So I'd like to continue with our theme about looking into difficulty and considering various responses that arise when we face what we find difficult. Because I've been thinking a lot about Terry Dobson and what his intention in his own practice was with respect to teaching the merit and virtue of non-resistance. I've been thinking about what it means to practice non-resistance in the face of difficulty. What? Oh, I thought you were telling me to do something. It was a clue I hadn't learned yet. Oh my God, what am I doing?

[01:01]

My fly is unbuttoned. There's a practice that I have done over some long period of time, usually in very specific relationships where I've discovered that my response or more likely my knee-jerk reaction of, what do you mean? No, I didn't. Hasn't led to much benefit or usefulness. To try, in the spirit of cultivating sympathy, agreeing with my so-called opponent. Now, remember that Terry Dobson was an aikido teacher. He was talking about non-resistance in a very sophisticated way, I think.

[02:05]

There is something about the way you move with your opponent rather than blocking your opponent, where you allow your energy to join, to be fluid, to step to one side so that what is perhaps not useful just moves right by you. The difference between standing head-on in the middle of the train track as the train is coming towards you and stepping to one side and letting it go by. So what I'm interested in or looking at together is that practice of agreeing with one's opponent in a very particular way. And I think there's some danger here, especially for those of us who have a tendency to give ourselves away and imagine that everyone else in the world must be right and I must be wrong. So we should flag this as a risky practice.

[03:09]

Nevertheless, even considering that there's some hazard here, I would propose that there is something utterly disarming about saying to someone who's just accused you of some perfectly dreadful behavior, or maybe not even such dreadful behavior, just mildly, slightly dreadful. Gee, you may be right. As an exercise in trying on the other person's point of view, sincerely and wholeheartedly looking at a situation from the other person's perspective. Actually putting oneself in the other person's shoes and imagining how it is that they might see me in such and such a light or understand my behavior as being such and such or so and so. Because, of course, when I do that, I have more likelihood of being able to see what little shred of what they're saying may be accurate, which gives me a chance to do the work that only I can do.

[04:34]

It also helps me understand sympathetically how the other person has come to the conclusion that they've come to. And my experience is that when I can speak or act from that place of sympathetic understanding of the other person, when I can say to someone wholeheartedly, well, when I think about it from your point of view, I can understand that you might be feeling upset with me. That makes some sense, given what I understand about how you're looking at this situation. This does not, of course, put away the possibility of also understanding that there may be some obstacle, some obscuration for the other party in seeing what my intention is or more of the story.

[05:39]

So, it means that I may be able to sympathetically see when someone has told themselves a story about what happened. The two of us were in the same room at the same time and something happened. And the other person has a drastically different experience than I do. I can begin to understand Are one or both of us doing some editing? Is there some lying in the form of self-deception? And if so, what purpose might that mode serve? In thinking about this, what came up for me is my favorite difficult relationship. Interesting that I still have one favorite difficult relationship after all these years.

[06:49]

I guess I used to have two, my mother being one of them, but she slipped off the map somehow, interestingly. And my other favorite difficult relationship is that relationship that I have with my ordination teacher. sublimely difficult relationship. And I know that in my own practice with the details of that relationship and the difficulty that I've experienced, my ability to see our relationship from the other person's point of view has been very helpful in my understanding the limitations, at least for now, in what is possible between us. To be sympathetic for how another person might behave in ways that were very difficult and in some cases harmful for me.

[07:56]

And to not in any way give up my ability to understand that there's a difference between the person and their behavior. And to have some very clear boundaries and limits about my conclusions about certain kinds of behavior, and yet still have an open heart towards this person. And of course, curiously, this spring, spring, maybe winter, I don't know, what's February 14th? It's right there on the cusp in California. Still winter, gosh, I guess so. Anyway, it was Valentine's Day, that's what I noticed. And I saw my ordination teacher for the first time in a number of years. And I actually had a chance to test the ground. And I was surprised at how little excited I got.

[09:01]

That I was indeed able to finally be able to stay present in the room with what was so with very striking differences in the views, if you will, that each of us held, and not have my heart close in the way, which is, of course, so costly whenever our heart closes towards another person, especially a person we have a complicated and mixed relationship with. The sorts of relationships we often think of in terms of our families, our mothers, our fathers, and our lovers. But of course, Dharma practice relationships get us in the same territory, don't they? Similar ground of tenderness. And what happens when we feel vulnerable with another person? If we feel threatened, we very often shut down.

