Good morning. I'm going to speak this morning about creativity and compassion as part of
our practice, or we could say it's the heart of our practice. So this zazen or zen meditation
we've just been doing is a kind of creative expression. It's a kind of
way of expressing something that we sometimes call buddha nature or expressing this deeper
awareness which we connect with in zazen. So in taking your posture, sitting upright, being present,
we are each expressing buddha as it appears on our own cushion or chair.
So meditation, zazen, and practice is not
primarily about understanding something or trying to figure out something. It's not about
some particular experience. It's about enacting or expressing
buddha nature. The deep awareness that we have an opportunity to connect with as we sit uprightly,
relaxed, inhaling and exhaling. Being present in this body and mind as it is.
Being open to not knowing who we are, what we're doing, how we're doing it, but just being here,
being present, this body and mind, and returning to pay attention to that.
So this is a kind of creative act, an act of expression. And this is not just about
our sitting meditation, although for us that's our focal point for this, but also it's about
what happens when we stand up and start doing walking meditation,
when we chant, when we go out into our lives.
So this creative mode of zazen, excuse me, in many ways interacts with aspects of our daily life.
So some of us here have explicitly what we call creative activities that we do.
Painting, or making music, or writing, or parenting, or as counselors or therapists helping people,
or as teachers. All of these are creative activities, but actually in our daily life,
through this awareness of zazen, we can see all of our activities
as creative, playful enactments of Buddha.
How do we express Buddha in our various activities, in our relationships,
in our presence, in our work context, in
meditation, cooking, gardening, washing dishes, taking out the trash. All of our daily activities
can be creative activities. And the creative activities that each of you do in your daily
life, there's a kind of mysterious but deep relationship between them and zazen.
So some of you have sat for the first time, a few of you for the first time this morning,
which is wonderful for all of us.
This isn't something that's necessarily obvious. It's not something we necessarily realize,
but in various ways there is this relationship between the activity of just sitting,
taking some regular time out of your life, 30 or 40 minutes, or even 15 or 20 minutes,
several times a week or more, and just being present, facing the wall, facing ourselves,
being willing to be in this body and mind, and to sit up brightly, and to see what that is,
and to pay attention to that gently, persistently. This informs all of the
everyday creative activities that each of you do, and vice versa.
So as we sit, we start to see, we start to develop a capacity. This is a practice of patience,
of tolerance, of awareness, of learning to be able to tolerate sometimes some physical discomfort,
more often just all the thoughts or feelings that are rumbling around,
many thoughts that come up that we don't control.
So for those of you who sat the first time, you may realize that thoughts arise,
and we don't know where they come from, and we don't control our thoughts, and actually
being in control of things is not the point of this practice. How can we be open to
playing with our experience, playing with our intention, playing with our activities?
So this sitting practice, if someone walked in and saw us all sitting here during meditation,
facing the wall, they would think of it as a very kind of stern or stoic kind of activity, but
I encourage you to find the play and the playfulness in your sitting and in your life.
Part of how this works is that we start to have a tolerance, a wider capacity to
see things in new ways, to try new things, to make mistakes,
and hopefully not too harmful mistakes, but to not to let go of our sense of
who we are and how the world is and how we should do things and how we can control things.
So we have specific forms for how to move around the meditation hall.
We have specific forms for bowing and for doing service and for chanting and so forth.
All of these, and also a form for doing this meditation practice, these are all ways to see
structures for seeing our deeper freedom, our deeper possibility for being in new ways.
And one aspect of this that's most fundamental, as you develop a regular sitting practice,
as this starts to become part of the rhythm of your life, for some people what happens more
if you come and do a longer sitting. So we offer every month either an all-day sitting or sometimes
a half-day sitting or next month three days to sit for a little longer when you're ready for that.
They provide more opportunity for this, but even just sitting for one period
and finding a regular rhythm of doing that through your week, we start to,
without necessarily knowing it or seeing it or realizing it, we start to access
this deep source of creative energy,
being willing to be present and upright. There is this,
Zen mostly talks about it in terms of metaphors, this wellspring or this spaciousness or this
stream of
creative awareness, creative energy.
