Good morning. Welcome to a Chinese landscape painting. It's a little bit what it feels like out here with the mist coming and going. Nice to see you all. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, my next door neighbor and I were talking and she had a flower pot with a burned leaf in it, burned from the frost. I said, oh, what's that? She said, it's a night-blooming Sirius. Want it? So a year later, it's, I don't know, three feet tall with a nine-foot branch and just finished its fifth bloom with another one coming.

[01:13]

And I have been pretty excited about this blossoming. My next door neighbor said that I should be working in a fertility clinic, teaching meditation. But even the buds after the opening are pretty spectacular. If anybody wants to look at them, it's just inside the front door of the house. And of course, it begins to open about eight o'clock in the evening and by two in the morning, it's at its absolute perfection, filling the entire room with perfume. And then by morning, it's closed and drooping and on its way out. So heaven forbid, if the mind goes to clinging and grasping, it's not what this is about. This is about get up in the middle of the night, ooh and ah, be grateful for this brief appearance, sing to the plant as

[02:28]

much as you can and let it go. Last weekend, Bill and I renewed our marriage vows on the occasion of our 20th wedding anniversary. And it looked pretty possible that the Sirius would open. Bloomed early and later, but on its own appointed schedule. So what I want to talk about this morning is really in response to what one of you emailed me about recently. What are we doing? What are we doing in our meditation practice? What are we doing? Picking up the teachings of

[03:32]

the Buddha and all the ancestors before and since his great awakening and teaching. And the first thing I would say is it's not about what are we doing, it's about what am I doing. There is certainly enormous benefit in being able to practice together, to have the support and company of like-minded beings. But ultimately the efficacy of meditation practice is really in each of our hands. In the first book that came out with Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings in it,

[04:40]

Miracle of Mindfulness, he talks early on in that book about you can't heal the wound you don't know you have. You first have to be willing to see the wound and be interested in it. Investigate and look into is the implication. So in this tradition the focus is on first of all noticing the fact of our suffering and giving up our aversion to it. Cultivating our willingness to notice what arises in the mind that leads to suffering and what arises in the mind that leads to joy.

[05:42]

So one answer I would propose about this question, what am I doing, has to do with understanding that no matter what tradition of meditation in the Buddhist streams, what we're doing first of all is studying the mind and only secondarily, although significantly, training the mind. And what we run into right away is all of our habitual thinking about how I'm suffering because of what the world is doing to me or what some particular person is doing to me or, you know, fill in the blanks. But where we have this sense of our suffering is caused by what's happening out there. And I think that for many of us it's a very long journey to begin to see that whatever happens

[07:01]

is what happens. And suffering arises from what arises in the mind reactively. And I think that the process of becoming curious and interested in suffering and in particular my own reactive patterns, which I think can be reasonably called the territory of suffering, that may take a while. We may run into a lot of the reaction of I don't wanna. I don't wanna hang out here. There's a dedication verse that I enjoy using that has a line about, I think I have to do the

[08:04]

whole thing. May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all never be separated from the sacred happiness devoid of suffering. May all know equanimity without too much attraction and too much aversion. So part of the process of studying the mind has to do with noticing this pull to like, don't like, attraction, aversion, attraction, aversion, attraction, aversion. The night blooming serius is in the attraction part of it. Except that when we had the great bloom

[09:09]

night before last with a beautiful scent, the night before that we had three blooms and they smelled like some funky basement. But it says in the book that there's perfume. Well, it's perfume, but not what I think of as perfume. Fetid, stinky, damp basement smell. I think it had to kind of get its gears going for them. But you know, there was one night attraction to the bloom, aversion to the smell. The next night, attraction, attraction, attraction. So in answer to this cry, this question, what are we doing? What am I doing? You know, when I suggested that the practice here is walking in a clockwise direction,

[10:20]

I'm also inviting you to participate in walking in this room in a way that's inconvenient. Sarah, sitting in that seat gets to walk all the way around until she gets to her seat. Gary, who's right there, because he usually sits there walking all the way around. Because of course, when we take on these practices for the cultivation of mindfulness, we run into all of our preferences about, well, I want to go this way because it's more convenient, it's easier. But of course, our lives don't always give us that kind of option. What happens when I sit still for a little while? Some of you may have experienced what I call the great itch gremlin.

