Thank you, Denke. Thank all of you here for your attention. I'd like to start out by... That's a little loud. Is that better? Can you hear me in the back? Jake, can you hear me? Yes. I'd like to start out by expressing my gratitude for your co-creation of this talk with me. And what I mean by that is that, even if you don't say anything, what I say is already conditioned about what I know about you, how I want to be received and understood by you, and whether I have something surprising or perhaps a little provocative to say. So, I want to thank you in advance for all of that. We're talking together across a permeable boundary, and words are kind of a perfect example.

[02:33]

I don't know if it's perfect, but it's a good example how we co-create reality. You know, we may think that our expression is understood just as we intended, but to know that, we just have to keep checking in with the so-called outside of ourselves to find out whether or not we really were understood. And we almost have to proceed as though we don't know what we're doing. This is a kind of not knowing, not as ignorance, but as openness to something unexpected. So thank you for that. I want to say that the main focus of my talk, or at least started off to be the main focus, was what we call the Four Postures. These are mentioned in traditional texts such as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Satipatthana Sutta. They are known as, said to be, standing, walking, sitting, and lying down.

[03:42]

Mushin Ikeda, when she was here a few weeks ago, mentioned this. And she said, well, this is just shorthand for continuous practice. Whatever posture we're in, we're trying to find who we are inside, outside, all around. And it's also mentioned in the Metta Sutta, which we chant here weekly, and various other sources. So I want to explore out loud a little bit about how we practice an awareness of our bodies and others' bodies. In traditional Buddhist teachings, this falls into the category of mindfulness of the body, one of the four foundations of mindfulness. I'm going to digress here a little bit because I couldn't figure out how to pull this together without digressing. But those foundations are mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of thoughts or mental impressions or activity, and mindfulness of dharmas, which are the primary elements, said to be the basic elements of experience.

[04:52]

I just want to say that I sometimes think that we should talk some about what mindfulness of thinking is, because it's, again, one of those things that mindfulness of thinking, thinking about thinking, It's something that we're engaging in all the time and that we often engage in here purposefully in study and in trying to organize a comprehensive and integrated understanding of something for ourselves either here in the context of our practice or at work. And yet we don't really think about it in the same way, in the same detail that we normally give practices such as mindfulness of the body.

[06:00]

But having said all that, I'm not going to talk further about it. It's just something that I look forward to finding a way to explore. It's mentioned, as Hosan mentioned in a recent talk, it's not entirely clear what the provenance of the English word mindfulness is. And he did say that he felt that Jon Kabat-Zinn had a good understanding of this, so on the basis of that, I'm going to read you Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition of mindfulness. Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. Now, I know we could spend a long time talking about that one sentence, but I want to point out one thing about it. As you know, mindfulness is a kind of buzzword in our culture at the moment, and there are many understandings of it.

[07:09]

some understandings are intentionally not connected with Buddhism or any kind of moral context or religious reference. But I want to say that this This definition by Kabat-Zinn includes an interesting word, on purpose. Well, on purpose for what purpose? So, and I think in our practice that purpose is liberation of self and others, liberation of all beings, engaging in the Bodhisattva path. And so that, I think that's an important term in this definition. I want to talk a little bit about Certainly, it says, mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.

[08:21]

In other words, in the present moment, without mucking it up. Getting back to the four foundations of mindfulness and the Mindfulness of the body in particular. This practice is named, as it's translated into English in a couple of different ways, in early Abhidhamma texts, known as the Path of Purification. The copy I have is translated as Mindfulness Occupied with the Body. Thich Nhat Hanh translates this as Mindfulness of the Body in the Body. To me, these expressions point to an essential ambiguity about paying attention on purpose to something you already are, as well as something that changes on its own and changes by virtue of your observation, a real moving target which you already are.

