Good morning. So happy solstice. Not so happy for a lot of people this time of the year when we have the longest night. Partially I think because we live on the dark side of the ridge, the night sky when we are having these wild storms at this time of year is quite beautiful. And for a number of years I've made a very clear intention about shifting gears as the light and dark patterns begin to change. But of course the way our modern culture goes, instead of slowing down and being quiet, we're all running around shopping.

[01:07]

I had to go get some groceries yesterday and I scurried back home as quickly as I could. I find it very interesting that this marking of the solstice has been going on all around the world for centuries. It gets lots of people's attention. Not always positive. Sometimes there's a lot of fear associated with these long nights. I think it's one of the reasons why we decorate trees and put lights light lots of candles, etc. But there's also, in the evening, a kind of celebration of, oh, now there will be this turning towards gradually shortening nights and longer days.

[02:20]

We've not had electricity for much of this past week. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, Sunday night, and realized, oh, it's very quiet. There must be no electricity. That kind of low level from that we get so used to that it can be quite a surprise. And by and large, I must say, I found not having any electricity for some few days rather agreeable. The only part that wasn't so agreeable was all the food in the refrigerator getting quite funky. Kerosene lamps and all of that, but we just went to bed early. This is also for some people a very troubling and difficult time of the year.

[03:37]

The suicide rate goes way up. People drink too much to blot out whatever anxiety and fear may arise. And I think particularly if we make the mistake of listening to the news or reading the newspaper, we can have a kind of sinking heart. I don't know if any of you saw the article in yesterday's Times on an Arab school dedicated to coexistence with everyone, including the Israeli Jews, called Hope Flowers, a Hope Flowers school. On the outside of the building, they had painted the flags of all the different countries in the world, including the Israeli flag.

[04:42]

So apparently, the school was on the edge of Bethlehem. Not Bethlehem from, you know, back there when Jesus was born, but Bethlehem now. And apparently the young man, son of the founder of the school, rented an apartment to someone who said that he was involved in something pretty innocuous, but he turned out to be a terrorist. the Israelis in tracking him down, nearly destroyed the school, and did a fair bit of destruction to this man's house, and he is now in jail. And one of the children who's in the schoolyard with his relative, who's the kind of guard, safety person for the school,

[05:51]

is seen in the photograph walking across the big play area. And he's quoted when someone asks him about his interest now in being with Jews, he said, no, they shoot people. This is a kid who's been going to this school where there has been regular programs for both Arab kids and Jewish kids. Like a kind of lightning bolt went through the school and the population of children who have been going there for a long time. I brought the article over. If any of you are interested in looking at it, it's, I think, worth reading. I bring it up for our purposes because I think that, particularly for those of us who are engaged in this Buddhist meditation path, with respect to training the mind, it's very important to pay attention to what leads us to be discouraged.

[07:15]

Kind of sinking heart and sinking mind. and to throw up our hands with something like, you know, what's the use? All is lost. A lot of what I've been reading in the last few weeks coming from writers in Israel and Palestine carries consistently a note of deep discouragement on all sides. And I think many of us who live in this country, as there is this mounting energy for war, feel some conflict and discouragement, fear.

[08:21]

with what's happening in North Korea. It's a long list. It can be. And what is, I think, very important is, particularly for those of us who have had some taste of the possibility of training the mind, is to not sink into despair and discouragement. how easily we go to despair and discouragement when we take what's happening in the moment and extrapolate it into the future in terms of what we are afraid will happen, what we think will happen, what we're certain will happen. Pulling our energy from the present moment and possibilities that exist if we are really here.

[09:29]

And of course, this process, as I think most of you know, maybe all of you know, of training the mind, of pulling our attention back into this moment, not going to the future and harboring the past, takes an enormous amount of determination. Because those habits of going to the past and to the future are for most of us very deeply set. Bill and I sometimes talk about the village which is where we shop and get gas and get our shoes repaired and go to the laundry, et cetera.

[10:33]

And have, over the years, lamented the decline of the village. But what I find interesting is that we have a little list all the merchants who make up the village. And I'm quite committed to shopping at the local village places that are not chains. And I talk about the village and try to get other people to tend the village. And what's interesting is that there was quite a steep decline in the village. And now they're, you know, the tenacious small group of people who make up our village have been here now for a while. They don't seem to be going away. And I've been making a practice of expressing my appreciation for all these people as often as I can.

