This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. All that form and ceremony. It's both centering and and un-centering. I'm really not happy with my Zagu. Linda, would you fix my Zagu? I was going to just accept it, but since I have friends... Thank you. Yeah, it doesn't get used much, and it's got its own system. Okay. Thank you very much. Sorry, those of you out there can't see, but my bowing cloth was kind of cattywampus.

[01:06]

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Suzanne O'Connell, and I've lived here a really long time. And I want to thank the whole Tonto team, so welcome. We have new tantos, old tantos, tanto assistants, heads of practice who got together and invited me to give this talk. So thank you all. Where's Heather? Is Heather here? Okay. Anyway. So movable tantos. So there's a lot going on. Do you resonate with that? Is that And one of the benefits of having a practice that encourages us and trains us to pause, to be still, to be kind, is that in that space of receptivity, in that brief hesitation before responding, we can sometimes touch the ground...

[02:25]

and have a choice about how we meet a lot going on. Think for a minute of all the things that are going on in your life. The family, relationship realm, the work process, your health, your concerns about what's happening in the world. At what point does your chest start to get tight? And do you find yourself holding your breath? Are there strong emotions arising like anger or sadness or thoughts of overwhelm or paralysis? When Heather, who is in Tassajara, asked me a week or so ago,

[03:27]

if I would be willing to give this talk, my first reaction was, oh, wow, my plate is so full, I can barely function. And there's a lot going on. I moved to San Francisco Zen Center in December of 1995. And I've lived at all three of our temples. I moved back to City Center from Green Gulch in the spring of 2006. And on October 31st, I will be moving out of the space that I've been living in at City Center for 17 years and out of the practice community that I've been taking refuge in for 27 years. I'm transitioning to Enso Village in Healdsburg.

[04:31]

It's a Zen-inspired senior living community that's opening on October 31st. And this is after many years in which I've been leading the effort to create this community, to raise the money, to develop the various partnerships, to oversee innovations, and advocate for the Enso Village idea, which is initially to provide adequate care for the retiring Zen teachers at San Francisco Zen Center and to share the practice of conscious aging with the wider world. So I'm leaving my familiar space and I am... transitioning from one community to another. I'm taking 26 of my retiring Zen Center friends with me, and I'm going to be living with 250 new friends.

[05:42]

Oh, and I'm working full-time in the capacity of what I call Mama Lion, around maintaining the difference-makers at Enso Village, because... It takes vigilance when you're creating something new to keep from slipping back into older and perhaps easier ways of thinking about aging. The premise of Zen-inspired senior living is that wellness includes attention to the body, mind, heart, and spirit. And that it's really important to not turn away from and to help each other meet the realities of this amazing and difficult and inevitable process of aging. Oh, and San Francisco Zen Center is in partnership with the Kendall Corporation to develop a second Zen-inspired senior living community in Southern California called Enso Verde, for which I am also serving as Mama Lion.

[06:56]

There's a lot going on. So I asked Heather if I could please sleep on the request. It was quite possible I was actually going to say I have limits. Those of you who know me may think that's funny, but I was thinking about saying no. But when I woke up the next morning, And I looked at my calendar and I saw that there was a lot going on. But at the same time, I felt energized and happy. Actually, more than happy. I felt joyful. And it was clear to me that I wanted to talk with you about the kind of power of joy.

[08:02]

and how it can help us when there's a lot going on, which is always. So also this is an opportunity to publicly say goodbye to this place and to this phase of my life with you. So what is this joy? What does it feel like? Where does it come from? How do we cultivate it? So I want to start with what does it feel like for me? So I've been looking at this over the past couple of days. When I'm feeling joyful, I'm aware that my, I can feel that my lungs are filled with fresh, cool air. And that And that the diaphragm is dropped and released.

[09:07]

And there's an awareness of my heart beating and also kind of radiating warmth. And the corners of my mouth are slightly turned up. I think that's an important one. And my eyes are relaxed. And... welcoming whatever is appearing. And lastly, there's an overall sense of lightness that I call buoyancy. So I want to invite you to see if you can join me in this process of studying joy and see if you can identify your own sense or memory of joy. Just take a moment and see if you can conjure up a moment or a situation in which you felt what you would call joy.

[10:18]

Those of you in the electronic world, please do the same if you'd like. Just take a moment. Close your eyes if you need to and... So, you know, for me, two days ago, I was up at Enso Village and walking around studying the construction. And I walked into what we call the bistro, which is the vegetarian restaurant that we're going to have there. It's inspired by Green's Restaurant. And I looked up and I had known what we had planned for the ceiling. And I looked up. It was so beautiful.

