Vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. My name is Yvonne Rand, and I practiced here in this meditation hall for a number of years, and now practice down the road. And I'm always very touched and happy to be in this wonderful practice space, and to see my old friends, Shakyamuni Buddha and Manjusri and Jizo and Tara, and all of you. So it's the first Sunday of the month, so I want to begin by saying a few things to the young members of our gathering this morning. As some of you may know from listening to your parents

[01:08]

or other adults in your lives, our world is full of suffering, and I think especially so these days. And I want to invite each of you to consider saying some prayers for other children like yourselves who live all over the world, here and other places, that you might do the practice of saying prayers for them. Because it seems that when we say prayers for people, there's some benefit from doing that. And the prayer that I want to suggest to you is a very old one that has to do with the cultivation of the heart. And it's based on the understanding that everybody,

[02:08]

every single being wants to be happy. And I imagine that's true for every one of you. And it's probably true for all of the people that you know. So based on that, you can maybe more easily imagine that it might be true for people you don't know as well, that they want to be happy. So the prayer goes like this, but you can also fiddle with it. You can change the words if you want to. May all beings be happy, be well, be at ease, be peaceful. And you can begin by having that prayer or wish for the people you know, the people you're closest to, your families and friends,

[03:11]

and people you don't know very well, but that you see sometimes, like when you go to the grocery store or go to get the car full of gas, or even people you see driving down the road. And then the next group of people you think about with this prayer are people you don't know, near and far. And last, you consider the people you don't like or that you think don't like you. You don't start with them. You kind of warm up your heart energy with the people for whom it's easy to say, I want them to be well and at ease and peaceful and happy. So I know that some of you are going to do some project

[04:13]

with Wendy this morning. And one of the things you might do with her help is to actually put the prayer into the things that you're going to be working with so that you actually drop this thought for the well-being of others into whatever you're making. And of course you can do that with anything. You can do it when you, if you ever sew something, you can actually sew that thought into what you're sewing or cooking, or if you're going to be pressing some leaves, something like that that Wendy has in mind for you to do. You can actually drop that thought into what you're making. So I hope that you can keep this thought that can manifest as a kind of prayer from your heart,

[05:14]

especially for all the children in the world who need us to be holding them in our hearts, in our heart mind. But also remember that the prayer should always include yourselves. It's not instinctive, it's not instinctive. Instead of you, it's including each of you. Okay? I don't think that's 10 minutes, but I think it's enough. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Yeah. Good morning.

[06:21]

Good morning. So now that leaves the rest of us. I think that for many of us, this is a very troubling time in the world. The suffering quotient seems to be very high, even for the planet itself. Which is not to say that there has not always been suffering but it does look like we are destroying our nest. And I think that particularly for those of us who live here in the Bay Area, where we have an extraordinary level of ease and abundance, we can get caught by some superficial yearning

[07:46]

for comfort and happiness and amusement and above all, distraction. We do live in a society which has cultivated distraction into a fine art. If you are doing any kind of practice for cultivating being in attention, you will begin to notice very quickly all of the pulls out of attention. So I think it has always been true, this admonition about don't waste time with respect to our inner lives, our spiritual lives. But I feel it more palpably, partially because I'm older, but also I think because of the condition of the world.

[08:49]

And I think that it is very easy for us to imagine or assume that we are helpless to make a difference. The scale at which our world needs some change may seem quite overwhelming. And I want to invite all of us to take up the possibility that if each one of us can do whatever we can, whatever arises in the moment under our noses to act for well-being, for wholesomeness, for being awake, rather than being asleep, we may be surprised at what can happen. One of the things we can all do on Tuesday is vote.

[09:54]

And I'm not saying anything about who you should vote for. I just hope everybody votes, for example. So what I'd like to talk about this morning is a way to consider this period of time which I always think of as beginning in September, going through the new year, the so-called holiday season. Going back to school, Yom Kippur, Halloween, Day of the Dead, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and solstice, Christmas and New Year's. I want you to feel invited to consider

[11:01]

that you could consider this period of time as the time which is saturated with possibilities for the cultivation of the heart and for the cultivation of our inner lives. The process that I'm talking about does mean going against the mainstream, but the benefits are surprising and significant. Some years ago, my family and I decided that we would not be engaged with present exchanges during the holidays. And I was struck by how many years it took us to actually drop it. And what a bad reputation we have in the extended family, like we're somehow spoil sports. So what was required was a certain conviction

[12:11]

about just dropping out of the commercialization of the holiday season. I was struck this year, I wonder if any of you were, Halloween is now on the map as a commercial event. I have been traveling some in October in other parts of the state and was surprised at how much it's not just local, this is happening in many, many places. So I actually take each holiday and think about it in terms of what is the quality or what is the focal point for this particular holiday? And is there a way that I can work with that focal point in terms of my inner life,

[13:11]

in terms of my spiritual practice? Is there a way that I can attend differently to the inner experience as well as my outer behavior? So for the last two months, our meditation room has been full of dead creatures, noticing impermanence, getting ready for Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Old mummified mice, skeletons of some finches, a fox skull and a possum skull, a beautiful gopher skeleton, quite beautiful, a thigh bone trumpet from Tibet and so on.

