Good morning. As I was breathing in the energy from the earth, will it mean it works? All right, so here we are, talking on the tape and wondering if it's working. Okay, now we're gonna stop. I have noticed. Well, you got a feather coat? No, thank you. And then we had that robust, gopher back there. I was trying to figure out what happened to all the snow in summer. Now I know. Gopher food. What I want to talk about this morning has to do with considering the meditation path in the Buddhist tradition as being, among other things, about the cultivation of intimacy.

[01:11]

Ultimately, with all beings and things. But of course we have to begin with ourselves. And then if we're willing to risk it, the cultivation of intimacy or connection, sustained connection with ourselves and with someone we're practicing with. This aspect of practice is very up for me right now, partially because, as some of you know, I've been on a kind of retreat binge. Well, a little bit like that. You know, first five days at Mount Baldy and then zoom up to Alaska for some more retreat.

[02:23]

But in both retreats, the one at Mount Baldy and the retreat that I just came back from in Juneau, I'm struck by what is necessary if we are going to, in fact, develop this capacity for sustained and unwavering connection. or if not unwavering, waveringly unwavering. I'm struck by the sense of sustained connection that I experience with the people that I practice with at Mount Baldy twice a year.

[03:33]

helped of course by the fact that some of those people are beginning to come up here instead of just us going down there. But there is over the years that I've been teaching those retreats with Ken MacLeod and practicing with the people who keep showing up for those retreats a growing and deepening connection which doesn't disappear in between the retreats. And I have a similar experience with the people I practice with in Juno. As one woman in one of the Juno groups commented, we do a phone session once a month. like the study groups that I do here, only I'm a dismembered voice coming from a speakerphone in the middle of the floor, in the middle of the room.

[04:47]

This one woman said, it's just weird, just plain weird. And of course I had to agree. What we're trying to do, which is to develop and sustain the ground of trusting and knowing each other at this long distance is challenging. But I notice, particularly with people from the Alaska groups, there are a few of them who are committed to coming here once a year and my going there twice a year. And my experience is that three or four retreats a year makes an enormous difference in one's practice. What are the differences?

[05:49]

I think that we have a chance to come to know reactive mind in an environment where we can begin to practice showing up, being present with the arising of reactive mental and emotional patterns. When we have some protected, contained circumstance in which the energy we spend in our ordinary daily lives with things like, what are we going to have for dinner? Do we have to go to the store and cooking the food and cleaning up afterwards? All of the events of our daily lives are pared down in a retreat context so that we have a kind of freed up energy for sustained presence.

[06:58]

And what I know out of my own experience and see with the people that I practice with in their retreat context, it's as though we are allowing the cultivation of energy in our battery pack, if you will, that can be a resource for months. We sometimes talk about kind of dropping or going deep in our meditation practice. And I know that it is possible to do that in a sustained, consistent daily practice. But there's a different taste to what is possible if we actually allow ourselves to

[08:04]

drop and stay dropped for five or six or seven or 10 or 21 days. Rather frequently, image that the late Tarantulco used to come up with about how if our practice is intermittent, it is as though we were trying to make a fire with two fire sticks and some tinder, and we rub the fire sticks and then we stop, and we rub the fire sticks and we stop, and we rub the fire sticks and we stop. we never get the spark that we can use to ignite the tinder, which then allows us to build a fire.

[09:18]

So what I'm really talking about is a path that includes our daily practice, and the extension of our meditation practice into our daily lives. And then whatever we can do by way of short, medium, and long retreats that give us a taste of what is possible all the time. The Buddhist path is highly relational. It's a path about relationality. And of course, initially, for some of us, the initial stage may go on for some while.

[10:35]

What we begin with is relationship with ourselves. coming to know ourselves in some clear and accurate way with kindness, free of judgment, but to see the whole display, including what leads to suffering, most particularly what leads to suffering. And in time, some growing capacity for sustained connection or intimacy with ourselves. The great Zen guy, Dogen, says, we study the self to forget the self.

