Good evening, everybody, and I just want to say two words to introduce Kema. Probably all of you know her and know her books and know her teaching. I feel really lucky that she's been able to spend some retreat time here and miraculously at least have a little bit of peace and quiet in the middle of Green Gulch. I don't know how that's possible, but somehow she seems to have achieved it. And she's, as I'm sure you know, a real treasure of Dharma for us, really bringing very rich and complicated teachings straight home and straight down to Earth for us. So I look forward to her speaking tonight. Welcome. Well, first of all, I'd like to say thank you to everyone here and to Green Gulch, the place,

[01:23]

because I think on Friday the 13th, I will have been here for six weeks. And it's been six weeks of really deep relaxation and meditation contemplation for me. It's actually been a very profound time. I've been recovering from an illness, and I needed something just like this. And I feel about 10 years younger and 15 years healthier than I did when I first came here. So I've read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind about five times, and walked all over this land.

[02:25]

And it's very special. And then in such sort of beautiful timing, I went away to teach in Berkeley. And when I came back for my last 10 days, the Hope Cottage was ready. And so for the last 10 days, I've been up there where the hawks fly below you. And so thank you very, very much, all of you. I hardly got to know anybody. Got to know a few people quite well. I've been beautifully taken care of, sort of like nurtured, actually. And so I really thank you, and thank you to this land as well.

[03:28]

So what I wanted to do tonight, instead of giving formal talks, I thought instead I'd have you ask me questions. And that would be the form of this time together tonight. And also, I have been requested to teach the Tonglen practice. And so I also would like to tell you a bit about that practice, which is a very specific practice for awakening compassion. Actually, for awakening the absolute and relative bodhicitta, the experience of compassion and emptiness inseparably. But with a big emphasis on the compassion part. So I thought we could just start and see if there are any questions.

[04:42]

And that I could, just from my own experience, see what I can do with your questions. I know you have a monastery in Nova Scotia. What would you say is your primary purpose in having a monastery up there? What do you hope to accomplish up there? Hmm. Originally we started the monastery with one monk and one nun, just because the monk, particularly Sutrim, he had been ordained by that time for almost 15 years and never had a monastery. And I don't know how long I'd been ordained, about 10 years or 12.

[05:45]

And I also had never had a monastery. So really it had simple motivation to just have a place where people who wished to follow a monastic path could do so. And we have other centers which are secular, and so it seemed that this was needed as an additional center. Then as it develops over the years, it's... We live by precepts there which include celibacy precept. So whether someone is ordained as a monk or nun for their life, or whether they take the temporary ordination of a monk or nun, or whether they're just a visitor, everybody lives by these five precepts which includes celibacy and also no drinking of alcohol.

[06:47]

So in that way it's quite strict in terms of precepts. And also it's in a very isolated place. Very isolated place. So I think the main discipline there is that you can't get away from yourself. It's a small community at the end of the world where there's no entertainment. That becomes the main discipline. And it's pretty harsh discipline in some ways, which is probably why my teaching has so much emphasis on compassion and gentleness and softer side. So we hope we train people there to be monks and nuns. And I'm particularly interested in the place as a place where people can learn to live together in a compassionate way as a journey of awakening.

[07:54]

That living together in community is a journey of awakening. And learning how to be kind to each other in a really non-conceptual way, not a moralistic way, but a really sort of unconditional way. You said that you read Zen Mind Beginners' Mind a number of times. And I don't know so much about, maybe I'll say your practice. Are there places where it merges and where it's different than what we're doing here? In the way it manifests?

[08:56]

Well, you know, when I read Suzuki Roshi, then I'd say no, no difference. But definitely, you know, there's differences in terms of how it manifests. With Tibetan practices, as students of Trungpa Rinpoche's, we sit a lot. And there's a lot of influence from Suzuki Roshi, actually. For instance, we do ariyoki, and a lot of our forms are from Japanese tradition. But still the practices are so different, you know, in terms of visualizations, mantras, ringing bells, and little drums, and group practice where you chant, and these kind of things. But we also have what's called Mahamudra and Dzogchen. And that's actually like Zen. And when I read Suzuki Roshi...

[10:04]

Well, actually my feeling in reading Suzuki Roshi here was I think I'm just going to keep reading Suzuki Roshi for the rest of my life. And as a teacher, and try to figure out exactly what he's talking about. And it's so profound what he has to say, and it's so close to what I feel I understand, and yet so beyond what I understand at the same time, that I find it totally exhilarating to read it. And it has this amazing humor, tenderness, and he certainly understands, he is able to speak from a place of inseparable compassion and emptiness, which is so rare. And so, you know, reading him, it feels like,

