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 evening everyone. I want to start with a poem. Something you have heard it before. It's the if you will, the thematic poem of the practice period. And here it is. Love is a place. And through this place of love, move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world. And in this world of yes, live skillfully curled all worlds.

[01:04]

Love is a place. And through this place of love, move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world. And in this world of yes, live. skillfully curled, all worlds. What is your place of love? What is your place of yes? And how do you live there? How do you embody those places? How do you embody those worlds? How do you embody yes? We're here to embody life itself, to know it completely, to say yes to it completely.

[02:20]

So thank you for being here to take up that particular endeavor. For those of you who may not know me, my name is David Zimmerman, and I live and practice here at City Center. And we're also, a number of us have been engaged in a six-week practice period, and we are now in the final stretch, the last few days of the six-week practice period. And at the opening talk, On May 1st, I had mentioned that the Japanese word for practice period is ongo, and that translates as peaceful abode or peaceful dwelling place. And I thought this was particularly apropos given the focus of our spring practice period, which is at home in the boundless heart, embodying the Brahma Viharas.

[03:25]

So just out of curiosity, how many people have been engaged in the practice period? And how many people are here for the first time? Great, welcome. For those of you who are not familiar with the Brahmaviharas, who are here for the first time, perhaps, they are spoken of as four aspects of love. And the word Brahmavihara can be translated as divine abode or heavenly abodes or heavenly dwellings. These abodes are described as four limitless and immeasurable qualities or states of mind. And their names in Pali are Metta, Karuna, Mudita, and Upeka. And so Metta is kindness. friendliness, goodwill, or benevolence, among other things.

[04:30]

And it's defined as a strong wish for the welfare and happiness of others. So it's directed outwards, it's directed to others, the sense of goodwill and friendliness, wish for their happiness. And karuna is compassion. And it's the ability to feel the distress or pain of others as if it were one's own. And feeling that distress or pain, when we practice compassion, we have a sense of empathetic care directed towards others. We wish for them to be liberated from their suffering and from their pain. Somehow to have that pain and suffering be transformed, lightened some way. And then buddhita. Mudita means appreciative joy or inclusive joy. And it's joy at the success and good fortune of others. So it implies recognizing and admiring first the goodness in others.

[05:35]

What is good in them? And wishing for their goodness and their happiness to continue unobstructed. And then the final brahma-vihara, upekka, translated as equanimity. And it's an even-mindedness. I often like to also use the word even-heartedness. It's a balance of mind and heart that arises from non-attachment and from wisdom. So these Brahma Viharas are the Buddha's teachings, his primary heart teachings, the ones that most connect us directly with our desire for true happiness. So our spring practice period concludes this week with a three-day sushin. And that sushin starts tonight. I know a number of you here are here for that particular sushin. And we're also having a one-day sitting, which is part of the sushin, on Saturday.

[06:42]

So some people are coming just for that. And this talk is launching or initiating the sushin. And... Also, I want to be offering some encouragement during this talk for those of you who are sitting with the sushin, as well as continue our exploration of the Brahma Viharas, which I'll be speaking on those and touching upon the teachings of the Brahma Viharas a bit more throughout the next few days. So, sushin literally means touching or gathering or uniting the heart-mind. So the word sushin comes from, it's a compound of the Sino-Japanese term, so it's made up of two ideographs. One is setsu, and the other is shin, or shin, depending on how you pronounce it. So shin or shin means mine as well as heart, so it can have both of those particular meanings. And the word setsu has several different meanings. It can mean touch, receive, convey, or gather.

[07:48]

So sashin can be literally translated as to touch the mind. It also means to convey the mind or to receive the mind. So all these expressions are included in the word sashin. And it's an opportunity, sashin is an opportunity to put aside our usual affairs, our usual business. spend a few days to just gather our energy and concentrate our hearts and mind on clarifying the great matter for ourselves. What are we doing here? How are we living our lives in a way that's deeply meaningful to us? And we're going to do this through the simple activity of just following our breaths and focusing our intention on the direct experience of just sitting. It's that simple. Following our breaths and paying direct attention to this activity of just sitting.

