Well, those of you who are new here, I don't know, we've been having a kind of conversation once a week, but you're welcome to join it. And I think last time, wasn't it, recently I spoke about finding your seat. And the sense of not only finding your seat, first of all, and best of all, in Zazen. But... the sense of finding your seat in any situation, every situation. These are simple things you can do as part of meditation practice.

[01:04]

Although really the sense of Finding your seat as a place of mind and body. Free of distractions. where you really feel things just as they are, where you're really looking into your own experience to find a sense of order.

[02:11]

So today I thought I'd speak about articulating your posture. Yeah, we, you know, if you practice here, we're somewhere between a, you know, we're not quite a monastery. Zen, a place concentrated only on Zen practice. We're not exactly a place concentrated only on Zen practice.

[03:16]

This isn't isolated from the world. And so to what extent we should practice bowing to each other and so forth, I don't really know. But I wanted to try to speak about it as an expression or a way of articulating our posture. Now I also want to introduce you to the rather different world that practice assumes. So, I mean, when I say articulating your posture, I'm not saying articulating... I'm saying posture, not body.

[04:36]

Because, you know, you... You don't have a body. Perhaps we can say you are a body. And as you know, we can't separate body and mind. We can experience them differently. Wir können sie unterschiedlich erfahren. But there's no mind without a body. Aber es gibt kein Geist ohne Körper. Yeah. So I'm saying articulating your posture.

[05:40]

Also deshalb möchte ich sagen, deine Haltung artikulieren. Because it would be more accurate to say, I mean sometimes I say body, but right now, I'd say it's more accurate to say posture than body. And we speak about, traditionally in Buddhism, the four postures. Walking, standing, sitting and reclining. Why is so much made of such a simple thing as four postures? Because the understanding is that each posture is actually a different body or a different mind. The posture of, I mean, the mind of sleeping and dreaming is primarily a posture of reclining.

[06:56]

It's very difficult, as I say, unless you're driving a car, to sleep vertically. So sleeping and dreaming go with reclining posture. And the mind of Zazen doesn't go with walking. Maybe not entirely true, but mostly that's true. So we're articulating a posture. And then, once you accept that, what is a posture?

[08:19]

A posture is an articulation. Now, one of the entries into Zazen practice, into meditation practice, is to articulate your postures. To find, you know, to bring a clarity, preciseness, openness to the feel of the body. and a weakness. And you'll find that we teach a certain posture when we learn to practice those things. And I or someone might straighten your back a little bit and so forth.

[09:29]

But as you begin to discover your own postures, Without any instruction. And your posture would feel the most clear and open. You'd find yourself, without anybody showing you the posture, you'd find yourself in a kind of classic sitting posture. Yeah, and as you begin to articulate your posture, And discover an openness and transparency even in all parts of the body.

[10:53]

You'll find you come to certain parts of the body which are just like blocks or awareness can't reach into them. You can't feel much differentiation in certain areas of the body. And those undifferentiated areas are a kind of block or darkness in the body. But through practice and intention you can begin to open up those blocks or undifferentiated areas.

[12:04]

One way to do this is to feel or practice with the specific postures that go along with zazen practice. One way to do this is to feel or practice with the specific postures that go along with zazen practice. One way to do this is to feel or practice with the specific postures that go along with zazen practice. Okay. Now there's a koan that's Officer Lu Xuan. He quoted somebody named Tseng Chau. said that all that heaven and I, heaven and earth and I share the same root.

[13:35]

And myriad things and I share the same body. Same body. Same posture, maybe. Okay. And Nan Chuan, you know, he was about seven, I think he was six, six eighty-five or something like that, anyway, to the seventh and eighth century. Also, this Nan Chuan, To 748, I believe. Anyway, pretty long time ago.

[14:47]

And he said, looking at a peony, What's that? A flower. People these days see this flower as in a dream. Now I'm not going to go too much into this koan. But like the Buddha did, thousand and more years earlier, pointed out, pointed out, pointed to a flower. We can ask, of course, what was he pointing out to you and I and to Officer Lu Xuan?

[15:49]

But at least we can look more carefully at what did he mean? The world and heaven and earth and I share the same root. At least we can look more closely and ask ourselves what he understands by saying that heaven, earth and I share the same roots. This Sang-jiao was an important influence on Zen and in our particular lineage. And this story catches the feeling of it. Heaven and Earth and I share the same root. Myriad things and I share the same body.

