Okay, I'm going to make an incense offering and then I'll begin with the instruction. Well, good morning, everyone, wherever you are. Greetings from San Francisco, the online San Francisco Zen Center Zendo. My name is Shundo. I'm a priest who trained at San Francisco Zen Center for about 15 years. Now I live out in the city. It's a kind of gray morning here in San Francisco, and that's where I've got all my lights on.

[01:33]

So we're going to spend the next hour or so discussing, well, I'm going to be doing a lot of the discussion, but hopefully there'll be room for you to ask questions and questions. have comments and observations. Talking about zazen, which is a Japanese word we use for seated meditation. And meditation is a very basic practice of all Buddhist traditions. Came from the historical practice of the Buddha who was a prince in northern India about two and a half thousand years ago. And it was essential to his path to understanding, you could say. And so every Buddhist tradition, even though the Buddhist school has kind of evolved into many different styles, meditation is common to all of them. And the particular style we practice at San Francisco Zen Center comes from the Japanese Zen tradition, in particular the Soto style. There's two main schools of Japanese Zen, and we're the Soto one, which does place a lot of emphasis on just quiet sitting.

[02:34]

And if... You talk to people from other Buddhist schools, they might say that this style of meditation that we practice is actually the hardest style of all to teach or to practice because we're not gifting you any particular thing to focus your mind on, which is challenging because the mind is a pretty unruly object and it likes to go rushing around thinking about all kinds of stuff. So many meditation traditions will give you something to focus the mind on. You'll have a mantra, something you recite, which gives you a very particular focus. Or you do a visualization, giving you very particular things to visualize in the mind. Or doing a body scan. It's a very basic technique where you're just paying attention to different parts of the body. But we don't give you anything very particular to do. Our main encouragement would be to pay attention to your breath because You're always breathing, and it's something you can always pay attention to.

[03:37]

And what I'm going to be talking about a fair amount during the session is posture, because while I've been to meditation instructions with other traditions where they say, you can do this on the couch, you can do this lying down. Very traditionally, there's an upright posture for sitting. I'm going to go into quite a lot of detail about that, so I'll just say that for the moment. So I'm sitting in a cross-legged position now, and I'll tilt the screen as you go through the session so you can see a little more detail on that. But the first thing I want everyone to do is just close your eyes. You can pay attention to your breath for a moment. And notice where it is you're breathing from. Do you feel that you're breathing in your chest, in the middle of your torso? is your breathing engaging the very base of the belly. So here's a very basic practice, just to have you tuning in to the present moment experience.

[04:51]

can be noticed if if your breathing feels maybe a little rapid still or if it's still pretty slow if you've been sitting down for a while hopefully your breath has slowed down as your body slows down and you can notice other things about the breath if you breathe in through the nose what's the temperature of the air as it comes in the nostrils Breathe out onto the temperature of the air. And if you start to pay attention to the difference between those two temperatures, you can maybe visualize all the work that goes on inside your lungs with each lungful of air each time you breathe. the body is doing to convert the oxygen, move it into the bloodstream and then push out the air that's not needed.

[06:15]

And then alongside the breath, what else is happening for you right now? So on Pacific time, it's relatively early on a Saturday morning. How are you feeling at this particular time of day wherever you are? If you're still waking up, it's mid-morning and you're feeling kind of lively. What is your level of energy right now? And how do you notice the temperature on your skin of the air? certain your level of hunger or thirst maybe if you're over caffeinated or under caffeinated or if that's not an issue for you then any other particular sensations in your body that

[07:48]

to the foreground when we get quiet what's the energy like in your head their particular places of tension in the body or particular places of ease What sounds can you hear around you? Even with your eyes closed, can you detect the amount of light where you are? Can you

[08:52]

Feel the contact of your body with the ground or the cushion or the chair. Are there any smells or tastes that present themselves to you? So this process of meditation, this mindfulness practice is really composed of three elements. It's a very good, simple definition of mindfulness, which is that we're choosing to pay attention to the present moment without judgment. So in what we've just been doing, we've been choosing to pay attention to the present moment. So we're directing our attention to right here, right now.

[09:58]

And then we try to do that without judgment. So whatever your state of body is, noticing where the judgment comes in and try to rest in the experience before the judgment. That's why breathing can be a very helpful thing to pay attention to because we don't tend to judge our breathing. It's just a natural process. It is what it is. Resting in that kind of non-judgmental awareness, we can start to meet other experiences, whether that's a physical sensation of being warm or cool or tired or energized, at ease or stressed. We can meet these with a lack of judgment. So I think it's very common. You sit down in meditation and you think, oh, my mind is still racing. I'm not a very good meditator because my mind is racing so much when I sit. And that's just adding a level of judgment to your own experience.

