forward to hearing her speak. I've seen her around Zen Center for quite a long time. She was a student, I think, of Suzuki Roshi's in the beginning. As I say, I've seen her, but never Thank you. It's wonderful being in this sendo. This is my first visit here. Can you hear me okay? A little louder. As I was thinking about this talk the other night, I just by chance happened to pick up a book of poetry by Norman Fisher, who had his start in Nisendo, and found there just the right line, The life you lead may not be your own.

[01:42]

And I was quite delighted. I don't know if it's his, originally in the context of a poem called The Starlings. But it was one way of expressing some thoughts I've been having about my life, our collective life, our practice life. And I found it a very felicitous formulation When I was sitting the Green Gelt Sashin a few weeks ago, what came into my mind then is, you're missing your life. How easy to miss your life, sitting there period after period, waiting for the bell to ring, spinning thoughts, anywhere but there on the cushion.

[02:46]

whereas we notice that every day in Zazen that's only forty minutes maybe but to notice it during the extraordinary effort of a seven-day Sashin struck me as well, this wasn't what I wanted to do I am Some years ago, I read a book by Wendell Berry called The Hidden Wound, published in 1970. I suppose most of you know who Wendell Berry is. Raised in Kentucky on a farm that his father and grandfather before him had owned. He's a poet, a philosopher, an essayist, a lecturer, a conservationist.

[03:51]

And in this book he talks about race relations in this country, the blacks and the whites. And he made one point that has stayed with me very strongly, that the white man, by owning the land, didn't really own it, had what he called an abstract relationship to it. And the black man, by not owning the land, by having to work very hard on it actually owned it actually developed an intimate relationship to it and he talked about the land as being an ultimate value for the black man and for the man who really owned it in the legal or social sense it was

[04:52]

It was tied up with finances, with crop failures, with hiring people. Some distance from it, access to success perhaps, access to reputation, access to going on to some other part of the society. but intimate knowledge of the seasons, of the soil, of the creatures that inhabit the land. And the cultural, the authentic culture which grew out of that kind of relationship to your everyday life belonged to the black man, he said. And he apologized, he said it's hard for somebody from another culture to really know what's going on with another man's life, another woman's life. But that's how it seemed to him growing up.

[05:59]

He was raised by some black people who lived on his father's farm. And I was... I thought about that. It sort of stayed with me, probably because my own life experience has been the other. My parents emigrated from Europe and I feel that they were caught by the dream of success, economic success, and didn't always have, didn't much of the time have that sense of completion through work or validation or intimacy with work that we were busy getting ahead the American dream that the immigrant brought to this country.

[07:04]

And I think so many of us have come to practice out of a desperate need to find some authentic experience in our lives something that's not abstract that's not an economic goal or achievement some separation that we feel we need to heal and we don't know what that is but we feel that division or that separation in our lives We aren't at home in our lives. When I was in my 20s, I made my first trip to Greece to visit my relatives. And it was at a time when I was feeling... Perhaps the reason that I didn't feel so authentic in my life was that I was so comfortable in this country.

[08:16]

I had everything I wanted to eat I had clean sheets always and I was comfortable with central heating at home. And I thought maybe these things were barriers. I was especially interested in meeting my relatives who lived in very poor villages in northern Greece because I thought that if they were really, if a person was really poor, lived that close to the edge in his life, that he might know something more authentic about living than I knew. And what I found was that my relatives had a narrow mind, had a suspicious mind. They hadn't had experiences to open their minds. So I didn't find the answer I was looking for through poverty or through hard work

[09:20]

or through a kind of maybe cultural innocence they were not so sophisticated It was 15 years later that I found what I was looking for when I met Suzuki Roshi Here was a man in many ways an ordinary man, but someone who was obviously at home, at home with himself. I didn't know the dimensions of his experience when I first met him.

[10:29]

It was hard to get a hold of. It's taken a few years to begin to understand what the practice is. the practice of learning to be at home with yourself, learning to live your own life, to be author of your life. When I say you don't own your own life, the life you lead may not be your own, We don't create our life. We're born from our parents.

