I vow to taste the truth about Tathagata's words. We are fortunate to have Darlene Cullen with us this morning. Darlene has been a Zen practitioner since 1970, mostly, I think, at Zen Center, San Francisco. And she is a licensed body worker, and has most recently written a book which will be talking about living with arthritis. And she and I were just talking before we came in. Darlene is engaged in spreading the Dharma and spreading the teaching in a very intimate and embodied way. So it is our privileged to have her this morning and hear this perspective.

[01:04]

Thank you. Thank you, Maile. Good morning. Good morning. I want to start off by apologizing for having notes. I've found that if I don't have notes to keep me on a subject, I just free associate to what I last said, and I'll end up telling you what I wore in seventh grade, that kind of thing. Very interesting in itself, but we want to stick to this today. Today I'd like to talk about Buddhism and self-healing, what we in California call self-healing.

[02:13]

I myself have had rheumatoid arthritis, which is a very painful and crippling disease for about 18 years. And I developed it in my seventh year of Zen practice while I was living at Green Gulch Farm. So that's one reason I'd like to talk about healing today. in that that's a great area of interest for me personally. And another reason that I would like to talk about healing is it seems that as we age, more and more of our friends are stricken with very serious diseases, AIDS or cancer, diabetes. And also as we age, we become more concerned about our bodies as they change. We don't have the bodies that we once had twenty years ago, thirty years ago. So I think healing is a topic of general interest to people especially people who practice, who have some sort of practice of penetration because such people tend to use their illness and their healing process as a penetration into the nature of things a penetration into the self

[03:36]

In the Blue Cliff Records, Jungmann said, medicine and sickness mutually correspond. The whole universe is our medicine. What is the self? When I was first ill and other Zen students took care of me, I actually didn't have any place to turn for healing except myself, outside of myself. When I went to the doctor, He told me there was no cure for rheumatoid arthritis, that it was just a chronic degenerative disease, that I might be in a wheelchair someday, but that there was no cure. There are lots of palliatives, drugs to ease stiffness and pain, but there's no cure. You just live with it. And when you're in this situation, people give you lots of advice. My doctor, with all of society's authority and weight behind him, advised me to take toxic drugs.

[04:42]

And my friends, my wonderful friends, suggested a variety of treatments. I was given rice bread instead of wheat bread to eat. Every week, several times, I was wrapped in comfrey-soaked sheets. I had every massage known to man or woman, I had acupuncture, and I must have taken the extract of every plant that grows in Northern California or China. But I got worse despite all this loving and generous care. My ability to move got less and less, and as my body got weaker, And my pain got greater. And I saw that I would have to stop just waiting for some miraculous divine intervention. I had to figure out what is important to pay attention to in this situation.

[05:48]

Where will my help come from? Inside? Outside? What is it that I have to pay attention to? And as it turned out, my Zen meditation training up to that point, as I say, I'd had seven years at Tassajara in Green Gulch, was a very great help. I'd been taught at Zen Center to study the objects of consciousness. Feelings, perceptions, impulses, body awareness. In fact, in long periods of sitting in sashins, I had even been able to watch my perceptions as they were being formed. And I'll read a little bit from my book about that particular thing. The practice of Zen meditation is to observe one's own bodily sensations, thoughts and perceptions, and emotional feelings as they occur.

[06:51]

When you meditate on these events, you aren't trying to change them. You simply recognize that you are standing or sitting You're intensely aware that you are thinking about what you will be doing later in the day. or that you are hearing cars passing outside, or feeling a little anxious, and so on. You notice your internal and external environment. There's no goal involved. The practice of self-healing, on the other hand, is to make these same observations and then to manipulate the sensations, thoughts, and perceptions and feelings that you are able to observe in order to improve your health. Since I had a background in Zen, it was not difficult for me to continue to make these observations in the service of my healing. So it was crucial to me to make the observations that we usually have trouble interrupting our discursive minds to make. You know how it is when you begin a practice, say, the very common practice of observing your posture.

