This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Wow, thank you all very much for coming this morning. I hear the class was wonderful. and that many people attended. So thank you for participating in this practice period. The practice period is entitled Awake Body, Awake Mind. And... Yes. Yes, please, there are seats here. think it's going to be warm in here, or at least for me it is.

[01:18]

So I always, I often forget to say who I am, so the people arriving and needing seats allowed me to remember that that's always a good place to start. So thank you for coming and reminding me. My name is Mary, and I live at this temple. I've lived at all three of the San Francisco Zen center temples, so I lived at Green Gulch, Tassajara, and I've been at city center for a number of years. At this point, my position is called the Tonto, or head of practice, and I've been doing it for about nine months, and I'm still not exactly sure what that means or what that position entails. It's one of these positions that is opening up, you could say, like a flower, or or you could say, like, a horrible dream. It's hard to know, actually. And I'm in the middle of trying to figure out what that is.

[02:23]

So the practice period that we started a couple weeks ago is called Awake Body, Awake Mind. And this idea of having an awakened mind, an awakened heart, An awakened body is something that is over and over and over in the teachings. What does that mean? If you were to close your eyes right now, that's okay, at the sound of the cell phone, if you were to close your eyes, what would that mean to you? What would it mean to have an awake mind, an awake heart? an awake body. Is that a pleasing thought for you? Is it a comparative thought? Is it something that you aspire to or something you know?

[03:33]

One of the things that I'm learning about Buddhism is that the questions are always more important than the answers. Asking the questions over and over and over to see what answer happens now. Because the answer that's happening now, I'm quite certain, will be different than the answer that happened two weeks ago or two months ago or will happen in two days. Two days ago, I was laying in bed with a flu. Many people right now, I understand, are experiencing this kind of fall sickness. And I started feeling sick last Sunday with a headache, and I felt wretched, actually.

[04:33]

And it's through the encouragement of Christina around feeling one's body, feeling our body, I decided to stay home for a number of days. That isn't always an easy decision. Often people go to school or go to work and they feel wretched and they're not so in tune with their body or they don't want to be in tune with that feeling because the demands that are placed on them are real. and we don't know how to negotiate that very well. So this invitation, this idea about an awake body, awake mind, is that. It's settling in, feeling, settling in, feeling, and seeing what happens. And it's not so easy, because a lot of us are very used to ignoring

[05:39]

what's actually happening, for an idea of what we think should be happening, a want that is placed somewhere in our minds that tells us we should be doing this or doing that. Last week in a talk, Christina referred a couple of times to this. She said, do you feel safe enough? Do you feel safe enough? And that is, as she pointed out, and I've been thinking about it over and over again, enough is not something that we talk about very much or think about in this culture. We think about more. We think about inadequacy. And that if we could change a couple of things, our lives would be better. If we could muscle our way from this moment and change something, we would have better lives, we would be better people, we would have more of a lot of things.

[06:53]

And my experience in this practice is starting to teach me that the body, this body and this mind, offer everything that I need if I can pay attention. And the things it offers might not be the things that I think I want. And how do I negotiate that? So settling into this idea of paying attention, of having an awake body-mind, is actually pretty uncomfortable for us. Because we're often at some sort of odds with the things we think we should have or want and the way things are.

[07:57]

And this reconciliation isn't a conversation that happens once. This reconciliation is the practice of Buddhism over many, many lifetimes, actually. So today, what I wanted to talk a little bit about are two ways that I've found that I'm actively working with this idea of waking up to my body and my mind. And they're not... They're not immediate relief. Because I don't think that there is such a thing. I think that we often imagine that we can change ourselves through sheer will and determination. And I'm finding more and more that that is not so easy.

[09:06]

How many of you, you don't have to raise your hand if you don't want to, how many of you have had a New Year's resolution? And it can work for maybe a day or a week or this idea that you want to change the way you look so you go on a diet. And that can last a day or a week or a year. We can change. We can want to change. We can firmly decide and resolve to change. And what I'm learning more and more is that firm resolve is in opposition to what will happen. It's the softening of around change, the kindness around change, the knowing oneself and moving towards change in a gentle way that lets us change.

[10:18]

And that is not something that we hear very often. It's not the message of the media It's not the message of the culture. The message of the culture is if you drive yourself determinedly towards something, you can get that something. And I'm finding out more and more that that often causes a lot of chaos behind us and causes a lot of problems in front of us. So... Last time I spoke, a number of months ago, I talked about my first Buddhist teacher. Her name was Trime Lamo. And she studied Buddhism for 40 years and was a very serious student.

