How's that? Better? So, we welcome Sente Kuka, Susan Barber. Her Dharma name means Spring Garden Virtuous Presence. And Susan has been practicing here for many years. She was head student in 2000. Thank you. Welcome everyone. I'd like to especially welcome anyone who's here for the first time and hope you find something worth coming back to explore with all of us.

[01:20]

I guess this has to go over. I've been thinking about habit energy. recently. And so I've been reading and talking to people and observing habit energy in myself and others. And I want to share a bit of what I've been thinking about with you. I started thinking about habit energy in May. when I had an experience that I'm going to describe to you. I went to Quebec to visit my 93-year-old cousin, Jean, and after spending several days there, I dropped down into Vermont, where I was born and grew up, and I spent about a week visiting three sets of friends. On the day of my scheduled departure, I drove to the airport, I turned in the rental car, and I walked into the airport and made my way towards the security area.

[03:00]

I stopped on the way to look at that big board that gives the departure and arrival times to make sure that my plane was still on time. And it was all lit up with a big cancelled sign on it. I was really surprised because no one had notified me and I'd been checking the texts. So I turned around and was making my way back to the ticket area for JetBlue and noticed a big crowd of people milling around, a lot of people on their cell phones, a lot of people talking loudly, and people didn't look happy. And I wasn't happy myself that my plan had completely changed at a moment's notice. And there was a ticket agent walking through the crowd and trying to calm people down and explaining we could either go online and rebook the flight for tomorrow, there were no more flights, or go to the ticket counter.

[04:10]

So I proceeded towards this ticket counter. I asked people if they knew what happened. Nobody knew what happened. And as I waited in line, I could feel the frustration in myself just building my shoulders, my neck, my head, my thoughts, and my chest just being filled with the kind of annoyance and tension. And all of a sudden there was this sentence that presented itself didn't come from my head. It was just this sentence. That's just habit energy. It didn't have any particular emotion to it. It wasn't critical. It wasn't judgmental. It didn't have any shoulds in it. And it didn't feel like it came from me, Susan. It wasn't like I was standing there thinking about

[05:13]

habit energy, it just presented itself from some place that seemed much deeper. That's just habit energy. And suddenly, my whole body relaxed. And I felt this great sense of relief. And by this time, I was getting towards the counter. I was maybe two or three people away from the counter. And the next thing that happened was I thought of all the people here in the practice period. We were in the middle of the practice period. And I had gone back because my cousin had been sick. And the Shuso had a koan, which was sun face Buddha, moon face Buddha.

[06:18]

And I immediately thought, well, this is it. This is sun face Buddha, moon face Buddha. And I thought of the Shuso and I thought of all of you and it was so encouraging. And, uh, You know, it's the true blessing of Sangha that even thousands of miles away, we can be right there with one another, encouraging one another. By the time I got to the counter, I had a whole plan in place. because I was calm enough to think of a plan. I grew up there, I know the city well. It was a beautiful day, it was one o'clock in the afternoon. I thought, I'm gonna take the shuttle to the hotel. I'm gonna get on the local bus and ride the bus into town to the waterfront. Burlington's on a very large, beautiful lake.

[07:21]

I'm gonna rent a bicycle and I'm gonna ride along the path along the lake. The path goes very far, way up into the Lake Champlain Islands. So when I got to the counter, I was friendly, I was calm. You know, I think I could have been exactly the opposite. I'm not a screamer, I wouldn't have done that, but I certainly know how to be puffed up. You know, all that tension that you want to release onto somebody whose fault it was. So when I got to the counter, I was, you know, friendly Buddha. And the agent was friendly, and I'm sure the agent appreciated friendly Buddha. We had a little chit chat, and I said to her, is the airline going to put us up and give us food vouchers?