[11:04]

And it's very common for our minds to be racing. Our minds are, as I said earlier, very busy all the time. Even when we're asleep, our minds are unraveling through dreams, all the things we've been processing during the day. But that's what the mind does, is it processes the experience. So if we're being strictly focused on the present moment, what our mind makes of that present moment is not part of the present moment. It's a subsequent process. Obviously, the mind going through those subsequent processes is a part of our present moment experience. But actually, the live moment does not include our thoughts about that moment. And so when we get caught up in our thinking, what happens is we move away from the present moment. We all know what that's like and we're sitting doing whatever we might be doing and our mind is suddenly like focusing for the rest of the weekend or when we're going to take our next trip or what we're having for dinner or else you're back in the past and you're trying to recreate and reconstruct a previous conversation that you want to turn out differently.

[12:21]

And that takes you completely away from the present moment. So when we do these kind of practices, we have to be aware of the tendency of the mind to do that. It's very powerful. It's used to being in charge of our experience. The mind is in charge of our experience because that helps keep us alive. Helps discern situations that are safe, situations that are dangerous. And when you're sitting quietly by yourself, hopefully there are no dangerous situations it needs to be on the lookout for. So you can take this opportunity to, I'm not going to say turn the mind off because that's very difficult to do. And when I hear people say, oh yeah, I don't think during meditation, I tend not to believe them. But we can turn down the volume on that. We can let that go on as a background process. And the moment it starts coming into the foreground, we try to bring our attention somewhere else. So our attention is usually on some aspect of our physical experience.

[13:25]

some sensation. That's a sight, sound, smell, taste, things we touch. And I find in my own meditation, what I do is spending a lot of time focusing on how my posture is manifesting. So that's what I'm going to talk about for the next little bit of time. So traditionally, there are four postures for meditation. Standing, walking, sitting and lying down. So it is possible to meditate in all kinds of situations. I've certainly known people at the Zen Center who meditated standing up because of physical issues. Walking meditation is something that is practiced in any monastic setting because sitting for a long time isn't so good for the body and getting up and walking is very helpful. It also allows you to meditate when you're outside, which is something I do quite a lot. Leading mindful hikes around San Francisco under ordinary circumstances. And lying down is also a completely acceptable option, again, if you have physical limitations that make it hard to sit.

[14:36]

The only difficulty that I can see with meditating lying down is it's more likely to leave you in a sleepy state. And not that that's a bad thing in itself because having the body relax is already a beneficial thing. But we're always trying to meet that sweet spot between thinking too much and relaxing so much we fall asleep. There is a very nice little sweet spot in the middle of that. What I'm going to mostly be focusing on today is seated meditation and I'm going to get up and bring in a chair just to demonstrate sitting in a chair because sitting cross-legged is a traditional thing and it's also not accessible for everybody. So it's... Always good to have options and sitting in a chair means you really can do this anywhere. So I'm going to get up for a moment and move the screen a little bit as well. So this is just a kitchen chair for my house.

[15:42]

It's a very simple, straightforward wooden chair. What I'm going to suggest if you're sitting in any kind of chair is to really have your seat firmly planted, your hips, knees, and ankles pretty much in alignment. You don't necessarily want to be spreading out like this. Keep a fairly narrow stance and move your feet firmly on the floor if possible. One thing that can be helpful, and we'll talk about this a lot more later, it gives the squeakiness of the chair, is to elevate your hips slightly above the knees. because this helps with the alignment of the spine. And what I really want to demonstrate here is an alignment of the spine, which is why I'm sitting sideways. So this is what I would think of as a very active meditative posture with a really upright spine. And even though I spend as much time as anybody sitting like this, it's not actually very beneficial in terms of the bodily alignment. I feel very comfortable to kind of make use of that.

[16:45]

back of the chair, but unless you have difficulty with your spine, I'd really suggest to really lift yourself up and have a strong spine and open torso. I'm going to talk a lot more about this area here as we move on through this. So meditating in a chair is great. It means you can do it in any circumstance out in the world. Under normal conditions, I would say this is something I do in an airport. Whenever I go to an airport or when I'm commuting, those things aren't happening so much now. But nevertheless, it's a wonderful opportunity to extend your practice away from whatever space you might have at home or whatever temple you might visit. And just be able to do that out in the world. Now, here's where my props aren't quite as good as the ones we have at Zen Center. But I want to demonstrate a kneeling posture. This is actually like a footstool from the armchair I have, and you notice it's got an angle to it.

