Well, it's warmer in here now than it was at six o'clock this morning. Thank you for bringing your body heat. I'd like to welcome everyone, especially those of you who are here for the first time. It's a big step to come to a place like this and find out what it's all about. And I am going to talk about Buddhism. But I wanted to have a little fun with it. I wanted to tell you a little bit about how I'm practicing with it in my life right now and some connections I've been making. And maybe you'll find it interesting and maybe you'll be able to make some of the same connections in your own life with what you're doing. I would like to talk about improvisation as practice.

[01:18]

And improvisation has many meanings and where it's come up for me is a workshop I've been taking on improvisation. And I've been taking it on Tuesday nights for several weeks and I have a couple more to go. And I've done it before. And I used to do theater many years ago, and I did quite a bit of improvisational theater when I was doing that. And in fact, as some of you might recall, I really credit my work in the theater and some of the techniques I learned as bringing me to practice. Some of the teachers I had had some very basic sort of techniques and philosophies and stances that led very naturally to a life of practice. So, in my experience, they're very linked, they're very related, and right now, this workshop is just bringing up a lot of really delicious kinds of ways of being, being in zazen, in motion.

[02:36]

Also, as most of you know, I'm a I'm a classroom teacher. Well, I'm a teacher of children. I don't teach the classroom. Although, the space is very important. As an actor, relating to the space is just as powerful as relating to the people. I keep rearranging the furniture on my kids. They keep wondering where things are. So it's like an adventure every day, where's the paper going to be and that sort of thing. But the space has all these possibilities for how we relate to one another. So I found that in being a classroom teacher, even if I'm very prepared, which is not usually the case, but even if I were to be very prepared, still working with any group of people, but really notably children, you have to be prepared to improvise because they are going to give you all kinds of opportunities to come up with who you really are instead of what you think should be happening.

[03:49]

I sort of treat my classroom as a stage in a way, not just for me, but there is a lot of improvisation that goes on, but within a structure. And the structure, you know, is 9 to 10 is reading, recess. 10 to 11 is math, recess. You know, just like 540 to 620 is zazen, kinning. You know, it's kind of the same thing. There's these structures and forms within which we improvise. And I wanted to sort of remind us of the liveliness of our lives. My friend sent me a card from Tassajara. And on the picture is a goldfish bowl with a goldfish sitting at a desk writing. And it's called Diary of a Fish. And it says, Monday, swam around bowl, ate, slept. Tuesday, swam around bowl, ate, slept. Wednesday, right? And this is particularly, you know, meaningful for a Tassajara bird, Tassajara fish.

[04:59]

It's like, It seems the same, and yet it's not. So I have found a couple of sources that turn out to be Zen sources, even if they're not Zen teachers. They're both sort of improvisational experts. And this first one, I don't know, and I didn't have the book, but someone handed me all these quotes, and that's why I thought of doing this talk, because I got handed these quotes. I don't have too many, but. This is Steven Natmanovich from a book called Free Play, which I don't know if it is in print anymore, but he seems to have a very reverent and sort of spiritual relationship with improvisation. When we think improvisation, we tend to think first of improvised music or theater or dance. But beyond their own delights, such art forms are doors into an experience that constitutes the whole of everyday life.

[06:03]

We are all improvisers. The most common form of improvisation is ordinary speech. As we talk and listen, we are drawing on a set of building blocks, vocabulary. and the rules for combining them, grammar. These have been given to us by our culture, but the sentences we make with them may never have been said before and may never be said again. Every conversation is a form of jazz. The activity of instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing. I'll tell you a little bit about this workshop so that you start to understand how I connected the aspects with what I do in the workshop to what I do in Zazen practice. We meet in a theater space and we check in.

[07:05]

How are you doing? How's your week? Just sort of the thing you do in probably all the meetings you go to in your life. We check in and then we do some warm-up work. And the warm-up work typically starts with walking around the space, putting our feet on the ground and being instructed and reminded to feel the ground and to feel gravity not as a force pushing down on us but as a very vibrant energy that is actually making our standing possible. So that it's not exactly reversing the flow, but it's connecting with gravity in this other way. Instead of sort of down, you get this sort of planted feeling in your feet. And as you know, like trees reach their roots down, the more secure and deep and strong their roots, the taller and straighter they can grow.

