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. Morning, everybody. It's the third day. For a lot of people, the third day is a very special day. It usually is for me. I don't know if it is for you. Sometimes I call it cranky day. This morning I did my orioki order, a little fishtungi. It's that kind of day. Often by the third day we're loosening up so some of the connections loosen. And ultimately I think that's good. So Today also, well, this month also, is the first month in 823 years that we have five Fridays, Saturday, and Sundays in one month.

[01:13]

I thought that would be an important thing for you to know. And it won't happen again for another 823 years. This is how my mind is working this morning. Okay, so we're having this fundamental intention, this practice period of aligning all activity with the heart of Buddha. This is great because I can turn my head now and I don't lose you. This is really fabulous. This is the embodiment of practice. That's what we've been working on, embodying our practice, walking it into our lives, into our everyday life. wash the dishes, drive the car, go to your job day. So this is a body practice and Zazen teaches us through the body, our wise bodies.

[02:16]

We just have to realize the wisdom. So our great Shuso Li talked very movingly yesterday about about staying with the body and staying in the not knowing and learning from our bodies. And she did this in a very inspiring way, and so I want to thank you very much for that. And so I'm going to continue that theme because I think it's exactly what we're doing here at Beginner's Mind Temple. We're cultivating that not knowing. mind, that beginner's mind. And that's an empty mind. It's an uncluttered mind. It's free. It allows for a fresh moment without any preconceptions.

[03:20]

And to have an empty mind takes a fair amount of stability. and flexibility. So how do we bring ourselves to each moment with that not knowing mind? It's hard. I just want to say for a moment though that the context here is really special because in the world, you know, when you get a job and you go out and you have your job, you're expected to know how to do it. And people get upset with you if you don't know how to do it. And here at Zen Center, we often give people jobs because they don't know how to do it. And they're not expected to know how to do it. And they're expected to learn how to do it on the job. And so we have a lot of on-the-job training here. And Zazen's on-the-job training, too. So, two weeks ago I went to a training in trauma healing called Somatic Experiencing.

[04:38]

And one of the main premises of this work is whether it's repetitive trauma or catastrophic big thing happened to you trauma, it's... that one of the main threads is that the recovery lies in completing the experience. That often, when we have trauma in our lives, what makes us have that, what everybody calls PTSD, post-traumatic stress, is we haven't thoroughly completed that experience in the first place. Because... Either we were so young it was too overwhelming and we just couldn't integrate it, or we were in a situation where we didn't have any real resources to know how to absorb such a big experience. So we get to a certain level of intensity or a certain step, and then we stop.

[05:47]

Something stops. We either freeze or we get very agitated. or we make vows to avoid that whole constellation of events entirely, because we don't want to feel that intensity. And part of why we don't want to feel it is we don't have the proper resources. We don't know how to sit still for it. So in some ways, zazen, is a bit-by-bit way of learning how to sit still for yourself and be able to tolerate the full brunt of your experience. And fortunately or unfortunately, often we get to get our beginning learnings in the pain department, being able to tolerate our own pain. And...

[06:50]

So it's a hard sell, actually, because if you're willing to sit there and feel all your pain, then you're going to get to this more stable, resilient place. But it's, you know, who wants to do that? So, but it's... Those of us here, most people here are seekers. They want the truth, and that's the price. The price of the truth is developing... enough stability through this stable posture and through developing your concentration, which also gives you confidence to be able to sit still for whatever it is that's going to show up. So how do we help ourselves stay present for what was initially unbearable or too overwhelming? Well, we do it a little bit, slowly. And we learn how to regulate our own nervous system.

[07:56]

Now, part of why sesheen is so helpful is because we're all together, and just by being together, we're regulating each other's nervous systems. And when we get together and we agree to be in this form together, we agree to... support ourselves to move slowly, to be calm, to respect everybody's privacy by not making eye contact, by not getting into social interactions, which gives us space to just slow everything way, way down. And the more we can slow things down, the more we can feel things a little tiny bit at a time. and we can learn how to regulate and stabilize our own being.