[17:09]

Now, when you actually practice this articulating the body, you find you're actually articulating your world as well. Now, I can't explain this exactly, but there's a feeling that what you look at, what you feel, this room begins to have some... It doesn't feel, how can I say it?

[18:12]

It feels like part of your posture. Yeah, now when we do, sometimes we talk about in Zazen doing heel breathing. And we breathe up through our whole body. And you know when we do kin hin, walking meditation, for those of you who are newer to our practice, you know we walk quite slowly. And when you walk, we lift our heel, we breathe in. And as you breathe in, you feel like you're breathing up through your heels.

[19:16]

And you feel this breath energy coming up your back and through your head. And you feel something like the earth coming up through you. The more this is clear, your body doesn't feel separate from you. And if you step forward, you exhale. And breathe down into the earth. And then the next step, of course, you breathe up again. That's not just this movement too, but it almost feels like you are actually rooted up again. And when you're sitting and you bring a greater articulation to your posture,

[20:42]

As an entry into meditation practice. Like you might bring attention to your breath. Now I'm speaking, really you bring articulation to the body itself. That's what I'm emphasizing. To a body as a posture. your body not separate from your awareness. And the more clear this articulation is, eventually your body, there's no dark areas in your body. And the closer you get to that feeling, it feels like your body disappears.

[22:26]

And everyone who does Zazen meditation has this experience to some extent. One of the most common is you don't know where your thumbs are. But you don't know where your chin is. It's all in a kind of big space. This is something like myriad things and I share the same body. Yeah, Sandokai was written, we chant sometimes, by Shido after reading a line of Seng Chao. I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly, but maybe slightly better than you are.

[23:42]

That's for sure. And when the articulation of your posture is clear, this sense of space has a real tactile quality. And the world returns to you as poetry. The sounds, the breeze, whatever. There's a kind of poetry in your experience. Now I've also been, you know, since I've been here quite a bit recently, I have a habit of bowing to you when I see you in the hall and think,

[25:18]

I want to talk about that. Quality, perhaps ideal quality, but the quality of that practice. Because the doing of it is not just a politeness, it's at the center of our practice. You see someone and you stop outside your doing. As much as possible outside your doing. So that the one who bows is the one who's not busy.

[26:30]

It's kind of outside of time. It's where myriad things and I have the same body. You know, you can, sorry to bring up these silly things, but if you put your hands together, you can sometimes feel a kind of spongy quality of space. It takes a moment to feel it. If you get the feeling of it, it's actually kind of spongy. This kind of thing is part of the martial arts and so forth.

[27:46]

It's part of this understanding of the body. This spongy is part of the body. Again, it takes a moment for it to appear. It requires a certain mind that's not thinking about anything. And then we stop in the hall and bow to someone. We stop in a way that actually you sometimes feel this quality between you and the person you're bowing to.

[28:52]

It doesn't have to be pointed out. And the people who feel it usually don't talk so much. Because it's such a much more tangible sense of connectedness than any talking. Perhaps you've seen how you can take your fingers and make one finger just swing loosely. But you can't do it with the middle finger. Because the middle finger is stuck in the mind. You can take usually this fourth finger. It just swings loose.

[30:04]

Sophia can do it with much of her body. But anyway, that kind of looseness is also part of the bow. Like the consciousness, but not awareness. Consciousness is drained out of the body. So this is really an important part of our practice with someone else, this stopping and bowing. And sometimes it gets a little crazy. I meet you going this way and I bow. We've both forgotten something. We turn around and go and we pass each other 30 seconds later and we bow. Then you change your mind and you bow again.

[31:13]

Then you're bowing at the garbage and while you're washing the dishes. You have to be somewhat realistic about it. But still the sense is, are we in a hurry? If in three minutes I get to bow to you four times, this is wonderful. If you're counting, that was four times in three minutes, then you're busy, you have a busy mind. And each time is a kind of vacation or a little relaxation. Yeah. And like you breathe as you... step forward in the kin hin walking meditation.

