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. Well, good morning, everyone. Good to see you all here. This morning was supposed to be our one-day sit. And due to the Abbott, the Acting Tonto, and the Eno testing positive for COVID, we canceled the one-day sit due to logistical as well as safety concerns. So we're here on Zoom for the Dharma Talk today. And I very much look forward to being back with a lot of you in person very soon. But it's good to connect with all of you around the world that are here. And welcome to the Dharma Talk here at City Center in San Francisco. I'm a resident priest here and the CFO of San Francisco Zen Center.

[01:01]

And we are making our way through these COVID times. So I wanted to start off with a... A story, and it's one that you might have heard before, but somebody who is a musician goes to the Buddha and says, should I maintain tight controls in my mind during meditation or should I let it flow? And because this is a musician, the Buddha replied, how do you tune your instrument? And the musician says, if I tune the strings too tightly, they break. And if they're too loose, no sound comes out. And the Buddhist said, well, just so you should hold your mind in meditation. And this is the million dollar question I think that I have and that many of us have about so many situations in life.

[02:01]

Is do I act or do I not act? Should I get more energy into this? Should I give more focus into this? Or should I relax more? Should I tighten? Should I release? Tight or loose? How do I know how to navigate? And we all have a default. We pretty much know what our default is. Whether we tend to be too tight and hyper-focused or whether we tend to be too loose. It reminds me of the character in Steinbeck's... novel of mice and men the feeble-minded lenny who um didn't know his own strength was very strong was a big person but wasn't that bright and he had a mouse that you know he loved and he loved it to touch things that were soft and he had this little mouse and it was in his pocket in the beginning of the novel you find out that lenny's mouse that's in his pocket is actually dead

[03:04]

And he still has the mouse there. He likes it. He likes to touch it because it's soft. But it comes out later that he actually squeezed the mouse too hard. He loved the mouse. But he also killed it. Because he squeezed it too hard. And there can be so many things in our life, in my life, that I love, that I'm trying to do good at. that I want to do well, relationships that I want to go well, jobs that I have that I want to perform well at, situations that I want to meet. But through my being too tight or overexerting, I might actually kill the mouse. There's a skillful side and an unskillful side to being both tight or loose. You know, on the unskillful side, if you're too tight, you can hyper-focus. You can hyper ignore. You can have hyper boundaries. You can be critical. You can be unforgiving.

[04:06]

And to lose, I might not take appropriate action. I might lack good boundary. I might lack appropriate focus. But with the skillful side, tight can be responsible, organized, dependable, persevering with diligent and appropriate boundaries. And loose can be open to others, open to ourselves, spacious, forgiven, using humor and creativity to lighten the heavy weight. It's not that either one is the one to go to, it's the fact that we need to shift. And knowing when to shift can be so difficult. What should I do in this situation? Have you ever said that? to a friend, to a mentor, to a counselor. What should I do in this situation? Should I give it more energy? Should I give it less energy? Navigating. This is something that we study in Zen. And our Zen practice gives us the context and tools to be with and to meet the moments in our lives, honing our gut as it were, as to whether to be tight or loose, to bring more energy or to relax.

[05:21]

to act, or to wait. Which one is my default? So the Buddha went the middle way, as we know. And the Buddha had experienced tight and loose. He had experienced a life of leisure without bringing too much focus or awareness to his life. He just kind of existed in a palace with everything being taken care of for him with very little awareness to the human condition, to the suffering, to what was going on with the people around him. He lived a fairly, I guess you could say, relaxed and loose life. And then, of course, the Buddha goes to the other extreme and becomes really rigid and tight and ascetic. and eating almost nothing and being incredibly diligent about every single little thing really buttoned up and it almost killed him.

[06:24]

It almost killed him. In fact, both of them almost killed him. And like that instrument player that the Buddha was talking to in the beginning of this, um, about whether or not to tighten the strings and what happens when the strings are too tight or too loose. Um, We need to find ways in which we can navigate. Ways in which we can tune the instrument where we actually hit the chord, where the note is actually what was being looked for. And that subtle way, just that little way of being. You might have experienced this before with an artist and listening to music. Have you ever... Have you ever had a favorite artist or musician or band, and they have a certain feel, a certain tone, a certain just approach and attitude that you can't really define, but it's a groove, it's a flow.

