So usually when I give a Friday afternoon Zazen refresher, I ask for questions. But this time I was requested to do a full Zazen instruction with all the details. So that's what I will do. And what I have just done, is show us how we approach our seat by bowing. And you don't have to fall over when you sit down like I did. That's not part of the instruction. So first of all, I'm going to start out with showing you the various ways of crossing our legs.

[01:01]

I know that many, many of you have been through this before many times, but we tend to forget little things and major things. So that's why I'm going to talk about everything as if you didn't know anything. So the way I'm sitting now is what I call the campfire. approach or the cowboy approach. You're sitting around the campfire and you're crossing your ankles and your knees are up. This is a very common entryway to cross your legs. And then some people can right away cross and do what we call a quarter lotus. That's where you put your left foot on your calf. But there's an intermediate step, which is called the Burmese position, where you don't actually cross your legs, but you keep one leg tied up against your body.

[02:22]

your left leg in front of your right leg. And that's a very comfortable position for most people and it's a good entry way to begin sitting. And then the third way is to put your left foot on top of your thigh. And it's good if you can put it all the way up as far as you can because it takes the pressure off your knee. It takes the pressure off your knee when you put your foot all the way up. And if you only do it halfway, then it puts pressure on your knee. And then there's, that's the half lotus. And the full lotus is where You put your right foot on your left thigh, as far up as you can.

[03:26]

And then put your left foot on your right thigh, as far as you can. I do not recommend this. Sometimes people start to do this before they're ready. When you begin, it can be a little painful. But once you get used to it, it's very comfortable. So what I recommend is that you start out with the easiest posture, the way that you can sit for the longest period of time without having too much trouble. So little by little, when you're, Your leg will tell you how far to go. When your legs tell you, gee, I want to go up a little further, then that's the time to do that.

[04:28]

So wait for the signal from your legs. So you're cooperating with your body, and your body tells you what it wants you to do. So listen to your body. and don't try to do something too quickly or think that you have to sit in this full lotus. Any position that you sit in that's comfortable is good. The main thing is that you take a position that is the easiest position for you when you're sitting. And then if you need to sit in a more extreme position, that's fine. So once we have our legs in the position that's appropriate for us, hold our back as straight as we can.

[05:39]

The way I teach holding your back straight is to put your hands on your knees like this, and to lean over, arching your back so that your head is not down, your head is up, all the way up. And that helps to give you a curve, give you your natural curvature of the back. Yes, like this. And then just sit up. And keep your head rotated down so that the back of your head and the shoulders and your behind are all in a straight line. And you're not looking up like this. I'll give you that. Keep your head Not like this, but like this. And you can take a few deep breaths.

[06:47]

Like that. I'm exaggerating, but. And this sits, it primes your breath. It primes your breath so that it allows your breath to go down to your lower abdomen. So when you inhale, your lower abdomen expands. And when you exhale, it contracts. Sometimes I will teach to, in order to prime your breathing, to take a really deep breath through your mouth for three times. And then exhale and feel your front, your abdomen and your backbone coming together. And then just apply your normal breathing through your nose.

[08:09]

But deeply, I say lower abdomen. Lower abdomen is really, of course, the bottom of your lungs, but it feels like your lower abdomen. So you exhale all the way to the bottom of where your breath can't go any further, and then you inhale. to just resume normal breathing. We don't try to control our breath, but we simply follow it. If the rhythm of your breathing, of your breath is quick, then just let it be quick. If it's slow, just let it be slow, and just follow the rhythm, and it will settle, your breath will settle itself into the proper mode by itself. So we do not exercise breath control.

[09:14]

We simply follow our breath as it is. You can count if you like, from one to 10, in order to establish your attention on your breathing. Inhale, and when you exhale, you count one. We only count on the exhale. and then inhale, and count two. And it's not like counting sheep. It's, you become the breath. Your whole body, mind is the breath. So, one, inhale, and exhale. And then exhale, two, three, like that.