[09:32]

Nonetheless, paying attention to the body as awareness of posture is one way we connect deeply with ourselves. Now, we say there are four postures, standing, walking, sitting, and lying down, but there are really an infinite variety of postures. There is also running, swimming, vacuuming, driving, and mindfulness occupied with the body, and each one of these activities has its own set of challenges. We're also engaging in new forms of mindfulness of the body in the body. One I can think of is particularly fraught because it involves use of a power object which tends to draw our attention away from the body. It kind of works like this. I'll see if I can do this posture. Now often you will see it done this way, which I will maintain as

[10:35]

has already, the body has already gone way off balance in a certain way. But I was noticing that during, and you'll see this, people will not only do this in sitting posture and standing, but they also do it in walking, and of course lying down for sure. But I was noticing this morning during breakfast that orioke practice is a particularly good way to learn how to practice with this. Because in orioke practice, we're eating and we're sitting upright, and occasionally we need to see what's happening, you know, at the bowl level. And does that mean because we're so interested in the food or so worried about spilling that we're like this the whole meal? It could be. Or, occasionally, we look down. So, how do we keep the body in balance and allowing our head to move in such a way?

[11:41]

Just our head. We don't need to move our neck. The neck is not really a joint. Anyway, how do we do that? Oriyogi practice is a great situation for how to sit upright in activity. while taking care of ourselves to the extent that we need to. So how do we do almost any kind of activity without getting carried away with our own sense of what we're doing, what comes up? Often, you know, when I'm doing this and eating, the thoughts just start, you know, that runaway train is just barreling down the track. But like this, it's okay. And more broadly, how do we relate to or use any such practices instead of being used by them? And when I say, in our way of practice, being used by can often include attempting to achieve some sought-after result or some kind of engaging in a gaining mind where your attention goes to an imaginary future object

[12:58]

you know, I'm going to gain this. But what you're really doing is bringing your attention to an imaginary object, an object of mind. So I want to kind of use a metaphor now, and I'm going to use the metaphor of swimming. Most of the time we're swimming. We're just making it up as we go, and it's great until it isn't, because we can often become confused, discouraged. But then we can put our hand on the side of the pool, and we can remind ourselves of where we are and where our body is. Then we let go and swim. And it's not that swimming is the real practice and putting your hand on the side of the pool is some kind of time out.

[14:01]

For swimming to be real practice, we need to connect with ourselves in a deeply stable way, in a way that we call practice, and that naming something as practice is part of paying attention to what we're doing. So swimming, the swimming part is like finding the space between moments of contact and the space inside moments of contact and inside words. Using practices to find the space in between the reference points. And using the space in between the reference points to find practice. Anyway, most of what we experience is beyond definition. Swimming. We are swimming, and occasionally we need to touch land, but what is land? So on that note, I want to talk a little bit about Earth, which is one of the primary ways we know about the body.

[15:05]

It's the big stimulus that gets our attention. It's the thing we fall down on, and the thing we stand up on. Gravity brings us into contact with our bodies and also stimulates our posture. The key to any postures that you engage in is what is your connection to the earth and where is it? So where your body meets the earth and sitting of course is different than where it is when you're standing or walking, not to mention lying down. When we are sitting, the earth supports us through the bottom of our pelvis And that support stimulates uprightness, which is intrinsic to the body. We start with a little story about how we are sitting, giving ourselves some instruction, getting basically oriented. And through this activity, we find out our true practice, our true posture. Then we start swimming, etc., etc.

[16:14]

And through this activity, we find our true posture, which is completely beyond, but includes the story we've been telling ourselves. And we encounter, that is, must encounter, all the ways in which we get in the way of our true uprightness. Now, this getting in the way is the result usually of our upbringing and culture in various forms of conditioning, social media, who knows, that takes the form of habitual unconscious sort of gripping, holding on, or habitual unconscious collapse or heaviness. And usually both of these tendencies are at play in getting in the way. because the body is always attempting to achieve balance, no matter what position you're in. So, if you're holding here, perhaps it's to offset a collapse over here.

[17:17]

For instance, for years I've had difficulty with a kind of tightness in the very small of my back, right at the bottom, where it seems like that part of my body just did not want to participate in uprightness. And when I discovered a really long-held habit of letting my torso collapse into my pelvis, this part of my back just sort of sprung into action. We don't need to do posture, although we talk about doing posture. We talk about it as a way to find our true posture, to go beyond our starting point and just keep going. Sojin frequently talks, as you know, almost ad nauseum, about cultivating balance and flexibility in sitting. Part of this is to adjust. Part of this is to trust. When we experience tenseness in the body, we remind ourselves to do what we call letting go.

