I vow to take the truth of Thay's words. Good morning. Good morning. I feel honored to be able to address you in this way. about taking our place. But first I wanted to share with you a little something I learned in a yoga class. One of the hardest things I find about zazen posture is this thing that Suzuki Roshi called putting strength in your posture. What he said, how he described it was to push down, push your diaphragm down, something like that. And Mel's, I think Mel's way of saying it is that you push your lower back forward a little.

[01:06]

And I've also heard people say, you know, push your sitting bones down and rise, let your posture rise up from there. Anyway, I learned this really neat thing. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to convey it to you, that I learned in the yoga class. There's this muscle called the psoas muscle, and it's attached to the front of your lumbar spine, your lower back. and it goes through the notch in your pelvis, wherever that is, and to the top of your thigh bone. And it's not a muscle you can actually manipulate, so this is just the kind of thing that we're going to imagine. But what you do is, it's kind of like you imagine a rope going from your lower back, the inside, to the top of your thigh bone. and there's a handle to the rope a little bit above your thigh bone and you just pull it down straight down to the ground and so what you're actually doing is you're actually opening and loosening this muscle rather than tightening anything to get the strength in your posture and I found it really helpful because it's hard to get the strength without doing some holding or tightening

[02:22]

So you can play with that during zazen. So just as in zazen, we try to find the balance point where we're not leaning forward at all or backward at all. We're not leaning to the left. We're not leaning to the right. In our lives of practice, try to take our place not leaning into sort of independent self-existence and not leaning into non-existence. So we take our place in this moment And then we experience our connection with all beings. As it says in the Sandokai, which is a Tantra we chant here in the mornings.

[03:30]

Each thing has its own intrinsic value and is related to everything else in function and position. So Mel brought this up once and he And I think for many of us, part of coming to practice was part of the dream of personal fulfillment. Like when we read the stories about enlightenment, we think that it's going to be like the ultimate personal fulfillment experience. And so a certain amount of what we learn in practice is to let go of that dream and just be in the present. And so I want to talk about both being stuck in self-existence and being stuck in non-existence, particularly about emphasizing being stuck in non-existence, which I don't feel like we talk about very much.

[04:45]

When the Buddha was about to enter enlightenment. The last doubt that assailed him, or as they say, Mara's last temptation, but I think of it as the last doubt that assailed him was, how do you dare to do this? Who do you think you are to do this? Who do you think you are to take your place in the universe? And Buddha's response was to touch the ground. And the earth trembled as a way of sort of saying, yes, we give you this place. And so let's see. I think that There's an emphasis, as I said, in Zazen practice, and especially in the way we talk about it, not so much in Zazen, I don't believe, but in the way we talk about it in what we're doing is letting go of self, letting go of our idea of an independent self.

[06:03]

But I was talking to a teacher at Tassajara, Leslie James, And she said that she felt, I was talking about this, and she said that her experience is for a lot of women, and I think this is true for a lot of people, part of what you've, that for some of us, what we experience when we sit zazen is our first feeling of ourself separate from our circumstances and our life, or not separate from our life, but separate from the web of interconnection in our life. And I had a friend who was at Zen Center for a while and she left quite a while ago and has gone on to other things. She's recently gotten into a different kind of spiritual practice and she said to me recently, when I was at Zen Center, I just didn't have enough of a self to forget. And I think that we all actually have a lot of both.

[07:05]

We have modes and times and areas in our life when we've become caught up in trying to fulfill an independent existence or control our world through an independent existence. And we also have times that we retreat from life where we may not be retreating, we may feel stuck, we may feel like we can't get in. And it's important to remember, I'm just going to bring up a bunch of sort of examples and speculations about this and they may ring true for you, they may not, but in any case, it's important to remember that we're never actually stuck in existence or non-existence. In reality, we're always perfectly balanced. In reality, And, as it says, it's an erroneous imagination. Another chant we do, called the Song of the Jewel Mirror of Samadhi, says, when erroneous imaginations cease, the acquiescent mind realizes itself.

