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, it's clearly been a while since I've done this. So, a few things. Thank you so much to... Tonto and everyone for the opportunity. I'm incredibly grateful for it. Apologies for all the things that I've done wrong up to this moment and for all the things I'm going to do wrong in the following 45 minutes or so. And one of them is this.

[01:00]

I've given versions of this talk previously, and I happen to know that some people that are here have heard parts of it. So I hope that that's not a problem and that there's enough additional material so that you're not just going, oh, my God, here it goes again. So the... Just as a warning, the talk is about the breath and the horror, which are big topics, and I hope I can do them justice. So, it's probably worth starting by asking what zazen actually is. Does anyone want to jump out and make a statement around that?

[02:06]

What is zazen anyway? Excellent. When somebody asked Paul, my teacher, that in a Shosan ceremony, he just meant, which is great. But that's not actually what Zazen is from the perspective of this particular discussion. So let's get on with it. And the most simple description of zazen is that it's a devotional act in which you assume the posture of the guy on the altar, basically.

[03:14]

And there's a lot of stuff in the literature about how that's true, right? And it is in fact true, right? So start with that. So to do zazen, you assume a posture. And by now it's clear that not everybody has to assume the posture of the guy on the altar, but nonetheless you assume a posture. And you hold it for a period of time that by pretty much all physical and mental standards is ridiculously long. We go through life assuming postures all the live long day. We stand up, we sit down, we pose, we turn to talk to somebody, we turn to talk to somebody angry, we turn to talk to somebody loving and accepting, et cetera.

[04:23]

All of that, right? And we do it smoothly and quickly and, you know, in the sort of rhythm of everyday life. We do it in, the correct term is real time, right? Because it's a part of our activity as humans and those postures communicate things both to the... to the one who's assuming the posture, and to the one who's observing. They're important in a whole bunch of frameworks. So that's what it means to assume a posture, but we do it for this ridiculously long time, and we do it in a different way than the usual, which is we're... we're asked to do it in the light of a kind of broad and comprehensive attention and a kind of intentional deliberateness, right?

[05:47]

Deliberation, right? When Baker Roshi came here a number of years ago to give a talk. He talked about physical and mental posture, right? So you assume a posture, there's a physical posture that goes with it, but there's also a mental posture that has to do with how the mind and the posture interact, play on each other, help each other out, and sometimes get in each other's way, right? And Pekiroshi's statement about mental posture was mostly that you shouldn't move. But there's more to it than that, right? We're constantly moving, even when it looks for all the world like we're sitting still. And the... The request is more like to, again, to be deliberate and attentive and as thorough as possible about it.

[06:56]

And, of course, this is difficult. And it's difficult for reasons that everyone in this room understands, which is great. We can all agree that it's difficult. The most obvious simple explanations is your body really doesn't like holding a posture for 45 minutes or an hour, right? It's like, what the hell is going on here? I haven't done anything with this hip joint for an hour, and I think I'll generate some pain signals to make them do something about it, right? So there's that, and then there's... the way in which we can actually buy through inattention and kind of the natural slumping and other things that go on, find ourselves in a position where we're actually pulling too hard on some joint or muscle and it actually gets very painful and you can even hurt yourself doing it.

[08:07]

And then the last bit is if you're sitting in such a way that you have a impingement and nerve impingement in your hips or knees or ankles some part of your body goes to sleep and becomes unmanageable and in the long run that can be also damaging right so it's a lot right and and it is difficult so the question is why would anybody sit saws in right um i'm tempted to ask if anybody can volunteer a response to that. Okay, why? Yeah, that's right. I mean, so what Dogen says is this, right? You do this thing of taking this posture and doing it in this...