[10:18]

If you get to 10, you're lucky. Because your mind is always wandering in some direction. So you realize how much your mind is wandering when you count. And when you get to three or four, and you forget what you're doing, You just come back, reminding yourself. This is called the practice of recollection. Always reminding yourself, oh yes, come back. Oh yeah, come back. And you don't have to say goodbye to what you're thinking. You just let go of it and come back to posture and breathing. When you have established a posture, you can put your hands upside down on top of your knees and then lean over to the right as far as you can go. Slowly. And then lean over to the left as far as you can go.

[11:24]

This stretches out your body and allows you more freedom and flexibility One of the main factors of Zazen is flexibility. Although we're sitting in an extreme position with our legs all tied up and our body in a seemingly rigid position, which it's not, we actually should, when we sit, find the various places where we're holding tenseness and enter that place and dispersing the tenseness. I'm not using the word tension. Tension holds everything together.

[12:24]

Tenseness is what's extra. And so we find the correct tension that holds our body together with ease. And I call it the tenseness, which is caused by various mental problems. Like, oh my God, how did I do this? So once we have, you can do this as many times as you want, and depending on how good it feels, it really feels good to do this. This is a way also of letting go of tenseness. Because we think of zazen as some kind of, often we do, not everybody, not always, but we think often that we're sitting in a very tense way.

[13:30]

Sometimes when I go walk around and adjust people's posture, it's just as stiff as a board or like a statue. Flexibility is the name of the game in Sanzen. To be totally flexible, that's what you should aim at. At the same time, holding the posture in a straightforward way. So then, once we have established our posture and our breathing, we put our hands in the mudra. It's called cosmic mudra. We're holding the whole universe in the palm of our hand. Sometimes it said, hold the mudra in your left palm,

[14:35]

hold the universe in your left palm. So I don't want to go into that, but it's great. We're universal beings. We're bits and pieces of the universe. So we should appreciate that. And when you hold your hands like this, in this Buddha, Cosmic Buddha, the thumbs are barely touching each other. This is a kind of barometer of how you're doing. If you're holding your thumbs like this and pressing them together, you know that there's a lot of tenseness in your body. You know that there's a lot of laxness in your body. So the balance between effort and ease is what we're always aiming at in Zazen.

[15:39]

Effort keeps the posture upright and it exerts, keeping the posture upright without being tense. but finding the right tension so that you remain comfortable and flexible. At the same time, it's like the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, it's all held together. All the, I don't know how many, 350 bones and tension, tendons and all that. So all those parts of the body are following the leader. And the leader is sitting up straight and letting go at the same time. So letting go is the ease that allows the posture to be sustained for long periods of time.

[16:49]

It's called comfortable. This is what makes posture comfortable to sit with good effort and good ease at the same time. So these are two sides. And this is what makes our posture, our zazen, universal. Because the effort is one side, and the ease is the other side. The ease is, the effort is human, and the ease is Buddha. So our human nature and our Buddha nature, working together in total harmony.

[17:50]

So you can feel, to eat the thumbs, barely touching. If you can concentrate on that, that's really good. You don't have to count. Counting is for, you might say beginners, but not necessarily. When I find myself in a difficult position, in order to return to the ease, I just automatically find my counting, because I've done that, I've learned how to do that. So sometimes people say, well, do I have to keep counting? What do numbers have to do with meditation? But yes, you don't have to keep counting. But if you learn how to count, it's a valuable tool.

[18:58]

Sister Dickey used to say, it's like a handle on a cup. You don't need a handle in order to drink out of the cup, but it can be a help. So we're sitting with the right, correct posture. Our feet are in a place where we can actually feel comfortable for ourselves. And our breath, we're settled in our breath. And then there's the thinking mind. Mind, shita, is mind. It's a kind of generic term for mind. Sometimes it has a specific meaning.

