Okay. Be careful. It might be too loud. Just put it on there for recording. Good evening. Good to see all of you. How many folks are here for the very first time? One. Welcome. Welcome. You're very welcome. Great to have you here. This is Beginner's Mind Temple. You're in the right place. My name is Sozan Michael McCord, and I am grateful to my teacher, Ryushin Paul Haller, who ordained me and has been my root teacher for a decade, as well as the Tonto. I'd like to thank her for inviting me to speak here this evening, and hopefully I will leave you with something useful. There's some reason that you came here this evening.

[01:21]

There's some reason why we come to a monastery or come anywhere. We go there because we think it's a good idea. We go there because we think there's something that's going to happen when we get there that will generally be good for us, either short term or long term. But there's a good reason to be there. So we're here in a monastery. And... a lot of things that are associated with monasteries might be one of the reasons why you came here or why I came here originally. And that was things like inner peace, to calm, to better focus, to have a sense of well-being. These things are all associated with monasteries. And maybe that's one of the reasons why you came here, was one of those things. And the thought, might generally be my life needs more of what is in that monastery. I need more inner peace. I haven't met a lot of people recently that just said, you know, I just have too much inner peace.

[02:27]

It's kind of overflowing and we need to back off the inner peace. And so there is something there with the tornado of life that is attractive to come to the monastery. And what is that essence? What is that thing that we're connecting to when we come here? What are these practices that are creating this idea or this kind of perception or experience that is this thing? You can think of people that embody this for you. You can think of good and evil. Think of the person... who in your life is very spacious, maybe growing up, where you could make mistakes, where you could say something wrong, where you felt unencumbered to be you, and they just had this spaciousness for you, kind of like on this heart level, not even spoken love.

[03:30]

But you felt like you could be you. You could be creative. You could say this idea. You could come up with this thing. And I think everyone's known someone in their life where they felt more spacious. And then you think of the other person maybe. Think of the person that maybe was not spacious with you. Where there wasn't room to make mistakes. And how you felt in that situation. being active, even learning, memory, communication, listening, all those things get dampened in that sort of environment. So what is it in the monastery? that embodies these things, that is the spaciousness for others, that is the connecting at a heart level, that is the I have room in this reservoir for you.

[04:31]

And how can I take that into my life and not just have it be in the monastery? Because if they just created monasteries for... that being the central place where that stuff was done and it emanated from that place, then it would just be a hobby. It would be a place where you could go, a vacation spot for your mind, but not a way of life. The principles of Zen are more relevant than ever to a person's life at home and at work. A lot of what you hear people talking about these are things like... No time, anxiety, fractured focus, being pulled in many different directions, change so fast that you can't really keep up with it, a sense of dis-ease at a deep level, a sense of things not being quite right.

[05:33]

Is there some way we can take these things out of the monastery and bring them into our bedroom, into our kitchen, into our cubicle, onto Muni. How do these things live and breathe outside of San Francisco Zen Center, Monastery, Zendo, sitting there facing the wall, just me? Is that the only place that it lives and breathes? What I want to talk about this evening are some of the principles that we practice that are core principles in the monastery, in the Zen monastery. Some of the core things we teach people when they first come here and how that you can start with those core things and relate them to habits and practices outside of the monastery. A lot of this inspiration came from a book that I read a long time ago. It was one of the first Buddhist books I read, written by Thich Nhat Hanh. And he was asked a question by his brother who lived in Asia in a busy capital.

[06:40]

He was newly married, a baby. He had a job. He was incredibly busy. And he felt like he didn't have any time. In fact, he felt like he was just rushing through his life. It was just full of anxiety and stress. And then he had this brother, Thich Nhat Hanh. And Thich Nhat Hanh got to be a forest monk. And he got to sit. And he got to be calm. And he got to do all these things that are spacious. And he said to his brother, well, of course, you can be spacious, but I've got all of these demands. How can I possibly live a life like that? And so over the course of a few years, Thich Nhat Hanh started writing him letters about how he could take the principles of the monastery out into his life and could use them in the busyness of his everyday life. And that book is called The Miracle of Mindfulness. Because we can think of a time, maybe we're at work or we're at home, where things get stressful.

