This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Green Gulch, Green Dragon Zen Temple, and Happy Easter. And happy first days of spring and almost Passover. I want to talk this morning about the topic of resilience, one of my favorite topics, resilience. So resilience, the definition of resilience is usually posed as responding to difficulty and change.

[01:06]

The definition I like better is transforming difficulty and change. Transforming difficulty and change. And I thought of starting with one of my favorite resilience stories. Some of you, I'm sure, have heard this story, but most of you have. And for those of you who have heard it, it's from so long ago that you've probably forgotten by now. This is a story of when I lived here, which was now close to 40 years ago, which is kind of hard to imagine. But when I lived here, my job was I was in charge of the draft horses, the draft horse farming project. Actually, in charge is probably overstating it. the horses did not think I was in charge. They were pretty clear about who was in charge. But this... Yeah, and I always thought it was rather odd that I was living at Tassajara when I was asked to come to Green Gulch and figure out how to farm with horses.

[02:25]

And I often thought that my resume must have been misread, that I was pretty good at gymnastics and the horse. I was pretty good at the horse in high school gym. But I had never actually had anything to do with the four-legged kind of horses. So I was really surprised at this particular job. But one day in particular stands out. Actually, not only was I... responsible for the horses, but we also had a milk cow at the time, Daisy. And my day here, you know, generally I would come to the zendo early in the morning for meditation and then I would, my day would start by going and bringing up the horses from the field and getting the horses ready and milking the cow. But this one day stands out, which was when I went to milk the cow early in the morning, Daisy was lying on her side in the shed, actually right over here.

[03:38]

And I knew from the bit of studying that I had done that this was not a good thing and that if cows lie on their side for more than a few hours, they'll die. So I was kind of propping Daisy up as much as I could so that she wasn't lying on her side and had yelled for help. And I knew someone was going to get the veterinarian. And I don't know how long I was there propping Daisy up. with my back against the wooden cow and horse structure and kind of trying to keep her head not on the ground. But it was some time. The vet came and gave Daisy some kind of a shot, and miraculously up she went, and she was fine. I wasn't so fine. I was exhausted. And... And I think it was, at least in my memory, you know, this is so long ago, I'm not exactly sure of the events, but in my memory, I was walking back to my room after that event when I heard someone yelling, there's a horse stuck in the mud.

[04:56]

And I was like, what the hell is that? Like, horses don't, like, come on, it must be some kind of a joke, right? There's a horse stuck in the mud. And they got my attention. So I went and followed this person out back where the Wheelwright Center is. There used to be more of a pond back there than there is now. The creek runs through there. There was a pond. The horses used to be put out to pasture there. And one of the horses, in fact, it was Snip. this female perjuring horse, had wandered in to get a drink and had wandered in a little bit too far and was literally stuck in the mud in a pond there, kind of almost up to her waist. This was rather alarming. And fortunately, and again, I don't know exactly how these events all unfolded,

[06:02]

But I have this picture in my mind, and I don't know if Linda and Steve, you might have both been part of this. I picture the whole community, plus I think people from Muir Beach might have been called in for this, and we wrapped fire hoses around the back and sides of SNP, and little by little were able to pull SNP out of the mud. So this was an untypical day. at Green Gulch, but a day that comes up for me when I think about resilience, the topic of resilience. I was recently grabbed by a quote, a quote by Walker Evans, who Walker Evans was a photographer who wrote many books, but one of the books that he wrote was known for. It was a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

[07:04]

And it was a book of photographs that he took during the Great Depression, 1930s. And I just recently came across this quote that I had never seen before, and it's a quote that I've been really turning, and I think it goes quite well with this topic of resilience and also the topic of the question of What is Zen practice? So here's the quote stare It is the way to educate our eye and more Stare pry listen eavesdrop Die knowing something you are not here long Say it one more time stare it is the way to educate our eye and more stare pry listen eavesdrop die knowing something you are not here long so i i thought this was an incredible incredible quote and

[08:24]

You know, even thinking about, whether we're thinking about Easter or Passover or this day of me responding to the needs of cows and horses. And we think about our lives. It's all, I think, about how do we deal with difficulty? How do we deal with change? I had dinner last night with a man named Cliff Soren, who's one of the world's leading scientists studying mindfulness and meditation. And as we were in the restaurant having dinner, he was showing different videos of brain studies.

[09:28]

One of the videos he showed was the activity of the brain while doing a really simple kind of word problem. And in this brain scan that he was showing, there were like thousands, maybe millions of lights that light up in the human brain when doing the most simple task. Yeah. And as we were sitting in this restaurant, we were looking around and he was saying how our brains, our ability to take in, our ability to pay attention, we're maybe seeing about between 3% and 5% of what's happening in any one moment in our lives. And that we are so incredibly selective. in what we see.