[17:48]

There are a lot of meditation benches you can buy, which also have an angle. They're not quite so high as this, but I just wanted to demonstrate a kneeling position. And again, this is hips, knees, and ankles in a straight line, and with the hips higher than the knees, there's a forward tilt to the pelvis, and so that naturally brings the spine up, right? And this is a very comfortable way to sit. This particular stool is a little high, but if you get a meditation bench, it allows this kind of posture. And I found this very comfortable. When I first did monastic training, we had a lot of meditation. I couldn't sit cross-legged for the amount of time. It was the expected of us. So I spent a lot of time kneeling. Now you can just... You can just kneel down on your heels. If any of you practice martial art, that's a possibility. And it's also very hard on your legs.

[18:52]

So you can do this with a cushion. This is one of my meditation cushions. This one's pretty solid. So it doesn't give very much when I sit down on it. But you can take the cushion vertically, place it underneath you, and sit like that, which gives you elevation. So you're not compressing the calf muscles, which will get your legs going to sleep. So this allows you to sit very comfortably without straining your hips. And I find I can sit like this for an hour or more without very much difficulty. So that's always an option. If sitting cross-legged is hard for you. But I'm going to talk about sitting cross-legged next because that's the most traditional posture. I've got another cushion here, which... You can hear the noise it makes. It's made out of buckwheat, so it can be quite firm. This one is also very low. Compared to this one, there's not a lot of elevation, which is why I have also an extra support cushion to give me a little elevation.

[19:56]

And depending on how flexible I'm feeling, I might sit on this one or this one. I'm going to start with the firm cushion. This one's made out of K-pop and came from the Zen Center bookstore. You can buy cushions online, I think, very easily, or you can use home cushions or pillows. if you don't have that kind of thing. So the main point of sitting on a cushion, again, is to have the elevation of your hips over the knees. So you want to get your knees onto the ground, ideally, because this gives you stability. Now, what I see very often, and I'm sure you've seen this too, is commercials where people are sitting like this with their knees way off the ground and just their hands in this kind of like... I am a cool person doing meditation. It's great advertising speak for meditation, but it's not very comfortable. So if I'm sitting like this, I don't feel any forward to back stability. There's really nothing. My feet are grounding me and my backside is grounding me, but there's not a lot of stability there.

[21:02]

So if you have your knees down to the ground, it gives you this tripod with triangle of stability, which is much more stable. and you can do this for much longer, much more sustainable. So this is why this kind of cross-legged posture has been kind of handed down across millennia and across many human cultures as a way of approaching meditation, because this posture lends itself to kind of a sustained stability and uprightness and a balance. This is the kind of important part. Now, if you sit right in the middle of the cushion, it's harder to get your knees onto the ground. So I sit right at the very front edge of the cushion, almost like I'm about to fall off. It really helps to get that stability. And you can also use cushions like this if your knees and hips aren't so flexible. You can put a cushion underneath them to give you that stability.

[22:05]

Because that's really the key part for me, is having this stability. Now, if you can see my feet, my feet are literally in this position, just one in front of the other. There's no crossing going on. So if you're not super flexible, this is the easiest posture to practice. Although I'd suggest the kneeling posture is even easier than this because you're not having to work the hip flexors. And if you're not very flexible as I wasn't when I started sitting, this can be quite a challenging posture. So just notice what your own body feels like it wants to do, and you don't have to push yourself. This is not a competitive sport. It's not an endurance sport. So we're aiming to find the most comfortable position for you and your body as it is right now. And just to say to that, I know many teachers who've been sitting at Zen Zen for many, many years who sat cross-legged in full lotus, and as they age, lose that flexibility, and they're now sitting in chairs.

[23:06]

So there's no shame, there's no diminishment to your meditation if you're not sitting cross-legged. It just happens to be a very convenient, helpful posture to be able to do this. So don't feel worried if you can't do any of this. But I'm going to demonstrate a couple of options here. So this one with one foot in front of the other is traditionally called the Burmese posture. If you want to develop a practice, I'm going to suggest that you switch sides. and see what happens if you put the other foot up. So the way I went to first was my natural side, and this side feels a little different to me. My body is not completely symmetrical, so that feels a little less natural to me, but it's good to switch sides and make sure your body feels balanced. If you're feeling flexible, it's totally okay to put one foot up on a thigh. This gives you a little more lower back stability as you sit cross-legged. I was very helpfully instructed by a yoga teacher when I started sitting to remember that the hip is a rotating muscle, a rotating joint rather.