[07:42]

Maybe you're at work and there's a meeting. Something happens in the meeting. And you've already got enough work. And then that person says that one thing in the meeting. And they always say that one thing. And you wish that that person wasn't in the meeting. And then you have that idea... that nobody listened to, and then somebody else had a very similar idea, and then everybody went with that idea, and then you went back to your desk kind of discouraged, and then you realized you had signed up for a few new projects, and then you already had enough work, and you've just, like, that Zen thing I was doing with that one-day sit 10 days ago at the monastery, that just does not feel like right now. I am going to summon with all of my will the Zen monastery here at my desk. I'm going to be Zen. I remember what it felt like. I'm going to conjure that. Here we go. I have done that very thing. And I started doing that years ago when I worked in the financial district, and I've continued to do that even here working in the monastery.

[08:46]

And there's this thought that if I just think of summoning it, that it will appear. And you know what? You can actually calm yourself down a little bit for five minutes or ten minutes. There are some A to B sort of self-help things that work. But if you're really looking at a spiritual program, something that goes deep, it has to be something that has to do with what even comes up in the meeting. Something that affects that deeper level. Because if we were to go out right now and just... say, take what you have on. And you have the intention, and you can visualize it. Maybe you've even run before in your life. But let's say we can visualize it, but we're going to run a marathon. We're just going to go out the front door right now, and we're going to start. And we're going to go 26.2 miles with what we have on. Now, we have the intention, but if we haven't trained, if we haven't actually...

[09:48]

brought that into our body over a certain period of time, it's impossible. And so what are the things that we can do in our life that would help us bring that, not just to that moment sitting at our desk wanting to summon it, but would actually bring that as something that we would have space for, an understanding for, be ready for? Well, I'm going to talk about four different things that we do in the monastery. There's a lot of different things that we do, but these are four key things that we do in the monastery. And they can be done anywhere. And they can be practiced. And they're practiced in the monastery to help people start to embody and to start to bring this into the somatic heart-mind practice. The first one is give full attention to one thing at a time. Now, when you're in that busy space at work, it does not feel like you're giving full attention to one thing at a time.

[10:53]

And we tell people in the monastery to use both hands when they carry an object. We try to focus on doing one simple thing and then do another simple thing. Now, you might have heard the analogy of doing the dishes to do the dishes. But what is it that we rush through in order to get to next? What is it we try to pass by because we're going to get to that thing that we want to do? Because that's the nature of not giving our full attention to something. It's to get the thing out of the way that's right in front of us, or to check it off, or to be hopping between ideas. Suzuki Roshi said in... Zen mind, beginner's mind. Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else. So years ago, I started taking this principle with actually doing dishes because I didn't like to do dishes.

[12:05]

And I always wanted to get dishes done. And when I was washing dishes, I was thinking about when these dishes are done, I'm going to do X. I was not ever thinking about the dishes and just being with the dishes. Can I approach dishes with the mentality that this is the most important thing I could be doing on the planet right now? I mean, they're just dishes. But if that's the thing I'm going to be doing, then give it that kind of focus. And in fact... I might even want to do that with something that I like first. Years ago, I noticed that even with stuff that I liked, like, say, pizza, I never even just ate pizza. I would eat pizza and watch TV, eat pizza and talk to a friend, eat pizza and talk on the phone, eat pizza and do something else.

[13:12]

But I'm just giving my full attention to something that I like. really appreciate. And starting with things that we really appreciate, things that we really can give our full attention to, and then moving to things that we might want to get through with. And noticing that inclination. It's like when you're going to a restaurant and you don't get to live until you actually get the food. You go to the restaurant and you're in your car and there's traffic. And you don't feel like you're living because you don't really want the traffic to be there. And you're thinking about next. I can't wait till I get to the restaurant. How come there's so much traffic? Come on, traffic. Go away. Let's get to the restaurant. Let's get to my life. My life is in the restaurant. My life is not here in the car in traffic. I feel disturbed. Now I can get to the restaurant. I can live my life. You get to the restaurant. You ask for your table. They say your reservation. They had a problem with it. You're going to have to wait 20 minutes. Now you don't get to live your life for another 20 minutes.