[11:28]

Is it itch here, and then I scratch it, and it's here, and it's here, and it's here. After a while, I realized, just stop scratching. This is the mind. I think that for many people, meditation practice is in what I consider a kind of hermetically sealed box. In formal practice, sitting and walking, for example, that's where I'm studying the mind and training the mind. I would propose that, in fact, it is only when we pick up the practices that we learn and cultivate

[12:33]

for studying the mind and training the mind. Only when we pick up those practices and extend them into as many moments of the day as possible, do we begin to have the possibility of actually training the mind. Because of course, what we haven't noticed is all of the unconscious training of the mind that's called conditioning, that comes from all of the experiences that we have, beginning in utero. How many hundreds of thousands and millions of times have I practiced whatever reaction I notice? One of my favorites to notice, because it's a conditioned habit of the mind for

[13:44]

so many of us as Americans, is habitual judgment. But there, of course, are many others. The habits that come with our conditioning, that arise as a result of the kind of training that we had, consciously or unconsciously, as children, but throughout our lives, those patterns we have recreated and re-energized literally countless numbers of times. And then we're surprised when we don't notice some relief from the suffering that comes from those patterns in a few weeks

[14:44]

or a month or maybe even a year. So being patient, being persistent, being determined, being consistent, and discovering as we can practices that we can train for both in formal meditation and in our so-called regular lives. That's where there's some opening. I met with someone yesterday who's rather new to meditation in this tradition and who came to our summer retreat and who, when we met yesterday,

[15:45]

expressed surprise at what I call retreat fallout. She, in a week, began to be able to notice how much time she spends telling stories. About what is going to happen and or what did happen. Our beloved past and future. And she began, in a week, to begin to have the taste of what happens with showing up. Wow. Beauty has the effect of, you know, a brick bat on the side of the head.

[16:54]

The night-blooming serious blossom reminded me of that. A friend of ours who's a painter was here for our ceremony and stayed on for a while and did the wall behind this beautiful Buddha from Eiling Temple in China, now underwater. And Glenn found a wonderful piece of old wood out there in the firewood shed, complete with rusty nail, to reset the figure. Bill said that we've just been playing all week. I think what we've been doing is allowing this Buddha to come alive for us.

[18:10]

And when I listened to my friend yesterday as she was talking to me about her beginning already to have some taste for her capacity to be present, not thinking, not caught in storytelling all the time. From paying attention to sitting up straight, not in holding oneself upright, but allowing the upper torso to be in alignment. Earth-shattering. I adjusted the placement of the elbows for a few of you this morning, because what I noticed was for some of you, you have your hands placed in such a way that your elbows are in front of your shoulders, which, of course, causes strain in the lower back.

[19:26]

And if the elbows are underneath the shoulders, there is some more ease in the lower back. Now, I could leave you alone, although that would be very hard for me to do. That kind of suffering, I'd like to open up, and I might adjust your placement of your elbows a few times, and then after that I'd leave it up to you. Because, of course, we have a habit in the way we place our hands when we sit down to meditate. And what is habitual, whether it's in the body, in the mind, in our speaking, what is habitual is often not noticed.

[20:30]

So a lot of the process of studying the mind is developing some ways for beginning to be present in those moments that I have a habit for not being present in. Checked out or busy, thinking about the past and future, looking around. In, I think it's last week's New Yorker, there's an article by Oliver Sacks, which I hope everyone will read. He's talking about the experiences of people who are blind, whether they're blind from birth or become blind later on. And part of what he's describing is what those of us who have some experience in meditation know about the domination of the eyes, of seeing.

[21:55]

And how when you go blind or are born blind or practice with your eyes dropped for 10 or 20 or 30 days, what happens to all of the other senses? A whole range of perception. It's like the dial gets turned up to visit. So, of course, part of this whole studying the mind and training the mind also has a lot to do with. Eventually being willing to have a witness. Usually what's referred to as working with a teacher.