[11:05]

you know, familiar and challenging, and just exactly how I've been taught. Which is probably why Trungpa Rinpoche is so admired. And the story is that when Trungpa Rinpoche met Suzuki Roshi, he cried afterwards because it was the first enlightened person he'd met in the West, and he realized he had such a longing to talk with someone like that, and he hadn't for such a long time. So, reading the book, I can really understand why he cried. But, you know, the thing that I'm most struck by is his way of describing non-dual reality. The way I, what I was getting so much from it was,

[12:13]

how he describes that as path. Because he has a way of talking about how we just look at the world. And he has a way of conveying how everything, there's nothing to be, nothing that you reject, and nothing that you emphasize as being right. So, like when he talks about weeds and flowers, I was talking on the parmitas in the teaching in Berkeley, and I wanted to teach the parmitas as practice. And I wanted to teach them as practice, that, as non-dual practice. And I'd always had a problem with the parmitas, actually, because they are so frequently taught dualistically. That when you practice generosity, you overcome poverty mind.

[13:21]

When you practice patience, it's the antidote to aggression. But it was like that. But that's not how Suzuki Roshi talked about it. He had a way of describing things that somehow, you see both sides, and both sides are somehow equally valuable. Or both sides are equally how things are. So, like when he says that, he quotes, Dogen is saying that the flower falls even though we love it, and the weed grows even though we don't love it, or we don't like it. He says it's like that, it's just like that. And somehow that gave me so much insight into the non-dual nature of the parmitas.

[14:23]

Because, of course, if they were dualistic, they wouldn't be perfection, they wouldn't be parmitas, they wouldn't take you to the other side, if generosity really was the opposite of something. So then I had a talk with Norman, and he told me about how teaching, about investigating the opposite side. For instance, if you teach the parmita of exertion, which has also been translated as enthusiasm, it's said that it's the antidote to laziness. Norman was saying that it could be taught or understood as if you teach the parmita of exertion, and that becomes a method of beginning to explore

[15:25]

and become curious about laziness. And so actually I taught it like this in Berkeley, which was to say that if you set out to be patient, and you think the point is to overcome impatience, then you really never are going to understand patience. That it's really only by knowing the nature of aggression, of restlessness, of impatience, only by actually knowing it, that you ever really understand what patience is, transcendental patience. Which is to say, what does it mean then to know the nature of aggression? What does it mean? Well, that's where I kept reading Suzuki Roshi over and over, because basically it has something to do with weeds and flowers,

[16:29]

that you don't come to know its nature because it's bad and you want to root it out, you just come to know its nature, because it exists in your experience, and it's part of the human condition. And in fact, a correct understanding is that it's just the other side of... impatience is just the other side of patience, like they don't... one can't exist without the other one. But to understand that, we always go about it from dualistic perspective of trying to get rid of the impatience, or in generosity trying to get rid of the stinginess or the holding on, and so forth. So if you start to practice instead, if you know, if you're actually pre-warned,

[17:32]

that if you're going to wholeheartedly try to practice any of the paramitas, if you're going to wholeheartedly practice patience, then very soon, probably in the first 45 minutes, you'll discover, not patience, you'll discover impatience and aggression. Then, if you haven't been... if you've been taught to look at that in a dualistic way, then you think your practice is... you're failing in your practice. And as Western students, this means that we're getting very good at what we already know how to do, which is beat up on ourselves. So the Dharma becomes a method for becoming more confused, all in the name of practicing paramitas.

[18:37]

So, but then if someone says, no, no, that is not... that's not correct understanding. That's not compassionate understanding. That's also not... has no understanding of emptiness or openness. That's just ordinary, bewildered, everyday understanding. No, the idea is, you try to practice patience knowing that you're going to become very intimate with aggression, and you're going to know it really well. And you allow it to be that way. No, when we say we allow it to be that way, that doesn't mean that we repress it, and it doesn't mean that we act or speak out of our aggression. It means that we basically

[19:42]

learn to be fully and completely with the feeling of aggression. We learn to let all the ideas about aggression, all the thoughts and words and conceptual overlay go, and we just come back to just becoming intimate with what that feels like, what aggression feels like, or laziness, or poverty, or whatever it is. And then somehow in that process something really begins to shift, that you're just looking at the whole thing. And somehow in that process also you come to really know generosity and discipline, and patience, exertion, and so forth.

[20:45]

So, for instance, one man who was doing the weekend, and he said afterwards he left the weekend, and he decided on the way home he would practice patience in traffic. And so he was practicing patience in traffic, and he was feeling, just coming from a weekend of meditation and so forth, he was quite patient. And he felt that he had some feeling for patience, what it really meant, in a kind of spacious way. And then he came to a stop sign, his car stopped, and this man was walking in front very, very slowly. He was practicing patience. And then the man turned and kicked his car and yelled at him.