[10:29]

And to me, this quote about stare and pry and listen, I saw it as try to open up that aperture, open up that ability of experience, a widened one's experience, and recognize the the narrowness of which, the way in which we take our experience and narrow it down into usually some kind of story that fits our own past, our own patterns, our own scripts. There was another scientist, this was a dinner with these two scientists last night, and the other scientist is someone who often talks a lot about how the human brain, the human mind, is a storytelling machine, that we're always kind of weaving these stories.

[11:42]

And then we take these stories so seriously, and we forget that the stories that we're telling ourselves are often quite different than what is actually happening. So again, it was quite powerful being in this restaurant. And you could see just the mass of activity that's happening. I mean, just think about what's happening in this room right now as I look around and how each person is like their own you're you're all we're all like our own worlds right we each the the amount of human thinking and human storytelling that is happening uh as you you know if you're listening to my words some of you probably are some of you may be off someplace else wondering about what you're going to do after this lecture or who is this guy or what just happened or

[12:55]

that there's, again, it's so amazingly selective where do we put our attention. And I think there's something so beautiful and basic about Zen practice of the practice of... putting our attention on whatever's happening right now, right here, and with the effort to see what is actually happening and to not be so caught by our storytelling. And again, I think these are essentially what Easter is about and what Passover is about, our kind of freedom, finding a radical freedom from our own limited stories, and shifting our stories to stories more about wisdom, more about compassion.

[14:17]

How can we live? What does it mean to live a wise and compassionate And why not tell those stories? And how can we embody those stories? And I want to share with you this morning seven practices that I think are really useful for not being so caught by our own stories and useful for this practice of resilience, this practice of transforming, transforming what is challenging or difficult. It almost seems strange to talk about transforming change because change is happening and transforming us.

[15:20]

Maybe almost a better definition of resilience is to this dance, to be in the dance of the relationship that we have with difficulty and with change. So Buddhist practice, Zen practice, embraces difficulty, embraces Difficulty, suffering, as it's sometimes called. It's kind of the most basic, maybe most profound teaching of the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, that difficulty is part of life, and that difficulty has a cause... And that there is a way that we can transform it, that it is transformable, not by ignoring it, not by putting it aside, but entering difficulty and change.

[16:31]

So these seven practices that I want to share with you this morning, I have to give credit to my good friend. and one of my teachers, Norman Fisher. These come from... A few years ago, I was involved, and something that I'm still very involved with is bringing meditation practice and mindfulness practice and what I hope wisdom and compassion practice into the world of... into the world of corporations. And I was leading a session of training about a dozen of Google engineers to teach meditation practice to other employees at Google.

[17:35]

And it brought Norman in to talk to these people engineers and have his own words of encouragement. Actually, it was a kind of interesting session with these 12 Google engineers and a few people who I work with. And I was sitting next to Norman this day, and I was looking at the agenda of what was supposed to happen. And I noticed early on in the morning, it said, Norman gives brief talk about mindfulness. And I had a feeling that no one had told Norman that. And I put this piece of paper in front of Norman and he kind of nodded that he didn't know he was supposed to do this. And literally he pulled out a napkin and a pen and wrote down these things. And what he wrote down were these seven practices. I've been...

[18:37]

I've been talking about and even writing about these practices now for the last couple of years. And I recently called Norman and thanked him for these practices and wanted to make sure he was okay with me talking about, writing about, and even I said I might even write a book someday about these seven practices. And Norman had absolutely no memory of ever having said these things. So... So I could take them as mine, but I still feel like I need to acknowledge that these really did come from Norman. And he said, I have no memory of having said those things. He said, they're pretty good. Go ahead and use them. So the seven practices are love the work, do the work, don't become an expert, feel your pain, feel the pain of others. depend on others, and keep making it simpler.

[19:38]

So I was going to say a few words about each of these, and they're quite beautiful. I find them really, really profound. I actually, these now, these seven practices with a little bit of commentary sit on the desks of all of the people who I, in the company that I, the nonprofit that I run, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. And I took these seven practices as how I want us to work together and how I want us to live our lives. And I think these seven practices can be applied quite beautifully to this practice of resilience. They can be applied to how... It's a great idea, right, transforming... transforming difficulty and change, but how do we do that? What does that look like? How do we practice that? So I think these practices can be nicely applied to that.

[20:42]

So the first practice is love the work. Love the work. And in this case, the work, you can call it the work of resilience. Love the work of transforming difficulty and change. Or you can look at it as Love the work of widening your view. Love the work of not being caught by your stories. Or love the work of meditation practice, like the practice of just sitting without trying to attain anything. So it's the work of just staring, prying, listening, eavesdropping to yourself, starting with yourself. Like really, this work, the work of paying attention, the work of, again, not being caught, the work of widening your own view. And this is the beginning, but to love it.

