This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. Green Gulch. Farm, green dragon, Zen temple. Beautiful morning clearing after a day of rain. It always feels special and moving for me to be here. I was realizing this is my 40th year anniversary of walking through these doors and that I was... married here a few years after that and actually spent, I lived here for three years working, I was going to say in charge of, but that would be misconstruing it, saying I was in charge of the draft horse farming project.

[01:16]

It was kind of an amazing time and also thinking of my good friend and head of the farm, Steve Stuckey. His funeral was here not so long ago. So lots of things happened in my life in these temple grounds. I want to talk this morning about wholeheartedness. And I was realizing that that was one of the things that really drew me here to Zen Center. to Green Gulch, to Zen practice, was feeling how split I was, how out of sync with myself. And I also, I don't think I had experienced many people as wholehearted.

[02:18]

And until I arrived at the Zen Center, that was... Profound experience for me when I first walked through the doors of 300 page street was seeing people who were So sincere there was a sincerity that drew me to be here to practice here and I want to read a story And talk about this story I think from the context or framework of wholeheartedness, and this is a story that I'm sure some of you know and probably many of you don't know. I've heard it many, many times, and each time I hear it, it stops me, makes me wonder, think about things a little bit differently about my life and about what it means to be a human being and how to live more wholeheartedly.

[03:24]

This is a story from China, probably at least as old as the sixth century. It's a folk tale, maybe older. And it's called Senjou and her soul are separated. Senjou was the beloved daughter of Chokam. In childhood, she played with her cousin, Ochu. And Senjou's father jokingly told them that they were married. They believed him and later fell in love. When her father told her she would marry another man, they were heartbroken. Ochu left the village in a boat before the marriage. As he left, he saw a figure running along the riverbank calling to him. It was Senjo. Joyfully, she joined him and they traveled far away where they married and had two children. Five years went by, and Senjou longed to see her parents and ask their forgiveness.

[04:28]

They traveled back to their village, and Ochu went to her father and told him the story and apologized for them both. The father, Chokhan, astonished, asked Ochu, what girl are you talking about? Your daughter, Senjou, replied Ochu. Chokhan said, my daughter, Senjou, ever since you left, She's been sick in bed, unable to speak. Then Ocho brought Senjo up from the boat. As they approached her parents' door, the Senjo, who had been sick, got up from her bed, smiling. When the two Senjos met, they merged into one. Senjo said, I saw Ocho going away, and that night I dreamed that I ran after. his boat. But now I cannot tell which was really me, the one that went away in the boat or the one that stayed at home.

[05:33]

Later, Zen Master Wuzu asked, Senju was separated from her soul. Which was the real Senju? And this story has gone on to be kind of part of a one of the more used, famous collections of Zen koans called The Gateless Gate. And it's mostly just that last question, which is the real senjo? So my question for myself and for all of us is, which is the real you? Which is the real you? What does it mean to be and live in the world completely wholeheartedly? And why is it so difficult to live wholeheartedly? And it's also a story about penetrating duality, the sense that we live very much in a dual world.

[06:51]

Suzuki Roshi once famously said, if we think that when we die that this is the end of our life, this is a mistake. If we think that when we die this is not the end of our life, this is a mistake. No wonder it's so hard to live wholeheartedly. No wonder. What do we do with such stories of these two senjos. What do we do with these stories of what it means to be wholehearted? Even these forms, this sitting, part of why it's said that we sit cross-legged is that the left foot, left part of us represents kind of wisdom. and calmness. And the right represents kind of more activity and practice.

