Good morning. I think I might have dropped the stopwatch. Okay. Not sure where. Okay. My name is Erin, and before I get started, some folks have started a tradition of asking a little bit about the people in the room. So first question, how many of you are here for the very first time today? A few people, great, welcome. A question I've been wanting to ask for a while since hearing that first question, how many of you were new last week or the week before and you're back? Okay, good to know, good to know. And I also wanted to ask, how many of you have been coming into this practice space for 20 years or more?

[01:12]

Me too. This is my 20-year anniversary, 2019. So I wanted to welcome all of you into this very beautiful practice space, whether you are brand new or you've been coming for a while. And I deeply... hope that you receive some nourishment for your practice this morning. So welcome. As mentioned, my name is Erin, and I am a resident priest here at City Center. But I would say that mostly what I do, this is what I do with my daily life, is I am a high school teacher. And I've just finished almost half of my 14th year teaching classes in... what we call body-mind education to 14 and 15-year-olds at a local independent high school. So I teach classes in yoga, mindfulness, health, and most recently a semester-long course in sexuality to 14 and 15-year-olds most of the day.

[02:18]

And I just bring that up because I find that the interaction between these... two spaces and kind of what they have to offer and how they view what's most important in the world is really kind of where my practice is. And so for those of you who don't live in a residential temple or who are wondering how to apply these teachings to your working life, that's really something that's very important to me and that I work with on a daily basis. And I want to express some gratitude for being offered the chance to give this talk today. So thank you so much both to Mary, the head of practice, and to Christina, the head of the practice period, both for offering me the chance to give a talk today, but also for being able to participate in the practice period this past year. How long has it been? Seven weeks of classes. I've been working with a small group of students, a small but steady group of students on a class called the Dharma Gate of Repose and Bliss, a practical yet playful exploration of zazen practice.

[03:32]

And I've been really delighted to participate in this autumn practice period that way. So thank you so much. All right, so to set a bit of context, as I mentioned, we are kind of towards the end of a practice period. And in Zen practice in particular, we have a few different practice periods throughout the year where we might decide to kind of heighten our experience of practice in some kind of way around a theme of teachings. And this practice period is called Awake Body, Awake Mind. And I've been so delighted, even though I haven't been able to participate by being in the temple every day and participating in every offering, I've just been really delighted to...

[04:36]

take the class and participate in ways that I can and listen to the teachings and the Dharma talks and just kind of have the practices turning in me throughout the day. And also, it's been really lovely to come into the space, into the temple, and feel the ripples of other people's practice and other people's really very deep and subtle ways of working with these teachings that we've been given. throughout the eight weeks of practicing together. So throughout this period of a couple of months, we've been encouraged to deeply tune into the very subtle experience of embodiment and to bring ourselves a little bit closer, closer and closer to being able to stay present with others. what's happening and what we can perceive about what's happening through the gate of the body.

[05:39]

And I think this is such an important and, for me, very welcome way to approach practice, especially because so much of our culture, and those of you who, whether you live really inside the temple or outside the temple, you know this, so much of our culture is about ignoring the body or hurting the body, or shoving the kind of cries and voice of the body to the side. And so having a chance and having the encouragement and kind of ongoing tools to use to bring ourselves to be able to be still enough to listen to that voice, I think is such an important action to counter what's happening in the culture, and such an important part of our most basic practice here in our Zen temple.

[06:42]

And given the theme of the practice period and also just the past few weeks that I've been working with Zazen posture, that's what I want to talk about today. It's just our Zazen practice. And so most of you probably know, unless you're very brand new, that Zazen, which literally means seated meditation, is considered kind of the heart of Soto Zen practice, which is this particular lineage that we are trying our best to carry out in this temple, in Beginner's Mind Temple. And each day in a Soto Zen, temple, we start the day with sazen. Usually we end the day with sazen. And depending on kind of what sort of practice space you might find yourself in or what sort of version of soto practice, sometimes you also have the chance to practice during the day.