[07:29]

And somebody might say, well, this other band is just like them. And you say, oh, no, no, no, no, they're not like them at all. No, no, no, no. They hit this certain tone. They hit this certain way, this certain way of being. That's not like them at all. This is the way... This band is totally different than that band. They have a totally different attitude and approach and tone and everything. And to the novice, they're like, well, that's just the same. And that's what happens when we start learning the not necessarily... Do I tighten or do I get loose? But how do I be? How am I to be? How am I to flow with this situation? It's not do I go left or right, but can someone demonstrate for me how to be that tone, that nuance to navigate this situation that I find incredibly difficult?

[08:31]

because it's not about left or right, tight or loose. It's a flow. Now, if you had never seen anyone ever ride a bicycle before, and someone gave you a bicycle, you might think, well, that seems a little dangerous, and I don't know. I mean, I could really fall over on that. It's only got two wheels, and you need to be moving in order for those two wheels to stay in balance. how would I actually do this? Is this really a good idea? Now, if you've grown up seeing people ride bicycles all your life, making micro adjustments left and right. And as they're riding the bicycle, they don't think, do I go left or right? Do I need to reevaluate whether or not I need to lean this way or that way? A bicyclist isn't thinking about that. They're in the flow of actually riding, even though they are actually going left and right, tight and loose over and over and over again, just to keep themselves focused. But because we have seen this and we've seen it demonstrated, we don't think it's that strange or that extreme to get on a two-wheeled object and to propel ourselves forward going left or right.

[09:51]

We have seen it demonstrated. We can do this. A child has seen this. Children can ride bicycles. And in these machines called Segways that you might have seen, there are two-wheeled machines that you get on, and they self-balance. And if you've ever ridden a Segway, it's really fun because it just constantly rebalances you. And there's five gyroscopes. They're little tiny machines that are actually rebalancing themselves a thousand times a second. A thousand times a second, these little gyroscopes are in a Segway. And they're rebalancing themselves over and over and over again, left and right, left and right, left and right. And I am so many times in life and looking for my gyroscope for a certain situation that I'm trying to navigate, a certain minefield that I'm trying to go through. And I don't want to fall over and I don't want to make a mistake of being too tight over here and then too loose over here.

[10:54]

I want to be able to flow. I want to be able to flow just like with that segue. And sometimes it feels like my gyroscope is just not working. And maybe it's in an area that I have never navigated before. And I really need help because the family that I grew up in, the family that you grew up in, didn't have all of the answers. No one's family had all the answers. And in fact, some of the ways we saw some stuff demonstrated in our family was just the opposite of how to navigate. And we internalized that as well. And in Zen, we have this great tradition called warm hand to warm hand, where it recognizes the value of teachers and of being taught. And there's so many ways we can learn. We can learn from a formal teacher, a counselor, a mentor, a Zen teacher. And we can learn from our friends.

[11:56]

We can learn from a child. We can learn from nature. There's so many ways that can be our teacher. But we are all learning. And as David Foster Wallace said, we are all worshiping. It made me laugh one time when someone said, I don't know if I want to come by Zen Center and spend too much time there. I might get indoctrinated. And I kind of laughed and I said, you will. And everywhere you go, whether it's the online gaming community, whether it's individuals that are into tractor repair or knitting or music or motorcycles or dance, you will get indoctrinated because we have these things called mirror neurons. And we learn from the activities of others. And we digest from that which is around us. And so we come and we intentionally find teachers, somebody who might be able to emulate some of that stuff that we didn't learn growing up. Some of that stuff that we just don't have inherently inside.

[12:58]

I asked my teacher, Ryushin Paul Haller, to be my teacher the week that I went to one of his talks during an intensive here in 2009. And he was giving a talk here at City Center. And I forget what the talk was even about. But I remember I really liked it. I thought it was a great talk. And I was really engaged. And it was an intensive so we could bring pen and paper. And it was a longer talk, about 90 minutes. And I'd taken a whole lot of notes and things I wanted to follow up with him about. And afterward, he did Q&A. And I don't know why, but the first two people that asked questions were really took him to task over some really pedantic points. They were like, yeah, but what about this? And I don't know about that. And I was really annoyed that they were asking questions in this way. I thought it was really trivial and they were off in the weeds. And, you know, there were so many other better things to explore.