So this isn't something you should try and get a hold of or try and figure out. This isn't
something you have to do anything about, actually. So again, our practice is not about reaching some
new state of mind or higher state of being or anything like that.
Our practice is about realizing something very deep that is already here for each of you in your
body and mind, in your own way. How Buddha looks is different on each cushion and chair.
How you express that in your uprightness, in your breathing,
is different. And yet, there is this deeper energy.
Some of you may recognize this when I talk about it and some not. It doesn't matter.
It's there. It's not, again, not something abstract.
It's not some philosophy or idea or some theory. It's much more tactile than that.
So people who paint or make music or write or parent, there are visible products.
Or maybe for playing music, there's a temporary transient audible product of your creativity.
For Zen students, what we create is much more ephemeral. We create this body of Buddha.
So it's not something that we don't really have a visible product. But
as you start to sit regularly, as you become familiar with this deeper space,
whether you think about it or know it or not, your awareness and your body itself becomes more
permeable, more accessible to this creative play.
And part of how this works,
so I want to get to the compassion part of this, part of how this works is that we start to
have a sense of our connectedness. So this is a basic Buddhist teaching that everything is
interconnected, that everything that happens, happens dependent on
mutual causation, this dependent arising of all things. In some ways, the whole universe is created
with this inhale and this exhale. Your whole world, including everybody you've ever known
or everybody who's ever known you or all the activities you've ever done,
is present here on this inhale and exhale. And we start to get a sense of that,
that we are deeply connected with each other and with many beings, and that things that happen
in different parts of the world or things that have happened in different parts of your life,
in the past or in the future, affect and interact with this next breath,
this last breath, and everything we do. So this deep interconnectedness is
part of this creative energy, a way of seeing this creative energy, a way of seeing how we are,
how our zazen is related to everything that we do, all of our creative activities in our life.
And again, when I talk about creative activities, I'm seeing this very widely.
How you enjoy walking down the street or riding a bicycle or seeing
the sights on your block. We can have that openness and freshness about our life.
We can inform our life with this creative energy.
From this connectedness comes what we sometimes call in Buddhism, compassion.
Because this deeper creative awareness, well, it's about ourselves, but it's also about
so-called others. Our usual way of thinking, our usual way of seeing the world, our usual
syntax and language for thinking is about subject and object. And we fall into thinking of ourselves
as subjects, verbing objects out there to get what we want, or protecting ourselves from being verbed
by subjects out there or whatever. But there is this connectedness. And we see that we are
related to those we may think of as others. We see that we are connected.
So the word compassion means passion together with. Again, this looks like a very
somber, stoic, stern kind of practice, just sitting upright,
eyes open, facing the wall. But really, you won't be able to persist in this unless you feel
some passion for life, some caring about what is the quality of this life? How am I
affecting the other people around me? How are they affecting me? How do we,
how am I working together with all the circumstances and situations of this life?
Self and others are connected.
So all of you, those of you who came for the first time this morning, and those of you who've
been here before, all of us came to this practice, well, maybe different combinations of reasons,
maybe out of some sense of wanting to be, to find some greater calm in our life,
wanting stress reduction, all of that is available in meditation, or wanting, or some question,
wanting to know how to take care of this life, how to be this person, or some sense of loss.
Many people find practice after some loss, some loved one, or some loss of some relationship,
or some situation, some job. The first noble truth is that there is sadness and suffering
as part of the nature of things. Compassion is about our caring about that. And because
you are here this morning, I know you all care about your life and the world.
So we are connected together, and the bodhisattva of compassion, the enlightening being of compassion
in Buddhism and Zen is named Kanon or Kanzeon. There's an image of him on either side wall,
actually Tara, the female version, one female expression of Kanon is right by the door in front.
