This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. First of all, I'd like to thank the abbess. for inviting me to give this talk and for inviting me to give talks at all this practice period. It's very unusual for someone other than the leader of the practice period, the tanto and the abiding teacher to give talks, so I'm very deeply grateful. I'd also like to thank you for your talk yesterday, which I found so deeply encouraging. And in yet another instance of we're all kind of in the same mind, I've been working on this talk, which is on very similar themes for days now.

[01:13]

So it was, you didn't give my talk, you simply embodied it. Thank you. And the abbess had asked us, the three of us, to talk about shikantaza again during this sishin as a way of supporting our practice together and of coming back to this ground we share through this practice. And again, when I think about Shikantaza and Dogen, what immediately comes up is that although Dogen extols Zazen to the skies, literally, he says very little about exactly what to do.

[02:21]

There's a book called Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation, And although scholarly work goes through all of this, pretty much ends by saying he doesn't really say what it is, which I think is actually completely appropriate. Very concrete about what to do with the body. And then this very subtle instruction The essential art of zazen is think not thinking. And then there's all his other works. The practice instructions are really on the body. Even the shingi is focused on the body, what we do.

[03:25]

It's awakening through the body. So we study the Buddha way by studying the self. And mostly when we sit, when we study the self, what comes up is our old karmic habits of mind. We see how we keep thinking. see the content of our thoughts. And at some point we start seeing how all the thinking is to get away from all the things that are uncomfortable. And we see our, you know, the greed, hate, and delusion. We see how we grasp after sense pleasures or love or whatever it is that we want that's largely about getting away from what is so intolerable, what we're trying to avert from.

[04:42]

And then there's a whole other layer of things that we just ignore, the ignorance, which we don't talk about a whole lot. You know, what was the phrase, the unknowable unknowables? There's what we know, what we know we don't know, and what we don't know that we don't know, because we can't see it yet. One of the great things about Sangha practice is others can usually see it pretty well. What is a mystery to us is often not a mystery to others. even on the most basic, basic levels. And we're so often focused on getting it right, getting our lives right, getting zazen right. How am I supposed to do this? How do I do it right?

[05:43]

Sojin Roshi, my teacher, is very patient and very... But if you want to get him a little miffed, you can talk about having a good or a bad period of zazan. Judging your zazan. You'll actually hear something about that from him. Don't judge your zazan. And I found this quote from Suzuki Roshi. It says, Dogen Zenji said, when you hit the mark... that is the same effort you have been doing. Suppose after trying 99 times a failure, you hit the mark at the 100th time. That effort, that meaning of hit the mark and the meaning of losing the mark should be the same. That effort, that meaning of hitting the mark and the meaning of losing the mark should be the same.

[06:50]

The only difference is now you hit the mark. From the materialistic viewpoint, to lose the mark or to miss the mark is not good at all. You should hit the mark. But from the meaning of practice, actual practice, even though you lose it, the meaning of the practice is the same. To hit the mark or to lose the mark is not different. That is our enlightenment. It is not only enlightenment that is valuable. It is not only enlightenment that is valuable. The failure by true spirit is also valuable. It is the same meaning. So that is why, even though your zazen is not perfect, it has the same meaning if you have way-seeking mind. So I love this idea of, you know, missing the mark 99 times and only hitting it on the hundredth time.

[08:05]

Years ago, I was studying art for a period of time. And one of my teachers, who I think of as my first Zen teacher, although he was not literally so, he said, your first 500 drawings are crap. Get started. And I recently read that as someone who said your first 100,000, which is maybe more like it. And what keeps us going through failure? What keeps us going through missing the mark? How do we meet that? Suzuki Roshi is talking about the mind of hitting the mark and missing the mark should be the same.

[09:11]

But that's not so easy because we judge this is good and that's bad. And we just do. We do that. So how do we meet that? So actually the seed of this talk, where this started, was remembering a TED talk that I watched on YouTube over the summer when I was out. I'd heard about it. It's by Brene Brown. It's on vulnerability. It's really popular. If you just Google Vulnerability Ted, you'll get it. That's first up. So she is a social worker. She's a researcher. And she was researching connection. She said, connection, if you're in the social sciences, is what it's all about.