[18:24]

When we experience heaviness and collapse, we seek to connect with gravity to stimulate our uprightness. the body will find its way. This is what the body does. It goes up. Another part of what the body does is based on horizontal orientation. Side to side, we're more or less symmetrical, but of course, not really. Anyway, from front to back, we are not symmetrical. We are face-forward and back-back. Being face-forward, we receive huge amounts of stimuli, and much of the judgmentalness referred to by Kabat-Zinn originates when we react to what is before us. We sometimes try to control the amount of stimulation by looking away. In my case, it's like doing this. You know, I'm not really here, I'm in my own little world. You know, we become overwhelmed, And I want to say that this is in part because our uprightness is disturbed.

[19:33]

When we are upright, face forward and open, we can tolerate a good deal more dissonance than we might otherwise. And cultivating this kind of balance requires bringing awareness to the back as a sensory field, but one in which in part engaged in a kind of trustful not knowing. In any case, the back moves to the back to do its part in uprightness, brings the torso under the head and above where your body meets the earth. I want to say a little bit more about how the back activates. When we talk about our mudra, either this mudra or this one as we're sitting, I'm holding it up high so you can see what I'm doing. We usually talk about, and Suzuki Roshi talks about this too, about the thumbs just touching, just barely touching, maybe enough to hold a slender piece of paper. And likewise, when we bring our hands together, we just bring our hands together like this.

[20:39]

But I want to ask, what is it like when the subtle contact between the hands or the thumbs proceeds not from the bringing them together, but letting them go apart. What happens in the shoulders and back when the subtle contact proceeds from coming apart? So there's an ambiguity between front and back for you. But when we are too far back, sometimes our story about sitting needs to be like this. My wife's family story is this, you know, be upright. My family story is something like, no, can't do it.

[21:43]

When you're too far back, you're putting strain on your back. You're usually kind of uncomfortable, or you get uncomfortable eventually. If you're too far forward, your breath becomes impeded because your weight falls onto your diaphragm, and you could fall asleep or get lost in your thoughts. And I've just recently realized how long I have spent allowing my head and neck to slump like this. I'm sitting upright, it's facing you. But I can go into this, it seems so natural. And, you know, believing whatever I was doing was some sort of internal matter. It's quite a story. And I actually feel like I've wasted decades of my life doing that.

[22:51]

When I could have been looking at you. It's not always wonderful to be upright and open because the world as we meet it these days is difficult, is painful. but it does feel a good deal more alive. So, we've talked about the body in so-called stationary positions. The body in motion. Actually, the body is, and it always is, always will be, always has been, even when you die, in motion. When you're dead, your body's moving around, turning into something, or it's going up in smoke, whatever, depending on circumstances. But this idea of face forward, which is our physical orientation, is particularly important in walking.

[24:04]

We find our connection in walking. We find our connection to the earth through our feet and ankles. This is the source of our uprightness in walking. But sometimes we need to look down and see where we're going. Again, this question is very useful. And it's also an interesting question when it comes to just sitting upright with no particular thing to do, or walking in a ... In our general practice and the way we talk about it, and the way we move around in our shared space, we often have times where our eyes are lowered. This is something that's a little bit of a challenge because your body tends to follow your eyes. So if your eyes are lowered and you find yourself doing this, it's probably important to adjust your gaze in such a way that you have enough ease in sitting up that you can kind of stay with that.

[25:19]

Sitting up, so to speak, and letting your head be upright on top of your body or allowing your body to be underneath your head so that if you had your eyes on the horizon, you would be completely face forward. But when we're walking, you know, sometimes we need to look. An occasional glance will usually do the trick. It's really amazing how much information you take in if you're just walking, looking straight ahead. You are taking in huge amounts of information, and often enough information for your feet to always land in the place where they should, right under your head. You can find this out particularly when walking on uneven ground and in rough trails. you start to adjust to the terrain in a way which is really uncanny.

[26:30]

It's kind of a miracle. So in walking, the head guiding us moving forward and up keeps our center of gravity in a stable position so we're not shifting our weight back and forth as we move forward. We're just going along. I do sometimes observe people walking in K'in like this, and I keep wishing that they would just raise their head to uprightness, consistent with the rest of their body. Not as though we're doing Zazen, but, well, we are. It seems more alive that way. Anyway, it takes you off balance like this when your head is down, and then you're compensating in some other place in your body. Now, I'm going to move to lying down, which is really difficult.