[24:15]

The knee is just a hinge. It's not a rotating joint. And the ankle has limited rotation. So don't just pick up your foot and drag it to your thigh because you're putting a lot of torque on the knee. So she suggested this very kind method where you pick up the back of your thigh and let the front of your leg dangle. Then you can... Bring them both together and rotate everything so that you're actually doing the work in the hip joint and putting less pressure on the knee. So that saved me probably a lot of injury in my early years. So picking up the back and then really making sure you're rotating the leg from the hip. Again, if you have kind of flexibility to do that, that's pretty nice. And again, check what happens if you do it the other way. So again, this is my less natural side. So it usually takes me a little longer just to get down in a comfortable way. And what I'm also going to try, never know how it works early in the morning, is to get the other foot on the other side into full lotus.

[25:19]

So if you see statues of Buddha, traditionally he's depicted in the full lotus posture. It's just a little more balanced with a little more lower back stability. It's not very easy for me to do this. And it took me 10 years of meditation even to manage this much. So I'm not going to continue to do that, and it's certainly not an essential part of your process. So is that relatively clear so far, everyone? So just finding whatever leg arrangement feels more comfortable for you right now, because what we want to do, whether we're in a chair or on a bench or even lying down, is just to have the bottom half of the body stable, and then we're going to focus on the top half of the body. I'm sorry, I just hope my head is cut off a little bit, but... I think you actually need to see that. I spend a lot of time paying attention to the torso. And again, if you remember how I was in the chair, if you're slumping down like this, it's very easy to just sit across the leg and just move. You're not giving yourself any room to breathe.

[26:21]

The wonderful thing about being elevated on a cushion or a bench is that with a forward tilt of the pelvis, you just swing sideways so you can see this. or till the pelvis, the back is naturally curved. So we're not doing, we're not a C shape, but we're really bringing the back upright. This is what the spine is naturally designed to do. So this position is beneficial because it allows the spine to do what it's evolved to do, which is bear our weight. Now, obviously, if you're teaching teenage boys, this is like, no, it's really hard, man. But actually, it is a very natural way for us to sit. And so as we sit, we really want to be paying attention to the alignment of the spine from the very base of the sacrum, really, all the way up to the crown of the head. So we have different curves in the spine, and we really want them all to be in alignment. So I'd suggest visualizing your spine as a gear stick in a car and just spend a moment trying to find a neutral position.

[27:30]

So you can lean a little forward, lean a little back, lean a little sideways. Just let your body come to what it feels like is alignment. There may be some structural issues in your body that means that's not completely vertical and balanced, but it's good to listen to your own body and let it tell you what it wants to do. If you pay very close attention to your ears, they will tell you when you're leaning to one side or another. That's where your balance mechanisms are. It's a very subtle message they give you. So just spending a moment really just trying to find a very relaxed neutral position. So physiologically what this allows is the spine is holding us up and then the abdominal muscles can relax because they're not having to do the work to balance you. So if you're doing this, you know, advertising meditation posture, I immediately notice my abdominal muscles engaging because I'm having to hold myself up to stop from falling forward or backwards.

[28:40]

But that's what this triangle of stability allows is that you don't need to be holding yourself up. The body is holding itself up. Abdominals can relax. And when the abdominals relax and other muscle, you know, other ancillary muscles that would otherwise be trying to balance you when they relax there's more room for the diaphragm to flow freely so as you breathe in and out the diaphragm is pushing down into stomach and then coming back up again so it's separating the stomach from the lungs so if we're sitting like this or if we're tensing it's harder for the diaphragm to flow freely as we breathe And then the subsequent result of that is if our diaphragm is moving freely, we can breathe more deeply and slowly. I'm not doing that right now because I'm talking so much. But if you've been sitting there quietly, hopefully your breath has slowed down.

[29:43]

And then this gives a message to our own nervous system. So the body, breath and nervous system are all working in tandem all the time. But we do have two particular states that we... move towards, there's fight or flight and there's rest and repose. So in fight or flight, we're taking short, shallow breaths from the top of the lungs and we're kind of ready for action because that's evolutionarily very helpful thing to do. But it's not very restful. It's like sending stress chemicals throughout the body. Now we spend enough of our lives doing that that we really don't need to be doing that during meditation. So what meditation is doing is promoting the opposite response. So as we stay still, as we stay upright, as the body relaxes, the breathing deepens. So there's a steady flow of breath, steady movement of the diaphragm. The nervous system knows to move into rest and repose response. And so that's the whole kind of physiological process behind meditation.