The name Kanon means to hear, or Kanzeon, to hear the suffering of the world, to hear the sounds
of the world. So compassion is first and foremost in Buddhism about listening,
about being open, not just to others, but also to ourselves. So we need to find a way to sit
upright and present and be kind to ourselves. So if you need to change your position in the
middle of the period, that's okay. But also can you be kind to yourself and allow yourself to
just sit still without moving, to be present in this body as it is.
And in various ways in our life, we need to be kind to ourselves, forgive ourselves for being
human beings and be kind to others to see. I've been talking recently about Buddha nature,
this quality of awareness in all people, in all beings, in all things. How do we see that in
others? How do we respect others and respect ourselves? So this deep creative energy is a
kind of respect, a kind of honoring of our life and of our activities,
and of the situation of just sitting upright as Buddha.
I wanted to share a little bit of teaching about compassion.
So this is from a week before last, I went to a symposium on Western socially engaged Buddhism
in Western Massachusetts at the Zen Peacemakers Order, many impressive people. One of the
panels, though, was about compassionate care and specifically care for the dying.
And on this panel were a number of people who have done this quite a lot themselves,
but also train others to do this, including an old friend of mine, Joan Halifax, who
leads the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. And she had some interesting things to say about
compassion. So I want to try and share this. First of all, she talked about how
some people, particularly people who are in helping professions or practices,
so she was thinking about it in terms of people who take care of the dying. But
for several of you in the room of therapists, and others of you are teachers or do helping work
in some way. And one of the things that happens for people who do that a lot is
they have this sense of what's sometimes called compassion fatigue.
Nancy's smiling, she's a therapist. And they have some sense of that. And maybe all of us do.
We get tired of, you know, taking care of other people or being kind or listening to others.
We may feel like, I don't want to do that anymore. Well, you also have to listen to yourself. But
anyway, Joan said this interesting thing, first of all, that really, there's no such thing as
compassion fatigue. That's a misnomer. That happens when we are not accessing universal
compassion. When we have some limited idea of compassion, when we are attached to some
particular outcome, then, you know, we might feel this compassion fatigue. But this universal
compassion, which is what Kanzeon and Buddhist compassion is really about, is wider than that,
is about, I can't put it in words exactly, because to put it in words would be limited.
But it's this sense, and coming back to this creative, tactile sense of expression
that we connect with in Zazen, it's this total sense of wholeness, of it's okay,
of the whole universe being right here, of you, just as you are, and each of you,
even those of you who have just sat one period now, we all have a sense also of our own
limitations and our own sometimes greed and grasping or anger and frustration or confusion.
This is what compassion is about, is that we allow ourselves to be the person you are,
not limited by, you know, your name and personal history and social security number,
but actually what's going on now, as you said, breathing this body and mind.
So this universal compassion goes beyond, you know, our idea of how we should be compassionate,
and what we should be, and how we should care for things, and how we listen.
And she broke it, Joan broke it down into, she had six aspects of, you know,
how she sees compassion. She's obviously thought about it a lot, so I'll just share this with you,
and as a way of talking about the texture of compassion, the components of compassion.
So the first one, she said, is empathy, emotional attunement, that we can be empathetic and
experience others suffering, that we can feel something about how others feel.
So this, of course, is, you know, primary to the practice of listening and to the practice of,
well, anyone who's being helpful. But she said that actually empathy can be used destructively.
Empathy in and of itself doesn't mean that we're going to respond in a caring, kind way.
We might be, we might understand somebody's suffering and then do something, you know,
cruel to them, based on that. So empathy is not, by itself, is not enough.
So what she has to say is interesting. So empathy is the first one, though. Then,
concern, just to be concerned. Again, about both self and others, to actually, you know,
what's going on, to have some concern, to pay some attention.
The third one, she called positive regard.
And I think this relates to what I was talking about in terms of respect and respectfulness.
So positive regard includes for ourselves. So sometimes students get upset at themselves
because we see more fully our own limitations and our own greediness.
We have to have positive regard, respect for ourselves and for others.
And even for people we maybe have problem with sometimes.
