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 evening. Thank you all for braving the heat of the Zendo to come this evening. People were saying, it's going to be hot in there. And I said, no, we have fans. We have fans. Sometimes the fans are just moving the hot air in circles. Fortunately, we have some cloud cover this evening. It looks like it's cooling down a little. So this is my first time sitting up here. In the evening, I used to give talks when I was head monk a few years ago.

[01:08]

In the mornings, it's quite different to be here with a group of people who are here out of interest and enthusiasm, and in some cases, loyalty. Some of my friends are here. rather than because this is what we do, because this is Dharma talk time. So I feel like you're a really interesting audience, and I'm going to leave some time for questions at the end because I really want to hear what you have to say. Being here this last few days has been... wonderful and interesting experience for me. I came straight from Ireland. I came here from Ireland where I live.

[02:09]

I went back to live in Ireland after 10 years in Zen Centre in January. So I've been there since January in the north of Ireland, which is on a parallel, I think, with Nova Scotia. So we have that kind of weather. It rains a lot. It rains all the time. It rains every day. And it's chilly. And we have very early dawn in the summer and very late sunset. It's like Scandinavia. It's beautiful. The sun goes down about 10 p.m. in the middle of the summer. So... It's been a really interesting experience to come back to this valley, which is baking hot, dry, and the sun comes up late, comes over the mountain late, and goes behind the mountain early in those short days.

[03:12]

It's quite a different experience. And I noticed that one of the effects that the temperature is having on me, and probably... on most of us is slowing down. My body is slowing down to deal with the heat and the great natural wisdom of our bodies. We don't want to move quickly when it's hot. It's uncomfortable to move quickly. So we're forced is the wrong word, but certainly we're encouraged to move more slowly and maintain our energy levels for when it's really needed. And it struck me, certainly the first day, moving slowly, moving bags very slowly.

[04:15]

And I thought, my other experience of this is being with... A child, what I used to call, when I babysat my sister's children, it was child time. Things happened at a completely slower pace when you're dealing with a three-year-old. You go, okay, we have to be here at two o'clock, and it's now 1.15, so we're going to get dressed. and have breakfast or dinner, and get in the car and drive to the place. And then we sit the three-year-old down, and she doesn't want to wear that dress, and she has lost the other sock, and she's trying to eat her shoe. And she decides it's time for a tantrum anyway, because that's more fun.

[05:16]

And everything slows down. There's no way to speed this up. And then we walk hand in hand to the car and it takes hours to get there because we have to stop and examine every flower and every pebble and say hello to every passerby who wants to stop and tell her how beautiful she is. And everything's happening at a completely different pace from what my life is used to. I never had children. I had the wonderful opportunity to be an aunt, which meant I got to play with them during the day and give them back. Give them back when they got complicated. But I really enjoyed that special way of being slow. being slow with a child. And those of you who have kids are kind of looking at me going, no, you've no idea.

[06:20]

You've no idea about having children. It's not slow at all. But that just reminded me, and seeing Calliope, the tiny little baby who's here now, last time I was here, she was a bump. So it's so sweet to see her. to see her walk around, seeing her here and seeing how people are taking care of her with that kind of attention and slowness and gentleness that we all use when dealing with children. And I feel like this is how my body is demanding I behave with it in the heat. It's like taking care of the child that is my body. It needs more rest. It needs to move slowly. It needs lots of hydration. It needs some kind of gentle, quiet time.

[07:23]

It's very, very sweet, and it's a really great reminder of what my practice life, which is my life, of what my life as a practitioner is about. When I were, before I came to the monastery, before I came to live here in 2007, I had a super busy life. I was a journalist and an editor and there was information coming at me all the time. It was in the days before smartphones. And I was one of the few people in the office who knew how to use this strange new thing called Google. I'm not kidding you. People used to come to me and say, what is this Google thing? And I'd show them Google. I was an authority on Google. That wasn't in 2007.

[08:24]

That was earlier. We weren't that far behind the times in Ireland. But I... It was busy... There was like an adrenaline energy about my days at work. And it was hard to switch off when I would come home. So I didn't really. But I found the periods that I spent on retreat. I come here a couple of times a year to California and sit with... With Zen Center, I found that so healing and refreshing. And it was partly because my brain slowed down. It wasn't processing information all the time. It wasn't full-on engaging with problems all the time. But invariably, the first few days were quite distressing because I...

