This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. It's an honor and joy to be with you all. And just want to take a moment to scan through the field, this Buddha field, and see all of your radiant faces and presences. manifesting from who knows where. Thank you for arriving in this very moment in this interconnected virtual way. What a joy and honor again to be with all of you. So this morning, I want to begin by recognizing how long we've been in this situation of navigating a pandemic. somewhat shocking to think it's actually coming up on a year now, a year that our respective communities and households had to hurriedly jump into pandemic pods, what I like to think of as life rafts, and push off from the familiar land of our daily routines and comforts to become refugees of sorts on the

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the wide open and unfamiliar waters of COVID-19. And while finally, 12 months later, there are now several COVID vaccines available, the distribution has been slow, unreliable, and equitable. So we remain with this kind of lingering uncertainty about when we'll all be able to return once more to the shore of so-called normalcy. although I'm sure some of us don't actually want to return to that particular shore as it was before for various reasons. Humans are very adaptive, and yet we live in stressful times. It's only natural that we've been experiencing heightened levels of distress, anxiety, fear, and concern for ourselves and each other. during this time of great upheaval.

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And while some of us may have been able to adapt, many of us are struggling. I confess, I find myself struggling at times, particularly, curiously, the first several months of January. I was like, okay, it's a new year. Isn't this nightmare over yet? Enough already. Have any of you felt the same way? I see a few nods. Yeah. Recently, I felt validated for feeling what I've been feeling after reading several articles about how many people are having the experience of hitting the pandemic wall, as it's called. It's a phrase that captures a particular and sudden feeling of spiritual and emotional exhaustion with life during COVID times. And it makes sense. We've been at this for a year now. And our fight and flight system, the emotional reaction to stress that has been otherwise energizing us throughout this pandemic, helping us to kind of go, go, go, it's totally overloaded.

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And when that happens, the constant flow of adrenaline starts to drain and an apathy sets in. And it leaves us feeling somewhat, I don't know, my experience is kind of unmotivated or disinterested, somewhat kind of just stuck in certain areas of my life, our life. And from what I've read and the conversations I've had with others, it seems that many of us have gone over that tipping point and we reach this place of burnout. And this is understandable. It's important to acknowledge that what we're going through on both a personal and a collective level isn't normal. What's being asked of us as human beings and as a collective body, it's challenging.

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And yet, life goes on. And we're so... we're still faced with the question of how can we continue and thrive in the midst of this pandemic and the midst of so much change and loss in our lives? And furthermore, can we consider whether this pandemic time, despite its challenges, might offer us new possibilities, new horizons, and even more meaningful connections with each other. Over the course of the past year, I've often reflected on our human capacity for resilience and how it is that we might rely on our Buddhist practice in particular to cultivate various aspects of resilience.

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So this morning, I'd like to share with you a few thoughts on both personal resilience and also communal resilience. And due to the coronavirus pandemic and other ongoing forms of distress at this time, including racial injustice, climate crisis, and economic inequality, to just name a few, many of us are continuing to feel certain, well, uncertainty, imbalance, and destabilization. And how each of us navigates this time of sustained distress and uncertainty is based in part on our own ability to self-regulate, to gain an internal sense of composure, uprightness, and purpose.

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Our resilience when encountering stress, adversity, and change depends on our inner resources as well as our external resources to some extent. So how we acknowledge, work with, and recover from adversity will determine the degree of its lasting impact, including the degree that we might feel by circumstances. Rather than fall apart when encountering adversity, when we are resilient, we can become stronger as we face it and learn from it. Wisdom and spiritual maturity can be found through cultivating our capacity for resilience. The dictionary defines resilience as the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, and stretched.

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Also, bringing back into shape, elasticity. And third, ability to recover from illness, depression, adversity, or the like. Buoyancy. So resilience is the act of rebounding, of being flexible, to take a leap and arise to the surface again. It's being able to get up when one's been knocked down or to be able to put oneself back together after we've been broken apart in some way. And resilience is both an inner capacity, a deep inner power, It's a part of our natural endowment. And it's one that we can cultivate with practice. And resilience is related to perseverance, which is also critical for the spiritual path.