[07:59]

This is a good, solid body awareness posture, or practice. You just observe when you change your posture. You go from sitting to standing to walking to lying, and you say, I am sitting. Now I am standing. And it's a very good way to begin to focus your mind, a very good mindfulness practice. But you know how it is. You decide to do this on a Sunday. You're gonna do this practice now. And Thursday you think, oh, I'm sitting, I'm sitting. It's very hard to interrupt your ordinary discursive mind to begin to do a practice like this. But for me, I had to notice every little sensation in my legs and my feet in order to go from sitting to standing. Changing posture was a very dramatic event for me. So I had no trouble. interrupting my mind to do that at that time.

[09:02]

And I had so little energy that I had to notice very precisely what increased it or decreased it. I lived a half block down from the San Francisco Zen Center on Page Street and I had to go uphill whenever I wanted to go to Zen Center, which I sometimes did to hear a lecture, to eat a meal with my friends. And so it was a very big hike to go a half a block uphill for me, and I would, after I would do the walking, I would be at the bottom of the steps, so I'd have to go up the steps, and then I'd have to knock on the door. So that was a kind of a triathlon event for me. And sometimes I would be so exhausted by the time I got to the bottom of the steps that I wouldn't be able to go up the steps and then knock on the door and I'd have to walk back down to my apartment. So I started thinking, well, what is it in this walking, in this one step after another, that is the problem?

[10:09]

Why am I getting so exhausted? And I noticed, when I started studying it that way, that actually there was a rest period in my walking that I wasn't taking advantage of, which is when I lifted my foot in the air. Now, from the point of view of your muscles, that's not a rest period. It takes your various muscles in your hip to raise your leg, but from the point of view of the joints, It is a rest period. Lifting the leg is a rest period for the joints. It's coming back down on the sidewalk, thud, that is the effort in the situation. But that's what we usually do if we concentrate on our walking. If we're doing Keen Heen or anything, we notice more the steps, the coming down, the meeting, the floor. That's what we call a step. But I just switched my focus to the lifting of the leg, and I found my stamina was much greater.

[11:10]

After I had that insight, I never again had to go back down to my apartment. I could get to the steps, go up the steps, and knock on the door. So just focusing on a different part of the step increased my stamina tremendously. And I was able to start walking down the Safeway, which was a couple of blocks away. So that was very interesting. And from an energy point of view, I noticed that it was very consequential who I hung out with. Before I had arthritis, I didn't pay any attention to this at all because, you know, here I was in this big community of people. If I wanted to go to a movie, I... virtually just turned to the person next to me, and you know, and I always accepted whatever social invitations were offered, but now some people just expanded me tremendously to be with them. They actually took my pain away just by talking to them, and then other people, after spending an hour or so with them, I'd have to stay in bed the next day.

[12:17]

So I said, what is the thing here and I studied it and studied it and studied it and I couldn't tell ahead of time who it was because I was constantly being distracted by what a person looked like, what they wore, how witty they were, and I couldn't seem to get the crucial thing about whether they increased or decreased my energy. So I decided to do a breath practice. I only would spend time with people who deepened my breath. And I would not spend time with people who inhibited my breathing. And that turned out to be a wonderfully reliable measure of who to hang out with. If I was with someone and I just felt my chest rise and fall, I just stayed with them until they tried to get rid of me. And, on the other hand, if someone came and I immediately felt that my breathing was constricted, I'd say, oh, I'm very sick, I have to go lie down.

[13:28]

And this turned out to be a wonderful practice. In fact, I might have continued it for the rest of my life, except that I started to get well, and it's very inconvenient at some point, because you find out you're married to people who inhibit your breathing and stuff like that. So I was not able to continue that practice indefinitely. So I had to do mindfulness practice to survive. And it was absolutely crucial for me, as you might have an idea from hearing me, to use mindfulness to break down reality from aggregates of experience those big clumps of ideas we have, into discrete motions, the tiny little units of experience. And to notice when my brain tended to clump ideas together, many disparate motions into some kind of idea which would prevent me from overcoming an obstacle to notice when I did that.

[14:38]

And you don't have to be sick to do this. We all do this all the time. For instance, a student said to me a couple of weeks ago, well, I can't practice. I never get to the zendo. That's an aggregate of experience. Instead of just going to the zendo when you can. That's discrete motions, not having this idea of practice that prevents you from actually being able to just go to the zendo. Just go to the zendo. You have to be very careful to notice when your brain is doing all that heaping and clumping. And I give arthritis workshops, and that is so common, you know, in an arthritis workshop, where people have a very strong idea of what they can and can't do. When I haul out the carrots and the cutting board and the knife, everybody says, oh, with my arthritic hands, I can't cut carrots. I haven't cut carrots for years.