[08:59]

We learn how to settle, how to settle inside of ourselves. So, I wanna say, I wanna read this poem. Well, let me just see how I wanna do this. So anyway, let me say this. I want to just say this other sentence, that in this slower, calmer state, it allows us to more fully experience what we couldn't early, or maybe just what we haven't gotten in the habit of letting ourselves feel. So I want to just say that sentence. And in the Sashin, we have this strong, safe container to learn how to be fully in the moment. And all the practice leaders and all the staff everybody around here is working to support this experience for us to have.

[10:02]

And they're doing this just to create this opportunity for you to wake up and for you to be more fully present than you were when you started. So there's a sentence that I want to read in this really brutal piece by Durkheim called The Way of Transformation. I want to read it because it's... I want to read it. The man who, or the woman, who, being really on the way, falls upon hard times in the world, will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him or her refuge and comfort and encourages his or her old self to survive. Rather... She will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help her to risk herself so that she may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a raft that leads to the far shore.

[11:12]

So we're asking when we turn to the practice leader or we... We're looking for support. We're actually looking for support not to let those old habits survive, but allow someone to really encourage us to face into what's more challenging. Where haven't I been? What have I avoided all my life? The other thing that helps And that we're developing when we sit zazen is a poem that we gave three different lectures on when I was chuseau with Blanche and Ryoman. It was called The Witness. And we found this poem so useful, all of us ended up lecturing on it. So it goes, when I can be the witness, all manner of miracles occur.

[12:20]

Old wounds heal. The past reveals itself to be released. Present dramas play themselves out without sinking emotional talons into my soft skin. Without sinking emotional talons into my soft skin. The witness welcomes truth and dares to meet reality on its own terms. It is the ground in which the seeds of transformation take root and finally flower. When the witness is awake, the lake of mind is still. And in that mirrored surface, I see my own true face as spirit smiling back at me. So that's the effort we're making, is to take this mental posture of stillness and this physical posture of stillness which supports this kind witness with no static on the line.

[13:34]

So the more we develop our concentration, the more we are able to turn down the static, turn down the busy... discursive mind. So, this stable witness takes some time to develop. And it takes practice, one period at a time, just being able to stay with watching without commenting. seeing what's coming up without commenting on it. You just see it. It's not good, it's not bad. Here it is, it's just what it is. Before, so the more we develop this witness, then at some point we can drop body of mind.

[14:40]

But first we have to have that stability and resilience in our bodies and our minds. But little by little as we learn to settle ourselves and to be less reactive and to be able to just see what is building inside, things start to build inside, to just be able to see it without having to do, do, do something about it, without having to move, without having to make any vows or policies, to just be able to live into what's arising with our breath. So developing this state is exactly what helps us get out of the way without opinions, without ideas of how it should be, without our improvements for others, how this shashim would be much better if they would only blah-de-blah. This is just static on the line. And when we learn to quiet that busy mind, we begin to see directly how it really is.

[15:48]

we get out of the way with our preferences and our stories. And it's very hard to understand this until you, I guess, make at some point that commitment to stick with it. Every session used to get this enormous cramp in my shoulder. I mean, just like a vice. And I would do a lot of rubbing it and massaging it in between, and I would try to do little adjustments during Zazen to see if I could just find some way. It wasn't going to quite hurt so much. And then one day I realized, okay, enough of this adjusting and avoiding, and I'm just going to sit here and see what happens. I just sort of went, okay, shoulder, bring it on. And I stuck with it.

[16:51]

And it really, really hurt. And I knew I wasn't hurting myself. I knew I wasn't going to do damage to a joint or anything like that. So I just stuck with it. And it was just exquisite pain. It was sort of inconceivable. I would be sitting there and going, I can't even believe I'm sitting here feeling this much pain. And why aren't I fading or something? And then something broke and I realized suddenly it just wasn't my pain anymore. It was just pain. It was just human pain. The pain of the human condition. And when I realized that, I... I cried and I... But I wasn't crying. I was just crying because it was so moving and awesome that there could be this much pain in the world.

[18:03]

And I just felt like I was feeling all the pain that ever was and ever would be. It wasn't my pain. It was just human pain. This is what it is to be a human being. And if you sign up for the whole enchilada, then you're going to get this. This goes with it. It's a set. There's no component parts. I'll just take these over here and I just won't take that really dark, black, tarry, yucky part. And the irony for me was that I felt this, you know, I felt it very deeply for a couple of days, and I was just in awe and gratitude. And the thing that surprised me was it changed my relationship to my pain and everybody else's pain for the rest of my life.