[32:32]

The bow is, you know, you put your hands here. Then you bring it up through your chakras. And then you bring it up in our lineage, at least up to the tip of your nose. And then you bow. And so it's a kind of inhaling of the chakras themselves and your breath and an exhaling. We're having a chance to find the mind of each posture. And the more you find the mind of each posture, find that the myriad things are self.

[33:42]

The more you find the posture of each mind, the sage is free of self but finds everything as self. Ist der Weise frei vom Selbst, erkennt aber alles als Selbst. It's this statement of Zeng Jiao's, something like close to that, on which Shida was enlightened. Also das ist eine Aussage, sehr ähnlich der von Zeng Jiao, Now I thought I'd bring the statue down to talk about what I'm talking about a little bit. Here you can see that the statue articulates the chakras here and here and here and so forth.

[34:48]

And I think this is a kind of shamanic, androgynous figure. What's androgynous? Male and female. Shamans are supposed to be androgynous. And it's somehow both Avalokiteshvara and also Maitreya Buddha. Maitreya Buddha is the Buddha of the future and Maitreya means the loving one or something like that, the all-encompassing love. Maitreya is the buddha of the future, but it also means the loving one or the one who connects everything to love.

[36:00]

And we can understand Maitreya, traditionally they say that Maitreya is kind of put down and so forth because he, she is ready to enter the world. When we understand Maitreya as the possibility of each of us as Buddha, we can feel the posture as she's about to lift her legs up and cross them. Now, one of the powers, I think, of this funny Chinese figure We've taken a piece of metal, iron, you know, shaped it into this.

[37:15]

It's amazing. You'll notice that this hand, well, first of all, there's a wonderful feeling between the chin and this ribbon, bow. I think the power of this figure is right there. And when you look at it, it tends to pull your feeling, seeing into this area. And that same feeling in yourself is pulled into this area. And then when you look at the statue a little more, it's released up into this figure in the head.

[38:27]

And into the feet and the hands. Now this right hand is right here at this chakra. So there's a power to this hand. And this hand we could say is reaching out into the world. But it's clearly both hands are related. There's a tremendous power in this hand which isn't lost in this hand. It's still in the realm of this area. So this is actually something like the way in our lineage we bow.

[39:35]

In a way we gather the aliveness, the power of being alive. The acceptance of just being alive. And often joy of being alive. We bring that into our hands and bring it up. And at this point, we lift it into a kind of shared common space. So this is more intimate. And this is more kind of Maitreya Buddha. This posture here, lifted out of this chakra up to here, is like this hand.

[40:43]

And then we take that space we've made with another person and we bow into it. So in any case, in each lineage you try to articulate the shared space together. Now this statue is in this realm of heaven and earth and I share the same root.

[41:50]

This is sort of heaven and this is sort of earth. Somehow this square clunky box gets transformed into this. And this body, this posture articulated through the being free of hindrance and the chakras, and And we can almost share this body with her.

[42:53]

Yeah. So when we go back to the koan a little bit when heaven and earth and I share the same root and myriad things and I share the same body Nanchon is saying something like, a thousand years ago, the Buddha pointed this out.

[44:04]

Holding up a flower. And people these days see this flower as if it were a dream. So that's one side of what he's saying to Lu Xuan. But this fellow, this government officer, practiced with him for many years. He's also saying, we can each hold up this flower, as the Buddha did, in our own When there's some feeling like the posture is our own, the flower is our own posture,

[45:11]

And that's not, you know, just kind of a nice idea or poetry. Does anyone want to bring something up? Why don't we have a break and come back in five or ten or fifteen minutes? We'll see if there's anything we'd like to speak about. Okay. It's nice when someone sees it, guys.

[47:14]

It's a nice figure, isn't it? She has a lotus drawn right here. So it's right there. Okay, then you want to speak about something. I've got a question. One does notice in one's mind and body many stains, impurities and so on. And I think just before Roshi said that this figure has a body somewhat free from stains.

[48:50]

And if one speaks about a practice like this practice, walking practice or something similar, So then I really ask myself, could that ever be of any help? How can I ever with my own will overcome this? But on the other hand, I also think, how could this impede it? How could what impede what? These things you want to overcome. I see, yeah. I think. What can one do? Yeah. Yeah. Well, in this statue, for example, the feeling is not of someone thinking.