[27:43]

It's kind of about the approach to sleep. I've had a lot of trouble sleeping. I've been really working hard at finding out how to sleep in a way which is restful and restful for my partner. We don't really know much about sleep. I mean, we study it in other people. But in terms of our own experience, I'm not going to say that people don't have vivid dreams and that I haven't had vivid dreams. Mostly, what we know about sleep is before and after. And according to Yogacara teachings of the consciousnesses, the sixth consciousness or mind consciousness, which is your organ of conscious control, that goes to sleep at night. And the seventh consciousness, manas, which is supposed to be just conveying impressions and energies from the storehouse consciousness, you know, your dream material or whatever it is, that's hard at work, usually causing trouble.

[28:50]

And you may have nightmares or wake up feeling really grumpy. Or great, who knows? But there are various, we know about there are various practices of reducing stimuli and creating space for you to actually lie down with mindfulness of breath and posture, letting your body extend, finding the right, finding yourself heavy on the bed, contacting the earth, allowing your head and whole body to meet the Earth. I was having an interesting conversation with Bob Rosenbaum, whom many of you know, who in his clinical psychology practice for a long time dealt with sleep disorders, and he said,

[29:52]

We chatted about this for a while and he said, you know, the research I'm aware of is that 85% of people's sleep problems, whatever those might be, are dealt with by getting out of bed. If you're lying in bed for 10 minutes and you can't go to sleep, you should get up. Sounds like something that Yogi Berra would advise. And of course, it's much easier said than done. But it's an interesting thought that your body in the bed, if you're conscious lying down on the bed, that at a certain point that becomes a stimulus for waking up. So get up. So after all this talk about posture, I want to say a little bit about, how much time do we have?

[31:02]

Oh goodness, we have just enough time. 20? I want to paraphrase Dogen's words from the Genjo Koan to say that, to study Zen is to study upright sitting. To study upright sitting is to forget upright sitting. The word study here means something a little different than our usual understanding. And I would say, I've made a little stab at it, to say that it means to thoroughly investigate and explore continuously until the dimensions of the object of your attention are so multifarious that you can't find upright sitting at all. This is the experience I had reading Dogen and trying to follow what he says about any particular topic, which is going beyond, always going beyond, keep going.

[32:19]

So, our attempts to work with our body position or posture in a way that is harmonious with our activity points to the fact that there's probably no such thing as posture, or that it's everywhere. But mindfulness of our body, in the body, and our daily activities, whatever those are, is the best way to meet the world. So, I'm going to stop at this point, because That's the end. And I'd love to hear from anybody who has a question or comment. Yes? I came across a book that is about a person who found Zen, had a friend who did Zen, because he was an insomniac.

[33:23]

Fascinating. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, most of us, when we come to practice, we spend a lot of time thinking that we could kind of do breath, that, you know, there's that You know, we're sometimes told just, you know, we give some instruction about how to sit in the posture, and then we say, just breathe naturally, whatever that means. But it seems to imply an activity, which is a big problem, because we're not really engaging in an activity. We're just paying attention to the body in movement. And so it's often, but it's also, it's the, but, Mindfulness of breathing is a very challenging practice. Like you say, it's attempting to achieve a result about something that we just do, that is just part of our nature, so to speak.

[34:45]

It's very hard to let go of trying to do something like that. That's interesting. I'm glad you brought that up. Yes, John. Thank you for your talk. I was very interested to hear the idea, which I guess I kind of learned from sitting that this, well, with the phone or without the phone, this sort of leaning brings you into a sleepy torpor and you get caught up with your ideas, and that sitting straight up allows more openness to to do. But it's interesting to think because lately I've been finding myself more caught in my ideas and I'm leaning forward. I have some kind of unique issues with sitting upright.

[35:51]

to sit completely still for long periods of time. But I don't think I'm alone in that. I mean, I think, you know, there are people in wheelchairs and there are people with various issues. And I always wonder how to include every body in the instruction about uprightness and breathing, because there are bodies that were upright might not look upright. Well, if I was in a room with a number of people whose bodies were very different from each other, how would I say that? I would say that the bodies can be upright intrinsically. and not all bodies are the same.