[30:48]

And I'm sure the people that started doing this thousands of years ago had no idea that all this was happening, but they could feel it. They knew what the benefits were. So now, you know, they can measure all kinds of brain waves and heart rate variations and all kinds of other things to tell you what your body can already do, which is relax. So this posture is designed to help you be stable, still, and in a position to relax. Now, we're not guaranteeing you're going to relax. In Zen, we don't guarantee anything. but it's ideally designed to promote that. So when I sit down, having arranged my legs, I focus on this area down here, right down at the base of the belly. Again, if you study martial arts, you'll be familiar with the idea of moving from this kind of center of the body. But this becomes our center of gravity and our center of attention.

[31:51]

And you might see people meditating with their hands in this position. So traditionally, if you look at any Buddhist statuary, There are a number of different hand positions that you see in Buddhist iconography. And this one is one that we use at Zen Center for sitting because it helps you to visualize this part of the body as being your center of gravity and your center of energy. And so you're thinking about breathing down to this part of the body. So if you want to practice that in a formal way, you take the big knuckle on the middle finger of the left hand and place it on the equivalent of the right hand. Rest your fingers left hand over right so they're just aligned. And then bring the thumbs together very gently and rest that slightly against the base of the belly, just above. So my thumbs are basically where my belly button is and my fingers are just above the pubic bone. Now, it's not necessarily a very comfortable position to take because some people find it strains the shoulders.

[32:55]

So there's no... insistence that you take this hand position, but if you visit Zen Center, if you visit many other Zen training places, this will be the position you see people meditating in. And it's a very helpful visual guide, it's a helpful physical reminder that this is your center of gravity while you're sitting. So that's the first area I focus on when I sit down. And then as I've been saying before, this sense of between the where I think of my solar plexus, where I think the diaphragm is, right about here, and the collar bones. Again, we can hunch over very easily. And we're compressing the space around the lungs and the heart. Or we can lift the spine. And this is, these days, what I spend most of my time paying attention to when I'm sitting. It's like, what's going on in this area of my body? So I think energetically, we often lock this area up when we're moving through the world because it's a very good way to protect ourselves.

[34:01]

We might not be physically aware that we're doing that, but I think energetically, that's something we do. And again, in meditation, hopefully there's not any sense of threat. So you can practice, you know, breathing in, lifting the collarbones, expanding the rib cage, and letting space into this area around the heart and lungs. And I found when I was doing monastic training practice at Tassajara, this was an area where there seemed to be a lot going on. So when I sat many, many hours, it was interesting to pay attention to more subtle things that were happening here. So I'm not saying that's what you need to spend your time doing, but I found personally it was very helpful to really pay attention to this segment of the torso. So you've established your base here, and you bring space here. And finally, just checking in with your head, If you're leaning your chin forward like a boxer, again, you're going to stress the neck and shoulders. So you want to really pay attention to the cervical curve in the body.

[35:07]

You can maybe visualize tucking your chin towards your throat slightly and just pushing the weight of the head slightly back over the neck. It's a kind of very exaggerated way you can do that, but you can kind of feel how that shifts tension in the neck and shoulder muscles. And these muscles here are very apt to get tense when you sit. So it's helpful to keep picturing those and keep letting them relax. So that's a lot of talking. What I'm going to suggest is we just try that. I'm going to ring the bell and I'll sit for five minutes or so. So just arranging yourself comfortably, making sure you have a stable base. being as upright as you can, or if you're lying down, having extended spine, picturing your breath moving in and out, and just notice what happens. I say there's no particular focus for your attention. We don't give you one thing to keep your mind occupied, but just notice where your attention goes. And your default is to leave your attention on the breath.

[36:10]

Every time the mind takes you away, without judgment, coming back to the breath. So we'll try that for a few minutes. OK, how was that for you?

[42:04]

This is time for you to ask any questions, have any comments or observations about anything? Yes. Is that Cale or Kyle? Yeah. Go ahead. OK, thank you. Yeah, we spoke previous time. You mentioned doing kinhin around San Francisco. When you do kinhin outside, at what speed do you walk? Is it the slow speed or just normal speed? Very good question. Thank you. So kinhin for everybody else is a Japanese word. It's the equivalent word for walking meditation that zazen is for sitting meditation. So if you do kinhin or walking meditation in the zendo, it's a very slow and a half step per breath practice. This is not very good for doing on Market Street in San Francisco or anything like that because people are going to think you're kind of weird. I've been to other training temples, especially in the Rinzai tradition, the other Japanese school, where walking meditation can be a very standard walking pace or even a very fast walking pace.