[08:27]

And she said, we can do that. They weren't advertising it, but she said, we can do that. And I said, I'll take both. So, off I went with my new boarding pass for the next morning, and I did all of the things that I told you I was going to do, and I had a wonderful afternoon. I had a good dinner at the hotel, and I went back to my room and watched the first game of Oakland and Cleveland. And it was delightful. And the next morning when I was riding the shuttle to the airport, the thought crossed my mind like, wow, what would it be like if we all could practice just moving from one activity to the next, no matter how it proceeded, no matter how our plans changed, no matter what happened,

[09:33]

What would it be like if we could work with habit energy every single time in some useful way? Well, of course that doesn't happen because there are gaps. There are gaps to our understanding and there are gaps in our practice. For all of us, we all make mistakes, we all fall down. And yet our practice is really about not why do we make mistakes and why do we have habit energy, but how do we stand back up? How do we develop composure that's so needed in our lives? Not just for ourselves, but for our communities and our families and the world. So practice, our practice and practice is very helpful in this way because in Zazen instruction, we learn that no matter what happens, we don't push it away.

[10:47]

We come back to the breath and the posture. That's really our foundation. No matter what happens, we come back to the breath and the posture. We notice what fills the mind and we don't push it away, we don't berate it, we don't chastise ourselves, we don't criticize ourselves, we don't make suggestions, we just keep coming back to the breath and the posture. And so that's very handy actually for when we're out of the gate in our daily lives and we run into our habit energy, our individual habit energy and our collective habit energy. We have this tendency to want to push it away, the parts that we don't like in ourselves. But actually, I think our job is really to befriend our habit energy.

[11:49]

to notice it, to accept it as part of who we are, and to embrace it as part of Buddha's experience. I'm gonna read you a little bit about what Thich Nhat Hanh has to say about habit energy. This wonderful book, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. There's a story in Zen about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road shouts, where are you going? And the first man replies, I don't know, ask the horse. This is also our story. We are riding a horse. We don't know where we're going and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along and we are powerless.

[12:52]

We are at war within ourselves and we can easily start a war with others. We have to learn the art of stopping. stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. How can we stop this state of agitation? How can we stop our fear, despair, anger, and craving? We say and do things. Our habit energies are often stronger than our volition. We say and do things we don't want to, and afterwards we regret it. We make ourselves and others suffer, and we bring about a lot of damage. We may vow not to do it again, but we do it again. Why? Because our habit energies push us. We need the energy of focusing awareness on this moment to recognize and be present with our habit energy in order to stop this course of destruction.

[13:53]

Moment by moment awareness, we have the capacity to recognize the habit energy every time it manifests. Hello, my habit energy. I know you are there. If we just smile to it, it will lose much of its strength. This way is the energy that allows us to recognize our habit energy and prevent it from dominating us. You know, I think in our culture, we have an aversion to that. Hello, my habit energy. It sounds so childlike, but actually, I think his point is that we need to make room for it. We need to not push it away. And I was thinking when he says, if we just smile to it, the Buddha always has that just slight smile in all the Buddha statues you see. It's not a big smile, but it's just a, smiling with all the suffering that exists.

[14:57]

This passage reminds me of, you know, a kind of habit energy that I know pretty intimately, and that's restlessness. I had a lot of restless energy as a young person and a young woman. always on the go. I didn't understand what Thich Nhat Hanh's talking about, this need to just stop. A lot of movement in my life, moving a lot, changing jobs a lot, traveling an awful lot. And it wasn't really until I came to practice that I began to see the influence of restlessness.

[16:13]

You know, restlessness is a great hindrance to practice. And even though I understood the psychological roots of restlessness in my own life, it didn't help me much. What helped me most was this practice, the idea that I could put that inside some bigger container, the container of Zazen. On sessions and multi-day sittings during rest periods, I often take a long, brisk walk. I find that the fresh air and the exercise helps me to settle into zazen again. And especially in the early years, for many years, when I was walking, I would feel a lot of restlessness.

