This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening to all of you here in the Buddha Hall on this almost full noon evening, and also hello to all of you joining us online. My name is Eli. I'm a resident priest here at City Center and also serve as the Director of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging for the Three Temples. Thank you to Tova and the Tonto team for inviting me to give this talk. And then from Jundos to Jukais, Dishes to Dokasan, deep gratitude to my teacher, Rinsod Sadasan, for extending Suzuki Roshi's warm hand and zest for practice to me.

[01:03]

I also want to take a brief moment to dedicate this talk and also have a moment of silence for Reverend Curtis Fabens, who is a dear Dharma friend of mine and recently passed... Not only was he my friend, but he was the person who showed me zendo forms and gave me my first zazen instruction. So I have great gratitude in my heart and in my ga sho for Curtis. If we could begin with a bit of sitting, just to ground ourselves this evening and also to ground myself. I invite you to close your eyes or... cast your your gaze down if that's comfortable and first just go ahead and take a couple of deep deep breaths just allowing your being to start to settle and allowing for whatever version of you is showing up to feel welcome and whole

[02:16]

As you return to your normal flow of breath and start to sense the... Oh boy, that's a horrible thing. Okay, this is what I get from switching from a paper to digital. But if you could just return to the natural flow of your breath and start to sense your connection to the earth. Feeling the support that she gives. Aware of the elements, aware of the indigenous ancestors who are on whatever land you're practicing. Becoming aware of the ancestors of your body and aware of the ancestors that informed your wisdom. Aware of the ancestors sitting next to you and online.

[03:30]

Aware of the ancestor you will be and to our ancestors of future generations. Thank you for grounding with me. So at the beginning of the month, I recently just got back from a practice period away from the temple. And a practice period, or formerly known as an ango for those of you who may not be familiar with that term, was traditionally a 90-day period and got its origins in the time of the Buddha. Him and his disciples would kind of hunker down during rainy seasons to practice more intensely. And for me, one of the draws of a practice period is that for three months, we get to take time out of our regular routine and get to let go of our preconceived notions, attachments, and distractions that can be a hindrance to personal growth.

[04:34]

And wait, I just said I got back from my practice period away from the temple. And since I'm a resident dad here, would you entertain, let me entertain you with a popsicle stick joke? What do you call a practice period outside of the temple? A Zenbatical. And that's what I want to talk tonight about. Whether a sabbatical or a practice period, by taking a backward step to intentionally attune to our life can have a transformative shift in how we navigate, experience, and connect with whatever we do next. So what is a Zenbatical, you might ask? It's very much the same as a traditional sabbatical. Zen Center staff members who have worked in leadership positions either in admin or on the spiritual side for seven consecutive years are eligible for a six-month sabbatical. To quote the policy, in order to devote time for personal rest, reflection, or study before returning to full-time participation.

[05:50]

You know, we don't make the most as a stipend. So I have to say that's quite an amazing benefit. However, my job would not really support me stepping away for a full six months. I would probably collapse. So I asked to split this six months over a couple of years. So there you have it. And I was a couple of weeks into my sabbatical. And I remember that 12 years prior, my wife and I took a sabbatical from our corporate jobs, thinking that we would go back. However, the sabbatical never ended, and here I am talking to you sometime later. So when I kind of contemplated on that, I was like, oh, you know, what does that mean? And not returning to Zen Center never crossed my mind, but because of the previous sabbatical experience, and how it showed me how transformative it could be.

[06:54]

I thought it might be worthwhile to orient myself to the sabbatical I was in more intentionally than I did the first few weeks. So I did a couple of things to learn more about sabbaticals and also apply the components of what we do in a Zen practice period, which in principle I feel is very much in line or synonymous. with a sabbatical and since i already kind of mentioned what a sabbatical is i just wanted to give you the definition of excuse me your practice period i want to give you the definition of a sabbatical just so that we're on the same page and wiki says that a sabbatical is a rest or a break from work an extended period of time intentionally spent on something that is not your routine job I also took some time and was speaking to my sister, who's the 11th Episcopalian Bishop of Vermont.