[07:46]

Here at City Center, most of the practice is around work practice, or I'd say like in terms of hours. mostly about work practice, but sort of the daily life in our sister monastery called Tassahara, people also spend a few more hours every day in the ango, in the regular practice period on Zazen. And also featured in this tradition in Soto Zen, we periodically set aside... some extended time to practice Zazen, which could range from a day, which some of you probably participated in the one-day sittings that we had during the practice period here, or multi-day, a few days, and you probably know, or you might be getting ready for our upcoming stretch of Zazen practice.

[08:52]

in which we're going to start in about a week. And when we do these extended periods of zazen, we call that time together seshin, which I've heard literally means collecting or gathering the heart-mind. So keep that in mind. Ah, and one more thing about our upcoming... seven days of sitting. This is a really special retreat in the Buddhist calendar, in the Zen calendar, because it specifically commemorates the story of the Buddha's enlightenment experience. And when I had the chance to practice full-time, both here at City Center or practice kind of formally in the temple life full-time, Here at City Center and also at Tassajara and at Green Gulch, this was my favorite session of the year.

[09:59]

I think both because the season, it feels, I don't know if you all are feeling this, but the season just feels like it's calling us to sit down with the extended darkness and sort of shift in energy and the quality of kind of everything quieting down. everything quieting down and supporting us to just take some time and allow ourselves to gather and collect all the pieces of our lives that have been out there in action. So hopefully some of you will get a chance to participate in that. All right, so if you have never tried it, I just want to make it a little clear what Zazen practice is about, especially because it's so important in this practice lineage.

[11:02]

The practice of Zazen itself involves sitting down in a stable posture, usually upright, although we offer variations here, and just opening to presence. So just opening to what you can actually experience through the gates of your body and mind. And just doing that over and over. That's it. Simple, right? Very simple. And if you heard something missing, it's true that zazen actually isn't a mindfulness practice. And so many of you probably Mindfulness is so much out there in the culture, and many of you have probably tried some kinds of mindfulness practice, and we've been given some tools of mindfulness to kind of help us wake up and feel, pay attention to something that we can discern in the present moment.

[12:11]

But strictly speaking, zazen practice itself is even more open than that. So there's not one single thing that we try to grab onto. which can make it feel very, first of all, hard to understand. And the founder of this lineage, he spends, if you read his instructions, his Zazen instructions, which you can, it's available on the website, you can access, it's called the Universal Instructions for Zazen, or I think maybe it's listed as Fukan Zazengi, so just the thing that starts with F. is the one that you can access. And he spends this much space describing the posture, how to set up in this stable, upright posture. And then he says, okay, after you've rocked your body right and left and you're settling into your upright sitting, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking?

[13:17]

easy, I added that, non-thinking. That's about all the instruction that he gives for working with the mind. So as you can imagine, it's a little bit of a, it's kind of a, has a challenge to it, to our, the ways that our human minds tend to work, especially if we're spending most of our time out there in the world of discernment and having to be really clear about what we're doing and how to do it. And this is kind of like, what? It's not even something I can grasp, which he also points out. And I'll read you some other descriptions of zazen. So just to throw that out there. So Dogen calls zazen simply... the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. And if you don't know that word, Dharma gate, a Dharma gate is just an entrance into directly being able to experience the teachings, something that helps you experience it for yourself.

[14:29]

He goes on to say, it is the practice realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It's the manifestation of ultimate reality. Traps and snares can never reach it. So actually our discerning mind that wants to figure out like, wait, what? How do you practice that? How do you think of not thinking? Easy, non-thinking. Once its heart is grasped, you're like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. This is actually your true nature. And the founder of this temple, whose name is Suzuki Roshi, Shudryu Suzuki Roshi, probably seen his text and maybe read it, called Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, or he has a couple, that's one of them. He says, Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature.

[15:33]

Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice. There's no other way of life than this life of zazen. And I've been working with an image that our practice leader of the practice period, Christina, gave us a few weeks ago, and she was speaking to the community about just noticing, observing that so few people had been showing up to afternoon zazen, to evening zazen. and she mentioned including herself, that she was putting out there, you know, it's so difficult. What is it that we commit to doing this period of practice, and then we find ourselves unable to get there, to sit down and do this really important key practice? And as a way of encouragement, or I took it as encouragement, she said, you know, zazen is really the taproot of our practice.