This, we can see this related to the practice I've talked about, about
seeing good in nature in all, in all beings. It's positive regard.
The next one, fourth of her six, she called insight. And it's a funny word for it,
because what she was talking about is to see self and other, to look and see.
Differences, to see how I am different from others, to see the particular quality of self
and other, and to see what we are up to in our relationships with others, and to see what,
and to see how others are with us. Actually, so I would call this more
discernment or even discrimination, but to actually pay attention to that.
The fifth one, and this is very, very important, is the desire to transform others' suffering.
And I would say this includes to transform our own suffering.
So this practice of zazen, this practice of awareness, of just sitting, we talk about it,
particularly in Suzuki Rush lineage, about non-gaining attitude, not to be attached to
some particular goal. And yet there is this, there is a transformative function to this.
And we don't always see how that works. And it happens over time.
Sometimes it happens, sometimes we have some sudden experience and let go of something,
that happens too, it can happen. But the point is sustaining it.
And part of that is what this, what she's calling this fifth aspect of
compassion, the desire to transform suffering. So we actually need to be empathetic.
We need to be concerned. We need to have a positive regard.
We need to see how things are working. And then we have to really care about transforming
this quality of suffering and difficulty in the world and in ourselves.
And then the last one I've already spoken of is to not be attached to some particular outcome.
So how do we give ourselves, to ourselves and to all beings and with caring, with compassion,
without having some idea of what some particular outcome should be?
So these are, you know, so this is interesting to consider, you know, in terms of
compassion and caring and beneficial action in the world, these aspects of compassion.
This, first of all, just this empathy or emotional attunement, this concern,
this positive regard or respect, this seeing into how we are related to others,
this desire to transform, and then not being attached to some particular outcome.
All of these are aspects of what Joan calls universal compassion, deeper, wider compassion,
not trying to manipulate things to get what we think needs to happen in some particular situation.
So I want to bring this back to the earlier discussion about creativity.
I would say that to really express and be and enact this kind of compassion
requires a kind of creativity, a kind of openness to seeing things in a new way,
a kind of playfulness, a kind of willingness to
look at the situation, to listen to our own or other suffering or both,
to see how can we be helpful to ask that question, to care about that, to be concerned,
to be playful about that.
So in our lives, so we can do this in our, this creative energy that we access in our
meditation practice and in our meditative awareness does inform all of our
everyday creative and compassionate activities and awarenesses, and we can kind of turn towards this.
So in your own life to see, and I'll be talking more about this tomorrow evening, but how to see
how you can try to be creative about how to express kindness, how to care for others,
how to care for yourself, to be kind to yourself too.
This is absolutely necessary to really be compassionate.
To not feel overwhelmed and fatigued by being helping others all the time.
Universal compassion means that we have some sense of balance and wholeness and it's not
that there's some particular thing that we have to do right now.
To give ourselves the space to just be present and upright, to express Buddha in
all kinds of ways that Shakyamuni Buddha never would have dreamed of.
So Buddha is alive in the world, in us, each of us, in our way of meeting the world, in our way of
bringing our wholeness to our life, in our openness to caring, in our openness to this creative play.
So we actually have some time now for discussion, questions, responses,
and for people who are new here this morning, also any basic questions about meditation,
please feel free. So, questions, comments, responses?
Good.
Good, enjoy that.
So, this happens, this is one of the reasons why we say to sit with your eyes open.
It's not the only reason, we sit with our ears open too.
But the point of this practice is not to reach some special experience or state of mind or state
of being, it's to be with what is. So compassion means to, okay, I'm sleepy and groggy this morning,
how is that? That's actually, I think, a very rich time to sit.
So, hopefully you'll have times when you're feeling more awake also,
more energetic, but there's a kind of energy that happens in sleepiness. So you can also
be present and upright and aware in the middle of sleepiness. It may be, it's most difficult
because you're trying to be something other than sleepy. And, you know, of course, you know,
if you started snoring, someone next to you might poke you, but, and you have permission to,
if somebody next to you is snoring, to gently, you know, just let them know that they're doing
that if they're sleeping. For myself, I, you know, it took me many years of sitting before I could
fall asleep in Zazen, but yeah, be with this situation as it is.