[08:54]

And we're going to do this as a group together. Because doing it as a group supports each and every one of us. We give each other kind of energy and vitality to actually do this machine together. So it's really hard to sit by yourself alone. So when we get together, we really support and encourage each other to do what can be an arduous task. So sushin is an opportunity to more intimately discover and deepen into our own hearts and minds, to come home, another way of saying that, to come home to ourselves and discover what it is to peacefully abide in this very body-mind. Right? right as it is, right as it's manifesting in this moment. So to gather and reconnect our hearts and minds, to be able to touch the core of our being, to allow ourselves to receive the gift of being human.

[09:59]

And we don't have to do anything to receive this gift. We simply can sit and bear witness to this wonderful generosity of the universe. So the title, At Home in the Boundless Heart, what might it mean to be at home in the boundless heart? What does it mean to embody such a heart? And first, what does it mean to be at home? I think for many of us, when we think of the word home, the term conjures up a place of belonging, of affirmation, of refuge, of shared being. Another way of describing home, perhaps, is a place of the heart, a place of love. Do any of you resonate with that particular kind of definition? I see a few nods. Well, I have to say that for many of us, our experience of home and a true home is not one of love or safety or affirmation.

[11:14]

So we need to acknowledge those of us who maybe that isn't true. Perhaps because of our childhood or family circumstances, our homes don't have that particular quality about them. So my own initial experience of home was often the opposite of affirmation. Home for me was often tended to be a place of disruption, uncertainty, unsettledness, anxiety. and also physical and verbal violence. So it's kind of hard to feel at home when you are around that kind of experience. Part of the story is after my mother fled when I was five years old, due to my father's drunken violence, my brother and I were placed into a children's home. And I was also in foster homes. So for five years, children's homes and foster homes and back and forth. And even after my brother and I returned to my father's house later on, it was still a very disrupted and discordant experience.

[12:19]

And so that sense of belonging and security was never something that I really felt when I was at home. And then later on in my mid-30s, I had spent a couple years traveling and living in Asia. And one of my intentions of doing so was to learn how to be at home in the world, how to expand my sense of home, to be a wider, to include a wider sphere. And when I came back from living in Asia, this was in 1999, I decided one of the first things I wanted to do was actually sit a session here, to get grounded, to reconnect, to being back on this particular continent. So I started Sashin, which was being led by my teacher-to-be, Tia Strozer, and Blanche Hartman. And at the end of the Sashin, there's what's called a Shosan ceremony, which is a kind of question-and-answer session with the teachers leading the practice period.

[13:22]

And the Sashin. And I asked Blanche, in a world of impermanence, unreliability, and oppression, where is my true home? And she said, right here, just in this very moment. And I was like, is it really that simple? Just right here, right now, in this moment? Is it really that simple? And it took me a number of years to really, through practice, to come to an understanding. of what she was pointing to at a much deeper level than just the surface words. To understand that home is not an external place. It's rather a state of the heart, a state of the mind, citta, a state of awake presence. And that we can choose to both reacquaint ourselves with and cultivate in any moment.

[14:28]

So we create home in every moment by the way that we relate to this presence right here, right now. And this is basically what the practices of the Brahmaviharas are teaching us. Again, Brahmavihara means divine abode. You can also translate that as royal abode or royal home. That's another way I've seen it. So you might think of the Brahmaviharas as our true home. It's what we come home to when we truly understand who we are. It's a way of understanding how the heart functions when we are truly at home, when we're nesting and not lost in thought and activity. Again, the poem. And this is by E.E. Cummings. Love is a place

[15:30]

And through this place of love, move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world, and in this world of yes, live skillfully curled all worlds. Love is a place. It's an abode. It's a home. It's a realm, one in which all places and all things move peacefully. And the Brahma Viharas are such places. So they're called immeasurable because there's no limit to the Brahma Viharas. There's no limit to these expressions or realms of love. They are boundless, unquantifiable, unconditional, and radiant. They're like warm sunlight that extends all over the whole world. And so in this way they're profoundly inclusive. They're able to extend, include, and brighten all places of the human heart.

[16:38]

And from a Buddhist perspective, the phrase brightness of peace is the light of our Buddha nature. That brightness, that light, the luminosity of awareness itself. Which is always still. It's unmoving, but not unmoved. It's quiescent, silent, luminous, heart-mind of our true nature. And when all beings rest in their true nature, they're naturally at peace, naturally at home. And this is a peace that we can touch and convey through our practice, and particularly through the support of Sushi. The first of the Brahma Vihara's metta, again, is the wish that all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.