[17:14]

And my pattern forever has been just go out the gate, turn right, go down to Martin Luther King, turn right again and walk far into Berkeley, then turn right and come up to Milvia and walk back. And often I would be walking and I would have this thought, I just want to keep walking right out of town. I just want to just walk forever. And the way that I worked with that energy, because it was very physical energy, was to just kind of invite that restlessness along. I don't know if you talk to yourself. I do talk to myself sometimes. And I would give myself kind of like Zazen instruction, but more like restlessness instruction. come along with me, you can walk with me, but you can't make me go out of town, kind of like that. And the other way that I worked with it is something I learned from our Dharma sister, Fran Tribe, many, many years ago.

[18:22]

She taught some of us to work with the breath, to breathe all that restlessness in, breathe it right into Buddha's heart. and then on the out breath to breathe something that we want to breathe into the world, something we literally want to offer the world through our breath. So I practiced that even though it may not feel, I think it was sincere, but it didn't feel I had all that restlessness, and I didn't know what to do with it, so I just did the practice. Breathe it in, and then on the out-breath, I would breathe something like gratitude for being alive that day, or equanimity, which I thought of might be the opposite of restlessness. And even though I didn't feel that way, I felt I could breathe that in as an image. So over the years, I would say I don't really have to talk to myself that way when I go for those walks anymore.

[19:35]

I would say that restlessness is still very much intact, very much a part of who I am as a personality, but that I don't feel like I have to follow it anymore. I remember another one of our Dharma sisters, Maile Scott, told me many, many years ago, and she was talking about herself. She said, all the edges of this personality are very much intact and ready to be unleashed at a moment's notice. But over time, we learn that we don't have to do that. And as a newcomer to Zen, I found that so encouraging because she was such a composed person, such a gentle soul. And I've always tried to remember that, that, okay, that restlessness is just a part of who I am as a personality, and it's still there, and that's okay.

[20:44]

That's part of the whole package. It can take years, I think, to transform habit energy, and we have so many different kinds of habit energy. Norman Fisher says that we can train ourselves, and he offers three kind of basic practical steps for training ourselves to work with habit energy. So he says the first step is just to notice it, notice and embrace it. And the second step, he says, is let it go. And when I read that, I thought, oh, you know, that's the kind of instruction that we're given a lot in Zen, let it go. And you know, we don't always know what does that mean? Like, okay, let it go, but how? And so as I read his book, I realized, I think what he's really talking about, or what I would add to it, is letting go means coming back to breath and posture.

[21:52]

And too bad it doesn't mean something else. We want some other way, but really that's the root of our practice, is breath and posture. And it's something we can use wherever we are. And so let it go doesn't mean something magical that we can find to make it go away forever because chances are it's gonna come back again. And so the third step is keep repeating step one and step two. I'd like to read you a little bit of his words because this book is training in compassion. The first difficulty is when the habitual impulse first appears in your mind, the moment when it first pops up.

[22:55]

Can you notice it? The second difficulty is that once it appears, it's compelling and very difficult to let go of. Can you let go? The third difficulty is that even if you can let go, it's hard not to be compelled by it all over again when it pops up again the next time because of the force of the residual residual habit energy that you've been putting into it all this time. Can you let it go again and again with patience? to train would be to be able first to identify the habitual impulse when it arises. Second, to let it go once you recognize it. And I think that part's important when he says once you recognize it, because just like in the experience I described to you in the airport, I didn't recognize it right away. I would have liked to have been able to say that I just smiled and went on to the very next thing, but it didn't happen that way.

[23:56]

to let go of it once you recognize it, and third, to keep going with the first two so that eventually it won't come up again. This is easiest to practice on your meditation cushion when there's nothing else going on. You can notice painful or nasty states of mind arising. You can see that they're unnecessary and unpleasant and let them go by coming back to the feeling of the breath and the body as a substitute, and you can keep on doing this. During the rest of the day, when life is a lot more complicated, you can use a simple three-step program. Step one, notice when negative habitual thinking arises. Step two, stop. So this is kind of similar to what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying, stop. Literally stop for a moment. If you're walking, stop walking. If you're sitting, stand up. If you're thinking, stop thinking. Step three, take a breath. Return to awareness with that breath.