[14:03]

And I thought, you know, I really hope Paul brings us back around to the focus of what he was talking about and not following these kind of silly pedantic questions off in the weeds. And I was kind of annoyed. And I was kind of ready for Paul to do this, to bring us back, you know. But he didn't do that. He answered each question like it was a really important, insightful question. And he made the person feel good about the asking of that question and the curiosity that they expressed. And he just met them. with spaciousness and i sat there and i thought that is something that i want that is something that i want to be able to emulate rather than being tight and resistant to someone that i feel maybe really isn't doing what i want maybe isn't really

[15:09]

expressing the dharma or their curiosity in a way that i think is really skillful to really to meet that person and i asked him later that week if he would be my teacher and he's been my formal teacher for the last 13 years they did this experiment one time with tennis players novices people who had not played tennis before, maybe you've heard of this experiment, but they gave them two months to learn how to play tennis. And one group they gave normal tennis instructions to, they took them out to the court and they had them hit the tennis balls and follow the instructors, um, different skill routines every day for practicing forehand and backhand and serving and all of this sort of thing. And then the other group, they did something different.

[16:10]

They gave them a racket and they let them go onto the tennis court. But most of what they did was they showed them videos, these big videos of people who were professional tennis players and how they played tennis. And they told these people, this second group, that you're going to be in a movie. And you don't need to necessarily be able to play tennis, actually. You just need to look like a professional. You just need to be able to look like you know what you're doing. You need to kind of have the form and the attitude and the body language of somebody who is a professional tennis player. And you're going to be an extra in a movie. And you're going to need to be able to look like you know what you're doing. And it doesn't matter where the ball goes or whether it lands wherever, but just look like a professional. So they would spend time watching professionals play tennis. Then they would go on the tennis court and they would try to, you know, move around and hit the ball. But nothing had to do with the results.

[17:10]

It was just about the form. Now, you might kind of guess where this is going, but after two months, they had actually both of those two groups play each other in tennis, and the group that was told they were going to be in the movie won hands down. They were actually digesting the way, the how, of somebody who knows how to do this. They were digesting the how, all the little tiny things that can never be explained. You could never really digest. How somebody who knows how to navigate in this area, the how of doing it. The how of doing it. You might have heard of the type of architecture called Japanese joinery. Some of our buildings at Tassajara are built this way.

[18:11]

It's a very difficult type of architecture, very difficult type of craftsmanship to actually execute. Very large beams that need to be cut in very specific ways without nails or glue or anything to hold them together. They must fit like those Lincoln Logs, maybe you've seen the game where things are stacked. But everything is cut just so. So the tools need to be honed precisely. And the wood needs to be cut precisely. It's a very meditative art. And it's something that's been passed down from generation to generation in Japan. And in fact, it's so revered that if you're an apprentice in Japanese joinery, you are not supposed to even be caught looking at the master. You're supposed to sneak glances because you're not supposed to be taking away from their focus. And in the first year as an apprentice in Japanese joinery, you don't even get to touch the wood or cut anything.

[19:17]

Traditionally, all you do is carry the tools, set up the wood, sharpen the tools, and take glimpses of the master, noticing how they go about things, noticing their aura, their attitude, their approach, their speed, how they fix things, how they correct things, learning to be in the presence of someone who has learned how to navigate something that is incredibly difficult. brought with all sorts of opportunities for it to go wrong. And when you see these giant pagodas in Japan with these massive beams of wood, they were all honed precisely with tools and hoisted and then set without any nails, without anything to join them except for gravity. And this ancient tradition is handed down just like it is here in at San Francisco Zen Center, warm hand to warm hand, of people working with each other, and the how of the navigating, of being with this moment, and not asking, do I go left or right?

[20:34]

Should I be tight or loose? But learning in your gut to hone that, how is it going? I can remember asking my teacher, Paul Heller, At Tassajara one time, I had been there for three years, and he came down to lead a practice period. And one dokusan, I asked him, a dokusan is where you sit formally and you meet with a teacher. And I asked him, I said, what am I doing here? And he said, honing your gut. Honing your gut. Learning how to approach things. Learning how to be with people. learning how to eat, learning how to navigate, learning how to be pliant. Lots of analogies around reeds blowing in the wind in Zen koans and around Zen stories and around bamboo and around things that can withstand and bend and pop back up and can absorb.

[21:47]

but not break and absorb the impact client learning how to be with. And if I'm too rigid, when something comes, I might break. And if I'm too, too loose, I might become unrooted, but nimble, nimble, the nimbleness of being able to move just a little bit left and a little bit, right. The nimbleness, the pliantness of our spirit and honing that. I want to tell you about two teachers that I had outside of this formal practice. And the first one has to do with this, this nimbleness, especially. And she was a senior project manager at Sony entertainment in Los Angeles. And her job was to work on all of the video games that Sony Entertainment produces.