[10:05]

And what I'm talking about is a way into some dangerous territory with the possibility of taking care of ourselves and yet not closing our hearts. So this is the way I've been thinking about and understanding and exploring what it means to be sympathetic with myself and with another person. to be able to try on another point of view and to see what a situation looks like standing over there in the other person's seat. I remember probably two or three years ago now when I was doing a class on right speech at the Congregational Church in Tiburon where a group of us have a meditation group that meets every Friday morning.

[11:10]

And it was fairly early on in the experience of that particular congregation in their very painful struggle as a consequence of discovering that the minister, who was a very charismatic and powerful person in that church, had been there for 25 years. and was having sexual relationships and had been over some period of time with various members of the congregation. Big time upset. And it was for me kind of deja vu. It reminded me of Zen Center in 1983, 84, 85. 76 over a period of time. Only this time I was in the lovely position of not being so invested in some outcome.

[12:14]

So it was the best of all possible worlds to be present, to care about the people involved, but to not have it be like my very life at stake in the way that was much more the case, at least at a certain point. in my life since then. And I remember one evening I suggested to the group that everybody pick someone in the congregation that they were having a really hard time with. And I had them do a writing exercise in which they described the situation that was common to the person in the class and the person they were thinking about. but from the other person's point of view. There was a kind of collective groan. Don't want to do this.

[13:17]

So we did a timed writing, you know, Natalie Goldberg-style writing. It was very interesting. Close to two-thirds of the people in the room discovered something they hadn't been able to see from the exercise. Something that was useful in their being able to stay, continue staying in some connection with the person that they were at loggerheads with. Then later we did another exercise where I asked them to pick somebody that they'd had a really hard time with, and to then write down everything they could think of that they appreciated about that person. Another way of coming into the territory from a slightly different point of view.

[14:27]

I remember one woman who had just a day or two before we had our class and did this exercise, had gotten into a kind of fight with a member of the congregation. They'd both been part of this church for a very long time. They'd both been very active leaders in the church. And this other person in a church meeting kind of read the riot act to this woman. She was very upset. But she, I guess she had a case of being a good girl. She said, well, it was the assignment, so I wrote a letter of appreciation to this person. I just sat down and did it. She said, I didn't feel like doing it. I certainly didn't imagine mailing it, but I just did it. I just went through the motions. And what she described was that immediately the container got bigger.

[15:37]

She still had all of the grief and dismay that she experienced at having been on the receiving end of a blast in a public meeting. But she could also remember years of shared history, common intention and concern. And she said, one of the most powerful parts of the shift that occurred was she began to wonder about the other person's suffering. She began to have some room in which she could imagine that what this woman was blasting her about was not a statement about her, but was a statement about this woman's state of mind. Our good old friend, the 98% rule. So she stopped taking what had happened in this meeting as a statement about her. I think that the hazard with what I'm suggesting is that if one is inclined to think that one is always wrong and everyone else is right, is already practiced in doormat-itis, that one can go to that place.

[17:02]

And that's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm not suggesting taking on this practice of looking at what might be so in a given situation from another person's point of view, instead of doing that from your own point of view, but in addition to. That by picking myself up and putting myself over here, the view is a little different. Last night when Bill was doing his talk, I sat in this seat over here, which is not a seat that I've sat in. I've sat in a number of seats in this room over the time that it's been a practice room. But I never sat there, especially not since I put the ancestors altar here. You know, it's a little, it's the alcove, it's sort of the bleachers, the peanut gallery, not the main orchestra seats.

[18:06]

I thought, wow, this is a great seat. This is a great seat. Look at all these folks I get to be reminded about right in my line of vision. It's interesting how just moving a foot changes one's perspective. I think I've told some of you what is, to me, a very amusing story. Mostly amusing because it's a story about some liberation from some prison I'd cooked up for myself. I was, for a number of years, in the role of being the archetypal mother in Zen Center. And I had a lot of help getting into that position.

[19:10]

And I remember one night having a dream that I was inside a 35-foot tall stone figure of a woman with big breasts. Just, you know, an archetypal female figure, mother figure. And I was standing inside the figure. And during the dream, I discovered a little door in the skirt. And I opened the door, and I took one step to the left, which had the effect of getting me out the door and outside the figure. And so most of the dream was watching all my Dharma friends from Zen Center, or relating to the figure, thinking it was me. And I was so relieved to have discovered the door. Isn't that great? And I was stunned that just stepping one step changed the landscape so dramatically.

