince large groups of people to implement them in a relatively cooperative manner.

[07:43]

literally the meat and potatoes. I guess these days, meat and potatoes is a bad metaphor. That's the daily bread then of human world, urban life these days. Everybody's making plans, convincing some group that ranges in size from two to 10,000, 100,000 to work on them and using our linguistic skills and our planning skills to enable that implementation so that everything from, I don't know, a tasty dinner at a at an outdoor restaurant to a giant building in the middle of downtown can come into being.

[08:51]

Amazing. And there's some other kinds of things that people do with their language and long-range planning. They write books. Beautiful. They write poetry. Also beautiful. They plan and devise and both inscribe and then get together a bunch of people to play pieces of music that are moving and magnificent. So great. And everything in between. We also have in the process and using these gifts that are at our disposal, we've caused wars, genocides, disastrous environmental consequences, and that sort of thing as well.

[10:01]

So again, it's a mixed bag. So here's the difficult part and the part of that that Zazen is designed to address. All of those things, the gifts and the activities and uses we make around those gifts come with a number of requirements and costs. And the main requirement, it seems to me, is this. In order to be that planning, scheming, executing, speaking, spoken to, acting, being acted upon being, we need to devise

[11:09]

We need to imagine ourselves, to model ourselves as a self in the world. We start cooking up this self pretty much the minute we're born. And we work on it pretty hard for... roughly the first 10 years of our lives. And at that point, it's pretty well-developed modulo, a whole bunch of stuff that everyone's familiar with that happens during adolescence. But if you've ever hung around and really gotten to know, say, an 11-year-old, what you discover is there's a person with a... highly developed sense of self and model for, um, both the world and their place in it.

[12:14]

And it's pretty sophisticated actually. So it, you know, it takes, um, certainly there's other things that happen later in elaborations that, that take place later, but, but the, um, but, you know, by the time you're 10, you, you're pretty much, uh, cooked up, um, reified and implanted this sense of self in your body and mind. And at that point in everyone's life, it seems to me that that self kind of thinks it's running the show. And how exactly does that work, right? I mean, everyone, if you examine your inner life, You see this in operation all the time. In fact, it's the main thing you see if you examine the bringing up as a series of images or as a narrative, a picture of the future, weighing that out by

[13:30]

of mostly by sensing some kind of emotional weight that attaches to those thoughts, images, narratives, and either heading in that direction if it looks good or not heading in that direction, running the other way if it looks bad. the way we constantly sense and measure the social fabric in which we're sitting or standing, the intimate details of the relationships that we're engaged in right now, Mostly, again, on the basis of a kind of emotional valence that those things have, this emotional quality.

[14:36]

And you can see how this plays out on a large scale. It's quite easy to observe and kind of marvelous. So for example, I used to do international standards work for a living in an engineering context. And the way that works is you go to Someplace in the world, well, first of all, the way it works is you have hours of conference calls every workday. But in addition, you go to some place in the world, if you're involved in a couple of standards bodies or so, once a month, and somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people show up. and divide into little groups and work on specific issues around some piece of a standard that they've been charged with developing.

[15:42]

And so it's all essentially all talk and a little bit of writing stuff down. Well, actually, in the end, a lot of writing stuff down. But the vast volume of the work involves discussion and decision-making as a result of that discussion. And what you discover if you do this stuff for a while is that for a particular standards organization, some of the groups are tremendously effective and get stuff done and seem to Everyone seems to be enjoying their work and so on and so forth. And some of the groups are just a disaster. And if you look a little bit further, and they can work for years and years and years and not produce anything at all. But if you look into the functioning of that disaster, what you start to see is this really interesting thing.

[16:51]

The general kind of profile of one of these groups is there can be as many as 30-ish people in the group, sometimes less, sometimes more. Those 30-ish people, somewhere between 10 and a little bit less, do all the talking. Everybody else is just sitting around on their laptop reading email and browsing the web. And of those 10-ish people, somewhere between three and five do all the work, do all the substantive work of writing things down, developing the standards documents, and so on. And interestingly, if those three to five people, if the emotional quality of the relationships between those three to five people is not pretty good, then nobody gets anything done.

