Mindlessness when you bring the tape recorder but forget to turn it on. So with these two quotes what I'd like to do is to talk for a moment about what's the point of mind training in the sense that the meditation path is about. I would say that the point is the cultivation of our ability for impartial awareness. of what is so. That is awareness which doesn't have a bias in terms of what we like and what we don't like. Which are the two points that most of us ricochet between. Avoiding what we don't like and grasping, craving and grasping what we do like. And being dissatisfied when what we want goes away and what we don't want doesn't go away or doesn't go away soon enough. So what I'd like to talk about tonight are some practices that can help us cultivate this impartial awareness.

[01:12]

Now, I want to flag as the accompanying qualities with this impartial awareness, the qualities of patience and of kindness. We cannot seek to cultivate some impartial awareness, some capacity to be present with things as they are unless we are very patient with our habits and tendencies to not be aware of what is so. We must be very patient as we begin to get to know what our habits are and begin to be able to see our blindness. And being able to see our blindness is very challenging, very difficult. And my experience is that the only way we can do that is if we are extremely kind and patient with ourselves when we aren't able to see something until much later.

[02:15]

One of my favorite quotations from my first teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, around from the Zen Center in San Francisco, formed in the late 50s. I have a little piece of paper on which he wrote, Do Not Say Too Late. His statement to encourage us to accept awareness when it comes, even if it's a week or a year or 10 years after the fact. How often have you had some experience and behaved badly and then later been very hard on yourself because you had some insight about what you could have done differently and you then chastise yourself because you didn't have that insight soon enough. It's very painful because we end up being very harsh judges with ourselves around this issue of not being soon enough. with our insight or our wisdom or our awareness.

[03:19]

And what he was proposing was that whenever insight arises is soon enough, especially if we're willing then to act on or accept wholeheartedly the insight, rather than say, oh, well, it doesn't do me any good now because it's come too late. So this is an instance where our cultivation of patience with the slowness of our waking up, the slowness of our cultivating impartial awareness is extremely important. And being kind in the sense of being tender when we begin to see what we do that we're not so thrilled with. The kinds of things that we don't want on our press release. So what I'd like to do is to talk about some specific practices that you could do that cultivate awakeness or awareness.

[04:24]

And what I have done is to categorize some specific practices in the standard grouping, practices that have to do with the mind, practices that have to do with the body, and practices that have to do with speech. Now, of course, any practice that I do in conjunction with the cultivation of body awareness or speech awareness will, of course, influence and affect the mind. So, in some way, what I'm doing with these different practices I'm going to describe will be training the mind directly or indirectly. And I think you'll understand what I mean better when I give you some specific examples. So one of the practices that I've been doing for some few years now that I have found very, very helpful is a practice of setting a clear intention.

[05:30]

Most of us, when we pick up this practice of cultivating a clear intention, take on too big an intention. We're not modest enough. We don't start with something very small and specific and doable. In order to have a clear intention, I have to first have some understanding that it's possible to have one. And I have been surprised at how powerful clear intention is. I've been quite surprised in my early experiences when I would set a very simple intention but be very exacting about it, that the next thing I knew I was doing that which I had set my intention for. So that it's a way of bringing together a certain focused inner energy. Sometimes in the symbolism of sacred art in the Buddhist tradition, the jewel that is held in the hands of a Buddha or a Bodhisattva is sometimes called the wish-fulfilling gem and sometimes is thought of as the symbol for clear intention.

[06:49]

One of the first intentions that I took on, I took on really by the inspiration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. when I learned that one of the practices he does in the early morning before he sees anyone or speaks to anyone is that he sets his intention to speak as kindly as he can. And my few experiences with him have been such that I'm deeply impressed by him as an example of the great cultivation that the Buddhist path produces. remarkable, awake, remarkably kind person. And I thought, well, if His Holiness can take that on as an intention, maybe I can try it. So I decided that I would set my intention to speak to myself in my thoughts and to others in my speaking with as much kindness as I can.

