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. Good morning. Can you hear me? Okay. First of all, I want to welcome you all. I welcome the ones of you who may be here for the first time. I know one person said she was here for the first time. If you're here for the first time, just be open to the experience.

[01:02]

Be here. And that's what I'm inviting all of you to do, to make sure that you sit comfortably, as comfortably as you can, as supported in your seat as you can be. When your body tells you to move and readjust, be free to do that. And I also want to say good morning to everybody who might be online. whom I have no visual, but welcome, and I encourage you to do the same at home. Just for now, just for now, without asking how, let yourself sink into stillness. Just for now, lay down the weight you so patiently bear upon your shoulders.

[02:15]

Feel the earth receive you and the infinite expanse of sky grow even wider as your awareness reaches up to meet it. just for now. Allow a wave of breath to enliven your experience. Breathe out whatever blocks you from the truth, just for now. Be boundless, free, awakened, energy tingling in your hands and feet. Drink in the possibility of being who and what you really are, so fully alive that when you open your eyes, the world looks different, newly born and vibrant,

[03:41]

just for now. So today I would like to invite you, actually to seduce you, to contemplate, engage, possibility of rest and resting as a spiritual practice. Thich Nhat Hanh writes, there is a story in the end circles about the man and the horse. the horse is galloping quickly and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important.

[04:49]

Another man standing alongside the road shouts, where are you going? And the first man replies, I don't know, ask the horse. This is also our story. We are riding a horse. We don't know where we are going and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy, pulling us along, and we are powerless. We are always running, and it has become a habit. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others. Then he talks about the two aspects of meditation.

[06:10]

shamatha and vipassana. And usually we tend to be involved in vipassana, which is inside inquiry, deeper understanding. But he stresses that the very first function that is actually necessary for the second aspect of inquiry to be fruitful is And shamatha is calming the body and the mind. And he says it has five stages, breaks it down in five stages. One is to arrive with what is and to recognize what's here. what our body feels like at the moment, how our feeling state is at the moment, what the state of our mind is, what we're running in our mind, and then to accept that as being so at the moment.

[07:36]

To not engage in any argument with it. Just accept that's how my body feels, what my emotional landscape is right now, and what's my mental state. Then he says the next thing is to embrace it. The image he uses is to put your arms around like you will put your arms around the baby. So he uses the example of anger. So anger is here. It doesn't say I am angry, which is an identification, but anger is present. That's a very important part to not identify with the states that you recognize as being here. They're all transient.

[08:38]

They're all going to change. They come and go, but they're present at the moment. So he says, if we put our arms around the current experience, like a mother around a baby, that immediately has a calming effect because it allows us to be present with rather than wanting it to be different or pushing it aside. So then we can look more deeply and maybe see where it's coming from. And then, and that's what I want to talk about mostly today, comes the third function of shamatha is resting. And he uses the image of, imagine a pebble that you throw in the pond.

[09:48]

that is clear, and see how it allows itself to just slowly sink down to the ground and rest there. So he says, when we practice sitting meditation, we can allow ourselves to rest just like that pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally and into the position of sitting, resting without effort. This is something we need to learn. It's not something that our culture actually teaches us and supports us in doing. If we have wounds in our body or our mind, we have to rest. so that they can heal.

[10:48]

Then he says, calming allows us to rest and resting is a precondition for healing. When animals in the forest get wounded, they find a place to lie down and they rest completely for many days. They don't think about food or anything else. They just rest and they get the healing they need. When we humans get sick, we just worry. We look for doctors and medicine, but we don't stop. So that's why I would like to talk about resting today and see if I can interest you in resting, to start experimenting with resting, to allow resting to become part of your spiritual practice and part of taking care of your life.

[12:10]

The culture we live in has no pause button. Thomas Merton writes, There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence, and that is activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace.

[13:23]

It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work because it kills the root of our inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. We get conditioned from early on. At the beginning of one of the practice periods I led in a lecture, I said, who in this room doesn't immediately go to the bathroom when their body tells them they should go? And a lot of people raised their hand. the moment we go to school, we're told there is a break when you can go to the bathroom, and till that break comes, you better hold it in.