And sometimes you might be sleepy, sometimes you might be agitated,
concerned about something going on in your life that week,
or you might be, you know, anyway, there's a continuum of awareness
that includes dream and sleep, to be present and upright in the middle of that. So, good.
Again, this is being, being kind to yourself means being able to just be present and upright,
even if you're feeling sleepy. Other comments or questions or responses, please feel free.
Well, one thought I had as I was listening was, I find myself constantly looking back at this
idea, it's very easy in an atmosphere like this, we have our reminders of Buddha nature
to acculturate that here and to feel their presence, but I find it difficult when I get
into other aspects of my life, such as my job, where there are no touch points of Buddha nature,
other areas around me, to tap into their presence all the time. So,
I find that's for me a struggle to maintain some idea of Buddha nature environments where there's
reminders of that.
Good, thank you. That's a wonderful, important question for all of us. So,
we're not practicing in a residential community or a monastery, we're in,
you know, out on the street in the city. All of us have, you know, various kinds of active lives
in the world. So, yeah, this is the question, practically for us.
And one of the basic aspects of our practice is to remember Buddha, to remind ourselves of Buddha,
to bring back this awareness right into our everyday activities, as you're working in your
everyday context. So, there's a particular, there's a branch of Buddhism, Nantsen, that
does what's called Nembutsu practice, which is chanting the name of Buddha as a reminder.
Literally, it means to remember Buddha. As Zen students, we can do that as well.
So, based on your connection from sitting with breathing,
to just stop in the middle of your day and take a breath, and really enjoy your inhale and your
exhale. It doesn't take that long. It won't take you away from the work you have to do very long,
but just to stop and do that. There are various tricks for this. So, you say you work in a cubicle,
or a desk in an office, you know, you could have something on your desk to remind you.
It doesn't have to be a Buddha or a Bodhisattva image. It could be, I don't know,
some natural, you know, a pine cone or a rock you like particularly. It doesn't have to be,
this isn't about Buddhism. This is about bringing your life to life. So, yeah, have something to
remind you. And there are various other particular mindfulness practices that I've mentioned before.
One is whenever the phone rings. Do you have a phone on your desk? Yeah, so when the phone rings,
sometimes we can get in the habit of just reaching for the phone and picking it up on
the first ring. I used to work at Parallax Press that published Thich Nhat Hanh's books, and they
had this practice there. And I kind of, it graded on me a little bit because you have to, whenever
the phone rings, everybody stops everything. You're in the middle of typing a word, and you
stop in the middle of the word, and wait to the fourth ring, and then take that time to breathe.
But you can do a more moderate version of that. You know, if the person who's calling you really
wants to talk to you, they'll still be there on the third ring. So, the first ring and the second
ring, you can, you know, take a breath or two, and then pick it up. So, again, this is about
finding ways to remind Buddha in the middle of your day. Another one, one of my teachers talked
about is whenever you walk through a doorway. I'm entering a new space. So, you have doors somewhere
in your office. So, every time you're passing through a doorway, you may, now don't know if you
forget, and you pick up the phone right away, or you walk through the doorway, and you don't think
about it. That's okay. Don't, you know, be compassionate to yourself and to the doorway.
But sometimes you might remember, oh yeah, okay. So, there's a kind of craft or knack that we get
of reminding ourselves of this kind of space that's here. So, thank you for that question.
Other questions, practical or otherwise, any responses, please feel free. Yes, Tom.
You know, when you're meditating, you focus on breathing. The thing your mind could move away.
How long should you move away before it comes back to breathing? When you realize that you're
off on some train of thought, it doesn't matter if it's a couple minutes or 20 minutes.
So, it's not, there's not some rule about these things. It's about being alive.
So, oh yeah, I'm thinking about, you know, this thing I have to do tomorrow. Oh, okay.