[07:55]

One of the things I've discovered over the years is that anything I do just after I wake up or right before I go to sleep tends to be more penetrating than practices I do at almost any other time of the day. So I began by doing this practice of setting my intention for kind speaking as soon as I woke up in the morning. One of the first things I did as an act of kindness was I did not expect myself to remember that that was my practice. So I put a sign by the side of the bed. We have a small black dog who is much beloved in our family, and she tends to sleep with us at night. And so I thought of her as a kind of small Saint Bernard. St. Bernard in the sense that instead of having a keg around her neck, she had a sign around her neck which only I could see. And it said, remember your intention to speak kindly.

[09:02]

So because she would often, almost always, be right in my face when I would first wake up in the morning, she became my reminder about setting my intention. And so the minute I would open my eyes, and this little black face with these little beady eyes would be right there, and I would say, good morning, Valsha. And so my first words were to greet her kindly. Shall we get up and go in the kitchen and turn on the water kettle? So for several weeks, I had these little conversations with the dog. Getting up, putting on my robe, going to the kitchen, turning on the kettle. How are you? Did you sleep well? And she would talk back to me, and we would have this very pleasant little conversation. After about three weeks, I realized, gee, I haven't been grouchy for a while. And as I thought about it, I realized that my first words were kindly in the conversation with the dog.

[10:13]

And that, of course, I wasn't grouchy because the first activity of my mind and my speaking was kindly. And that that obviously was having some effect on my state of mind. I was startled at how effective that intention was in terms of the positive and wholesome effect on my state of mind. Yesterday morning I went to visit at a meditation group that meets at a Christian church near where we live. One of the people in the meditation group was quite sad and weeping sometimes. After we sat, I gave a little Dharma talk and then we had a discussion and during the discussion she talked about how she had just seen her son for the first time in five years. Her son is addicted to drugs and alcohol.

[11:16]

And as a result of those addictions, has been in a lot of trouble with the police and has in fact been in and out of jail. And she, five years ago, said that she would not have anything to do with him until he had been clean and sober for six months. Finally, they met earlier this week on a street corner in the town where she lives. And he said to her, that will never happen. I will never be clean and sober for six months. I don't know how to do that. I will never do that. So part of what she was crying about yesterday morning was how to be with her son. And one of the suggestions I made to her was every time she was going to talk to him on the phone or see him, that she take this practice of clear intention. and that she be very specific about what her intention might be for that particular phone call or that particular meeting.

[12:25]

So if her intention was to be present and to listen to him and to do her best not to give him a lot of advice about how he should be living his life, she could help herself be the way she wanted to be with her son by having that be her intention. A few years ago someone came to talk to me about meditation practice and she told me about a very challenging situation she was about to be in. Her husband's children from a former marriage were going to be involved in one of the children's weddings. And so there would be many members of the family, an extended family, coming together and this woman had historically gotten into a lot of trouble whenever there were family gatherings. She would have a little too many glasses of wine and begin speaking her mind a little too bluntly and would get into arguments and one thing and another.

[13:30]

And she said, I would like to go through the 10 days of wedding parties and not start any fights with anybody. I would like to be part of this wedding, series of wedding parties and stay out of trouble and in fact be as kindly as I can be. So I told her about this clear intention practice. She said, okay, I'll try it. My intention is to be as kind as I can during this 10 days. And she said at the end of the 10-day period she came back and she said quite proud of herself, it worked. She said before each event she reminded herself what her intention was. She would usually have something around her wrist to help her remember. She said, sometimes I would have to get up from the table and excuse myself and go to the ladies' room where I could talk to myself about what my intention was, just to remind myself.

[14:32]

She said I had to work my way through each event, sometimes a third of the event at a time. She said it also helped that I decided not to have any alcohol to drink during these parties, and I noticed that that helped a lot also, because I could stay more clear-headed. And she was so surprised to discover that she had this capacity to not speak out in some blunt or harsh way, a capacity she actually wasn't sure she had. So she uncovered it for herself. So I hope in my examples you understand that what I'm suggesting in this practice of setting your clear intention, that you be quite specific with what you set, and that you be quite clear that what you are going for is something quite doable.