[16:42]

And when she said that, it really hit me as just kind of this image and this feeling of sinking down and how important the action of sitting down is really to our practice. And she also said, you know, this is the only time that we have during the day to just be without an agenda. There's no agenda in zazen. Once you get there and you kind of attuned to your posture and set yourself up in a way that feels stable and that you can relax. There's nothing else to do except just be there with it. So how can we not make that a priority? But it's so hard for us to show up sometimes. And... kind of staying with the image and the feeling of a taproot, I actually decided that I didn't know what a taproot was.

[17:46]

I had this idea, like it's a big root that reaches down or something, or it's an important root. But I actually looked up some pictures of taproots just to see. And just in case you didn't know, you probably all know that carrots are taproots. So taproots have a... a tapered shape. That's part of what's special about them. They're very thick. And apparently, plants either have a taproot system or they have this other system called a fibrous root system. And the fibrous roots are kind of smaller. There are lots of them, and they're sort of tangled up. And they just kind of all reach out in different directions to try to find nutrients. But plants that use the taproot system... have a central root that's very focused, and it's pointing in a direction down towards the nutrients. And then in addition to this big, thick root, central root that's rooting down to the ground, it's also got little tendrils, little tendril roots that reach out in case there might be some extra nutrients out there in the universe.

[18:59]

So when I kind of read about tap roots and saw the pictures, I really thought, like, whoa, this really is a beautiful description and for me felt very accurate description of Zazen. And one time, I haven't been able to find it since, but one time I was looking up the sort of etymology of the characters that we use for Zazen, which are, you know, kind of... translated from Chinese characters, which are then translated from Sanskrit characters. And I saw this one description of za, which means seated, or just sitting, as one of the radicals. It's a character that includes a central line. I don't know what the radical is called, but a central line... flowing down, and that radical actually means planting oneself firmly into the ground.

[20:03]

I thought that was beautiful. All right, so we have all this sort of advertisement and kind of beautiful descriptions of our practice and... We know coming into this space, if we spend a little time, how important, at least in idea, Zazen is to the practice and how much is kind of written about it. And we also offer Zazen instruction and we offer public Zazen sessions. And one thing I've noticed in working with people who don't sit Zazen, so most of the people I spend my day with are not Zen practitioners. We do have a Mindful Mondays at the school, which is very mindfulness-oriented, so kind of very good stuff, body scans and different ways of tuning into the body. But when I try to describe what we do here at Zen Center and what Zazen is, I notice people kind of looking at me politely...

[21:16]

It doesn't sound like the thing. It doesn't sound important enough. And at my school, it's a very progressive kind of social activist. It calls itself a private school with a public purpose. And so there's a lot of activity around how to be an upright person in the world and how to use our privilege towards... really responding to all the chaos, aggression, violence, pain, and difficulty in the world. And that's what we kind of spend every class. I'd say whatever topic it is at the school, that's the angle. That's the lens. And so trying to explain to people or kind of share with people that like, oh, well, in this tradition, one of the most important things that we do is we just sit down on a cushion and open to the present moment and say, That's what we do.

[22:22]

And people feel like, how is that actually going to be useful or helpful? I mean, that sounds really nice, but there's stuff to do, right? So if you're spending all of your time and also you're doing this thing that can't be done, you can't do zazen. Zazen does you. Zazen does zazen. So anyway, because I have all of this kind of energy, which is not, you know, the choir. Like here, maybe it's the choir. But when I'm out there teaching at school, there's, you know, most people are like, yeah, that doesn't sound like a very useful thing to do. Or maybe if you could fit it in, you know, they'll say like, well, is that on my Calm app? Like, is there a Zazen on my call map? Maybe.