[07:56]

And that when we sit like this, we can't tell which is which. They kind of get, we mix them together. Or if we sit in a chair, it's, you know, the practice of, with each inhale, a sense of knowing, knowing ourselves, kind of coming into ourselves. And with each exhale, a sense of completely letting go, completely giving up, completely dropping any sense of who we think we are. So wholeheartedness, right? So wholeheartedness, I think, is this how do we put these things together? How do we not stick to our old, usually quite limiting stories of who we are? think we are. And one of the things that I love about this story is that I think it brings up for all of us the ways that either we were separate from ourselves, like seeing the things that we've done in our lives that has led us to feel less wholehearted,

[09:19]

I think of my own childhood, of growing up in a family where there was tremendous stress and separation. Growing up with a manic depressive father and a mother that didn't know how to deal with that, I felt like I developed all kinds of strategies for not being wholehearted, strategies for survival, strategies to push that stress away. And it's hard being wholehearted when we're pushing things away and protecting ourselves. So how do we open our hearts even to the difficulties and stresses of... I mean, just being born is traumatic.

[10:20]

Just living with these less-than-perfect parents situations that we grow up in, there's so much difficulty, so much to process. So I've recently been reading about several different studies. One is studies that look at what is it that makes great cultures. And this particular study looks at, I think, a variety of Asian cultures and some Jewish cultures and different cultures throughout the world. And I've also been looking at reading many, many studies about what is it that makes great leaders? What is it that separates average leaders from great leaders? Great cultures from not-so-great cultures.

[11:22]

And what was really fascinating to me was that there seemed to be three different qualities that lined up almost exactly in both of these, in terms of cultures and in studies of leaders. And these three... these three particular competencies. One was great achievement drive or confidence. Great achievement drive and confidence. The second was great humility and doubt. And the third was great perseverance, the ability to persevere. So I want to just talk a little bit about these three qualities and how, in some, I think, profound way, perhaps practicing these may be a way to actually see a wholeheartedness as a practice. So achievement drive.

[12:27]

You know, this is somewhat paradoxical, right? Because Zen... Zen talks often about that the heart of Zen practice is moving away from attainment to non-attainment, right? That when we sit, we're not trying to improve ourselves or be better or be anything else than who we are. So what do we mean by... What do I mean by achievement drive? What do I mean by confidence? Well, often in these... We start these... these talks by start and sometimes end, these talks by saying, beings are numberless. I vow to save them. This sounds like achievement drive to me. The vow, the vow to save all beings. Or sometimes people say, when I talk about achievement or ambition, I say, I want to work with and help people

[13:30]

who are ambitious about wanting to reduce poverty or wanting to reduce violence or wanting to reduce inequality. And I think we admire the part of ourselves that wants to do that and people who seem to so brilliantly and skillfully exude the sense of... And in a way, this kind of achievement drive is perhaps... Compassion. Compassion has various elements in it, but one element of compassion. Compassion isn't just feeling the feelings of others. That's a part of compassion. But compassion is feeling the feelings of others and taking the desire, the motivation, the action to actually help. So this kind of achievement drive is a practice that we can develop.

[14:39]

And confidence, again, it's this mixture, this interesting mixture, this quality of achievement drive and confidence. But this confidence is, again, it's a little paradoxical. It's like, I think it takes great confidence to sit together meditation, right? Just the confidence to sit and not want anything, the confidence to sit and not know who you are, what will happen. I've been kind of studying this realm of emotional intelligence and And a lot of my own life has been the practice of making dharma, making these teachings as accessible to a wide range of people as I possibly can.

[15:47]

This has been sort of my vow since I was director of Tassahara, which was 30 years ago, and decided that this was somehow going to be my path. And I remember people thought, I must be a little crazy to want to do that. I went right from being director of Tassahara to business school, naturally. And I've been on this path ever since, and I'm now... find myself working with corporations like Google and Genentech and SAP, as well as with doctors and hospitals and government people who suddenly are more and more open and interested in how do these teachings, how can they help people

[16:58]

be healthier? How can they help organizations work together with more? They're actually even using the words wisdom and compassion. I went to hear Arianna Huffington speak just a couple of nights ago, and she made this statement that 2013 was the year of CEOs coming out not as gay, but as meditators. And that leading CEOs from all over the country and all over the world, it turns out, have had long-term meditation practices and are talking about how useful it is in their lives. Yeah, so achievement drive, which is, again, a kind of compassion.