[50:39]

The feeling is of this person alive through their chakras. That's the iconographical statement of the statue. And Kin Hin gives you a chance to experience that yourself. And each time you have some experience of that, We say, I mean, it's kind of corny expressions, one minute of zazen is one minute of Buddha. Yeah, it's kind of, you know. kind of advertising slogan, like, does, does everything.

[51:47]

Das ist so eine Art Werbespruch, wie, ich weiß nicht. Does was a soap. Do you remember does, does everything? It was a soap, D-U-Z. Before tide, tides in, dirts out. Also so wie tut, tut alles. Also das ist ein Waschmittel, was alles sauber macht. Oder ein anderes Waschmittel heißt wie flut... But still, one minute of Buddha, one minute of Zazen is one minute of Buddha, is a different way of looking at what we are than thinking of identity as over a long period of time. So into the dharma moments of your own sequence of dharma moments that you are, or the sequence of karma moments and dharma moments, if in your practice you have, even for the time of Kenyan, some kind of feeling of stepping out of your karma,

[53:14]

This influences the whole of what you are. And if we have a practice where we become more and more familiar with these dharma moments like when we bow to each other like you're just there for a moment with another person there's nothing else The more we have a life with moments like that, they become familiar to our body and mind.

[54:18]

And they begin to nourish our, we could say, Buddha body. I mean, I don't know, it's kind of like big words, but it is something like that. Yeah. Yes. So it seems to me that this might just push or thinking aside it's like as soon as you don't do this practice it just thinking pops back um

[55:29]

If I understood you right, these stains or the impurity just come through thinking. I mean, is it really overcome then? Or is it just a different experience but the same? Yeah. It's not that they arise only through thinking. But they do arise through your experience. And what kind of shape you've given your experience. I would say something like traditionally that they arise through habit energy.

[56:53]

The thoughts or what arises through that, the impurities? Well, I don't like the word impurities too much, but... The things that lock us into certain attitudes and feelings in our body and so forth. Probably too simple to say they're just thinking. It is kind of habit energy of our mind and body from our whole life. But it's possible to step out of that. And it's actually not so hard.

[57:54]

First of all, you have to want to do it. Usually we like our habits better than we think. And a habit is, actually the word habit goes back to, the root is to receive and to give. So its root is a kind of dharma, receiving and giving. But it becomes to mean to have, to possess something. So again, let me, Suzuki Roshi, saying that, moved his glasses.

[59:12]

He said, these glasses belong to you. But you know about my tired old eyes, so you let me use your glasses. That's the feeling of giving and receiving. And of course it's a fact that glasses are the creation of our culture, our society, I think in the 14th century in Italy. But the sense of giving and receiving becomes possessing. Then it comes to mean your clothes. like a nun's habit in English.

[60:35]

So then it comes to mean what you... the unconscious activity of your life. Things that are just your habit. And practice is to make your habits conscious or aware. So we make our clothes our conscious habit. We make our postures our more conscious or aware habits. And if we keep bringing awareness into our habits like that, And habits which you are aware don't have the same power over you.

[61:50]

And you begin to cut off their nourishment. Because what thinking does and repetitive acts is they nourish our habits. So your habits don't change very rapidly, but you begin to stop feeding them. And So from what you said in the beginning of the second time you spoke, there's different spaces of mind. Yeah, and somebody thought I was a little bit going a little too far when I talked about the spaces in which we dream on our left side or right side, so...

[63:24]

And I was saying just experiment with the different feeling of space in which you dream and think lying flat on your back or on the left or right. I was just trying to give you some kind of, without talking about meditation, some accessible way to sense this invisible or subtle body. This koan has a comment, the entry is subtle, no, the emergence is subtle, the entry is non-attachment. The emergence is subtle, the entry is non-attachment. And the attachment is?

[64:48]

And the entry is? Non-attachment. And that's what this is, her entry is non-attachment. So when we're practicing, and you begin to flip out of thinking mind in zazen, and you begin to feel the space around thoughts, it's not only that the space is around between thoughts, penetrating thoughts, The space begins to replace the contents of mind, replace thoughts. And eventually you have a mental body space, mind-body space, that thinking doesn't stick to it. And when you have that in zazen, you can't think, you don't think.