[15:40]

That's aggregative experience, I can't cut carrots. Many ideas are heaped in that sentence. But if you take the knife, feel the wooden handle and that hard steel blade, and then you touch the flesh of the carrot on the wooden board, And raise your hand and lower your wrist. Raise your wrist, lower your wrist. Discrete motions, one after another, the flesh of the carrot, the steel blade, the rising and falling of your wrist. You can cut carrots. And people, tears come to people's eyes. They haven't been able to cut carrots for years. So we, our minds tend to get into the idea of something rather than actually noticing our tiny little units of experience, our actual life as it goes along.

[16:46]

And we clump, heap, and pile rather than actually live our life moment after moment. And this basically, this breaking down aggregates into discrete motions is how I learn to move again. how I learned to move again. And I think this is such a valuable approach to the whole idea of disability, which is why I wrote this book. The book I wrote is about everyday life for people who have ideas about what they can and can't do. But maybe the most important thing you learn from the study of Zen are the dimensions of self-clinging. This is also very important in the process of self-healing because you have to let go of what was before and no longer is because the functioning of your body was once something and now it's something else.

[17:53]

This is very difficult for many people, very difficult. to give up or to see a functioning, strong body, a slave body that will do anything you ask without your thanking it one little bit, to see a body like that go to a helpless, painful body. This is very difficult for people. It shakes us to our very identities, this kind of thing. I give a pain seminar at St. Mary's Hospital in the city. And I meet many people there, young people, who've had accidents that may have made their lives since intolerable. A young man for whom soccer was the social and physical center of his world. Everything in his world revolved around his playing soccer several times a week. And after his accident, the big accomplishment of his week is that he comes to the pain seminar.

[18:59]

to me, a young man. Another woman, a very successful financial consultant in the financial district of San Francisco, thriving in a man's world, loving the fact that she was a woman doing well in a man's world. After her accident, she's dependent financially on her mother again, like a child, as if her success never happened. People like this have to give up their past. They have to grieve for what once was and put it away. Close the book on the past and learn to see their present lives as demanding all the energy and creativity that they have, maybe even more so than their old lives did. All the energy and creativity that they have. But injured or not, we have to face, we all have to face this situation as we age.

[20:06]

Most of us, and I like to use the term for the normal populace as temporarily abled, most of us get to face this slowly instead of in one swift irreparable blow. But if you live long enough, you are going to face it. And Joseph Campbell, I saw him on TV. He was being interviewed by Bill Moyers. Do you all know who he is? He's a Jungian fellow. Brilliant, you know, in his analysis of myth and symbols for the human mind. Anyway, he was talking about this to Bill Moyers, and he compared us to a car as we get older. He said, oh, the headlights dim, and the engine sputters, and a fender falls off. And he was grinning as he was talking about this. And I was watching the TV. And I thought, that's easy for you to say, Joseph Campbell.

[21:08]

You're a man of ideas. You live in your head, not your body. For us sensate types, we care when the fender falls off. But no matter what identifies yourself to yourself, your ideas, your movements, your beauty, your thoughts, you have to give up. We all have to give up our bodies sooner or later. And I think the sick among us get in practice. So it's true that you can use mindfulness and meditation practice to achieve your health goals. you might get rid of your disease and heal your injury completely, but if you practice mainly to get rid of your suffering and return to a functioning body, rather than to express your life itself and your own nature, then it's a very narrow and vulnerable achievement.

[22:12]

A clay Buddha can't go through the water, A wood Buddha can't go through the fire, and a goal-oriented healing cannot penetrate deeply enough to balance your life in a proper way. You must penetrate your anguish and pain so that illness and health lose their distinction in order to allow you to just live your life. Our relief from pain and our healing have to be given up again and again to get free of the desire to get well. Otherwise, getting well is just another hindrance, another robber of the time you have to live, another idea that enslaves you like enlightenment, just something to chase after and never quite attain.