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Now, from a Buddhist perspective, the best way to think about resilience is in the context of a path of practice. In other words, whatever arises on our path, including challenges, obstacles, adversity, and difficulties, can all be woven and integrated into the context of a practice path. So everything, both so-called good and so-called bad experiences, serve as integral parts of the journey toward liberation. Actually, from a Zen perspective, There's not some other path that's free of obstacles that we're trying to get to. Whatever we encounter is the only path there is. I heard a story about a group of Western Buddhist teachers who went to see the Dalai Rama.

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And they asked him, what is the most important piece of advice that you can give us? And the Dalai Lama replied, and this is somewhat of a paraphrasing of what he said, what is most important is that people have the strength of heart and wisdom to make any situation into a path of awakening. Now, this is a pretty radical statement, to make anything into a path of awakening. And we can envision a lot of difficult experiences that we wouldn't wish on anyone, And yet, it's a path of liberation and awakening. Chonggyam Chongpa, in a similar vein, said, every experience and every situation is workable. Every experience and every situation is workable. So nothing is static or fixed.

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And when we see a situation as overwhelming... It's because in part we're unable to see the doorways and the turning points to help change the situation or at least change our relationship to the situation, which is really where our freedom lies. Now, resilience can be a bit of a buzzword, and it's particularly a buzzword at the moment, and it's possible to explore resilience. from many number of different angles, including psychological, physical, and spiritual, as well as in the context of Buddhist teachings. And so for the purposes of this talk, I thought I'd briefly offer five Dharma-oriented skills for cultivating resilience that we can engage on a personal level. And then for the latter part of the talk, I want to move into sharing some thoughts about communal resilience.

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So the five personal resilience skills I want to share are self-awareness, attention, letting go on a physical level, letting go on a mental level, and finally assessing and sustaining positive or wholesome emotion or affect, you could say. So... The first skill necessary for resilience is that of self-awareness. And self-awareness is foundational because it's the first step in moving out of reactivity when we encounter adversity. Out of reactivity and into responsiveness. And if we're aware of what's going on for us in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts, including our feelings and our motives and our desires, and we're able to meet it all with a measure of self-acceptance and compassion, then we're able to better discern what we might need in the moment in order to take care of ourselves.

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Obviously, having a regular meditation practice supports us in cultivating self-awareness. because it supports us to tune into, to notice and stay open to whatever experiences we might be having at any moment. The second skill supporting resilience is attention. The capacity to have both stability and flexibility in terms of one's focus. So attention or mindfulness is essential in being able to maintain stability and a constancy of awareness to note and track what is happening right here and right now without becoming distracted. When we're able to maintain our focus on our practice intentions, whether it's simply staying focused on the breath when we're meditating,

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or vowing to meet others who we find irritating or disagreeable, to meet them with patience and kindness. Then we have a supportive through line, or think of it as a touchstone, to help us stay grounded in the midst of any distress or uncertainty that might be arising. There's a lot of teaching in Buddhism and Zen. about cultivating flexibility or pliancy within our mind. So it's a softness, a suppleness, which has the capacity to bend and respond in accord with the moment. Rather than habitually reacting, based on our past experiences, that we kind of unconsciously overlay on the reality of the present moment.

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We're instead able to respond in accord with what's actually happening right here and right now. And this is what we cultivate in Zaza in this particular capacity, developing the mind of equanimity, of stability. When we do this, we begin to discover that there is space and time within which to see and move with intention rather than reactivity. A third, a third skill related to cultivating resilience is that of letting go, of not holding on. And this is a letting go on both a physical and a mental level. Obviously, part of cultivating resilience entails taking good care of ourselves physically, including eating well and getting enough sleep and exercise and being in an environment in which you can find avenues to feel safe enough to nourish and restore ourselves.

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And that's the granting side, the giving side of resilience. renunciation, or letting go side of resilience. And this form of letting go on a physical level means we allow ourselves to relax and release, grasping throughout the body, to notice the places where we hold tension, anxiety, and aversion. And just the simple act of Bringing awareness to these experiences often helps them to change, to shift in some way. There's a way in which bringing awareness to areas of contraction, tension, and holding in the body can allow them to release, to let go, to let flow. Sometimes I think this process, using the analogy of sunlight,

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Melting a snowman. Some of you may have seen me with my little snowman snow globe analogy. So the warm sunlight of awareness, it melts the old frozen karmic conditioning and energy in our bodies so that it can be freed. And this happens slowly at times. It's an ongoing process. And this letting go is tapping into a sense of rest and ease that's deeply within our bodies. It's a place of knowing our original embodied sense of wholeness and confidence. The other level of letting go is a mental one.