[08:11]

So, we just have to realize that this dream of personal fulfillment is a dream. or we have to realize that we do exist and our actions have consequences or whatever the way we're sort of not facing our actual existence. We just have to wake up to the fact of what's happening. So one of the modes of being caught in self-existence is that we try to establish our existence by diminishing the existence of others or ignoring or putting others into non-existence so that we accumulate more and more self and everybody else accumulates less and less. And another feeling, trying to decide if I want to go back and forth or if I want to do all and all existence.

[09:18]

Maybe when we're caught in non-existence we feel kind of helpless or hopeless or we feel totally trapped in circumstances. We don't feel like we can do anything or we feel powerless. I think another mode of being caught in self-existence is when we feel like we have to do everything ourselves. We look around at the world and we think, oh, I just, there's not enough time, I can't, I can't save the world, I have to do it all by myself and I can't do it. And when we're caught in non-existence, we may feel like nothing we do matters or it doesn't make a difference, we can't make a difference. When we are in, when we're caught up in self-existence, we may be running from the reality of our connectedness with everyone.

[10:27]

We may not want to face that. And when we're stuck in non-existence, we may not want to face, may not want to stand out. We may not want to face being the center of attention. But I think also, if we're in self-existence at the same time, we feel alienated and isolated and we're hungry for some kind of connectedness. And I think that when we're caught in non-existence, we feel hungry for some kind of weight to our life. And I want to read you This is from a book about psychology and dream work, but I found it when I read it a long time ago. It's very much about practice too.

[11:28]

This is what we are each after. a sense of matter apart from material things and a materialist view of things. We want our lives to matter, our relationships, how we spend our days, and that our death not be immaterial." And in another place he says, through this work we gain both vessel and ground. So maybe we don't have a self, but we have a vessel and a spot, a vessel to contain our experience and a spot, a location in the web of all beings. So, I've been thinking about some reasons why we might get caught up in non-existence, and one might be that our life is just too painful to actually experience it.

[12:59]

We may have had a painful childhood, an abusive childhood, or we may have something very painful in our present life, and it may just be too awful. We may not be able to, we may not have found a way to be ourselves, because it's just too painful. And I think zazen is really a wonderful practice for expanding our capacity for experience, and particularly sitting with pain in zazen, if we can find a way to do it that's a kind of opening, compassionate way, I was going to say an undisciplined way, but I think what I mean is a non-disciplinary way to sit with the pain and zazen. That's one way we can grow and expand our vessel and our capacity to experience suffering. We may be able to experience our own terrible suffering of our life,

[14:07]

and grow to be able to experience others and how much suffering there is in the world and to be able to contain that somewhat. Maybe we can never contain it. Another reason why we might be caught in non-existences, we might be afraid to face how precious and fleeting our life is. We may feel like, we may have an instinct or an intuition that if we actually were ourselves we'd have to take a stand about something and we might be afraid to. We might be able to afraid we might be afraid of our death facing our actual life and our actual passing, our actual, the fleeting aspect of our life.

[15:10]

Another mode that we can get into, I think, is we can actually be trying to get into existence. Like we've been thrust out of existence. And I think in society there is a certain thrust towards children, towards women, towards people of color, towards kind of societally oppressed groups. And really everybody in a way in the society. All the people, working people. There's a kind of a thrust to society to those groups to be in non-existence or to be the other. And depending on our own personal upbringing and what we're bringing into the situation, we may have received that more or less. But I think actually children need us to help them find their place, and give them their place, and show them their place, and show them how to take their place.