[23:03]

But a lot of what I and other people who sit in a teaching seat are doing is being a witness as you bring forth, as you present what you're seeing about your own mind strength. Not for my benefit, but for your own, because, of course, when you do that with a witness, you hear what you're saying differently than if you have the conversation by yourself. And there's, of course, the additional benefit, one would hope, of having the person sitting in the teaching seat having a little experience or a lot of experience to be able to say, try bringing your elbows so they're aligned under your shoulders. Oh, notice the habit of judgment, etc.

[24:19]

And, of course, in the end, change comes about from what we begin to see ourselves. Sometimes when we're ready, someone else can say, I noticed such and such a pattern. And if I'm willing to give up defendedness, I may in that moment say, oh, I'd like to sit with that. See what I see. But the change that comes with studying the mind and training the mind rests on my own experience of noticing. I've said this, I think, before, but in the context of what I'm bringing up this morning, I think it's relevant.

[25:45]

Some years ago, an old friend of mine who's been a practitioner in the Zen tradition for, at the point at which we had this conversation, maybe 25 years, and is himself someone who sits in the teaching seat. And he admitted to me something he had not ever said out loud to anybody else, which is, I don't have any confidence that I know what I'm doing when I'm meditating. And I felt my heartache for my friend because, in fact, he has had and has a quite authentic and deep meditation practice.

[26:47]

But without some confidence in what he knows and what he doesn't know, he was mostly filled with doubt, self-doubt. So there is, along with guidance, a little to the left, a little to the right, notice what happens with the placement of the chin, comes the process of also having someone confirm the validity of what you have come to see. And I think that for us as Americans, putting ourselves in this position of being seen by another person, and I don't mean our press release,

[27:59]

I mean a much more authentic and deep being seen, can initially feel like, hmm, I don't wanna. And I think that's particularly true if we've grown up feeling a lot of judgment, being told that we were not perfect enough by somebody significant in our lives. But even that early training about what a creep I am can be dismantled. We can cultivate our capacity to release ourselves from those views that are, in fact, not accurate or sound.

[29:01]

So that's what's on my mind this morning. As some of you know, because you were here, we just finished a retreat in July. And as I think many of you know, I have a great regard for extended retreats and what one can drop into by way of studying the mind. But I also know that what's actually crucial is what I do many, many times during each day.

[30:15]

This is where working with precepts can be a great path, because, of course, the precepts are pointing out the areas of behavior in our daily lives. That we may want to begin to notice. I mentioned this during the retreat, and the precept that I mentioned was in the so-called ten grave precepts, a disciple of Buddha does not lie. It really caught my friend's attention. She said, not lie. I don't lie. I'm not a person who lies. And she then began, since the retreat, paying attention to all kinds of lying that she hadn't noticed.

[31:28]

Silence, exaggeration, my favorite, understatement, etc. So I suggested, stay with that precept since it's the one that picked you. A year and a half. But you have to pepper your life with reminders, because what we most want to remember that we are going to do, we forget. As Coyote says, in all of the Coyote stories, after the old wise crone says something or other, I knew that, I just forgot. It's that part of the untrained mind, the conditioned mind, called the saboteur.

[32:32]

What was it I was going to pay attention to? A month ago, last year. So, I wonder if any of you would like to bring something up. Yes, William? At the beginning of your talk, you said something like, mind study, studying the mind is crucial and mind training is almost secondary. And I wondered whether your choice of the word secondary was meant to point to a sequence or to evaluation? Well, I'd have to think about it, but I think perhaps some of both. Because to a remarkable degree, when we see a pattern that clearly leads to suffering, when we see the suffering,

[33:42]

there's often already the beginning of the dismantling of that pattern. So, for example, paying attention to the conditioned habit of one. After a while, if I keep showing up for that, noticing that pattern, cultivating the willingness to see what might be an instance of one, I begin to see the consequences of that behavior. And the seeing the consequences becomes the ground for the willingness to give the habit up. So, I do think that that seeing is crucial and that training the mind doesn't become a possibility until or unless that seeing begins to occur.

[34:56]

And I also think that, particularly for us as Americans, because we have so much emphasis on doing, the combination of the emphasis on doing and the pace of contemporary life is such that we may miss the possibility of if I can just keep coming back to being present, keep coming back to showing up, there isn't so much to do. The very dismantling of conditioning can happen with benign neglect, with that returning and resting in the present moment. Given what you've said, then I want to ask you about the meaning of study in this context.