[23:17]

some ideal to measure yourself by. And you don't have to be sick to get on this wheel. You can just decide to improve your health, go on a diet, start working out, eat healthy food, the whole thing. And you too, just like a person who's struggling to recover from some catastrophic illness, can get on the cycle of elation and dejection. encouragement and discouragement. You lose some weight, then you go to a party and get on the scale the next morning and you've gained it all back in one fell swoop. And so you're discouraged. But it's not the program, it's not trying to get well, it's not trying to get healthy that's the problem. It's just being attached to the goal, to have the goal as something that you're trying to attain.

[24:18]

But fortunately, for our way-seeking mind, recurring illness, recurring failure to maintain our bodies at a certain level is like a villain stomping on your fingertips as you cling desperately to a healthy functioning body. I want to propose that healing oneself or taking proper care of your body is a lot like living your life. It's not preparing for something real. It's not a journey to some state called health. It's its own self. It has its own value. There's a spaciousness around events, around everything when you decide to just live. It's just each thing as it is. Form is form. Emptiness is emptiness. You just live expressing your sincerity, your own nature.

[25:24]

You take care of your body because it yearns to be taken care of, and you feel generous toward it. When there's no thought of obtaining good health, there's full appreciation for your body as it is, even if it's a weak body, a limited body, it's still your home. It's how you're manifesting this life. And from the practice point of view, it's your penetration into reality. Your body is the only way that you have to experience the transparency of all things and their interrelationship That's it for this time is your body. I had a client for a long time in a wheelchair and she was diagnosed with severe arthritis of the spine and hips and she came to me because she wanted to spend some time out of the wheelchair to be able to move around her house or

[26:38]

to do various things. She actually wanted to inhabit her body again from the waist down. So she came to see if she couldn't do this. So as Meili said, I'm a body worker, which grew out of this work I've done with myself. And so I gave her many movements, you know, sensory awareness exercises, and I gave her lots of exercises to strengthen her very weak lower body. And she did her exercises like taking medicine. She didn't actually live through them. I could tell because of the questions she'd ask me. She'd say, how many times should I do this? Or what should I do if it hurts? Or should I do this exercise before this exercise? All very mechanically minded questions. But one day, she greeted me with this big grin before our session.

[27:40]

And she said, very excited, she said, everything is information. Hurting, being tired, not wanting to do my exercises. It's all information to me. I'm noticing everything. And I realized she had gone from mechanical movement and dropped into the timeless realm of sensation itself. The whole universe was her medicine. A monk asked Feng Sui, speech is a matter of subject and object, and silence is a matter of subject and object. So how do we get out of subject and object? How do we get out of this dualism? And Feng Sui said, I like to think of Chien Nang in March, partridges chirp among the many fragrant flowers.

[28:40]

So how do we develop this appreciation, this broad and generous spirit in our life? Or as Akin Roshi puts it in this wonderful way, he says, how do we see our life as a wallet stuffed with hundred dollar bills, that we don't even bother to pick up and put into our pockets. Well, our teachers tell us to look into ordinary things. Ordinary things. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about washing the dishes, combing your hair. He says that those activities get you into contact with reality. Well, so do our bodies. So do inhabiting our bodies for periods of time. If you move a leg across your bed and put it on the floor, that's reality. You lift a spoon to your lips, or your feet accept the weight of your body as you come to a standing position, you're connected with reality.

[29:50]

That's real stuff happening to you. For some of us, being sick is the first time that we slow down enough to notice ordinary things, to notice our mundane existence, what moves, what stays still in our ordinary lives. If you lie in bed when you have the flu or a cold and take a day off from work, you can hear the background noises, or what you usually think of as background noises, and they can come to the forefront of your consciousness. Children playing, cars passing, the leaves fluttering in the wind. Of course these kinds of things happen to all of us all the time, every day, sick or well, but we usually just dismiss them as mundane, and we don't register them as the real stuff of our lives. or of our healing.

[30:50]

Trungpa Rinpoche writes that human intelligence and dignity are attuned to experiencing the mundane things in life. Colors, object, sounds, smells, sky. And I think he's suggesting that our intelligence and dignity themselves are developed, actually developed by noticing mundane things. and I'll read you a couple of things in my book about that subject. Basically, it's telling people how to do things from the point of view of noticing. For instance, this is vacuuming. As you work, Well, actually that's what my book is about, this everyday mundane chores business. But actually being alive for the mundane chores, not just numbing out, I have to get this done before I actually live my life.