[22:54]

And you might not realize it, but when they put these video games together, there's a storyline, and there's characters, and there's backstories. And then there's all these voice actors that need to act the different parts. And they might have ideas about how they need to act the part. And the... Writers that write the narratives, of course, are creative types that want to have their ideas validated. And her job was to go into a room with these folks. And I was taking a class on voice acting with her one time. She came up from Los Angeles and was teaching this class on voice acting. But the thing that I learned from her was not about voice acting. It was about nimbleness. She was a senior project manager around all of these creative types. And if you've ever been around creative types, especially professionals, that their lifeblood is to write or to act, you get them in a room and you're trying to decide, how are we going to go with this narrative?

[23:55]

And everyone wants their voice to be heard, and everyone wants this or that to be validated. And she was so good at setting boundaries and hearing people. She was able to hear people. And when she rejected an idea, you didn't feel like it was just like she took herself somehow or another. She had this magic thing where she took herself and her ego out of the equation. And it wasn't there in the room. And when she talked, it was like, you know, we're going to go with this idea. And that's not such a great idea. We're going to we're going to massage this over here a little bit more. And we're going to choose this person to do the voice acting of this thing. And now, no, we need that a little bit louder. No, no, no. How you're doing it, it needs to be a little bit softer. I do a poor job of mirroring exactly how she did it. But she was just like riding a bike. She was navigating left and right and feeling.

[24:56]

how to actually be with this moment over and over and over again without having to really think about whether or not I need to go left or right, tight or loose. She was just with the people as they were speaking. And I can remember just sitting there and going, I am learning something totally different from this class than what you came here to teach. But I'm learning actually how a person leads a room full of people that are type A personalities that all want to be heard and letting them all feel validated while at the same time accomplishing something. Not an easy task. Sometimes just doing that with one person can be enough. And I could see why she was a senior project manager at Sony Entertainment and why she ran the entire creative video gaming project. because she got things done and everyone wanted to work with her.

[25:57]

There's different things that we learned growing up and some of those things we don't want to replicate anymore. And there's other things we learned that were great. There's many things I learned in my family that I'm so thankful for my mother and father for, that I'm thankful for every single day. And there's things that I learned that I'll be unlearning the rest of my life. The other example I wanted to talk about was my mentor growing up named or my mentor in the Middle East named Corey Erickson. And Corey did something that I did not learn in my family. He was the head of ambassador projects for Ambassador Foundation in the Middle East, a nonprofit organization that worked with developing countries to bring skilled professionals into the country where they needed folks they couldn't pay for, essentially.

[27:09]

And I was there working with young men that had Down syndrome and cerebral palsy and doing vocational training. And Corey was the head of the ambassador projects in the Middle East. And he lived just down the street from me. And I would go there in Amman, Jordan to Corey's apartment, oh, two or three times a week for meetings and to talk about how things were going. And I thought he was really old and wise. I was 21 at the time. He was 28. So he was quite old. And I would go down the street. We would talk about the projects and how things were going. And there was a conflict that was going on at the center that I was working at. And I was really disturbed by what was going on. And I felt like I knew what needed to happen and I needed his help. And I went there, and it was with several people that were working on different projects there in Amman, Jordan, or in the room with him. And Corey and I got into an argument. We got into an argument about what should actually be done.

[28:11]

And it actually became quite heated. And it got heated to the point where it turned personal. And Corey was a very energetic, passionate person. person but definitely passionate and energetic and I can be very energetic and opinionated and we got into it and it turned very personal and we started to criticize each other's motives and each other's intentions and And it got really heated and it got so heated that I was going to storm out of the room and I was just going to, all right, I'm just going to leave. And I got up and I stormed out of the room and I stormed out of the apartment and I slammed the door and I was going to go home. And then I realized I went the wrong direction. And I was now in Corey's bathroom. And all those people are out there sitting in the main room.

[29:12]

And the only way for me to get out of this apartment is to walk back through all of that room and out the other side. This is not going to be good. So I waited about five minutes in the bathroom and tried to collect myself, tried to figure out how I was going to I was like, all right, I'm just going to walk out really quickly, walk around the back near the wall, and I'm going to walk out the door, and that's just going to be the end of this. I'm going to slam the door. I'm going to leave and whatever, and I'll be embarrassed later about walking into the bathroom. I don't care. I'm just going to get out of here. So there I went. I opened up the bathroom door. I walked down the hallway really quickly. I entered into the main room. I started to go toward the back wall, and Corey popped up from his chair. I was like, oh, no. And he walked over to me and he got with him about that close to my face. And he put his arms around my neck like this. And he said, I'm so sorry.