[08:08]

So we stand. We stand and we breathe. and then we walk around and we breathe and we notice our feet on the floor and we notice our passing another person and we notice that we're trying to walk in an interesting way because we're in a theater workshop. Then we try to go back to just walking, you know, just doing the activity. And then there are various exercises we do, vocal exercises to sort of free up the voice and letting our body move in different ways. And then we start improvising. We start getting up in front of each other in ones or twos and creating pieces out of feels like nothing. And that's what we're going to talk about. You know, creating our lives out of what? So I've been having a lot of fun in this workshop.

[09:10]

I think as I get older, my natural self-consciousness, although it's still there, doesn't quite equal the fact that I'm sort of desperate to have my life be really fun and actualize myself. So that sort of wins out. And this also happens to be something I'm kind of good at. So I didn't sign up for the singing workshop, let's say. The sewing workshop. I wanted that experience of connecting in a way that I can connect with. So there are just these aspects of improvisation that line up really nicely in my mind and experience with how practice is. And I've sort of organized them, but some of them may repeat or be deeper dimensions of one I've mentioned before. And so the first one is I guess the most important one in Zazen practice and in theater work, which is being present.

[10:12]

And those exercises I told you where we start our workshop are critical. And we sort of rush through them, but I know that the teacher I have and his company, they spend a lot of time working on being present. That if you're not, if I'm not actually there in my body and voice, in my mind, in my experience, you as the audience are not going to get that thing you came for. And it's the same in life. I mean, we don't quite get what we signed up for if people aren't really there. And if I'm not really there, I kind of miss it. I go to the grocery store sometimes and think it should be over and done with because I need to get to my life. constant theme in Zen practice. That's my life right then. I actually found myself being in the grocery store the other day and walking and pushing the cart and choosing the vegetables and I was there and I was relaxed when I got home.

[11:19]

I was present when I got home. So when you do that on stage you can have the same sort of presence and that is a quality I think that we can never say too much or remind each other too much about. And it comes and goes for most of us. And so we have these ways of sort of tricking ourselves back to being present. And in Zazen we have going back to the breathing and coming back to our mudra and coming back to our spine. And in the theater, we have stopping and waiting for the next thing to come. There's this quality of non-thinking. And what that means is we're not trying to think of what to do.

[12:24]

In our lives we have to think of what to do. And we know what we have to do. But when we start doing them, we don't have to think of what to do because we're doing it. And so what we need to do is follow the lead of the organism. And the organism is this collection, body, mind, emotion, sensation, karma. And it has a lot of information. And our job is to allow the impulses to arise. They're already there. They're already going on. And letting impulses arise, bring you your material. You don't have to memorize Shakespeare to get up and perform. You already have your monologue. You already have your story. And telling a story is something everyone knows how to do when they have the story. If I asked any one of you to tell the story of when you lost a tooth, or if you could retell the story of the three little pigs, which you probably know backwards, or the story of your breakfast this morning, you wouldn't even think about it.

[13:40]

You would just say it. You would just be it, that story. So, A lot of the ways we allow those impulses to come up, allow our life to come up, is to get out of the way. So we're really trying to step aside And the way we do that in theater are these, you know, really fun games. We do sound and movement games where you can't think. I mean, you're already gonna look stupid, so if you think about it, you'll probably just look stupid in a different way, you know? You might think you're more creative, but it's so, you flap your arms and you make vocal sounds and you mirror people and it really does get you out of your head and kind of warms you up to the fact that your body and mind is already is already having a story. Things are already going on. So again from Steven Nakmanovich, how does one learn improvisation?

