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. It's lovely to be here. Thank you, Tim, our Tonto, head of practice, for inviting me to speak this evening. And thank you to my root teacher, Linda Ruth Cutts, and my Shuso teacher, and Ed Sadezan, who I received Dharma Entrustment with in 2014 right here in this Buddha Hall. It's lovely to be back here at City Center. My name is Nancy Petran. And I'm a former resident of San Francisco Zen Center of Green Gulch Farm, first in Tassajara, and then later here at City Center.

[01:08]

I've practiced at Zen Center in these temples, in this practice, since 1995, when I arrived as a farm apprentice at Green Gulch Farm. And I was there for 10 years. And then I left a mother when I left. But I left the farm, and then I was working here in the development offices for eight years. So thank you to all the members and donors here and joining us online. Please continue to support the temples. I can't help myself. It's so wonderful to be back, and especially when Tim asked if I wanted to come on Wednesday evening. There's something about being here on Wednesday evening as it's starting to get dark.

[02:13]

It's very intimate here in the Buddha Hall, and I really do love the forms. So on Wednesday evening, we all stand and we all bow together, or we bow as we do. And there's something about our bodies joining together that way in some kind of expression, some kind of human expression that has been passed on to us through many, many years, many, many sanghas And though I'm a lay teacher in this tradition and we don't technically carry or pass on the forms, I just can't help myself. They just come through me and I really love them.

[03:16]

There's something, what I wanted to talk about tonight was, is returning. and what it means to return, what it means to, perhaps it's my age, I'm now 61, and I'm feeling the richness of my life in a different way, really taking time to reflect on where I came from, who I came from, imagining back to who I and they and we came from. So there's something about being here and returning to the temple that gives the opportunity to see what arises. You know, as I sit zazen this evening down with

[04:21]

you all, I was sitting next to you, I think, down in the Zendo, and coming up to dinner, joining in the meal, seeing what's new since our renovation, and what just feels very familiar in returning. So appreciating the layers of our life, and how I might think I have an understanding about something or someone in my life, and then allowing the richness of the layers to expose themselves, maybe in a new way. I think that this returning is often what I'm doing in Zazen. returning to the body, returning to the breath, returning to the experience.

[05:31]

And, you know, for those who live in the temple or for those who are very disciplined in your practice lives outside of a temple schedule, that returning where you hear the bell, you see the schedule, you know you need to get to the zendo. And there's something about putting everything down and just sitting down in the middle of your life and the giving over to that activity and to returning to the activity of zazen. So in Zazen, the allowing of perhaps noticing the resistance to or the boredom in our meditation practice.

[06:39]

A few weeks ago, a group of us from Enzo Village. So Enzo Village is a Zen-inspired senior living community in Healdsburg, California. And until recently, I was working there. I worked there for two and a half years. I was the spiritual life coordinator. So I got to set up the Zendo and our Zen practice in this new senior living community. So a few weeks ago, I got to lead a group to Green Gulch Farm, and we participated in a Sangha week there. And prior to going to Green Gulch for those five days, we took up a teaching, and the teaching was from Suzuki Roshi's collection of lectures called Not Always So. The lecture that we studied was called Be Kind With Yourself.

[07:47]

And the first time I read this teaching or came across this teaching or heard this teaching, I had already been practicing for many years at Zen Center. And I think I may have kind of just skipped over it, you know, skipped over that, oh, be kind with yourself. And in this lecture, Suzuki Roshi says to his students, so he's lecturing to his students, and he says, if you do not have a warm, kind feeling in your zazen, you are not doing it correctly. And I'm not sure at what point I actually really started appreciating this instruction of Suzuki Roshi's. Perhaps it was realizing that he had come from a training in Japan, very traditional training, and at Eheiji, you know, the biggest, kind of most important Soto Zen training temple still is.

[08:57]

And I remember thinking, I wonder if he was ever given that instruction at Eheiji, you know? If you don't have a warm, kind feeling in your zazen, You are not doing it correctly. So I think there was something that he appreciated, that he really understood along the way. He says in this lecture, what he wants us to understand in our meditation, in our zazen, is the feeling of just sitting, the feeling of zazen. And he says the feeling of zazen is not simply counting your breaths as some people do, as I do at times, to settle myself, to settle into my sitting. It's not a rote, prescribed recipe for sitting.