[17:55]

And as such, metta is considered kind of the energy power of all the Brahma Viharas, the foundation. It's what gives them their kind of oomph, their source, right? And I've been defining happiness throughout this practice period as the knowing of of our own being. Happiness as the knowing of our own being. So this is, in Buddhist terms, the direct knowing or recognition of our Buddha nature, our awakened being, awakening being. So again, it's a verb. There's not a thing there that awakens. It's the activity itself. Mind is simply that awake. And so happiness is a matter of coming home to ourselves, of being at home in ourselves.

[18:58]

And we feel a deep sense of presence and affirmation and belonging within. And when we are home in our own being, we know without doubt who we are truly. We're no longer seeking outside of in the external world for fulfillment or affirmation in some way. And I've also been proposing through this practice period that love is different than happiness, insofar as love arises in relationship. So happiness is a personal matter, and love is an interpersonal or interpersonal. So the definition of love that I've been entertaining is that love is the knowing of our shared being. The knowing of our shared being. So the experience of love is simply the felt knowing of our shared being, the felt sense of our profound interconnectedness, or interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh says.

[20:09]

Again, the emphasis is on being as a verb. So the experience of our shared being is the direct experience of our non-separation with others. I recently stumbled upon a YouTube video in which the Benedictine monk, Brother David Stendlerast, was being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey as part of her Super Soul Sunday series, I think it is. And I don't know, some of you might know Brother David. He was actually at one point... a resident here at San Francisco Zen Center. I know he did, I think, a couple practice periods at Tassajara, and over the years has stayed connected to Zen Center, and particularly with Paul Haller, he's been, on a yearly basis, co-leading retreats at Tassajara on Catholic and Zen, Christian and Zen dialogue together, up until very recently. He's just, I think, retired from the public life, per se,

[21:14]

And so he's no longer doing the retreats at Tassajara. But in the clip that I saw with Oprah, she asked him the definition of love. What is his definition of love? And he responds that love is a lived yes to belonging. Love is a lived yes to belonging. How beautiful is that? I would propose that the practice of zazen is also the practice of a lived yes. A lived yes to the world of being human and to all the experience that we experience in being alive. As such is a profound inclusive engagement. So it's a It's a yes to knowingly belonging to our subsequent aches and pains.

[22:16]

For example, the slight tension in our neck, or the searing pain in our knees when we're sitting, or the minor slights and deep sorrows, perhaps being overlooked for seconds during oryoki, or the memory of a loved one who has died and there still remains in your heart a deep hole of missing them. and also the simultaneous discomforts and joy of being human and the overwhelming ruptures in the fabric of trust and safety due to violence and trauma and various forms of oppression. So, when the Brahma Bihara has become a place where we abide and rest our minds in the radiant peace of our Buddha nature, then they also serve for us as a world of yes, a world of radical inclusion in which no being, no experience, no phenomenon is turned away or left out of our hearts.

[23:27]

Each of us in our own world, each of us a particular nexus and a blooming of causes and conditions. And no one can know our own experience our own particular experience. And frankly, that can be lonely at times. And yet, we all share, we all manifest in our modulations of the same Buddha nature. And through the practice of Zazen and the Buddha Dharma, we seek to go to the edges of our heart and step beyond. Step into the space of vulnerability and the unknown. which is the space of our deepest connectedness with others. So I would propose that the practice of being aware is itself the open, boundless heart. So how is this? How might we discover this for ourselves? Of course, we start first with zazen.

[24:33]

We start by taking our seat in the zendo, which is what we're going to do, those of us who are sitting the sashim. And we're going to attend to the present moment no matter what it is, good, bad, pleasant or unpleasant. And as we practice and get some skill at it, hey, I can sit here and actually be OK in the midst of knee pain and in the midst of all the irritations and in the midst of my aching heart. And we realize just this, that the capacity to be mindful and aware means having an open heart. It's not a conceptual thing. It's a felt insight, one that's viscerally known in the body-mind. So when we sit zazen, just sitting there, or lying down, if that's what our body needs, hour after hour, we learn to say yes. Yes to both the inner world and the outer world.

[25:39]

Yes to our irregular breathing and our itchy back. Yes to the noise of the garbage truck at 5.45 outside of the Zendo, like this morning. I think it went on for at least half an hour, you know, most of the period. And we say yes to our grief and our pain and our shame and our sense of self-importance and our deep fear. And we say yes to it all because it's real for us. in that moment. It's real and it's fleeting. It doesn't last. It's simply a part of who we are, but it's not what we ultimately are. So we sit there, not acting on the impulse, but letting the impulses pass without re-energizing them. Our nervous system begins to relax when we just not engage with these impulses, right?