[11:46]

So last week I took some shoes to Tony, the shoe repair man. Just a shining light. And I said something to him about how much I appreciate him and think of him as part of the village, and he said, oh good, because I mean to be part of the village, and I am not going away. We always have this little, you know, playful banter. Old shoes and handbags and belts and suitcases kind of piled up like this on either side of him. I don't know how he can figure out whose belongs to what or what belongs to who, but he has it figured out. But in the midst of reading the news,

[12:49]

those encounters which are about the heart in our ordinary daily life can be enormous source of buoyancy. And it is out of that sense of connectedness that we can remember that we have a voice and that if we use our voice, the voice may be joined by other voices and we can make a difference about the world we live in. If we go to the future out of fear, we will become mute. Mostly, I think that's what happens. Several people who were going to come this morning left a message that it was raining very heavily and they were sure that there'd be flooding and they couldn't possibly get here.

[14:09]

Look at it. Delightful morning. The kind of day where we can see the drops of water hanging on the dawn redwood like little ornaments catching the light. It's pretty great. You know why we say Gesundheit when people sneeze? I thought it was because it was When you're sneezing, part of your soul might escape from your body. It goes out and then you want it to come back in, right? So it's a little dangerous. Thanks a lot. It's great, I got your back. Please may your soul go back inside.

[15:13]

So for today, I would like to invite all of us to celebrate both light and dark. And to think about this day of the turning towards light as not being either or. Not being either or. How different This time of year is when we think about light and dark from the perspective of both end. I had to laugh last night when I was lying in bed waiting for sleep to descend. This is supposed to be the dark time of the year, but of course there's a full moon, nearly full moon, flooding in the windows. Oh. The other thing I'd like to talk to you about this morning, you may have noticed a certain, what would be the right word?

[16:47]

multiplication of Buddhas and Kuan Yins on various porches from China. From one temple, which is soon to be flooded with the Three Gorges Dam. The stone figures are 350 years old. carved before the temple was built. The man who brought them in whacked the heads off the bodies because it was easier to bring just heads in. And he could tell from the look on my face that I wasn't thrilled when he confessed that he was the culprit. They, oh, well, they were broken. They had lots of things wrong with them. I said, if you bring any more in, please bring the whole, the whole, the whole show.

[17:58]

We'll see. And I was very sad when I saw this collection of Buddha heads and Kuan Yin's and some wonderful monks, really portraits of individuals, which in the Japanese Buddhist tradition are seen as the emanation of protective, nurturing, compassion, accompanying beings as they travel into life and as they travel out of life. There are a couple of Kuan Yin heads in the house which you can go look at after the morning is over if you want to, where apparently the practice over the centuries is that you pray to Kuan Yin and if whatever you're asking for comes into being, you then go and buy a little piece of gold leaf and put it on her face.

[19:13]

So there's some iron figures and some stone figures where they're all covered with gold. The man I got them from could tell I was dismayed. And he said brightly, but, you know, it's all for progress. And, you know, from the perspective of the mind of both hand, this may be somewhat similar to what happened when the Tibetan monasteries in Tibet were destroyed. And the Tibetans and all of the extraordinary art that comes from that tradition got kind of sent out into the world. with enormous positive consequences.

[20:24]

Most of my exposure to the Buddhist sacred art tradition is through Japanese art and Buddhist art and the Tibetan Buddhist art, a little bit from Southeast Asia. So I was not prepared for a certain quality of warmth in the Chinese figures. Extraordinary quality of warmth. And how many of them look like portraits of actual people, which I think is wonderful. Because this is, of course, a tradition about human beings, not gods. So when the when the goddess Quan Yin actually looks like somebody in particular. Isn't that quite inspiring? This is a figure that somebody gave us a few years ago.

[21:33]

It's been outside the front door. I realized that she wasn't faring very well out there in these storms, and I wonder how long she's going to be there before I realize that there isn't someone standing there in the window. I've got to go like this. One of the pulls for both me and Bill in doing what we call the Icon Rescue Project, diverting sacred art back into the hands of practitioners, is out of our own respective love of this artistic tradition. But also, I know, particularly for me, I find that I've learned a lot from this art tradition about what's possible in practice.

[22:36]

Certain qualities that get expressed when an artist is himself or herself a practitioner, where you get a kind of taste, non-verbally, of what's possible. We just unpacked them, so I have to figure out what we paid for them, which we'll do in the next few days, and then we'll make them available for whoever wants to have a Buddha or a Kuan Yin to live with. Some emanation of wisdom and compassion that can help us stay committed to training our own mind stream.