[17:58]

It's amazing. If they can't just look each other in the eye and feel comfortable and trusting enough to have ideas together in a comfortable and sort of seamless, easy way, then things don't get done. It's amazing. And the group can work. generate parliamentary procedure and call plenary votes and all this other stuff. There's all this drama around it, but actually nothing gets done. And eventually, those groups become the kind of laughingstock of the standards world, and they're disbanded. And lest you think that this is just some sort of inconsequential foolishness, it costs tremendous amounts of money and causes the failure of large projects that could, in principle, have been very useful and kind of great and made the world better in some sense.

[19:08]

So there's an example. But that's the world we're in. And if you look at your own life in any sphere and sort of domain that you care to examine it, you see the way this works, right? So you look at family, friend group, work situation, local politics, regional politics, and so on. And you see this thing in operation. Everybody's got a self. Everybody has a powerful emotional attachment to the to the dictates of self, to the plans and schemes, the agendas, the sort of future planning, and also the desire to reach back and fiddle with one's past to make it look and feel good and so on.

[20:11]

All of that mediated by and driven by these powerful emotional attachments. You get a bunch of people together that are operating that way, and no wonder conflict and difficulty arises. They disagree, and they disagree strongly. It's possible to mess a whole bunch of things up. And here's the even worse part. This kind of thing scales up in this weird way that, again, has been both tremendously functional and So another thing that we're good at is envisioning these kind of group identities. They're kind of an extension of self, of this self. So not only am I this one, I'm also a Buddhist priest.

[21:16]

That's a group identity for me. I hope, is fairly benign. But other ones are just obviously, if you read the news, deeply problematic. I am a Democrat who by default mistrusts people who identify as being from other parties, right? That's become a very problematic feature of American political life that is responsible for a lot of difficulty and suffering. It's not any particular side of that divide. Well, let me put it this way. As it turns out, those social identities and the agreements on which they're based are really kind of paper thin.

[22:28]

If you examine the actual, in detail, the actual people that are involved and their ideas about the world and so on and so forth, there's a lot more nuance and so on than the simple categorical claim these people over here are Democrats and these people over here are Republicans, for example, actually covers. But that nuance and so on gets lost in the context of of large-scale group identification and large-scale agreements that drives highly consequential actions, for example, in the political arena and also in the national arena.

[23:30]

If you stand a group of people up over here and a group of people up over here that disagree about who owns a particular piece of territory, you get things like wars or genocides. It's really, really awful what happened. So that's the human condition. That's how we're built. And the truth is it arises out of something fundamental in our nature as humans. And it's entangled with our greatest gifts and capacities, the things that uniquely, in some ways, make us human. What a bind. So how does Zazen address that?

[24:35]

you look at the Zazen instruction that was written in the 13th century that I mentioned earlier, he says all that in a lot shorter space. He says it in a paragraph or something like that. He says, if you attach, if you engage in this particular kind of human activity, it's going to lead to suffering. But if you sit zazen and you study it in the context of day-to-day practice, then you can be free of that. That's the axiomatic claim of Buddhism, is that there's freedom from that kind of suffering. And Dogen, the guy that wrote the 13th century zazen instruction, is holding up Zazen is the key feature of a practice that will enable that freedom, that will give rise to that freedom in each of us.

[25:44]

So then he says, OK, well, how do you do it? And the funny thing about the rest of the document is that it's almost all about logistics and posture and a few other technical aspects. So he says, get everyone to go away and stop bothering you and find yourself a quiet place to do it. Unfortunately, well, maybe I don't have to remove the cat from my lap, but generally speaking, you have to remove the cat from your lap because you're about, well, I unfortunately do have to remove the cat from my lap because I'm about to demonstrate some postural aspects. He says, put down some matting and put a cushion on top of it. So let me show you first the cushions that I'm using. Kitty, you have to move. Oh, cat. So I use this thing.

[26:52]

It's called a Zafu. Mine is pretty skinny and small, but normally they're bigger than this. And I also use a little tiny square support cushion underneath it to adjust the height. And sometimes I use the support cushion. Sometimes I don't. This thing to sit on, the Zafu, is excellent for sitting in a cross-legged posture. And the reason is, now that the cat is gone, I'm not sure you can really see my legs. Hold on, adjust this. Try that. That might be a little bit better.

[27:55]

Okay, so Dogen, the author of this document says, you sit... either in full lotus or in half lotus. So I'm going to demonstrate full lotus as a kind of pointer to something. Let's put it that way. So he says in full lotus, you put your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh. OK. That's good. The thing that's good about full lotus posture, and this is why I'm demonstrating it, this posture is some people can do it easily and some people have trouble with it. I couldn't do it at all for the first roughly, I could do it for three to five minutes for the first 20 years or so of practice.