[10:12]

It's foundational. And so she was asking people about connection. She was collecting qualitative research. She's collecting stories from people. So she asked them about connection. When was a time you felt connected? And what she would hear back about immediately was disconnection. when people felt terribly disconnected, cut off, isolated. And she was very curious about this. She's like, why if I ask about connection, am I hearing about disconnection? She thought maybe it had something to do with the fact that if you're getting a job review and they have a whole bunch of... and excellence and positive, and there's one needs work, you'll focus on the needs work. So we tend to notice about ourselves what's not going well.

[11:17]

But she was curious about this, so she kept studying this. And what she found in studying connection and disconnection was shame. And she defined shame as the fear of disconnection. When we think about connecting, our fear of not connecting comes up right away. Because we feel that there's something about us that's not good enough, that we can only connect if we're right or perfect or good, you know, of all the things about us that we feel, and I think in many cases that we have experienced, block connection, whatever that is, for each one of us.

[12:21]

You know, our basic experience of the ways that we're not okay that cuts off that has cut off connection in our families or with others. But then it gets really generalized because we don't want to touch that core. There's no way to heal it. So there's this feeling of, I have to be perfect in order to connect. And a lot of times what happens is that we also disconnect from ourselves and from our own experience. I can't stand to connect with my own experience, to be present for what's actually arising, for being so vulnerable. So as she was doing her research, Brene Brown, she... She said, in order for connection to happen, we actually have to allow ourselves to be deeply seen and to be deeply real.

[13:42]

That this is how connection happens. That it's when we're putting up this good facade, this good front, what Suzuki Roshi calls looks like good, that we're actually not connecting. And if we can feel some connection from the other person, it's tainted because they're not loving us for who we really are. They're loving us for this good facade, this nice show, that we're funny or smart or in control, but we know we're not in control. Somewhere we know that. So it all can feel like a lie. Because when we're actually real is when the real connection happens. It's not like connection is always raw and vulnerable. But connection is made problematic if we feel like we can't include the raw and the vulnerable.

[14:48]

Because if we're trying so hard to hold back a part of ourselves, especially if it's a fairly large part of ourselves, the connection the disconnect, the numbing isn't selective. It's like there's no local anesthesia on emotions, basically. It's pretty much general. When we start numbing with whatever we're using to numb, whether it's food or alcohol or drugs or sex or being super social or Facebook or computers or work or whatever, or zazen. For some people, it's zazen. It can be anything. But if we're using it to get away and we're successful at it, actually, if you're successful at it, then you're really sunk.

[15:50]

Because it's very hard to get around that and you have to get to the point where it's like, You know, there's really something missing here. It all looks like good and it's completely dead. I think I was about 20 years old when I hit that point. Things were really tightly wrapped. And I was really dead. And I said, well, you know, anything's going to be better than... Actually, I was 18. It was right as I was going to college. It's like anything is going to be better than this deadness. So that was really freeing, actually, because it kind of opened up the whole thing again. It's like, okay, completely successful at numbing. That was my bottom, I think, one of my bottoms in coming out of this, yeah. I think we have to get to a point where we realize all the things that we're trying to do to avoid the pain of just being human aren't getting us the love, the safety, the connection that we long for and that we were doing all of this in order to get.

[17:07]

It's actually not working. So I recommend that you watch this video if you go out and enjoy such things. It's 10 minutes long, and it's hysterically funny. I considered trying to share some of the humor, but I can't do her at all. Let's just say she's not a poster child for vulnerability. She became a social worker, said one of the... mottos is, life's messy, love it. And her motto was more like, life's messy, measure it, organize it, and put it in a bento box. So as she was studying connection, finding vulnerability, she thought, great, I'm going to study vulnerability, and I'm going to predict and control vulnerability.