[23:43]

Before I open things up for discussion, I also wanted to make a couple of observations about the details of sitting meditation. A number of you are sitting with your legs under you in what's called Seiza position in Japanese. If you sit so that your feet are hanging over the back of the mat, you can more gradually then develop some ease in that extension that happens in sitting in that posture with the foot getting flattened out on the top part. And for those of you who are not so experienced in sitting meditation, I want to encourage you to pay a lot of attention to the details of what you're sitting on and how you sit so that you have some quality both of attention and ease. I've become convinced that the cultivation of wisdom and compassion requires ease, not just drawing art.

[25:02]

Maybe in spite of trying. So maybe that's enough from me and I wonder if any of you have something you'd like to bring up. Karen. I want to go back to your talking about the sense of despair. I have looked forward to this time, to the solstice, just the notion of turning back towards the light. And I was working with someone yesterday who wants to stop working because she feels there's no point because she's been years and years. So she's hopeless. And I offer her a description of what it might be like on this very day to just literally feel Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

[26:07]

As someone I practice with who is a therapist and lives up in Juneau, Alaska, just had one of her clients commit suicide. She shot herself. And Juneau is a small, small town. And it's ricocheted through the whole town. People are really having a very hard time with this woman's death. And I think that if we come back to our own experience of those moments when we feel despair or hopeless, how often does that condition of mind arise out of generalizing about how things are and how they will be? A kind of solidifying of our description of what's so. that is actually in opposition with our direct experience if we can bear to begin to be present with our actual experience.

[27:44]

But that kind of generalizing and projecting out onto the future in terms of what it's going to be like, what's going to happen or not happen, and a kind of solidifying. And I think you're completely right that such states of mind are contagious. Fear and anxiety can be quite contagious. So it's very important to pay attention to what is my own mind stream in this moment. And if I'm going to spend some time with someone who is struggling in the way that you're describing this person struggling, what are my expectations about what I should be able to do for another person?

[29:00]

And to what degree can I abandon taking care of my own mind stream in my effort to rescue someone else? That edge between doing and being, doing and being with. How often we have that pull to want to do something in the face of someone suffering, in the face of our own suffering. I just want this to go away. Slippery ground. I think this solidification came with this person having frozen into what has been before as if it will always be. There's no possibility, so she can't move into the present.

[30:04]

Because there's no possibility of it being other than it was, so it can't be what it is right now. That's why I love the phrase, up until now. There's a little tiny crack in the door. But that's exactly what I mean when I say the generalizing, based on what has been, can absolutely sink us. Someone I know, as someone who has an enormous amount of suffering in her life, she's been in a couple of really terrible accidents. One on her motorcycle. And the other when somebody crashed into her van. Her dog had to be medevaced to a special vet to put the dog back together again.

[31:06]

Anyway, she's had pretty significant brain damage and been impaired enough so that she can no longer work. And she was involved in a lawsuit against the insurance company for the vehicle that hit her in her most recent accident. And she said, you know, I kept going to these depositions where the lawyers for the insurance company pawed through every record of all my years of therapy, every record of all my medical history. She said everything I was afraid to have anybody know about, they trotted out as a way of trying to challenge me, hoping that I would give up. And she said, this went on for a long time.

[32:09]

And she just kept staying present with herself and describing her own experience and what she did in the face of this and this and this and this. And she said, you know, it got to the point where I had nothing that I was ashamed of that wasn't trotted out there in those meetings. The jig was up. She said, I'm alive. I know that my friends love me. And I won the lawsuit. But you know, that sinking that she kept going through with every detail of her life, and particularly her psychological history, kind of cringing, and at the same time, being able to stay with herself.

[33:15]

I was just thrilled for her because she said, you know, I don't have the same relationship with fear I used to have. What else could happen to me? Get run over again, I suppose. John. I have a couple of quick things. One of them had to do with just the time of the year solstice, and what comes to my mind is that part of a cycle. Absolutely. It's not like it's going to continue to get dark, dark, dark forever, or light, light, light forever. It's just part of the cycle. Sometimes I think about that in relation to some of the conflicts that are happening in the world, especially Israel, where we have, and as

[34:22]

a lot of family and friends in Israel. And we hear, plus read, some of what's going on in the newspapers. But there is, I don't know if hope is the right word, but there is, in a lot of people's minds, the possibility that this is some kind of a cycle and it will turn around. And at this point, not knowing what it will take. Yeah, yeah, exactly. a glimmer of hope at this point. The other thing I was going to say, it just totally spaced out. It's like my saying to Bill, there are three things I really want, I could remember two, but the third one I couldn't remember. You just reminded me what it was. Company. For some reason, at the time of the year, there was an expression wish to punish us, they grant us our wishes.