[28:57]

And over time, my body sort of shift it around to the point where I can do it. And it actually turns out it's really comfortable once you adjust. So give it 20 years. The thing that's good about it is that the weight on your knees is pretty balanced. Just because of the nature of the posture, you can see there's equal sort of equal down pressure on your thighs and so on. So the weight on your knees is pretty balanced. And And if you're sitting on a Zafu in full lotus, you have this evenly distributed tripod of support, your knees and your butt. So that's good. It feels solid and well-balanced. So if you can't do full lotus, the next step would be to try half lotus.

[29:58]

For a half lotus, you just press your left foot against your right thigh, like that. Now, one of the things you might have noticed when I did that is that my knees moved a little bit apart. That's okay, but just so you know, the further apart your knees are, the more stress there is on some of these muscles up here. So that's worth noting. And all of this stuff is kind of a balancing act, right? The thing that makes... full load is hard to do is that it requires a lot of sort of twist in your hips and knees. If you don't have that, you can, you know, half lotus requires a little bit less of that kind of twist. But again, it places a little bit more strain on muscles up here and just to balance those things out. And so this is the sort of the most I don't know, aggressive form of half lotus where your foot is right up on top of your thigh.

[31:04]

But you can also place it here on your calf. And there's even a posture called Burmese where it's placed down here. And you'll notice in each of these, my knees are kind of moving farther apart. The posture is more spread like this. And all of that is a little bit harder on these muscles. It makes this part of your body a little, This applies a little bit of stress to that part of your body. So those are all things that are worth considering. And then there's the kind of traditional campfire cross-legged position. That's also good. It has this slight issue that often your knees are elevated and not planted. And so it might be a little bit harder to balance. If you sit like this, and it's possible to sit like this, it might be good to take a cushion or something and put it under your knees so that they're supported.

[32:10]

And if you look at people that sell sitting paraphernalia, they often sell these, like I showed you, these support cushions. And you can just take one and fold it and put it under your knee or just and put it down on the mat under your knee. So that's the cross-legged postures. Since then, since the 13th century, we've added a couple of postures. One is sitting in a chair. So sitting in a chair is great. You can sit zazen in a chair. The request is similar. You want to have your feet solidly planted on the ground to promote balance. And you want to have your butt solidly planted on the chair. And you want to have the contact with the chair be as small and focused as possible. It's probably not good to be smushing back in the chair.

[33:15]

It's good to have a chair that allows you to sit so that you mostly feel your sit bones contacting the chair that doesn't have a big upslope, so there's not a lot of pressure against the back of your thighs where you're sitting and so on. So it's worth poking around to find yourself a chair that works if you're going to sit in a chair. The other postures are variants of a posture that in Japanese we call seiza, and I think they're really... all variants of a yoga posture called Duryasana. So the simplest version of that is this posture. You just put your legs together, allow your feet to fall sideways a little bit, and you sit right there. This is very simple. And again, over time, your body can adjust to it so that it's actually quite comfortable.

[34:17]

But even for people for whom this posture is comfortable, there's a problem with it, which is that it puts a lot of pressure on a number of places in your lower legs, and eventually your legs are probably going to fall asleep. And eventually, for me, it's about somewhere between... and a half an hour and 45 minutes. For a lot of people, it's more like somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. So it's not good to have your legs asleep for too long while you're sitting. So there's a number of ways to fix that. One is you take a cushion, put it on edge, and you Just lift it between your feet, and you sit on it on edge.

[35:19]

My cushion is kind of squishy, so it doesn't hold me up much. But it's enough to relieve some of those impingements in my lower legs. And my legs are way less likely to fall asleep. There are a bunch of different other kinds of things you can sit on and say, as I built this myself, it's a sculpted yoga block. And it's kind of sculpted to be like a bicycle seat. So I do this. Put that in there. That's pretty comfortable. And finally, you can find these online. This is a bench. This is actually pretty comfortable. You just put the bench under your sit bones. It elevates you quite handily. And the advantage of sitting on a bench is that it allows you to keep your legs together.