[35:59]

Because I think one can easily understand study as studying about, rather than a direct engagement. The root of the word study is to be eager, to dab. That's great. Well, I think the distinction you're pointing out is crucial. The difference between experiencing the arising of reaction and in time developing my ability to be present in the midst of that arising, I also experience it rises and gone. And I begin to experience the reaction of anger and that even that emotion has the mark of change, of impermanence, gone.

[37:01]

And I have the glimpse of what happens when I don't feed with storytelling. The very reaction of anger or judgment or self-doubt or fill in the blanks. That's what I mean by the continual returning to being present. And as that capacity for presence becomes more and more accessible, and I have more and more levels of energy in being present, I'm developing the willingness to experience reactive emotions, for example, in some way other than feeding them with storytelling. Or whatever our particular way of feeding the reactive emotion may be. So there's no doing in that process.

[38:09]

Now there is the eagerness, the cultivation of the eagerness and curiosity about reactive patterns. Over against, ugh, not that again. Ugh. But the only doing here is noticing and coming back into the alignment of the upper body, the experience of gravity, breath. And if I do that several hundred times a day, I begin to cultivate the taste for that coming back into the present moment that takes a second. And I only have to be present with reactive anger, for example, once and experience anger rising, gone.

[39:10]

Ugh. It's that glimpse into the liberation from the habit of reactive emotional states. So in this context, studying is much more in the realm of noting and get out of town. Note, that is observe, identify, name and come back into aligned posture, gravity, breath. Because for many of us, we notice the reaction and then we have this whole long exploration about the reaction and what a creep I am and I always do this. And well, I wouldn't have done that if he hadn't spoken to me, that damn driver behind me on my tail flashing his lights. We get caught in what is this landscape the Buddha identified as suffering.

[40:17]

So in this context, study is embedded in this practice of note, come back into the present moment. And there may come a time, but it is much later in the game than most of us as Americans consider, to actually study causes and conditions for a particular reactive pattern. That can be fruitful after I've had enough experience of being present with the reaction to actually have some insights about causes and conditions begin to bubble up. Otherwise, we are just reinforcing thinking about the reaction, not directly experiencing the reaction. Bill is helping me unpack what I'm saying because of course I have this tendency up until now to speak in code.

[41:35]

It seems to me if you have a very reactive mind, which I do, that there is a kind of a razor's edge between being able to be present in a fruitful way, as opposed to needing to move the mind. Do you know what I'm saying? Sure, that's the reaction of aversion. I want to get rid of this or change this. No, I don't mean that. I mean, let's say the reactivity is so intense, is it possible that it's ever a better practice to say, don't go down that road? Sometimes, but it depends a lot on what the particular reaction is that you're working with. For example, after you spend a few days or a week doing the noting practice of habitual judgment and experiencing the sinking that comes with the habit of judgment,

[42:54]

I wouldn't linger there. I wouldn't do bare noting of habitual judgment longer than it takes me to see, oh, this is a pattern. Here's a habit. In that particular case, what I would suggest is quick, ten things you're grateful for, specific and particular. That's an example of picking my mind out of that deep habitual groove of habitual judgment and placing it on the groove I hope I can begin to set more deeply and intentionally called the quality of mind of appreciation and gratitude. But this is, of course, where having somebody to work with can be very helpful because what I just described will not be applicable to every reactive pattern.

[43:59]

I also want to just call your attention, if I may, I have this reactive mind. The very language of I have carries a kind of solidifying in the description of the nature of your mind stream. I think there's some benefit in noticing the language patterns that lead us to solidifying our definitions of who I am. I am reactive. I am angry. I am lazy. Up until now, I've noticed a strong tendency for reactivity. There's a little door open when I speak that way.

[44:59]

It's no accident that the first of the perfections, the ground for the entire path is the cultivation of generosity. Generosity manifests in our relationship with ourselves as kindness, spaciousness, patience. Oh, up until now, rather than recommitting, vowing to, well, I'll always be like this, that thinking carries a language of always and never. Kiss of death. But definitely, it's absolutely correct that there are certain reactive patterns where the conditioning is very deep, where what we need to do is to have some sense about where I can place attention.