[25:03]

This simple three-step practice is surprisingly powerful. The mind is extremely difficult to train and mostly the training will proceed from failure to failure, but this is normal. That's how it works. So noticing that you're in a mess and being able to simply stop right there without the frustration and recrimination taking over and take a breath And then with that breath, returning to positive intentions and being willing to do this time and time again as normal life, that's the essential practice. So to me, when we talk about transformation, to me, this is the transformation, the transformation of my habit. of not being willing to do this practice over and over and over again. Once I decide, okay, I'm just going to keep doing this over and over and over again, that is the transformation.

[26:07]

But when we hear that word, that's a kind of overused word nowadays. Transformation, it's kind of like, whoo, out there, right? And actually, I think he's saying, take a breath and then with that breath returning to positive intentions and being willing to do this time and time again as normal life. That's it. That's the essential practice. you know, over a lifetime of practice and zazen, we have the chance to touch Buddha mind and realize that it's there to inform us, that it's deeper or separate or however you want to talk about it from the personality and yet it includes the personality, but we should never,

[27:18]

misconstrued the personality for Buddha. I want to read you what Suzuki Roshi has to say about habit energy. I found this lecture online, it's from July 1965 in San Francisco, and I'm just going to read you a few pieces. A student asked him about habit energy. He says, habit, habitual energy, habits, that is the result of the previous wrong conducts. And the student asks, how can we avoid creating more habits? He says, our purpose of practice is to cut completely, and cut is underlined. Cut completely down the habitual power, you know, to be completely free from our habitual energy or whatever it is, habits, habitual power. At least we should not doubt we are intrinsically free from habit energy.

[28:24]

Habit energy is something we create. We create and we, we suffer from it. And all those we's are underlined. We should no doubt, we should not doubt we are intrinsically free from habit energy. That's so encouraging. So inspiring to, to take into our lives. To become, you know, to create means in Buddhism, to create means to accumulate some elements and create something. And when those factors become separated, there is nothing left. composed, all composed being, we say. So our purpose of Zazen is to get out of the usual understanding of create or destroy. You know, this kind of scientific philosophical thinking. When we are free from those thinking, there is no creation or no destroy.

[29:30]

We are always free from those defilements. And we know this is our true nature. When we know that there's no more continuity of habits, we can stop the habits. Even for a moment, you can do it. Stop everything completely. Because we can stop it, we do not even stop it just to practice. We don't try to stop anything. Even we do not try to stop it. When you try to stop, as long as you try to stop, it will not work. So, you know, in his kind of broken English, I think what he's trying to say there is the very same thing that Thich Nhat Hanh and Norman Fisher are saying, that we don't try to stop it. We don't try to push it away. But through the practice, it can go away.

[30:33]

Then he says, it isn't verbal. Teaching is the teaching. The peek at it. Your conduct should not be based on just verbal teaching. Your inmost nature will tell you, you know. That is true teaching. What I say is not true teaching. I just give you the hint, you know. So this is really wonderful, I think. He's pointing at, he doesn't talk about the precepts, but he's talking about that's where the precepts come, from the inside out, from Buddha nature, not from some outward set of laws or rules, and not from our teachers, even though we value our teachers, but that inmost Buddha nature that's in all living beings.

[31:42]

I think it was a couple of weeks ago when Hozon gave a lecture, and I remember only one thing about the lecture. He said, we have everything we need. And I think as a personality, the response is, well, no, I don't have everything I need. But again, we're talking about our Buddha nature, that we have everything we need when we allow that Buddha nature to inform our lives. It's a much deeper place. And when we reside in calm mind, choices appear. That's not the mind of Susan or any of us, it's the mind of Buddha. The very last part of the lecture that he gives, a student asks, what happens if a person dies without realizing his Buddha nature?