And just return to awareness. And it's not that it's bad to have those thoughts.
Thoughts naturally come and go. But just when you realize, oh yeah,
I'm thinking about whatever, gently then return to uprightness, inhale, exhale.
So, you don't have to, so trying to get rid of your thoughts or trying to manipulate your
thoughts is just more thinking. Just let it go. And more thoughts will likely come again shortly.
Or sometimes there's a space between them, and that's okay too.
Good practical questions. Any other comments, responses about practice? Yes, Jeremy.
If you don't mind, if I make a comment to what was said before by the way to be generous,
or to be, to relate to other people better, to be more generous to them. I was trying to
present a question to Mr. Ruiz the other day. He gave the response of the Buddha nature
is a good way to respond to other people. I think I've found that if you allow yourself
to see your own Buddha nature, and that the mind is separating you from what you think,
is your thought of Buddha nature is so microscopically small. I find that to be
very helpful in relating to other people. Yeah, so this Buddha nature is not something
that we can have or not have or get, but it's just that there is this underlying possibility
of awareness and respectfulness. And so to respect others, respect yourself,
to see this quality of awareness in our life. Yeah, good. Thank you. Dawn.
You guys, well recently, I've noticed, have said, and I'm not going to say it quite right,
it took me a minute when I understood the internet. When we're sitting, notice,
just start, can we be happy with just this, or be content with just how we're feeling,
how we're sitting, just naturally. And so that's, that's helped me a lot with what
John says, number six, kind of outcome. Just in some of my outcomes with sitting. So
kind of slowly working on being content with outcomes. Because I think I get so hung up in
that, you know, I'm expecting, you know, my expectations. A lot of people do that personally,
for sure I do. And that causes so much pain and suffering, you know. And so that's been
a really helpful practice, with you saying that, to just be able to sit with that, and like,
can I be content with how I'm really feeling right now? And so, just, so that kind of connected
me with number six. Yeah, I, you know, and I'm feeling this more and more, that the biggest
obstacle to awareness and to Zen practice, for Americans particularly, is that we tend to have
some, it's very hard to get rid of our idea of how things should be. We're having some ideal of
enlightenment, or meditation, or Buddha, or whatever. We, our minds are such that we create
these ideas. It's very subtle, and it's very pernicious that my Zazen shouldn't be sleeping,
you know, or should be some particular way. We do have all kinds of ideas about that.
Or how I should be as a person, you know, we, this is very deep and pervasive. And it's
really, it's a big obstacle. Not that you should now have the idea to destroy all ideas,
but just to notice that when you have some ideal of how things should be, that that's not it.
But actually, we're alive. It's all about just finding the way for you
to be alive in your life, to bring life to your life. Thank you.
Yes, Steve.
I've done meditation off and on, more often than not.
Part of it is, it's very difficult at times. It's very difficult to just sit with what comes up.
And so it does feel like a somber challenge to practice at times.
And yet, I watch, I just watched a DVD of the Dalai Lama, and, you know, he talks about joy.
Yes, good.
There's a lot of seemingly joy that he expresses. When do you get that?
Is that by product of long-term practice?
So you didn't notice your joy in this last period of meditation?
No. With my new colleague, I was very sleepy, and, you know, bouncing back and forth between,
I know there's antidotes to when you feel sleepy, you know, using some of those.
Yeah, you know, one of the things you can do is if you're sleepy, maybe I should mention this
as a practical thing, you know, we usually say to look about 45 degree angle down, but
you can raise your gaze a little bit to help raise your energy if you feel sleepy. So yeah,
all these techniques, but can you enjoy just being sleepy? Can you enjoy, please enjoy
this situation? So yes, this practice is about joyfulness. And everything I've been talking
about is about joyfulness. Creativity is joyful. Compassion is joyful. How do we
enjoy our breath? How do we enjoy the challenges of, you know, sitting upright for 30 minutes or
whatever? So, again, you have some idea of joyfulness.