[14:18]

And so for the last two months, those of us who practice together have been doing various practices having to do with bringing our attention to the fact of change. One woman who I've been practicing with now for a number of years has had enormous resistance to looking at impermanence. And what got her was the beauty of the finch skeletons as though in flight. And she kept looking at them during one of our meditation times and a day long. And finally said, do you have a magnifying glass? So I gave her a magnifying glass and she began to look at these skeletons which vary in age from maybe eight months

[15:21]

since the bird died to a couple of years. It was the beauty of the bird skeletons that brought her into closer attention. She began to see that there's still life in the skeletons, all the nearly invisible munchers. And it was through her experience of the beauty of the skeletons that she found her resistance beginning to melt just in the nick of time because since then she's had two deaths in her life which she was certainly more present for. And more willing to be present for. So at the end of this week after the Day of the Dead had passed and after we'd done various practices,

[16:23]

the next turn is to Thanksgiving. I've always thought that Thanksgiving was of all of our holidays during this season one of the easiest with respect to giving thanks, the practice of giving thanks, of appreciating, of noticing what we have to be thankful for. And in particular for those of us who are a little cranky, have a kind of cranky nature or habit, some habit about seeing what's wrong, noticing what we have to be grateful for, what we can be thankful for can be a very correcting kind of practice so that we come more into balance in what we can see about what is so. And the practice of gratitude, of thanksgiving,

[17:31]

spawns generosity which will come whether we like it or not in December. It has been a number of years since I have dreaded these holidays. Finding a way to fully take up what each of the holidays is focusing on has become easier and more full with enormous benefit for me and for those around me. I actually make an effort in the month after Thanksgiving to go shopping very little, to go to the grocery store even as infrequently as possible,

[18:36]

to stay out of the car as much as possible so that I can stay underneath the kind of frenetic radar that has become so cultivated in our society at this time of year. So I'm talking to you about all of this because the easiest of the holidays is the next one. It's Thanksgiving. And I would invite you to find ways of bringing that focus, what do I have to be thankful for into your lives if you can every day for the rest of this month. You may be surprised at what you begin to notice

[19:40]

and what begins to be possible that you hadn't imagined before. As I said to the children before they left, it's very important that we do practices of the heart, actually all of our practices in ways that include ourselves not instead of. So we might begin today with bringing our attention to what am I thankful for right now for myself in my life? I have a, at least these days, a bone spur in my left hip.

[20:41]

So if I move a little out of balance or out of alignment, my hip can get quite cranky. And one of the things I'm thankful for since this bone spur had developed is on the days when I can walk with ease, I am thrilled. But I wasn't nearly so thrilled before I had the bone spur. I just took it for granted that I could walk with ease. I used to enjoy walking up on the ridge to the south of this valley. And I can walk up there, but it's not so good for my hip to walk down. And I don't think I fully enjoyed those walks up the ridge when I was able to make them. So every day when the ridge is not covered in fog

[21:47]

and I look up there and think about how beautiful it is up there, I use that noticing to help me come back to what is possible today with the condition of the physical body that I have. How much we take for granted, how much we assume we will be able to do without any noticing that, of course, everything about our bodies, about our state of mind, about our lives is subject continually to change. So the practice of thankfulness, of appreciation can help us in the very deep and penetrating cultivation called seeing things as they are, seeing more clearly.

[22:49]

Sometimes people ask, those of us who are practitioners of the Buddhist teachings, isn't this a kind of grim path, all this focus on death and impermanence and what an old friend of mine used to call the miserable details? But my experience is that longtime practitioners actually have about them a quality of joyfulness. If I can see things as they are, if I can bear it, if I am willing to see what is so, I am more likely to be developing my capacity to be present, to be in the moment. We miss so much when we fall into our conditioned mind

[23:58]

of living in the future and in the past. And one of the things we miss is coming to know our capacities. I'm quite convinced that very few people have much inkling of what their capacities are, that our capacities as human beings are extraordinary. But if we keep living out of our conditioning, if we keep living out of reactive habit, habit of the mind, reactive patterning in emotions, all of what is gathered under this reference of conditioning, we're not present enough to begin to access, much less develop our great capacities. Pardon me.