[10:00]

It is the feeling of taking care of your breath sitting in zazen and actually caring for the in-breath and the out-breath, feeling a warmth and a kindness in our bodies as we take our meditation seat, our meditation posture, and returning there, returning to that feeling of kindness, of softness, of gratitude, of warmth. It was very difficult for all of us to go through COVID, the time of COVID. It was very difficult here in this temple. We couldn't sit together.

[11:04]

So we were all sitting on Zoom. And I remember, I can't remember, it was at least a year before we went down and sat together in the zendo. And I remember that first morning sitting there. And at the time, I was Tonto, so I got to sit facing out, and I got to sit and just take everyone in sitting in the zendo. And I may be making this up, but I think that Paul may have spoken. Paul Howler, our teacher, may have spoken out into the Zendo that morning. But I could be confusing it with another time, as happens. But it's been very helpful, my confusion. Because what I remember Paul saying is, is as we settled into our zazen, it could have been in a sesheen or something else he was leading, but he said after we were settled in our posture to bring a gratitude, to call up into our being, a gratitude, something that we were appreciative of.

[12:25]

And after hearing that instruction, I did that often. as I was beginning my zazen. I'd settle into my posture. Some of us sit cross-legged. Some of us sit in chairs. You know, at Enzo Village, we're all sitting in chairs. It's an amazing-looking zendo. But as we settle in to call in that gratitude, something. And I just remember in those first days, my gratitude was the same one each. time over and over, and it was for that zendo and that we could actually be sitting together. And that gratitude had layers and dimensionality, and it brought me back to, you know, when we acquired this building, I wasn't around then.

[13:29]

But my imagination brought me back to those times and all of the effort that brought me to that morning sitting there and appreciating the practice and the structure and the forms. So in Zazen, we sit in the middle of our lives. We sit down in the middle of whatever is swirling, whatever is most alive in our beings, and simply return to this body, this breath, noting whatever might be most alive in our bodies and noticing the stories and the thoughts that arise and return to our breath, return to the warmth and the kindness.

[14:49]

Perhaps this is something, if you haven't been practicing this way, that you might want to experiment with. Suzuki Roshi in that talk says that the way that a mother responds to her baby, even when she can't quite figure out what her baby needs, that is the kind of attention that we bring, that we can bring to our zazen. My husband, Miles, and I just spent last weekend with family up at our place. They came up to visit for a few days, and there was a five-year-old, a four-year-old, and two eight-month-old babies. And it was so wonderful to now be a grandmother and observe these parents, these young parents with their children and with the big,

[15:54]

big emotions of five and four-year-olds that come and go and now this and now that and tattling and negotiating and it really is stretching. It is very stretching. And just appreciating these parents and their effort to really see their children in the midst of big emotion and talk to them through that. And it had me reflecting on, well, first on being a mother. That was very kind of, I was relating a lot, but then a mother to young children. But then thinking about how I was raised, and I was raised in a very loving household. And we got spanked.

[16:56]

Our father spanked us. And if he couldn't tell who of the three sisters had done what needed a spanking, we all three got spanked. And so I was just reflecting on that of how different it can be, how different it might be. I'm still exploring this. To be able to kind of have the arc of the emotion or the the fullness of the emotion without it being shut down so quickly, you know. I think I learned very early on that anger was not a good thing to express, that if I expressed anger, I would, anger would, or frustration or, you know, all the many forms of anger could very quickly come back. So I think I didn't, I was really afraid of anger. for many, many years. And just slowly, you know, with kind of building a safe place of exploration, could really explore the layers of anger.

[18:12]

So the curiosity of the mother responding to the child and how Suzuki Roshi was likening this to our curiosity in Zazen, that kind, loving, warm curiosity that can be cultivated simply in the care of our breath and the returning to this experience. And in there also the cultivation of not knowing mind, open, open mind.

[19:17]

I've recently been hearing this term, the settled self. Maybe this is out there in the ether, and you've been hearing this expression as well. I just, when Roger asked me, we were standing up at the hunt, he said, what are you going to talk about? And I said, well, I think I'm going to talk about the settled self. He goes, ooh, how do you get that? How do you get that? I said, you've got it. So, you know, this is another expression, I think, that I can relate to of when I am sitting in zazen, I'm feeling settled. And I'm sorry if my voice is getting very quiet and I'm putting you to sleep. The settled, the settled self. So I believe this is what we're cultivating in zazen, is this settled self. this settled self, recognizing the settled self and recognizing when we're sitting down in our zazen and we're definitely not feeling settled.