[43:15]

And I've certainly been to temples where you start pretty slow and then they'll ring a bell and then you... speed up a little bit and ring bell again and you'll be kind of a normal walking pace and then I'll ring it again and you'll be kind of fast walking. And then the last one, you're almost running around Zendo. So it's possible to do any kind of speed you like. The important thing is the awareness of what you're doing. So with, with the seated meditation, as I've suggested, where I'm paying a lot of attention to my posture, you know, how, how my legs are, whether my legs have gone to sleep, you know, how my breathing is. So with a walking meditation, With the slowest one, it's very simple. You feel your feet landing on the ground and the heel lifting. You feel the foot coming. You feel the contact with the ground. And you're aware of trying to keep an upright posture still, being aware of the breath as you walk, being aware of sensations. So when I do walking meditation or mindful hikes, I should say more accurately, in San Francisco, which I lead in normal times,

[44:16]

It can be a regular hiking pace. It can be a little bit slower. But the instruction really is to take in your surroundings. The one instruction I didn't give before we started sitting was that in Zen tradition, we meditate with our eyes open, which is unusual for a lot of people. But part of the point of that is to take in the visual information just as you're taking in the sound information or the feeling of the air on your skin. In a meditation hall, especially when you're sitting against the wall, there's very little information to take in. It's just a question of staying grounded. The moment you step outside and do walking meditation, obviously there's a huge amount of information coming in all the time. There's light, there's color, there's sound. And so it's harder to stay grounded during that practice. But it's a good practice to do. So I would suggest if you have a regular walk that you do or even just walking down to the corner store to get milk, whatever it is, take in your surroundings, take in the noise, take in the people, take in the dirt, take in the colors, and just stay aware of how it is you're moving through space.

[45:22]

That would be my walking meditation practice. So the speed doesn't matter so much then? No, I think, you know, I say in a formal setting, it would be very slow. It's perfectly possible to do that at a normal walking speed and just continuing to pay attention, especially to posture and... contact with the ground. So in San Francisco, thank you. Yeah. In San Francisco, a lot of our hikes go up and down hills. And so like when you're walking up a hill, then obviously you're much more aware of, you know, of your body when you're doing that compared to just walking, walking along the flat. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes. Yeah. I had a question that kind of tagged along with that. Um, cause I'm, I'm trying to follow the practices in the morning where we do King King as well. And, um, I was wondering, do you still continue practicing counting the breaths? Because I do inhale and exhales. So I wonder, the way that I've been doing it is when I start, I take a step after every full inhale and exhale.

[46:24]

So I'm wondering if you do it as a continuous motion. Because I start, I'm up, I take one, two, and then half a step with my right foot. And then three, four. So I'm wondering if... if that or if it would be a more continuous to sort of notice everything at once. Because then I'm kind of trying to pinpoint what I'm, does that make sense, what I'm focusing on? And then I focus on the step itself, if that makes sense, you know? Yeah, let me stand up. I'm going to try and adjust my screen. And hopefully you can hear me once I get off mic a little bit. Just to do a very quick demonstration of how we would do it in the Zen Center. So, you know, we have our hands a particular way. feet so you'd start literally with the feet half half a foot width apart so the big toe of this foot is right against the arch the other foot so what i do is on the in breath lift it's hard to start it is right exactly yeah um so i have the toes in front foot lifted and then out breath bringing the front toes down and the back heel up um

[47:35]

lifting that foot to the front. And again, I keep the toes lifted until the out-breath toes come down and the back foot comes up. I'll just back up again and maybe do it from the side as well. So starting from there with the front toes lifted, out-breath, back heel lifts, in-breath, bringing the foot forward, out-breath, back heel up, front toes down. That's how I would do it. in that very formal setting. So that ties the motion in with the breath still. And of course, if you're doing it in a crowd of people in the meditation hall, you have to be aware of your spacing with other people. So you kind of extend or compact a little bit depending on how much room there is. So in big sittings at city center, if there's like 100 people in Zendo, it's very hard to do that successfully. But that's the effort. So continuing Yeah, in the same way that you would be focusing on your breath as you sit, you can continue to focus.