[18:13]

This is great. because I hate vulnerability, and I'm going to get a lock on it. She said, you know this is not going to turn out well. So the outcome of many years of study, and one of the great things about the TED Talks is you can actually get transcripts of them. So over the summer, I got the transcript and had it. So she said, if I roughly took the people I interviewed them and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness, because that's what it comes down to, a sense of worthiness. They have a strong sense of love and belonging. And folks who struggle for it, folks who are always wondering if they're good enough, there was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging.

[19:22]

That's it. They believe that they're worthy. And that's about like saying, just drop body and mind. Yes, that's what it's about. And at the moments... when we do drop body and mind, and when we believe that we're worthy. And I think for all of us, there are moments of that, regardless of what the general ground is. That's it. You know, we can accept it. We have those moments where... And I think it's the same thing, you know? That feeling of worthiness is actually... feeling that we are not separate from the entire universe. We are part and parcel of the whole of being. We are free from the delusion of a separate, painful self that has to be protected at all costs.

[20:32]

And that is dropping body and mind. So she called such people who have a sense of worthiness, and she was actually talking about it in a more limited sense, of course. She called them wholehearted. She said what they have in common is a sense of courage. And she differentiated courage and bravery. Courage comes from the word heart, French for courage. you know, heart, related to encourage. And it originally meant to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. In other words, to be honest, to be present, to be whole. So that is courage, is basically to show up for our lives as we are.

[21:41]

It's not to be unafraid. It's to show up with the fear or with the whatever it is. Incidentally, I remembered a friend of mine years ago who was studying courage, and he asked a number of people who he thought were courageous to tell them about a time when they were courageous. And they all said, no, I have never been courageous. He said, okay, can you tell me someone that you think was courageous? And they said, oh, yes, yes, I can tell you several people. So he went and contacted them and he asked them, and he said, so-and-so said you were very courageous, can you tell me about a time when you were courageous? And they said, no, no, no, I have never been courageous. So like connection and disconnection, it seems to be difficult to connect with the experience of courage. because we don't think that courage could feel like your knees shaking.

[22:50]

Or if your knees are shaking, at least your voice shouldn't be breaking. Of course, it looks very different from the outside. It's so easy to see someone completely showing up exactly who they are as being completely courageous in all of their openness and presence and vulnerability. So Brene Brown goes on to say, it's the courage to be imperfect, to have compassion for self and others, and It's a form of authenticity. Oh, no, they said they had connection as a result of authenticity. I had to read this about five times.

[23:55]

They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were. And it's this willingness. This is the effort to hit the mark and to take the risk of missing the mark, just to come back again and again to be willing, to be willing to let go of who we think we should be in order to be who we really are. Sitting down for zazen. My zazen should be like this right now. My thoughts should be calm, focused, and actually non-existent. And that completely gets in the way of being present with what's there.

[25:01]

So just one more thing on Brene Brown. She said that her mission to control and predict vulnerability, the fact that what it led to, for her, the inescapable outcome, which she absolutely did not want to see, being vulnerability-phobic, was that the way to connection was to learn to live with vulnerability. to be vulnerable, to be open-hearted, and to stop controlling and predicting. She said, and this led to a little bit of a breakdown. She said, actually, a big breakdown. My therapist called it a spiritual awakening. And I think it, you know, this is what we talk about, the self-dying. You know, when it comes... inescapably comes up against round peg won't fit square hole.

[26:19]

I can dominate zazen. I can be really good at zazen. I can figure it out. I can control it. I can control my experience. I can control you. I can control me. Whatever it is that we're going to get around, at some point, our efforts are going to either just flat out fail. And we get to see that because we actually did well enough at it that we can see, you know, that's not working. It's all gone dead. Squeezed the life out of life. William Blake, a fool if he persists in his foolishness will become wise. You know, you come to the end of, you know, I know what to do. And at that point, and it seems to take somehow getting to that point where we actually have the visceral lived experience of my life as I'm living it is not working.