[32:56]

What happens to his Buddha nature? Suzuki Roshi is surprised. What happens to Buddha nature? Nothing happened to it. It's always same and constant. The Buddha nature is always taking activity. It is in incessant activity. That is, there is not two Buddha nature. There's only one Buddha nature for everyone, for everything. And it is always in incessant activity. So I think it's easy for us to forget that, that there's always this activity, however we want to imagine it, below the surface, down deep, always trying its best to inform us. And in our clouded minds, we don't always see or hear it, hear that message. But it's very important because it's what's feeding us, it's what's feeding all life, this voice of Buddha.

[34:08]

When I read that part, The image that came to mind for me was of planting a tomato plant in the garden. When I was very young, my father taught me how to plant tomato plants. And he said, the most important thing that you have to do first is you have to loosen all the soil. You have to dig way down deep and all around and loosen up the soil so that there's air, so that the roots can breathe, and so that the soil can feed the plant. And then he said, you dig this deep, deep hole and put some manure in the bottom of the hole and then cover the manure with some soil so that the manure won't burn the roots of the tomato plant. And then by the time you have the soil on top of the manure, it's up high enough, you lay the tomato plant in there and then put all the soil around it, plant it. and water it. And over the life of the tomato, as it grows, the roots begin to grow and reach down for that manure which feeds it.

[35:21]

as it grows and develops and sets fruit. And that image came to me because I think it's the same in our practice that our practice loosens us up. I know some people think this is a strict and hard practice, but I've never felt that way myself. I feel like it's a very soft practice and it loosens us up so that we can reach down deep for the nature of life, Buddha nature, which is like the manure in the hole, at least in my eyes. So it's about five of 11 and I'd like to leave some time for discussion. And I'd like to end on time because it seems to be a topic of discussion around here.

[36:27]

Yes, it's five of 11. But before we have questions, I'd like to ask, Sojin, do you have something to say about habit energy? I do. I like your energy. Yeah, so it becomes looser and looser and nutrients are freed up and the water goes down to the roots and then it's drawn into the, into the plant and I often feel like a tree and I should probably, these are the roots.

[37:33]

Hmm. You're doing work unconditionally, not being controlled by conditioning. You're open to conditions, but they don't control you. So, I really appreciate you talking to me about that. You have that in you? Yes. We are appreciative. Thank you. And Hozon, do you have something to say about habit energy?

[38:44]

Okay. Okay. Yeah, Gary. Hmm. But I think that's only because of great faith and practice. I think, you know, I'm pretty aware I have a strong personality. I don't know if it's any stronger than anybody else's in this room, but I'm aware it's strong. And as, you know, as a young person, I allow that to rule me. So walking out of town, I wouldn't do that in this practice because of the great faith I have in this practice.

[39:53]

Does that make sense? Right. Is that your experience? Right. I always feel like in the beginning, it's almost like, Some of the things we're asked to do in practice that we don't believe, so what? Just practice it anyhow. Like we have to almost pretend in the beginning, you know? I think that's true with certainly people that play instruments or do artwork.

[40:56]

You know, when you're really bad at something in the beginning, the only thing you can do is practice. And it's the practice itself that brings about not just improvement, but enjoyment. Right? You know what I mean? Is that your experience? Luminous heart. I think it probably does come in as long as I'm not thinking I'm graceful.

[42:45]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's good. How does that work in your life? Right. Right. Right. That sounds good. The word that popped into my head was gratitude. I mean, maybe grace and gratitude are partners. Ellen?

[43:47]

I was interested in your description when you were standing in line, and you said, by the time I got almost to the second person, I had a plan. Yeah. And I'm noticing, and I'm sort of an individualist, you know, when I have a plan, I'm sort of okay. I think you're right. You know, I think that it could have gone a different way. I mean, I think I could have eventually arrived at a plan, but the tension and the frustration could have been unleashed just even just in, you know, saying something nasty to the, you know, those poor agents get a lot of that.