[35:24]

I was thinking about, you know, I want, I need, I've got to have. Give me, give [...] me. It just kind of feeds on itself. There's no respite. Well, I have to tell you, I really do recommend giving up shopping between November and January. Just don't do it. Also stay off the road. Yeah, yeah, yeah. give it up, hunker in, and this becomes a really sweet and wonderful time of year, a time for a kind of renewing. You know, it's one of the reasons why I love doing the retreat that we do after Christmas through New Year's, because it's the most sane thing I can think of doing, to just sit down and be quiet, to do that kind of reviewing that comes with getting ready for this turning, which is manifested in the world in terms of, oh, tonight will be the longest night, and then tomorrow night will be a tiny bit shorter.

[36:43]

I wanted to go back to something Karen said too, not so much the specifics, but years ago I had this story from a friend of mine He was going through a divorce, and he had lost his business, and he was in the process of losing his job, and it was like just one thing after the other. But he maintained a fairly positive outlook on life. And he had told me this little story about how he did it. And he said, you have to kind of picture yourself. You're at the edge of a bathtub, and you're all soaked up. And you're just sliding down this one side of the bathtub, and things are just getting worse, worse, worse. The thing to remember is at some point you're going to level off. You're still moving. And eventually you're going to hit the other side of the bed. For me it's just a little something that I bring to mind sometimes. Quite charming. When I get caught up. All soaked up. But you know the kiss of death is generalizing about the past and about the future.

[37:48]

And we sink. with those generalizations, and it's the way we keep ourselves from being present with experience coming and going, rising and falling, rising and falling, that nothing stays solid and continuous. And I think it's very easy in certain states of mind to simply lose track of that, not know it. Covered with soap. I was covered with soap and there was no hot water. There I am all swabbed in towels going out to the boiler room to try to figure out what's going on and the thermostat was set for vacation.

[38:54]

Jenny. I think it's a neat time of year, because I think it is nice to go down, especially if you know you're going to come up. But sometimes I need contagious inspiration, as well as contagious despair. So I've been thinking a lot about you, Yvonne, because this book showed up at the Berkeley Library, GZO Bodhisattva. Maybe you've already told everybody to go read it. It's by a friend of yours, Jan Chosen-Banks. I don't think it's a very good book. Well, it's very inspiring to me. Good. I'm like, wow, Jizo. You've talked about Jizo for years. I've never really grokked Jizo. So I've been reading it at night before I fall asleep, and it's actually, wow, this is a great book for me in terms of dealing with the darkness of this time. Well, you know, this whole notion of our transmigrating into life and out of life, which is what the Jizo Bodhisattva

[39:56]

and a form of Lakitesh were about. And you know, lo and behold, what did I find but a Kuan Yin with a little baby on her knee. Yeah, of course. There she is, you know, with the same function. But then there we are. Yeah. Holding our little selves as we go down into the dark, and a cyclone around. I have some amaryllis bulbs I kept in a dark closet for two months. And I just brought them out. And, you know, I can almost hear them growing. Yeah, totally. You know, thrum, [...] thrum. Replacing that electrical hum. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All the manifestations of protective and nurturing compassion. So wonderful. I think this time of year is easier for those of us who are gardeners. because there's so much happening that we can't see, but that if it doesn't happen now, spring won't happen.

[40:59]

Yeah. It's all kind of cranking around there underground. And then I can feel it happening in myself and see it happening in other people. Yes, absolutely. When Linda and I were driving over here this morning, there's a store on Shattuck Avenue that has a sign up that says, Compassion Restores. Yeah. Right on. I thought it was pretty good. It was like Compassion for Me. Stores. Shopper. It was a liquor store. Well, you know, we find the truth in some unlikely places. Yeah, it's great. That's the cynic speaking Well, I have a little Refrigerator magnet there on that glass brick of a fish because of course The salmon are spawning.