[22:05]

And he said at that point this rage welled up in him. And then he remembered at that point, if you're going to practice patience, you're going to get, you're also going to be practicing coming to know, becoming intimate with aggression. And there it was. And he said what he did at that moment was actually, based on the tonglen practice, he just sort of, he breathed in and completely felt that aggression that he was feeling, and for all the other people in the world who feel that. And he wrote me all this in a note. Then he said at that moment he just felt so sad for that guy who had kicked his car, who didn't even know him, who was just someone who was so that angry that he kicked and yelled,

[23:10]

someone he didn't even know. Okay. Okay. I wonder how you practice with being in a, in my home, especially an illness that's gone on for some time.

[24:15]

Hmm. Well, my illness has been a really interesting one. It sort of falls in the general category of the immune breakdown, system breaking down. So, you know, to be really honest, you know, like what the journey of the whole thing has been is it's been a, it's been a lot like having my teacher standing behind me with a stick and hitting me every time I start to get, speak, act, or particularly just think or react in a habitual way. Because I began to realize that the,

[25:18]

the feeling of fatigue and flu-like symptoms intensified, were intensified by what you normally would call stress. But I began to realize that what stress is, is that we tighten in a very, very old, familiar way. And basically I think as practitioners it means we're getting close to the edge of, we're about to step outside of what is known, what is predictable, what confirms us and makes us feel secure and comfortable. And there's like this, this perfume of fear starts sort of coming up. And I became so familiar with the process, but usually I think without seeing it so precisely,

[26:20]

basically what happens is just things all the time in our life cause us to shut down, close off, and actually not only do our minds close down, but so do our bodies, and there's some kind of tension at every level of our being. And so as soon as I would start to do that, which I came to think of as just reacting in a very ancient conditioned pattern, habitual tendency, basically I think it's what we would call how ego presents itself at this sort of moment-to-moment level. Ego presents itself at the moment-to-moment level in a sort of tension. And so as soon as I would start to do that, all hell would break loose in terms of my sickness. Which is to say I was sick most of the time.

[27:22]

You know, it began to feel like. And so I just started training in acknowledging when I would be, when I was starting to shut down, to sort of tense, close. And it was physical, but it was also mental. It was a completely synchronized situation. And I started to train in first acknowledging it and then in what we would call dharmically, basically changing the habitual pattern or not grasping and fixating, letting go of old ways of seeing and knowing and seeing and acting and reacting. But at a very personal level

[28:23]

it would feel like a knot and just training in how to sort of, you know, just relax basically, very deeply. And so it began to feel like every time my old ways of holding myself together, literally I began to feel like I just held myself together tenaciously. It was like a fierce determination to just hold myself together. But it was making me sick. So every time I would start doing it, it was as if my teacher hit me over the head or on the shoulder. I got hit. So I would just train in. I began to feel it in a lot of ways, like turning around and facing what I was running from or definitely letting go of storylines.

[29:27]

I've learned a lot from illness. And I think no matter what people's illness is, it teaches them a lot. But I just will emphasize this one point because there's such a powerful kind of path quality to it. Needless to say, it also teaches you about death. It teaches you about death in every moment. It teaches you about the futility of holding on and grasping. It teaches you about the total insanity and sadness of the human condition in terms of thinking that we can get it all together, control it and make it go a certain way. And how we all are making ourselves sick in terms of recreating suffering every moment of our lives. So it's taught me a lot about that. What do you do when you get stuck in the fear

[30:39]

that that kind of illness or whatever won't go away? Well, sometimes it won't go away. For instance, terminal cancer, anyone who has AIDS. So first of all, it teaches you to give up hope as an affirmation. Let's put it this way. It causes you to stop getting stuck in the dualism of hope and fear. Now, first, that's just words, right? That's just something you hear. But at the practical level, I would say it's very much like the exploration of the Parmitas. You could say you try to have a non-dual understanding of the whole thing,

[31:40]

which at a very practical level means that you become intimate with fear. Meaning, not that you're becoming intimate with something bad, but that you're actually just becoming intimate with your experience. And of course, it has a very negative connotation and so forth. But how to stop resisting our own energy, I guess, is really what it comes down to. So, I think for... Well, it was complicated for me. I had a lot of fear, anxiety, which was complicated by menopause, which I didn't know at the time, but with menopause, sometimes it goes along with it that you have these anxiety attacks, just because of the chemical changes that are taking place. So basically, at the same time I was getting sick,

[32:41]

I was also going through menopause, and I would have, every night, intense anxiety about three o'clock in the morning, which basically just stayed there. And also it would arise very unexpectedly at any time of the day or night. It would just come up like a horror movie or something, except nothing would be causing it. So for at least five years, I really trained in trying to understand how to not resist. I asked every Dharma teacher I met, I actually asked bus drivers and people I'd meet on the beach, I was just asking everybody about fear, and I was reading everything I could find, all the Dharma teachings, all the therapy, everything.