[11:32]

Our mother gives birth to us. We don't possess our life. Anyone who's had a diagnosis of cancer can tell you you don't possess your life. We aren't always present for our life. We're very seldom present for our life. as our experience of Zazen reveals to us. And yet the most fundamental teaching of Buddhism is that we actually do create our life moment after moment. Everyone actually creates his or her own life. How can we understand this? How do we create our life and how do we know that?

[12:34]

Well, to create your life, to become intimate with it, as Suzuki Roshi was, first you have to know who you are. And Buddhism has a practice, a technique, a way to help us develop that intimacy with ourselves In the zendo we get a taste of it sometimes quite a gulp of it but frequently when we leave the zendo and go outside or go into our homes or into our jobs into our family life outside the zendo there's some sense of not continuing the experience

[13:57]

of intimacy or self-exploration that we had in this Hindu. We have been working with an interesting kind of koan in San Francisco called mindfulness or mindful awareness and we're using the the experience of walking as an opportunity to be present. So we're trying to simply notice that we're walking. And if you've ever tried to simply notice that you're walking it's almost as hard as noticing what you're doing with your breath in Zazen. And the class This is a class being taught in San Francisco.

[14:59]

The class for the first two weeks, many of us just encountered one resistance after another to not being able to remember that we're walking or to bring our mind to our walking. By the third week, some of us have begun to settle a little bit and to remember when we're walking that we're walking. And for each person I think this is a different experience. Some people may be saying, I'm walking, or just walking. I found that was just a a complication for me. I was more interested in simply experiencing my body as walking. I tried to do that in various ways. following, being aware of what my feet were doing, being aware of what my hips were doing, being aware of my breathing.

[16:01]

When you start noticing what you're walking is like, or that you're walking, you almost immediately notice that you're breathing. You notice what your breath is doing. And my own experience was that my breath got calmer and lowered, and that some... And I became aware that I carry a a visualization around, a visual image of myself, which, when I notice that I'm walking and that I'm breathing, I get a, on my screen comes a full picture of my body, and I feel connected with my whole body, which leads me to believe that when I'm not aware that I'm walking and not aware of my breathing, I must get flashes of just patches of him. Maybe then I just exist, my picture is of myself up to here or something.

[17:07]

I feel that's an important clue that I think many of us maybe carry images of ourselves almost at an unconscious level which in some kind of a feedback loop to our consciousness keep reinforcing our experience of ourselves and our way of carrying ourselves. So this was very interesting information that if I am aware of my breathing and slow it, if I'm aware of my walking, then I'm aware of my breathing, some kind of slowing down or care takes place and a kind of softer feeling in my body And then this image of myself, two arms, two legs, sort of like a child's drawing. It's an interesting experience. Somebody in the class said that when he started noticing that, or able to stay with the fact that he was walking, that he noticed that he slowed down and that he had always thought of himself as being speedy and so

[18:22]

from trying to stay with his walking, he became aware of how he usually is. And another person found that through attending to her walking, she became aware of many other feelings that arose about her job and her life, and she ended up quitting her job. So this practice can lead you almost anywhere. We've extended it to the bakery, I work at the Tassajara Bakery and some of you may have been there and it's pretty jammed a fair amount of the time and we do forget to breathe because the clamor from the customers is so heavy or we feel we must speed them on by or they're all catching a bus or something. we thought of the gimmick of putting breathe little signs at each cash register and behind the counter and over the dishwasher and I think there's one by the coffee machine although that's an easier place to remember to breathe because you're actually doing something and you have to pause and putting breathe signs all over the bakery made an enormous difference in our lives

[19:47]

It sort of gave you permission to breathe. And it sort of, up till then, the bakery had been tilting in the direction of the customers, and their ground was heavier and more solid than ours, and we were a little off balance. And suddenly, we came back, and our ground was solid, and we were constantly seeing all these little admonitions breathe, And it's surprising how well it works. I realized walking down the street from my yoga class the other day that that dimension that I felt had been missing in my life was beginning to be contacted through body awareness, through awareness of breath, through awareness of walking.