[19:04]

And I felt like it just lightened my load. It was like, oh, this is just pain. Oh. This is just agony. I don't know what to say about it. It gave me courage. It gave me courage, and I felt more stable. So together, when we build this great big stillness together, which we can feel, you know, we notice as each day goes by, it gets more still in the zendo. we move a little more slowly. When we're building this together, it supports us to have this mental posture and physical posture of stillness. And the more we support it, the more we build it. Even though we have to do all the work by ourselves, we see how we can't do it alone.

[20:08]

So we're all together here building this stillness, and everybody's on their own at the same time. So... I was thinking about maybe talking about some resources that might be helpful to some of you during the Sashin. Because... Anyway, we all have a major resource, and that's the breath. And we've been focusing on that for quite a while. We're all expert breathers. And just plain breathing is a form of regulating the nervous system. And letting your breath breathe you without doing anything to it allows the breath to help settle the body.

[21:11]

if you can let it alone and just not mess with it, and stay with it, let it guide you, it will settle you. And when you're not sitting in zazen, you can also help to anchor yourself. If you start to feel like you're getting a little floaty or a little spacey, you can help to anchor yourself by either holding onto your elbows, These joints here. It could be very comforting to you. Or if you're sitting in a chair or somewhere, hold on to your knees or to your ankles. I'm not sure why this is the case, but this is what they taught us in this class. And this is a very... Oops, I don't want to... This can be a very comforting posture. And that's all you have to do.

[22:14]

Just let yourself hold your elbows and some of you can feel it's a little bit safer. It feels a little bit comforting. So when you feel that, when you want to, you can do that. And the other thing that's also useful is something called reorienting. If you're starting to feel like you're getting a little overwhelmed, to open your eyes and find something that's somewhat pleasant to look at. Like right now, you could look at the Gandhara Buddha. And then maybe, if you like the color of the mat, you could look at the mat. And then take a breath. But just sort of, you know, look around. See, I'm in the room. There are people here. And that's a way of kind of grounding yourself and settling yourself with something outside you.

[23:15]

If what's going on inside is getting a little out of hand, then go outside for a little and just look at something outside and just go, oh, that's a nice light. Look at that. And that's a way of giving yourself a little bit of a break so you don't overwhelm yourself. Because one of the things we learned in somatic experiencing is that it's not so great to keep overwhelming yourself. so that you end up kind of shutting down. If you're starting to get too overwhelmed, it's really useful to shift your focus. If you can't hang in there, then it's going to take another few rounds before you can. So this is about right effort, not about putting yourself into a situation that... actually re-injures you from how you got the soup in the first place. So you want to keep yourself within a range and just slowly, slowly you expand your range.

[24:19]

So I don't know how many sessions I sat before I decided to turn around and face my shoulder and go, okay. But I certainly didn't do it on the first session. I didn't do it on the tenth either. So it took some... And the other thing that you can do is connecting to the earth, connecting to the ground. So when you're sitting zazen, really feel your knees on the mat, if you're sitting in a chair, or if you're in a room, you can lie down and feel the weight of your body on the mattress or on the floor and feel that solidity. or sitting in a chair, just feel your feet on the floor, on the ground. And that's another way to kind of connect and feel the solidity that if you're starting to feel like you're breaking up a little, you can come back and let the earth hold you.

[25:26]

So... Yeah, I liked what Lee said. I want to say it because I just like to hear that when she said, you know, feel your tush on the kush. So where am I now? The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, I wanted to tell you a story. It's always good to end with a story, don't you think? Everybody likes a good story. And I thought this story that is in a Pema Chodron book, called Awakening Loving Kindness, was nice because I think that that is what we're trying to develop is this kind and gentle, I think a grandmother mind witness that isn't gonna judge what's coming up and that knows whatever it is you're feeling Whatever it is that's coming up or building in you, there's a good reason for it, whether you understand it or not.