[15:33]

And of course what's wonderful about this practice is that if you don't know what your clear intention is, then your clear intention can be to find your clear intention. So there's no way you can be lost. And I like practices like that a lot. The other piece of the practice is at the end of the day to ask yourself, well, how did it go? Not with a big flashlight and a stick, how did it go? But with kindness, how did it go today? When were the times when I forgot my intention? or when I somehow was not able to hold to it, because of course those will be the times that will be very informative if you are willing to notice them with impartiality, that is without judging, just describing and noticing. So to do a kind of review, how did it go today, and to then renew your intention just before you go to sleep.

[16:39]

Now that's a practice that you can do for 30 seconds before you get out of the warm, cozy bed in the morning. I think that particularly for those of us who are householders, there are many practices that come out of the precepts that can be followed as householders and as people living in the world. So one of the, I think virtually all of the precepts lend themselves to being picked up as a focus in our daily lives. One of the precepts that I think is extremely powerful is the one about anger. In the tradition that I follow, we translate that precept as a disciple of the Buddha does not harbor ill will. When I first began my own practice, it was a great relief to me to realize that the precept does not say, don't ever have ill will arise.

[17:52]

It says don't harbor it. And I think that is a relief, that precept is a relief, because it means we can begin with focusing on when ill will arises, what are the things that I do to keep the ill will fired up. Things like telling someone, do you know what she said to me? That telling the story over and over again can be a way of harboring or fanning the fire, if you will. So if I was going to take on that precept as a focus of my practice for a while, and when I talk this way, what I mean is that would be my only focus for a week or a month, or if I had a big habit of anger, I might stay with it for even longer, a year or so. The first time I went through the precepts, most of them I spent a year or a year and a half with each one.

[18:57]

So I'm not talking about a quick fix. I'm talking about very slow, tenacious, patient, coming back to something. So if I took this precept of not harboring ill will, the first step of taking that on as the focus of my spiritual practice for whatever period of time I was taking it on would be to be willing to notice harboring. That would be the first step. Because of course I can't stop harboring ill will until I begin to see when I harbor ill will, how I harbor ill will, what the details of that activity called harboring are. Talking about it is one of the ways we keep the flame fanned. Reviewing the story, perhaps not to others, but in our own minds. How many times has something happened, someone has done something that we feel particularly upset about and we go over it and over it and over it and over it.

[20:08]

Our mind gets locked on the story. I have one friend who is quite adept at this kind of obsessing about something that happened, that someone else did to her. One of the suggestions I made to her when she began to realize that she harbors ill will with this kind of obsessing about a particular situation, and she just keeps talking to herself about it, sometimes for hours. She goes to sleep talking to her about what her neighbor did, and she wakes up still talking to herself about what her neighbor did, for example. So one of the suggestions that I made to her was that she make a date with herself to talk to herself about the situation and that whenever the thoughts came up about the story, she would say, not now. I have a date on Thursday at three and I can sit and talk to myself about this situation then, not now.

[21:12]

But of course, Before she could do that, before she could see that she needed to find some way to stop obsessing, she had to notice that she was obsessing about what the misdeed was that had been wrought upon her. Each of us has our own particular way of keeping the flame burning under anger. And the starting point, I think, is to notice the territory, to notice what we get angry about, to become a little bit interested in anger and begin to see that under that term we have many, many, many different emotional states. And that if we begin to pay attention to anger when it's not quite so hot, we may have more ability to not harbor than when it's really at a full boil. I may be able to notice harboring or the beginning stages of harboring with irritation somewhat more easily than when I'm really angry in the way that leaves me feeling blind.

[22:28]

So that's another example of a practice that has to do with the mind. that might be the focus that you could take on without having to shave your head and wear robes and go to the monastery. And I'm sure that the world would be blessed by whatever degree of lessening of anger we can bring about in our own lives. So many times we feel helpless to make the world a better place because there is such a vast amount of anger and violence in the world that we live in. And we get so focused on all of the anger that's out there that we forget that the place to start is with our own minds. So the third practice I want to describe, which I think is also a practice that you could do in conjunction with the lives you actually have today, is the practice of gratitude.