[21:19]

through the kind of awareness of my body which is arising out of yoga. When we first started Zen Center Suzuki Roshi didn't want his students to do yoga practice. It was apparently he thought that it might confuse us or distract us or be an alternative to So for many years at Zen Center, even though my body was quite asymmetrical and I couldn't sit without a kind of lurching off to the side, nobody suggested anything that I might do to help myself. Suzuki Roshi came by one day when I was lurching off in my rhythmic way and said, you have a problem. But he never said... He never suggested what I might do.

[22:26]

And when I would try to sneak in a yoga class, thinking that might be some help, the feeling I had at those days in Zen Center was that it wasn't quite okay to do it. You know, I was sort of following another path. Today, it's okay at Zen Center to take yoga classes and to meet your body. There are many people taking different kinds of disciplines, physical practices, that are enormously helpful in putting us in touch with our breath. Many of us have found, through many years of doing Zazen, that we still weren't breathing very deeply, that we still hadn't found that quality of intimacy with our bodies, that feeling of that wholeness. And especially more recently at Zen Center with the changes that have been happening the past few months people are exploring many different alternatives to

[23:41]

to augment practice, to supplement our practices, and people are reaching out in whatever directions draw them. It's a rich time, a confusing time, but a very encouraging time. are looking at how many years it has been possible to practice without living your own life. I think the feeling I had in that sashim was that I had followed the forms of practice and it was very easy in practice to get caught by the forms and not cut through them to your own personal, intimate sense of it. And I feel that the mindfulness of breathing practice is a first step in a very useful and accessible way to meet that, to meet ourselves.

[24:59]

Because once you're in your breath, you're there. You go away maybe, somebody comes up and talks to you, but you can come back. Suzuki Roshi used to say, just sit and he also said that in his zendo there was only one person maybe or there were two people who were just sitting and I never I felt kind of badly because I knew that I wasn't one of them because I knew I was sitting to get someplace and I often wondered what that just sitting was about I don't think I know. Because there's still the effort. We have to make the effort.

[26:00]

But eventually, through the effort of striving, I think You simply find the pleasure or enjoyment or satisfaction out of your breath. In that, that is enough. When Suzuki Roshi was told he had cancer, he said, this cancer is my friend. I will take care of it. I think he showed us how to accept your own life.

[27:18]

to be there for it, to make it yours regardless of what happens. That's the koan that I'm working with. I expect I'll be working with it for many years. I wanted to express it and share that with you this morning. Thank you very much. Can you take some questions? Would you like me to? Oh, sure. Oh, you've been behind the pole all this time. When you talk about owning our own lives, it comes to mind the idea of law and female law Now I'm lost for a minute. Here he is, you know, quite energetic.

[29:02]

I've been working with, trying to understand myself, how much control do we truly have over our mind authorities? Is this too more of an illusion than a reality? I don't know how much of a question I have that you can say if you're a Catholic. It's something I'm trying to grasp. The idea of control, I think, is a troublesome one for us. I don't want to control my life anymore. I want to be open and let life in. And I think when I had the idea of controlling it, I had narrow, single-minded directions and I was like this, and I couldn't see what was there.

[30:04]

So, I don't know what you mean by control exactly, but what I'm working with is the Hokyo Zanmai says, when erroneous imaginations cease, acquiescent mind realizes itself. And I thought, what's acquiescent mind, thinking that that, you know, we use the word acquiesce in a kind of pejorative way, sort of giving in. And yet I feel what arose for me is that acquiescent mind is yes, is the mind that says yes. And that that's a way to be, to move with life, to say yes to what's happening. And control seems to me like to impose an idea, or to limit. It's looking more at the idea of choice, having the choice of moving in one direction or another, when the situation occurs, to truly choose.

[31:17]

Or is the idea I don't have any trouble with that. That sounds good to me. Yes? I wanted to come from the other side and ask about conflict. If that is open, and when is conflict useful?

[32:19]

And when does conflict join us? We can't accept everything. Situations come up. I'm in a situation in my work life where there's a great deal of conflict. And it seems to me that from time to time situations come up that we can't accept. And, well, just what I said. How can conflict join us? How can we use it? And when can we not avoid it? And how is it our friend? Well, I think the kind of conflict that comes to my mind right now is what we're going through at Zen Center about our teacher. And that's a very fruitful kind of conflict. And the way I work with it is to let anything that comes up come up until I feel like there's nothing more that's stirring that I haven't gotten in touch with.