[44:50]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Well, I think there was a space there and that in the space, things become obvious. Choices become obvious, right? And maybe I didn't say that, but You know, this was a matter of probably 30 minutes from the minute I saw that the flight was canceled to when I actually got up to talk to the, so. Yeah, I think that is really what you're saying is interesting. And that space, the time of the space might be different depending on what situation you were in. I mean, I was in a place I knew very well. So the choice came up very quickly once I put the mind to rest and once I relaxed, right? But that could be different depending on the kind of situation that a person's in and the danger that a person is in.

[46:12]

I mean, there are all kinds of scenarios, right? Yeah. Yeah, you had your hand up for a while, Kelsey. That's a really good question. I thought about that when I was thinking about giving the lecture. Should I talk about positive habit energy? And so when I thought about it, I experienced a lot of things physically. My orientation to the world is kind of physical. So I can identify negative habit energy in the way it manifests in my body physically, but I think a good habit, because the body's relaxed, maybe that isn't there. We all have good habits and we don't have to think about them, we just do them, right?

[47:17]

So... I think it does matter because we are trying to replace our habit energy with good habits, right? What's your experience? It's really hard to identify the positive. A lot of times the negative is what I'm Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, then that's kind of mixing up positive and negative energy, isn't it? I mean, the habit can be a good habit, but then if it's overdone, it can turn into a bad habit.

[48:21]

if there's some excess energy there, or kind of what we call in Zen practice, extra, right? We can do our job, but then if we're looking around to see who's watching us, then that's kind of the extra. So then we could drop that and come back to the breath. I don't know, that's what comes to my mind. Dean? empty space where the plan comes, whether the next part of the plan

[49:27]

I think you're right. I mean, I think we all have that experience of clear mind, calm mind, and choices arise. Options. I mean, in a kind of anxious or tense or clouded mind, I think I can safely say that I don't see as many choices, but there's always at least two choices and probably way more that we can see when the mind is not so clouded. Yeah, John.

[50:52]

behavior now and let something else take over. So is it stop or would you say you clarified it more correctly or what would you say? Well, maybe both. I mean, stop to me just means take a breath at the very least. Take a breath. Right. And don't do anything. But take a breath. I see that striker, I have 10 after, what do you have? Okay, okay. Yes, I've forgotten your name, I'm so sorry. Carl, that's right. Could be, yeah.

[52:36]

Yeah, well then that's why, I mean, if that's true, whether it's true or not, that's why we should be gentle with ourselves. We shouldn't be criticizing ourselves and judging ourselves and mad the next time that energy arises again. It takes a long time to realize that, that we don't need to be so mean to ourselves. and that that's the source of then being able to extend that outwards. If we're not so mean to ourselves, then we're not gonna extend that outwards. Well, that's good. Yeah. Right. Like an old friend, which is hard for us to, kind of say, right? But maybe not so with practice, right?

[54:04]

Yeah, well, probably all of us, because we've all got habit energy, right? And it's very powerful. So I think stop, the way I'm thinking of stop is just take a breath. That's what I mean. Because in that breath, possibilities may arise. I think so. I think so. Judy, and then we'll stop. Well, I think this is a joyful practice myself. I mean, I think joy is just there in our everyday activity.

[55:13]

And it doesn't, I see it as different than happy. Happy kind of comes and goes. But I think of joy as being a satisfaction with the way things are. or in spite of the way things are, right? We have so much to be grateful for. Look where we are. Does that make, I mean, how about for you? Resonating with what you said, that you experience these things in your body. So it's like you don't have to think your way to joy or even that gratitude. My experience is it just naturally arises. It's just an expression It is a relief. Right, right. And that's accessible to all of us because that's what Buddha nature is.

[56:20]

It's, you know, we each express it differently because we're individuals, but the activity of Buddha is there to be expressed, however, in each of us, right? All right, we're gonna stop. I'll talk to you outside, okay? All right, thank you all so much.

[56:43]

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