There's a joy, there's all kinds of joys, of course, but there's a naturally bubbling
surfacing joy. Yeah. That I kind of wonder if that happens. And yet, when I just mentioned
this, there was kind of a, you know, a recognition that yes, this is a challenge.
Yeah. That it is work, you know, and that naturally bubbling doesn't,
and it's not just here, I've been in other places too, you know, but that's elusive sometimes.
Yes. So sad. It's work, and that means it's also play. So this is what I've been talking
about today. This source of creative energy, it's joyful. It may also, it doesn't exclude
the sadness. It doesn't exclude anything. But just to be able to sit and be present and upright
with the difficulties and concerns and questions and sadnesses of your life,
there's a kind of dignity, there's a kind of wholeness, there's a kind of joy that
is available. And again, it's not your idea of joy,
but enjoy the situation of being present. Just sit. So this is a yogic practice, as I've,
as I said, saying earlier during the meditation instruction, we actually, you know, sit upright.
All of the forms we do here, our bows, our prostrations, are yogic practices. They're to
find in our body, in our tactile sense, as opposed to our ideas,
some awareness or space. So one of the practices, one practice I'd like to encourage is
something that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about, that while you're sitting, please smile quietly.
It can be a soft smile. It doesn't mean you should try and, you know, have some idea of
smiling or some idea of getting rid of all suffering. Smile in the middle of whatever's
going on. So if you look at Buddha images, maybe not Bodhidharma, because he's very stern, but
there's a subtle smile. And just smile a little bit as you're sitting to give yourself that space
to enjoy the work and play of being present in the middle of concerns, in the middle of
uncertainty, in the middle of, you know, all the incredible suffering of our world,
in the middle of sleepiness, frustration. Right in the middle of frustration, you can enjoy that.
It's possible. You can say, oh yeah, here I am. I'm all concerned about or anxious about
this or that or I'm frustrated with so-and-so or whatever. Can you just be there and enjoy that?
Yeah. So I know this is challenging, but plan. Kathy? I just wanted to respond briefly in that I
definitely think from my own experience and from lots of people's experience that there's also,
you go through a lot of difficulty. It's not easy to see the joy sometimes because as you sit,
some things come to the surface that are painful that you become more acutely aware of,
whether it's being angry at somebody in your life or seeing yourself more honestly or
missing something or it can be a variety of things. And so I think that that does get easier over
time, but there definitely is a sitting through. And Thay and I remember once when we were doing
Sashin, you said that you sat at Sashin once where somebody ran screaming from the temple
at the end of the day. So that there are times when it's like overwhelming.
But there's also the intense other feelings as well that come as you sit, which are positive.
And yes, absolutely. Thank you for saying that. And
just being able to sit and be present and upright, even in the middle of those difficulties,
there's a kind of deep satisfaction that we can start to feel that even if I'm sleepy or
feeling these crummy parts of myself or whatever, still I can just,
I can be present and upright. And there's a dignity to that.
And yeah, it does. So doing this practice regularly over time does help to support that.
I am maybe also hung up on the word enjoy as well, because I think for me, when I think of
enjoying something, I think of maybe a synonym of it being to like it. And I wonder if that's
maybe not completely necessary when you're talking about enjoying something. And so I
wonder if it would it be okay to use the word like appreciate or embody and appreciate meaning
also sort of to observe the value of something. Sure. All of that's there. And so our idea of
joy is not enjoy. Enjoy means to bring joy to also. To empower and have and to bring and enjoy,
you know, so that, you know, joy might be a good koan for many of you. What is joy? Just,
you know, not based on your idea of liking something.
You might really dislike something, but really enjoy it. I remember a story about a Zen student
who went to a movie and somebody asked him afterwards, how was the movie? And he said,
oh, I really enjoyed it. And he said, oh, was it a good movie? No, it was a terrible movie,
but I really enjoyed myself in it. So how can you enjoy this difficulty?
And so I'm enjoying the tension of it's kind of time to stop, but I don't want to.