[30:17]

I shouldn't treat you that way. You're one of the most respected people on this project. And even if you and I disagree, I want you to know that I really love you and I care about you. And I really don't want to behave that way because that's disrespectful to you. And I hope you can absorb my apology. I didn't learn that growing up. That's not how we dealt with conflict. We usually didn't talk to each other for a few days or whatever, and then eventually we got back to just doing stuff, you know. And I love my family, and I learned all sorts of great things from them. But when people got mad like that, that's not how things got solved. And Corey demonstrated that to me on that day, and it just melted me.

[31:19]

We are constantly teaching each other and giving each other the examples that we have from our past and from our life and from things that we learned. And there's so many people out there that can be our teachers that are emulating things that we didn't get growing up. Learning to look for those things. Learning that everywhere we go, we are worshiping. Learning that we have mirror neurons that take in how things are done and absorb them. We take in attitude. We take in approach. And we can learn from a teacher as though, I don't think this is going to work. Or we can learn from a teacher with curiosity of, maybe this will work. Let's try this on for size. Because we're not trying to be clones of our teacher. We're just trying to learn the how of how they have learned to navigate.

[32:30]

It's the attitude of trying things on as though they might work. Trying it on for size. Being willing to fully engage it as though it might work. And learning how to reflect it in our own way. like our own prism. There's no two prisms that are the same. They all refract light a little bit differently, a different spectrum from each prism, the exact same sun. We're here to tell our own story, but we're learning to navigate from the world around us and actively choosing and looking for areas that maybe we're not so strong in and who has something to teach us in that area. I've learned so many things from people at Zen Center like Paul Haller. And I've also learned loads of things at Zen Center from individuals that are their first day in the door. And wherever it is that they came from, I don't know what happened, but they learned something that I didn't.

[33:37]

And it's such a powerful teacher. But learning to look for those things and doing a self-inventory. What are the things that I haven't learned so well in regard to navigating? Do I know what those are? Have I ever spelled those things out for myself? Where do I yet not navigate so well? Who do I know who actually navigates fairly well in this area? That's an interesting study to undertake and to undertake it with spaciousness, not as a self-critical exercise, but just as a way of saying there could be teachers. There could be folks that are out there have learned how to hit that chord. that are actually in tune in that area. Where all I feel that I'm doing over and over again is sounding out of tune. But they have, they have honed the instrument and that string tight or loose, tight or loose. They have honed that string where now when it is struck, it's in tune.

[34:44]

Hmm. How did you do that? How did you do that? And you just watch like somebody who's learning Japanese joinery, like somebody who's learning to ride a bicycle, like anything that you're doing or you're watching a master or somebody who has learned a way growing up. Someone told me about a, um, Cowboy that they learned how to mend fences from is the same sort of thing. They said, cowboys don't talk a lot. In fact, the entire day, you know, if you're out with a cowboy or a cowgirl, there's just not a lot that said most of what is taught is demonstrated. And this person grew up in Montana and she said that she learned how to mend fences from an old cowboy.

[35:48]

so that the cows can't get through, so that the horses can't get through, but not so that it injures them, and so that it doesn't need to be done next week. In a certain way, in a certain approach, and how tight the barbed wire needs to be, not too tight, not too loose, how the fence posts need to be, how to spot things that are a little bit askew. And she said, maybe we said two sentences a day. But the rest of it was just doing the work. It was the how. The how things were done. And I think about Corey and I think about standing in that room back in Amon Jordan. And I learned a lesson for life. That people don't just have to be mad at each other. That you actually can have something melt in a moment. If somebody is willing to get down. And be the first. And to connect on a heart level.

[36:52]

That is possible. I knew that was intellectually possible before Corey did it. But I never saw it demonstrated that way. So poignantly and in such a timely way. And it's a lesson that I'll never forget. Our Zen practice gives us the context and tools to be with and to meet the moments in our life, honing our gut as to whether to tighten or release, to bring more energy to something or to relax, to act or to wait. And the how of that learning comes from the many teachers around us, realizing that we are always worshiping. And if we can become aware of what we are learning and seek out those who may have a demonstration for a way to walk a path that we are unable to traverse, it gives us the experience of what a tuned note even sounds like.

[37:56]

And we start to let our own expression unfold in how to navigate more skillfully. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:32]

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