This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. It's wonderful to see you all. It's a particular experience to be here in the Tassajara Zendo giving a Dharma talk. Wow, it's a treat. It's a delight. For those of you who may not know me, my name is David Zimmerman, Tenzin David Zimmerman, and I am the tanto, the head of practice at our city center in San Francisco. And I want to offer a special gratitude to my counterpart here, Greg Fane, who is not here tonight. He went to my place. up in the city in order to attend the funeral of our dear Sangha member, Jordan Thorne.

[01:01]

So I'm here and he's there. And again, I'm very grateful for this invitation. I came in yesterday and I'm here for a number of days with my dear friend, Letitia Bartlett. We are co-leading a Zen and Yoga retreat here, and the theme of our retreat is Cultivating Trust, Zen and Yoga to Develop Balance, Relationship, and Appreciation. And both the practices of Zen and Yoga really require us to discover the capacity to be able to find in our own being an innate sense of trust. And then once we have touched into that capacity, to really clarify, what is it that we most rely on? And from that place, from that grounding, from that deeper sense of embodiment, how is it that we relate to the world, relate to each other? And then through this process of relating to each other, how is it that we can begin to appreciate and have gratitude

[02:13]

for how it is that we all come together in this amazing, beautiful way. I think one of the ways that we've been engaging as a means of cultivating trust in retreat, which is kind of going to be probably obvious to all of you, is through the practice of zazen. And cultivating trust means cultivating the capacity to be with our experience. whatever it is, however difficult, however beautiful, whatever way it shows up, can we turn to it and then turn away? Can we soften to it and welcome it rather than harden to it in some way? So I thought tonight that I would continue on the theme of cultivating trust through the practices of Zazen, but... I've kind of been in a playful mood for the last day, and I wanted to have a little bit of fun while I was doing this.

[03:14]

And besides, it's too hot to be serious tonight. So when I usually kind of do zazen instruction, if you will, at the retreats and workshops that I lead on transforming depression and anxiety, I try to find a lighthearted way of... speaking about Zazen and the process of transformation that happens. And I often use a special prop, a visual aid, which I brought with me tonight, and I'm going to share with you all. Are you ready? Ta-da! I don't know if you can see it from your distance. Maybe the little light here will help. So it is a snow globe with a crystal Buddha in it. So I'm going to put it over here for now.

[04:18]

And there goes the light. Come back, light. Thank you. Okay, so imagine the environment inside the snow globe as your mind, right? And Buddhism tells us that our natural state of mind is clear, transparent, spacious, luminous. It's open and cloudless like a sky, right? And that when we rest in our natural state of mind, when we are still, silent and quiet and peaceful, we're able to see things clearly in all ten directions. Nothing obscures our view. And we might, you know, because nothing obscures our view, we're able to see reality very clearly.

[05:27]

And our natural state of mind or consciousness or what you might call Buddha mind or Buddha nature, is originally pure, unstained, and undefiled. And therefore, we're able to see life and reality very, very clearly. And when we are able to do this, we're able to sit like a Buddha, peacefully in whatever environment we find ourselves, simply being still and observing, and are enjoying ourselves as we flow or course in samadhi. So this is all of you, just imagining yourself as a little Buddha here in a snow globe. The thing about the analogy of a snow globe, however, is that it might lend you to this idea that there's an inside or an outside to the mind. And Buddhism says that's not true. So the reality is it's all one mind.

[06:30]

There's no inside, no outside, just one environment, one vast, open, spacious, illuminated, boundless environment in which all appearances and phenomena arise and fall away. So for the sake of this analogy, imagine that the snowflakes in this snow globe are your thoughts and emotions. And you probably realize that for the first time when you sit down to meditate and observe your inward environment, there's a lot going on in your mind. There's all kinds of weather, all kinds of thoughts and emotions and images and perceptions such as sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and so on that are just arising, all kinds of experiences that are passing through the sky-like mind. Ever-changing weather and related exertion is simply a natural part of the environment of our mind.