[20:04]

But when we talk about mind, mind means concentration. There are many levels of concentration in our mind. Our mind starts to wander because our mind is always working, constantly. If you read the books, The books are rather simple sometimes, the explanations in the translations, but mind is always looking for something.

[21:23]

A mind is always looking for food of one kind or another. It's always seeking something. And it's very hard to control our mind. So sometimes the books will say, you should stop your thinking, cut off thinking. But actually, you can't really cut off thinking, not for very long. You know, you can do it for a little bit, but it always sneaks up on you in the back. So we think we're stopping our mind here, but it's coming up here. And before we know it, we're thinking. This is the nature of our thought. We're always thinking. We're not thinking. Mind is thinking. Thinking is thinking. It does it all by itself. We don't necessarily call it forth. But the thinking mind always needs sustenance, so we let it have sustenance.

[22:30]

We don't try to stop the thinking, the working of our mind. We allow the working of our mind to enter. We notice, we are aware of the thought, and then we let go of the thought. The problem is we don't let go of the thought. So this is a very important part of Zazen. to not try to stop the thoughts, but to simply let them have their thinking and pass on. And our job, so to speak, is to not be led astray by them. And so when we realize that our mind is thinking something, we come back and think the thought of Zazen.

[23:37]

We do have positive thinking, and that positive thinking is to think the thought of Zazen. And when other thoughts are, when our mind carries us off to other thoughts, to come back to the thought of Zazen, So we're continually returning to what we're doing. And that's our training. It's always to keep coming back to the thought of Zazen. So think the thought of Zazen. That's my motto. Think the thought of Zazen. It's not, don't think. We have to direct the thought somewhere. Think the thought of Zazen. And then Zazen thinks its own thoughts. So sometimes we just let our thoughts, let them think. And we could sometimes follow them, they're very interesting. So the discipline, although they're very interesting, the discipline is not to be captivated by or seduced by our thinking mind.

[24:45]

The whole world around us is making, you can say, is making an effort to seduce us. So, we are, our effort is to not get caught. That's what our old teacher said. Just don't get caught by anything. But we like to get caught. This is one of our problems. We like to get caught. It's called desire. There's nothing wrong with desire. Desire is important and necessary. But this seduction of the world around us, especially in the age of advertisement, everything is advertising itself. Me, me, me. And our mind gets caught by that. If you like it, great.

[25:53]

Do that. Let yourself get seduced. That's fine. It's not really fine, but I can't help that. So our discipline is to keep returning to the thought of Zazen. When we're thinking the thought of Zazen, we're doing Zazen. When we think the thought of something else, we're doing that. So it's easy. The hardest thing is to stay focused on zazen, because as we sometimes say, it's not interesting. But when you get bored, I think boredom means disconnection. I might get bored, think that, oh, doing, washing the dishes is boring.

[26:55]

But once I engage in it, it's not boring, it's interesting. It's like, it captures my interest. So, when you feel bored, just come back to, it's because you're not thinking the thought of something. There's a gap. So don't leave any gap in your mind. That's why coming back or letting go of your subjective mind to your practice mind is so important. So sitting up straight, in order to have a successful, I say successful, but in order to have the most satisfying Sazen experience is to hold your back straight for 40 minutes.

[28:16]

That is the key. You slump, and you dive, and you lose your posture, and you lose the strength of your body. So to keep your back straight, that's where you come back to, and then all the rest of it is more easily accessible. to keep your back straight and keep your head on top of your spine. And when we say look down a little bit, look at the floor or something, it doesn't mean that you lean your head forward. It's simply you rotate your head, but you keep it in place. And then you can go by little, and scanning, is my mudra correct?