[07:54]

And the right reverend said that in Christianity, sabbaticals are a reconciliation with God. And time to step away from the push and pulls of capitalistic society and really get an inward perspective that's more personally resident without all the need to do expectations of everyday life. And in sabbatical, we also get the rest that we may need from the roles that we're asked, required, or obligated to hold. And this is especially important if we're in an environment where we're a minority, as we often have to hold more identities that have to kind of... and navigate the environments that we may be in due to oppression. In addition, I watched a couple of TED Talks on sabbaticals, and some of them are not so good, so I'm not recommending that necessarily.

[09:00]

But there was a speaker who did speak to one point that I wanted to extend a little bit further than they intended. And the speaker highlighted one of the most central questions to our life. A question that is kind of a driving force behind so much of what we do. And that question is, what's next? What's next? And her point in general is that sabbaticals are really important as they help you in a more connected way respond to that question. And although she wasn't speaking in the context of practice, that did have me considering to an extent whether we are thinking about the next activity that we engage in or the next thing that we'll say or the next career move or how AI will impact things or even what's next after we die.

[10:06]

As humans, we do think about a form of what's next all the time. The inquiry also made me reflect on my last sabbatical, as I mentioned, which began at Tassajara, where we spent a summer, followed by coming to City Center, where Kat and I still currently reside with our six-year-old daughter. So from that standpoint, I can say that a sabbatical totally transformed what was next for me. And that was over a decade ago. So what's the magic? The reason sabbaticals are good for answering the question of what's next is because just like practice periods, they're an invitation to step outside of our routine ways and commit to an intentional space. And what happens is our less revealed, less witness, fuller being has the space to come forth. And that creates a shift in perspective, allowing for a deeper connection to life in a way that can be transformative.

[11:11]

So when you think about it, in order to meet this question of what's next, we're actually best suited by understanding what's present right now. What's right here? What is right now? And as Dogen says, students of the way, never expect to practice tomorrow. You should practice following the Buddha. only today and in this moment. And I found when we slow down practice and meet ourselves in the present moment, we're more likely to actually be aligned with whatever comes next rather than our normal strategy of trying to control things. Whether it's the next activity we engage in or meeting the impermanence of this form of our existence, practice periods or sabbaticals can give us a container to do this work. We also get the chance to engage with one of Dogen, our Soto founder's core teachings, which you can find out about more in the upcoming practice period led by Rosh and Paul Haller.

[12:17]

That's a plug for the practice period. And most of you have heard it before if you've been around, and that's to study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. And a sabbatical or a practice period can support this instruction and can be a time for that deep self-reflection and self-discovery. By taking these pauses in our life, we're able to focus and understand ourselves better and get a clearer perspective of our life. So it's not that I necessarily don't think about the big scale, what's next, but before getting into... the question of what's next in a wider context, it was important for me to use the space of the Zenbatical to reflect on who I was or who I am outside of this Zen bubble. So off we were on my Zenbatical.

[13:23]

And we started actually at Tassajara again out of all places for about a week. But after that, the settings of where I was at really had no Buddhist affiliation or what I would call appreciation for practices you can often find in the Bay Area. So when engaging with my friends or their kids or others, I couldn't really speak to this life in general terms. I don't know if any of you have tried to do that, let alone bring up any Buddhist philosophy. And when I would try, I'd fail. And I found myself pondering this question. And that's when I'm outside of the Bay Area, what happens to the identity I have, the knowledge and the language I use when it's not social currency and doesn't translate. Yet it also became quite clear that I was having conversations also on my sabbatical in...

