Good morning. Today is the 17th of November 2024, and for teisho today, my tentative title, I never know what the title should be until the teisho is over, and even then, I'm not sure, is Get Out of Your Head. Good advice. Good advice for me. I sort of came to my topic this morning, just inspired, affected by the recent election and by the reaction that so many people have had to the election and the result. I think a lot of people, not everybody, for sure, a lot of people feel like we're in uncharted territory, and they're wondering, how bad can it be? Sure. Pretty bad. Could definitely be pretty bad. We don't know. We just don't know. I think last week, Tom Kowal gave a Dharma talk, and I know he was thinking of bringing up the story of the Lost Horse. I won't go through that, because I think he did, but we just, one thing happens, and it leads to another, and it leads to another. And we really don't know. We really don't know, but I wanted to read a poem. You like poetry, right?
It's a poem by a woman named Alison litterman. The title is holding vigil. My cousin asks if I can describe this moment, the heaviness of it, like sitting outside the operating room while someone you love is in surgery and you're on those awful plastic chairs eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine, which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner wise, waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out in her scrubs and face mask, which she will Pull down to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That's how it feels as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat, asking if I'm okay, telling me how scared they are. I suppose, in that way, this is a moment of unity, the fact that we are all waiting in the same hospital corridor for the same patient who is on life support, and we're asking each other, will he wake up? Will she be herself? And we're taking turns holding vigil, as families do, and bringing each other coffee from the cafeteria, and some of us think she's going to make it. Others are already planning what they'll wear to the funeral, which is also what happens at time like times like these. And I tell my cousin, I don't think I can describe this moment heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep of human history a soap bubble, because empires are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations die. They do. They get wiped out. This happens all the time. It's just a shock when it happens to your civilization, your country, when it's someone from your family on the respirator. I don't ask her how she's sleeping or what she thinks about when she wakes at three in the morning, because she's got two daughters. And that's the thing. It's not just us. Older people, forget about us. We had our day and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food, cheap clothing. But right now, I'm talking about the babies, and not just the human ones, also the turtles and owls and white tigers and redwoods, the ozone layer, the icebergs. For the love of God, every single blessed being on the face of this earth is holding its breath in this moment. And if you're asking, can I describe that cousin? Well, I got to say, no, no one could describe it. We all just have to live through it, holding each other's hands.
Maybe a little over the top, whole civilizations going down in flames. And also, I have no idea what it's like to hold plutonium. I don't think any of us do, but it's pretty heavy.
I guess. What's really interesting about it is it. Happens to a lot of people this, this recent, you know, election and its result, and all the mind spinning that's going on about what could happen, and the circular blame game that apparently is going on in the Democratic Party. And it's just, it's just a communal experience of the sort of response we have when things don't go the way we want and think they're going to go and we just have the ground pulled out, the rug pulled out from underneath us and and generally, what we do is we start to catastrophize, and we go up in our head, and we try to run away from all the painful feelings that come up. So whether you're affected by the election or not, this dis ta applies to you.
The most people know who Helen Keller is. She became blind and deaf at a at a very early age, I think, like 19 months, she got sick and lost both her sight and her hearing and her life was really interesting how she learned to communicate and became quite a remarkable person. She wrote something she said, security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of man as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Really. We can, we can? We can go two different ways. We can hunker down and hide from our fears, other people's fears, our discomfort, our anxiety, or we can enter fully into our lives to what needs to be done. We had a member who died a few years back, Audrey Fernandez. I loved having her around because there was somebody older than me been here from the beginning. She used to say that what the country needs is a good war. Because during the Vietnamese war, people streamed into the center, because so many people were looking for something, for something they were looking for something, things weren't right. And who knows, you know, maybe, maybe all of us will be inspired by things we don't like. You know, if you look at it, take the long view, as the poet mentions, when Zen was the most alive in ancient China, those were bad times. Those were those were difficult times. There were invasions from the north, there were changes of regime, there was brutality, there was brigandry. There are well known Zen masters who died at the hands of robber or a bandit. And the same is actually true for the Buddh India. In those days, there were, you know, nation states or city states that had sort of sprung up at that time, what they call the Axial Age. And there was, there was a lot of lot of war. In fact, according to the texts, the Buddha's own clan, the shakyas, is known as Shakyamuni, which means the silent sage of the Shakya clan were actually wiped out by a neighboring King. According to the story, the Buddha knew that their army was coming, and he went and stood in the road, and they turned around and went back. And they did okay. Came again, and he stood in the road, and they turned around and went back. Third time, he let them go. You