[07:35]

It's the scenery of our lives, and it is what it means to be human. So our mind has a tendency to secrete thoughts and emotions, just like our glands secrete hormones, which are necessary in order to have healthy functioning. So our thoughts and our emotions are a healthy part of functioning. They have their usefulness, they have their value, and they have their beauty. And just as snowflakes can bring us joy and delight, so can thoughts and emotions bring us joy and delight. And we might spend a lot of time in Zazen in our life just watching these thoughts and emotions kind of fall through the sky of the mind. passing through. We might even decide that we want to kind of chase after them a little bit, have some fun with them, catch them on the tip of our tongue, and just enjoy them for the brief time they're here until they melt away.

[08:40]

Now, what happens when you shake a snow globe? Can you see it? So there's a snowstorm. It's a pretty snowstorm. I actually have a miniature version of this. I'm going to pass it around so you can all see and relate to your own snow globe mind. So just like when the snow globe is agitated in some way, and it obscures the clear aspect inside, so does our mind, when it gets agitated, also become obscured. And the way to clarify again the environment in the snow globe is to not do anything.

[09:43]

Just let it be still. Let it rest. And in time, the snow settles once again. And it's the same thing with our own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. When they become too prolific and too kind of over-agitated and we find ourselves chasing after them, all we need to do is to stop and settle. So if we lose sight of our inherent Buddha nature, coming back to stillness once more allows our inherent burden nature, to become a parent again. And this is where the practice of zazen supports us. So zazen is the practice of not shaking the globe. So you're just allowing the mind to once again become still and then just remembering that the fundamental instruction of zazen is what?

[10:48]

Don't move. Do nothing. Do nothing, right? Don't in any way start moving the mind to try to fix or change anything, right? Because the minute you do that, it just continues the disturbance in the mind. So we sit and be still and just rest as the open, spacious awareness that we already are. And then if we don't engage it... everything begins to settle down once more. So one of the things that we can do, besides not disturbing or chasing after the snowflakes, we can also just simply observe the space between the snowflakes. You ever do that? You ever try to watch the space between snowflakes? I actually like to do this with rainstorms. standing in the rain, and just see if you can watch the space between each of the raindrops.

[11:53]

You can do the same in meditation with your thoughts. Look for the space between your thoughts. When you do that, the snowstorm of thinking, which seems kind of really kind of dense and impossible to break through, you actually see that there's gaps in there. And if you rest in those gaps, then the density of of what's happening in the mind, it begins to kind of open up in some way. It becomes more porous. And you have an opportunity to choose in that spaciousness how it is you want to respond or act going forward. Excuse me a second. However... rather than sitting in zazen with our thoughts and emotions and just letting them be, we have a tendency actually to chase after them and try to gather them.

[12:54]

And not only do we try to gather them, but we begin to hold on to them, trying to fix them in some way in order to keep them from changing, particularly if we have a particular emotional fault that we like, that we want to hold on to. A beautiful snowflake. You grab it. Oh, I want to hold on to this. This is beautiful. I want to have it forever. And so you grab onto it and hold it tight. And what we have it tends to do, though, is we just don't grab onto one snowflake. We grab onto a whole bunch. And soon we're grabbing onto all these snowflake thoughts and emotions, and we begin to roll them up and compacting them and making them denser. rolling them up and up. And finally, we begin to actually try to create, if you will, a snowman or a snowperson out of all these thoughts and emotions. And we even go so far as to dress up or adorn the snowperson in some way.

[14:03]

So we ascribe a name to it, a personality, You know, we might fix earrings to it, a hat, certain kind of clothing, you know. We have this kind of particular snow person we want to be and therefore we're going to dress it in this particular way so that other people have a particular opinion about this particular snow being, you know. So we embellish it, we polish it, we reify it and cherish it, we make it more compact, right. And in the process, we try to bring this pseudo, person further to life. Kind of like the old story of Frosty the Snowman. So you can imagine then what happens is we begin identifying with this alternate frozen being in some way. Thinking that this is who we truly are. And then I become David the Zen student. Something fixed.

[15:07]

Hard. that I'm trying to hold on to, trying to act out in some way. Now, the sad thing is that we live in a perpetual state of fear because deep down we know that this frozen state of being is very fragile, right? It's very vulnerable, this inner snow person that we have. We know that anything that brings a sense of warmth or light to it will in some way impact it. And neurosciences tells us a lot of our ways that we try to defend ourselves is through fight, flight, and freeze. And it seems that most of the time what we do is we freeze. So we, in order to protect this fragile snow being and our fragile sense of self, we freeze and harden even more.

