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. My name is Cynthia Keir, and I'd like to welcome everyone to Beginner's Mind Temple. How many people are here who are new and here for the first time? Well, a lot of you, or several of you. Well, welcome. And welcome, of course, to the people who keep coming back. So I'd like to start my comments with a poem. This is a poem by Naomi Shiab Nye. It's called Kindness. Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things.

[01:08]

Feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt, in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go. So you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

[02:16]

You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore. only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. So... I have been here in the building for the last three days with my Dharma brother, Jeffrey Schneider, and some of our good Dharma friends. And we've taken some time out of our lives to retreat alone together. And the particular sangha that we form that has brought us together is the Sangha of Meditation and Recovery.

[03:24]

For those of you who don't know, there's a very robust program here on Monday nights and then a couple of nights at Hartford Street of this confluence of two practices of meditation and recovery. And so we've come together, and it was very nice. I knew some of the people and others I just had the chance to get to know for the first time. And, you know, when I think about the word recovery, I mean, of course, everyone here probably immediately thinks of 12 steps and things like that, and that isn't the truth, the basis, the genesis of that part of the program. But in a wider sense, I think we're all in recovery. We're all wanting to heal from something. We're all wanting to be returned and restored to a state of well-being. So whether you're in a specific 12-step program or not, I think I want to broaden the terminology so that we can all feel included. So as I got to know people and we got to talk, what I realized is that this sangha of about 11 of us, I think, came together as a microcosm of just life, just everywhere.

[04:41]

You know, people shared stories of the suffering, the challenges that they're enduring, dealing with, trying to be skillful with... over a whole range of areas. Everything from parents who are aging, parents who are actively dying, parents who have recently died, children who are challenging the suffering of their lives. Our own suffering, be it from loneliness or certain types of mental illness, the whole range. We even had somebody who had recently experienced in their sangha a suicide at the end of last week. So there's a lot of resonance in terms of some of the issues that I know residents and members of this community have felt as well. So my teacher, Darlene Cohen, always used to say that suffering in a certain way is just terribly banal. It's just everywhere. We can't get away from it.

[05:42]

But we know a couple of things about suffering. We know that suffering is hard. If you stop to feel your suffering, you can actually feel it in your body. constriction around the heart, aches in the bones. If you know people who have had hard lives, like people out on the street, you can say, oh, I see how hard their life is or has been on their face. And of course, it's because it's so hard that so many of us want to turn our gaze from it, try and come up with any number of strategies to obviate the feelings that arise with suffering. And, you know, given how many incredible, ingenious strategies there are, I'm amazed that anyone's in this room this morning. There's blue-bottled coffee, and there's smartphones, and there's Internet shopping, and there's any number of endless distractions. But the other thing that we know about suffering is that it's hardening.

[06:47]

It's not only hard, but it can be hardening. And this is something that I offer... to myself and to all of you as a cautionary note. You know, there could be such a tendency to become calcified internally to our suffering. And I'm sure that's not the reason why everyone is here today, but we know and have felt that in ourselves or seen it in other people. Another thing about suffering that I think we all experience is that it can be scary. Our suffering can cause us a lot of fear to catch a glimpse of it, you know, like a quick glimpse in the mirror sometimes can take our breath away. And we might be concerned that it could destroy us, that we might not be able to survive it somehow. Or maybe having figured out a way to survive our suffering, coming up with a successful strategy, we don't want to tamper with it.

[07:52]

We don't want to shake it up. Everything's fine. Don't go looking for more trouble. So those are the things that I think are some of the things that are common about suffering. So I just want to acknowledge that we are all here in some form of this practice wanting to be awake, awake to our lives, and we start by being awake to our suffering. There are so many metaphors in Buddhist practice about Buddha as the doctor, the Dharma as medicine. And so it takes a lot of courage and or a lot of pain to get us to this point in time. But nonetheless, if we are here and if we remain steadfast, we are about to embark or have embarked on an incredible, incredible journey. A lot of times when we're in that state of suffering, we just really don't know what to do. And there is something that Wendell Berry says that I think speaks to this.

[08:56]

It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. So there are many portals. in the wide pantheon of different types of Buddhism and Buddhist sutras and Buddhist teaching to enter into our suffering and to try to start working with it in a way that's really beneficial, that helps us to penetrate it, helps us to minimize it, helps us to work with it skillfully. From the perspective of Zen, we can go spelunking into the caves of our suffering with the flashlights of awareness and direct experience. But in the case of this particular meditation and recovery workshop, Jeffrey and I decided to turn to some of our Theravadan friends and to study the Brahma Vaharas. And how many people here are familiar with the Brahma Vaharas or the...