so what do we do when we find life has thrown us something that's that's knocked us out of kilter? We're unsettled. Everybody has their own flavor of that, don't they? You know some feeling in your gut, maybe in your chest, it's always somewhere in the body that's there's an alarm going. There's a teacher, sort of called Byron Katie, who calls that a compassionate alarm clock. So. Signal that we're lost in the dream. When I was young, I've told this before. I used to occasionally find myself in a really anxious mood and just really unsettled and not feeling good at all. And I would wonder, well, how did I start feeling this way? And then if I traced back my steps, I would find some bad news I got, or some thought that popped into my head that was unsettling, that triggered it. And of course, what I'd done, what many of us do, is when that blow comes, we bury it, push it out of the way, and then it festers, and we wonder why we're why we're feeling bad, or why we're irritable or impatient for lucky. We wonder if we don't we just pure reactivity, just spread the poison everywhere around us, and the
problem is almost always because we don't like the way things are. There is a poem supposedly written by the third ancestor of Zen, sang San that we chant every week and in seshin every day begins the great way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose when preferences are cast aside, the way stands clear and undisguised. The way is our true Life things as they are. You.
Until we let go of our demands, our non negotiable demands, we can't really settle into our life. There's there's no arguing with the way things are right now. Right now, it's like this. It's a given. It's adamant. It's set in granite, and it's changing. It's constantly changing. So it's like this right now, and we don't know what it's like a minute later, two minutes later, a year later, 10 years, 20 years, 200 years, all We can work with is what's here right now. And
it's difficult to wean ourselves from jumping up into our thoughts when we're upset or when we're stuck or when we're bored. It's where we go, isn't it, things aren't going according to plan. But we can also turn to that compassionate alarm clock, that feeling that that tension in the chest or the feeling in the pit of the stomach, because that's direct experience. It's not a thought. That's what is. That's not something that we're imagining. And yeah, such a different approach than our usual one, which is casting about for a way to fix it.
Anthony de Mello, many people are familiar with him, because I keep going back to him. Anthony Demello said the trouble with most people is that they're busy trying to fix things in themselves that they don't really understand. Stop fixing yourself. You're okay. Don't interfere. Don't fix anything. Simply watch, observe the things in you that you struggle to fix. Just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change. There's a change that comes in our life from real practice that isn't top down. We don't say, Well, here's the kind of person I'd like to be, and I'm going to start practicing being that person. Instead, we bring ourselves into what's real, into this moment, and see what's there, and it changes. Everything changes. I. It's why we always trot that snow globe out at a at a workshop. How do you settle the mind? Stop stirring it up. It's really that simple. I
master Rinzai, Lin Chi in Chinese, said, just put thoughts to rest and don't seek outwardly anymore. When things come up, then give them your attention. Just trust what is functional in you at present, and you have nothing to be concerned about. You.
Bodhidharma, who founded the Zen school, said, not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting or lying down, everything you do is Zen. Maybe we could amend that to say not thinking unnecessarily, because, as as bodhidroshi was fond of pointing out, our brain is an organ in the body that secretes thoughts always have thoughts are going to be coming up, sometimes in the background and sometimes hijacking our attention, but so unnecessary and to develop the habit of going through life just attending to what's in front of us, just doing one thing, just one thing at a time, whenever we can, just washing the dishes, just Walking down the street, just listening, just tuning in you. I
there's a book written by John Kabat Zinn called think it's called coming to our senses. It's always there direct experience the Zen teacher Joh go back, talks about when she feels squirrely, listening to cars going about going by outside her Zen dough
during the fan you a
way there's nothing more needed. There is, there is even in the even in the most frenetic activity, there's a quiet at the center, and we can be in touch with that. We lose touch when we start to flail, start to complain, and we start to judge whether we're judging ourselves or judging others feeling better than or worse than we miss what's there? Always there.
When we run into a roadblock or an upset, can we turn towards that discomfort rather than turning away. Doesn't mean to amplify it. Means to feel it. That's what I want to talk about today. Is really feeling things, really getting deeply into it, which means not deflecting, not running for respite, not hiding. It means it means being comfortable in our skin. It means being able to relax.