[09:12]

deliberate and attentive way. And that's an intimate form of self-study. And it naturally, of course, brings up as an object of study the activity of the body and also the activity of the mind. And what Dogen says, and he doesn't say it exactly this way, but what Dogen says is that To do that, not immediately, not suddenly, not gradually, some combination of those things, allows this broader picture of what it is to live a human life and have a human mind to swim into focus. And one of the main things that swims into focus when that happens

[10:14]

is this sort of other mode of being that's different from our everyday cognitive faculty that's all tangled up with language, that's all tangled up with sociality, that's all tangled up with long-range and short-range planning, that has preferences that can be expressed in words and has and is constantly wanging around dualistic notions that relate to those preferences and so on, right? This other mode, Suzuki Roshi calls it big mind, but you can really also, let's be clear, call it Buddha mind, right? This other mode isn't concerned with those things at all. It's drivers, it's effective drivers. feel very, very different than our sort of emotional constructs. And its primary kind of attribute, under most circumstances that you're likely to run into when you're sitting zazen, is a kind of deep and unconditioned appreciation for just being alive.

[11:38]

So that swims into view, right? And then Zazen is also considered a model for how you live an everyday human life with an everyday human mind, right? and live in such a way that the mind of zazen and big mind, Buddha mind, are a part of everyday activity, right? They can be brought forward as a result of triggers that we learn. There's a difficult thing happening here. I know what to do. To slow down, to meet it, carefully and considerately and bring forward this sort of broad, receptive attention, compassionate curiosity, and the kind of intentional deliberateness that's required to meet difficult situations.

[12:58]

And why would we do that? It's because it enables a life that's more skillful and agile than our sort of regular, everyday concerns and the faculties that work on them, right? So it doesn't... It doesn't remove, but it deprecates the agendas of the separate self and even the notion of separate self. That's why it's all that. That's why...

[14:00]

a life of practice. This is the kind of thing that doesn't happen suddenly. It happens as a result of a, of a, of extended and diligent practice. Um, so I, I haven't really even once mentioned the breath yet. So I should probably do that now. So the, um, So where's the breath in all this? When we're sitting zazen and walking around in the world, we're relying on our body, right? And with respect to the body, some of the things that the body does are completely beyond our control. Like, how much control do you have over the operation of your pancreas, for example? Probably very little, right? Do you even know what it means for your mind to talk to your pancreas?

[15:01]

No, there's nothing like that. But your arms, your legs, your back, and your lungs, we have a fair amount of control over those, but honestly, no really deeper, comprehensive understanding about how they work. They're a mystery, but we can... we have these levers we can pull that change the way they operate. And in particular with the breath, right? The breath, obviously, we need to breathe or we're going to die, right? And we need to breathe pretty regularly. or we're going to die. But we can choose not to breathe for a little while. That's useful, for example, if we're underwater. Or we can choose to breathe slowly or quickly.

[16:03]

I do a lot of crazy long-distance cycling, and I have a lot of technique for calibrating the rate of my breath in order to keep oxygen in my legs as I'm and doing stuff, right? Yeah, we can do that, right? And all of that is possible, but for the most part, we just ignore the breath, right? And let it take its own, what we think of as its natural course, right? And in some ways, that nature quote, natural course, is a way that we've learned how to breathe, right? It's the way we learned how to breathe from day zero. And people, if you, you know, people have different natural breath cycles and sort of breath strategies that they can carry with them.

[17:11]

Hmm. The request of zazen is to take on both sitting and breathing as monastic forms. That's what they are in zazen. They're monastic forms. And, you know, what exactly does that mean, right? I mean, again, in the simplest sense, it means we take a posture, right? But... Everybody has a different body and, again, a different way of breathing and different capacities. And everybody's posture is unique. I mean, you know, some of this has to do with capacity to sit in, say, full lotus or half lotus or in Seiza or, you know, et cetera, right?

[18:19]

But even laying that aside... Even if every single one of us was thoroughly capable of sitting, you know, sitting full lotus for an hour and 15 minutes, still our postures would all be completely different, right? And our experience of them would be completely different from each other because we're all unique, singular individuals, right? And so... In the broadest sense, what it means to consider your posture and your breath as a monastic form is to completely and thoroughly express your very own posture. If you happen to pick half lotus, you completely express your own half lotus, right?

[19:26]

And the same thing with the breath. You completely express your own cycle and depth and rate of breath, right? So that's what it is to, that's the starting point of considering your posture and breath as monastic forms. You can't just take any posture and any time and breathe in any way. The idea is you kind of home in on a posture or a collection of postures that allow you to to sit in this way where you can fully express them for the entire, you know, 40 minutes, an hour, an hour, 15 minutes, whatever, right?