[11:19]

It was beyond my imagination. I thought I knew what it was going to look like, but I didn't. And I looked up, and those feelings, that physical sensation I just described, was there. So how many people could not find a joyful experience? Raise your hand. Oh, really? Oh, then there's a whole part of my talk that might not even... Okay, so I'm going to talk about it anyway because in the past couple of weeks when I've been at 10 days that I've been talking to people about joy, a couple of people I know rejected the concept of joy. They said, it seems too big. It seems too energized. So just to widen the gate a little bit, I'm going to add a couple of other synonyms. And I'd like to add gratitude. So I was grateful for that ceiling.

[12:22]

I was grateful to the architects. I was grateful to the people who did such an exacting job. Delight is another word. Ice cream, that reminds me of ice cream. You know, taking a lick of an ice cream cone on a hot day, delight. Glee, that kind of reminds me of kind of... hopscotch or dancing gleefully. Or sort of another whole basket of joy is peacefulness or equanimity. So if those words are helpful to you, please use them. But each of those words require the corners of the mouth turned up. Another way to explore joy is by thinking about what it is not, or what I might refer to as the near enemy of joy.

[13:32]

Many times, extreme feelings can be an attempt to control our life. We go very high or we go very low. We mistakenly believe... that the advantage of going very high or going very low is that we think we are the ones turning the volume up and down. So in a way we feel in control. And we imagine we can protect ourselves from our hearts being broken by floating above the situation or dwelling in the pain and in that way preemptively breaking our own hearts. And I want to also take just a moment to acknowledge depression, which is to me a kind of a dwelling in the pain, being stuck in the pain.

[14:38]

And I understand that there are many people who experience depression in various titrations. And I also understand that sometimes it's not possible to turn towards joy. However, the circumstances of my life are such that I've only had a handful of experiences where I have felt despair. And for a period of time, I felt, oh, there won't be an end to it. I've had that experience. Like, no way up, no way out. But these experiences did not last long for me. And I was able to actually watch them fade and then a lightness return. And I've been accused of being too buoyant. But it's just, these are the causes and condition of my life.

[15:42]

So this experience I have is like being a cork on the ocean. Not in the air, not above it all, but like right in the middle, bubbling. But I respect that the area of depression is not an area where I am able to report or teach very much or how to work with it. But I can talk about joy. Now, joy can become ungrounded and too breathy, in which case it's not the joy I'm talking about. Ungrounded joy is joy that is overinflated and maybe an attempt to get out of a situation, to bounce around it, maybe spiritual bypassing. But buoyancy is not the same thing as ecstasy.

[16:44]

Joyful buoyancy is being that cork that's simply bobbling on the surface, not above it, not below it. So where does joy come from? What are the conditions for the arising of joy? Well, the kind of joy I'm talking about is not something that needs to be created. It's the joy that's flowing right now at the ground floor of being alive. It's the place that Suzuki Roshi talked about when he said, Just being alive is enough. We are human. We are alive. We are breathing. We are in community. We are flawed. We are restless and frightened in one breath and comforted and settled in the next.

[17:48]

We are surviving the ebbs and flows of our intentional interconnected lives. Joy is cultivated. Joy is conditioned by not resisting it. It's right here. It's right here. And at the edge of this joy is the potential for tears of appreciation. be tears for joy and gratitude are different titrations of the same thing knowing we are so so fortunate to be alive and this appreciation can increase as we age and settle

[18:55]

settle with the reality of life's ending coming closer. Or of a pending transition out of this community. There are other responses to the awareness of an ending or a transition. we sometimes have those too. Fear, panic, denial. Our choice is whether to dwell on those or to allow the joy that's already there to arise. It's not to say we should cancel those other responses. Fear. But I have found that leaning towards joy is what helps me meet my life in a refreshed way. It helps me better tolerate the heaviness of grief, to counter the temptation to close my heart to others in kind of solitary suffering.

[20:20]

These are the moments where you see, oh, I've got three pages left. Do I edit? is a sweet story, so I'll tell it to you. You may have heard this. This is about how, what it takes to kind of shore up that choice towards joy. And there was once an elder Cherokee man who was with his grandson teaching him about life. And the man says, a fight is going on inside of me. It's a terrible fight, and it's between two wolves. One is filled with anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other, on the other's shoulder, is filled with joy, peace, hope,

[21:35]

Love, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. And the same fight is going on inside you, my beloved grandson, and inside every other person, too. The grandson thought about it for a minute, and then he asked his grandfather, which wolf will win? And the elder Cherokee simply replied, the one you feed. Maybe you've heard that story before. But it's the one we feed. This is the part I'm going to cut. Okay. Okay. So I'm leaving the container of this community.