[25:04]

Someone very close to me had a heart attack about three and a half or four months ago. And in the last two weeks has had two more surgeries and is right now having a third one. He had bypass surgery for five arteries. This is someone who's been drinking the leftover butter after artichokes were served at dinner, going around the table, you know. And guess what? Actions have consequences. And neither he nor his immediate family have brought their attention to the fact of change. So these circumstances of the last three and a half or four months are a great surprise,

[26:08]

a great and terrible surprise. If we are not willing to be awake to our lives as they are, we will then be more likely to be surprised with the occurrences in our lives, whatever they may be. I am deeply, deeply grateful for this ancient path marked by the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha about how to wake up, a path that gives us the yoga, if you will, for the process, the specific details of the process of slowly but penetratingly being more and more awake,

[27:09]

not falling back into what is familiar and in service of being asleep. And I know from my own life that I am indeed much happier and have much more capacity for calm, for an open heart, for a generosity than was true some years ago. And that that is possible, that kind of transition or transformation is possible for all of us. We have a tendency sometimes to say, oh, well, I don't have time or I'll do it on the weekend or next summer when I have a vacation,

[28:11]

I'll go on a retreat and really knuckle down, that kind of putting off until later. So part of what I'm suggesting to you about using the holidays as they come is a way of taking what is arising in front of us and using our intelligence and our imagination to see how to shape the focus of the society we live in in service of the kind of cultivation that is at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. The only way we will come to a really full, developed gratitude on Thanksgiving Day is if we are cultivating that quality of mind beginning this morning.

[29:12]

And if we do this practice of focusing our attention on finding the answers, continuously finding the answers to, for what am I thankful? For what do I feel gratitude? That this becomes a path for cultivating the capacity for gratitude in the mindstream. My suggestion is that you might start with quick, right now. What are 10 things you're grateful for? And please let them be very specific. Just close your eyes for a few moments and make yourselves a list. 10. Taking the cultivation of gratitude in that way

[30:48]

so that you bring up very specific circumstances or qualities or aspects in your life is the way to cultivate the kind of mind quality that will begin to deepen and develop. To be grateful in general is practicing keeping everything a little out of focus. So I want to invite you to do the cultivations that you pick up by being very specific. Don't wait until you can't walk to be grateful for walking. Don't wait until your dear friend has passed away

[31:55]

before you tell them how much you care about them. I had a kind of slap in the face the other day. I went to see an old friend who is now 100 and she said, is the only time you're going to come and see me when you think I'm dying? And she was, of course, right. She was thinking about dying the day she called me. But it was very clear she wants me to come and see her on the days when she's not dying. Also. I think for any of us who've had the experience of being in a situation and having what arises as, oh, too late. And we sometimes say to ourselves,

[32:56]

it's too late for me to go and say such and such to so and so. Is it really? Or is the designation of it's too late a kind of excuse, a way of letting ourselves off the hook? Even to say something that we want to say to someone who has passed away, just because they aren't in a body, does it mean that you can't still speak to them? As a kind of a lingering of the Day of the Dead and the Seikaki ceremony that was done here last Sunday, this afternoon I'm going to do a ceremony that I do four times a year.

[33:57]

That is a ceremony for unborn and newly born children who've died through all of the ways in which they die, through abortion and miscarriage and sudden infant death syndrome and all of the ways in which a brand new baby may die. I've been doing this ceremony for a number of years. And it's basically a ceremony which is based on a traditional Buddhist funeral and memorial service, has all the elements of that adapted to this particular focus. And here on my left is this magnificent Jizo Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva of compassion, who is the focal point in this ceremony,

[35:03]

calling upon the compassion that has this quality of protection and nurturance for those beings who have died, guiding them with that quality of nurturance and protection to the realm or circumstance presided over by Amida Buddha. But of course, what I love about the ceremony is that with not much adaptation, it makes sense for people, no matter what their religious tradition is. Because what we're calling upon is whatever manifestations of compassion there are that we have some sense of that we can call upon bigger than ourselves. And that by having a ceremony, a ritual, where there is some clear container,

[36:03]

some boundedness within which to allow all of the carried but often unacknowledged or unexpressed feeling that arises from the experiences of miscarriage and abortion in particular, which we as a society don't seem to know what to do with. Not so unusual given that we don't attend to dying nearly to the fullness that was true 100 years ago and is true in other cultures. So if there are any of you who wish to attend the ceremony, you're invited to do so. It will begin at two o'clock. I bring this up partially because I want people to know

[37:07]

that it's happening this afternoon, but also because the occasion of this ceremony is for some people revisiting what they feel it's too late to do anything about. And yet over and over again in the years that I've been doing the ceremony, what I see is that people discover that it is not too late to attend to suffering no matter when it happened. If I'm still carrying the experience of suffering, then I can attend to it now. So perhaps that's enough. And I hope you will understand my suggestions as really invitations to explore

[38:09]

some possibilities for yourselves. Some possibilities for your own and others' happiness as we enter into this challenging time of year, as the days get shorter and the nights get longer, and as we pretend that it's light all the time. Unless you live on this side of the hill where we periodically lose electricity, which I always consider a great blessing. I'd like to encourage you to consider that the Thanksgiving holiday, and whatever you celebrate in December, it has to do with remembrance of various kinds, but also very much about generosity, and the solstice, which is about light

[39:10]

in the midst of darkness, and then, of course, the turning of the year, that you will, out of your own creativity and imagination, discover, which I'm sure you can do your own ways of bringing these various calendrial markings as the occasion of allowing your inner life to have more fullness. Our world needs us to do this very much now. If our inner lives are full and lively, if we are moving towards being more awake, we will see things that may not even involve doing something but are more cultivating our capacity for being present. And out of that, innumerable blessings arise.

[40:15]

Thank you very much. May our intention.

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