[26:36]

And if you make the assumption that whatever's coming up does make sense somehow, and accept it from there, you have a little more respect for what your body's trying to teach you. Even if you don't understand it right away, it's okay. But just assume your body's right. Didn't get that way by accident. So here's the story. A big, burly samurai comes to the wise man and says, tell me the nature of heaven and hell. And the roshi looks him in the face and says, why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you? Samurai starts to get purple in the face. His hair starts to stand up, but the Roshi won't stop. He keeps saying, a miserable worm like you.

[27:37]

Yuck. Do you think I should tell you anything? Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword, and he's just about to cut off the head of the Roshi, and then the Roshi says, that's hell. The samurai, who is in fact a sensitive person, instantly gets it that he just created his own hell. It was black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment, so much so that he was going to kill this man. Tears fill his eyes, and he starts to cry, and he puts his palms together, and the Roshi says, that's heaven. There isn't any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life. When you want to say no to the situation you're in, it's fine to say no.

[28:45]

But when you build up a big case, a big self-righteous case, to the point where you're so convinced that you would draw your sword and cut off someone's head, that kind of resistance to life is hell. Arguing with how it is, is hell. So, we're going to keep trying to embrace the way it is with some grace, some kindness to ourselves. And let's really be very kind to each other because, as you know, we start to get a little raw. We get a little more sensitive. I can feel it. You could probably feel it in the lecture. I'm sort of a little herky-jerky in my recitation today. I don't feel so completely smooth. And I suspect not everybody here feels so smooth. So let's be gentle with ourselves and let's be gentle with each other as much as we can.

[29:53]

Want to have some questions? Yeah. Does anybody have any comments, questions? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Thank you for the story. And if you don't want to cut off anybody's head, but you want it to stop. The pain or, you know, the rage, the dance of rage against what's going on. It's almost as if raising the sword and being stuck was like a saving interaction. Where is the saving interaction? You're not exactly interacting. What do you think? Do you have any thoughts about them?

[31:03]

Well, it occurs to me that an interaction might help, but some kind of... Well, when I'm triggered, and I'm sure most of you know, there's this kind of thing that can happen. Somebody says something or do something. It just sets you. All of a sudden, you feel like greased lightning. All your sphincters... immediately constrict, that would be reactive. So what's really hard and what we're really trying to do here is slow that down and really begin to take a look at what got my knickers in a twist? What's that about? What's my problem? Now, usually we can make a case. We're all such good attorneys. We can build a case for anything. Well, they da-da-da-da-da.

[32:03]

But there's usually about 100 possible responses to anything somebody does. And the first one that's the most useful is, gee, I don't understand. If we actually recognize that we don't know, we think, oh, you're just trying to blah-de-blah. You know, we think we know something. And the first thing is to remember, I actually don't know. Just the way Lee was telling us. I don't know. So when you see something trigger you, see if you've made an assumption, if that's part of the constriction. The part that's arguing, just going, no. I'm no. Mm-mm. When I'm doing that, I usually know I have a case of whatever it is somebody's doing in front of me. The thing that irritates me the most, and this might be true for you, I don't know, but the thing that irritates me the most is usually something I have a case of.

[33:14]

When I was in high school, I used to lie. And many of us did in high school. I lied a lot. And I would get outraged if I found someone lying to me. I would just be... When I stopped lying, I had a very different response to being lied to. Sometimes I was sad. Sometimes I was puzzled. But I stopped being outraged. I stopped having this sphincter thing. So often when you have that, you might see if you're looking at yourself and if that's what's irritating you. That was also true, and I vowed, you know, many of us vowed we're not going to be like our parents. I'm not going to be like that. And then if we go into therapy, we find out, ooh, I think I got some. I have a case of it, and then we have to spend some time. reprogramming the inner dialogue. Does that help at all?

[34:19]

That hit a bell? Good. Helps to say yes, yeah. The silver tongue is the worst sword. It's worse than a soul. And it's so easy to adjust. You say everything. It's really kind of gotten my gears going again. Sometimes you just say things and I go, I'm guilty of it. I just say something and I walk away thinking, we're not going to collapse, not realizing that.