[09:26]

I'd experienced it. I didn't know how to describe what was happening to myself. I thought, I'm kind of bored. This is boredom. It's boring to be doing everything so slowly. It's boring to not have constant assaults on my senses, on my brain. And it would take about three days before I'd begin to go, no, this isn't boring. This is great. This is really, really good. I really enjoy this slower pace, this steadiness, this predictability, how wonderful it was to have a predictable life. And eventually I made the decision to stop working in the frantic world of journalism and to come and live here as a monk. I had slowed down.

[10:28]

I was still pretty frantic by Tassajara standards. There was a lot of talking in silent times. There was a lot of just generally causing situations. So I think because I found it entertaining to have problems. as my life has continued as a practitioner, it's like I seem to have fewer and fewer problems, which is great. So in the marketplace, as we say, like not in the monastery, in the marketplace, speed is, to say someone is really quick is a compliment. This is a good thing. This is... what we're all aiming for in the marketplace, to be quicker and better and more successful, more driven, more urgent.

[11:37]

And that was not the attitude that the people in Tassajara had when I came here. I was rushing around, chopping carrots faster than everybody else, just being that kind of energy in... a monastic environment. And it felt quite, you know, quite a jolt to have people say to me, the bell has gone for the end of work. You stop now. And I go, but I haven't finished this potato. And they say, stop, stop. You're doing the wrong thing. Stop chopping. It's now bath time. Go take a bath. And I go, what's wrong with you people? And I got to examine that and try to see, like, so what was the energy in there? Did I want approval? Did I want to be the best potato chopper? And if I was the best potato chopper, what would the result be?

[12:42]

Was I going to get a promotion to Abbott or something? You know, was I going to advance in my Zen career more quickly if I was the best potato chopper? No. Was I going to get paid more? No, I was actually paying to be here. It was like the urgency that I had been trained in, that I had been conditioned, the way I'd been conditioned to behave, had no function here. And taking that urgency away gave me this amazing opportunity to settle, to slow down, And pay attention. Because, of course, in my speedy, busy life, the years just flew by. I really wasn't noticing my life. I wasn't noticing anything except the next little flicker of data that was just all this stuff coming into my brain.

[13:47]

I wasn't taking the time. I didn't... Smell the coffee. I didn't exhale, take a moment, sit in the sun. None of that happened. So coming here, even though, I mean, our days, as you see, our days are busy. We work hard here. I say this as if I was still a resident. I'm not anymore. But the people who live here work pretty hard and are pretty efficient. but somehow the busyness of the marketplace isn't there, and that's wonderful. Part of what's really great about being here now is that there's no Wi-Fi. I don't know if you've noticed that. We're all offline.

[14:50]

Some people have. internet access. Some very senior people who can be trusted with it. But you've noticed that your smartphone doesn't work in here. And it's an amazing opportunity to look at what happens when you haven't got that constant feed of information. And you haven't got that constant access to Google, to finding out the answer to every question. I was thinking about this talk and I thought, oh, what did Dogen say? And I was actually going to Google it. And I thought, oh, I can't. And then I thought, oh, I could go up to the library and look through all the books. And then I thought, I'm just not even going to mention that. I'm going to just bypass that. The move towards

[15:52]

using my phone, I notice it here that every time I have a feeling, it's like every time I have any kind of a feeling, I reach for my phone and then I discover it's offline. And then I realize I'm reaching for it as a consolation. It's definitely an addiction. It's definitely a... a thing that I do. I lean into that. And when I can't do that, I get to notice, huh, oh, I'm having a feeling there. So rather than just scrolling through whatever your favorite device is, just kind of sitting and examining what the feeling was that came up, what the thing that triggered me was, that made me rush to my phone.

[16:53]

My suitcase has gone astray. The airline has lost my suitcase. And I'm kind of wearing other people's clothes and patching things together. I'm using other people's suture cloths. Thank you, Jack Lee. And there's nothing I can do about it. I think they're going to deliver it to James Burke. And I have a phone number. And every time I pass by the phone booth, I have this little pang of, maybe if I call them now, they'll tell me where my bag is. And I see this thing, and I think, no. Here in Tassajara... got these precious few days in this amazing space, to be constantly leaning into the, where's my bag?