[31:52]

As you work, move from your body's point of view. Feel your lower body joints support the movement of your upper body as you manipulate the vacuum cleaner. Focus on distributing your lower body movements over your feet, knees, hips, and lower back. Check the weight distribution on your feet. You should be moving around enough to be shifting your weight so that all your joints, not just a few overworked ones, are moved and share the effort. People with painful ankles and knees tend to plant their bodies in one place and reach everything they can from there. This is a static and flexible posture that stresses the lower body joints. If, on the other hand, you're willing to keep moving a little bit at a time, you make a light dancing activity of your work, which gradually loosens and strengthens all the joints of your lower body. It's very important to resist the freezing mentality of painful arthritis.

[32:59]

The more you introduce movement, gentle, easy movement, to your constricted body, the more possibilities it feels. Every time you feel your body moving in an easy, pleasurable way, you're increasing the probability that your next movements, too, will be easy. This is like the Abhidharma, you know, wholesome thoughts, unwholesome thoughts. The probability that the next thought is wholesome or unwholesome depends on the previous one. Every time you move in a tense, frozen, reluctant way, you're reducing your options. Use bending to get under furniture as an exercise, breathing as you curl your spine forward and letting your neck hang loosely forward. If you're sweeping with a broom, let your sweeping motions twist your body gently from side to side and feel the relief in your back and hips as you turn. Let the broom sweep you.

[34:01]

rather than you sweep the broom. This is a very relaxing attitude and worth the extra time it might take you to clean your house from your body's point of view. Then just as quick as I can, I'll read you an example from my own life. This is years later, this example when I had healed quite a bit. Oh, about seven or eight years after that initial striking. being struck. After having arthritis for several years, I spent a summer on the staff of a resort in Big Sur. Guess where? Since I was spending most of the day in meetings, I wanted to make certain I had a period of vigorous exercise in the mornings. I requested the job of cabin cleaning, a daily three-hour stint of preparing cabins for new guests. Usually only teenagers and young people were assigned to cabin cleaning, because of the prevalent belief that the job required youth and stamina.

[35:05]

The duties were clear cut, blah, blah, blah. The tasks were performed at high speed because anywhere from 15 to 25 cabins needed to be done by lunchtime. Because there was no conceptual thinking required on this job, I spent the entire work period every day as a mindfulness session. I did back bends and stretches while changing the bed linens. I twisted my body rhythmically to sweep floors. I stretched every vertebra in my back to scour the toilet. I squeezed the Windex bottle with all five fingers, alternating my hands to wash the windows. I breathed fully and deeply to set a rhythm for my body movements. After a few weeks of this activity, I was exhilarated and bursting with energy. My posture had improved dramatically from making 20 to 40 beds each morning. I still marvel at the efficacy of actually living my everyday life as a healing.

[36:07]

Awareness of these things is to me a meditation on the synchronization of body and mind. This synchronization is a very deep healing. You experience your deep integrity. You experience yourself as all of a piece. It's very unconventional in our culture to value this subtle experience. We're not encouraged to do this at all in our culture. You're on your own as far as the wider culture goes if you decide to do this. And this is why we need a Sangha, why we need to support each other in this endeavor. It's much more usual to think about how special we are, how uniquely gifted, how particularly loved, It's very extraordinary to be willing to live in the ordinary world, to be willing to be alive for your laundry, for your dishes, for your mate.

[37:29]

Very extraordinary to be willing to live in the ordinary world. The same client that I told you about earlier, was very annoyed and she scolded her husband when he came into the room in which I was massaging her one time to tell me a joke. And I asked her why she minded so much. And she said, he was using up my time with you. Well, this indicates a very deprived, starved state of mind, one that obviously couldn't get satisfaction from the sound of her husband's voice as he told the joke, my fingers on her back as I was massaging her, or just she could close her eyes and just feel the animal presence of us all in the room, or the dog barking outside, or even even to be with the pang of jealousy that she felt when he came in and took my attention away from her.

[38:38]

This kind of pang, this noticing that you have an ungenerous attitude, can actually be very sweet because it adds to the texture of your life. You begin to include the shadow in your life. Your conscious life begins to be shaded and textured and have rough surfaces on it, just like the cloth you love to touch because it's so interesting. Your conscious life can be shaded and textured by your anguish and your petty little snits, the ones you don't ever let your Zen teacher see, can actually be quite deepening and worthwhile to your conscious life. People sometimes ask me where my healing energy comes from. How in the midst of this kind of pain and this slow crippling can I encourage not only myself, but other people?