[26:44]

We relax because, alas, we're acknowledging the truth of things as it is. And at a fundamental level, truth is relaxing because we no longer have to sustain the effort that is involved in resisting the truth. To resist truth takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of energy to resist. So when we sit in zazen not resisting, just relaxing into what is, we actually in time release energy. And that's one of the reasons why after a few periods, a few days of sitting, we somehow gain more energy, more aliveness. Everything becomes brighter, more vibrant. Because all the energy that we've been putting into resisting and contracting has been freed and been able to be redeployed in some way. When we open to truth, we can let go of even more deeply into belonging to yes.

[27:46]

So yes means attending to and surrendering to whatever our experience is. Attending to the body, attending to the strong emotions, and also returning to the breath whenever it gets to be too much, returning to the breath as a touchstone. as a foundation, as something to ground us once more here in the present moment. And in the breath, we can hold all of our experience in some way. The breath as spacelessness itself in the body. Connecting to the breath, feeling the breath in our body, feeling the space of that at a very visceral level is a place where we can actually allow that space to hold everything we're feeling. And even thinking, all of it can be included there. So saying yes is very inclusive. It's a very inclusive practice. It means nothing is left out. do you want to say yes to?

[29:15]

What do you need to say yes to? What have you brought here that you still haven't said yes to? What haven't you accepted about your life and who you are and how things are in your life, in your relationships, in the world? What are you still resisting? When we sit here, we study that. We acknowledge it. We allow it to be true. This is what I'm resisting. This is resistance. Resistance hurts. This pain, it hurts. It's suffering. Can I say yes to this? How do I say yes to this? How do I embody in this moment that yes? How do I allow my body to be with this experience? of the broken heart, the fractured mind, the broken trust.

[30:21]

So sitting and just breathing with all that is true for you now liberates. And it liberates and it transforms. So can we say yes to our inner life as well as to our outer life? All these worlds to say yes to, the inner world and the external world. They're all skillfully curled, as the poem says, interwoven. You can't separate them. You can't leave one or the other out. They're nested together in some way. So in time, as we sit with this, with both the inner world and the outer world, we realize that our heart is bigger than we ever imagined. It's vast.

[31:28]

It's beyond measure. It's measureless. As Walt Whitman said, I am large, I contain multitudes. That I is not the I of the self, the separate self. It's the I of the universe. It's the eye of Buddha, the eye of awake. All that is awake. The whole universe is awake. There's nothing left out of that, right? So our true nature, the true nature of our heart is vast and spacious, and it's actually waiting to be broken open. So the place of suffering is where we can break open into something larger. It tells us where we're limited, those edges of suffering. It tells us what we need to open into and soften into and relax into a little bit more so we can open into our true size, which is boundless.

[32:34]

So in zazen, we make our best effort to open. And open. and open some more and continue opening, there's no end to that opening. There's no end to zazen and there's no end to opening of the heart and mind. And over time we've discovered when we do this, when we say yes again and again to all of our experience, that the attentive and open heart is more and more just who we are. We become that open heart itself. We live from that place. So my invitation and encouragement to you during the sushin or the sitting practice, whatever you do, and even in the in-between moments, is just to come back to awareness. Come back to whatever touchstone is supportive of you in this moment to settle and come home to yourself.

[33:43]

If that's the breath, if that's the body, if that's just open, spacious awareness, right? Allow that sense of presencing, whatever you're presencing and connecting to in this moment, allow it to hold the energy, right? Allow it to hold you so that your spinning mind and your spinning emotions begin to settle down, right? They have the space to settle, to become quiet and still. And Sashin supports us to arrive and settle and gather attention and come home to ourselves. So love is a place. And through this place of love, move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world, and in this world of yes, live skillfully curled,

[34:47]

All worlds. space of silence right there. Rest there. Give yourself over to it. Say yes to it, but now actually allow it to

[35:54]

Allow that yes to be your being. And to embody that, to be embodied by yes itself. So for those of you who are going to be sitting for the next few days, thank you for joining. Thank you for taking this journey of presencing yourself and with each other, coming home to our being. Those of you who are going home, may you continue in whatever way as supportive of you to find your way back to who you truly are. You don't have to go very far. Thank you very much. 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.

[37:02]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:18]

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