[14:45]

The only answer is to ask another question. What is stopping us? Spontaneous creation comes from our deepest being and is immaculately and originally ourselves. What we have to express is already with us. It is us. So the work of creativity is not a matter of making the material come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow. When I read this quote, I sort of substituted some words. I said, how does one learn practice for improvisation? And again, you can ask, well, what's stopping me? what I have to express in practice is already in me. It already is me. So the work of practice is not a matter of making enlightenment come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow. You know, the purposes for practice and the purposes for theater improvisation fundamentally are different.

[15:52]

I don't mean to suggest that doing a theater workshop is a replacement for earnest practice. However, when we take up activities in our life with the same sort of commitment and realize that they all, when they're really good, follow the way Zazen does, nice connections are made. Then everything I do can be practiced. So this thing about material, you know, we are emptiness in a form. We are emptiness. We are Buddha in a form. We have this body and mind and karma. And this teacher I'm working with said something very interesting during our check-in. Sometimes during the workshop we take a break and we go and we write and we do free writing. You know, when we're up hopping around on stage, I'm really happy and, you know, kind of in my element.

[16:57]

And when we have to sit down and write, I feel kind of punished and nervous. Well, because I, you know, I don't like to write and I judge my writing really harshly. And I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You know, it's fine to get up and, you know, make some gibberish monologue. But when I try to do gibberish monologues in writing, all this stuff comes up. And the teacher has said, you know, our material is just our material. Whatever comes up just comes up. It's not a problem to be fixed. So when you're acting or when you're writing and a problem comes up, let it be your material. Let it be the scene you're gonna play. Let it be your story. Don't try to fix it. And this has really freed me up because when I did theater a lot of years ago, We did a lot of sound and movement, a lot of character work, and this stuff would come up. And you'd connect to feelings you didn't know you have.

[17:59]

You'd find yourself wailing about something, and then you didn't really have the tools to sort of contain it back up. And then you thought you had all these big problems, and then you got branded as someone. Oh, it's her and her mother thing, or he's got that thing about young women, or him and his food thing. And people would start knowing you in this way and it became your problem. And it could be a little destructive unless you really knew how to handle it. Well for me, and this teacher happens to be very good at just, you know, being interested in what you say, in receiving what you say. And it's not a problem to be fixed. So this was like a great liberation for me that, you know, the fact that I have issues with my voice, let's say, is not a problem to be fixed. It becomes material for my story. Or the fact that I had a fight with someone is not a problem.

[19:05]

I have to rush home and fix. In that moment, it's my material. This material, I think, is unavoidable in our lives. We have material. And in practice, the material is what brings us back to our experience. It's not something to get away from. In joining with the material, accepting the material then sort of mysteriously because we've become in relationship to our material we've accepted our material we've maybe, dare we, delight in our material a little bit we have some freedom in distance, we're not gripped by it. We're not driven by it. It's not the story or that story doesn't drive us, you know. Buddha drives us. In a way to me that's sort of like, for me it's a kind of practice of right view.

[20:09]

It's not that we don't have problems that need fixing or situations that require our attention, but a lot of us kind of spend a lot of time whipping ourselves for not being better than we are, or thinking we have problems, when in fact this is our material. This is the stuff that lets us be who we are. When we deepen our non-thinking, when we really allow ourselves to respond to our impulses, real allowance and real uncovering or real discovering happens. We really do get out of the way and scary things can happen. This teacher often says, when you get up to do an improv in front of other people, you should feel like you're falling.

[21:16]

And you do, you know. If you're really not trying to trick it out and go, okay, I'll do something about my mother or that will, you know, if you really try to be with what's happening and just let whatever comes out, you feel like you're falling. And, you know, Zen practice has often been described as this sort of sensation of having nothing to hold on to. I have a couple places I want to go at once, so I'm trying to make a choice here. One of the ways we practice this, let's say in the theater workshop, is I might do something, when I get up to start a piece in front of people, I have no idea, like no idea. Or maybe I have one line that I've taken from my writing, a line that might be as simple as, I put my hat on, I put my hat on. I put on my hat, I put my hat, so I have a line maybe. But I don't start with the line, I start with my breath and my body.