[23:35]

It's a very effective focus, especially if you have much habit with negative thinking, particularly with judging, habitual judging kind of thought. The minute you notice some unwholesome or unhappy or some negative state of mind, ask yourself, quick, 10 things I'm grateful for. You don't have to feel grateful. You don't have to want to do it. You can do it quite mechanically, and you may be surprised at what happens. My suggestion is that your list of 10 things be very specific. And every time you do it, it can be the same list or it can be a different list. Some years ago, I was practicing with someone who was married and had two young children. And she would come to see me every couple of weeks and spend most of the time talking to me about how upset she was with her husband who couldn't do anything right.

[24:46]

She had a very long list of all the things that he did that weren't right. In fact, there wasn't anything she could think of that he did right. And she did reluctantly begin to admit that she enjoyed these lists. So I suggested to her that she, every time she realized she was beginning to make a list about what her husband did that was wrong, that she do this 10 things she's grateful for. So a week after she did this, she came back and kind of shuffling her feet, a little pouty, she said, well, it worked. Damn it. So she had to deal with the fact that she was actually enjoying her grumpy, judging, policeman mind. But what she reported was the quickness with which her state of mind changed with this ten things, quick ten things I'm grateful for.

[25:53]

This practice is also a great antidote for anxiety and worry. It's a wonderful quote from D.T. Suzuki, don't worry, be grateful. You may be surprised sometime when you're in a little worry fit. Ask yourself, what am I grateful for right now, just in this moment? What happens when you do this practice is you're in a way picking up your mind, you're picking up your intention. from the focus of worry or judgment or criticism or whatever it is, and you're placing it on what you're grateful for or what you appreciate. And there is an immediate effect. So it's an example of mind training, if you will. Because of course what we don't realize is that what we do repeatedly becomes a habit. And negative thinking can become a habit.

[27:01]

just in the way that we have the habit of picking up a cup with one hand rather than another. We have all kinds of habits, physical habits, we have habits in our speaking, we have habits in the kinds of thoughts we have, we have all kinds of habits. And to have the habit of negative thought can have quite dramatic and unhappy consequences. Because we only see part of the picture. Even if what we're looking at, even if our negative description is accurate, insofar as it goes, it's not the whole picture. I'm someone who has a very developed capacity for noticing what's wrong. I was trained by a master. I sometimes think that I was trained to notice what's wrong as I got my mother's milk, if you will. My mother is also very good at noticing what's wrong.

[28:06]

And I remember one day when I was walking from my house to the center at Green Gulch Farm, near where I live, for a meeting that I, for a number of years, went to every Wednesday afternoon. I had a kind of experience of this cranky mind that notices everything that's wrong. The tools left out in the fields, the coffee cups left along the path, the cardboard boxes left out in the rain looking kind of ugly and disarrayed. An endless list of what was wrong. As I'm walking through this beautiful valley and these beautiful fields with kill deer, singing in the fields and the sun overhead and here I am grumping along about all the things I see as I walk along that are wrong. And I was just tired of it. So I said, for the rest of this walk I'm going to pay attention to what I appreciate.

[29:09]

It's not that I'm not going to see what isn't taken care of, but I'm going to consciously choose to place my attention on what I'm grateful for or what I appreciate. I was completely stunned at the shift in my experience of the world. It was as though someone had turned a light on or we'd gone from black and white to color. There was that dramatic a shift in my state of mind. So dramatic that I've never forgotten it. So if you are one of those people blessed with such a cranky mind, this practice of focusing on gratitude I think can be quite interesting and perhaps surprising. And as with most of the practices that I'm talking about, you can't just hear about them. The only way you'll discover whether they're effective for you is if you actually try them out.

[30:16]

Let me mention three examples of practices that have to do with speech. I'm particularly fond of language practices because they can have a wholesome effect very quickly. And for most Americans, we're very impatient. We want results very quickly. We don't have time to meditate for 40 minutes or an hour every day for years before we begin to see some. a positive consequence, but what I've discovered is that if we pay attention to the way we speak, we can sometimes discover quite dramatic shifts and changes in awakenings. So let me just suggest several. My favorite, well, I don't know if it's my favorite, one of my favorite, is the precept about the disciple of the Buddha does not lie.