[39:49]

And my answer is that my healing comes from my bitterness itself. my pain and my terror. It comes from the shadow. I have to dip down into that muck again and again to receive its healing energy. And of course, I don't go willingly when I feel the pull down into that despair. That's why it's called despair. We don't go there willingly. We don't say, oh, I've done this a million times. This will be a snap. I'll come back with energy. I tried it. It doesn't work. You're not there if you're willing to be there. But I've come to trust it deeply. It's enriched my life and informed my work.

[40:53]

and taught me not to fear the dark. It seems to me that when we fall ill, we have an opportunity we may not have noticed when we were well, to demythologize the wisdom of the Buddha and literally incorporate it and present it as our own bodies. Thank you very much. I think we have time for a question or two before we break up and go for tea. Is there anything anyone would like to ask? Yes.

[41:58]

Thanks, that's a wonderful point to make. The relationships that we have with objects as well as with people. That's a feeling of connection, a feeling of connection. I personally think the only way I know of to alleviate suffering in any way is through connection. Anything else? Yes. And there's also something about, I go into my shadow.

[44:36]

The shadow is very much tied to that idea of myself, who I am, because it comes from my past experience of suffering. And so, Something valuable. Something valuable, you would lose something valuable. Well the Balancing Act, it's quite proper to struggle with it. You can't wipe away, and you don't want to wipe away, your past.

[45:41]

your identity as a disabled person. You just don't live there. You just don't take a stance there. And I often just say to people in my workshops, this whole question of denial. You know, denial has a bum rap these days, but denial is very valuable. It can help you get through a deadline, you know, nothing's wrong with me if I could just make it to August 30th, you know, can enable you to do that, for one. And for two, it's enabled me to do things that people told me I would never be able to do. I've whitewater rafted the Grand Canyon. And people said, you can't do that. Oh, I'm strong enough, whatever. And I actually felt that there was an element of denial in that once I actually got on the Grand Canyon. Denial can extend the time that you have to accept a catastrophic situation.

[47:04]

But you don't want to live in denial because what denial entails is that you live in this narrow little band of consciousness and not get any of the information that's coming up from your hara or any of the information that's coming in from your friends. Oh, you look terrible, let me help. No, no, no, no, I'm fine. So you can't, if you're going to live in denial, you can't accept any information that contradicts it. But as I say, it's a good way to get through a period of time. So I think you're saying a balance, a balance between Well, between many things, going in and out of states of mind. Again, all this requires flexibility of mind. I talk in my book about being mindful in the office, and people say, how on earth would I be mindful in the office? Well, there are times if the phone rings, you have a nanosecond to be mindful before you answer it.

[48:08]

You can reach your hand across the desk to pick it up. You can be mindful in that second. What it requires is mental flexibility. That's what practice requires, is mental flexibility. And as far as being pulled down into our past, maybe we can allow that to happen if we know that we're going to come back up. Now my shadow, is my shadow. I don't think it's everybody's shadow. I'm not sure my shadow is your shadow. I just happen to be real scared of some things, and I call it the shadow. But actually, as I come to be more familiar with it, it's other things. Those things that are in the shadow come up into the light, and other things are the shadow. When you shine light on something, it's not really the shadow anymore.

[49:14]

It's stuff that you can't stand to shine light on that's in the shadow. So I'm not quite sure that your past is the shadow to you. Maybe your practice is allowing emotional states that are pretty painful to sweep over you. See them come and see them go. Does that help you at all? I'm not a person who has easy access to my emotions, but at Zen Center I've known many people who do, and I've always admired that. How does a person live in those horrible emotions day in and day out? And I finally decided many years ago to start practicing with that, to start actually letting emotions sweep over me. I think I began because of all this stuff. Because my first approach, of course, was just put all my suffering behind me. So long, sucker.

[50:17]

I'm passing for normal from now on. But of course, I was throwing away a very valuable part of my experience. But that was my first adjustment, was just to say, forget that. That was an unpleasant thing. We'll never refer to that again. So should we stop?

[50:38]

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