[14:28]

particularly in the diversity community space or retreat that I go to yearly, and I realized that there was so much being expressed that doesn't get expressed here, which means there's part of myself that are not included in my daily life in the temple. So now I actually have the opportunity to be aware of that, to practice with that, and hopefully allowing for a more fully or fuller body expression of myself to come forth. Another couple of questions that arose for me, along with a comment. The questions were, what's fundamentally being practiced and expressed and experienced? And also, how can my eye of practice extend beyond the words and forms of Zen and Bay Area culture? The perspective I gained was how much I had personally undervalued the underlying experience,

[15:29]

of moment to moment that I was having in practice versus my ability to conceptualize and express my experience or say something, you know, which is a form of trying to figure out what's next. In addition, realizing that my way of peeling the potato of practice is not the only way, and I should be less concerned about talking to people about things How I peel versus it being more impactful to explore the ways they're already peeling. The way that they're bringing breath, stillness, and insight into their life. Could I try to promote and amplify that, whatever it is for them? And if I just be, and in that being, perhaps I'll have a chance to reveal what's been peeled in me. Several other insights were... that came up in this practice mirror I was given was that for one, and some of you may relate, there was a sort of Zen snobbiness, I think that I was forming as if we have some kind of, you know, deep power in this or deep source of power within these temple walls that, you know, allow us to go deep and it just can't happen elsewhere.

[16:53]

And, for those of you who may have never lived or practiced in a temple, may have some of that ideal too. But from this experience, I am fully convinced, other than just hearing it, that practice occurs, or that awakening occurs anywhere practice does happen. And Suzuki Roshi, our founding teacher, really expressed this. And the richness that I experienced in my time away, really pointed to the fact that our practice only has the limitations we put on it. And Suzuki Roshi in the book Beginner's Mind, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, speaks to this in the chapter about right effort. And he says, because all of us are doing the same thing, making the same mistake, we do not realize it. So without realizing it, we are making many mistakes. and creating problems amongst among us.

[17:56]

This kind of bad effort is called being Dharma ridden or practice ridden. You're involved in some idea of practice or attainment and you cannot get out of it. When you're involved in some dualistic idea, it means your practice is not pure by purity. We do not mean to polish something, trying to make something impure, some impure thing, pure by purity. We mean, things as they are. When something is added, that's impure. When something becomes dualistic, that is not pure. If you think you will get something from practicing Zazen, you are already involved in impure practice. It is alright to say there is practice and there is enlightenment, but you should not be caught by the statement. You should not be tainted by it. When you practice Zazen, just practice Zazen. If enlightenment comes, it comes.

[18:57]

We should not attach the attainment. The true quality of zazen is always there, even if you are not aware of it. So forget all about what you think you may have gained from it. Just do it. The quality of zazen will express itself. Then you will have it. And that's definitely something I realized about myself, is that in part my practice had become somewhat of this kind of identity rather than an engagement. And again, as Suzuki Roshi said, I want to emphasize the true quality of Zazen is always there, even if you're not aware of it. So forget all about what you think you may have gained from it. Just do it. The quality of Zazen will express itself. Then you will have it. When I look back at my life before coming to practice, there are many similarities in how my life was formed around an identity. And that identity informed most of the decisions and choices that I made. Back then it was kind of like, you know, get the degree, go to get a job, get a house, yada, yada, yada.

[20:04]

Move up, check the boxes. And later that pattern repeated to a degree. So yes, I was doing things a lot more intentionally and I was not as kind of hooked by my conditioned mind anymore. as my kind of pre-Zen self, but in a sense I was checking Zen boxes. And I want to also say that identities or advancement in the world is not wrong. But when identity precludes awareness of what is or what needs to be, when identities limit, confine, or exclude part of our being, then our identity is nothing more than full-body delusion. We are more than the stories that we tell ourselves, and our vastness is incomprehensible. And sometimes the felt experience of life that is not tied to identity can be hard to experience when we're in the same day-to-day routine. So it's important to get perspective on as well as drop the identities that we hold.

[21:09]

While I thought I had left the corporate hamster wheel a decade ago, I did find myself at Beginner's Mind Temple practicing Zen Zen. being in the present moment, but somehow unknowingly, I found myself in the same kind of hamster wheeling along, spinning through my morning program and often into work. So having breaks from these traditional patterns or routines that we're in, especially through a practice period or a sabbatical, provides a chance to re-engage without the normal constraints that we perceive in our day-to-day environment. And to be honest, I feel a thousand times more reconnected to life, reconnected to practice and refreshed after coming back. So I thought that I would maybe name some of the components that contributed to that shift or what I brought forth into my Zenbatical.