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And it's important during times like these to be able to let go of the various thoughts and stories and narratives and opinions and judgments and, gosh, worries, et cetera, that we have about the situation, about ourselves and others, and to instead rest in direct awareness or direct experiencing. And in meditation, we're encouraged to let go of thinking, to allow the mind to rest, to have a break from its chattering and spinning, and be able to return to silence. Its original, its original voice, you could say. When we're caught, In our deluded stream and eddies of thoughts and emotions, reactivity and beliefs tethered to our ingrained habits, there is very little resilience.

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Rather than buoyancy, we simply get pulled under further to the point where we find ourselves basically drowning in our own minds, our own deludedness. whirlwind of thoughts, whirlpool of thoughts. Letting go is rooted in one of the key principles of Buddhism, which is impermanence. Another way to think of impermanence is as the capacity for new beginnings. For example, when we meditate and have lots of wandering thoughts, we can recognize that each thought is a new wandering thought, a new beginning. All thoughts come and go. And when we see this, then we can have a new beginning. All we need to do is consciously, and yet to a certain degree effortlessly, bring ourselves to the present moment.

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In this sense, all thoughts liberate themselves in the present. There's nothing you need to do about them. You don't need to engage with the thoughts. When you don't engage with them, they actually liberate themselves. Moment by moment, all thoughts dissipate due to impermanence. All you have to do is bring yourself, bring the mind to the immediate sensate experience. Direct attention. consciously participate, actively engage in the present. And when you do this, then the thoughts liberate themselves in this very moment, right here, right now. It's the only moment we need to be in. It's the only moment we can be in. The next thought comes, thought after thought comes, and they liberate themselves.

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And again, there's nothing in you to do with that. Then your sense of well-being is no longer dependent on or rooted in what kind of thoughts you have, what kind of thoughts you think you have to have, or how you tend to feel in the moment. Facing our sense of well-being on what we think or feel is precarious. Because our thoughts and feelings are unstable. They're not dependable. They're not reliable in any way whatsoever. And they'll often be hijacked and influenced by the conditions of the external world. When things are going well and favorable, everything's good. But if things are getting worse and unstable, and they're not so good in our opinion, then we become anxious and depressed. Obviously, this is not a good way to live. We want to be in a place in which even when everything is not going well, we still see hope.

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We see an opening. We see possibility. Why? Because everything is a new beginning. This is what practice is about. always taking a leap into the next moment by letting go of the past, letting go of the last moment. The final skill I'll share for cultivating personal resilience is that of accessing and sustaining positive, or I think of it as wholesome emotion. And this is the buoyancy aspect of resilience, not to give in to negative or what we could think of as sinking mind, but to connect to a mind of aspiration and possibility. So having positive emotion isn't about being a Pollyanna, being blindly optimistic, but about having a flexible mind, a mind that can reframe

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the circumstances, and we frame them as practice opportunities. This means to relate to all types of experiences as potential pathways for self-discovery and liberation. What can this situation tell me about my conditioned limited views and tendencies towards How might I reorient any negative mental habit patterns to instead embrace attitudes that are loving, kind, compassionate, grateful, and inclusive? Can I look at what is challenging as ways to strengthen my practice? to transform harmful mental states and emotions into beneficial orientations focused on truly transformative change.

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So these five skills related to cultivating what I'm thinking of as personal resilience, self-awareness, attention or mindfulness, letting go physically, letting go mentally, and assessing and sustaining a positive or uplifting mind. They allow us to respond rather than to react to adverse circumstances. They support having a sense of personal agency and choicefulness. Having a sense of agency is one of the key factors, in fact, and not having adverse situations become dramatically embedded in us. While we might not have control over the external conditions, we can cultivate a capacity for internal regulation. That internal regulation ultimately, however, is

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comes from knowing who we truly are. It comes from a sense of presence and being that is not dependent on or affected by external circumstances. It doesn't orientate itself to them. Spiritual resilience is rooted in the Inherent wisdom and compassion naturally arises from the unlimited, vast Buddha mind. I would go so far as to propose that true resilience is a manifestation of emptiness, of groundlessness, of the boundlessness that is our true nature. because it recognizes that all things are empty of an inherent fixed existence.