[14:26]

I used the example of a friend who is an artist and a singer, and he discovered that when he was practicing, sometimes he couldn't reach notes, that usually were not a problem for him to reach, and it took him a long time to understand why and when that happened. Then he realized, when his body told him he needed to go to the bathroom, which actually we call a restroom, interestingly, and ignored that, he couldn't reach those notes. Actually, a part of his body and his capacity was totally absorbed in holding back and not following the message that his body was giving him. And that's true for all of us.

[15:30]

The moment we start ignoring those signals, we are losing our capacity to be present for what we're doing. It will take us longer. It won't work so well. It will stress us. It will make us impatient. It has a whole set of other things that come in. But we live in a culture that doesn't acknowledge, that actually teaches us that our bodies are objects and that we are objects. We are and... So we slowly learn to actually not even feel the messages of our body. We are trained to disconnect from them. And if we are disconnected from our bodily messages and the wisdom that lives in our body like the wisdom that needs us,

[16:37]

lives in animal bodies, we are disconnected from ourselves. So how we are socialized is actually taking away our freedom to respond to our body's needs. and not just our body's needs, our being's needs. And it disconnects us from the innate capacity in our bodies to heal, to not be traumatized after we sustain the trauma, but not stay traumatized. But when we are not connected to our bodies, we don't allow this process to engage.

[17:44]

This capacity of our body to regulate itself, to restore itself, and to heal itself. This culture also teaches us that our worth is absolutely determined by our productivity. There is no message that you are just absolutely okay, just the way you are, and that you have nothing to do for that. there is no rest, there's no pause button. If you have a weekend, the question is, what did you do on the weekend? You have to go hike, you have to go run, you have to produce, you have to be on social media.

[18:57]

There is no... If you say, ow, I just lounged around at home, they look at you like you're, you know, a lazy bum. And you think of yourself as a lazy bum or couch vegetable. So we stay in that we are like hamsters in a treadmill. And it's really not easy to step out of that. Because there is a certain amount of habit energy that... Thich Nhat Hanh speaks about that when we have a day off, if we don't actually create the transition time, we will go into that day off with the same energy and through the day with the same energy and into the next week with the same energy. It doesn't just shift by itself if it says day off.

[20:00]

We actually in some ways have to sit down and not do anything for quite a while till maybe what would be a restful activity shows up. It may not be what you thought two days ago you were going to do on your day off. That's going to be restful. Maybe something surprising. Maybe, oh, I'm going to take a nap. Or I'm going to read a book. Or I go to the beach. surprising you. So to step out of habit energy, we have to interrupt it by pausing, by stopping, by sitting down, by lying down, and allowing some time which may not feel comfortable because we don't know what to do.

[21:02]

And it's easier to just continue the way we have been. Just let the horse run. And this culture looks at rest as luxury, as privilege, as extra treat after we exhausted ourselves and can't do it anymore, but not as our birthright. Unless we have domestic sized animals which like cows or pigs we don't allow and chickens we don't give them their space and their time and their needs are not taken into account they're only looked at how quick and much they can produce but we are treated in this culture the same way and we treat ourselves the same way

[22:04]

But when we have a cat and a dog, we watch them and we love that they just follow what their body is telling them. They lie down and sleep. They lounge in the sun and we take them for a walk. So they afford us to be on a walk, but it depends how we bring ourselves to that walk for it to be something that restores and charges our batteries, or if that's another chore we have to do. So then we afford it. Our children, we afford it to some degree, but we send them earlier and earlier to school where they have to follow rules. They can't follow, they can't even... really establish a connection to themselves where they can move around when their body tells them to move around, to lie down and fall asleep, to cry, to laugh, to poop, to digest.

[23:17]

Very quickly we try to socialize them. There's not free playtime. So I propose rest is not a luxury. Rest is actually an absolute necessity. If we want to stay and be connected and deepen our connection to our own being, to the intrinsic Buddha nature that lives in us, to the full humanness that we have, have been born into as a possibility. Having a human body comes with the potential for developing the full capacity of a human being, which in Buddhism is called Bodhisattva or Buddha, as a possibility to be fully awake, fully alive, fully present.