[16:15]

We freeze because we're afraid. Our fear makes us hard, rigid, tight, fixed. And we even might in time develop icicle-like sharp edges or other parts of ourselves as ways of defending ourselves. But being frozen and hard hurts. It hurts us and it hurts others. Particularly when we bump into each other with our frozen sharp edges and aspects. And then the more contracted and compacted we are, the more brittle and ultimately vulnerable becomes our inner snow person. And the more brittle we become, the sharper we become, the harder we become, the more lonely we become, more lonely and isolated.

[17:28]

Does that feel true to you in some way? The Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, when offering a similar analogy in which she kind of described us as ice cubes, wrote that when we're frozen solid, it's a very lonely and cold life. In fact, what we really want is to melt. We want to be a puddle. Perhaps all that we can say about practice is that we're learning how to melt. And so sometimes we're even afraid of love. Because just like sunlight and warmth melt snow, love melts us. Love makes us less contracted and frozen. True love, not romantic love, not idealized love, but true love undoes us.

[18:36]

and helps us to flow once again as our true nature. So what does Zen and meditation practice have to do with melting? The 8th century monk Menzen Zenji, who's one of the great scholars of Soto Zen, said that when, through practice, you know the reality of Zazen thoroughly, the frozen blockage of emotion-thought will naturally melt away. He goes on, however, to say, if you think you have cut off illusory thought, instead of clarifying how emotion thought melts, the emotion thought will come up again, as though you have cut the stem of a blade of grass or the trunk of a tree and left the root alive. And Jacobet, commenting on this, adds that, A lot of people misunderstand practice as to cutting off of illusory thoughts, as if you will, cutting off or stopping the snow.

[19:43]

Of course, of course, thoughts are illusory. But, as Menzen says, if you cut them off instead of clarifying how emotion thought melts, you'll learn little. Many people have little enlightenment experiences, but because they have not clarified how emotion thought melts, the sour fruits of emotion thought will be what they eat in daily life. And as Menzen said, she reminds us, emotion thought is the root of delusion, a stubborn attachment to a one-sided point of view formed by our own conditioned perceptions. In other words, inner transformation or inner thawing isn't about cutting off some part of ourselves, cutting off our emotions or faults, but rather using the light of awareness to illuminate and see into their root nature. That is, to see the way in which they are ultimately empty, insubstantial, and impermanent.

[20:51]

They dissolve, in the light of wisdom. Buddhism teaches us that the secret of falling is already inside of us. The original light of Buddha nature is always present within, even though we have made I may have lost sight of it due to whatever obscurations we have in the mind or due to whatever kind of snowstorms we have going on in some way. In his book, The Sun, My Heart, Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says that our bright awareness is softly shining out like a sun illuminating and warming the infinite space around us. Throughout your meditation, keep the sun of your awareness shining. Like the physical sun, which lights every leaf and every blade of grass, our awareness lights our every thought and feeling, allowing us to recognize them, be aware of their birth, duration, and dissolution, without judging or evaluating, welcoming or banishing them.

[22:14]

So I want to invite you to just take a moment and turn that light inward. And if it's helpful to you, you can close your eyes for a moment. And as if it were a sunbeam, allowing awareness to sweep through your body, through your mind, landing on everything that it encounters, whether it's the breath, the sensation of your hands, the sound of my voice, whatever thought might be passing through the mind, whatever sense of emotion or tightness or anything else you might experience in the body. Allow everything to be illuminated with this ever radiant attention and awareness. And this effort of illuminating inside of us isn't about trying to force any frozen places in us to melt.

[23:31]

But simply allowing the warmth of awareness to illuminate them. And in this way we allow the natural light or the fire within to warm us from the inside out. So thank you for that. The Dharma teacher and psychotherapist John Pendergrast writes that global warming takes on a completely different meaning when we are talking about inner transformation and integration. Warming the interior of the body-mind with our own warm affectionate intention leads to greater fluidity and aliveness. Sometimes it can be helpful to first find an area in our bodies that feels spacious and alive, and then bring attention to an area, a level, that feels numb. Sharing a frozen area with someone trustworthy, friend, a partner, a therapist, can also quicken the thawing process since so much of our inner ice originates from disruptive or absent relationships.