[11:23]

She was a nun, a Tibetan nun. And one of the things that she came to believe is that most of the people... in our world at this time aren't very kind to themselves. So the messages they say to themselves involve this force. I want to be better. I want to change. And she taught for more than 20 years in a sangha. And over those years, she came up with 52 affirmations that she wanted her sangha to practice with. These were something to, it was one for a week. And so there are instructions about how to do this.

[12:27]

And she was very clear about how she wanted people to work with these slogans. but I wanted to read a few of them to you, and while I'm reading them, I'd like you to close your eyes. Every thought I think is creating my future. Every thought I think is creating my future. Every thought I think is creating my future. I am totally adequate for all situations. I am totally adequate for all situations.

[13:37]

I am totally adequate for all situations. My mind is the source of all my joy. My mind is the source of all my sorrow. My mind is the source of all my joy. My mind is the source of all my sorrow. I am willing to release the desire to examine the faults of others. I am willing to release the desire to examine the faults of others. am willing to release the desire to examine the faults of others.

[14:56]

I trust my ability to see things as they are. I trust my ability to see things as they are. I trust my ability to see things as they are. How do these things feel as I read them? Do you believe them? For me, when I read these, I felt that there was a kind of settling, a hopefulness even.

[16:22]

And then almost I was incredulous because I didn't think that I could get behind them, you know. do I really believe that I'm adequate in all situations? Wouldn't that be a marvelous thing to feel? So how do we get there? And Trime proposed that one of the ways we get there is by having a slogan, having one of these short affirmations in our mind, and thinking about it, having it rise up through the day, having it rise up when you wake up. So instead of having the alarm ring and think, oh boy, here's another day, I had to think about that, because that's not what I'd say.

[17:30]

That kind of sinking feeling, if you... If one could wake up and have one of these things that pops into our minds first, that's the way of working with our mind. It's training. It takes repetition over and over and over again to actually counteract the messages that we've been learning that have been infused in our world, in our bodies, in our minds for the time we've been alive. So I think that these can pop into our consciousness if we are familiar with them, if we use them. And the benefit of that is instead of the noisy chatter that's often in our brain about how inadequate we are, how we're not doing a good job,

[18:37]

how we want other people to say we're doing a good job, and even when they say we're doing a good job, we don't believe them, you know, because how could we be doing a good job? These kind of things, these thoughts get in there, and they work at that, and they're like little things. work away at these solid ideas that we've developed about ourselves and our ability to have some say in our lives, actually. I think it's, when I think about the world right now, when I take myself out of the context of this book of affirmations, I feel very despairing, actually.

[19:39]

I feel despairing about the situation in the world. And my despairing, I know, is no help for the world. So it's important to me to try to shape my mind in a way that I feel is helpful and kind. And just wanting myself to be helpful and kind doesn't work. I've tried that. I tried that for a long time. I have some desire to be a kind person. I think most of us do. We wake up in the morning and we don't think, well, I want to be nasty today. Probably. So I think it's that how do we get there? And I think one of the things that I'm finding as a result of practice is this idea of... working with my mind in a positive, gentle, kind way is allowing me to move towards that thing that I do want, that aspiration that I do have, which is kindness, which is openness.

[20:49]

And I think that that, I believe that that affects me and how I am and affects the people that I engage with on a day-to-day basis. and in fact affects the world. So I think that these little affirmations, working with these, making them part of our consciousness, is an actual way to... counteract the messages of the culture. The second tool that I rely on very heavily is, and I've talked about this many times while sitting here, are some, it's called mind training or in Tibetan lojong slogans.

[21:54]

And there are 59 slogans that are to turn the mind towards kindness and compassion. And it's a form of training. Two nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night. Boom. And the slogan, 21, was the slogan that came in my mind. And the slogan is number 10. which is always maintain only a joyful mind. How is that even possible? And then I thought, wow, I haven't been following that slogan very well lately. I haven't been feeling all that joyful. So to have that be in my mind in the middle of the night, it's...

[22:57]

It's more like, oh, this is something I'd like. This is something that's worthwhile. And I remembered in the middle of the night that that was something I wanted. And for me, that's kind of a miracle that I woke up in the middle of the night thinking, always maintain only a joyful mind rather than, oh, rats, here I am in the middle of the night. I have to get up tomorrow morning. I don't feel very well. You know, blah, blah, blah. That's a miracle. It might not be a big miracle, but maybe it is a big miracle. And so I've been working with these slogans. I've been teaching them. My partner and I do a retreat at Tassajara around them. I've memorized the 59 slogans.