[33:42]

But basically my question was, how do you not resist? Because I had a feeling that I would be learning how to die if I could learn how to relate to this. And I'd seen people die, and I knew that people can die, and it can be like watching someone become enlightened, because they just let go into the big mind. And they can also die in complete terror, like screaming and pushing against. And so I knew this fear was worthy of exploration, but I just didn't know how to do it. So there's a story about Milarepa, where he meets demons in his cave, and these demons are things like fear, and hope and fear, and these kind of things. And he tries everything to try to make them go away. He tries compassion, he tries magic spells, he tries sitting down and teaching them about the Dharma.

[34:44]

He tries everything, and they won't go. Finally he just gives up, and he says, well, listen, I'm not going anywhere, and neither are you, so why don't we just sit here and have a cup of tea? And the story is that they all evaporate, except one. And I was like, yeah, that one is called my fear. And in any case, except one. And he said, oh, this one must really be strong. And so what he did was, he went and put himself in its mouth, and then it dissolved also. So that was my koan, how to put myself in the mouth. And so all I can say is, that's the Dharma path. I can't really tell you how I learned to do that. All I can tell you is that for at least five years it was my main koan,

[35:45]

and I tried everything, and I brought my practice to it, and I brought my whole life to it, but I wanted to find out how to put myself in the mouth of the demon, so to speak, which is to say, to not separate myself. And then I just realized at one point that I'd gotten the hang of it. And so that's how practice is. And that's, again, Sister Kiyoshi talks about that a lot, how it isn't like walking in the rain, it's like walking in the mist. And you don't even know what's happening. But I think if we take what we consider the pain and confusion and obstacles of our lives and use them as the path to enlightenment, they're the best path, I think, really, the best path. Because right in there, in all of that, is where you actually discover the compassion and emptiness.

[36:51]

Right in all of that. In that which seems to be the big blockage. You could say, well, maybe it is, but you just make it more of a blockage if you're trying to get rid of it or something like that. In my experience with pain, the most perilous thing for me has been the other demon, the hope, that when things go well, I find it very easy to get on this roll where it's like, well, this is it. Now everything is going to be cool. And just kind of get better and better from here. And that's usually when I really crash. When I really lose my concentration and just things happen that are kind of a bummer.

[37:52]

Do you see any difference in the way to practice with the impulses that kind of spur us on? The hope, the kind of greed for more good experience, more help, more control over circumstances. Is there any difference for you between that and the fear? No, I don't think there's any difference. I think you basically set about to become sort of intimate with your experience. And I think the first part of that as practitioners, as students, is that we acknowledge what's happening with us. But we acknowledge it with compassion. In other words, we're not setting out here to become really good at being judgmental and harsh and critical.

[38:56]

We're just setting out to basically open our minds as large as they can get towards whatever is occurring and open our hearts as large as they can get towards what's ever occurring. So I think you work in the same way, but you become intimate with your experience. Because hope is as much a worthy one to put yourself in the mouth of as the fear, you know. It's basically, I think of them as like hooks. The things that kind of like really hook us. Another way I think of it is we get very solid around these things. Very, very solid. So for me, I'm actually sort of like... I almost have to work at not getting too excited when I find myself seeing I'm getting solid because I find it... because I realize it's such an opportunity to, you know...

[40:02]

In other words, I don't want to just have this life that everything goes well because I know perfectly well that that just means the causes and conditions have not arisen just now that would provoke my insanity. So basically when my insanity gets provoked, I value it very much. I value it very, very much because I want to be able to acknowledge that I'm getting hooked, you know. And then to practice compassion and complete open mind with that. Basically, to put it simply, practice learning how not to shut down and close down. So how to... a very, very simple way to talk about it is learning how pain escalates and learning how pain de-escalates at a very personal level, you know. How confusion escalates, how confusion de-escalates. And it doesn't seem that confusion de-escalates by buying into dualistic thinking of yes and no,

[41:13]

you know, right and wrong, like getting very, very behind good and bad. It seems that that just causes suffering to escalate. So somehow to go beyond dualistic thinking, but at the same time jumping right into the middle of life, you know, if you see what I mean. So, for instance, I was talking with people from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and they had wonderfully provocative questions about being activists and this whole thing about aren't there times when you should say wrong and right and so forth. And so we had good discussion about that. And my main feeling I realized was that you set out to heal the suffering of the world.