[24:50]

So in time, the more we expose ourselves to this warm light of awareness, what happens is that we become mushy buddhas. When you see a snowman that's been sitting in the sun for a while, it starts getting kind of mushy, soft, beginning to get lower and smaller and shrinking in some way. And you can often notice, particularly when people have been practicing for a little bit, how they begin to turn to mush, the way in which their faces begin to soften, right? And their body begins to kind of be a little bit more relaxed. Their shoulders drop. There's a greater sense of ease, a little bit more gentle and open in the way that we lay to each other, you know? There's just this kind of sense of a greater lightness about them, a greater receptivity. a greater sense of ease and relaxation. And the more we become liquid, the more we can begin to experience our non-separation.

[26:00]

The wonderful thing is that when we allow ourselves to melt, the warm water that results affects those around us. And then when we melt, we encourage others around us to melt. And in time, all this melting begins to flow together. And it's just a sense of creating together, if you will, a sea of love. Now, this process of freezing our emotion thoughts and our experience has been going on for a long time for many of us, right? And the extent of our frozenness can feel pretty significant. And it might be that we might even be kind of frozen from the neck down. We can't feel our bodies in some way.

[27:03]

And it may seem that rather than being snow people, we actually might think or feel like we're an iceberg. And a good deal of our being in some way is submerged. beneath the kind of currents of our everyday life, hidden from even us, waiting at some point, if we're not in relationship to it, to do some kind of damage or harm to ourselves or others. And it may be that we're actually afraid to look beneath the water, to see what is down there in the depths of our being. And so as a consequence, we hate the idea of falling. Even though we know it's our deepest wish to once again return to that organic natural state of flowing life in some way.

[28:05]

So there can be a lot of fear and resistance because we know that eventually if we really want to live we have to become undone in some way. And so practice, the more we stay with it, in time it begins to release a lot of feelings and emotions. And we might find ourselves initially crying a lot, flowing once again. And this is natural. This is what happens. I remember when I first started practicing that I would spend whole periods just tears streaming down my eye, my face in some way. And that's a good thing. It means that we're coming back to life in some way. And furthermore, there might be frozen parts of ourselves that, as they begin to fall, begin to come to the surface and become exposed once again.

[29:08]

Parts of our being that were long frozen, old memories, old experiences, old traumas, anything that got trapped down deep in that sense of a frozen self. And as the sunlight of awareness melts these layers of frozen being, these old things, long buried, come to the surface to once again be seen and met, to be welcomed, witnessed, acknowledged, integrated. and allow to return to their nature, their true nature, which is fluid once more. And it may be that you'll realize in time that a whole being wants to be seen. And this is what Zazen is. Zazen is the activity of making our best effort to see our whole being as completely as possible.

[30:11]

And in doing so, come to wholeness once more. And this coming back to life, however, can be kind of uncomfortable and disorienting at times. It's kind of like when you've been sitting zazen for a while and your leg goes numb. You've cut off the blood flow in some way. And then when you finally, the bell rings and you can start moving your leg again. Slowly, you can't feel anything, but as the blood comes back again, you start feeling this kind of uncomfortable prickly. feeling and so on. And it's a good sign. That pain is a good sign because it means that you're returning to life. Your leg is once again receiving the necessary blood flow. And it could be that a whole being experiences discomfort as we come back to life in some way. We become disoriented. We don't quite know how to walk and proceed in the world. And so we have to be very... careful and tender with ourselves, just as when we get up from zazen, we don't want to just jump up and start, you know, running somewhere.

[31:17]

Very careful, taking our time, put one foot down, see how it feels, and then the next foot, you know, just taking good care of ourselves as we kind of walk through this process of getting reoriented to ourselves. And it might be, once again, that we need to turn to a good friend or a mentor or a therapist in some way to help kind of figure out how is it that I deal with this discomfort and this disorientation in some way. How do I live my life now, given what has come back into flow again? And as we become acquainted with the dark layers that have been buried for so long, we notice that a lot of them have stories attached to them in some way. They have partly stories, for example, what may have happened to you in your childhood. And they also have partly sensations.