[36:26]

If you have a cushion in here, they're further apart. And I've noticed that that over time can be a little bit difficult. So all of these postures are pretty comfortable. And people find... often that they can sit in them for long periods of time without trouble. So let me get back in some posture where I'm facing you in any case. So stacked on top of that lower body posture, and I would just encourage everyone to explore the various options and find one that works. The main thing you have to play with in all of these is height. So if I were sitting like this, flat on the mat, without anything underneath me, it's pretty comfortable for me.

[37:36]

But you'll notice that my left knee is slightly elevated just because it's not as I have a little bit less twist in my left leg than in my right. But if I was up like this, manifestly both my knees are planted. So somewhere in between here and here, there's a sweet spot where you're elevated enough so that your butt is planted and your knees are planted. And for me, that's this. For other people, it's going to be different. So just to find your own. And then stacked on top of that, there's an upper body posture. So to make the back straight, both straight and relaxed, that's the key. You want to have a kind of soft engagement of your stomach muscles, a soft engagement of the muscles in your lower back. They can't be totally relaxed because otherwise you'd fall over.

[38:41]

But they can be soft and lightly engaged. And that's the sort of key is to be upright, largely because you're balanced and because you have a sort of soft engagement with the large muscles in your upper body. That's kind of how it works. So to find your balance, maybe rock right and left and find the middle. Rock forward and back, find the middle. And as you rock forward and back, notice the way your muscles engage and let go. Find a midpoint where you're upright and where the muscles in your upper body are either relaxed or lightly engaged. It helps to imagine your head kind of floating up off your shoulders and slightly back so that your face falls into a vertical plane and your nose is right above your navel, your ears are right above your shoulders.

[39:50]

The energy in your shoulders and arms should be out and down. So you make a big circle with your arms and in the middle of that circle you place this smaller circle that you get by putting your left palm on top of your right palm, bending your finger, your thumbs around into a big circle like that. You place that right here. So that's against your lower abdomen such that your thumb tips are above your navel and the rest of the hand is sort of falling below the navel. It's pressed gently up against your lower abdomen so that The little fingers of your two hands are making a very light contact with your lower abdomen. Also, the contact between your thumbs should be really soft. And in general, the contact between your hands should be light. It should just float there. It shouldn't be falling in your lap and probably shouldn't be up here.

[40:55]

You'll notice that if you raise them up, you start to feel engagement in these muscles, but after a while, it's going to get tired. This is the body posture as a whole. Relaxed and energized and upright. So with this posture, let's try this. Breathe all the way out. And then when the breath wants to come in, just let it come in. Do that again. Do that somewhere between three to five times.

[41:56]

Just breathe all the way out. Maybe put some attention right down here below your navel in the middle of your body. This place that in Japanese we call the hara. Pause. And then... Allow the breath when it wants to come in. So do that about three to five times. And then just let your breath take its natural depth and tempo and watch it. We're going to sit for a few minutes, and then we'll have a little time for Q&A. And then right after this, there's an opportunity to sit for a longer period with the whole Zen Center assembly. So let's just, we'll do a few minutes. I'll ring a bell to start and when we're going to finish. Just to be here.

[44:18]

There's nowhere to go. Nothing to do but to be present in your body. Present with the contents of your sensorium. Present with your mental activity, the thoughts, the images. underlying texture and flavor of your mind this morning. That's the soul request, Zadza. if you find that at some point a thought is coming up and taking your attention it's okay that's who we are we're the ones that think like that but inevitably you arrive back here just to just to be here when that happens to notice it

[46:07]

Watch your breath. Leave the body. Refill the body with energy. And then let it go. So that's pretty much all there is to it.

[47:34]

Does anyone have any questions or comments about what just happened, about the posture, about how it works? And we're a small enough group so that my guess is you can just unmute yourself if you If you want to talk, it would be. But if you have any questions, now's a good time. I see a chat message. So what do you think? Me?

[48:40]

Anyone. So I guess here's what I'd say. It's OK that nobody has a question. But here's what I'd say. What's on offer with this practice is a life that is free from, in this particular way, the suffering and difficulty that I was talking about earlier, tendency that humans have to attach to self, to attach to outcomes, to put separation between themselves and others, and so on.

[49:49]

All of that causes tremendous difficulty for all of us, I think. For all of us and, let's be clear, for some groups way more than others. the suffering is both universal and unevenly distributed. So this practice and the life that wraps around it offers relief from that in a particular way. It's not that the practice makes makes those, that planning, that self-identification and so on, the sort of social, what's the word?