[27:36]

or this piece of it is not working. All this effort is tying me up tighter. And then we can let go. So to become willing, you know, and not everyone has to go to the ends of the earth. You hear an instruction, you know, become willing to let go of who you think you should be in order to be who you are. And they're like, okay. Usually the people who can do that are not the people who have been at the head of the class most of their lives. You know, if you're at the head of the class, you've learned, my mind is going to do it for me. I can figure this out. think the more that we're familiar with failure, the more it's okay.

[28:43]

The more we know, yeah, it takes a lot of hard work. It takes trying again and again and not giving up. It's about persistence. It's not about getting it right the first time or even the tenth. It's about being okay with not getting it right. And not just being okay with it and forgetting about it, or ignoring it or not caring. It's not not caring. It's caring deeply and being able to stand the feelings of missing the mark. And sometimes, you know, missing the mark, it's just like, okay, well, that didn't work. I'm ready to try again. There's curiosity and investigation, and that's wonderful. And having that mind is so supportive. But when it gets down to our tougher places, the ones that we spend the most effort defending or avoiding, the ones that start coming up in Sashin,

[30:04]

in the last sushin of the practice period, on the silent days when we have this container and so much stuff starts falling away, how do we continue to just soften and open and be with it? So in Christina's yesterday, I felt that she so completely embodied this. Just, you know, this is what's arising. So beautiful. Completely opened my heart. My heart was a little tight yesterday because I was thinking about giving my talk. I get worried before I give talks. I think about them. So that actually keeps me from connecting when I get too into that.

[31:14]

And I was also thinking, what is it that... I think we're worried that if we're messy, that it's not under control, that we'll burden people somehow, that we won't be taking care of them or something. I thought, what is it that makes it actually encouraging to share our whole selves? And I think one of the things is, on some level, being okay with not being okay. Still doesn't feel okay. But there's a willingness to show up for that and some deeper sense of trust. And a lot of that trust...

[32:28]

It's twofold. Part of it is based on experience, that we've done this before. We've had this experience of crossing the abyss and taking that step into the unknown, stepping out on the ice one step at a time, and being familiar with that territory. And the more we can get familiar with it, the more we trust it. We know how to walk on thin ice. We don't have to jump up and down on it. We can be gentle with it. Sometimes I think we, it's like, okay, I'm going to be vulnerable. We kind of do a cannonball out onto the middle of the thin ice. That's called counterphobic. And we're actually no more open or vulnerable when we're like, than we are when we're frozen or looking like good or whatever our version is.

[33:36]

Neither one is actually being present and connected. It's not the drama and it's not the deadness. It's that very tender, and staying present with it. And even though the waves may be a little choppy, a part of ourself is still connected to the ocean floor. We're still walking solidly on the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes most of our experience is on the ocean floor and sometimes most of it is... You know, the waves are just slapping us in the face. And we can't breathe. And I think most of our lives, you know, we're somewhere in the middle.

[34:37]

And I think this is a big part of why we, in our practice, keep coming back to the body. Why we keep talking about the body endlessly. Even though there's nothing to say about it, right? The body has nothing to say. I mean, the body speaks to us, but not in language. And here we are talking about the body again. But it's listening, deeply listening to to those places in our being, in our body, that are literally holding those deep, tangled knots that on the one hand are the obstructions that preclude our realization and at the same time are the Dharma gate that we have to pass through. Being completely present with those places, literally in the body, is what opens the door of realization.

[36:18]

The Ehe Koso says, Dogen says, in this life, save the body which is the fruit of many lives. And that phrase has stuck out for years for me because it didn't quite seem to fit with the rest of Dogen. When I hear the phrase, save the body, I think of more like saving it up or rescue it. And I kind of have the connotation, well, be nice to the body. You know, this is a precious human body. Don't abuse it. But what came to me this morning is that salvation, like saving all beings, awakening, saving from suffering, happens in this body.

[37:32]

Saving is in this body. Save the body. this body that is our being in the world and no other. This is the body that we awaken in, not some other body. And as Dogen says, the whole earth is the true human body. The whole earth is the gate of liberation. When the Buddha awakened, shortly before he awakened, Mara, the tempter, came to him in visions and tempted him with what I think the usual sex power and wealth, you know.