[17:56]

What am I going to do? Maybe I could engineer things so it's not so complicated. And I'm thinking, no, this is not my practice. This is not what I've learned in all these years in this monastery. This is like, leave it be. watch what's happening right now, even if what's happening right now is my anxiety, and just explore that. This isn't the week I thought I was going to have. I had selected my careful little wardrobe, you know, to deal with Tassajara, and instead I'm wearing old T-shirts that I found in a box somewhere, oh, this wasn't what I had planned. As that great Dharma teacher John Lennon said, life is what happens when you're making other plans.

[19:01]

This is the life I've got right now, the one without the suitcase, without the book, without the t-shirts and the yoga pants and all the things I had prepared. This is it right now. And this is amazing. If I stop and pay attention, this is perfect exactly as it is. So the one other thing I wanted to say was my mother said, oh, you're going to California? You're so lucky. because it rains all the time in Ireland and it's cold. So she was going, lucky thing. It's going to be really warm. And I said, Mum, it's going to be like 110 degrees. And she said, oh, gorgeous, beautiful. So... It's... I mean, it's that old addictive idea of, you know, if a thing is good...

[20:10]

then more of it is better. So if 80 degrees is good, well then 110 degrees that I think she's probably never experienced in her life is amazing. I went on a retreat to Thailand 15 years ago in the Theravadan tradition and it was really hot and there were a lot of bugs and it was really uncomfortable and after about three days I had an interview with the teacher and I went and said, there's been a terrible mistake. I'm Irish. I can't do this. And he went, uh-huh. He was actually from New York. He went, right. He said, so where do you think the Buddha got enlightened? I was going, well, yeah, it was just up the roads in India. And he's going, exactly. And I was going, but, you know, really kind of Western European idea. I was going, but, you know, Indian people were used to us. He's like, no.

[21:11]

It was really uncomfortably hot. He sat in the heat. And I thought, okay, I can do that. So this is the kind of weather, this is the kind of weather that was going on in India two and a half thousand years ago. So the heat slows us down. The heat teaches us to take care of ourselves. I bow to the heat in gratitude. Yeah. So we have a few minutes. If anybody would like to ask a question or make a comment, now is your moment. No, because what I'm doing is I'm taking care of Paul's Zen Center in Belfast.

[22:37]

So we sit nine times a week and have lots of retreats and one day sitting. Most of my active daily life is about the Dharma, which is great. it doesn't seem like I re-entered the marketplace because I'm determined never to go back to journalism. It's not the way I want to live. And I think when I run out of money, I'll just get a job in a sweet chop or something, you know. Chop carrots, I'm really good at chopping carrots. Thank you for the question. Yeah, the re-entry I thought was going to be difficult, but I spent a lot of time in city center in our temple in San Francisco, which is more of an urban environment, more of a temple in the city, and it taught me how to manage that.

[23:52]

So if you're thinking of transitioning, it's good to do it via... fear the temple in the city. There's a fly very interested in my ear, which is why I'm doing this. Yes, hi. What a good question. I would say try to You try to sit tzazen every day. Try to just do that even ten minutes a day on a daily basis. Just find that steady place. Yeah. I have lots of other things, but only one thing. That's good for me. You have to reduce it to one thing. I think that would help. You know, everybody's probably saying...

[24:55]

If she stops now, we get to go to bed early. Nobody wants to ask a question. And I totally appreciate that. I've been that soldier. I've been in this position going, no, no, no, it's okay. You can end early. We don't mind. Anyway. That also is a good question. And I had sat with lots of different groups like that, Theravadan group, various different, experimented with various different ways of practicing. I heard the Heart Sutra. This sounds very dramatic, but I heard the Heart Sutra in another group that used to chant it.

[25:58]

And I said, you know, I really love the way that goes. the emptiness teaching of that, it seemed to really speak to me. And the guy who was running that group said, oh, you should go talk to the Zen people. They do a lot of that heart sutra stuff. And I did. And it was, there was something about the nakedness of that, the deep authenticity of of that unadorned practice that I really, really enjoyed. You know, we're all Buddhist. All versions of this are rooted in the same teachings, I think. So I think different people, you know, some people like pink. It was never my color.

[27:00]

Yeah. The Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra got me here. Be careful with the Heart Sutra. You end up in a monastery. Okay. Are we good? 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[27:35]

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