[10:02]

That's good. Blanche is familiar. All right. You get a gold star. Well, that's great because she's close. If I get into trouble, I can go to her for help. So the Brahma-viharas are also called the divine abodes. They're called the immeasurables. There is a way in which I think those two words alone or those two descriptions kind of speak to some of the spirit of the Brahma-viharas. And they're a very interesting, kind of a systematic way. of allowing us to look at our practice and to look at some of the aspects of our suffering. So I'm just going to talk for just a quick moment about the technology here. With the Brahma Baharas, there are like four general areas that we look to. The first is loving kindness. The second is, and that is Maitri.

[11:04]

The second is Karuna, or compassion. The third is mudita, or sympathetic joy. And the fourth is upeka, or equanimity. And I was sitting in this room such a long time ago that I actually had color in my hair. And I remember I was sitting on that side of the room, and there was a visiting teacher by the name of Kamala Armstrong, I think. And this was the first time I ever heard of this particular practice of the Brahma Vaharas and of loving kindness. And I was so shaken by it. The possibility of it had never occurred to me. Loving kindness? Wait a second, what is this? You know, Cynthia is locked in her habitual thinking of being critical of self and others, of having no compassion. You know, why don't we just get on with things, tough it up? tough it out, whatever. And so when I heard her speak about this, I have to tell you, it felt as though in a certain way water had been dropped into the desert of my heart.

[12:11]

And I really just felt something touched and some seed start to be cultivated. And I was so fascinated by it, I asked a question at the end, which was basically, could you repeat your whole lecture? I just can't grasp this. So how this works is that we start with loving kindness, which is a sense of wanting to extend goodwill to all beings. But we start here. We start with this one. To offer loving kindness, to offer any of these, first and foremost to ourselves, we must include this entity. This is Kishanti, one of the great paramitas, to include ourselves in our own suffering. And so we start here, and then progressively, as we feel more comfortable, as though we feel we're a little more engaged, more grounded, then if we are at the center, we go out another

[13:19]

concentric circle. And then we offer it to a friend, to somebody that we really care about, someone who it's very easy to offer loving kindness to. May Patty be free from pain and suffering. May Michael be healed and whole. And once we have that piece of it down, we then go out to somebody neutral. We're just taking our show on the road further and further. And we try to see what it feels like to wish somebody that is a very neutral person in our sphere, goodwill. And then, and here comes the tricky part, of course. Some of you know the other shoe that's going to drop. Then we offer loving kindness to someone who's a challenge for us. someone who we might call an enemy, or, you know, for me, just pushes every single button that I have, right? And that's a very interesting practice. Now, all of these, of course, can take any time.

[14:20]

The time involved can be variable, let's say. And then once we feel as though we have, you know, in some way, I'm not going to say mastered, because I think that's an inappropriate word under the circumstances. But once we have cultivated some understanding of this practice and have met with some sort of a softening with it, if you will, then we're able to extend it out to all beings. And so many of you who come here know, of course, the loving-kindness meditation. And this speaks to the third paragraph. May all beings be happy, may they be joyous, and live in safety. All living beings, whether weak or strong, in high or middle or low realms of existence, small or great, visible or invisible, near or far, born or to be born, may all beings be happy. So that is the first paragraph

[15:24]

step of this. And from loving kindness, we then move on to the other areas of trying to do the same with the topic of compassion, trying to truly be with other people's suffering, trying to not turn away or avert from the suffering that we see of people, first and foremost, of ourselves. and then next, going through the progression of people we feel friendly toward, and then on and on until we actually try to cultivate compassion for those who, you know, otherwise we might just say, great, you're suffering, terrific, finally, about time. So, which is an inclination we have, but it's kind of counter to the spirit of this paradigm. And then from there we move on to sympathetic joy. to actually have a sense of true happiness, that someone might have good things happen to them into their lives.

[16:27]

And once we have worked with Sympathetic Joy, we move to OPECA, which is equanimity. And this is an absolutely wonderful practice. They're all wonderful in their own way. But Apeka really is the place where we, I think, can experience a sense of balance and a sense of stability in our lives. So that is kind of the technology, if you will. And what often happens is with a particular person or a particular issue that we're dealing with in ourselves, that it's not possible to find immediate success. And so when that happens, or there might be a person that feels just too dangerous to us, who has wronged us so deeply that we can't embrace this person in terms of loving kindness. And so we say, you know, instead of saying, may so-and-so be free from pain and suffering, we say, may I have the willingness to forgive this person in the future.

[17:38]

So we always are looking to cultivate some sort of connection and engagement, even if it can't happen completely in this moment, if we can't truly offer ourselves up to it. And in a way, that's being respectful of what our genuine situation is and where we really are. I myself have kind of condensed this. You'll find, as I'm sure many of you already have, lots of almost like gathas, where people use various phrases for the loving kindness. But this is the one that I have honed for myself over the years. And I'd like everyone to just take a minute and actually maybe close your eyes and listen to this. And as I read it, note what happens in your body and your mind. And I'll read it twice.