[35:28]

I've just totally shattered this person and not realized that I had just done. It's just like, well, you know, we think of practice. It's the truth. I'm just telling you how I feel. Just dumping my psychic garbage all over your head. That shouldn't bother you. You know, we don't realize. And we can, and especially in Sashin, it gets really subtle. You know, you can really... just give someone the stink eye without even looking at them. So it's really, it's amazing how we do it. We don't even realize how much we're creating a vibe that's not very pleasant because we're having a hard time. But as soon as we claim it and we're able to just claim I'm to ourselves, I'm having a hard time, then we can stop walking around like it's everybody else's fault. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

[36:30]

Thank you. Yes? You said earlier that we're all expert readers, and if I can confess it, I'm not. Especially with a lot of grief in the last four months, I actually realized that I'm during the day that I'm not reading. And... The practice of deeply remembering how I couldn't read has been extremely helpful. So I would like to respectfully disagree with you and say that maybe having a beginner's mind even as about reading. Thank you. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think we don't always notice that we're holding our breath. Like I said, it wasn't like I wasn't even holding it. It was almost like the end of the exhale and forgot the end.

[37:33]

Mm-hmm. It wasn't so much getting help. It was just not showing up. Not showing up. Yeah, and to return to remembering it might want to go all the way to that last three of it, you know, remembering the barrel that filled. without the basics of breathing. Thank you. Yeah. Peter. Thank you for your example. You mentioned the biggest part of our resources, that the concentration we build, concentration is a number of people. Well, I could just tell you about my own sad story about, you know, I was told to count my breath in groups of ten.

[38:46]

And so I would sit there, and they said, if you start thinking of something else, Go back to one. So you already figured it out, right? So I go one. You go, okay. One. Okay, one. So I couldn't get to two to save my mind. So I stopped counting. I just went in and out. I just followed it in and out. And when I saw I was going someplace else, I just kept coming back to my breath. And I did that for months. And I just, you know, it's humbling. Because I just felt like, you know, I'm an intelligent person. What's the matter? And it wasn't anything that, you know, low or high place. It had nothing to do with intelligence.

[39:49]

It had to just do with not having trained. And it just took practice. Anybody else got any ideas? That's what I have. Yeah. How do you have a shelter at home? What makes you think she doesn't know whether there's heaven or hell? What makes me... Oh. Well, I don't know. I'll amend that. I mean, Pema may know, but I don't. I don't know. I'm just saying that I do believe, though, that how I bring myself to this moment has a whole lot to do with whether I'm experiencing myself in a hell state or a heaven state or a plain state.

[40:53]

how I bring myself to the moment, and realizing that I actually have a way that I can bring myself to this moment with an open heart and an open mind, or I can be closed. So, but... Maybe, yes, well, yes. There's the one I can certainly create for sure in my mind. And then I don't know, well, there's some question about if there's anything out there anyway. So isn't it all in our mind in the first place? Yeah, Barbara. There's something about the children's story that disturbs me. The behavior of the abbot to provoke the person who He's supposedly trying to help, and it just doesn't fit with a teaching method.

[41:55]

Well, I think since we're not in the days of the samurai, I think that's a different culture, so I don't think we would do it quite that way today, but I think that for a teaching, I think we could say it's somewhat apocryphal. So I think your point's well taken. One more from the Chusot. Well, it occurred to me the question around concentration, us paying attention to concentration and traveling. It could be that we have an idea that we have trouble concentrating, but that that isn't really so. Because when we're interested in what it is we want to be with, We can concentrate. I can concentrate very easily on an online game to the degree that there is nothing else except that game. Or I can concentrate on a recipe I'm making or something I'm creating and there is no time and all my effort.

[43:06]

I'm only interested in this. So if the object of interest is what is happening internally, then we cultivate the attitude of what is going on here. I don't know what could possibly be going on here with some even enthusiasm. So can everybody hear her? Okay. Let me repeat a little bit. Because I think it's great what you're saying. So she said maybe we have an idea about ourselves, not not being able to concentrate or not knowing how or not having the ability. But in fact, if you notice when you're playing an online game or you're doing something that really does interest you, you don't have any trouble concentrating. She was mentioned a recipe or playing an online game where nothing else exists but what she's doing. And so cultivating that same interest in terms of what's going on inside

[44:12]

and starting to have some interest in, what is this about? What's going on here? Would definitely support your capacity to concentrate. So even being interested in your breath, as the Eno suggests, be interested in how that is moving or not moving in you. It's a way of supporting your own concentration. The bells are ringing. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:09]

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