[31:21]

I actually think that we could do away with all of the ten grave precepts and just keep that one and we would come to all the rest in time. It's so fundamental. A few, I don't know, maybe two months ago I started working with a man who is a lawyer who came to see me He came to see me feeling quite desperate about his suffering. He said, I'm very depressed. I'm very unhappy. I have everything I could possibly want in the world, and I'm miserable. And I don't want to take antidepressants, and I don't know what to do. And I'm not the least bit interested in meditation, and I don't want a spiritual life. And I thought, well, it's kind of odd that you've come to talk to me, but let's talk to each other for a little while and see what happens.

[32:24]

Let's try it once or twice and see what happens. So the first session he told me his story. And very quickly what I realized was he had every reason to be depressed and to be unhappy. His father had been killed in a car accident when he was five, and his mother had disappeared into a kind of shell. She functioned. She took care of he and his brothers. She provided for them, but she was emotionally and psychologically and spiritually gone. So at five, he in a very real sense lost both his parents. And he grew up being extremely good at everything he does, the best. And one of the things he did was to lead a kind of double life. He never had one girlfriend.

[33:30]

He always had two or three. As he was just breaking up with one, he always had at least one backup. That kind of thing. but to quite a startling degree. So I listened to his story and I said, well, I told him what I just said to you. I think you have a good reason to be depressed and unhappy. Makes sense to me. He said, well, you are a good listener. I'd like to come and talk to you again. So the next time he came, we talked for a while, and then I said, I want to make a suggestion to you. I would like you to pay attention to when you lie. And he kind of gulped, and he said, really? And I just noticed out loud to him the lies I had observed.

[34:35]

I said, I don't want you to stop lying. I'm not asking you to change your behavior in any way. All I want you to do is to notice lying. So two weeks later, he came back and he said, I'm amazed. And he was not only quite aware of how pervasive this pattern was, he immediately was clear how much of his suffering was the result of his lying. And he said, it's not worth it. And over the course of the past two months, he has begun telling slowly a few people and then a few more people more about his story and has let a few people know more fully who he really is. So the last time he came to see me, he said, I'm worried about my spiritual life.

[35:46]

I don't have any. I said, I thought you didn't want one. He said, well, I was wrong. I heckle him a lot. I enjoy somebody that doesn't mind my heckling them. He's very bright, and he's a litigation lawyer, so he likes, you know, tussles, et cetera. He said, of course, you know, in my professional life, I probably have to lie. I said, really? He said, well, don't I? I said, well, I don't know. That's for you to find out. So that's his current assignment. Is it possible for him to practice law and not lie? I said, now remember, I'm not saying tell the truth. I'm saying don't lie. I actually think it's more doable. Who knows what the truth is? I mean, the truth keeps changing depending on how much information we have. So these precepts are very wise, I think, in the way they are formulated.

[36:47]

So here's this one focus that this man, who is absolutely cynical about Buddhism, about meditation, about spiritual practice, but somehow Because of the conversations we've been having, he said, well, all right, I'll try it. And what I saw was this kind of constricted cement shell he had imprisoned himself in began to crack a little bit. And I hope he stays with this paying attention to not lying for a long time. The first time I worked with this precept, I worked with it continuously for a year and a half. I used it almost as a kind of mantra. I just kept asking myself, is this a lie? I tried to notice, I tried to begin with noticing what constitutes lying. When is silence lying?

[37:49]

When is exaggeration or understatement a form of lying? Lying is very complicated and we are so, in our society, so surrounded by different forms of lying and there is so much permission for certain kinds of lying. You know, we have this category called little white lies. They don't count. That's of course not true. Erosion happens very slowly, especially erosion of the mind. Any one of us could take on this practice. We all have time. practice like this. Let me mention two others just briefly as examples of some language practices, and then maybe after the break, if you're interested, we can talk about a few more. One of my favorite, I often hear people say, I can't do such and such. And what I've come to understand is that almost always when someone says I can't, what they really mean is either I don't want to or I don't know how.

[39:03]

Very rarely when I say I can't do I mean I literally am unable to do this. There are those situations. I am unable to lift this car by myself. Will you come help me? I happen to have a car four people can pick up, so it's not quite so outrageous an example. My experience is that if I say I don't want to, or I don't know how, when I'm used to saying I can't, that I have a sense of some personal authority and power which leaves me able to proceed in a way that is not the consequence of saying I can't. When I say I can't, there is a kind of shutting down, a kind of helplessness, a kind of I'm a victim, I can't move. Which isn't there when I say I don't know how.