[16:22]

But as adults, you know, we may feel like we're waiting around, or we may be waiting for someone to give it to us, still from our childhood, or we may just be in that mode. We may think that we need an external object, or accumulate material, or we need another person to acknowledge our place for us to be able to take our place. And, you know, I think it is nice for us to acknowledge each other, and it's important, but I think it's very powerful for us to know and to realize that we can just take our place. We have a place, this world, and we can take it even if no one else is going along for whatever reason you're in, you know, situation you're in. You may have gotten yourself in a situation where a lot of people are buying into your non-existence that you've put out, but you can just take your place And I've been working with this... Let's see, am I ready to talk about that yet?

[17:29]

I think one thing that happens when we're in this mode where we're trying to take our place, we're doing everything we possibly can to take our place, For one thing, there's a flaw there, because since we already have our place, if we're trying to take our place, we're already in the state of mind where we don't have a place, so we're never going to be able to, because we're in this state of mind that we don't have and we're trying to get it. But I think one thing that happens is we don't realize the impact we're actually having on the people around us, because we kind of feel like we don't exist. So we're doing these things to establish our existence and we may feel like we're screaming at a glass wall, but actually we're having a tremendous impact on the people around us. So it's good for us to notice that we are in our place and we're in the web of causes and conditions with everyone else and we're affecting everyone else. And so we're never going to have any more connectedness or matter or vessel or place than we have.

[18:59]

We may feel more connectedness, less or more, but we're totally connected with everyone. And we have our spot in the web. And so let's just take our place and celebrate our connectedness with each other. I wanted to give you a few examples from my life. One of the ways I always was, in my earlier life, was I was incredibly scared to get up in front of a room full of people and talk. I mean, more than anybody else, except one other girl in my grade school and I, were as equally scared to do it. And I would be so scared that my voice, and you've probably heard me do this at different times, squeaky and I would, I would just, I never got over this. I just went through school and I dreaded those, you know, public speaking learning experiences.

[20:04]

And when I came to Zen Center, I had this idea to take voice lessons and I took a couple of voice lessons and I used the, one of the things you learn when you take voice lessons is you learn to take a whole lot of air into your lungs and push your diaphragm down and then you hold the air down and you let a little bit come out as you sing or speak. And so I use this, I practice this during a service, because I only had time to take a few voice lessons and then I kind of dropped it. But all during service, all through my time at Page Street in Tassajara, I practiced this during service, holding my diaphragm down and letting this strong, thin voice out. And I never had an opportunity when I was at Zen Center. When I first came to Zen Center, there was like so many It's like you never got to do anything hardly.

[21:08]

And so I never got to be like a Kokyo or the person who leads the chanting while I was there and then I was at Tassajara and I got sort of in the cooking track and so I never got to do that there. And that went on so I was like at Zen Center for eight or nine years and I'd never been a Doan or Kokyo or anything. And then I came here, met my husband and I came here and started to practice here and you know the first thing was like, well do you want to be Kokyo? So I sort of was nervous about it, and I said, sure, and like, so they trained me in Tokyo, and this incredible voice came out. It was just really amazing. I'd never really heard it, because in service, you sort of hear your voice, but you don't really hear it. So, this incredible voice came out, and I think through that, at that time I was still a little, I would get into this squeaky voice thing. But I think being Kokyo has been a great practice for me in taking my place and having everybody hear me. That was an example I wanted to share from my life.

[22:13]

Another example from my life is my conflicts with my husband. Now, whenever I had a conflict with somebody before, all through the years, I would really intensely practice a kind of letting go of myself, letting go of my idea of what I wanted from the situation, letting go of who I thought I was or who I thought the other person was. And I got a lot of mileage out of that in practice. And when I started to get into some things with my husband, really intense things, I wouldn't know what to do, and so I would try that. I would try just letting, you know, he wouldn't be doing things the way I wanted him to, and we would have a big conflict, and I would try letting go of my idea of what I wanted. And it worked to a certain extent, and I felt, you know, in a way it worked for kind of cultivating myself, like I was becoming more patient, But somehow I had this feeling, almost physical feeling, I was retreating from the actual situation.