[11:39]

It's very useful to keep in mind the second part. Otherwise, it just looks like American navel gazing for the sake of me, [...] me as the center of the universe, which is not what the Buddha Shakyamuni was pointing to. So there's also the aspect of cultivation of connection with ourselves that then gets extended to the development of sustained connection with ourselves and with another person, which can then begin to be extended to a sense of connection with others. the people we practice with, but also with the gopher who is out there having a field day, so to speak.

[12:50]

And of course, this cultivation of Intimacy is not just with other human beings or other beings, also with things. What arises for me is remembering one Saturday morning many years ago when my first teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, was still alive. And he was about to give the Saturday morning lecture. And he had a cup, kind of like this, full of water. And he took the lid off and proceeded to take a drink of water. Looked like he was drinking the most delicious drink he'd ever had.

[14:09]

Just sensuously lip-snacking, enjoying a drink of water. But also something about the way he held the cup. I think this capacity that we can tend for connection is really another way of talking about the cultivation of attention and of our capacity for presence. There is nothing about the connectedness that I'm talking about that has attachment or grasping in it. When we're outside doing walking meditation, is it possible to allow ourselves to experience the physicalness of walking in detail?

[15:36]

To be really present with the bottoms of the feet and with the lifting, moving, placing of each foot. With the whole shifting and balancing and moving of the whole body. to develop so much presence when we're sitting with the physical body that we begin to be more attuned to the difference between sitting with an upright torso, but with ease, and schlumping, the sag. When will the bell ring?

[16:44]

Some of you know the story about Suzuki Roshi hitting the bell one time to mark the beginning of a period of meditation and then leaving the meditation room and you could hear him going upstairs and rustling some papers and he didn't come back for two and a half hours. The mind of when will the bell ring was really big that morning. And of course what none of us ever knew was whether it was intentional or evidence of his extraordinary forgetfulness. He could be both quite forgetful and quite present. Interesting combination. Traditionally, before in the Zen tradition, and particularly in the Soto Zen tradition in Japan, before you're admitted into a training place for a period of training, you have to sit outside the gate and nobody will let you in until you've sat there for five days.

[18:11]

There are all kinds of stories about people doing that, you know, in the snow, etc. It's perhaps the samurai view. But of course, some version of that practice continues to this day. And when you sit for five days and nobody's ringing any bell, except when everybody comes in to do some chanting and bowing, and with relief you join them. But during those five days of sitting, from four in the morning until nine at night with not much movement, what arises is the possibility of extraordinary capacity for intimacy with discomfort.

[19:14]

with the mind that's like the snake in the bamboo tube trying to get out. And in the first day or two, what we often run into is the mind of, I can't do this. And then slowly we begin to discover how to sit in one place for five days. Believe it or not, that process can be quite interesting and revealing in the end, a source of the cultivation of confidence in one's ability to do what one doesn't yet know one can do.

[20:29]

And of course, what often comes up is, why on earth would any of us want to do such a thing? But right now, there are three people who have over the years practiced with us here, who are doing their own form of that practice, what's called Tongariro, because of terrible illness. and an enormous amount of physical pain. Oh, I'll get around to developing a relationship to discomfort later.

[21:41]

Not today. But if we keep talking to ourselves in that way, later never comes until our lives bring us face-to-face with what we do not know how to be with. We think about or bargain with the cultivation of capacity that we might want to draw on in those situations as being later, another time, this won't happen to me.

[22:42]

I think we can count on our lives bringing up what we might call stuff. Circumstances and experiences where initially we go to reaction and fumble around not knowing what to do or how to be with whatever uncertainty arose unexpectedly. One of the consequences of long-term Dharma practice is that we begin to bring ourselves willingly to whatever we experience as difficult or challenging, not with rigidity or forcing or trying too hard, but on the breath, in attention.

[24:15]

My own experience in practicing with some of you in the way that I'm describing is that what we each experience is a kind of intimacy that's not in a certain way personal and yet is kind of relationship in which anything is possible. The more bounded and sustained the connection the more that's the case. And out of that can come the actual knowing for each of us of our capacity to be in relationship in that way with others.

[25:39]

This is not about exclusivity. Two of the people I practice with up in Juneau have spouses, spice, who are a little bit afraid that their honey has another lover called spiritual practice. And I encouraged these two practitioners to acknowledge and name that fear with their spouse Because of course, that may be your sweetheart's experience for a while.