[40:08]

If it's accurate, I don't know how, is the first step towards, oh, well then my task is to discover how to do what I don't know how to do. I'm still on the map somehow in a way that I'm not when I say, I can't. Some years ago, I practiced with someone who used to say anytime he or anyone else would make a mistake, you dummy. And he would say it as a kind of joke. And he would sometimes say it almost lovingly. So that it was very easy to not realize that this is a judgment. And what I've discovered is that far more people say that to themselves than they say to other people. If you have some way of speaking to yourself that puts yourself down, that's a kind of a judgment, pay attention to that, because it has an effect on the mind, which consequently has an effect on how you experience yourself in the world.

[41:24]

Now, with a habitual habit of that sort in speaking, the way to do the noticing is with this wonderful practice that comes out of the Theravadan tradition called bare noting. You note what the habit is. You note it and label it. In this case, I might say judgment. And then I shift my awareness to a neutral body sensation and then the breath. In other words, I note what I'm paying attention to, but so briefly that I don't get caught with a big story about what a jerk I am to be speaking this way to myself, which is called judging the judge. And if I keep doing that very brief noting, I don't get caught in the content, I note the habit, I note the pattern. And in time, the pattern begins to not be quite so established, there begins to be a kind of loosening.

[42:29]

So those are three examples of speech practices. Of course, there are lots of practices that have to do with the body. And let me just mention a few. As I said earlier, I think one of the issues for many, if not all of us, is the pace of our lives. I don't think that going at a fast pace is inherently unwholesome, but it's unwholesome if it's the only pace at which we go, because we forget. We lose ourselves. We forget to eat lunch. We forget to go to the bathroom in a timely way. We forget to go get a drink of water. We forget to take care of ourselves. We forget all kinds of things if we're just going at a dead run all day. we certainly lose our mindfulness if we're going at a fast pace.

[43:33]

There is a dramatic correlation, I think, between pace and awareness. So there are a number of practices that are very useful for interrupting habitual pace. One of them is a practice that I I think of as mouth yoga. I think Thich Nhat Hanh also talks about it as mouth yoga, the practice of the half smile. It's one of my, again, one of my more favorite practices because it's easy, it's brief, and it's surprisingly effective and penetrating. You lift the corners of your mouth, but so slightly that if you looked in a mirror, you would not say you were smiling. and you hold the lift for three breaths. Sometimes I'll go to somebody's house and I'll say, oh, may I use your telephone? And I'll go and pick up the phone in there and the cradle will be this little sign that says smile.

[44:37]

And I realize, ah, someone who does the half smile. The half smile is a brief enough practice so you could do it in the middle of a meeting. You can do it in the middle of a conversation. Because you're not going to be out of the conversation for very long. Three breaths from the inside feels like a very long time, but it isn't actually so long. But it's long enough to just check in. Check in to the corners of the mouth, that slight lifting. The good old Harvard Medical School has discovered that when the muscles at the corners of the mouth that are involved in smiling are utilized, there are actual chemical changes in the body different from the chemicals that are released when we frown. So this ancient practice has some wisdom which now the Harvard Medical School has corroborated for us. But it's also a very effective practice for

[45:38]

interrupting the pace of the day. It's classically, this as an aside, is also used as an antidote to negative states of mind. Not that you stop feeling cranky, but you just refocus for three breaths and you go back to being cranky. Another way to interrupt habitual pace is to focus on a breath. In a temple like this, where there are so many altars, there is ample opportunity for the practice of doing a slight bow whenever you see a Buddha figure somewhere, a Buddha picture. For a number of years, I was the secretary at the Zen Center in San Francisco, and there were little altars outside all the bathrooms. So I would always wait too long to go to the bathroom, and so I would

[46:42]

go running down the hall and I would get to the door to the bathroom but of course there was this practice that I was supposed to do which was to bow at the altar before I went in the door to the bathroom. And I was always surprised that very brief on-the-run bow dropped me into what I call Buddhist space. That spaciousness that I know from meditation practice. Just that simple collecting and gathering myself for a slight bow. Oh, I've been running around again. Just stop. I know people who use a sound that happens in the course of the day. When I used to spend a lot of time in the city, I'd use the sound of the directional signal on the city buses. I have a friend who works near the Campanile in Berkeley, and she uses the sound of the bell. You can use any kind of sound.