[33:32]

So if it's anger or if it's frustration or if it's hurt or if it's envy or whatever I want to let all that come up because my body tells me when when I haven't when I've come to some answer that's sitting on something. So, I think conflict can join us if we own it, if we let it come up, if we recognize it, if we don't back off from anger or disagreement, because I don't think that any one person has, you know, your having one point of view doesn't invalidate the other point of view. Together we can see how they create the whole, the whole, the whole mandala.

[34:34]

And I, I feel more comfortable when I can include my position and see where, how I got to it and then hear the other situation out and understand it and then we can both see, validate each other's position. And usually when that happens, there's some deeper understanding from which to find some middle way that includes both, that doesn't exclude one or the other. Is that talking to your question? For myself, I find, I think If I'm not very careful, if my practice gets in my way, or it's an illusion that I attach to practice, which is that if I feel in conflict with somebody else and some kind of anxiety, my first response is to go back inside and to think about breathing and so on.

[35:39]

But the trap is that that can constitute a kind of withdrawal. Absolutely. But sometimes it's necessary to examine and explore where you're coming from. And this kind of situation comes up a lot at work, and it's very helpful. I encourage people to talk together, to meet each other in some neutral ground, not right there when they're having you know, when they're really angry at each other, but take some time, when there's no pressure, and go talk about it, and explain. And usually when people say, this is how I was feeling, and why, and this is how I perceived what you were doing, and it comes back at you, it changes, because we're all projecting so much onto each other, we're not, any one of us really seeing what happened. And many things happened, each of you would describe it differently.

[36:42]

So because at Zen Center, so far, we have not encouraged or developed the skills to talk with each other and confront each other, we've moved that kind of stuff off to the side, developed a hierarchy for it. We don't have the confidence to take our feelings and our experience and present it to somebody else and say, can you help me? I'm not sure. I don't know quite why I'm angry. This is how I feel. or I feel envious and trusting each other because you're practicing if you're practicing together or if you're not practicing together this is your friend wanting some resolution that desire, when it's real makes an enormous difference and that's when you communicate you communicate, you know, an intention to understand and you're offering yourself to change you're not saying, this is the way it is what's going on here, what's wrong.

[37:44]

In that spirit, I think anything's possible. And I've even seen people at the height of battle, you know, square off against each other, and that, they understand that mode, and that mode works for them. If you can handle that mode, that's fine. I do that sometimes. When they come at me, I sometimes, it just comes out, you know, and I feel ridiculous. And I think, well, that's who I am. You know, I got mad then. And everybody feels enormously relieved when I stop playing something called priest and just end. And I think that's what gets in our way. It's we think we should be some other way. And I think that's the underlying clue is that the way we are isn't okay. We always should be some other way. And somehow we've got to penetrate that one. Yes.

[38:48]

You talked just a few minutes ago about control. How do you distinguish between trying to control your life and trying to strive for certain things that you feel are of value in your life? Well, I think trying and pursuing your interests, that's fine. I don't think that's control. that's recognizing maybe your talent or your interest you know, each of us has a different configuration so you can follow your talent or your interest and still be open to other people still be open in the way you go about it still be flexible in the way you go about it When I think of control, I think of the way I was trying to live my life before I came to Zen Center. I programmed, you know, degrees, achievement.

[39:53]

If I went into a job, I had to have this position at the job because that was the top position. And if you didn't recognize my skills, or what I was comfortable doing, or what I was happy doing, it was just some idea. I was governed by an idea, and I think When I use control or think of control, it's when the head is doing it and not the whole situation. And control happens somewhere in here, in my guts. And I can tell when I'm no longer needing to do it. It's not so much fun. It's a barrier. So, it's almost a process. but I think you can keep asking yourself that various stages if you're doing something you're enjoying and if you're really enjoying it and you feel guilty about that or you're wondering if you're closing something else out does that talk to your question?

[41:09]

Thank you very much.

[41:29]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