[23:18]

Like that somehow wasn't meeting the situation. And I can't exactly explain what this other thing I do when I try to take my place in a conflict with him. But it works, it's very different. And I think it has to do with the sexism that comes into our relationship that's operating. Somehow he just takes up a place, and I feel like that leaves me no place. But it's just my feeling, and between the two of us. I just have to remember I can't just let go when we have a conflict. I can't just do a letting go kind of thing, letting go of what I wanted out of the situation or who I thought he should be or something. I think it's good to do that and I think most situations we're actually in require both letting go and taking our place at the same time. And the other example I wanted to give has to do with taking turns.

[24:24]

Because we might think, or there might be a feeling that when it's your turn, you're in existence, and then when it's not your turn, you're in non-existence. And I'm watching kids a lot, learning how to take turns, and so I'm watching this quite a lot. And I think that it's always our turn, in a way, in the way I'm talking about. It's always our turn, and sometimes your turn is to have everyone's attention on you, and sometimes your turn is to be giving your attention to someone else. My husband plays bluegrass music, and in bluegrass music it's like there's a banjo, a violin, a fiddle, a guitar, and a bass or something. And it's like everyone's kind of equal in the music. It's not like you have a rock and roll and that's the guitar's the star, the lead guitar, and then everybody else is like the backup or something.

[25:29]

And it's kind of a neat music. I mean, in one sense, it's like a music for egomaniacs because no, everyone is, you know, the star in a way. But it's also really cool because, as Alan talks about it, what they do is, let's say it's a song and there's a verse and then there's what's called a break, and one of the instruments will kind of take the lead and play a little solo, even though everyone else is playing, but they're louder and they're in the forefront. and then they'll do another verse, and then another personal, another instrument will do the break, and everybody does a break in a song, or you know, maybe not everybody gets a break in every song, but what Alan talks about is, you know, when you're doing your break, you're doing a solo piece of music, but when someone else is doing their break, you're concentrated on making their music as beautiful, playing your background music, so that it completely supports without interfering with the person who's doing the break.

[26:33]

So I think, you know, like that chant we did at the beginning, you know, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. That's what you're doing. I'm the one who's taking the turn of having you all listen to me. And you've got a job too. You're taking your, taking your turn at the same time to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. One thing you might think I'm saying, which I don't want to be saying, is that taking your place is like, I'm the kind of person who does blah blah blah. taking your place as sort of typing yourself or admitting who you are in some way that's a limited way. And I found it helpful and I think it can be helpful to understand kind of the modes we tend to get into and what kind of person we are usually or under the circumstances given our past and present circumstances.

[27:40]

But I'm not really talking about that, I'm talking about you don't know what's going to happen, what self is going to arise when you take your place. You take your place in this moment and there's a limitless potential for what could happen. So we study the self that arises in that moment and with that study we can forget about this independent dream of a self that we are carrying around and then we can be enlightened by all things. It's like, it's called, We Are All Earthlings. Has anybody else heard it? Anyway, the line I wanted to share was, all of us can have a happy, healthy place to be if we can walk and fly and swim in earthling harmony.

[28:49]

I don't know that much about the ceremony that's happening this afternoon, but I just want to say a few words. I felt that I should say a few words. I think that Jizo is the image that we're going to be doing the ceremony with, and he's, among other things, the guardian of women and children and travelers, which, you know, I think he's the guardian, maybe, of people who have a little bit of trouble taking their place. When you're a traveler, you're kind of other, You know, if you're a traveler in a community, you're the other. And so, I think it fits that he's going to be doing our ceremony. And I was very moved in the, one of the things I was most moved by in the article, I don't know if everyone read the article that Yvonne wrote that was sort of preparation for this sitting, but the thing about talking to your unborn baby and telling them

[30:01]

what the conflicts you're having about the pregnancy and I was really moved by that because I haven't had an unwanted pregnancy but my mother did and I've often thought about tried to imagine her situation in the early 1950s and I think I would be inclined to not want to acknowledge that there was anybody there if I was contemplating terminating a pregnancy, and I thought it was very true and beautiful that when you can take your place and acknowledge that what's happening right now is a pregnancy, that you can give a place, the place to someone else, and that that's actually the thing that helps that situation, can be the thing that helps that situation. I had a little exercise I wanted us to try to kind of embody or enact this thing I'm bringing up.