[26:44]

But eventually, if one's practice is really sound, there is a kind of turning toward and discovering one's capacity for a different kind of connection with the person who's right there at your side. One of the things that happens when one lives in the same place for a long time is that you begin to have a completely different kind of relationship with the landscape, very much in particular.

[27:48]

In the last several weeks while I've been away, the roses were up to something. And they all kind of went boom. Some of them are roses that I've been living with for quite a long time. And so there's a kind of the intimacy of knowing plant over a long period of time but also the very real experience of I've never seen this blossom before and of course I haven't. And I certainly haven't seen such a brazen gopher as I saw a little while ago.

[29:10]

Fearless. I clapped my hands and he went back in his hole and he was back again in seconds. Don't interrupt my meal. We don't usually think about intimacy in terms of intimacy with every being and thing. We think of intimacy with the one we want to be connected with, picking and choosing. But what I'm talking about is about the way through this capacity with literally every being and thing one meets moment by moment.

[30:19]

So, I know some of you understand what I'm talking about from your own experience. And for some of you I'm talking about more like headlines from a foreign country or a country that you have some sense of but may not know directly yet. So I think that's Enough? Bill? I want to give a short etymological riff, if I may. The opposite of intimacy is extremity, if one considers the Latin

[31:36]

The progression goes, ex or extra, meaning out of or outside, to exterior, exterior, which is further out, to extremus, which is furthest out. They disintegrate, they have the mark of impermanence. Continue please. And then there's the sequence in or intra, interior, which is more inward, and intimus, which is furthest in. And what strikes me is that extremus imparts a sense of separation and ultimately, ultimus also means far out, ultimately isolation.

[32:48]

Whereas our contemporary word intimacy I think is associated first of all with a loving relationship. signifies some kind of connection. So what is the linkage that leads from being intimus, innermost, to connectedness? And isn't it that when one is fully inner, dropping beneath the conventional entanglements, I find myself immersed in a sense of the connectedness of things, the relatedness of things.

[33:52]

So intimacy is about deep connected relatedness. For any of us who have had children, We know the intimacy of holding a young infant that is very much about breathing together. One of the great aspects of the intimacy with one's lover has to do with actually breathing together. And of course when we meditate together, guess what we are all doing? We're all breathing together. So there is a growing awakening to the experience itself that has to do with connection that doesn't rely primarily on language, on talking to each other.

[35:09]

And for any of us who are used to having most of our energy up in our heads with a lot of thinking, mostly thinking and not so grounded in the physical body and breath, we may feel like we've gone to some wild frontier when we begin to have some experience of connectedness with the heart beating. breath as it comes and goes. The sense of blood going through our veins with the stomach. With discovering what it means to be supported by the bony structure rather than holding ourselves or walking primarily with muscles and tendons.

[36:22]

Yeah, Lynn. Talking about living with children, I had spent some time this week with a friend who's teaching her three-year-old daughter to look at the light at a crossing Breathe, stop, look, listen. And as she's been repeating this over and over again, she's been sucking that in herself and was feeling herself rushing to get back to her office and do chores and try to beat the clock and was coming up at a light and this came back to her and she thought, well, I'm just gonna really make myself take a full breath before I start up. And as she stood there and did that, the man standing next to her stepped out as the light changed and was run over and killed by a car. I mean, just imagine the impact anyway and also the impact of actually the relationality with her daughter in that moment.

[37:37]

That while she's been doing this to train her daughter, there was the connectedness of it also training herself. Basically, she felt saving her own life. And then just spending time with her as her friend and just breathing with her as she told this story, feeling, I'm not feeling the energy now, just sitting with her, just feeling the power of her experience and her, one second later, looking at the ground and seeing this man and his head. brains and all that, just... Yeah. You know, someone that I knew a number of years ago is a public health nurse who works in a big hospital in the East Bay, started stopping before she would go in the door to do something with a patient in the hospital.