[42:18]

So suppose that's to try to stop nuclear weapons, nuclear power or anything. And you set out to just protest the bombing of Iraq or anything. But you do it as your path to enlightenment, so that basically it will teach you everything you need to know, because if you really do it as a path to enlightenment, you quickly see that you just cannot do it with right-wrong mind, like you, me, mine, good, bad, mine, good guys, bad guys, mind. It just will never take you anywhere to just where you already are, spinning around in confusion if you do it that way. So it challenges you greatly how to basically try to stop something harmful from happening,

[43:24]

but not in a way that actually is adding more aggression, more dualistic thinking, more pain to the planet. So then our practice actually gets really real. And also that's another thing Suzuki Roshi says somewhere there in the book, he says something like encouraging the students to really question, really question the Dharma, and he says that's what gives it life. I think that's sort of what I'm meaning, that you just take something that's important to you, just like I took fear, you know, that was very personal, but it can also be more social action, but you take it as a way of trying to really understand the Buddha way or the path to alignment. All the words you hear, what do they really mean? When you come face to face with really difficult situations that push all your buttons,

[44:29]

causing you to get very, very tight and tense and righteously indignant and so forth, you can't just call yourself bad. And that doesn't change anything. On the other hand, you can't just call yourself right, because that's what you're already doing, right? Righteously indignant. So, something in the middle that heals us, I think, and heals everybody, heals the whole situation, something in between the extreme views of right and wrong, virtuous and un-virtuous, and so forth. Maybe I should teach the tonglen practice. When we were having this discussion with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship,

[45:35]

one of the men remarked that one of the problems he came up against a lot was not being able to feel really connected with the pain of others, particularly if the others were far away on the other side of the world. And that he found that very painful, this sort of inability to really... just the kind of distancing he would feel. So we talked about tonglen in that respect. Tonglen is a practice, it can be described in a lot of ways, but the way that I find it so extremely valuable is whenever you feel stuck in any way, whenever you feel pain in any way,

[46:38]

so first of all, that takes being able to acknowledge that you're really feeling something. Whenever you feel that, instead of just criticizing yourself for that, or justifying that, you do something completely different. And you use that, what we usually would call poison, say like passion, aggression, ignorance, that you're experiencing in that moment of your life, you use that poison as medicine. And this is to say, you use it as the seed of compassion. And actually it's the seed of bodhicitta altogether, the absolute emptiness and compassion. And this is how it works. Let's say the man who was practicing patience,

[47:46]

the guy kicked his car, and then up came this anger. So at that point, what he did was, he did the tonglen practice in its simplest form, he simply breathed in and connected, he felt his anger. It's very non-conceptual actually. You just simply breathe in, because you're feeling something very strong. And you breathe in, you take it in, and you take it in for everyone who's feeling what you feel at that moment. You just breathe in for all the angry people in the whole world. But the thing is that you don't really, all you really know is your own anger, that's all you really know. But it's your kinship with this whole vast network of human beings.

[48:52]

It's your kinship with billions of people. So you breathe in for all of us, and then you send out, with your out-breath, you just send out some kind of compassionate relief in any form that you want. If any of you have done metta practice, the out-breath is like metta. But the in-breath, it's very interesting. I was telling Norman, I described this practice to a Theravadan teacher, who was of course taught metta all the time. And the teacher, when I described the breathing in part, the teacher said, oh no, [...] no. Buddha would never have taught that. And the purpose of the path is to have the cessation of suffering,

[50:00]

he would never take on more. And that was the first time I just absolutely understood the step between the Hinayana and the Mahayana, what that transition is really about between the old tradition and the Mahayana, is that actually as Mahayanas, actually we vow, sentient beings are limitless, and we vow to save them, I mean, part of this path is to awaken our compassion. So, originally, I don't know about originally, but often the way this practice is taught is that you, you know, you see, say, a homeless person, you wish to help them, so you breathe in with the wish that all of their suffering and confusion would be gone, and you send them out, you know,

[51:03]

just some sense of relief or something like that. And the way it's described is that it isn't that actually a person who you're doing tonglen for, for instance, if someone has a sickness, it isn't that they're free of their sickness, it's that they lighten up somehow, their mind lightens up. I would say it's probably an experience of experiencing emptiness of some kind, that you do tonglen for a person and they begin to connect with their own sanity, with their own wisdom, with their own bigger perspective, instead of being completely claustrophobic and caught up in fear, shame, anger, and the various things that might go along with illness or living on the street or anything. When you breathe in, what you're taking away from people is their claustrophobia, basically, and sending out some sense of relief so that people can begin to feel some space

[52:05]

and begin to connect with their own Buddha nature. They can basically connect with the wisdom that they have. So it's like helping people to find their own wisdom and their own truth and just creating the space where that could be possible. So usually, it is anyway often taught that way, that you do it for another person. But the way Trungpa Rinpoche taught it was that you start with what you're feeling as the kindling or the stepping stone for understanding other people's pain. And so this man in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship who was talking about always feeling a sense of distance, I said, well, just start training in just connecting with any unwanted feelings that come up in you, whatever they are, just train again and again in breathing it in and feeling it completely, owning it completely without the words and storylines,

[53:09]

and then just sending out relief. And in that way, what actually happens over time, gradually, at its own speed, what actually occurs is that the bodhicitta does begin to awaken. It does begin to become sort of ignited or, you know, in other words, this spark is in us. That's what I have found so incredibly inspiring for myself and working with students is what you see is that it is in us. There's no question about it because if we practice in a way that begins to, where we can lighten up and relax, it just expands, it just sort of starts coming out, so that at some point you find that you don't feel this distance any longer

[54:12]

from the suffering of other people. And on the other hand, you also don't become so overwhelmed by the suffering of other people that you can't bear it. And so somehow by doing this practice of just, when you feel unwanted feelings, you breathe in with the wish that all people could be free of this, including yourself, or even with just the idea that, you just breathe in with the idea of completely owning it, completely feeling and sending out the relief. It's an interesting process because it awakens compassion and also awakens the, what I would say, the experiential level of emptiness, which is that you begin to feel lighter and you begin to feel, well, as somebody said, as you become lighter and lighter, you can step into heavier and heavier situations.