[47:44]

It can be a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound or a sound that you don't have any particular response to as the trigger for doing this practice of just focusing on one breath. The telephone ringing. My husband, when he worked in the city, told me that he used to, every time he would come back to his desk chair and get ready to sit down, he would just pause for a breath. So you can use something, a particular place that you go by, or a sound, a situation, as a way of focusing on a breath. It's a way of interrupting the pace of the day for a few moments. Going for a slow walk for five minutes can have the same effect. A little walking meditation. Now we're five minutes late for our break, I'm sorry.

[48:46]

So we'll take a 10 minute break and then when we reconvene if there are some situations in your lives that you'd like to think about together for the occasion or a spiritual practice, maybe we can talk about some of those situations. Or you may have some questions or things you'd like to pursue. So let's have a little break. What would you like to talk about? Yeah, please. Okay, good, that's a helpful question. Yes, I will. The question is about the focus on not judging in all religious traditions and is there a point at which judging is okay, where making distinctions between one thing.

[49:58]

and another is okay. At least from the Buddhist perspective, the issue is not judgment of all sorts, but is the specific form of judgment which is habitual and consequently unconscious. There are lots of different situations in our lives where it's appropriate to make a judgment about this or that. where that's what's appropriate and called for and what we need to do just to function in the most practical way. Those kinds of judgments which we make, which we are aware of making, don't get us into the same kind of trouble, don't lead us into a habit of negative mind in the way that habitual judgment, it's almost a different category because so often we're not even aware that we're doing it.

[50:59]

I mean, one of the experiences I've had with working with people who have a pretty strong habitual judging voice is a kind of amazement, and in some cases almost horror, when someone realizes, my goodness, I had no idea. I talked to myself this way. I wouldn't talk to my worst enemy this way. So it's a matter of what we're aware of or not. and whether it's habitual or not. And whatever is a habit will be by definition tenacious and fairly deeply set. So if it's not a wholesome habit, then we have not only the work of transforming that habit, but we have the consequences of it being a habit as well. So it's like the characteristics of habit are on top of what the particular pattern is. So as I've this evening been talking about habitual thinking, I mean judgment, what I'm talking about is habitual judgment.

[52:05]

And I'm sorry I wasn't clear about that. Help? Well, but this question comes up a lot because there are situations where we do make judgments and that's appropriate. This is not a kind of blanket statement about all judgment. You'd be in a hard place when you go out to buy a new car or figure out what you're going to make for dinner or figure out what apartment to rent or picking out your sweater. Thank you. Please. Yes, I think that it's not just a matter of different body types in terms of meditation practices, but I think it has to do with temperament and particularly with conditioning.

[53:19]

So that if somebody comes to meditation practice and they have a lot of fear or they have a lot of agitation, then the kind of meditation practice that's going to be appropriate and skillful for them will be different than the kind of meditation that someone whose nervous system is somewhat more subtle, for example. I have, sometimes people will come to practice with me who have a lot of anxiety and agitation And so for them to do a lot of quiet sitting is just agony. But if they do a lot of moving practices they in time develop a more settled mind and calmness which makes it possible then to do some periods of sitting meditation in a way that they actually enjoy.

[54:22]

And occasionally someone will come to talk to me about meditation practices, and I'll actually suggest that they not do any sitting meditation at all, at least for the time being. And particularly in the United States, I think that we've come to think of sitting meditation as the only real practice, and everything else is kind of second-class citizen. And I think in a way sitting meditation can be presented as a kind of tyrant. This is what you do if you're going to have a spiritual practice or else you're a failure. Well, if you're someone, for example, who has suffered an enormous amount of abuse, And every time you sit down, all kinds of memories and body memories begin to come up. It's just simply not skillful or kind to have the person start with sitting meditation.