[46:11]

Rather than revisiting and re-energizing, re-creating over and over again that particular reactive pattern. I have this stone from Eagle Beach up in Juneau. You look at the top of it, all you see are barnacles. But then there's this lovely stone underneath it. If you think of reactive patterns as these barnacles, the barnacles can get worn away and chipped away in time. So a lot of meditation practice, if you will, this whole path of mind training, can be seen as uncovering what is our essential nature of mind, which is virtuous and pure. Well, not my work. Take me four more lifetimes to get that, if ever.

[47:19]

Ah, conditioned mind speaking. Yes? I just wanted to share a response that I had to the article you mentioned about blindness, which I just read. It made a huge impression on me, and he interviewed a number of people who had been born sighted and then at different points became blind. And in one of them, I remember when I read the article, having heard interviewed several years ago, he made a huge impression on me then. And he talks about this experience of deep blindness where he forgets what it's like to be sighted and he can no longer reconstruct that. And then he interviews the other people who've also gone blind to a totally different experience where they work very hard to maintain that visual sense and reconstruct it in their minds. And some of those second people sort of almost express a horror at this loss that this other man describes and says, well, that's not my experience at all.

[48:26]

And I guess it just made a huge impression on me, the kind of surrender that I saw in the man who described deep blindness. And the kind of acceptance of the loss and just this kind of complete acceptance and willingness to let go and then experience the world in this really radically different way without this thing that had been such an important part of life. And that we all is such an important part of how all of us experience life. I don't know if that's a question, but I just wanted to share that because I guess I had a deep respect for his willingness to experience this deep blindness. Well, I found the article very stimulating, and I probably will require people who come here to do retreats to read the article before they sign up.

[49:29]

Because for anyone who's not used to sustained periods of silence, which includes the eyes dropped, because there's a lot of nonverbal speaking through eye contact. When you spend a week or two or three with your eyes dropped, initially people will, not always, but not at all uncommon, to have a kind of freak out about, well, but I'm so alone. I feel so isolated. How will I know how I'm doing if I can't look at everybody's face and find out that they think I'm fine? And of course, from another point of view, the possibility is to see, oh, look at how much of my conditioning includes getting all my cues from out there about how I am.

[50:30]

And my okayness, often to the absence of some sense from the inside out. I suppose part of reading the article and the effect that I felt from reading it is because my eyesight is deteriorating measurably, and Bill has macular degeneration in one eye. And I have a friend who's an artist in New York who has been blind for a number of years, and I've watched her resist accepting her blindness. So reading the article, there was a kind of vivid, direct experience of, oh, here are people who Saks has interviewed and worked with for whom there was this great loss, but that's not the whole picture by any means.

[51:50]

Not by any means. Sarah? I've been sort of playing with, you know, what am I doing, and I find that what I seem to be enjoying doing, it really is an incredibly rich field, but I'm just seeing how deep it is, and that is just being with pure perception. So as I was walking this morning, I was just trying to be in the moment and keep coming back to being present, and I found that, you know, my hip was hurting, the Achilles tendon was bothering me, and it just felt as if I had, even though I wasn't conscious of thoughts coming in saying I'm aging, this is the end, still there just seemed to be an incredibly subtle level of baggage that I was carrying in terms of cultural, conceptual. Could you speak to that? Because it wasn't anything that was coming through as thoughts, but it was just there as if I was dragging it along with me.

[52:59]

Well, you know, during the retreat I talked about this phenomenon that I call dragging our gunny sack around, and of course none of us, including me, knew what the word gunny meant, except that you fill it with gunnies, you know, you drag around all the things that have happened that are terrible, etc. Well, it turns out that the word gunny refers to a word, now I can't remember the word from which gunny comes, but it means hemp. So it's a sack made out of hemp fiber, but I've seen pictures, for example, of people harvesting different things, like cotton, these great big sacks dragging along.

[54:02]

And I know from my own experience, I had a long period of time when I had this very big gunny sack into which I would put, you know, all the things that had happened to me that were terrible and that I didn't like, etc. dragging it along. I don't know if you've seen Luis Buñuel's movie, The Andalusian Dog, but there's a protagonist in the film, periodically is seen with a toe band across his forehead, pulling a baby grand piano with a dead donkey draped over it, like a kind of Spanish shawl. And of course, all he has to do is slip the toe line off and walk away. And when I saw that film, it dropped in so that later when I was ready to just drop the handle of the gunny sack, that image was very useful, do this with it.