[38:40]

She would stop and let her attention just rest on a full inhalation, exhalation. And then she would go in. And she said the real test was when there would be some, however it's communicated, when someone's going to be coded. I don't know if it's a sound or a must be over the loud system. And she said the first time she walked into that situation, into the room, and stopped and took a full breath, there was this thought, are you crazy? Just act. And yet what she discovered and then began to be more open to was how much more appropriate and effective she was in those emergency situations with taking that few moments for a breath and seeing the situation more fully. Of course, the kind of situation that you just described with your friend,

[39:47]

It's not the situation that we imagine wanting to be present for, but it arises. If you want to bring something up that's not on this topic, it's fine. Yes, Betty? It's on the topic. This past week I've been experiencing the stressful side of remodeling. The surprise. As the remodel comes more to the interior of the house.

[40:54]

Got any arms and legs left? What I've been describing is that everything that I touch or use daily in the course of my life in my house is either in a box under plastic or covered with plaster dust. So the intimacy that I'm experiencing is a kind of chaotic intimacy and you've been telling me about this for a while and this is stressful. I'm feeling stressed. Yes, I am feeling stressed with the disorder of a ground that I have some tendency to take for granted.

[42:05]

Intimacy with plaster dust. On the dogs, on the altar, on my desk, on the floors, on my clothes, in my hair, in my nose, in my eyes. You could set up a tent in the backyard. We have a really small backyard. I know. And just when we felt that the chaos had reached its fever pitch, the two dogs discovered exposed insulation and had a heyday. We walked into the living room, you know, what's left of the living room, carpeted with cotton ball sized yellow insulation just everywhere.

[43:14]

You know, them with their little bits of insulation caught in their beards. They had a really good time. And, you know, they don't really find this disruptive at all, that I felt. Well, I think dogs have a different relationship to uncertainty. The more uncertainty, the more fun. And maybe we could consider that as a possibility. Well, one of the things I put on my map prior to all of this is an intention to discover playfulness. Well, as you know, I love to remodel, but then I think, I signed up for this.

[44:22]

It's a little like pulling the rug out from under one's own feet. Yes. Well, I'm being present with crankiness. Whatever arises. Whatever. Right. What's blooped up for me is the intimacy scene in the Seven Samurai. It's the recruiting scene, you may remember. Yes. Oh, so wonderful. The head samurai is sitting at the table inside the house and he tells the kid, as he sees a couple applicants coming to the door, pick up the piece of firewood, stand behind the door. When the guy comes through, hit him as hard as you can. And the first guy comes through, and the kid swings, and the applicant throws him across the room.

[45:32]

The head guy says, you're hard. And then the second applicant is waiting. And the applicant stops two or three feet from the threshold and bows. You can see the head sound line inside. And then looks up and says, please, no tricks. His awareness included the kid behind the door. He was that intimate with what was going on. It's a scene that, to me, makes such sense coming out of Japanese culture, which is so markedly different from ours in being essentially a body culture, not a mind culture.

[46:37]

Another way to translate intimacy is innermost. He was inside the room with his awareness and cognition, even though he was physically two or three feet outside. Darren? You were talking about the intimacy of developing intimacy or having intimacy with things. I was thinking about my home in L.A. which was just so. And I was kind of running through the intense familiarity with the patio and the block wall that was breaking down and the plants there. I could really feel it.

[47:41]

And so, I like where we live now. it doesn't have the feeling, that familiarity with my former home and I have a tendency to cast off, oh here's change, let's go, okay I'm done with that part of my life, let's get on with this part. So being at that transition point, It's not, I just, I begin to look at it more. Transitioning from the past, those things. I mean, this room, this garden, is new. And I'm sort of just beginning to absorb, like, the flowers this morning.

[48:46]

They're out. I can't think of it, but I know that it's going on. Always. How long did you live in the house in LA? 31 years. So that's about as long, a little bit longer than I've lived here. So of course there is a kind of deep knowing and connection that happens, it's like the fine patina when you sand a piece of wood with finer and finer sandpaper. And of course, what I find challenging is, is there a way in which knowing one place so deeply and so thoroughly can

[49:53]

lead to my being open to knowing another place or any place deeply. And I think that when we live in a place for 30 years or 31 years, the hindrance that arises is attachment. You know, I think about leaving here and I'm busy digging up and taking giant plants that have no business being lifted and taped. I mean, you know, it's absurd. It's got to do with this. That's right. Happily, if one digs up in the mind, digs up and transplants, you know, and of things you kind of into the absurdity of it, but what's under it is that extraordinary experience when the heart is open to place, to a plant, to the sunlight, to the whole show.