[24:30]

And that comes... with all the qualities of a bodhisattva, which I'll get to later. When we get exhausted, which I think is almost a general field in this culture and these days, all our capacities are lowered.

[25:37]

We are less able to concentrate. We are less able to care for ourselves or others. We are less generous with our time, our attention. We are less patient We are less tolerant of ourselves and others. We get shocked when you hear of war crimes, how prisoners are treated, how women are treated, raped, killed, children. It has something to do with the level of exhaustion and fear

[26:42]

that is there when we send our people to war to go kill each other for whatever good reason we think we have. So there's a direct correlation to those atrocities that are in addition to just trying to save your country, is to torture your prisoners or to destroy their livelihood in addition to what you might think is really necessary has to do with disconnection from ourselves which means also disconnection with others and an absolute disconnection from experiencing the intrinsic interconnection our bodies have with others everything that is in this universe, on this planet, all the plants, all the animals, all the people, everything, the stars, that has to do, that gets, all this disconnection gets supported by exhaustion, by being in that treadmill.

[28:11]

and not having developed a capacity to rest. So in our tradition, we have meditation, Zazen, and Dogen calls it the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. So a restful place, a restorative place. But many of us use it as another place to work ourselves into exhaustion and not to actually use it as like that pebble that sinks down, that is supported by everything, that is trusting and has nothing to do but just be, to celebrate the life that's flowing through you. that's just been given as a gift to you, in just the body you've been given, not the body of your neighbor that you... We always, if we covet something, we always covet a little piece of a person's physics or a person's money or a person's job or a person's partner or a person's hair or a person's teeth.

[29:35]

If we were to have their whole life... we will probably not want it because it would involve a lot of other things that we would never resonate with. So these cutouts we create and then spend a lot of time being worried about our hair, my hair, no hair, lots of hair, is such a distraction and is again one of those parts that we think worth, the worth of a human being, the worth of a life, gets measured by something absolutely external and irrelevant. So that's when it also says in one of Dogen's fascicles, if all the Buddhas from the Ten Directions came together and would like to measure

[30:40]

the merit of one person's sasen, they would not be able to measure it. There is no measure that can be applied to life, a human life, any life. But we keep measuring all the time, ourselves and others, with measures that don't apply and that create this connection again. and suffering and pain. So I would propose rest is a form of Sazen. And it is rest is care. Rest is a site of liberation. Liberation is a process, it's not a state. Liberation is a continuous process of not being caught by fixed ideas, not being caught by habits of body, of mind, of heart, of stepping out of those when we recognize them, of being willing to not know.

[32:05]

to find out rather than know ahead of time, oh, I'm going to meet this person, oh, this is going to go this way, then we already are stuck. And the poor other person is stuck with us because we look through predetermined glasses at them, a lens. Oh, she's going to be mad. She will say no or she will say yes or she has to. So to... step out of that. That's the work of liberation. It's rest is a space to reclaim love and care for self and others. It's love and care for self and community. You know, Reb used to say, Reb Anderson,

[33:06]

You can't lift a finger by yourself. The whole universe is engaged in letting you lift a finger. It's what you ate, what somebody created, food, how it came to you, how your body is working right now. It's a communal activity. Resting is an embodied practice. It's not an idea. You have to do it with the body you're having and let the body you have at the stage you're in, at which age you're in, what condition it's in, to let it inform you what is restful for you, for it, for you. And there's no body is here and I am somewhere else. You are always and your life is always only happening where your body is.

[34:12]

Rest is stopping to donate our lives to an external and also internalized system of placing profit on over people and over lives. We have internalized the conditioning of the system we grow in, and we perpetuate it, and we participate in it. So we can't delegate it to... It's like we can't delegate the future of this country... just by voting for somebody. That's one part, how we can support what we feel is furthering, is benefiting all beings. But we have to do it ourselves in our own life.