[22:19]

And I'm in front of people, breathing and standing. And then I let movement happen. So then I start moving in these sort of impulsive, Karen-y ways. You know, and movements happen and then voice happens. And so I'm looking a little psychotic in front of my audience as I'm moving around looking for my material or allowing my material to come. I'm going to return to that psychotic thing in a minute. And then I might find that my arm is doing something and then it becomes something. My arm just may be doing this gesture and then all of a sudden it becomes the fact that I'm flinging flour across the room because I don't want to bake the pie crust. And now a story started and I had no idea and I don't have pie crust written down here. So it's like you let your material arise out of who you are. And it's really fun and you find these places in yourself that usually are kind of kept really tight because... And this is a book which I recommend everybody read.

[23:33]

It's really fun. It's called Impro. It's by Keith Johnstone. Because we have three basic fears. The fear of looking psychotic. The fear of being obscene. And the worst, the fear of being unoriginal. So those three fears keep us kind of looking good. And, you know, looking good is great as far as it goes, but you're not going to really come to know yourself if you continue to look good. So, a couple things. I want to just say something about psychotic thought. He has this great theory about psychotic thought. Most of us have them. Most of us have that edge of being really loony. We would probably say if we were admitting to someone, you know, I think I'm a little bit more loony than the rest of people I know.

[24:38]

And we all feel that way a little bit. that he thinks sanity is actually a way we learn. Well, it is. You know, we learn to act a certain way. And that the problem with insanity is not that we are insane on the inside, but it's that we act insane towards other people. That's really the only problem. And here's his illustration. I love this story. I once read about a man who believed himself to have a fish in his jaw. The case was reported in New Society. This fish moved about and caused him quite a lot of discomfort. When he tried to tell people about the fish, they thought him crazy, which led to violent arguments. After he had been hospitalized several times with no effect on the fish, It was suggested that perhaps he shouldn't tell anyone. After all, it was the quarrels that were getting him put away rather than his delusion. Once he agreed to keep his problems secret, he was able to lead a normal life.

[25:42]

His sanity is like our sanity. We may not have a fish in our jaw, but we all have its equivalent. When you're sitting zazen, the fish in your jaw, if you allow it, arises naturally. You don't act it out, though. You let it live inside and let it pass away. In theater, the only difference is we let it live and we express it. We express our enlightenment through sitting still in zazen and allowing the fish in the jaw. In theater, we just let it rip a little bit, but it's really teaching me about if I can let go of my thinking and sort of judgments and what looks good, wild stuff comes up that does lead me somewhere. There's an intelligence in it that's not a normal sort of intellectual intelligence.

[26:47]

There's an intelligence that leads me to my own story, to a better knowledge of myself, a better relationship with myself. The other thing he says to be a good improviser is to be really, really obvious. To be really direct and really obvious. We find this in practice to be that there's a lot of mundane things that we do. Our rituals, you know, swam around bowl, ate, slept. You know, we have these mundane things that are our life. In the zendo we have bowing, sitting cross-legged, fluffing cushion, bowing some more, cleaning the zendo.

[27:54]

We have these forms. They're very mundane, but these, this is exactly where the rich story is. I mean, if you've ever been to a skit night in May here, you know, all we're doing is making fun of the things we do every day. It's the best stuff. So, um, our lives already have given us the best stuff. It's if we choose to accept it. I, um, I can't find that quote, but there's another one here that just brings in again the notion of the judge that we all struggle with when we are trying to express ourselves inwardly or outwardly. And this is from Viola Spolin. Our simplest move out into the environment is interrupted by our need for favorable comment or interpretation by an established authority.

[28:56]

We either fear that we will not get approval or we will accept outside comment and interpretation unquestionably. In a culture where approval and disapproval has become the predominant regulator of effort and position, and often the substitute for love, our personal freedoms are dissipated. I like that phrase, the predominant regulator of effort and position. What's moving us? Is Buddha moving us? Is Big Mind moving us? Or is it what we think the outside world is going to say? Whether we're ready to resist it or accept it. Where is our reference? And this personal freedom, you know, when you sit in zazen, a lot of us have sat for many years and missed a big part of our life because our habits of closing down on the mundane, the psychotic, and the obscene are so in place.