[48:41]

Continue, right. But I like this feels a lot more fluid because it doesn't feel fluid when I do it. So I feel like incorporating all of it is definitely a better approach, it feels like. I know there have been many conferences about exactly what the right way to do it. So I might be giving a slightly unorthodox view, but that's the way I do it. Yeah. A step per breath is fine. If you want to dig deep into the formalities of Japanese Zen, there are many more supplements you can take in. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Great. Any other questions out there? I had another. I don't know if anyone else has. I don't want to... Go ahead. Jump in. I was just going to ask, what are also the formalities of the bows? How do you... So if I'm doing the practice in the morning, how do you... sort of treat the space? Because I know you bow towards, bow away, but I'm wondering, for example, when the first bell rings, and this is also with the swaying as well, when do these usually take place?

[49:42]

So is it when I'm back from King Him, do I bow in or do I sway then or do I only sway at the end? Is that make sense? No, totally. So I'm going to picture the normal times endo. So everybody would be... be sitting down before the priests arrive okay so there would be the instrument that's calling you to um i don't know if you hear that on the online's end or not you know the instrument calling you to meditation which is a wooden block though right right would be arriving during that time and they would be doing their kind of settling on the seat while that's happening so at the official start time is really the the officiating priest arrive makes the altar offering as i did at the beginning and then the bells are timed with that so one bell for the offering at the altar one bell when the the priest bows to his seat, his or her seat, and the other one, they turn around and bow to the room. So those bells are really like you should be sitting in place with that. Now, again, this is, you know, you can go deep into the weeds here.

[50:44]

If the walking meditation between Zazen periods, if you don't leave the Zendo, you don't necessarily have to bow to your seat and away from your seat between at the end of the first period and the beginning of the second period, because the notion is that you haven't actually left your seat. Even if you've got up and you're walking around, you're still active with your seat. So if you were leaving the Zendo, then you would, you know, you'd tidy up your seat, you'd bow to the seat and bow away from it, and then you'd be ready to leave. In terms of, you know, the kind of the arrangement, I would say every time you sit down, you know, do this kind of stretching. So Brent, who's here on the call with me and my ordination teacher, you know, he doesn't just do that. He will do this kind of like, deep forward bending and kind of deep stretching over the side i'm pretty sure he does that every single time he sits down that actually felt really good yeah really good for the back um stretches the hip muscles too so really each time you sit down you know take care to get your posture right take a couple of minutes to do that and if if you go and train at the temple the monastery people will be doing that for a few minutes it's not like you have to be sitting like right there as soon as though yeah great and and then at the end of the

[51:56]

So, for example, before we start the king, do you bow at that bell? Because I noticed that they bow at their seats as well. Right, yeah. So that's like, yeah, okay, I'm ending that period of meditation. Okay, great, great. Thank you so much. That clarifies so much. I really appreciate this talk. It's fun to learn all these things, definitely. It's so great. Yeah, there's so much. Yeah. And I'm so grateful with how much the San Francisco Zen Center offers to everyone. And it's so accessible. I'm so grateful, especially at a time like this. So thank you. We love to hear that. Thank you very much. No, thank you. Any other questions out there? Master Brent, dumb brother. What was your question? Oh, no question, just waving. Please go ahead. I'm saying goodbye. Oh, okay. We'll see you next time. I'll see you next time. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

[52:59]

Oh, the question I had, can you guys hear me? Sometimes it's easy to sit for half an hour at a time, but when I sit back today, I don't know if you noticed, but I ended up scratching my nose, my ear, and it irritates. How do you get over that? Ah, that is the crux of meditation. So, what happens if you didn't, what would happen if you didn't do that at that moment, do you think? Like if, you know, if you have a scratch, like what happens if you don't itch it? Well, mine stays focused on it for ages and ages. Ah, uh-huh. Not for ages, it does go off after a while, but it builds and builds and builds. There you go, you've answered your own question there. So, apart from anything else, that keeps you very present. Like if you're focused on an itch or if your leg has gone to sleep and you're focused on your leg being asleep, then you are very present. You know, your mind is not drifting off somewhere else. You're actually like really concentrated on the present moment. So that's a good practice in itself. And knowing that your immediate tendency is to, you know, to want to scratch your nose or, you know, or any kind of other fidgeting behavior.