[14:14]

And you have to sit in the waiting room. with all those other people that are waiting for their table, people you didn't choose. It's cramped. It's cold. The door keeps opening. You don't get to live your life yet. When am I going to get to live my life? Let's get the dishes done. Let's get to the thing that's my life. Let's get to the food. And you get to your table, and then, of course, the food isn't there. And then the waiter might be a little bit slow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we can go through life like that. Next, next, next, next, next. And how about... What we're doing right now is our life. This is it. This is it. Now, in doing things, there's another principle that we use in the monastery, and we notice it when we start and stop things. I call it shifting gears. You notice we sit zazen for a specific period of time. And you might be having a really relaxing period of zazen, and you want to go a little bit deeper, but no, the bell rings.

[15:17]

And you notice that each person just gets up. It is time to walk kinyin. It is time to do something else. And then kinyin ends walking meditation, and then it's time to sit zazen again. And then that ends, and it's time to do chanting. And then that ends, and it's time to do soji work. And we have these bells and these bells give us transitions and we move to the next thing and the next thing. And we shift gears. But I don't know about you, in my life I tend to find the gear that works best for me and just wear out that gear. It's like living in San Francisco with a one gear bike or something or put it in fourth gear and just go around San Francisco. And I realized that I did most things at the speed of as fast as I can do it without making a mistake. And, you know, there's different contexts to different speeds.

[16:18]

And, in fact, you learn things in different ways at different speeds. And it's hard to actually know what gear to be in until you've played with all the different gears. It's fun with the momentum of the thing that you know to just keep doing it. And so in the temple, we say, okay, it's time for this. Now it's time for that. And we have a bell. So one of the things you can do, just thinking about like your home or a small space, a dorm, an apartment, a house, take something that you want to get done with and and whether it's dishes or the one I chose was dusting, and do it at a different gear. Do it at 25% speed. Take the books off one at a time with both hands and put them on the ground and get to know the feeling of your books and then go over that shelf and get to know the shelf at 25% speed.

[17:25]

And just get to know what that's like, to be in a different gear with that shelf. And to notice how your perception of time and how you feel inside changes. And sometimes I might feel like I'm getting a lot of things done at work or in my life, but I'm actually on some level feeling kind of wound, kind of anxious. I've kind of burned out the gear that I'm good at, but that's the gear that I'm comfortable with. And downshifting or finding a different gear just isn't attractive. See what it's like to do things at different speeds intentionally and then speed them up. I don't know how many of you have ever downloaded an app on your phone and you did it because you needed to accomplish something and then you downloaded something on your phone and then you didn't really learn the app. You just learned how to go from A to B really quickly to accomplish the thing and then that app sits on your phone and the next time you try to use it, you try to go really quickly and do something from A to B and you get lost down some rabbit hole.

[18:32]

And then it frustrates you. And then you start over. But you never really took the time to learn that thing. Someone probably spent a year of their life writing. And there's all sorts of intricate different areas that you could go down with this application. But you just did it so quickly the first time that now you're kind of stressed out every time you try to use it. And this brings me to my next point, which is reverence. There's something beautiful about reverence. to revere something, to give it honor, to give it respect. Japanese joinery is a type of architecture where you build buildings without any nails or adhesives or anything. The way that you cut the wood... is all that you have to go on in regard to how those joints are going to fit together. And there is a certain mentality to be able to do something so precisely.

[19:39]

I mean, if you start doing something with Japanese joinery and you get halfway through the building and then you realize, oh, that third beam we put in, that's not actually going to work now. Oh my, that's a problem. It all has to fit together and it has to fit together exactly. And when you're an apprentice for Japanese joinery, you actually do this for five years traditionally, and you don't get to ask any questions. And the teacher doesn't say anything to you. And in fact, for the first year, you're supposed to actually watch the teacher when the teacher doesn't notice that you're watching them. You're supposed to actually have other tasks that you're doing, and you're supposed to sneak a glance and notice what they're doing. And slowly work your way up to where you're carrying the tools and you're sharpening the tools. And you notice how. You notice how. How it's engaged. Developing a certain reverence for the tools.