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Everything is of the nature to be in continuous flux. Impermanence and dependence origination are the ground from which resilience is made possible. A lot more could be said about resilience on a personal level, how we as individuals meet, make sense of, and recover from difficult circumstances. I've been also recently reflecting on resilience on a collective or communal level. And community at Sangha is always important. But it's even more so now, given our sense of separation in the midst of COVID, it's hard for us to connect outside the

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these virtual exchanges online. So the question of community now and going forward is important. And this situation gives us a perspective on what matters most and a perspective going forward regarding what kind of community do we want to foster? And Do we want to form communities around shared values and around what's important to us collectively? So it's important to recognize that the path of practice is not just a personal path, something that we as individuals engage on our own in a solitary fashion. It's also a communal one. a Sangha needs to realize and attend to its own shared path of practice.

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A path that unfolds for us as a collective body-mind, you could say, encountering the way. So we can ask them, what is it that's required to cultivate community resilience? And not just resilience in terms of everyday matters such as making sure everyone is food secure, has shelter, health and safety. But also resilience in the terms of the enduring spirit and vitality of a community or of a sangha. How is it that we thrive as individuals? How it is that we thrive as individuals is intrinsically connected to how we thrive as communities, and vice versa. We as humans have a capacity to come from a vantage point, you could say, of isolation and separation.

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Or we can make the effort to come from the vantage point of connection. The Buddhist vantage point is always the one of coming from connections. of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing, our fundamental interconnected existence. Interbeing is another word for emptiness or boundlessness. It is our wholeness, our fundamental wholeness. So a resilient community is one that fosters connection. A resilient community is one that is able to work together to interpret and frame adversity and success within a coherent framework of practice and then intentionally finds ways to support each other as both individuals and as a collective to navigate the way with some degree of

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composure, compassion, creativity, and skillfulness. And the communities we create will ideally not be insular. Our communities gain their resilience from and through diversity. And to the degree that we are limited in our diversity, we'll be limited in our resilience. So how do we conceive of ourselves collectively on a path without our individual paths being considered contradictory? As someone who is European descended and white racialized, my own contemplations, and how to understand and cultivate resilience on both a personal level and a communal level, and through a Dharma lens, have recently been invigorated by a number of books I've read by Black Buddhist authors.

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One book in particular that I found informative and insightful is titled Black and Buddhist, What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom. Here's the cover of it, if you haven't seen it. And it's an inspiring collection of Dharma teachings and personal stories that are a testament to courage and wisdom and enduring hope in the face of relentless adversity, harm, and suffering. And coincidentally, there also happens to be a related summit. It's called the Black and Buddhist Online Summit that's being freely offered this week. And it features over 20 leading African descended Dharma teachers offering their wisdom and insights in regard to personal and collective liberation and resilience. And I'll ask Kodo at some point in this to share the links to both the book as well as to the online summit for any of you who might be interested.

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Well, many of us may think that Surviving a year-long pandemic is difficult. African-descended people have been dealing with the pandemic of white supremacy, racism, and systemic oppression for over 400 years, as have Native Americans, Asians, and other racially marginalized people in this country. And while it's vital that we all recognize and address the profound physical, psychological, and emotional trauma, that Black, Indigenous, and other individuals and communities of color have in the past and continue to this day to experience, what is equally noteworthy is their remarkable expression of human resilience and perseverance in the midst of great suffering. In reading Black authors, what is so often apparent is the way that Blackness has a sense of identity

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connection, and community is often the wellspring of their creativity and joy, as it represents for them infinite possibilities and riches. In a recent edition of Time Magazine celebrating Black History Month, which is this month, there is an article by Professor Ibram X. Kendi, who is the author of How to Be an Antiracist. And in the article, he notes several historical episodes of what he calls Black Renaissance. And this includes the 1920 Harlem Renaissance, as well as the art Renaissance, Black art in the 1960s and 70s. And he says we are now in the midst of another Black Renaissance. And he writes that... The current Black Renaissance is fighting for the freedom of being.