[38:38]

those Shakyamuni pretty easily put aside. And then Mara said, he challenged him, he said, what right do you have to awaken? And the Buddha reached down and touched the earth. And he called on the earth to witness his right, his birthright. to awaken, to be whole. We all have this birthright. But we have to claim it. And all we have to do to claim it is to claim it.

[39:42]

And that is practice. I forgot my watch, so I don't know what time it is. Could someone tell me? We have time for one or two questions. Come on. Thank you so much, Mary. Do you think it resonated with me? There's one part I feel stuck on where you talked about, that we can't reveal with the notion. They go pretty far back in what you discussed about the notion of our separateness . I think I meant just that we feel that it can't be healed.

[40:46]

It's a delusion. There's absolutely no problem at all. But that delusion, that belief, creates a wound. It is. Primarily by realizing that it never... It's like when we completely realize that it's non-existent, then it's completely healed. It's like, I have never been separate. I have never been unworthy. I have experienced disconnection. I've disconnected in my mind. But actually, I've been here all along. I haven't gone anywhere. And the experience of disconnection, I am connected to my experience. That is my experience, is of disconnection. We can connect to anything. We are connected to everything, including all the experiences that our mind cooks up for us.

[41:56]

Thank you for asking. Yes. Chris. During your talk about connection, I have this strange feeling that often I go forward by looking into the rear view more. When the thinking comes into play, these things were before. This is where I want to go. And so it's basically thoughts and experiences that had in the past seem to direct where I'm going while I'm truly pressing. I don't look in the mirror what I wanted, what I was thinking in the past, but I look at what's pressing.

[43:07]

So the The idea seems to be to remember what happened, but not let it be the driver's seat so much. I think even when we're looking in the rearview mirror, there's an experience of looking in the rearview mirror, which is in the present moment. And we can just connect to that. Oh, I'm... looking for something to help me. And I'm feeling a little shaky. Curtis. Thank you. I'd like to ask about something that I didn't hear in the talk, but I connect with this topic and see if you agree with it. It is very encouraging

[44:08]

this notion of the same effort being made the 99 times as it's made the hundreds time. And the notion of it actually being okay to miss the mark, or if it's okay, fail. That's a very encouraging thought. And it can, I think, also be a rather selfish practice because sometimes when we miss the mark, we hurt people. And I think that part of this mix, the responsibility that we not just keep making, that we also make the effort to address the consequences of missing the mark or repeating the mark, which may not be the same each of those 99 times, but sometimes we break some eggs. And actually, after you pay your rights to wash your bowl, there's a personal responsibility element

[45:09]

making amends, or at least attempting to see, oh, did I just damage somebody? And not simply going along without addressing that. Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, absolutely. It's not like ringing the bells as a doha. It's like, oh, missed that one. It's okay. Okay. I mean, Acceptance of this is what is is very different from I approve of this. This is okay. It has no consequences. So this is what happened. If what happened is causing harm, then we have to address that. We meet that wholeheartedly. So, yeah. whatever it is that my words or my actions have had an impact that was painful, whether I meant it or not, then that's the next thing, is to meet that and to care for that.

[46:28]

But I think it's pointing to not to be afraid to act because we're afraid of what will happen. And we do our best. to not harm. Right, it's like, well, showing who I am. Well, who I am right now is, I hate you. We can cause a lot of harm by, quote, showing who we are. This is really what's on my mind right now, and that's not what's meant at all. That's just another layer of defenses, some idea about who you are or who I am or, you know, that's trying to get at the other person. This is more focused on can I be present for all my efforts, my best efforts going awry and caring for them when they go awry those 99 times.

[47:34]

Does that answer your question? Or is there another piece to it? Absolutely. Yes. Yes. I guess I assumed that so deeply I didn't say that. Yes. When our efforts go astray, When we miss the mark, we have to care for the people that they've affected. And our efforts to do that may again go astray, and we keep coming back, not turning away from beings, not giving up on anyone. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge.

[48:38]

and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[48:51]

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