[20:24]

I told everybody I could get to listen to that dream as a way of announcing that I have resigned. This was my resignation dream. It was the left side. It was the left side of the figure. I was very, it was very, very vivid. And I had this sense of the physical change in my whole, especially this part of my body and my shoulders. It was like relief to be, you know, in scale and congruent out of the cement prison. And yet I could feel such sympathy and see how clearly we'd all worked to create this, you know, 35-foot-tall figure.

[21:28]

It was great. I have an article. I haven't read it for a long time, but I was talking to somebody in a situation where it was relevant. It made me think about this article, so I went and dragged it out again. It's an article by a family therapist named Murray Bowen. It's a really good paper. I was so thrilled with the paper that I read some other things that he wrote and went to a lecture he gave one time and discovered he's better in print than he is in person. In person, I found him a little bit of a jerk. But this article is really useful. In it, he talks about... Of course, he's coming from the focus of family systems therapy He talked about getting clear about his role in his family of origin and what happened one time when he went to a family reunion and he stepped one step to the left.

[22:35]

He just stepped out of his usual habitual role. And how the dynamic in the family completely changed. It was like everything was up for grabs again. So it's his personal description of this process of moving your location as a way of widening the possibilities. Body, mind, and spirit. Body, mind, and spirit. The whole business. Yeah, exactly. Some years ago, I think maybe the first time when Bill and I went up to this beautiful spot that we were camping in, as you go over Tioga Pass to go down to Mono Lake, there's a wilderness area off to the left towards a lake called, is it?

[23:42]

Saddleback Lake. And there's a campground there called Sawmill Campground. We actually stopped there on our way home this summer and fantasized all of us going up there for a camping trip, because it's so beautiful. This particular time we were only there, as I recall, maybe a night or two, not very long. But I remember understanding more clearly than I ever had, realizing, remembering, that something happens when I go to the high mountains, and I think that's true for many of us. It was really the first time I began wondering about how much of the great insights and spiritual quality of the high mountain people in the Himalayas is because, to some degree anyway, because of where they live.

[24:45]

What happens when we go up onto Mount Tamalpais and we can see the whole area where we live? We get such a different perspective. I think there's a way in which allowing myself to step into another person's shoes and to look at a situation from their point of view or from several different people's point of view has some of that same effect. I begin to get more of the big picture. So I would invite you to try it on. Because, of course, in the cultivation of the Bodhisattva and the whole articulation of the Bodhisattva path, there's quite a strong emphasis on sympathy and sympathetic joy.

[25:55]

And I think it really does arise out of doing this business of putting myself in someone else's shoes. Listening, really careful listening, can help us discover how to do it. The trick is to do it in a way that also includes thoroughly putting ourselves in our shoes, also, and not doing one habitually instead of the other. I think that's where the risk is for giving ourselves away. Can you say that again? that the trick is to not do the practice of putting myself in someone else's shoes instead of letting myself be in my shoes, but in addition to.

[26:58]

It's the either or that gets us into trouble. You know, so yesterday, Stephanie, when you were talking about feeling overwhelmed, how easily we can say, what's wrong with you, instead of saying, yeah, that fits, that's appropriate. So, I would encourage all of us, myself included, to not do the practice of looking at something from another person's point of view, instead of thoroughly doing it from my point of view, but in addition to. There's so much in the articulation of the bodhisattva path and the bodhisattva vow that is a kind of magnet for unwholesome patterns, you know, codependence unite, right?

[28:09]

So we have to keep an eye out for ourselves. And I think that the traps come up pretty consistently in either or. So sometimes true compassion means having some boundaries and limits when somebody's behavior is causing me some harm. And the question is, can I do that in a way that doesn't require that I close my heart? The kind of process that Laura was talking about yesterday in her juggling act with the architect and the subcontractor who's the painter and the client. You know, who's right and who's wrong? Lots and lots and lots of situations in which if we take more than one point of view, we begin to see the complexity of what is really so.

[29:12]

I think absolutely required, at least annually, required reading is to read Rashomon. It's a great story about exactly what I'm talking about. Something happens. From somebody's standpoint, it's a love story. From someone else's standpoint, there's a murder. From someone else's standpoint, there's a robbery. So good luck. So let's walk. Let's walk. What did you think I said? Let's walk. I was hoping for a little more stability than that.

[30:09]

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