[22:14]

And so one thing that I wanted to say as a general approach to Zenbatical practice periods or sabbaticals, I really have been rounding myself and rooting myself in a teaching from a friend of mine and mindfulness teacher, Rashid Hughes. And Rashid uses REST, R-E-S-T, as an acronym. It stands for R, relax your attention, release. E is for exhale all striving. empty. S is for sense the silence, surrender. T is for tune into awareness, trust. And I so encourage you to look up Rashid's work because there's a lot more to rest, but he describes rest as an antidote to capitalism, fatigue, and self-improvement, and that it focuses more on the being than doing.

[23:20]

This practice is intended to help us integrate moments of personal intimacy and awareness into our daily lives. Rest is an invitation to become more familiar with our inner spaciousness and give ourselves permission to pause and relax into the space without guilt. Rest is neither a form of sleep therapy nor a call for us to take more naps, which can easily become an escape from reality. Instead, it's an invitation for all people to rediscover belonging and awareness in just being. Beautiful for me. So for me, this invitation to rest is a vital instruction for practice in general and an intentional approach that I bring into practice periods or Zenbaticals. And this teaching of slowing down to meet the fullness of our being

[24:20]

was actually kind of first instilled and given to me when I arrived to City Center over a decade ago by Osho Zenju Earthland Manuel, who at the time was serving as the head student or Shusho for the practice period that we were about to take. And she later put these words into her book, The Way of Tenderness, which you can get over there. And when she describes her first Zen retreat, she says, So while participating in a silent seven-day meditation retreat, I began to practice leaving everything, or at least leaving my obsession with things, leaving my aspirations, hopes, dreams, identity, all notions of being this or that, of doing this, that, and the other. I was to say goodbye to these things for seven days. I sat for hours, simply breathing in and out.

[25:22]

As things came up, I would say goodbye, bowing dutifully at the parade of passing thoughts. So both of these are a form of rest and an act of courage and of reconciliation and really a way of touching the ground. Some other components. that I wanted to mention that are important in creating an intentional practice container for a practice period of sabbatical. Could include, but are not limited to, centering a theme or intention for your life or for that period. You could change your schedule a bit, increase formal practice. You could connect with a practice community. You could create spaciousness or a shift in your activity, perhaps changing something in your diet, but most importantly, creating a form of rest.

[26:26]

So I'll take a moment and kind of dive into some of these components a little bit more to give them some shape. So first, a theme to ground yourself in and something to emphasize in your activity. In part, my intention for the Zenbatical was to live the summer through the eyes of a six-year-old. So besides the obvious, the intention was for me to really lighten up, relax the thinking mind, the planning mind, and try to embody whatever activity I was doing with curiosity and wonder. For my daughter, Maya, who was floating around here in the lobby earlier, we... did things like created forts in the different Airbnb living rooms that we were staying at, splashing with silliness as we were fishing the pool, or making prehistoric landscapes with mini toy dinosaurs that we won with little tickets that we got from the boardwalk in Santa Cruz.

[27:28]

And under the spell of my kind of typical everyday life, this would have been sidetracked by work. by some type of house responsibility. I'd have been doing emails in between all of these activities, but with the space and this intention to meet the summer through her eyes, I was likely a more enjoyable father, but also got to connect with a side of myself that's less restricted and craves play, which I don't often give myself in everyday life. So the next component is following the schedule. And in my case, the Zenbatical non-schedule. And if you attend any Zen retreat, you've probably heard the practice advice, just stick to the schedule as a practice focus. And if you haven't tried this, I encourage it because many of us use a lot of energy trying to, as I said, plan what's next and negotiate what we'll do and how we'll manage our time.