[23:23]

I don't know. I haven't looked. Anyway, so one of the questions that I feel like I'm always turning is how to express something about that relationship between this practice of accessing the taproot of giving each of our body-mind complex ideas unique beings, the chance to sit down and take space and not have an agenda, how is that important enough? How is that actually an urgent enough thing to do to actually choose it when there's so many other things that you could be doing and it might not feel like rolling up your sleeves and getting to work? And even recently I was... I participated in a Zen yoga. We have a lot of Zen yoga workshops at Zen Center, which is one way to get people to come in because I think yoga feels a little bit more useful sometimes to people than just Zen.

[24:33]

And one of the people in the workshop was like, wouldn't you say that this is just a really self-absorbed practice? I mean, what do you actually do for other people? when you're choosing to spend your time actually just sitting there, facing a wall, tuning into yourself? How is that actually helpful? And then he named, he felt very comfortable to express himself, and so he named all the other kind of religious organizations that he'd heard about who... work on helping help other people. And I was explaining, well, no, we do have a outreach. We have a wonderful outreach program here at City Center, at least. I'm not sure about Green Gulch or Tassajara, but here we have outreach.

[25:33]

But then I was thinking about it later, and I felt like, no, wait a minute. Sazen is outreach. It is meaningful. And so that's part of what I wanted to talk about today. It is meaningful in the context of this world that feels like it needs us to respond and needs us to act right now, and that the speed of it and the kind of access that we have to hearing about everything all at once, all of the pain around the world all at once coming at us if we let it, that zazen is a powerful response. So one way that we've been working about or with this question, just kind of what is Zazen and how do we really allow ourselves to kind of enter the tradition here and enter Zazen practice fully as if it...

[27:00]

really has something to offer us, and we have something to offer it, and it is our true nature. How do we get there? And so in the posture class, really the focus has been kind of figuring out, okay, now we've received the instructions from our teachers about how to sit down and... what the posture looks like and what kind of cushion you should use and various things. And we have images all around of people sitting, usually in one posture. But then when we actually sit down and tune in ourselves to what's happening, what do we notice? What do we notice? Because we're the only person We're the only being who knows the experience of sitting and being and living in this unique body-mind complex.

[28:06]

And so when we receive instructions and teachings kind of from the outside, some of our teachers have said, you know, just to even write about this is like defilement. Just to even write about this is like... I shouldn't write about this because it's going to confuse all of you. It's what some of our teachers say. And at the same time, how do we actually arrive and how do we actually enter the teachings and the practice without some description or without some help or some kind of instruction? And how to balance... the relationship between what we actually perceive and experience and whether we actually are awake enough, embodied enough to perceive and experience what's happening, how do we balance that with what we hear from the outside? And so just to say one more thing about that, or to remind you, I'm sure many of you have heard one of the kind of most

[29:20]

well-known features of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, of his teaching style or his pedagogy was his insistence and his encouragement that, like, don't take my word for it. Don't take my word for, don't just listen to me and do what I say, but actually find out if what I say is true. Find out for yourself, right? So his encouragement to, for each of us to make our practice really an alive, engaged, and embodied practice, not a passive, well, I guess I'll just do what you say, or I'll just keep doing this even though I don't understand it or I don't feel it, or it doesn't seem to be true, it doesn't seem to be the way that you're saying it. But Shakyamuni Buddha said, you have to find out for yourself. And specifically, he said, Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon rumor, nor upon what is in a scripture, nor upon surmise, nor upon an axiom, nor upon specious reasoning, nor upon a bias toward a notion that has been pondered over, nor upon another's seeming ability, nor upon the consideration the monk is our teacher.

[30:48]

Basically, listen to the teachings, but rely on your own experience. Trust your own experience as a source of teachings as well. So just to keep that in mind, in the posture class, we've been trying to kind of not settle for an experience of posture, I'd say, that is sort of more either putting us to sleep or causing us to take on an attitude of enduring. Like, I'll just get through this because everyone says this is how I should sit. And also some people in the sangha have said that legs falling asleep is just normal. So I guess you just have to suck it up. and get through it. And so in the posture class, we've been trying to take that apart and really keep our practice vibrant and awake.