Relaxation is a funny thing. It's really, in a way, the foundation of good Zen practice. Guo Gu the chan teacher, disciple of Sheng yen, talks about contentment as being the basis for practice. Contentment means being able to relax into things. As they are, so it's a skill. But most people, when they're told to relax, it's just another thing we're supposed to do, right? We go into our top down model and try to be relaxed. Make ourselves relaxed. Really takes practice, and a lot of it is being okay with what we don't like. There's a guy named Dan Lawrence who says it's rare to meet a man or woman who retains the capacity from infancy. That is the capacity that we all had as infants, the capacity to breathe with their whole body in fluid movement and deep relaxation. Practice it for a few moments and see what it feels like. Breath is quickened or held in fear, and this becomes our collective and so familiarly reinforced, cultural breath, cultural breath we live in a very un relaxed world. He says, it's why I always veer away from telling people to breathe using a new technique for advice often carries an implicit demand that invites resistance and more fear. It's enough to know that you're not just breathing and uncomfortably, relax into that for a while. Really interesting, because usually when you try to relax and it's not working, you want to push that away. But really the way in is to open,
always to open. Alan Wallace, Vajrayana teacher, author says again and again, counteract the agitation and turbulence of the mind by relaxing more deeply, not by contract, contracting the body or mind,
going to turn to Joh co Beck, for those who aren't familiar with her, she was a Zen teacher in San Diego for many years. Died a few years back, number of years back, I guess I it.
She says functioning is what Zen practice is. All about. Our practice is to function according to the demands of life, not according to our personal agenda for what we think life should be I want this. I'm nervous about this. Maybe that meeting won't go right. Maybe they won't like me. Every time you have a thought like that, tension builds up in your body. A thought poof tension, up, up, up. Nobody who is human is entirely free from it. But as the need for life to be a certain way eventually leaves us, the tension slowly releases, and we are more and more free. The more our practice matures, the more the body is free of anything but functional tension. Obviously, there needs to be some tension in the body, otherwise we'd fall in a soggy heap. She says it has taken me decades for my body to be naturally relaxed most of the time. Get back to the body, the thoughts are repetitive. They just go round and round and round. You aren't going to lose a thing. If you just let them be for a moment, they'll all be back.
And it's a process. You know, there's a lot of people get into the Zen, and they have ideas about full and perfect enlightenment and basically flying off into a life of perfection and bliss. But I'm here to tell you, it's not like that. We're always, always have something to work with. In Japan, they say somewhere the Buddha is still working on himself. But Joh also points out there's a tremendous difference between between being all the way stuck and being unstuck 50% of the time, even 50% unstuck is 50% free.
I want to read a little bit from a book called the wakeful body, written by Willa Blythe Baker.
Can't remember who turned me on to it, but she's a Vajrayana practitioner, one of those people who did the three year, three day, a three month, three hour, three day, I don't know, some long retreat, solitary. Well, not solitary, but retreat with no speaking, sort of like a endless, endless seshin. Sounds really interesting to do. Actually, there's a member of the center who went off and did that I never was able to talk to him afterwards. Never saw him again, but
can be done.
So will Baker is talking about what she calls somatic mindfulness. So this is basically the awareness of the body at any moment when you turn into the tune into the body, the body is aware. The body feels what it feels. It's why it's such a good place to go when you're spinning off into thoughts and anxiety, what you're running away from, which is the feelings in the body is actually what will bring you back to stability. And she says this somatic mindfulness is informed by one very simple observation, the mind is distracted, but the body is not. The body is not thinking or ruminating. It's just feeling and being present, aware and vibrant. In other words, the body is already mindful. The turning point in this model that sets somatic mindfulness apart from the more orthodox model. And the Orthodox model is, of course, using the mind to train the body,
sort of the image of a, what you see in Zen of an ox handler tending the Ox. When thoughts go off in the wrong direction, you cut them off. And that can work, but it's this, this missing, this body component, I think, can be a problem for most people. And she says, at the moment of distraction, instead of prioritizing control, a practitioner of somatic mindfulness releases control and allows attention to be drawn back by the body or by the feeling of the breath, which, after all, is a somatic feeling, somatic sensation, or we could just say body sensation, such as the air in your nostrils, the rise of your diaphragm recenters Attention, the return is experienced not as a discipline of effortful redirection by a higher executive function, but as a natural draw to the body's steady wakefulness, like iron filings return to a magnet, scattered attention represents the iron filings and the body is the magnet.