[20:42]

for wood. I knew someone who did Japanese joinery once and they were standing next to a pile of wood on a construction site and someone walked by and they needed to go somewhere and the wood was in the way so they stepped across the pile of wood and he stopped the person. He says, please don't step on the wood. And the person was really shocked. They were like... And then they just kind of like walked on. There was a reverence that they had developed for this object. that brought their focus to it in a way that was beautiful. And it was in a way that inside fired something that was bigger than just doing a task. It really connected them to it at a heart level. Now, most people in this room probably have a mobile phone. And you've probably heard the analogy that in a mobile phone, there is more technology, and more engineering than all the engineering and technology in the world up to 1985 or something like that, one of those analogies.

[21:45]

But there is an immense amount of world-global collaboration over decades, over centuries, to get to that object that you can put in your pocket and can access things all around the world. It's a pretty amazing device if you think about just one of those things and you were to go back in time to say 1985 or 1990, people would be floored with what that thing can do. And it has a flashlight. I mean, there's just like, it's unbelievable. Oh, and by the way, we just put like a camera in there that's better than most cameras on the planet 20 years ago. We just keep sticking stuff in there. And then we shove it in our back pocket. We throw it in the back seat of our car. We throw it onto our bed. We break them. We drop them in a fountain. And the relationship to objects becomes cheap. It becomes temporary.

[22:46]

It becomes like this next, next, next mentality. We can start to treat people and relationships that way. We can start treating our tasks that way. I realized this about my phone about 15 years ago. It was 2004. And I had broken probably about a phone every 12 to 16 months. And I think I got my first phone in 1998. So this is six years later. So I'd probably broken four or five phones by then. Or lost them. I did drop one in a fountain. And so I didn't do this on purpose at first. This kind of evolved, but I took the case off of my phone, those protective cases. I took it off the phone. And when I started studying Zen, I started doing this thing where every time I pick up the phone, even if it's just quickly, I just use two hands to pick it up, and then I use the phone. And when I put it down, at the very end, I put two hands on it.

[23:49]

And then I gave it a home. At home, there's like two places that it lives. There's one place that lives in my bag, and there's one place that lives in my office. And those are its homes. And nothing else goes in that home. So I can't scratch the surface with keys or things like that. It's building a relationship to something. And I haven't broken any phones since 2004, knock on wood. But I think that my relationship to that object changed. And this can be done with any object you want. You can adopt an object and start building a reverence into your life where things have more of an attachment for you in regard to it being connected, let's say, to your heart. Connected to you having a deeper relationship. One of the things that we did one summer at Tassajara is I asked people to adopt something in the kitchen and not tell anybody else what it was.

[24:59]

But just adopt something and give it your attention for five minutes every day. And I adopted one of our sinks. And then I would clean it at like 25% speed. And I got to know all the little crevices and the cracks and the joints and the caulking. And it was really strange. Every time I went to that sink the rest of the summer, I felt different. I just, I felt different. There was something not so fleeting about it. Now there's a word for this, and it's the fourth point. There's something that we do in the monastery where we engage things with an attitude of spaciousness. Not necessarily just getting from A to B. Things that are not necessarily built for efficiency. Even though things might end up being very efficient, we do feed the whole sangha and clean our bowls and oreoche.