[18:40]

May I be free from pain and suffering. May I be healed, whole, and happy. May I know the joy of my true nature. May I be at ease, and may I have peace. May I be free from pain and suffering. May I be healed, whole, and happy. May I know the joy of my true nature. May I be at ease, and may I have peace. So one of the things we did in our study time together these last couple of days was to actually just experience how those words feel as they hit the ear and as the concept hits the mind. And there are a variety of things that arise as possibilities. One is, wow, that's just impossible.

[19:45]

A couple of you experienced that, huh? I could never have that type of joy and ease. Some people experienced, you know, this is for other people. This isn't for me. This is not something that I could do. Or, you know, there's too much of a hallmark feel to it. There's something maybe too candied sweet about what's at the heart of this. And others, you know, just that more cynical, why would I even want it anyway? I'm fine with my... just the way I am and all the strategies that I'm using. But, you know, as I reflect on this particular... phrase. These are words, you know, in our culture that is so geared toward to speed. You know, think of the pace at which you live and operate in your day-to-day life, right? I mean, it's whoosh. There's no stopping. There's good news and bad news in terms of being so connected.

[20:49]

We're connected 24-7. I know in my own job, it's like, you know, there's like a a moral obligation to check my BlackBerry emails before I go to bed and to check them the first thing when I get out of bed. There's an expectation that we be so connected. So we operate in an environment where that's one element of it, that we have tremendous pressures on us to perform in all kinds of ways. The culture is just moving so, so quickly. In jobs, These days, especially, you know, you give your 50, 60 hours worth of work, and then they say, thank you very much, and by the way, more, more. And all of the messages from the culture are ones about acquisition, you know, and things that will really bring you happiness. So to actually entertain this idea that we could be free from pain and suffering...

[21:50]

that we could be healed, whole, and happy. These are messages we just don't even hear in our nine to five or nine to eight or whatever lives we live. And even in a broader culture, it takes a group of spiritual friends to remind us that these are things that not only are feasible, but these are things that would be beneficial. These are things that would actually help us. And I think that in the spirit of this, particularly the loving-kindness piece of the Brahma-Baharas, the Four Immeasurables, there is a wonderful sense of bounty and of ease. And most of us are operating, you know, like, I don't know where the market is. Thank God I've been away from CNN for three days. Don't tell me, don't tell me. I understand there's some volatility out there. Yeah. There's volatility in life. Why not in the markets? But the notion that we could actually have and embody and experience, we, each and every one of us, could genuinely touch and sink into the spirit of some of these words is something that we just don't, most of us, take time to really embrace or to take to heart.

[23:08]

And again, something that is not necessarily... And so many of us are coming from a peddling faster and faster to stay, you know, at just where we are, to stay in place. Or we bring to our lives an incredible sense of scarcity. maybe because of the karmic conditions of our upbringing, but we don't really even know where to begin in terms of giving ourselves a sense of nourishment, a sense of health and well-being, a sense of trust that there will be enough for us. So when we work with these Brahma-Baharas, what happens is... Over time, as we start to sink into them and experience them and cultivate a genuine relationship with them that says, yes, I do, I am getting some ease in my life. Yes, I am, amazingly enough, starting to feel compassion toward that family member who just drives me frickin' nuts.

[24:16]

Oh, I really am starting to feel happy for you that you have something that I don't. that I would like, but I feel genuinely happy for you. When this starts to happen and we experience it in ourselves, then we just naturally are so full that we want everyone else to experience. And then the process of giving it and extending it to all beings becomes really not so as foreboding or impossible or far-fetched as it might initially sound. I think that there are many, many benefits of a practice like this, but a few of them that come to mind are that it really allows us to experience something that, especially in the face of suffering, might not be something that we often experience, which is a softening.

[25:19]

Now, if you listen to those words, Do you feel a softening in yourself? Do they have some resonance with you in that way? And we've got to start somewhere, right? So rather than living a life, which is a life that I led for many, many years of being hunkered down and armored and just kind of shoulder to the wheel in the face of suffering and my whole idea of how Cynthia's world ran, which was... not right because it wasn't going the way Cynthia thought it should, this notion of starting to genuinely feel some softening up around this is... It's really nice. It just is nice. The image I was using the last couple of days is that the top soil of our lives can get very hard. It, too, can get calcified. And so this process of using the Brahma Biharas can start to loosen that soil and soften things.