[54:04]

So this is where you get into very interesting things. Like, do I need to scratch my nose or is that a habitual pattern? You know, or am I just adjusting my glasses because that's what I do? Or, you know, tugging your ear because that's what you do. So you start to notice. your own tics and habits and preferences and all these things. And again, if you can do that without judgment, not like, Oh, I failed because I scratched my nose or like, Oh dear. If, if I, you know, if, if a fly landed on my ear and I brushed it away, I must be a terrible meditator. No, no, no, not at all. But you, you notice what's happening as you do that. And you, as you do that, as that happens more often. And if you, excuse me, go and live at Tassajara, um, You get a lot of flies bothering you. And it's very interesting because it's very hard not to be sorting them away. I can have a fly landing on my head and kind of wandering around. If it gets towards my ear, no, that's it. I'm done. But I'm not going to judge myself for that. I'm going to try to be mindful of it, try to notice what my immediate instinct is, and then see what happens if I don't follow my immediate instinct.

[55:12]

And that's just great practice, whatever's going on. But if you need to scratch, you scratch, right? Or no? Well, try both things. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And this especially goes for feeling physical pain. So I know that my leg will sometimes go to sleep when I'm sitting, and I know that I can sit with a leg that's got pins and needles for some time, and it's not going to cause me any damage. And, you know, as soon as I get up and walk around, it will get better. If you're feeling some kind of sharp stabbing pain, again, it's not an endurance sport. You don't have to, like, sit there going, oh, I'm a mindful Zen monk. I'm not going to move even though my leg's really hurting. That's not what we're, you know, asking you to do. If you go and do monastic practice, you can experiment with that because you'll spend a lot of the time sitting. But otherwise, you know, just put your legs up. Just give yourself a little break. Do that and be mindful with that. And there's always people doing this in the Zendo, and it's totally fine. So you're not pushing yourself past pain barriers, but it's interesting to know, oh, my knee's a little sore.

[56:15]

Do I want to move that now? And just check in with your own body and don't be cruel to yourself. Be kind. Thank you. We've got maybe a couple more minutes if anyone else has a question. Otherwise, I'm... Sometimes if there's more time, we'd have a little second sitting. But what happens in our online world is that we have the 925 meditation period is going to be starting next. So if you want to do a little more sitting, there's the public meditation session at 925. And there's a 15-minute kind of on-ramp period for that, which we'll start in a few minutes. There's the talk that starts at 10 o'clock. And I'm afraid, Kodo, I did not take in who's talking this morning. So if you're able to tell us that. Yes, it's Grace Denman this morning. Oh, fantastic. Well, Grace Damon is a wonderful person, and I don't know what she's going to be talking about, but she has an amazing history. She was a prominent AIDS doctor in San Francisco decades ago, and she also was paralyzed in a crash on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is one of the reasons they have barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge now.

[57:26]

And so she has an amazing perspective on life, and she's one of the most human people ever. could possibly meet so i'm sure the talk will be fantastic and that will start again there's a 15 minute kind of on-ramp period at 10 o'clock and the talk will start at 10 15. so that's i think the rest of this morning's public activities uh we unfortunately can't offer virtual tea and biscuits as we would do on a regular saturday in the temple but please you know thank you for your support and i know i'm having getting emails from Zen Center that people have donated literally a million dollars to Zen Center since the pandemic began to help keep the programs running that we offer. And things like this, we do offer free of charge. So thank you for your part in that. And feel free to check out the website for other offerings. come back and do another meditation instruction. We have a rotating cast of teachers who do that, and everyone has their own particular approach. So it's worth listening to how other people present things.

[58:27]

You know, it should be slightly different to the way I do it. The next thing I'm going to be doing on a portal like this is a class on Dogen, who is the Japanese founder of Soto Zen. So the four Mondays in July in the evening, I'm teaching one of his early texts, The Wholehearted Way, which is all about Zazen. It's all about... It gets a little mystical and esoteric, but my approach to Dogen is you don't have to be scared of him. If we take it chunk by chunk, it's actually pretty accessible. Some of it's pretty accessible, and it's very, very deep teaching. So if you're interested in that, there's definitely details of that on the website. Otherwise, I want to thank you very much for being here, and I'm going to pass back to Kodo, the Zendo host. Great. Thanks so much, Shundo. That was wonderful. Thanks, everyone, for joining. And as Shinto just outlined, we have a few more offerings going on this morning, 925 Zazen, 1015 Dharma Talk. So if you'd like, all of that's happening right here in the same room, so you can stay connected if you wish, or stand up, stretch your legs, take a break.

[59:31]

I hope you have a great morning of practice, and thanks for being part of the San Francisco Zen Center community.

[59:38]

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