[51:12]

I came back from Alaska on Wednesday, and Thursday morning Bill and I were sitting behind the house looking into the alder trees having coffee in the morning. And of course, what struck me is, oh, these are exactly the same breed of alder I just was hanging out with in Juneau. Red alder there, red alder here. And I know these alder trees very well. And there's a way in which my experience with these alder trees is not separatable from seeing, being with the alders in the place where we were doing our tree. Oh. Is that red alder? The color of the bark looks the same.

[52:17]

Then I asked somebody. So in the situation, this transition that you're in, you'll get to probably already have been developing some intimacy with attachment and the possibility of opening the hand. And of course, I don't know about you, but I think for many of us, what we go for is trying to recreate what we knew. And in a lot of ways, that's what we do when we're on the cushion. We want this to be a repeatable universe. We want the breath to be repeatable.

[53:21]

and the possibility of opening to each inhalation and each exhalation having the particular characteristics for that inhalation and that exhalation. You know, huh? I can imagine these next few years having a lot of this smelling and remembering and being back in that house and surround that you're not in anymore. Karen?

[54:26]

When you were talking about marking the breath, the child, I was thinking of all the times that I've sat with people who are dying, who I didn't know, often total strangers, and in that process of breathing with them comes a kind of closeness and gratitude. I think it's absolutely the experience of intimacy in the way I'm talking about it. And to have that experience with someone whose history you don't know, you may or may not even know their name, and yet there is that possibility of connectedness. And of course, when we practice together, we probably don't know each other's story. we can have this experience of remarkable degree of intimacy in much the same way.

[55:30]

Sometimes when I haven't been here on summer retreats, when Jenny and I have been retreating in the East Bay and we've all been here, and each day when I sat, I would sit down and I would go around the room and just breathe with everybody who was here, imagining that as a way of being in connection with Mars, 25 miles away. I also want to just say that the highlight of today has been the Grand Thomas Bush. And I've walked that path with that yellow rose bush for years now. And it was that one, I thought, I've never seen it this way, because there's a certain lushness, or it was, this is my familiar place to me, and how extraordinarily real it is to me. You might look at the other one on the walking path, which is even more nuts. It's just the most generous rose I've met yet. This is also, the lushness this year is partially the absence of pruning.

[56:32]

I pruned very little. In fact, I'm not sure I pruned anything this last winter for a variety of reasons. Very interesting to see what happens to that plant that you know so well. This is just, it's doing its thing. Wow. Kim? Well, I'd just like to say that in the last 30 years, I've moved 18 times. And the longest place I've ever lived was nine years. Was nine years? Nine. So this is after, you know, leaving my family. So, you know, the ideas of intimacy and commitment or grasping or familiarity or whatever is just a totally different experience. Yes. Yes. Well, I know I'm something of an anomaly.

[57:41]

I was born in San Francisco and I've lived within a 50 mile radius of where I was born my entire life. So I know the landscape. Those of us who have our second or third or fourth generation have a certain kind of sense of landscape that is somewhat less accessible for someone who comes from a very different landscape. I've changed landscapes. Yes, absolutely. I had a different kind of experience about landscape that has to do with swimming in one's gene pool. One time I went to teach in Norway, in Oslo, and I took my son and daughter with me.

[58:42]

And just walking down the street, my son at that point was his adult height of, what is he, 6'3 or 6'4? He's a big guy. And he just looked like an average young man walking down the street. But I had this physical sense of swimming in some familiar gene pool, different from external landscape, but related. Nice to see you all. Take good care of yourselves and cruise around and smell the roses. We have had an extraordinary amount of wind the last couple of weeks, week and a half, and there's a little movement, but how blessed to have the day be a little still.

[59:48]

So for those of you who brought your lunch, enjoy the garden. Nice to see you.

[59:54]

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