[18:04]

And I started to talk about, I mentioned emotional intelligence, right? So emotional intelligence, I think, is just another way of taking these practices and putting them in language that maybe decouples them from its religious roots, but can change. perhaps keep a lot of the depth of these teachings. So in the realm of emotional intelligence, emotional intelligence talks about self-awareness as the primary practice. The primary practice of emotional intelligence is self-awareness, which when you look at it, it looks a lot like mindfulness practice or meditation practice, this sense of becoming more and more aware of our emotional lives with the intent of developing greater and greater freedom.

[19:08]

And this looks a lot to me like Zen practice, becoming just sitting, just allowing all of our emotions, to arise without judging. So this mindfulness practice is sometimes defined as the awareness that develops through non-judgmental being, by paying attention, training our attention. Often when I go into the corporate world, There's some places where, even now, still the word meditation or mindfulness can be a little bit disconcerting to people. So I'm happy to say, let's do some attention training. So if that is easier for people, more accessible. So when we talk about self-awareness,

[20:14]

and achievement drive, self-awareness is described in the emotional intelligence framework as having these three different pieces. One piece is emotional awareness. The second piece is accurate self-assessment. And the third is confidence. And it's said that when you practice, by practicing more and more self-awareness and self-assessment, it leads to a kind of confidence. But it's not the confidence of arrogance or being too sure. It's the confidence that includes humility, the confidence that includes a kind of not knowing. The similar kind of confidence that I think it takes to sit, to just sit without knowing. what will happen.

[21:16]

One of the essential pieces of whether you call it attention training, mindfulness practice, meditation practice, or zazen. Zazen is like just sitting. Just sitting. The confidence that it takes to just sit. As well as the humility. So the second practice is the practice of that it's not about me. So in the realm of leadership, it's being able to move from me to we, that knowing that in order to get things done, it takes all of us or takes many of us and that it's not about my ego. So it's interesting. there is this, so confidence has a bit of ego in it, but humility then is the sense of dropping ego.

[22:24]

So how is it that we can, in a way, practice both of these, practice kind of completely knowing ourselves, completely trusting ourselves, and at the same time not knowing, letting go. Again, this feels like this story, this story of which is it? Did Sanjo thrive? Did she leave? Did she have the confidence to follow her heart and leave? Or did she somehow need to stay and take care of her family? And was she sick and heartbroken? Perhaps, or could she have done both? Maybe she left and was heartbroken. Maybe she stayed and lived this dream of this other life.

[23:31]

So there's a certain way that we all seem to be many people. We all seem to live many, many lives. And how do we embrace that? How do we allow ourselves to celebrate that and to use those as practices to find more and more freedom, more and more wholeheartedness? How can we wholeheartedly accept how wide our hearts are. Yesterday, I was talking about this topic and a woman came up to me and said, well, I'm feeling, I'm feeling, I'm in a real difficult place in my life right now. I'm feeling not so passionate as I was much of my life.

[24:37]

What can I do? And I thought, well, this is really the time to practice wholeheartedness, to even bring that sense of difficulty or lack of passion into a larger sense of being wholehearted. We don't always have to be happy or passionate, but we can always find a way, I think, to be wholehearted. I find these days, more and more, I'm asked to help people who are in transition in their lives, which I think is all of us. But especially, it seems like we all hit different points when we're in some larger transition.

[25:41]

In particular, I get asked, people come to me who are in some kind of a work transition, or these days it will be my friends want me to meet with their children, their grown children, who are trying to figure out what do I do with my life? How do I figure out what is my path? What is my path? And what I find is when I'm talking to people in transition that I almost always come back to practicing wholeheartedness, looking at your attitude, your approach to figuring out what it is you want to do. We get caught by thinking, if we're just doing the right thing, then we'll be able to be wholehearted. But I find that if we can be wholehearted, it will help us figure out what the right thing is.