[66:15]

And as soon as you move toward thinking your observations, you lose that space. But that space is free of your karma. And it's right here, it's not somewhere else. And so some taste of that, or any practice that moves you in the direction of that, Like I drew in the flip chart last week, the direction begins to change the flow of your life. So it's the movement toward this freedom which frees you, not freedom itself.

[67:18]

It's the movement towards this freedom which frees you. Okay. Sorry for such a long response. Do you have a third? Somebody else before he gets on his third chapter? If he gives me the topic, I write the chapter. Well, actually, just Boris and I can meet every Sunday. Boris and I could actually wear this every Sunday. When you talk about to settle in this seat that you are aware of different blocks in the body, yeah, there's no energy flowing, doesn't that open it, the practice, to the therapy?

[68:48]

Because that's also exactly what therapists are working with blocks in the body, and to work with that block and to see what causes it. What kind of memories are there? And also, because I know you don't like deciding very much of mixing Buddhism and therapy. Well, it's not Yes, in German, please. He spoke at the beginning that you put yourself in this posture, in this posture, that you are also aware of various blockages in the body, and that is exactly what is worked with a lot in body therapy, no matter what kind of body therapy you do. Well, I actually think that therapy and practice for the practitioner work together very well.

[70:06]

But I don't think it works very well for the teacher to be a therapist as well as the Zen teacher. So even if I could be a good therapist, I should suggest somebody who should see a therapist to see a therapist who's not me. Because it's a different kind of relationship. But for the practitioner, You want to do anything that helps. And so you can, I mean, I think that for some people, psychotherapy is really helpful for Zen practice and for them personally.

[71:18]

And sometimes you can do physical things, massage, a cold shower, kinomichi perhaps, I don't know what, to free these some kind of blocks in a physical way. I don't know much about kinomichi, so I'm just throwing that out. But Zen practice and meditation practice is different from those things. To put it simply, Zen doesn't try to analyze what comes up. How did it arise in the past and so forth?

[72:27]

Although you can do that. You can use psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic approaches in your own meditation practices. There's lots of ways you can practice in a way that's psychotherapeutic. But the extent that that is done would be an influence of our contemporary culture on Buddhism. The emphasis in Buddhism is not to understand your karma but to change the mind that supports the karma. So Bodhidharma says Oh, this karma, it all came from the past and it's lives, you can't even, lives, you don't have anything to do with it.

[73:49]

Just change, just change the mind that supports the karma. The mind that supports the karma. Yeah, don't try to figure it out. But I think for us, both are reasonable things to do. And it's clear for me that some people I've practiced with a long time, if they do psychotherapy, it makes their practice go faster. And in general, I think people who've done some type of therapy in general have a more, you can feel that they've examined their life more than people who haven't done it. They have more perspective on themselves in a way that makes their practice go easier.

[75:03]

But anyway, they're different approaches. We had this discussion recently in Berlin with therapists, a few therapists now showing up and sitting with us, and just to see if I got that right, both is possible. So if someone feels clogs or whatever sensation in his body, it's possible to take these things coming up and take these things through a therapist and work with whatever the therapist is doing. And at the same time, it's also possible to get this Zen, Zazen mind as it is, or just sit and sit still. Yeah. And I know lots of therapists who find, have found,

[76:22]

that their own life improved and their therapy when they started to practice. They have more success with their clients if their clients happen to also practice. And I think the power of both is that they're different. And so I think to talk about a Buddhist psychology is strictly speaking nonsense or wrong. As a craft and as a conception, they're different. Loosely speaking, you can say it, but Buddhism is a mindology. It studies the mind. It's not studying the psyche.

[77:26]

I would like to talk about an experience I had in Münster. I have since years now, when I go to work, a part of the street where I have to walk through, I am using for practice and now I was very busy when I speak in Münster and I tried to use this part of the street when I was walking through it to calm down and so I tried to have kind of pure perception and not thinking. And I have had several times the same experience and I don't know really what to do with it. At the beginning of the street it really calms me down.

[78:49]

So I'm already in the habit of it to... put my thoughts away and then I see the green of the bushes and so and I really can feel in my body that it's calming down then I sometimes I start naming things but then this process turns around and in this just perceiving all these things in the streets, it's speeding up, I don't know how to do it, and the feeling is, what is pure perception? Because suddenly I perceive all the things in the streets, and it's very... Yeah, in my body quite kind of annoying because I feel even kind of pure perception is a picking.