[55:14]

Traditionally, when they talk about this practice, they say that what's happening is you are completely dissolving, completely dissolving the whole mechanism of how ego functions, which is to say that usually the most kind of core human realm quality is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Just at the sort of molecular level, we do that. And the Tonglen practice is that you actually take in the pain, you breathe it in, and you give away and share pleasure. So when it's taught very traditionally, they say the reason it works is because it does such a number on ego clinging. It completely reverses the habitual pattern. But I don't really know why it works. Frankly, it just seems to have a very powerful ability to open the heart and the mind.

[56:27]

Thank you for a kind of, not a technique, but something you mentioned several times during your talk in San Francisco. You said again just a moment ago about creating space, and you mentioned breathing space. Anyway, I found this idea to be viscerally useful. So what is it you think about? Yeah. I'm always trying to find ways to talk about emptiness, which also is translated openness. At the sort of like, well, just ways to talk about it. Because it's always taught that it's inseparable from compassion,

[58:21]

and yet that can seem so puzzling. If it's just something we're studying as the absolute, you know. So I think really at the experiential level, the discovery of emptiness really begins with allowing space and with qualities of gentleness, softness, these kind of things with some sense of relaxation in our practice. And I think it's especially helpful if we have a kind of very formal practice that has a very clear and precise form, so that in the practice itself there's a real backbone

[59:26]

and a real, like, sort of prajna, you know, built right into the posture and the practice. Then if we do that practice with compassion and attitude and bring the softness in at the level of, what would you call that? Our attitude or our sort of the spirit with which we practice, then somehow we begin to awaken the inseparability of compassion. And I mean, it just comes out. We begin to understand more and more how we're really not bound by anything. But at the same time, the pain of the world gets through more and more. It's especially helpful on the level of some people,

[60:30]

such as myself, putting effort into practice. Sometimes, you know, sometimes I find that there's rigidity there. So just this concept of allowing space for movement. Yeah, you see, I think that's what's so interesting, is that sort of like how it rubs against each other, is that the form is a real discipline. I think rigid would be the wrong word, but it's very precise and clear, and you just do it. And then the attitude is very compassionate and spacious. And then somehow, then it starts to kind of like...

[61:30]

Then you really understand what it means to say, you know, Buddha sits here, you know. Because Buddha, you know, clearly isn't like uptight. Yes? Earlier you said that it's a challenge to live together. It's one of our great practices, and many of us have lived together for over 20 years, and I don't know how long your group has been together, but I'd be interested... I think we'd be interested to hear what you do when there's difficulty, what practices you bring to it, or just how you meet the interpersonal difficulties that arise. You know, it's funny, there's this quote from Thomas Merton,

[62:35]

where he says, you know, trap is very strict. And then Merton is quoted as saying, he said, we really don't need any austerities. He says, living in community is quite enough of an austerity. So actually, we aren't too... We don't have... We're just learning about this at the Abbey, about how to live together, and how to be kind to each other, and how to use the whole thing as path and practice. And I don't have a lot to share with you, because somehow we're now 10 years old, 11 years old, and I think right now that's just becoming more the main focus. For so long, we were just getting the place built, but definitely that's becoming more and more the focus,

[63:44]

because it's clear that that's a really wonderful path. It's just living together, and what it brings up, and using that as path. So for myself, I would say that I have learned. You know, next to my illness, the main teacher who's been standing behind me with the stick has been the community, you know. And it's kept me so honest, and so forth. But I do think that's the main thing, is that working with it, how does one work with it without it either going too far to the degree of being careless, or too far to the side of being moralistic, you know, and trying to set up all these very strict rules

[64:44]

that everybody has to abide by. Good rules, of course, rules that would protect people and everything, but how do you avoid going to the extremes, and actually keep it a living, fluid thing, where for each person, it always comes back to trying to be completely, keep one's heart and mind open in the present moment. So, of course, a lot of that is coming up with ways that people can communicate what's on their minds, in group and individually, you know, obvious things like that, people needing to be able, that there's no sense of a lid, there's no sense of repression, that there's like some sense of fearlessness in the environment that you can't say what's happening, but on the other hand, that that's a dual process of learning to be honest, and then also learning that you might be completely off the wall,