[26:28]

And in the spirit of softening, we start to experience some things... at least for the type of person that I used to be, are pretty radical, which is flexibility, fluidity, meeting life on life's terms, life just as it is. And in that experience, then what we get to do is we actually get to relax. Oh, I don't know what's going to happen next, but I can relax. Or, oh, this is going on. It's not what I thought, but I can relax. And so I get to sink into the life that I actually have versus the life that I think I deserve or I think I want or I fantasize about. And that's a wonderful moment when that happens, when we kind of have a one-to-one correspondence with where we are in our very lives. That's very, very juicy. It's a great mode for healing. You know, if you find that you're feeling stuck with yourself about something where your critical mind is saying, damn it, why can't I do this better?

[27:36]

How come I don't, I'm not at this point, I'm only here. How come I, you know, this person just keeps annoying me. When you're stuck in a place like that, taking the Brahma Vaharas out for a quick spin can be very, very helpful and very, very healing because it really does start to dislodge things. And then we start energetically to feel things moving. Whenever we're stuck, not a good place to be. You know, suffering just pools and pools and pools. It is a... a way of predisposing ourselves to experience our lives in a way that is skillful, that's wholesome, that's beneficial. These are not things to achieve. Oh, I have loving kindness. Oh, I'm compassionate. Of course I am. Rather, they are states of mind.

[28:41]

And there are states of mind that each and every one of us can genuinely experience. And because none of us are fixed beings, and because nothing about life is fixed, we will come and we will go. We will have a dynamic experience of ebb and flow with them. But nonetheless, the intention that comes with them by practicing them, by bringing them into your lives, by working with them, is really a way of predisposing us to live in a way in relation with all beings, including ourselves, that is very much skillful and wholesome. And so what happens, you know, this morning we had the full moon ceremony, which is when we basically retake vows, and it's a really moving ceremony. And when I say vows in a less formal sense, what I mean is just we restate our intention. We restate our intention, whatever that is, if it's to be awake, or whether it's to lead a more upright life, or to make progress with a difficult person, we

[29:52]

we restate our intention. In his book, The Heart of Being, Dido Laurie talks about vow as putting into motion the karma of our intention. And I'm sure you have all noticed this. I mean, you know, whether it's something as perhaps frivolous as... you know, a diet, you know, I want to just start eating more healthfully, or I want to exercise more. You start putting the seed there, you start watering that seed, and you're increasing your chances that you're going to manifest that particular reality. So working with these allows us to start experiencing them from the same perspective. We're increasing our chances that we are going to, one, approach all of our lives with just this wonderful sense of bounty and ease, of loving kindness, of compassion, of sympathetic joy, and of equanimity.

[30:53]

And then that starts to unfold. You know, the other thing is that all of this in the aggregate winds up giving us a tremendous amount of balance, particularly equanimity. Because what we learn to be able to do is to be more spacious, to be more supple. Dogen talks about the value of this in terms of valuing a soft mind. He actually has a term for it, Robai Shin, grandmother's mind. And he says it doesn't matter. You know, it doesn't matter how much you know about Buddhism, how smart you are, how erudite you are. What really, really matters is the sense of compassion. You know, and very often we think, oh, in order to really practice I need to make sure I understand, you know, the teachings, the Dharma, the form. I can't make any mistakes. Then I'll practice when I've got that all under my belt. But the fact of the matter is the real invitation of practice is to enter into each and every moment of our lives.

[31:55]

And these Brahma Paharas allow us to do it. And compassion and equanimity really, really support us and give us balance in this area. And of course, it all finishes up by giving us, as well, a great deal of resilience. So even if we, you know, as we invariably will, kind of experience a lapse, loving kindness, loving kindness, oh, damn. then it's no big deal. What we have to do is just return. So much of practice is kind of getting the foundation and then learning always, building up the muscle to return, to not be demoralized by our own human actions, our own human foibles and frailties, not to be demoralized by some of the truly challenging tough situations that we encounter in our lives for ourselves and for others. But it is really, it's not to be perfect in any of those moments, but to put our best effort forward.

[33:03]

And when we're not satisfied with that effort, when we feel there's a dissonance between the space where we want to be and where we find ourselves, that we have this intention that we return. We renew our vow, as we did this morning. So let me just end. close to time, by rereading this poem about kindness. Also something that we don't often see on billboards. Hey, kindness. Available at... Maybe we should put it on Muni sides. And in the spirit of this whole topic of loving kindness, I just want to also offer a quote by the big guy. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and attention, affection and attention, but in this case we'll go with affection.

[34:14]

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. And that's a quote from Buddha. So let me read this one last time. Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things. Feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. how you ride and ride, thinking the bus will never stop, thinking that the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in the white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

[35:22]

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow, you must speak to it, till your voice catches the threads of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then, It is only kindness that makes sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread. Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend. Thank you. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[36:34]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:37]

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