[37:04]

So that if you simply have to work with what's in front of you, sometimes that looks like it should be easy, but it's not. And sometimes it looks like it should be hard, but it's doable. Can perhaps stability be a little more general than uprightness? Stability is an important quality. If we're talking about sitting, a stationary, so-called stationary body, then finding how you achieve stability is probably key in the way to allow the most freedom in the breath, and the most freedom in your position.

[38:08]

Yes? I was actually just remembering. Some years ago, when it was my job to answer, we used to have a phone in the community room, and it was the job of the least senior resident to answer and take messages. And there was a request from a retirement, a senior living facility down on white in Sacramento, I think it is. I don't remember the name. But they wanted someone to come in and give meditation instruction. You know, so I, no one else wanted to do it, so I went. And there were all these people in wheelchairs. And I ended up telling them to put the tip of their tongue on the roof of their mouth. Because that was, they could, you could be, all of them could do that and be, so they could be upright. But many of them couldn't do a mudra. So, you know, maybe that's sort of the approach is to find some part of our body that we can have comfortably upright and stable and still, you know, as our bodies change.

[39:17]

Yes, and I think the definition that I cited of mindfulness says something about that. simply just trying to find a way to pay attention on purpose, without going into judgments about it. And so, I think your comments are very on point, because often when we give instruction which is not necessarily tailored to someone else's body, other than our own or to people we're used to seeing most often, that can stimulate distraction when someone is receiving that in a way which is sort of outside of their capacity. Anyway, thank you for bringing that up. It's important. Back there. Hi. Many years ago, when I was in my 50s,

[40:24]

body and let it do what it wants to do. And at some point, and I know many people have experienced where my body just wanted to go down. And it's not my mind that wants to go down, my body in the body wants to go down. So the body just went all the way down. My head was on the and rotating, and moving like this. And it's hard, because you're in a zendo, and you're supposed to be doing something else in that frame. And I just let it do it. And then my body came into the most beautiful, spontaneous, upright posture that I ever could have created. But that came out of working with those, you know. Mm-hmm. Trusting the body. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Thank you.

[41:37]

Yes, Judy. Flowing from that, I heard you speaking about trust your body and I also heard something in there about trust this vow that we share. And this thing of meeting the world, the posture with which to meet the world. How do you practice with that physicality of trust I was going to say the other, the other in front of me, the other behind me, the other inside, outside, all that. Well, that's where the non-judgmentally point comes into play. because the moment I think there's something I don't know in front of me, I can also start to think, maybe that's a problem.

[42:45]

Before I actually even engage, I've already set it up as some kind of difficulty. And so, not to confuse myself with my own thinking as I engage, I think is really key to what you're talking about. So how do you work with that physically? Like, for me it would be the moment that I notice that the tension that's coming up from these thoughts of judgmentality, I have a physical cue, because let's say, I'm going like this. Or a common one is, you know, not looking, Yeah. Directly from warm heart to warm heart. Yeah, avoiding contact, as you may define it. So, when that awareness arises, some tightness or averting, you're noticing it's uncomfortable,

[43:58]

Under those circumstances, you can try whatever you understand to be letting go of that and opening to it. It's an experiment, and it may be something that you realize you don't want to do in that moment for whatever good reasons you have. I'm not going to say you should do such and such and such and such. You need to ... I would encourage you to try to meet it in whatever way you feel you can without reacting. Right here, we're done, huh? Time's up. Do we have time for one more question? Yes. I had an experience that is kind of mind-body.

[45:03]

The other morning there was Zazen, we were here at Zazen, and there was a monk snoring throughout Zazen. I was getting all closed down and grumpy, and I just thought, what am I going to do with this? And Sojin has said to me recently, move Toward your aversion and remain open so I can't help and I moved toward the aversion and I stayed in upright posture and and the posture affected the mind and I remained open funny and it changed my outlook and I had compassion where there was no compassion before and so I just saw things differently and I got close to this I thing that was happening, and when you said that you spent 15 years looking down like this, and then finally you're up like that, and you can see everyone, that really rang true for me, and I wouldn't say that that's a waste, because you came up, and my experience was very profound.

[46:06]

Thank you. I was just thinking about something, some word you used, outlook. In order to have an outlook, you have to be out and look. Thank you.

[46:22]

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