[20:27]

And work with what happens when you do that, basically, right? So all monastic forms have an esoteric and an exoteric aspect, right, or aspects. The exoteric, that is public, aspect of Zazen posture and Zazen breathing has to mostly, and pretty much of all monastic forms that we practice, you know, stepping over the threshold with your left foot and you know, bowing in Gaff Show during Sushin when you pass somebody in the hall and all the rest of that sort of thing. The sort of exoteric public function of those mostly has to do with mindfulness, right?

[21:31]

So if you're, you know, and it's in particular mindfulness of, you know, speech, motion, efforts, et cetera, but in particular with breath, right, um, When you read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi at least sometimes recommends counting your breath. It's completely true that counting your breath, or we don't do this that much, but other Buddhist sects do, carrying a or some sort of recitation with your breath. Actually, you know, a lot of sotas and Buddhists secretly do this, just so you know. It's not public, but it can be a powerful aid to mindfulness, right?

[22:37]

It shows when you're paying attention, and it shows when you're not paying attention. Like all... like all of the monastic forms I just mentioned, right? They all have that quality. And that's useful, right? The problem with that is that, and Suzuki Roshi says this in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and Dogen says it in various places, right? When you set something up like that, it's easy to get it tangled up with... notions of perfection, notions of self, and so on and so forth, and to lose oneself or struggle with the kind of dynamic between awareness and control.

[23:39]

When you're aware of something, it's it's very easy to slip into working on it, right? And that's hard. And so, probably a lot of you have read Reb's new book, but he has this marvelous bit in sort of near the beginning where when he arrives at Tassajara and he learns how to sit Sazen, He learns the breath counting thing, and he vows that he's going to become the best breath counter at Tussar. And he works his ass off on it for six months or something like that. And finally, he can count his breath just continuously and impeccably without losing his awareness and so on and so forth. And then he's like, wait a second. How does this have anything to do with... with the gift and goal of zazen, right?

[24:40]

And he's like, okay, I'm going to stop doing this now. But it's really easy to do that. And my sense is that everyone has this problem with monastic forms, and in particular with breathing, right? It's really easy to fall into messing with stuff. And... and kind of lose track of what's... of the actual experience of sitting zazen. How can the mind that doesn't deal in me and you and... And, you know, perfect and imperfect and all the rest of that sort of thing. Even show its face when you're grinding away at some sort of perfection.

[25:41]

No. So. One time. So when I started sitting, I had a lot of problems with this, right? And my breath felt really tight and kind of shallow, and I knew I was supposed to do something with it, but I couldn't figure out what, and it was very, very uncomfortable. And most of the time when I was sitting, I felt like I wasn't getting enough air, right? And then this thing happened once during a sashim where I was, you know, at some point people advised me to just stop thinking about my breath.

[26:44]

And so I did that and then at one point I found myself thinking about it again and I was, you know, sort of working a little bit with my breath and all of a sudden my entire belly just opened up, right? And I felt like I had this, vast chamber down there where I could breathe in as deeply as I wanted and let it go as deeply as I wanted. It was marvelous. And what I noticed was that along with that came a kind of relaxation and lively attention that comes from getting enough oxygen and having a body that's breathing in a way that feels comfortable and healthful. And so I didn't really know what any of that meant. And then, this is the part I've talked about before, Paul invited this guy named Bill Zemsky to come in.

[27:52]

and give what's known as a horror development workshop, right? So, apparently this is a thing that, first of all, Bill Zemsky was a Rinzai teacher and also a Kendo master, right? So, he was involved with martial arts, and he was also involved with Rinzai Zen practice, which focuses very specifically on breathing, right? And so he taught this workshop where we did, we just did breathing exercises. And the breathing exercises, we probably won't have time. I was hoping to be able to do a few of them, but as usual, I've talked too long. But just to briefly describe them, they essentially focused on the hara, which is this area sort of here on the body, And the kind of center of it is this, or the heart of it is this place.