[29:21]

Because everything is changing. You may feel, ah, this is perfect posture, but then it's always changing. And so when we do a scan, and scan all these parts where I want them to be. And the more you can do that, the easier it is to hold your posture. And you think, oh my God, really? To hold my posture up for 40 minutes like this? Yeah, you can do that. Most of us can. If you can't do this, you do, this is like, this instruction is for someone who is physically fit to be able to do that. But not everybody is. So you have to find your own way given uh, the instruction. You may not be able to sit like that, and so you find a way that you can do that.

[30:23]

So, um, it's like compensation. Compensation is really important. Uh, you know, if your knees are, uh, uh, sore and all this and that, um, you can sit in a chair. It's fine to sit in a chair. If you can sit in a chair without leaning on the back, that's the best. If you can't, then lean on the back. There are instructions about sitting in a chair, but you have to accommodate yourself according to your ability to do that. If you're sitting in a wheelchair, you have to find how you can do that given the circumstances. So the effort, the success is not so much in how well you look when you're sitting, but in your effort to find the right posture given the circumstances.

[31:37]

Some people have to lay down. That's good as long as their effort is They have sincere effort in finding the right way to do that. So, you know, realization, a good percentage of realization is in your effort, not so much in what it looks like. I can sit, you know, and model the perfect position for Zazen. But that doesn't mean that my Zazen is good. Simply means that I've, you know, allowed my efforts, given me the ability to do this. But sometimes the person who is has the most difficult time sitting, but perseveres, is the model for all of us.

[32:43]

So we may look around the Zendo and see people who are sitting really well, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have the best thoughts, or the most successful thoughts. It's pretty good, but the effort of the one who has the hardest time So I encourage everybody to not worry about what your self-interest looks like, but how you really make your effort to do what you can. The enlightenment is in the effort. So, what I suggest to everybody is when you sit down, from beginning to end, that you give yourself self-instruction.

[33:49]

You know what you need to do to sit well. And so you give yourself instruction every time. This is how I bow. And this is how I get up on the tong. This is how I cross my legs. And so you're focusing in on what you're doing. And if you can do that, and do it every single time you sit, then you can give that as an instruction to somebody else. Because it comes from you, and not just from your head. It comes from your whole body-mind, which is in harmony. So body, breath, and mind.

[34:52]

Those are the three elements that we're always working with, basic elements, and so I think body, breath, and mind, and bringing them into one harmonious piece. Would you like to take a few questions? Yes. Actually, if people can, do you want to explain the process, Karen? Yes. Do this for about 10 minutes. We have a short period for questions. Please put your questions in the chat box. Due to our setup today, we cannot all hear each other. You'll see at the bottom of your screen, there's an option for chat.

[36:04]

And if you click on that, put your question in and Hozon will present the question to Sojin to answer. Do we use Sojin Roshi or do we use Berkeley Zen Center? Either way. Either one. Okay. I hope that the chat is set up so that people can actually chat, though. We could just hear Micah. There are a few questions, Hosan, now. Okay. Go ahead. You read them, then. Okay. The first question is, can you explain the tripod of sitting, the height of the cushion, for example?

[37:09]

Yeah, that's a good question. When we sit in the traditional way on the cushion, we should sit about a little Somewhere around halfway on the cushion, maybe a little further back, but not too much, maybe two-thirds of the cushion. We should have the cushion high enough so that it helps us to hold our back straight. Some people sit high and some people sit lower, but you can find that out by doing. The two knees being down, that's why eventually, if you're sitting cowboy style, to actually get your two knees to go down and the tailbone of your spine, those three points make a triangle.

[38:13]

But it's really helpful to be able to not sit on your tailbone but to sit on the back of your thighs, your two knees and the back of your thighs, which take the weight. Tailbone is not so good for taking the weight. So there's a little subtle difference there. So if you sit a little higher, then it helps your, it helps, your back of your thighs to give support to your body. Does that make sense? So the triangle is the most stable position when you're sitting. And that's why we use it. You know, when people are sitting and their elbows, your elbows a little bit out from your body, sometimes this is explained as

[39:20]

two raw eggs, one under your left, one under your right armpit. So it keeps you from holding your armpits too close to your body. So if somebody comes along and pushes your elbow, just your elbow moves. If you're sitting too tightly, too rigidly, then your whole body goes over. So this triangle I see as like the roots of a tree. We're all trees in this sense. And this triangle between your knees and your, I would call it your behind, give you a stability like roots in the ground. And then the rest of the body is very flexible.