[28:37]

When we allow our actions to be guided kind of by a schedule, it can free up that mind activity, allowing for more space to bring awareness to the present moment. However, as a Zen student that has kind of probably taken a little bit too much heed to that practice, it was really informative for me to not have to get up at a certain time, to relax a little bit about my schedule. which in result made me a more, again, friendly person with my family, not trying to constantly rush them out the door. So in short, I can say that, you know, in however you're holding these practices, the intention is to really be able to study yourself. And for me, I could see how I was being a little too aggressive with the schedule. Another component that I wanted to mention involves committing to a practice, a form of study, and a practice space.

[29:45]

So if you join us for the practice period, it's pretty straightforward here in the temple. That involves all of our formal practices, sitting in the zendo, chanting in service, participating in ceremonies and dharma talks. But outside of the temple, it was a lot of outdoor sitting. studying short Zen stories by this panda named Stillwater, which I definitely recommend for anyone who wants to broaden their eye of practice. We also did art projects, and every couple of days, if any of you have known me at all, we got into bubble practice. So we were blowing big bubbles, small bubbles. We'd hold our breath until bubbles popped. And really, eventually, the adults would join in together, collectively studying impermanence of bubbles. And don't tempt me. I have bubbles in my sleeve if anybody wants to give it a try.

[30:47]

Some of the other components are to have a community to practice with. So you're obviously welcome here at City Center or any of our temples. But if not you can do that more intentionally with others in your community. Also, I would recommend having some sort of teacher or a mentor to work with, perhaps a therapist or an accountability buddy to help you deepen the process of your practice period. And then really briefly, a couple other components, journaling, being in nature, learning a new hobby, service or volunteering, definitely tech detox, can all create an experience or an environment that helps you have a different perspective than your normal day-to-day routines. And then a couple more things, and we'll close up here.

[31:49]

I wanted to also say and take a moment to recognize that the ability to take a sabbatical or do a practice period both come with privilege. And for many people, taking that type of time away is not an option. To that, I would say that I hope collectively in society, we somehow make a shift towards allowing for more pause, slowing down, more Sabbath in our life. And I also believe that there's ways of creating a sabbatical or practice period experience in the timeframe of a week, perhaps some days or even over several lunch breaks. So I'm sure that there are a few things that I'm leaving out and you can be creative with your own Zenbatical. And before I close, I thought maybe you would be wondering if I spent any time other than kind of this precious what's next of focusing time, connecting with Maya, learning and playing with her, did I actually have time to contemplate any big what's next?

[33:02]

just to say a little bit, in part yes. I did have time to actually sit with a question, which was a major reason for my initial sabbatical from corporate, which in short, just contemplating the implications of artificial intelligence. Of course, I'm going to take it there. Some folks know talking to me already. So at the time, 15 years ago, I read two life-changing books. One was... Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by Suzuki Roshi, and the other was Singularity by Ray Kurzweil. Long story short, the implication that I had kind of gained and what I felt that the things humans have been in pursuit of for millennia would potentially be, well, at least drastically altered by AI. And whether that's having our intelligence surpassed or lengthening our life expectancy, the question about what it means to be human led me to the response to practice what this monk who came from Japan and here to San Francisco half a century ago was expressing.

[34:17]

These teachings truly were the appropriate response to the questions on my heart-mind. So here we are on the cusp of AI completely transforming life as we know it. And while I've made a decision to turn towards what's next in this moment, I also feel less threatened, less fearful, and less anxious about the uncertainty and transformation the next couple decades will hold. And while I don't have any exact answers, I don't feel as separate from technology and the world that we're co-creating with it. And I also have several ideas for revolutioning education amongst other things, but I won't get into that tonight. Funny enough, when I returned back from sabbatical, I was invited to speak at a conference, a mindfulness conference, and the theme literally is what's next. So while I've started to collect some thoughts about this, my sabbatical answer to what's next is right now.

[35:27]

I think I took this to time. Okay, so I think we'll get out of here. And of course, just to close with, I wanted to hold this on if you wouldn't mind. You can just close it out with that. And just notice, I'm sorry I don't have enough for everybody, but notice the bubbles breaking. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[36:32]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:41]

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