[65:46]

you know, in the process of saying what's going on, you may just hear yourself expressing your neurosis, and so you completely have to sort of, everybody, I think that's the main thing, at the level of community, try to provide the structures where there's a lot of opportunity, but then it's very individual with everybody working on it, sincerely themselves, not blaming themselves or others, and just trying to really work with it. So again, as Suzuki Roshi emphasizes again and again, he says in one of the things, you know, what's more important to make a million dollars or to enjoy the moment-by-moment effort of trying to make a million dollars, and so in that way, what's more important to, you know, like have the perfect community or the moment-by-moment effort of trying to learn how to care for each other,

[66:48]

so it's the moment-by-moment thing, and as far as I'm concerned, one thing I've learned from community is it never all comes together. Thank you. I don't know your history, Pamela, but do you sometimes find yourself in moments of struggle singing a song from your childhood and reconnecting with the religion of your birth? And you may not have had one, but I wonder if it sometimes arises. Why do you ask that question? I... it... it just... it arose. You sing modern songs? Pardon? You must sing modern songs. I don't know what kind of a song it is. Well, I was raised Catholic, and I would say that I never sang those songs.

[67:51]

In fact, I don't think we actually even had any songs. But, um... No. I, uh... I wasn't fortunate enough to have a Catholic girlhood that was, you know, had any enlightenment in it. It was a really... It wasn't, like, heavy-duty, but it was definitely very, very dogmatic, very, very conventional-minded, very... I didn't ever meet a priest that was inspiring. And, you know, now that I'm an adult, I've met so many Catholic priests and nuns that are just remarkable and deeply, profoundly contemplative spiritual people.

[68:58]

But as a child, it was just... I mean, I think I knew from the time I was six that I didn't want to have anything to do with this all. Because it was just always telling you that your basic feelings were sinful and, you know, not good. Also, in my situation, my mother was Catholic and my father wasn't. My father didn't particularly have any religion. He came from Australia and he was raised, I think, Episcopalian or high Church of England or something. But basically, he didn't have a go to church or anything. And so, at church, they told you that people who weren't Catholics were going to go to hell. And so, you know, that was really the bottom line, you know. My father was this great guy. I knew he wasn't going to go to hell. I had a lot of Catholic great-aunts who were, like, you know, snapped at you and were kind of really uptight and mean.

[70:02]

And I thought, you know, this whole philosophy is just, like, missing the point somehow. You know, because they were the ones that, just because they were Catholics, they were going to be saved. So, basically, I never had much patience for that kind of rigid thinking. But now, actually, I'm even more, even able to be more curious and interested even in that kind of thinking, actually, to be honest with you. Like, I really take it seriously that you don't reject anything. So, I would say, you know, I had a reaction against that. But now, I think, there are so many millions of people that have that, have very set minds. And, according to the teachings, they also are completely awakened beings with Buddha nature.

[71:04]

And, you know, so, basically, everything is worth taking an interest in, as far as I'm concerned. And the more my mind kind of closes down on it, the more I get interested in what's happening there, you know. I sing the songs of Milarepa. Only recently learned. I walk up here in the hills and I sing these songs. Did the mountain lion greet you again? No, but I heard him, or her, this morning. But I only saw a little bit. I saw her once, and where I saw her or him was from my balcony in the guest house. He was right out on the rock pile where all the new rocks were put. Just out there, sitting in the sun, enjoying himself, herself. Yeah.

[72:06]

So, now that I'm up there in the wilderness, I haven't seen her. What time of day was that? I can't remember, actually, whether it was early morning or... But it wasn't dawn or dusk. It was kind of, you know... You said it was about five in the afternoon. Oh, maybe five in the afternoon. Yes. Do you... I don't know what your status is now. Do you have a teacher now, or do you miss having a relationship with a teacher present, or do you find teachers... Well, my teacher now is a Sakyong, Nipun Rinpoche, who is Trungpa Rinpoche's oldest son. And he's a monk. And... But my situation was that when Trungpa Rinpoche died,

[73:10]

I was without a teacher for a while, because Sakyong is... Actually, I've known him since he was pretty young. Thirteen, actually. And I was at one time his meditation instructor. This is very funny. His father, Trungpa Rinpoche, asked me to be his meditation instructor when he was, like, fifteen. And I now realize it was just total set-up. Because of that, we became very close. And then it's actually developed into that I regard him as my teacher. But... But when Trungpa Rinpoche died, of course, you know, there are times still where I'll very unexpectedly start to cry thinking of him. Mostly with gratitude. Cry with gratitude. But when he died,

[74:12]

I realized very much, because of how I had been trained by him, that really what you learn from a teacher goes so far beyond them being alive or dead. It's something you learn about your relationship with your reality altogether. And they are like your... They're sort of like a spokesperson for a while. You actually have this relationship with them. And if you can get used to surrendering again and again to them... And Trungpa Rinpoche was quite a challenging person. So by basically just knowing him over the years, I guess he probably put me through every emotion and mood I could possibly experience as a human being just in my relationship with him, negative and positive feelings. So everything was included,