[28:56]

It's, you know, a couple inches below your navel, right in the middle of your body. And the idea of the style of breathing that he was describing and that we were practicing was that on the out-breath... you put a little bit of tension in your heart. And then yoga practitioners will recognize this. This is essentially the bottom half of Ujjayi breathing, right? You lock, in yoga terms, you lock the two lower locks, right? And you specifically don't lock your throat, and then you breathe out. And what happens is you leave your upper stomach muscles soft, and you allow your... your lower stomach muscles and your perineal and your sort of anal muscles to tighten a bit and allow the breath to happen. And so the out-breath to happen. And the experience is that, as Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind and Beginner's Mind, it's like there's a rock in your upper chest and it falls into your hara, pressing your breath out, right?

[30:08]

And then on the in-breath, you let that tension go, but you keep your attention in your hara, right? And you allow the breath to come in and fill the body, right? And a number of things happen when you do this, right? And you do it while you're sitting. There's this interaction between the breath and the posture in which on the out breath, you can carry a lot of the tension in your upper body down into your hara and let it go. And in particular, the tension that we often carry in our upper back can be allowed to just let go, and it's almost like you can feel the skin and the muscles on your upper back falling down towards your spine, basically. And in terms of the lower body posture, typically when you do this and you tighten your hara, the lower body sort of spreads and settles, right?

[31:09]

So it's actually really good, right? And when you breathe in, there's a kind of lift, and in particular, it makes it possible to keep your shoulders high and relaxed, basically. So it's good, right? And, you know, Bill Zemsky, I mean, briefly, he's... he described this as a sort of ancient practice that predates yoga, Jainism, you know, Buddhism, Taoism, and has probably been around for millennia more than that, right? And that has spread out all through South Asia and East Asia as part of various religious practices. But also, he says that in Japan... People do horror development workshops and use these sort of breathing exercises as calisthenics in offices and stuff. And interestingly enough, having done this and having started working on it, I remembered a couple of things about how these practices also show up in the West.

[32:22]

So the first one was my... middle school music teacher who was a great teacher, right? And he had to teach every year, like, about 100 or so kids to sing, right? And how he would do it was he'd call them up on the stage, he'd put his hand on their hara, and he would say, okay, put your energy there, give yourself a little tension and support there, and sing. And usually the first time, they'd be like, ah, ah, ah. and then he'd say, no, a little bit more, and then they'd go, ah, right, and after a while, they were making a note, right, and sometimes he had to do this over and over again, but in the end, every single one of them could sing, which was kind of remarkable, and it was explicitly about using the hara as a support for the breath, right, amazing, and for making noises with your vocal cords, right, and then the other one was

[33:22]

I had a theater teacher in high school. I wasn't much of a theater kid, but I did have a theater teacher, and he would say these things like, and well, first of all, he was a student of the Stanislavski method, and I think he even knew Stanislavski, but he would say, move from your belly and he would demonstrate it, and he wasn't a particularly graceful guy, but when he would do this, he was like, everybody could see where he was going, see what he was doing, and he had this kind of energy and power, and he was clearly calling on his hara to do this, and interestingly, I've discovered more recently that Stanislavski actually studied pranayama practice and stuff like that, so he was explicitly bringing this stuff to Western theater students, basically. So I guess what I wanted to say, I'm almost out of time, is that we probably won't have time to do any of these exercises, but it's really worth exploring the breath as an

[34:44]

as an important part and a really sort of formal and intentional part of your Zazen practice. Obviously, when you first start, you know, after I took this workshop, I was like, okay, I'm going to do this, right? And of course, it was the same struggle. It was really, you know, I would be like, I'm doing it now. And then, you know, I'd get myself into trouble by overdoing it or... or be slapping myself on the wrist for not doing it well enough or something like that. But over time what happens is that like riding a bicycle, like walking, like sitting zazen, you learn these sort of stored procedures for breathing, right? And the effort required to breathe in this way becomes less and less until in the end it kind of tails out to zero, right? And you're just breathing in this way that's manifestly beneficial, right?