[22:42]

It's the end of something and the beginning of something else. And I can assure you that joy is helping me navigate this transition. There is a relationship between joy and loss. or as my friend Emila, who lives at Green Gulch and is also preparing to move to Enzo Village, I asked her how she was doing, what was her state of mind, and she said, she's feeling gratitude and grief. Gratitude and grief. Blanche Hartman, who many of you know, and maybe some of you don't know, was the first female spiritual leader of the San Francisco Zen Center.

[23:49]

She was the abbess, and I think the first female abbess in the West, maybe anywhere, anywhere. And Blanche once wrote an article in The Lion's Roar that I found, and it was talking about her relationship between joy and death. in which her awareness of the closeness of death after her heart attack gave rise to spontaneous gratitude. She'd had a previous brush with death when she was younger, and then her primary response was fear, terror, actually, at the realization of her own mortality. Up until then, she had... known that everyone eventually dies, but it was impersonal. Now that she knew that she personally was going to die, and that it could happen at any moment, she understood firsthand the teaching that death is certain, the time of death is uncertain.

[25:09]

And with that, she was spontaneously grateful. Just being alive is enough. When I first came to Zen Center, we all come with our ideas about wanting things to be better, wanting me to be better, wanting my life to be better. and thinking that maybe there was some advanced state of consciousness that one could enter into with a great deal of rigorous practice. And there are, you know, occasionally little blips of ecstasy after you've been sitting a long time in the Zendo during Sashin and you happen to kind of fall into a state. They don't last long. And actually, this is what the Buddha, this is what made the Buddha sit down for seven days because he was able to go up into various states of ecstasy, which are possible when you do strong concentration practices.

[26:23]

But then he'd come down and, you know, be back in his actual life. And so what's the way to work with our actual life? That's what this practice is about. But I, for a long time... thought that it meant special states. So sorry, any of you who are here for special states, go for it, but it's not what it's about. Just being alive is enough. And being here, I've watched a few people go through the process of knowing they were dying soon. One was another spiritual leader here, Abbot Steve Stuckey, who I had the great privilege of working closely with when I was in the leadership here. One of his students, Rentsch and Bunce, recently put a book together of stories about Steve from Steve's various friends and family and students.

[27:30]

And one was from a diary that Mary Stairs wrote was keeping during the last month. She was his attendant and basically lived at his house along with his wife, Lane, and attended to Steve as Steve, in a very short period of time from when he knew he was dying, about four months, actually finished that process of dying, finished that process of living, actually. And so Mary, in this diary, says that she was watching him in that process of being near the end and clear that it was unavoidable. She felt that as he was doing what we call dying, he was being born. He was being liberated. Every time something ends,

[28:34]

We're afraid of losing that thing. What happens? And so village. A new arising. As long as we're alive, life keeps refreshing itself. It's not always pleasant. What arises next is not always pleasant. But it'll be new. It'll have never happened before. So... Steve's response to the news that he had fatal pancreatic cancer and about four months to live was to offer one of the most amazing Dharma talks I've ever heard. It's on gratitude and it's in our archive and I highly recommend it. Now I'm not exactly dying any more than all of us are dying. but I am experiencing a level of change that seems maybe bigger than the normal moment-by-moment renewal of life.

[29:43]

And in a sense, I'm being liberated. I had expected that this part of the talk I was going to give was going to be about saying goodbye, and it would be painful. It's not. I'm filled with joy and completion. I have made mistakes. I have hurt people. I've let people down. In the shoe-so ceremony, the head student ceremony, we say, My mistakes feel heaven and earth leaving me no place to hide. So anyone in this room that I've hurt? Anyone out there that I've hurt?

[30:50]

Sorry. And I have a sense of both my mistakes and the offering that I've been able to make. They both fill heaven and earth. So I'm satisfied that I've done my best because I deeply believe that we are all doing our best. Because if we could do better, we would. This is our best. This is our human best. And we can use a little improvement, right? But that's in the process of doing our best. So right now, the joy is outweighing the grief.

[31:59]

And maybe another condition for the arising of joy is being humbled by one's mistakes. And the deep acceptance of being human, accepting imperfections, except for my bowing cloth, that was not okay. So it's an ending and a beginning. A liberation from the familiar. a venture into the new, and a sense that I have been fully supported for 27 years to make my offering. And I've learned from many teachers and all of you to better understand and do my best to embody the importance of compassion. I'm a doer. And I have done things with very little compassion.

[33:07]

Those are my mistakes. And I still have this next breath and this next breath to encourage that compassion. And I think a joyful state is a great place for compassion to arise in. So, what could be better than this? Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:07]

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