[75:14]

and I began to realize a lot about how... Basically by having an unconditional relationship with him, it was just a method, a skillful means for beginning to have an unconditional relationship with reality altogether. And so by the time he died, I had... Well, when he died, I realized that that was something that he had given me or had taught me. And then since that time, it's sort of like reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind over and over. I mean, I learned so much from Trungpa Rinpoche that I haven't digested yet, that I haven't understood yet. And so basically, I have plenty... I'm still trying to understand that he taught me. And so... But yeah, I... Sometimes I'll just unexpectedly start to cry,

[76:15]

and it is with gratitude that somebody really was willing to stick with me with all my craziness and ups and downs and everything, and just, you know, hang in there and help me to understand something, you know. And also that he was willing to hang in there with a lot of really insane people and didn't give up on us, you know. I appreciate that, I'll tell you. It's rare that you meet somebody who really does not shut down on you. So it's sort of a model that it's possible to actually have that big a mind and that big a heart and basically, the crazier you get, the bigger the space gets, you know. Till after a while you feel like you're doing your number in a room

[77:16]

that's all covered with mirrors, you know. Just watching yourself, and just getting more and more embarrassed. And then you are judging yourself, and you are being harsh, but it's clear this other person is just there with you. So you learn a lot from that kind of thing. Thank you. Yes. Would you say something about leaving home and what that means? And becoming homeless? Yes. Well, my feeling is that

[78:18]

that is the definition of the whole spiritual journey, not just of becoming a priest or a monk or nun, but that the whole path is of leaving home. Once Trungpa Rinpoche said the whole spiritual path was about growing up. He said, you know, that should be your mantra. Om, grow up, swaha. So basically, what it means is that you become... You don't need mommy and daddy anymore. You also don't need, you know, to go home and there's a refrigerator there with everything you want in it. Basically, I think it means the way we usually feel that we need to hold on to something. And so when we become afraid or...

[79:19]

This closing down I talk about is usually just really a sign that we're on the edge of something that isn't known. That's why it's actually very positive, although we take it as negative. And so we train, actually, in being able to step out further and further. The boundaries just get wider. Sometimes they call it the widening the circle of compassion, but you could also say just basically the space in which you can move without feeling that you need to hold on to something. So basically the whole path is completely letting go of all the old ways of looking, the old ways of knowing, the old ways of having to have things certain, and you step out into the actual refreshing quality of uncertainty.

[80:26]

But as we all know, initially it is not refreshing. Initially it is terrifying. Or in some way we shut down when we start to move towards it. So I think the whole spiritual path is like weaning ourselves from the myth that there is even anything to hold on to. And realizing more and more that we actually... There never has been anything to hold on to. That we create all of that with our mind and that it causes us to suffer greatly. But on the other hand it has to be very compassionate, patient, and you have to allow it to go at its own speed. You can't rush it or push it or try to like

[81:29]

break through. And that gradually you just become more and more at home. In nowhere. You know, homeless. So like Trungpa Rinpoche once said, Prajna makes you homeless. So I think really that's the whole path is somehow learning that you're like a bird, you know, and you're learning how to fly. And a lot of the path is working with standing on the edge of a nest, you know, where you're just sort of like think you can't. And I think that's the crucial point, is how you work, what you do at that point, when you think you can't and you're terrified. I think that's very, very important,

[82:31]

how we work with that. Since what we're doing is so revolutionary that you're basically going to just completely step out. And... So personally I feel like it's very important to emphasize compassion and kindness and gentleness and those things. Because I think in our culture we tend to, when we shut down, to be very self-critical and harsh and those things. So maybe it's a good time to end now. I want to thank you for your talk tonight and being here with us all this time. And I hope that this is not the last time that you'll come. Maybe let's talk after this.

[83:33]

Well, guess what? I also hope it's not the last time. Maybe next summer. Yeah. It's really wonderful having you, it really is. Even though you've been on retreat and I hope that we've all tried to leave you alone. But it's been great having you, even though you haven't been in contact. It's been wonderful. Driving down the road and just seeing the trees here, knowing that you're there. Yeah, yeah, it's been great. It's like a church in the square. Maybe next time you come and be on retreat and then maybe for a week or something we can hang around and give some talks and do some things. We'll see, maybe that would be really nice. That could be really nice. That could be really nice. Yeah, so maybe next summer. Yeah. That's what I wanted to say. It was a gift for us to really have you here with us and particularly for me in the last ten days. You know, we opened this new space on the mountaintop and there you were. And I was deeply aware of your presence there in the last ten days.

[84:38]

And so I think it was a real gift for the community to open our new space with your lovely presence there. I want to thank you for that. Thanks. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.

[85:16]

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