[51:06]

machination or something like that. It's not like it goes away because that would be, that would probably be impossible. It's more like it becomes possible to hold it lightly and in a much larger picture, framework around what it is, what it actually is to be human. It's like we get to be fully human and draw on on a much larger set of human capacities than you originally thought were there. And at least that's been my experience with it. And that's wonderful. And all you got, yes. Yeah. What's up? Yes? Sorry, I think I just froze.

[52:07]

Can you hear me? I can, yeah. Yes, I can. Hello? Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. Okay. I have a question in the chat for you. Yes. Okay, great. Excellent. This is from Catherine. She says, hello, good morning. I'm speaking to you from South America. Luckily, you're talking about posture. When I sit, the circulation in my leg stops. And I'm wondering if you have any suggestions for me. Yes, absolutely. That's a great question. Your legs falling asleep pretty much always happens as a result of some kind of impingement. And there's a number of possible impingements that can happen in the course of a period of zazen.

[53:13]

But here are the most obvious ones. So I think the cat can probably stay here. But the most obvious one is that you impinge your sciatic nerve or the other nerves that run down the back of your leg in between the cushion at your bone, OK? So in other words, it has to do with how your butt is planted on the cushion. So if you notice that your legs are falling asleep from sort of here down, that's probably what's going on. And so you can do all sorts of things to fix that. But the most important thing is to pay attention when you're sitting and to notice the contact between the back of your legs and the cushion.

[54:16]

So note where it is, to know where it lands, and to try and kind of ease it so that contact is focused largely on your sit bones and isn't putting a whole lot of pressure or is putting a minimum amount of pressure on the on the back of your thighs. So one of the things I do is I actually sort of carved a little channel in the cushion on either side to make way for my leg bones and the nerves that run along the back of them. The other thing you can do is if you find your legs are starting to fall asleep, I sometimes just sort of squinch myself a little bit so that I'm pulling a little bit of extra flesh in between the cushion and my bones. And sometimes that's helpful. If it persists, I would say try a different posture.

[55:18]

So the impingements that arise in a cross-legged posture are not the same as the impingements that arise and are also not the same as the impingements that arise sitting on a chair. So that's a start. There are other places where you can cause impingement. So for example, here on the side of your knee. And if that's happening, it mostly helps to change the height of your seat or... or to be really careful with the way in which your knees are contacting the mat so that that impingement doesn't happen. And then the last one, this has been especially a problem for me, is you can actually impinge your nerves here so that your foot falls asleep or on this other side. I have a problem with that because I destroyed this foot about 20 years ago in a rock climbing fall, basically.

[56:23]

And it's a disaster. And the nerves have never really... reconnected properly and so on. And I discovered that if I put it in a particular position, it starts to fall asleep after a while. All I have to do is move it just about that much and impingement lifts, basically. So just to mostly be aware, as aware as you possibly can of the contacts that your body is making with the Zafu or whatever it is that you're sitting on with the mat and notice where that sort of feeling of deadness and sleepiness in your limb arises and address that particular contact. So again, for example, if it's in your knee, if you lift that knee up, often that impingement goes away. So just to explore that, it's your own body, and the impingements that it has are particular to the structure of your body and the way you sit.

[57:35]

But you can explore it just with awareness and with some sense of the really kind of mechanical functioning of your body. So does that help? Do you have any additional questions about that? Because it's a really excellent question. Yeah. Anything else? I'll wait just a second in the chat. OK. See what comes. Well, OK. So hopefully, that's helpful. So here's the last thing I'll say.

[58:42]

So after this, there's a period of Zazen. It's in this same virtual space, right? Isn't that right, Matt? MATTHEW WONG- Yeah. So there'll be a kind of a 15-minute pause in which everyone can mill around in whatever virtual space they happen to be in, and then come back and sit, and you can try out your newly-tuned sazen posture and so on. If you want to know more about the online programs of various kinds, sittings, classes, workshops, and so on. Zen Center's website has been streamlined and reorganized to present that stuff pretty seamlessly.

[59:42]

So I encourage you to check it out. And thank you so much for coming to Zaza Instruction. And hope to see you soon. So anything else, Matt? No. Great. Catherine says, thank you very much. It was very helpful. Awesome. That's great. I'm glad it was helpful. All right. Well, take care. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye.

[60:14]

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