[20:35]

So I think this is how we observe the settled self, by observing how unsettled we are. But I was thinking if Suzuki Roshi and what he's encouraging us in our zazen to acknowledge, to see, to experience is kindness and warmth. Then when we're off our cushion and we're noticing that we are unsettled, that we are feeling very big emotions, very strong emotions, and our encouragement in our practice is to pause, to reconnect, to explore, to be curious about what is going on, then perhaps when we're returning to ourself in this practice of kindness is we will find kindness, perhaps.

[21:43]

We'll find whatever is there is what we will find. So we often hear about this, the pause. Tara Brock calls it the sacred pause. Diana Rossetto, in her book, Waking Up to What We Do, her book on the precepts, has a metaphor for the pause. And the pause, as she describes it, is like a trapeze artist. And the artist is swinging through the air on the trapeze, on her karmic flow, her karmic energetic trapeze. And then something happens.

[22:46]

And there's a bit of a moment where she realizes, oh, I'm being moved along in a habitual pattern and a karmic pattern. And let's go of the trapeze. And there's the pause. And here's the next trapeze. But in that moment, there's a moment of choice. And we can actually drop to the net, actually, you know, if we're not ready, if we don't quite know what the next thing is, I say dropping to the net feels like a very kind of fun maybe thing to do, like giving ourself a little space before we decide the next thing. But this image of the trapeze where there's a choice, there's this pause in the middle before we take the next action.

[23:50]

And in that pause, There can be creativity. There can be even just maybe the question, what would be the kind thing to do for myself in this situation? Whatever it is that you might be working with, whatever it is that arises, I think Tara Brach calls it the sacred pause because it's few and far between often. that we realize that we have so much choice in our lives. I think we're mostly moving along, you know, in a quick karmic clip, you know. So acknowledging that there is this opportunity to do something different. Last week, Miles and I were at a family, a friend of a family funeral, and this woman was 95.

[24:53]

And she was a mother of four, and she was also the mother to a lot of their friends. Like all the teenagers seemed to find their way over to Carol Protus's house. And at the funeral, at the gathering afterwards, so many people, you know, in their 60s, grown people, grown adults, were getting up and talking about what it was like to be in this woman's presence as teenagers. Miles experienced this. She was a very good friend of their family. They all kind of said the same thing, that when she saw you, she would say, Brian, I'm so glad you're here. You felt it. She really made people feel seen and welcomed. And she was a mother.

[26:02]

She was a mother to a lot of these people. Maybe she didn't know in that moment what they were needing, but they were needing to be seen and to be loved and acknowledged. And one of There was this very funny story. I won't go into the whole thing, though I love telling stories. And Carol had this very funny interaction with Doris Day. Maybe some of you will have to Google who Doris Day is. But Doris Day had a hit song in the late 50s called Que Sera Sera. And so by the end of the gathering, we're all belting out Que Sera Sera for Carol, a life well lived. And then later I was kind of like, oh, I grew up with that song. I loved singing that song as a little girl, you know, and I was kind of like looking at the words and I was just like, hmm. There was something that didn't quite sit well with me. And it's, for those of you who don't know, it's been in my head nonstop ever since. It's que sera sera, whatever will be, will be.

[27:04]

The future is not ours to see. Que sera, sera. And it goes on, this child asks her mother, what will I be? And the mother says, we shall see. And so there was something about it that I was like, mm, I grew up with that song. Like I, you know, somehow, like that's kind of a part of the way I saw the world as a child, you know? And then I was thinking about, at some point, I'm not sure when, It came to me, like, I was like, how is this connected to, you know, Buddhist practice? And what came to me was simply the title of Norman Fisher's book, The World Could Be Otherwise. And I was like, yeah. Yeah, there's something that, you know, my father told me when I was little, Nancy, you're a girl. When you get old, you can be whatever you want to be.

[28:07]

I was like, oh, that's pretty cool that that's what my dad told me in the 60s, 70s. And I kind of hear that as well. You know, like in Norman's book, the world could be otherwise. I feel like it's calling us to something. Not like, oh, we'll see. But actually, in his book, he talks about imagination and the bodhisattva vow. And that in order to be bodhisattvas, those who commit to staying in this world until all beings are free of suffering, that we need big imaginations. We need the precepts. We need the paramitas. We know all of the teachings of Buddhism. We need big bodhisattva hearts. And we need imagination. This is something that Norman says.