[35:49]

And that, you know, I mean, my experience with doing these exercises was that I'd walk out the door and my entire body felt like butter and was warm all the way through, right, because of the work I'd been doing. And, you know, you don't need to breathe like this for an hour for that to happen. And you don't need to breathe do it, you know, as though it were calisthenics. But to do it in this sort of subtle and intentional way is tremendously beneficial. And to keep your attention while sitting in your hara, it's almost like you're watching... your body and watching the world from your hara also has a tremendous beneficial effect. It's related to the breath, but they're interdependent.

[36:50]

Even when you're not focusing on the breath, you can carry a soft but clear focus in the hara. It's like there's a pearl resting at the bottom of your diaphragm, and it takes in the out-breath, and it releases the energy of the in-breath, basically. And energy flows in and out of this pearl, and And you can carry it with you when you're walking around. You can carry it with you when you're lying down. So does anybody have any questions about any of that? I'm sorry I took so long to talk about it. I'm bad at that. Any questions?

[37:51]

You probably have time for a few, right? Oh, yeah, go ahead. You mentioned zazen was manifestly beneficial. I was wondering what sort of changes in your cognition you've noticed over the years as you've been practicing zazen. It's fascinating that you put it that way. I've noticed almost no changes in my cognition. But I've noticed a huge change in how I relate to my cognitive faculty. Does that make sense? My sense is that the relationship that we bring up and explore in the context of zazen is the relationship between our everyday cognitive faculty and this broader attentive mode of being and relating to the world.

[38:58]

And those two modes are deeply entangled, right? They're constantly sending information back and forth and so on and so forth. But what happens is that when this mode, this mode that when big mind is a player in the activity of the moment, it softens the emotional drivers and of our regular cognitive faculty and allows for more, allows for and invites more information about what's going on than we usually allow when we're acting out of habit. Does that make any sense or what do you think? Yes. Thank you. Yeah, that's really been my experience for that. You know, I have the same old thoughts. God, do I have the same old thoughts? And, you know, I'm like, wait, I first had that thought when I was three.

[40:03]

What's going on here? But nonetheless, my life is totally different because of the kind of difference in the dynamics of my everyday activity. Anyway, something like that. Anything else? Thank you. I was thinking about when your question was, what is Zazen? And then Tim said, doing nothing. And you said that was exactly right or something. Yeah. And I was like, oh, because my answer was everything.

[41:06]

Right. Because I thought, well, OK, we sit and practice Zazen, but it's called practice because it's practicing for. I mean, it's real, but it's also practicing for if you're a non monastic when you're out and you're not. practicing but you're actually it's go time in your life that hopefully or I guess I know this isn't supposed to be goal oriented but kind of is a goal for me I guess to like be able to do that enough here so that when it's when I'm out in the world and I feel myself in a like stressful scenario that I can like really connect back with the way my body is and my mind is when I'm here, which then will change my actions and when I'm out there. That's exactly right.

[42:08]

So I'm in zazen when I'm out there. I mean, ideally, but I'm not. I try, but frequently I'm not. I think what my experience with the trajectory of that is that slowly you start to see that, again, your practice of zazen has started to change the dynamic relationship between your habitual responses to the world and your broader capacity for responding, basically. Does that make sense? Yeah. And in some ways, it has massively changed my behaviors. Like driving, I'm so much better, chill, non-reactive driver. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good thing. That's like, yeah. But here's what I'd say about the whole nothing thing. The question is, when you say, what's Zazen, the question is, who's doing it?

[43:17]

Everything. Well, yes, exactly. But at the same time, like, you know, so, you know, for example, Blanche Hartman, you know, bless her heart, used to tell this great story about how she, too, had practiced counting her breath. And she went in to see Suzuki Roshi and said, I can really count my breath. It's really awesome. And... And he actually kind of yelled at her and he said, no, you don't sit zazen, zazen sits zazen, right? And so the, it's not that there's nothing going on, it's that at least ideally you're not doing any of it, it's doing it, right? And you're right. Our engagement with our embodied reality and the sensory reality that we experience through that embodied reality is...

[44:38]

ungraspable and marvelous, and the request of zazen is to take it in without, with a minimum, let's put it that way, of commentary and fiddling, leaving nothing out and adding nothing in. And that happens sometimes. Sometimes we comment. and we add things in. Thank you. Yeah, of course. That might be it, right? Okay. 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.

[45:44]

For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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