[35:22]

We can't think they do it for us. They may maybe help us, create conditions that make it support us to do it. But we have to do this for ourselves. So it's like when Gandhi says, you have to be the change you want to see in the world. It's absolutely true. It's resting is a practice of awakening. When I was abbess, after one year, I fell and hit my head and had a concussion, which then a year later let me step back as being an abbess. But I was allowed to still do a practice period, lead a practice period at Tassahara. My poor head and body were not capable of just doing...

[36:30]

very traditional Tassahara practice period. So resting had to be part of the practice period. And everything helped. So the weather was wonderful in the fall, so we did outside meditation. So I asked people to, for the first three or four days, when there was a time dedicated to meditating in nature, to meditate. within a perimeter that I defined how far they could go, to find a place that was supportive to their body and them, that felt safe and supportive. And once, so after those first initial days, then they had to just go always to the same place. So it wasn't each time there's outdoor I can go, oh, what would I like today? Then, from then on, it was like going to your seat in the Zendo.

[37:34]

You went to your place outdoors. And then it became cold and it was freezing and the pipes froze and burst and there was no heat and people would walk around with hot water bottles. So we did plunge Sazen in the bathhouse. And the task was you go to the bathhouse and... you go to the bathhouse with the same internal attitude and stance as you go to meditation. So you don't talk, but you do sasen while in the plunge or in the bathhouse. And I can still see how Greg and Linda, who were there at that time, rolled their eyes and thought, this is not the practice period. This is just, you know, this is too soft, too, too, too, too.

[38:35]

You know, this is not a real practice period. And they had practice discussions with these students. And at the end of the practice period, they said they had the most profound practice discussions with the people and I think it had to do because we rested a lot. When we are more rested, we are more connected and we can go deeper. When we are exhausted and at our limit, our survival mechanisms kick in. And those are never collaborative. They're never opening. They're shutting us down because when we had to survive, there was nobody there that helped us. So it's singular.

[39:36]

We are in a universe that is not friendly and supportive. So that's recreated. So we shut down. We become more tribal. and then more familial, and then more personal, which is also in ourselves. So that's why it said to do this practice is a transformation at the base, on a cellular level. Biologically, it makes sense that when there's less resources, that we become more tribal, and we exclude more and more people, so we can make sure our tribe, our genes survive. So that's where the spiritual practice, and as a human being, we have a capacity to not just be biologically determined, but to also engage our true interconnection with all beings.

[40:41]

And that's what I feel like that's what we can see in the world right now. There are so many stressors. I looked it up. There have been seven plus million people died from COVID. And millions of them died alone. Their families couldn't be with them. They couldn't have a memorial service. They couldn't have a funeral gathering. And I think there is a lot of grieving that hasn't ever gotten time because you need space to grieve. You need rest time to process the losses. So there is more and more... The climate change, I mean, the weather is just the storms, the wars, the political division, the violence.

[41:54]

I think these are all survival mechanisms and they have something. So if we want to remain peaceful or engage in peacefulness, we have to give ourselves rest time. It's a radical practice because it's a pushback against external and internal conditioning. A pushback, being determined by that, but then rather be oriented through our vows, through our intentions, through ourselves. the priorities which we have to also have rest time to actually know what those are. So, the Tanto just a while ago took the position of royal ease.

[43:12]

So there is the bodhisattva of compassion that's often, Kuan Yin, that's often depicted in royal ease. She has one knee up and one foot on the floor or ready to step off and an arm kind of loosely draped, but she's very awake, but very relaxed. So Tanto just had for a while that position. Thank you. So I talked about what gets less when we are not rested. But it's also the other way around. It gets more when we are rested.

[44:17]

So our resilience, our tolerance, our capacity to be present, our patience, our generosity, our perseverance to stay with something and keep it going is growing when we're resting. Our capacity to be peaceful in the middle of Difficulties. To not get thrown by it or to rebalance ourselves is higher. Our capacity to be interested, which is interesse, interesse, which means interbeing, to be interested and trying to understand the other person rather than just reacting to their behavior. So that's why I would like you to really contemplate if you could experiment with resting and allowing that in your life.