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The Black Renaissance is the freedom of being. Black Renaissance is the freedom of being. What a great phrase. Both Kemi's article and the phenomenon of Black creative and cultural Renaissance speaks to the resiliency of the human spirit, and particularly our human capacity to to creatively recast circumstances of adversity and suffering as pathways to liberation. The Buddha Dharma teaches that our liberation is intrinsically, intricately entwined with that of all beings. So when exploring and celebrating the history of African descended peoples in this country, we can come to recognize that Black history is our history. Black Renaissance is our Renaissance.

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Black liberation is our liberation, regardless of our racial, ethnic, or socially constructed and conditional intersectionalities, the ways that we locate or are located by others in this particular society and culture. What is it really that brings us together and sustains us, particularly in times of adversity? What are the stories we can tell and share that allow us to have a center of gravity in which there is a binding force, right? Pulls us together so that the communities we intend to create can come together. Kind of a magnet quality. What are the narrative, what are the liberative narratives we can collectively create and share that are able to integrate all our suffering and conflict and transform it?

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Transform it in a way that brings us closer together, allows us to heal. and makes us stronger because we are healing together. As Dharma teacher Larry Yang asks in his book, Awakening Together, the Spiritual Practice of Inclusity and Community, he asks, what would it be like, even in the complexity, even in the injury and the harm, to break together, rather, than to break apart. How do we stay in relationship with each other? So how do we, especially in this time when our communities have been altered in radical ways, how can we identify what it is that brings us together and connects us and restores us to our wholeness?

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We need to have discussions about this as communities, as individuals and as groups. Our collective resilience and healing arises through interrelationship, through engagement, through dialogue. It doesn't mean that's going to be easy. In fact, I find these dialogues often very messy and uncomfortable. And this is part of the process. But it's a conversation that needs to happen. And it needs to happen in real time. And to be allowed to come alive, to keep alive the question, what is it that brings us together? What is it that brings us back to our wholeness as both individuals, as communities, as a species and as part of this world, or maybe just say as this world?

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And what are the shared values that knit and keep us together? So the path of resilience is both individual and collective. For us to thrive as a community, there are parameters and practices that can support us in this challenging and yet transformative work. Shakyamuni Buddha, in his own time, spoke to practices that contain us collectively. Earlier this week at City Center, we held a ceremony in honor of the Buddha's parinavana, or a great passing away. And as part of the observation, a passage from the Pali Canon was read, which recounted the Buddha's passing, as well as some of his final teachings. And in closing, rather than offering you a poem, I thought I'd share this passage with you.

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And the passage begins with him counseling the Sangha on how I can prosper and enjoy happiness, even after his passing. And the Buddha said, good friends in the Dharma, I will teach you seven things that are conducive to welfare and happiness. Pay careful attention and I will speak. And then he said, As long as Sangha members hold regular and frequent assemblies, they may be expected to prosper and not decline. As long as they meet in harmony, break up in harmony, and carry out their business in harmony, may they be expected to prosper and not decline. As long as they do not authorize what has not been authorized already, and do not abolish what has been authorized, but proceed according to the precepts and the rules of training, they can be expected to prosper and not decline.

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As long as they remain faithful, excuse me, as long as they remain mindful of desires that lead to unwholesome action and suffering, but do not fall prey to those desires, they can be expected to prosper and not decline. As long as they are devoted to meditation and to letting go of busyness, Every day, it's a reminder for me, particularly, and for Zen Zenit, they can be expected to prosper and not decline. As long as they preserve their personal mindfulness, doing what they do with as much awareness as possible, so that in the future, the good among their companions will come to them. and those who have already come will feel at ease.

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They can be expected to prosper and not decline. And finally, as long as the Sangha members hold to these seven things and are seen to do so, the Sangha can be expected to prosper and not decline. I don't know about you, but I find the Buddhist teachings on these seven ways for a sangha to prosper and not decline very inspiring. And they also highlight, of course, what it takes for a spiritual community to be resilient. Maybe, perhaps, one of the reasons that Zen Center is still around today, coming up now 60 years since it was founded, is that we've been able to, for the most part, follow these practices recommended by the Buddha. And I'm encouraged to realize that all of us here today are here today because we care at some level not to step out our own resilience and capacity to thrive, but also the resilience of our sangha, of our community, of us as a collective.

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Just by being here, we are helping to ensure that this particular path of Buddhist practice and vessel of community is a source of encouragement and nourishment for all beings who choose to rely on it now and in the future. 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, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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