[55:12]

And I had a conversation with someone recently whose relationship with his mother was just dreadful from the moment of his conception. And one of the things we talked about was doing a practice that would allow him to have some closure with his experience as a child growing up with the mind that his mother had. That he's incorporated certain features of her mind stream that lead to a lot of suffering, like resentment and some potential for meanness. But of course, if I register, oh, I've taken this characteristic of my mother's mind into my own mind stream, I then have a choice about whether I feed that patterning or let go of it.

[56:32]

And I'm completely convinced that we all have the potential for all of what we see in human behavior, including what leads to huge amounts of suffering. And I'm convinced that when I know that I'm capable of corruption, I can keep an eye on that possibility and not feed it or let it grow out of not paying attention. And I think that a lot more than we often know, we carry the patterning of conditioning in the body. One of the reasons I'm so gone on paying attention to what we say is that I can study the mind by paying attention to what I say and how I say what I say.

[57:43]

I can also train the mind by changing the way I speak. So if I understand you, I'm almost thinking, well, it's positive that I at least have awareness, consciousness of this gunny sack I'm carrying. And then if I could find some creative way to almost have a ritual about letting go of this. Well, you may want to consider that you want to let go of the gunny sack more than once. Because the gunny sack does have a certain amount of energy and commitment to not being put down. You're not going to get rid of me like that. It suddenly gets to be a very big gunny sack. And you know, maybe what we all ought to do is we ought to do a gunny sack retreat. Where we all make a gunny sack and we do some sort of ritual for a different relationship with the gunny sack.

[58:57]

Maybe we don't want to take those bags back to Martin Brothers. We may want to keep them for some gunny sack creations. Yes? As I listen to this, it seems to me there are potentially two categories here that may be usefully distinguished. One is conditioning and gunny sacks. And the other is conditions, which I call chassis problems. Macular degeneration, phlebitis, Achilles tendons, degenerating hips, on and on. Physical conditions, which are sources of suffering, which can generate reactive expectation or judgment and the like. And many of the practices which are useful in dissolving conditioning, I think, can be brought to bear on our responses or reactions to conditions.

[60:06]

Well, in the way you just spoke, I could hear you saying that the suffering is in the phlebitis in your leg. Then I misspoke. It's my reaction to the phlebitis. It's my reaction to losing my eyesight. It's my reaction to having a degenerated hip such that I don't get to walk up and down the ridge with you. And that's all in the mind. And I think it takes a long time to get that. I think we have so much conditioning that our suffering is caused out there. And we don't see that reaction is what's happening in the conditioned, often unconscious mind. What's the difference then, just going on from Bill's analogy, from real physical pain, for example?

[61:19]

I don't mean to go into the more nebulous thing about mental pain, but physical pain, what's the difference between having your hand hurt or your hip hurt? And obviously you can build all kinds of things into it that are reactive, but there is a place where there is physical pain. And my relationship and experience of the pain can be vastly different if I turn towards the physical discomfort. I use language that's more neutral. I begin to have interest and curiosity about the area where there is the discomfort. I begin to expand rather than constrict, and the actual experience of what I've been calling pain changes. And we don't know that if we, oh, I have a pain in my hip, quick, go take an ibuprofen. I mean, it's part of what is embedded in the practice of sitting down and sitting still for a while, because some degree of discomfort will arise.

[62:32]

And we get to, in that moment, see the reaction of change. Oh, some discomfort in my hands, I'll move my hands. Some discomfort in my back, I'll move my back. Well, I can begin to open all that up by not changing my position right away, but just sitting with what I'm actually experiencing. And noticing the difference between constricting around the discomfort and opening up in the way that happens with turning toward with interest and curiosity. I still may adjust my posture or move in some way, but it won't be automatic and reactive. And the more I cultivate a range of ways of relating to physical discomfort, that opens up ways of working with mental and emotional discomfort as well.

[63:37]

Gary, did you want to say something? Yes, this particular part of the conversation is especially meaningful right now, because of my back hurts. Stand up. And what I did was something that I'd learned from Ken.

[63:59]

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