[80:00]

You know, it's a kind of decision process before because I now decide to see this white car and not this over there. And so I get kind of, I don't know, mixed up with all this stuff. And now my question is, is it just a trap or still thinking? I don't know. Practice is driving you crazy? The practice makes you crazy. So, Beate says she has a street in Münster. Whenever she walks through this street, she practices in the street. And this time she was very... and then he decided to just come to rest in the street and then he said, I'm just doing pure perception. And at the beginning the thoughts disappear and suddenly all things appear at the same time.

[81:06]

And it becomes very restless somehow. And now her question was whether this is again a fall of the spirit that has arisen there. And then he said, the practice makes you crazy. It feels like you've lost your seal. You're leaking. It feels like the practice kind of opens you up to another kind of energy pushing. But I wouldn't if I did that. I wouldn't try to do it. I would just... I wouldn't be so active in the practice, but just let it happen.

[82:17]

Even the decision to use the street sets you up for the opposite almost. You have some expectation of being able to practice on the street. Expectation weakens you. Of course, I had the expectation of the bliss of pure perception. Then I was full. Yes, that probably weakens you. Particularly since so many changes are occurring in your life right now. Closing up your apartment, everything, you're very vulnerable.

[83:30]

Something else? Yeah. I think it's similar to what Beate was covering how you answered how the limit of our active choices to practice and related to your talk before about establishing posture and I sense a difference between simple physicality and posture. There's something that's not just physical about posture, the way you discuss it.

[84:35]

Can you translate? Yes. It's somewhat related to what Beate said and how you answered it. the limit of what you can practice. This also applies to your lecture the last time, about finding your way from sitting to sitting, and there is a difference between physicality and And what's the distinction for you between the physicality and the posture? It's a different mind. feel do you find one better than the other or one more artificial or one more satisfying um one more aware posture it's uh it's an increased awareness with what posture of my pos yeah with posture

[85:53]

What is your difference between physicality and attitude? Do you have a preference for one or the other? How does it feel? The Spirit makes the difference. Attitude is somehow included in being true. My question is, or my feeling is that I can establish a posture. You can. I cannot actively establish a posture. But a posture establishes itself through elimination of extras, My question is what can we actively actually do and how much control do we actually have?

[86:56]

I think if you want to explore or just get familiar with this, this that you're speaking about, And you ask yourself the kind of questions you're asking yourself. That's all part of practice. But posture is, in a yogic sense, is to bring awareness to your posture. And yoga implies bringing a clarity into your posture, in a sense a kind of improvement of your posture. And if you say upright, a person who's upright in English is a person who's honest and decent and so forth.

[88:31]

But it's a physical description of a posture, upright. An honest person is straightforward. That's a physical description. So many of our most basic words describe actually a physical posture. If you say someone's a slouch, it doesn't get anything done. A slouch is this. So, um... But you don't want to be, you know, there's a kind of line, you don't want to be kind of artificial.

[90:01]

And there's no escaping from a posture, a slouch is a posture. But if you notice you're slouching, probably you straighten up. But if you notice that you get stuck, then you straighten up again. And Charlotte Selva said, and this is something quite simple, if you notice that you bite your teeth together, then relax your jaw. And if you don't notice it, then you just grind your teeth. 102, maybe?

[91:05]

As far as I know, she's planning to come to Europe again this year to teach. I don't know, but she's getting... We saw her when she was 101, and she's getting... It's a little hard and her recent communications from her are that she may or may not be able to do certain seminars, but you know. This announcement says you can sign up, but we can't be sure she's going to be there. We can't even be sure she's going to be on the planet. So I would say that basically for going back to Anton, practice is first of all to accept whatever posture you have. And then when you have to change your posture or do something.

[92:28]

You change it with a sense of the whole of your posture. You can feel her hand is also the whole of her posture. So when you do something, feel that the whole of your posture is moving in your body, that's yoga practice. Paul? I feel, looking at the statue, a sense of graceful ease. Graceful ease. And I feel in making an effort to work with my habits as I'm becoming aware of them, it's a different kind of posture.

[93:34]

My habit is a posture. And when I now become aware of myself...

[93:41]

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