[21:51]

This particular practice makes me think of I ran a greeting card company for many, many years, so I'm kind of a professional quote collector. It's one of the things that I do. So one of my favorite quotes that goes both with this particular practice, but also it's one that I think of in preparation as I'm about to do a talk like this. This is a quote by the celloist Pablo Casals. at the time, this was in the maybe 1950s and 60s, he was thought of as the world's greatest celloist. And he would play all over the world and would play for royalty. And someone once asked him, they said, don't you get nervous playing the cello for kings and queens and the greatest royalty throughout the world?

[22:55]

And when he was asked this question, he kind of was puzzled. And his response was, why would I be nervous? All I'm thinking about when I'm playing the cello is, how can I love my audience? How can I love my audience? And as I'm getting prepared and nervous for these kinds of talks, I try to remember that this is like, how can I bring a sense of love for the work? So the work is, in a way, it's whatever you're doing. How can you love yourself? whatever you're doing, whether that's your work or your family, your relationships, the difficult conversations, and even loving the difficult situations. So love the work is the first practice. The second practice is do the work. And I think here, Norman was saying, do the work of what I would think of as

[24:01]

dedicated practice and integrated practice. So dedicated practice is sitting time, actually have time of pausing, of stopping, of not trying to attain anything. And it can be very formal, as it is here. Here at Green Gulch, people are about to begin a seven-day, very formal sashin, a sitting practice, a retreat. Your practice can be very formal. There's something powerful about having a regular daily sitting practice. Or it can be less formal. You can have a practice where you are stopping and pausing and noticing your breath and body during the day. It can be for a few moments. There's... No one has yet determined what the minimal dosage is for effective meditation.

[25:05]

It's maybe as much about attitude and effort as it is about time. This is something... It's more about your own experience. See what it's like. I find it really useful to do half-day sittings and full-day sittings and longer sittings. experiment with doing the work. And doing the work also means integrated practice. How do you bring this sense of resilience, this sense of love, this sense of wisdom and compassion practice into your day-to-day life, in your relationships with the people who you come into contact with? So this is This is doing the work. So love the work, do the work. Don't become an expert is the third practice.

[26:08]

And this is very much akin to kind of the heart of Zen practice. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of these temples, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, used the term beginner's mind and wrote this collection of his talks, the first collection called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. So don't become an expert. How is it that... This is what I loved about staring, listening, eavesdropping, that there's something As I first read this quote, I thought how often we're taught not to stare, not to eavesdrop. But with beginner's mind, it's kind of a fresh way of paying attention, a fresh way of looking at the world.

[27:13]

So often, part of the way that we narrow the world was once we think that we know other people and we stop really paying attention to who they are, or we think we know what our work is, or we start taking things for granted. It's one of the things that I... I used to often teach meditation practice at the city center and at Tal Sahara, And I always loved kind of teaching people how to bow for the first time. And I loved actually seeing someone bow for the first time and just the freshness of just putting your hands together and bowing. And then saying, well, are you able to keep that same sense of freshness the second time or the third time?

[28:20]

Or are you trying to become the best bower? Are you wondering how people are looking at you? How can you bring that sense of beginner's mind into everything that you do? So love the work. Do the work. Don't become an expert. Feel your own pain. Again, such a basic Buddhist practice, Zen practice, of not avoiding what's difficult. And seeing, really becoming more and more friends with difficulty, with yearning, with not wanting to be here. Whatever our flavor of pain is, is to feel it, to notice it, to become friends with it, to transform it, right? So resilience, transforming.

[29:22]

transforming difficulty. Again, it's feeling it, it's owning it, it's the more that we can not run away from what's difficult. And there's plenty that's difficult, whether it's in our own psyches, our relationships, the people who are suffering. Yeah, and this line, this one line in this quote that keeps coming back to me is, die knowing something, which to me, it means live fully, right? Live fully. Live fully in the midst of not only your own pain, but your own appreciation and joy. And this fifth practice, feel the pain of others. Feel the pain of others.

[30:24]

So again, Norman was giving these instructions as if you're going to be a meditation teacher, that these are kind of core practices. And in some way, I think we're all meditation teachers. We all are attempting to live as fully as and with as much integrity, with as much wisdom, with as much compassion as we possibly can. So many stories. I was thinking of Yeah, I wasn't sure whether this story was around, you know, a beginner's mind or feeling your own pain or feeling the pain of others, but I was reflecting on... This was now, let's see, about 20 years ago when my mother died on our living room couch.