[55:27]

I also think that there's a whole curriculum of practices that develop different aspects of body and mind, and that balance and complement each other. And it doesn't make sense to just do one practice and not do others. I think the combination of sitting, of prostrations, of chanting, is very, very wholesome. There's a kind of fullness in one's cultivation when you do several practices in that way. And if you just sit, the tendency is to get rigid. There's not enough stretching you, literally and figuratively. If somebody has a lot of arrogance and pride, there is nothing like frustrations to sandpaper arrogance and pride or crankiness.

[56:32]

Someone who is unsure of themselves benefits from prostration practice enormously because you develop a combination of strength and flexibility in prostrations that translates not just to the body but gives you kind of mental and spiritual suppleness and flexibility and confidence that's genuine. So it depends a lot on a whole cluster of factors, not just body types. Bill? I just want to start reading the symptoms of the frequency of reference to the helicopter. Yes. Not sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting. Yes. Sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. I sometimes think of our meditation room as, it's the wiki group in our meditation room, because regularly if someone has some physical condition they need to take care of, then they do meditation lying down.

[57:41]

And it is, as Bill says, one of the noble postures. And there is the same exactitude in the detail for the practice as there is in sitting or standing or walking. And we can enjoy cultivation in all of those postures. And we have this idea, especially in the United States, that the real thing is sitting. So we also neglect the practices of the heart. We neglect the cultivation of loving-kindness, which is foundational. If you don't have loving-kindness, the rest of it is on quicksand. at a conference, which is where we met each other, of teachers from Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan traditions. One of the things that was very interesting to me in this meeting of teachers from these different traditions

[58:45]

that even within the Vipassana tradition in the United States, where the loving-kindness meditation is one of the primary and fundamental practices, the teachers by and large acknowledged that for most of them, they had for many years considered loving-kindness meditation to be kind of the second class, not the real thing, not the serious hardcore thing. and had come in with more maturity and practice to understand that that's not accurate, that the loving-kindness practice is fundamental and crucial. Because, of course, if we don't have this quality of open-heartedness with ourselves in order to have that quality with others, the wisdom that arises is arising from the wrong pew, if you will. It comes out of grasping, it comes out of all kinds of traps that we get drawn to in spiritual practice as much as in any other human endeavor.

[59:54]

We can hide in spiritual practice, we can hide in meditation just as well as we can hide in anything. I mean, we're good at figuring out how to hide. We can corrupt spiritual practice if that's what we are up to. Yes? From your years of practice and teaching, could you comment on how Buddhism is evolving in this country? Women have much more of a role in the way Buddhism is flowering in the United States, both as practitioners and as teachers. One of the things that I find very encouraging is the breaking down of sectarianism, that there has begun to be a very lively and rich dialogue, ongoing dialogue among teachers and practitioners in the three major traditions, which I think is very wholesome.

[60:57]

And I think that what's beginning to happen is, although there may be a home path in one center or with one teacher or another, including practices from other traditions as they are appropriate for individual practitioners. So, for example, in my own teaching, I do sometimes teach a Tibetan visualization and mantra practice in some specific cases where that's appropriate and seems useful and effective. And I've incorporated a lot of practices from the Vipassana tradition because I see the need for the practices that come from the Theravadan traditions that are more overt and explicit. They're there in Zen, but more by implication.

[62:01]

And we as Americans do better with more mapping and more articulating. In body cultures, communication about how to practice can happen non-verbally quite effectively. I don't think that works for many of us so effectively. I think most of us do better with a map. Someone once described to me that the difference between Zen and some other traditional practice of meditation traditions is that in the Zen tradition you're thrown into the ocean and we hope that you can figure out how to float and dog paddle and eventually learn to swim. From a Tibetan meditation perspective they're just amazed because Zen people are starting with the most advanced practice. Anyway, I think that this kind of bringing together of practices from different traditions is already beginning to happen more, primarily because teachers in one tradition are beginning to study with teachers in other traditions,

[63:11]

And I see that as being a great benefit to all of us. I know my own cultivation as a practitioner has been enhanced enormously from my studying with teachers outside of my home path. I've been able to develop aspects of my practice that hadn't come alive as fully as they needed to, just staying within the context of the Zen tradition that I started out in. largely because of the confusion about what's culture and what's Dharma. And a lot of what I got sidetracked by

[63:54]

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