[26:06]

We have a 40-minute session with six minutes of eating. If you've ever been to a flower arranging ceremony, it seems like not a lot happens. if you ever looked at the forms and the activities in a monastery, there is a certain way of going about things that creates a spaciousness. When you're looking at a service, when you're looking at zazen, the sense isn't those people are moving as quickly as they can without making a mistake. The way that I would tend to move the rest of my life. no there is a certain this is the right gear the word yutori is one that i first heard from naomi shihab nai and she's a poet who was over in japan doing a lecture tour and yutori is a word in japanese that exemplifies activities that create spaciousness

[27:14]

that create a feeling of spaciousness. It's the opposite of when you left the meeting we were talking about, when you weren't feeling very spacious, or when you're in that conversation where things are just getting tight. And intentionally building things into your life that create that sense of spaciousness. Naomi Shihab Nye called it living in a poem. and you think of what it's like to read a poem. If you're reading the poem, typically you don't start off with the first line and say, okay, I need to get this done. Here we go. I'm going to nail this poem. A to Z. Okay, I did it as quickly as I could without making a mistake. I think I got it. I'm moving on. Totally different attitude when you're living in a poem. You're letting things unfold. You're letting yourself take it in. The sense of wonder. starts to come forward, a sense of curiosity is flourishing, a sense of spaciousness is there.

[28:19]

You know, we have things like this in the temple. When you go to the restroom, there's probably very few times when you are maybe less impatient. So you really want to get into the restroom, and then what do we do in the Zen monastery? Well, we put a little gata or a little altar outside... the monastery, outside the restroom, and you have to stop and pause. And you need to say either like the saying or do a bow to the altar. Just a reminder. It's like, you've got time for this. We're not in that big of a rush. You've got five seconds. You know, take off your rakasu. It'll be okay. Just remember, there's space. And that spaciousness is an attitude. It is a way of being. It's probably very similar to that person that you thought of that I was talking about at the beginning that had space for you.

[29:24]

Where you felt like you could be creative. You felt like you could make a mistake. Can we learn to be that person for ourselves inside our head? what is that internal voice like? Is it a spacious voice? Is it a voice that allows us to make mistakes, to be creative, to be unencumbered, to move forward? Or is it tight and critical? If I raised a child from age zero to age five, and it was raised with the tone and the voice that primarily exists in my head, would this be a healthy human being That's the voice that is inspiring you, that is affecting you. Learning to be that for ourselves first is one of the things that we do in the monastery. Not because it's an A to B goal for Michael to be spacious, so therefore he's happy.

[30:33]

Nothing wrong with that. That's where we start. What is the reason that someone would come and sit and stare at a wall as opposed to go out to the world and help the homeless, to help climate change, to help building infrastructure, to donate their time to Doctors Without Borders? Why would someone sit and dedicate hours to staring at a wall? It's not just for me to build something for me so that I feel more spacious, but that's where I start. All of these things are things that are principles in the monastery, and they're designed so that we can be able to take this out there and be that person that we were thinking of when we first started this talk that was in your life, that was in my life, that was spacious, so that we can actually not just be forced nice.

[31:40]

You know what it's like when someone's forced nice? I mean, they're being nice, but they've had enough. Their emotional reservoir is full. What's it like when that emotional reservoir expands a little bit and it has more space for the person next to you to be less perfect, where they can actually make a mistake and you don't feel so wound? And they can sense that. And then you can see a little bit more clearly an appropriate response. And you've played with the gears and you kind of know the speed or the tone to actually work with. That's our gift back to the world, is to be that person that spreads that loving kindness, that spreads that acceptance of who someone else is on a level where that might... or water some little kernel inside them to realize that maybe the world isn't just the way that I thought it was. It's essentially our first step toward helping the universe.

[32:49]

We call it the bodhisattva vow. It's like the analogy if there was ease and calm and peace and liberation on one side of a wall, you would climb up the wall, but only sit on the top of the wall and help others up. There's ways that we can take these principles out into our life, into our relationships, but they have to be practiced and honed, like Japanese joinery. We can't just leave here and run a marathon. You can't just go back to your desk when you're just incredibly wound and summoned. that spaciousness. You might be able to calm yourself down. But what's it like to have a different reaction in the meeting to that person that said that thing? And you can still think clearly and not have to just react. This is our gift to the world.

[33:54]

And we start with ourselves. It's so much easier to be there for others when we are unencumbered by ourselves. What we came here for is so relevant to this world and it's getting more and more relevant every day.

[34:13]

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