[31:08]

And what I thought we could do is go around and each say our name. Please say it loudly because we don't know everybody's name. And then we'll all very warmly and connectedly say your name back. Maile, would you start? Maile. Mary. Andrea. Andrea. Belgium. Belgium. Miriam. Miriam. Marion. Marion. Astithi. Astithi. Carolyn. Carolyn. Susanna. Susanna. Grace. Grace. Rondi. Debbie. Pam. Dee.

[32:10]

Pat. Audelheid. Margaret. Anne. Nancy. Ivy. Lois. Lois. Robin. Robin. Lois. Lois. Lynn. Lynn. Carolyn. Carolyn. Pat. Pat. Anita. Anita. Lori. Lori. I was thinking about knowing what a place was and how complex and complicated it is to wake up at some point in your life and be wondering what you've been doing all this

[33:41]

what was a place, or who had a place, or where were you supposed to go, and so on. And when you began to talk about the reason for non-existence, or going to non-existence, I felt this great surge again of not knowing, and how long that may go on. I mean, not just women, but women, girls, from the very beginning being instructed and being good and obedient and trying to do all that. And when you finally get out from, you know, under the rules of that and get angry and so on, really what's underneath these samadhi been instructed on place, but how a place is a non-place or a particular peculiar kind of place.

[34:54]

I spend a lot of time educating or trying to myself and other people, and the feeling is, well, what are you supposed to do? Who are you? What are you supposed to do? What is a place? I feel very strongly when every time you said it and you used your hand, I thought, You know, what's in the open hand? What was it? And how do you keep having to do that over and over and over again to learn that? Seems like a life journey. And this, my incarnation, that's what I have to do. I don't know if children from my children will go on and know more about that. or sequiesce or whatever that they're doing. And to realize that what you do is connected to everyone else.

[35:59]

Because sometimes everyone else, I mean when you take your place, sometimes you know you have to do something too, that's the end. Sometimes you don't know and you just wait until you are moved. I think it's okay to not know. I don't, you know, I think you're moved to do something by, through your connectedness with everyone. Rebecca? When you started this talk, I had a thought about the book for a very long time. We were sitting in Dwight, at Dwight Way, and it was a Monday morning, Suzuki Roshi was there, And in the middle of the sitting, Suzuki's voice came out and said, take every breath as if you're breathing in the middle of the earth. And it took me years before I realized that he wasn't saying, breathe as deeply as you can.

[37:09]

And it wasn't until, I'm not sure whether it's in being time or zen that they talk about each blade of grass sitting on the whole earth. And then each blade of grass is sitting on the whole earth. Of course, we are. And then we're sitting there taking our place with every other thing on the board. And it was a wonderful to work on actually realizing it. And I did that by starting with spending a certain amount of time each day as I walked, being aware of each step going, being aware Yeah, this is something you do with your body and your mind.

[38:14]

It's not just an idea. I mean, it's not just something you think about. This is something we enact every moment with our body and mind. appreciating being here and finding my place, taking my place and yet not being identified with a goal and appreciating the community and Rebecca and Susan. They were taking their place and yet not grasping the role and how easy it is and how much in my life I thought taking my place was clinging to a

[39:17]

Yeah. Mhm. And I found myself really going into some kind of a panic. It seems like sometimes we try to, we do all these things, we accumulate, we think we need all this stuff to be ourselves and to realize that we don't need that and we have perfect freedom within the tiny, tiny limitations of our spot in this moment.

[41:12]

We have a compass for stories. Things are numerous

[41:37]

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