[30:02]

We don't even know. So we just sit there worrying about our job when in fact more murderous things are going on. I have a friend who's doing some really, really intense spiritual work in another tradition. She was a Zen student for about 17 years. She's working in another tradition right now that combines sitting with a kind of psychological processing and they open up these places in you and they sort of drive you into them and they use a little bit of theater in their work. They have you say things over and over to each other. They ask you questions like a million times and you answer it and all this stuff starts to come up and she went around for weeks and weeks, and her predominant experience was, I hate everyone in the world. I want them to be dead. I want to be the only one here. And it was real. It was this real thing. And again, the idea is not to dwell in these things, but to know that they're there.

[31:03]

And some of them, we haven't known for so long, in order for them to live, they may have to hang around a while. So that's why I particularly like theater, because I want them to come up. If they're going to hang around a while, I want to have some fun with it or make a story with it. I'm going to finish up here with, actually, I think the two most important things, one being present, and then this last one is kind of a combination. Everything in a theater improv requires an offer. When two people are improvising together or when you're improvising alone, what's required is an offer. Fortunately, you don't have to think of an offer because just standing there is an offering. Or just breathing is an offering. Or just moving your arm is an offering. And then if you're the partner, or if you're partners with yourself, but let's just say for now there's two people on stage, the other person's job is to accept the offer.

[32:05]

Bad improvisation happens when I'm asserting my ego and it's like, that's not a very clever idea. Here, I'll do something more original and I assert me. And then you fight me on that and you assert you. Real flow happens in a good improvisation when you're not worried so much about yourself. You're creating something together. So an offer is made and you accept it. You just say yes. Maybe they say something really boring like, I had fish for dinner. Fish is kind of a theme here, you know. It's slippery. It's slippery, yeah. And you might just say, so what, or no, or go somewhere else with it. But to make something really juicy happen, it's like fish, and take off on the fish, or dinner, or accept the offer.

[33:07]

Accept the offer. And we get offers all the time from ourselves, from the world, from objects, we get these offers. And we're constantly saying no. A lot of times we feel like we don't have room for it. We don't have room for this, you know, this person in front of me at the post office. I don't have time for that. I have my own life. Here's an offering, you know. She's fumbling with her purse and I... It's my story. It's my material. I'm turning my back on my material. So, um, It's really important in a good improvisation, in a good life, to say yes, to accept the offer. Now you may not like it, and you may argue with it, but you have to accept that it's there. So in theater, a good theater piece has conflict, right? It's not everybody going, yes, and this is nice, and that's nice. You want conflict, but in order to have that good conflict, you have to accept the premise.

[34:09]

to accept the other person and go with it. And if you see really good improv, you don't see the individual people, you see this flow happening. It's almost like, they're not making, this can't be happening just now. But it is, it's just arising just now because they're listening and they're saying yes. And they're listening and they're saying yes. And to me, that just sounds so much like good practice that I just can't resist it. The ideal, which we can approach but never fully reach, for we all get stuck from time to time, is moment-to-moment non-stop flow. This is what many of the spiritual traditions refer to when they speak of chopping wood, carrying water, bringing into the humdrum activities of daily life the qualities of luminosity, depth, and simplicity within complexity that we associate with inspired moments. We can then say with the Balinese, we have no art. Everything we do is art.

[35:10]

We can lead an active life in the world without being too entangled in scripts or rigid expectations. Doing without being too attached to the outcome because the doing is its own outcome. There's just two last things and this is kind of actually the point of my talk and the point of why theater work, theater improvisation work makes me think of practice. And that's because when you're on stage with another person, even if that other person is yourself, and you're saying yes, you are giving permission to that person. You are unleashing them. You are unleashing their imagination. And you're serving them. You're making it possible for them to be successful. So I find that when I'm really engaged in good improvisation, my ego has been laid to the side. It's not about me looking good or being special.