[29:10]

He says, for the Mahayana scriptures reveal the Buddha to be an endless, illuminated, imaginative projection whose limitless purpose was the same as that of each and every human being. That purpose is compassion. The endless, caring, and salvic, salve, as in. curative activity that would relieve the suffering of infinite beings throughout time and space. The Buddha portrayed by Mahayana Buddha scriptures is the imaginary embodiment of love. Each person at the core is a Buddha in potential. So... I think I'll take a pause.

[30:16]

As I swing through the air on my trapeze, where was I going? Returning. Returning to the settled being. with kindness and warmth and opening up to all kinds of potential. This is how we build trust. This is how we build trust in ourselves and in standing in our settledness and speaking our truth from there and meeting ourselves with kindness and warmth and emanating that.

[31:43]

So as we bring into our zazen a gratitude, from there, as David Zimmerman used to, perhaps he still says, open our aperture and extend that gratitude, that love, out to all beings. knowing that there is no boundary in this body. It is completely permeable. So again, noticing whenever we're contracted or triggered or agitated,

[32:51]

It's a way for us to note that we're not in our settled bodies and that there is something to explore there. There's some information, there's something wanting to be seen. So in turning back being present with, imagining into the future, the world that could be. I wanted to read this poem with you. The poem is called The Layers, and it's by Stanley Kunitz. It's from a collection called Wild Braid, and Stanley

[33:52]

put that collection together when he was 100 years old. It's his reflections on gardening and poetry. And he was helped in that endeavor by a former resident, a Sangha member named Janine Lunteen. The Layers. I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. And I am not who I was, though so though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind as I am compelled to look, before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered.

[35:01]

How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind, the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face, yet I turn, I turn, exalting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-colored, clouded voice directed me, live in the layers, not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. So bodhisattvas, I think we have time for maybe one question.

[36:12]

We have a hard stop at 8.30. before we all turn into pumpkins? Does anyone have a question? Someone will bring you a microphone so those online can hear. Hi, thank you for your talk. I was really intrigued by what you said about having a warm, kind feeling during zazen, because I feel like often, especially at 5.40 a.m., sometimes I have a very cold, determined feeling. Yeah, yeah. And I guess, yeah, is there any way that you would suggest trying to enter that kind of a mindset?

[37:15]

When I first started practicing, and especially I noticed when I went down to Tassajara, I was sitting next to a woman who then became my best friend, but we would eat formal meals in the Zendo. And she had already been down at Tassajara for two practice periods, so she was very quick with her... formal bowls and wrapping it up and finishing. And I would race her like every meal I would see. I was just like, I think I didn't see for a long time how tightly I was holding the forms, how strict I was, how tight I was in my body. And I think that tightness in my body was... very much tightness in my mind as well. So, you know, I think actually this instruction of calling up, it took me a long time to see that that's what I was doing, you know, years.

[38:30]

So I would say starting with a gratitude, In your heart, something that you can feel, perhaps you can experiment around feeling warmth or gratitude for something. Acknowledging, not overriding what is happening for you, you know? And even saying to yourself, this is hard, you know? Maybe when you get to the zendo in the morning and you're bowing to your cushion, you can say, good for you. We made it. We're going to do this. You know, maybe, did you ever have a coach in your life? You know, maybe you can have, like, a little coach, you know, standing on this, you know, like, we've got this, you know? And also just the feeling of, if you can recall when someone in your life was kind to you,

[39:38]

You know, oftentimes we have to be going through really hard times for a small kindness to really land, you know? I think like after 9-11, you've heard all these stories of people being kind with each other in New York, you know? Or during COVID, there was like this long line outside the grocery store and the sandwich board said, you know, Be kind with each... I just remember, like, be kind with each other. Like, we're all having a hard time, you know? And I think that's true all the time. You know, we never know what someone else is going through. But if you can remember maybe a little bit of review, looking back, someone who you kind of looked up to or admired, maybe as a kid, that was a kind kid, you know.

[40:42]

Maybe you can play with it a little bit. Start exploring all the layers of it. Thank you. Yeah, and sometimes Lawson's just hard. Yeah. Do you know rest posture? We have a form for resting. Yeah. Yeah. You can do that. Yeah. Be kind with yourself. Yeah. Thank you. I think we have no more time for questions. I do not think we do. I think we do not. Thank you everyone for being here tonight. 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.

[41:47]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:56]

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