[32:02]

And like, legs falling asleep is actually not a good sign. It's not normal. It's a sign that you're cutting off your circulation, that the posture you've chosen for yourself is not appropriate. for the current manifestation of your body, mind. And so how do you explore what's actually alive, nourishing, and vibrant for you? And so one idea about posture that we started with at the beginning of the class is just to keep in mind and to remember, and this really connects to My earlier question and the question that I encounter every day at work of like, okay, how is this practice of sitting down still, how is this connected to everything that's going on or seems to be going on in the world at large?

[33:03]

And that idea is that as human beings, we are by nature creatures of movement. So as soon as we come into being, as soon as we're conceived, We're already in motion. We're already moving. And movement is what transforms us into a recognizable human form. Movement is what allows us to be born. And as soon as we are born, we're already responding. And as we've been learning in Christina's class, a lot of our patterns that we take in and that we discover, through this practice of slowing down and attuning, are so old and so pre-volition, we don't even know where they came from. They're very old. And Buddhism describes this as ancient tangled karma, or sometimes here we use twisted, ancient twisted up karma, right?

[34:10]

And so our natural way of being, is to move, which makes sazen a very interesting practice, since usually we're moving away from things that bother us, or that we're afraid of, or that we assume will be problematic, and we're thinking that we're moving towards things that will bring us either at least a sense of ease, if not pleasure, or at least not bother us too much. And so we're constantly in this relationship of moving towards something or away from something. And when we sit down in zazen, we don't have any place to go physically. We're just physically planted. And so then we have the experience, all we really have besides...

[35:14]

tuning into the kind of natural movement that's always there are involuntary movements of breath and heartbeat. What we have instead are the movements of the mind. And so when we think about what's going on out there in the world and maybe our compulsion to kind of dive in and help or our compulsion to try to like arrange ourselves so that we can avoid all that stuff out there or some of it. Really, it all comes from this movement, right? From the way that we first form our actions. And in Buddhism, we call everything from mind, speech, and body. All of that is considered volitional, which means... actions that you chose, whether you actually meant to choose it, but that you're doing intentionally, you're doing at will, and that also have ripples.

[36:28]

So we call those actions of body, speech, and mind volitional actions, which is different from what we feel when we sit down in zazen. We can certainly feel the mind part, but... when we're tuning into the breath, when we're tuning in and feeling and perceiving the sensations of the body that are constantly moving without us seeming to participate just to keep us alive, all of that movement, all of that stuff is considered not karmic. And so Suzuki Roshi, I remember hearing this early on when I... came to Zen Center, he said that Zazen is one of the few places where we can actually practice the precepts. And the precepts are the kind of ethical body of teachings that we work with along with Zazen practice.

[37:38]

And Zazen is one place where we can actually keep the precepts. And I remember thinking to myself, that's not true. Because when I first sat, when I first decided to go to do some practice at Tassajara, our monastery, and we sit a lot, long, long periods of zazen and many sessions, or many, we only do three, but it feels like many, many, many sessions. I remember thinking almost every day, well, I know that the first precept is not killing. And I would say to myself, well, I know that right now I'm killing myself. Because zazen for me was so painful, like so overwhelming, and especially extended periods of time that I couldn't even breathe fully.

[38:42]

And yet, I don't think anyone knew what I was experiencing because people would constantly comment on, and this is what's interesting about that statement from Shakyamuni Buddha about what other people don't rely on another's seeming ability. People would always say to me, oh, you have such beautiful posture. probably very easy for you. Whereas, you know, I have this terrible posture and my back hurts and this and that and the other. And you, you know, you came from dance and it's probably like, so your hips are open and it's so easy. And I never felt that I could say to anyone, actually, like, I'm in so much pain. Like, you have no idea how much zazen hurts me. And so I just kept sitting, in this really harmful way to my body, which was exactly the instruction that I read in the Fukan Zazengi.