[45:44]

And that can look... Any which way, it can look like closing your eyes for 10 minutes, taking the time to feel the water flowing over your body when you take a shower, to really feel it, letting it flow over your head, through your hair, or the temperature of it, to daydream, give yourself Daydreaming time. To look out the window, taking in the sights of plants, sky, light, taking note of the sounds, enjoying a cup of tea, coffee, juice in your favorite chair or place. Letting your pet teach you about living in harmony with the body's needs.

[46:52]

And copy them. Sometimes when your dog lies down, think of, do I want to lie down a little bit too? And give yourself the time to do that. Or your kitty on your lap. Slowing down a fraction is a wonderful transformative thing and has to do with resting because the unrest that this culture kind of perpetuates has also to do with the speed. We are always speeding, speeding from one meeting to the other. I feel for you, Tanto-san, and all of you. When I was Tanto and Abbas here, I discovered that when I was getting caught by the... When I didn't do one thing after the other, but piled them all up in front of me, what I have to do today, and they became a pile.

[48:05]

Then I would feel my body tighten up, and I started to push. And so I would have to walk from my office... in the building to a meeting place somewhere else. And I would walk through that space. And everybody that was in that space became a potential obstacle in my pathway. And I tried to not make eye contact, not just get past them, you know, get out of my way. And that would just happen automatically. And when I remembered to slow down just a fraction, it was like a miracle. Suddenly, I perceived the weather outside those beautiful windows in the hallway and the stairway. I noticed what the weather was like outside.

[49:08]

I noticed, oh, this is Tim. And this is... Brent or Lorenzo or Eli, they were people, not obstacles. I had the space to say, good morning. And if they wanted something from me, I could say, I'm sorry, I don't have time right now. I have to be at the meeting. But I had connection, which nurtured me. But if I didn't do that, they were potential obstacles that I had to avoid. which then, of course, also doesn't nurture me. This connects me from the relational aspects, from being happy to see them, even if I didn't have time to spend with them, hang out. And nobody said, well, you can't go to a meeting, you have to now talk to me. So they would also all support me to go to the meeting. But we had that nurturing experience

[50:09]

for a second or two. So slowing down, only that you notice, it's not like you suddenly start walking like a snail through the town and everybody thinks, oh, is she okay or something. It's really a fraction shifts something profoundly. You know, Norman Fisher, he would walk like a snail through Green Gulch. And he would... just seeing him walk like this, while we were all running around, bustling, you know, was just like, oh. And he said, the more I have to do, the slower I move, and the more I have done at the end of the day. Which feels like counterintuitive, but it's true. Because he was just not getting hurried, So everything he could do, he could do in the way it needed to be done and it was done.

[51:14]

When I rush through things, I do things in a way I have to redo them or correct them later or do them again. I mean, it's not really working and it's not satisfactory. So slowing down when you brush your teeth, slowing down before you pick up the phone, Slowing down when you talk to somebody, just talk a little bit slower. I already, when I do that now, I feel like my whole body goes... Just talking slower. It is incredibly powerful and almost... not noticed on the outside in terms of speed, but the energetic field is completely changed.

[52:15]

And that's something you all can do and play with and experiment with and find out for yourself if it works that way. you know in Sazen we talk about or in this practice we talk about connecting to the essence of our being to Buddha nature that is just given to us as a potential to all of us it's not picked and chose for a selection of human beings, all human beings and all beings, that if we can rest and really give that to ourselves, we have an easier time to get in touch with that part.

[53:41]

and it will inform us and guide us. There's a book that is talking about this in beautiful ways. It's by an African-American minister. Her name is Tricia Hersey, and she created the Knapp Ministry. And she had big, she's an artist, a poet, and she made big napping events where people would come and take a nap together. And she has other things. It's a beautiful book. It's called Rest is Resistance, a Manifesto. So if you want to... dive into napping and resting.

[54:42]

That's a book that might be really inspiring for you. And then I want to maybe just read you a poem by Wendell Berry that also talks about this in a slightly different way. He says, When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

[55:47]

I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time... I rest in the grace of the world and am free. Thank you very much for being here. 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.

[56:51]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[56:54]

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