[36:14]

It's about participating in this creativity and serving the other person. And in fact, if I really focus on that other person and still keep that bit of my mind that has to be aware of my own impulses, my own breathing, you know, just enough attention to keep me in touch with my experience and then serve that other person You know, you say great theater happens or enlightenment happens. So I just feel like it's kind of a bodhisattva vow that it's an act of compassion to be so generous with your attention, with my attention. Just find one or two more from This is a game that Keith Johnstone plays with people.

[37:19]

It's called Presence. And you can play it with your loved one. I invented a rather childish game, which is now often used with small children, but works really well with grown-ups if you coax them through their initial resistance. I divide people into pairs and call them A and B. A gives a present to B, who receives it. B then gives a present back, and so on. At first, each person thinks of giving an interesting present, but then I stop them and suggest that they can just hold their hands out and see what it is the other person chooses to take. If you hold out both hands about three feet apart, then obviously it will be a larger present, but you don't have to determine what your gift is. The trick is to make the thing you are given as interesting as possible. You want to over-accept the offer. Everything you are given delights you. Maybe you wind it up and let it walk about on the floor, or you sit it on your arm and let it fly off after a small bird, or maybe you put it on and turn it into a gorilla.

[38:23]

An important change of thinking is involved here. When the actor concentrates on making the thing he gives interesting, Each actor is in competition and feels it. When they concentrate on making the gift they receive interesting they then generate warmth between them. So I think that's all I have to say about giving and receiving and offering and playing. We have a few minutes for comments and maybe your experience with your life in policy. to say no to some of them?

[39:33]

Yeah, like I can't come to dinner, I'm too busy. Yeah. Or anything. Sure, sure. We have to say no. When I say offer, I don't mean so much like invitation to do something, more like an offer to be present, an offer to accept a certain reality. Since all realities come and go, you know, that what's ever arising will live and pass away and the next thing will come. I just mean accepting the offer of what's really happening. So when you say no to something, you are accepting the offer that you're both in relationship and dinner is something you both agree on, but you're just saying no, not to the offer, but to the sort of the specific, if you know what I mean. So. Hi, Sue. That's very similar to my experience.

[40:46]

I have my body and breathing as my grounding point, as a place to return to. So these things arise and want my attention. But in Zazen, I'm not developing the story. I am becoming acquainted with the story. So things, excuse me, things might arise that haven't arisen before and they become more interesting. or things that are habitual might come up and they're stronger by virtue of their habit. But my task in Zazen is to be present even if it sounds like a cacophony of thoughts. and then to return to just the experience, sitting with too many thoughts. But I don't go choosing them or, I mean it happens, I wake up and find, oh I've chosen one and here I've been off for, lo these many minutes.

[41:47]

But it's a different purpose, you know, zazen is actually purposeless. Well I want to thank you for your talk, I feel like it's been with you that would go on a long time, and I was responding to, yeah, that's a great idea, and I wanna try that, and what about this? So, thank you for that, and I also, a couple of, what you said rang very true for me. A couple things that I wanted to say. One revolves around intention, and the other is persistence. My sense is that what arises that I cannot look at or accept persists. It's as if we're making it permanent, and I like the psychotic ideas that are unacceptable, or the obscene ideas that are unacceptable to us.

[42:57]

My experience is that sitting Zazen allows me to expand what I can accept, and then it becomes something that doesn't run me. And there's something in there about intention. When you come to Satsang, I think the robe chant establishes our intention to not just sit, just do something. I mean, just sitting, yes, it is an intention to just sit. Come back to just breath, just this, just this thought arising, and not make something of it. Right, right. In theater, the intention is to make something of it. And not. Right, and not. Hi. Hi. Thank you for your talk. What you said reminded me of sort of the opposite of the modern day saying, I will not go there.

[44:00]

And I guess, I will go there, but I will not stay there. Right. You will go there. You can't stay there because there isn't permanent. It's only permanent when we don't allow it. I think it's time. I'll talk to you after. Thank you. Beings are

[44:28]

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