[39:52]

You know, I followed those instructions, and I'm very upright, and my legs fit, and all of that. And I really, I could hardly stand it. And I kept it up for, I mean, when I first started at City Center, it was like that, and It wasn't that big of a deal because there's less sitting. And then when I got to Tassajara, I just like, ooh, this is getting a little harder to maintain my facade of practice here. And it wasn't until my second practice period that I really had like a, I want to say nervous breakdown, but it was more like a body, like mind breakdown during a nine-day session. Day seven. No, day nine. It was day nine. Day nine. Yeah. And finally, we had a kind of a closing ceremony where we asked a question of the teacher who was leading the practice period.

[40:57]

And I was just beside myself with my whole nervous system was like, what are you doing to me? Like, why are you hurting me so much? Like, what is this? of this practice, right? And I had no question, so I was really, I hate asking questions. I really don't like those ceremonies. And so I kind of stumbled up, which is just not like me. I prefer to be very, like, tidy with my body and my movements. And I stumbled up to the mat, and the question that came out of my mouth was, how can I stop hurting myself? And I think at that time, that was the beginning for me of realizing the power of this practice. The way that we work with ourselves when there's no agenda, when all there is is just this, what you can tune into, and how we relate to the experience of this

[42:13]

precious human life, which many Buddhist traditions point that out as the kind of fundamental attitude to take on before entering other teachings. Human life is precious. That was the first moment that I realized how I'm relating to myself and how I'm viewing what we're actually doing is exactly what I'm doing out there. It's the same way that I treat, that I act in the world. It all comes from this harm, this attitude of harm and control and taking on a shape that doesn't fit me and doing what other people, what it feels like other people are telling me to do. That was all kind of That was what I was practicing, right?

[43:17]

Not the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. So having this opportunity with this practice period where the theme is like, and the encouragement, but with gentleness and kindness, I felt, has been like, no, stay awake. Like, stay awake in your practice. It's yours. Nobody knows what your growth circles, like the face of a cut tree, look like. Nobody knows what that is to be you. You're the only person. It's your practice. And it's connected to everybody else and how you relate to your unique body-mind matters in terms of how everyone will feel you and your presence and your energy and your availability. And so for me, that became like the start of my question.

[44:26]

Like, what is this? And how does it, why is it so central and so important? And what is it that we're doing here? Like, what's the rolling up the sleeves of Zazen practice? And one of the practices that Christina offered us really early on in, I think it was day one of the class, I really related it to kind of my early approach to Zen practice. She asked us throughout the day and kind of even just during the talk she was giving and... during all of our different activities to kind of notice and imagine this window of what is actually tolerable.

[45:28]

So not necessarily comfortable, which it was interesting to think about that. Not necessarily comfortable, but tolerable in such a way that we're able to stay engaged. And the description that she gave us was, you know, if you're kind of like too over here, it'll resonate as like anxious energy, as a kind of heightened, speedy energy. And if you're too much over here, you'll shut down. You just can't take it. Shut down. And I thought, oh my goodness. I really spent all of my earliest years of... of Zen practice in one of these or the other, you know, one side or the other, never in here in the middle. So I've so much encouraged that, or I appreciated that encouragement.

[46:38]

Does this talk end at 11? Okay, time to end. Whoops, sorry, I thought it was like, I think it was 11.15. So I just want to end by saying I really do have faith in this practice and really Zazen practice and also everything else that we do that flows out of Zazen practice, both in the temple, but also for those of you outside the temple. And I just want to encourage people to try it. and to stay close. And hopefully, from the kind of generosity of these teachings of this practice period, which you can access, if you're new and you just kind of showed up, or if you've been coming, it's all of the teachings or the talks, at least, from this practice period are available to you on our website.

[47:44]

And just hopefully... as you're entering your practice or continuing your practice, that for you, you'll take really good care of yourself and allow this practice to be genuinely healing. Because if it is for you and if you're able to turn yourself towards that mind and that approach to your experience, that's what's going to flow out. And so that's the taproot that's reaching down that's going to actually make the flow of nourishment extend to other beings in the world. And so I'm going to end there. And if you have thoughts or questions or things about your own practice, you can come and join me in a little bit for questions.

[48:34]

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