[40:23]

Like, you know, like, can you see this? There's no, there's no, nothing to stop you. It's just all flexibility. It's all flexibility. It's not rigid. It's not, you're not a statue. So that's what we should be working toward, is finding the ease within the effort. It's the secret of work, it's the secret of how we negotiate our way and stay comfortable in our body. I have a question that came in from a young gentleman in Japan who asks, is there a difference between how we respond to thoughts and how we respond to visual or auditory phenomena during zazen? Well, we simply let everything come and we simply let everything go.

[41:25]

We don't, we respond, but we don't react. Responding means that we recognize what's in front of us. And we recognize our feelings. We recognize our thoughts. We recognize, you know, we don't ignore them, but we don't react to them. Responding, there's a difference between response and reaction. Response means that we recognize. Reaction means that we are affected by it. So we're not particularly affected by our emotions and thoughts and feelings, but we acknowledge them. But we don't get mixed up with them. Yes, there are a couple more.

[42:26]

There's another question about whether the arm or the hand rests on the thigh. When we place our hands in the mudra, does the arm touch the thigh? Well, you know, that's a tricky little problem because Like my heels are pretty close to each other, and it's kind of easy. I don't lean on my hand, but my hand can be touching my, touching my thumb, my heels. But if I'm only sitting with one leg up, then it's a different situation. It's a little more awkward because But you get used to these things, you know, and you find where the balance is. You know, this upper body is like a circle. People sometimes say, well, I find it hard because my arms get tired.

[43:34]

But actually, if you see it as a circle, a circle has no, The pressure is the same all the way around, right? The pressure of a circle doesn't vary. So when you hold, when you think of this upper body, the arms and the shoulders and the hands as a circle, then you equalize the pressure. And so it becomes, it's not a problem. Because only when there's an inequality of pressure is there a problem. So, Jun, what about if you get pins and needles in your foot or ankle or calf that it falls asleep? Oh, yeah, yeah.

[44:36]

Or you become numb. Is there something, how do you relate to that? This is one of the characteristics of Zazen is, and especially when you begin, because the blood vessels in your legs, when you use legs, is not used to this. And so the blood is cut off, and it's not entirely cut off, but it's slowed down, and it causes numbness or tingling in your legs. So, it's, It's an unsolvable problem.

[45:40]

It's one of the characteristics of keeping your legs like this, right? But the more you sit, the easier that becomes. Sometimes, that nerve... The vagus? No. The nerve... Sciatic nerve gets pinched and then that can cause some kind of problem. But my understanding or my experience, let's say, of this problem is for me, I don't recommend this to everybody, but for me, I just sit through everything. I've done that for over 50 years. And I don't have that anymore. So we have to be open to allowing that to happen and not get worried about it.

[46:53]

Although it can be a problem. It's an occupational hazard. But I don't worry about that anymore. I remember having it for years, you know, but I just keep sitting. And then it goes away. It doesn't happen anymore. And then it happens again. And then it doesn't happen anymore. And then it happens again. It's, you know, it's not permanent even though we think it's permanent. It's not. It comes and goes. That's why, here's what you can do. This. When you find that that's happening, just do this. And that will help the blood to flow through your legs. So I do recommend that. We say, when you sit, sit still.

[47:55]

But this is included in sitting still. To sway back and forth. And then you can feel, that tingling. And this is especially good at the end of Zazen. I always recommend this at the end of Zazen because this will start the blood flow again. So it feels really good to

[48:30]

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