Put another way, the model is not one of taming, but of trust. The doorway into a sustained, relaxed attention is to let go of control and find refuge in the body's immediate, present sensory field. When the mind relaxes its grip on the process. The body models sustained attention. The body leads the way. It's a great relief for the mind. In fact, if you've been struggling to develop mindfulness, this might come as a surprise, the secret to stabilizing your practice has not only been right under your nose, but it is your nose and the rest of your body too. For that matter, you.
It, yeah, it's just two things, being okay with things being how they are, because they can't be any other way, and being willing to feel it. It makes it can make a tremendous change. There's still a role for looking at our thoughts and seeing how intelligent or non intelligent they may be. Always fond of saying that if you could have a transcript of everything you think during the course of a day, you would not want to read it. But there's so much that feels right about just bringing bare attention to the body, to sounds, to anything that's real. I
it makes it makes our anxieties about what may happen, puts them into perspective. It's worrying about things that might happen and leaving things that are happening, why not turn that around? Supposedly, Mark Twain said, I'm an old man. I've known many troubles, most of which never happened.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna finish up with a quote from Bill Murray. Yeah, that's right. Interesting guy. So he says this, let's all ask ourselves that question right now, what does it feel like to be you? What does it feel like to be you? Yeah, it feels good to be you, doesn't it? It feels good because there's one thing that you are. You're the only one that's you, so you're the only one that's you. And we get confused sometimes, or I do. I think everyone does? You try to compete. You think, damn it, someone else is trying to be me. But I don't have to armor myself against those people. I don't have to armor myself against that idea. If I can just really relax and feel content in this way and in this regard, if I can just feel think now, how much do you weigh? This is a thing I like to do with myself when I get lost and I get feeling funny. How much do you weigh? Think about how much each person here weighs, and try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bottom right now, parts in your feet and parts in your bum. Just try to feel your own weight, in your own seat, in your own feet. Okay? So if you can feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most personal identification, a very personal identification, which is, I am. This is me now, here I am, right now. This is me now, then you don't feel like you have to leave and be over there or look over there. You don't feel like you have to rush off and be somewhere. There's just a wonderful sense of well being that begins to circulate up and down from your top to your bottom, up and down from your top to your spine, and you feel something that almost makes you want to smile, makes you want to feel good, makes you want to feel like you could embrace yourself. So what's it like to be me? You can ask yourself, What's it like to be me? You know the only way we'll ever know what it's like to be you is if you work your best as being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself that's where my home is really this moment, seeing directly this is our true home. Don't have to go off on a philosophical tangent. Don't have to imagine exalted states. This is the central tenet of Zen, direct experience. As I said before, it's not top down. It's not your improvement project. All it takes is willingness, willingness, curiosity, and eventually faith comes because you begin to see the difference. You have a refuge that's reliable, that's really there. It's not imagined. I. Doesn't depend on some sort of credo. It can be tested experientially, and you get can get better and better at it isn't fast, and sometimes it's painful, because really we're looking to take it all in, and that includes the stuff we don't like. Doesn't mean pretending to like things we don't like. That's just another top down process, just seeing that we don't like them and how we don't like them, change happens outside of our intentionality and and then we become available to life, or actually, can be of some use to other people. I read something I don't totally understand. I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but according to Guo Gu his teacher, Sheng yen, told him use the body like a rag and the mind like a mirror.
Did he say, use the body like a mind like a rag? Because you should be willing to throw it away. Maybe body like a rag, because don't carry tension in it. There's no tension in a rag. Body like a rag, because it's in service of what needs to be done, what needs to be cleaned up. Mind like a mirror. Everything appears in front of us without any intentionality on our part, but when we're busy trying to fix what we don't like, we miss that, and that's okay, that's how we are, that's what we're working with. But to see this other way, just to open up,
it's a blessing. So it's amazing. I always feel how fortunate we are to have found a path that works. Don't try to make it into something it's not Don't be in a hurry. This isn't about getting stars you collecting atta boys. So we all know one, aw shit wipes out 100 atta boys. Just being who we are, being okay with that. I
so simple, takes so long to get to never get there all the way. Just keep going. Keep going in that direction.
Okay, let's stop now and recite the four vows. Applause.