[24:00]

I go through them over and over again. I pick them up. I engage with them. They pop into my mind, which is the point. They're short, and this is exactly what they're intended to do, is instead of thinking, I wonder why that boss of mine is such a jerk, the slogan 26 pops into your mind, which is, don't ponder others. And it has a tendency to remind us that, yes, we could think about that boss of ours who's a real jerk, or we could think, yeah, I don't need to think about that. It may be true, it may not be true, but that's not what I'm going to think about right now. So for me, I think these tools are, they're not the intellectual deep dharma of Dogen.

[25:23]

They're not the koans that Zen practices famous for. They're not mind-expanding philosophical argument. But a teacher once said to me that there are 84,000 tenant teachings in Buddhism and that you only need one to pierce your heart. And so we find something that does that. We read and we look and we talk and we listen in the Dharma. And we work towards finding something that pierces our heart. And it can be oryoki practice. It can be listening to somebody else have a conversation on the bus. It can be years and years of study of the Dharma.

[26:29]

It can be bowing a hundred thousand times. It can be cooking somebody's lunch in the kitchen during a Saturday one day sit. It can be any of those things. It can be all of those things. But something, something that allows us to awake, awake this heart, awake this body, awake this mind, and to return over and over and over again to that feeling so we can recognize it and we know the shape of it, the texture of it, and it becomes familiar to us as a friend rather than as a strange occurrence that we think we want but we don't even know what it looks like. Zazen is about familiarity.

[27:35]

It's about doing it again and again and again. Allowing that feeling in our body and mind. Allowing for that feeling. I think Dharma is the same. It's over and over and over again. We want to be better learners, you know. We have this great model in our society of child prodigies who, you know, are three and they can play the violin or do math problems. We like that. We all wish we were like that. And it's... I don't know if that's something to aspire to, that quick, unknowable... How do you get there when you're a child prodigy, when you don't even know why you're good at something?

[28:36]

How does that feel in your body? I don't know. I think opening to ourselves and our abilities, getting to know ourselves, being awake is a... gentle, long pursuit. And I think that in a busy world, gentle, long pursuits sound pretty good to me. I think that having an awake body, having an awake mind allows us to experience our lives.

[29:48]

And I think that makes sense mostly to us, but I don't think mostly that's how we live. I think we get up in the morning, we do the things we have to do, Then we go to sleep. And we do that over and over again. And I think that's certainly one way to live. And I'm not sure that that... That's the best way to live. And I'm not even sure that I know what the best way to live is. But I'm working on trying to find out what the best way for me is. And I think every step of the way, I don't know what that is.

[30:52]

Because other people's paths aren't my path. And... We want the... We want somebody to show us the way. I think mostly we want somebody to show us the way. And then when they show us the way, we get mad at them. Or something like that. We have this complicated relationship with that, I think. But... I think there's this desire in many people to have somebody that's showing them the way. And I think that it's like, well, we can point in certain directions. When you're somebody's boss, you can point them in a certain direction.

[31:59]

And then at a certain point, I think they have to find their way. And this is the same as dharma. You can be pointed in a certain direction by all these teachings, by the Buddha, by somebody that you relate to, who's a Buddhist, who's more senior than you, a spiritual friend. And then at a certain point, I think each of us has to find our way. And... I think that that is, it's an interesting, scary journey if we're not used to finding our way. And one of the things I know for sure is that everybody wants to be cherished and loved and mostly from,

[33:06]

This perspective, I want myself to be cherished and loved more than I want other people to be cherished and loved. And so I start here to work with that so that there's this feeling that other people are as important as I am. And again, that's hard work. When I first started practicing, I had somebody that had been practicing longer than I had, and she said, I want to practice so I can love even the milkman. And I remembered thinking, why would I want that? Why would that be important? And as I practiced longer and longer, I think, yeah, I can get behind that idea.

[34:07]

I would like to be able to say that my confidence in the practice is big enough that I have the ability to love everybody, certainly in different ways, but that this awake heart can do that, has the capacity to do that. That was unthinkable for me years ago, that this being, could have that capacity. So I think it's years of sitting, years of listening, years of practice, sazen, that have opened me up to that idea, which I feel is worthwhile in this world. Trime was very funny.

[35:22]

She was sarcastic in a sort of a gentle way. And she had a... Maybe not sarcastic. She made fun of herself a lot. And over the years she got kinder and... I knew her for 16 years. Witty. And she wanted people to like themselves. And her way to do that was to offer these affirmations. And to offer them in such a way that the caution was that this is going to take some work, folks.

[36:35]

So it takes work to like yourself, really, deep down. And it's... wonderful, opening, softening, painful work. And it's worth every second. So thank you so much for coming today and for listening and for feeling your heart not easy to be human. And here we all are, being human. So thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[37:41]

Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:01]

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