[32:20]

Now, I want to encourage you not to focus on the stories. The stories really ultimately aren't that important, the content of them. What matters is the sensations. You can deal with the content. You can look at the stories. You can go to a therapist and figure out what is the narrative of which I've been acting out for so long in my life? And is there a new narrative, a liberative narrative, that I might want to take up instead in some way? That's fine. But that's not what zazen is about. That's not ultimately what our practice here is about. Our practice is turning to the sensation, the felt sense of being, and just recognizing it and going into it more deeply. and completely as possible. Because that's where the separate sense of self is rooted. Until we go into that sensation and illuminate it, the old root that is buried there isn't going to be released in some way.

[33:29]

So always come back to the body. I was telling the retreat participants earlier today, get out of the mind and into the body when we practice. This is an embodied practice. And oftentimes what happens, we'll notice that the more we sit, sometimes our body will start jerking and shaking in some way. And it's the way in which all this energy that has been trapped in so long is beginning to flow and come to life again. And we involuntarily kind of just release it. And it may be that we have a tendency to also fall back into old habit patterns, wanting to once again numb out to the sensations that we're feeling in some way. And so we might take up the old habit patterns that we've been kind of doing for many years, not to feel or experience our lives, such as shopping, sex, drugs, whatever, social media, anything that helps you to tune out

[34:33]

to what it is that you're experiencing. But in the end, once all those techniques no longer work for you, all you're left with is actually just turning back and facing it, really seeing and meeting and acknowledging with the loving light of awareness this deeper sense of being, inviting it in, allowing it, getting to know it, and allowing it to get to know us. So we're not practicing this with our mind. We're practicing with our hearts. And these layers are laid, these feelings, frozen feelings and emotion thoughts are laid down in layers. And as one layer is revealed, another one might be more apparent underneath. We might find underneath anger that there's great sadness or guilt in some way. Right?

[35:33]

And there might even be something that we can't quite name. And when we get down to the deepest layer of our being, we encounter something about our existence, a kind of existential feeling of lack or fear that is based in knowing the truth that there is no inherent self. So I think most of you, now that you've kind of passed around the globe, can see that the figure inside is transparent. And I wanted this particular snow globe because I think it illuminates for us this idea of no inherent self. So even there's an appearance of it being some outline of a self in here. Buddhism tells us that the self is nothing more than a... What's the word? ... I'm blanking on the word.

[36:36]

What's the word? What's that? Construct. Construct, constellation, and aggregates a series of different aspects. But there's nothing actually inherently solid here. So when we study Buddhism, we understand that the Buddha said there is no inherent self. He didn't say there isn't a self. He just said it's not a fixed sense of self. The self that is there is nothing but a construct in some way. And so just as this environment in here is made of free-flowing, open spaciousness, so is our internal sense of self. It's the same substance, this quality of being. It's ever-flowing energy and awareness, a vast ocean. which all phenomena arises like a wave for a short period of time and then abides and falls away.

[37:37]

So this dissolution of the small self into the ocean, the vast ocean of Buddha mind, can be often experienced as a form of death. In fact, when a practitioner realizes this truth and doing so drops away all the frozen concepts of body and mind, It's often called in Zen the great death. Ehi Dogen, the founder of our particular school of Sota Zen, upon witnessing the body of a Zen practitioner melt during a cremation ceremony, wrote the following poem. Vast emptiness, nothing holy is hard as iron. But placing him into the red furnace, he melts like snow. And now I ask, To where have you returned? With the green ocean waves deep, what moon do you see? So, in closing, I just want to suggest that we can think of our Zazen as a loving, holding environment, like this globe.

[38:50]

And simply being present with whatever is passing through, illuminating it, and not grabbing onto it, but allowing it to simply settle once more. And so we sit in zazen not moving. But it doesn't mean we're not moved in some way. We feel what we feel in order to liberate it. And so our loving attention is our zazen practice. I'm going to conclude with one more short poem, and this is by the monk Fusen, who wrote it as he lay dying in his 57th year. Today, then, is the day the melting snowman becomes a real person. Today, then, is the day the melting snowman becomes a real person. Thank you very much.

[39:56]

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, visit SSCC.org and click giving.

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