[31:49]

She had been diagnosed as having a brain tumor and moved from Florida and moved in with me, and at the time, two fairly young children. My son was 12 at the time, and this particular incident that I was remembering, which I think... again, maybe could illustrate several of these practices. Maybe it's more beginner's mind. My son teaching me about beginner's mind was... I can remember, you know, my mother died during the night, and it wasn't a surprise. She had been quite ill. And I went into my son Jason's... room and let him know that his grandmother had died.

[32:52]

And he came out. And this might have been the first time that he had seen someone, a dead body. And I wasn't sure how it was going to be for him. And he actually was, again, there was a bit of kind of staring. kind of disbelief and maybe shock, but also it seemed kind of ordinary the way he was responding to his first real taste of death. And I was surprised that he said he wanted to go to school that day. He was in middle school. And I said, you don't need to go to school. Why don't you just stay here? And he said, no, no, I want to go to school. So he left and he walked to the middle school in Mill Valley.

[33:57]

And I think a few hours later, we got a call from the counselor at his school saying that he needed to come home, that he was crying a lot. And they wanted our permission. Was it OK? if he walked home. And I said, of course, he could walk home. And maybe about a half hour later, Jason, he walked into the house and gave me a big hug, and we were both in tears crying. And he looked at me and said, Dad, you should walk. It will make you feel a lot better. And I felt like this was his own... his own practicing resilience, but also kind of feeling and dealing with his own pain and also dealing with my pain. So love the work.

[34:58]

Do the work. Don't become an expert. Feel your pain. Feel the pain of others. The sixth is depend on others, the practice of depending on others. Our culture so much tends to emphasize almost the opposite of that, the sense of being self-sufficient, right? Don't depend on others. And there is something, of course, about something positive about a kind of self-sufficiency. But it's important to notice just... in reality how dependent we are on others for virtually everything that we do. And to see that that's not a bad thing. It's what is. We're dependent on others for these buildings and these chairs.

[36:01]

And we're such social creatures. We so need each other. We're not at all We're not at all dependent. We are completely interdependent beings. And you really feel that. I think you really get a sense of that, like here at Green Gulch, the community, the way the community functions and how each person has their own particular role and the interdependency from teaching, to cooking, to cleaning, to gardening, and how we depend on others. We depend on others for our food and our oil and our transportation and our light. So just to see it as a practice of depend on others. And the seventh practice, again, all these are difficult

[37:05]

This one's particularly difficult, I think, with the pace and the technology has made this seventh practice maybe more and more difficult. Keep making it simpler. Keep making it simpler. And keep making it simpler doesn't mean to find simpler ways to be on your various phones and devices and video games and have conversations and... send emails all at the same time. This is often what... I was once asked by a Google engineer if meditating while playing video games counted as meditation. And I really try and have a very open mind about what could be defined as... And I said, I'm drawing the line here. No. No. This is not meditation practice. This is playing video games. So there's something about the essence of Zen practice is just sitting, just sitting, not doing anything else.

[38:26]

And There's a beautiful passage in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, in the topic on right effort, that our practice is moving from attainment to non-attainment. Moving from attainment to non-attainment. And it's a bit paradoxical, right? Because there's usually some there's some intention, there's some reason why we practice. We're drawn to practice. We're sitting for something, but the practice is to give up that something, to completely give up that something. And one of the most beautiful instructions, I think, for how to do this meditation practice is to, with each exhale, to completely give up everything. Imagine doing that.

[39:31]

And it's something that it's not... It's very simple. It really is a way of simplifying one's life, is that if you can, even for a few minutes each day, with each exhale, to literally let go of all of your... worries and concerns and wanting anything or your self-help programs or your self-help programs for others, your to-do lists, to just let it all go. In fact, again, there's an instruction by Suzuki Roshi where he suggests that you even give up living, that you are willing to die with each exhale, a kind of willingness to... just let everything go. And a kind of, and then almost being, imagine being a little surprised with the next inhale. It's like, oh, I'm alive.

[40:31]

I'm alive. And the power, the power of that, I'm alive. And I think that that, you know, there's all of these practices, and we all love the, I love how In the corporate setting, as soon as I mention I have seven practices, everyone gets out their notebook. I love that, because everyone wants to write them down. But really, I think, to me, maybe it's this, whether it's this last practice of keeping it simple, but the practice of just appreciating being alive. just not taking this life for granted, keeping it really, really simple. What does it mean to be a full, loving, compassionate human being?

[41:42]

Just doing it. Like right now, right now, there's nothing missing from any of our lives. Right now, we're all okay. There may be tremendous craziness and insanity happening in many, many places, unexplainable, unfathomable pain, but right now, we're all okay. So I want to just come back to this quote of stare. It is the way to educate our eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. And we're here a long time.

[42:50]

and we have no idea how long we will be here. But let's really see if we can appreciate every moment we're here. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:41]

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