[26:49]

Not that what we do doesn't matter. Of course it does. I think of, again, it was one of the things that really drew me to being here at the Zen Center and Zen practice was wherever I looked, I saw wholeheartedness. When people offered incense, it was done. Like, people really cared about it. Or I walked into the kitchen, and there was a sense of a wholeheartedness in chopping vegetables, in taking care of the rice. So this... And I was wholeheartedly really trying to figure out how... how to farm with horses. How can we farm with horses? It was pretty impossible. And actually, I recognized at some point that this was a lifetime commitment, farming with horses, and that Zen Center was going to need to make a multi-generational commitment

[28:05]

And as I began to express these things, I got shipped down back to Tassajara. Back to the kitchen. Which, actually, it was, you know, I grieved. I missed, I still grieve. You know, I still see, there's some photographs around here of those horses, Snip and Jerry. You know, they're, they still, they're in my heart, those horses. And yet, um, uh, It was amazing for me to go to Tassajara, where I was asked to be the assistant to the head cook for a year, and then I found myself as the head cook for a year. And little did I know that I was being cooked. I was working wholeheartedly. It was just that combination of sitting every day, Having that, what an amazing luxury to sit every day with a group of people.

[29:13]

Now, just the other day, I was leading a retreat for a group of Google engineers. And at the end of this retreat, there were a couple of people who said, wow, this sitting, this is fantastic. It was the first time they had spent a whole day. doing meditation practices. We did a combination of walking, sitting and walking. And they said, do we need to go to Tassajara? Do we need to quit Google and go to Tassajara? And I said, you can. I mean, that would be lovely if you can do that. But the other thing you could do is bring Tassajara to you. And I said that my experience my practice these days is I'm a monk every morning for about an hour. Every morning I turn part of my house into my own little private monastery where I light incense and do some boughs and I sit and I read.

[30:23]

And this is something that we can all do. Or we can all at least aspire to do. I know it's so, it's hard, life, it's hard to find the ability to do that, but I want to kind of recommend that as a core practice to being able to practice achievement drive and confidence, to being able to practice humility, right, to practice humility. And then the third piece I mentioned is perseverance, to be able to stay with it, to be able to withstand difficulty. This wholeheartedness, what does it mean to be wholehearted? Again, in this emotional intelligence framework, one of the pieces, one of the cheek

[31:32]

the big chunks of emotional intelligence is the practice of motivation, the practice of understanding why, you know, why do you do what you do? What gets you up in the morning? What's your passion? And within this practice of motivation, there are these three practices. Isn't it great? There's always these threes. They make them a lot easier to remember, at least for me. Three is about as many things as I can hold. But the three practices of motivation are the practices of alignment, envisioning, and resilience. And in a way, this is another way into looking at and talking about wholeheartedness. Alignment is being aligned with whatever your deepest values are. So it's knowing. What is in your heart?

[32:32]

And seeing in what way is the way that we're living, is our activity in alignment or out of alignment with that? And again, it's this constant sense, I think, of adjusting. But asking those questions. When I lived here, one of my teachers was a man named Harry Roberts, who was a... Yurak, shaman, medicine, agronomist. And his great teaching to me, which I keep coming back to over and over again all these years, his alignment teaching is he used to say, being a human being is easy. You just need to ask and answer three questions. What do you want? What do you have to do to get it? And can you pay the price? And then he would laugh wildly, saying, yeah, this human being stuff, real simple.

[33:39]

Most people never bother to ask the first question, what do you want? What do you want? So this is, I think, alignment. The practice of alignment is asking the question, what do you want? Envisioning is being open to looking at what comes up What is it you want? One of the exercises that we do in this emotional intelligence piece of some of the teaching that I do, the exercise is a writing exercise, which you spend 10 minutes writing. If everything in my life were to go exactly as I want it to, What might my life look like in five years from now? If everything were to go as exactly as I want it to. Now, of course, it's great to do these exercises just as a way of exploring.

[34:46]

And when I teach this, I think, don't be caught so much by the what. Another way to write about this is, how do I want to live my life? in the next day or next year or next five years. How might I practice living more wholeheartedly? What does wholehearted practice look like for me? How can I practice it? And again, coming back to this practice of sitting, it is, I believe, the way...

[35:24]

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