[42:20]

Still, that trout will be coming along soon. The creek is broken out to the ocean. I mean, it's been wild out here. I mean, beach? There's no beach. It's just open. And the fish have been sitting out there waiting. So even though the water's muddy, they're trucking on in. It's wonderful. I just seen the salmon walking up So there's a lot going on that we can miss if we sink into a negative mind. I can't remember who this is a quote from. It's not Heraclitus. A shipwreck at sea can ruin the whole day. It's pretty good.

[43:34]

Okay, if nobody else has something you'd like to bring up, enjoy the sun. My one request, if you are cruising around looking at the Buddhas and Kuan Yins. There are little slips of paper under each one that have an identifying number. So please don't move them. Because then my ability to figure out what's going on with them is completely gone to bits. And I'd like to suggest that the study group might meet at 1230 and let's meet in here and then Any of you want to go in the house where we have it's not a garage sale Karen. It's an attic sale And it's I wish I had one. It's the first of a series we Probably in January will maybe I think we'll be ready after the first sitting on the 11th

[44:43]

to make the figures from China available. But we've also got a lot of art by Mayumi Oda. I know some of you are interested in her work. We just have run out of wall space. So if it's not up, it goes, is the motto. And I'll also have some tankas available by then. What time? In the afternoon after the sitting on the 11th. No, no, today isn't something... Today you can go over anytime after, you know, beginning at, say, 1. It's an hour, an hour and a... in an hour or so. Bill may look like he's functional, but he's not. So if something's not on the piece of paper, take it. I have a little piece of paper with a price list and there are some things that are out to get the territory.

[45:51]

Want to add anything at this point? Okay. All right, let me just say a couple of words about another subset of judgment, which is comparison. haven't thought about this for a while. In the early days of Tassajara, when the San Francisco Zen Center was at that point still quite small, around that time there were one or two people who were paid staff members.

[47:07]

Up to that point there was no such thing. Everything was done with volunteers and And so, you know, as there were increasingly more and more people on staff, and they were paid, and then there would be arguments about why is so-and-so getting paid more than I am. One of the only times I have heard, I ever heard Suzuki Roshi say, don't do it. He said, don't compare. He was quite fierce about it. So one time when Bill and I were at Tassajara, when I'm down there I often hear Suzuki Roshi speaking. It's a kind of remembering. things that he's said to me, but there's a way in which his voice is more accessible for me in that place than almost anywhere else I can think of.

[48:11]

And this particular visit, I remembered quite with a kind of punch his don't compare and the fierceness of it. So on the ride home, I was describing this to Bill, So then we started musing about, well, what's the language that carries comparison? Comparative adjectives and adverbs. Well, is there anything either one of us wants to say that we wouldn't be able to say if we didn't use comparative adjectives and adverbs? This is what I mean by being imaginative and playful and the enormous benefit in having a swim buddy, particularly a swim buddy who's interested in language.

[49:13]

I lucked out. So we each decided, okay, well, we'll talk about this in a few days, but let's see what we've uncovered. Can either of us come up with something that we want to say that we're not able to say if we just eliminate this category of language? So we checked in with each other, as I recall, within, you know, two or three days, didn't come up with anything. But by then, we were each pretty intrigued, so we stayed with it for, as I recall, quite a while. That was a great breakfast. That was the best breakfast I've ever had. Oops. This morning, we had some Nancy's yogurt left over from the retreat with some applesauce made from the apples from our orchard that Betty cooked with cinnamon.

[50:29]

And I enjoyed both of them, especially mixed together. It's a mouthful. maybe a bit more than I had imagined telling you about my breakfast or that you were interested in hearing, but definitely askew towards description, right? Specific and descriptive. I remember years ago, Natalie Goldberg and I were doing some classes together, and she said, I don't want to hear about your old car. I want to hear about your 1950 pink Cadillac convertible. You see the... Yes. So this subset of of language that carries judgment, I think, is also extreme, can be quite interesting.

[51:36]

And, of course, what may happen as you become more convinced out of your own experience of the benefit of language which is specific and descriptive and free of this quality of habitual judgment, is that your own speaking begins to be increasingly more accurate, careful, and not reactive. Now, and I'm kind of living testimony, you know, with a mother who would go, and who, you know, my mother lived into her 90s and died suffering. And I would say that an enormous amount of her speaking and thinking was laced vigorously with habitual judgment over kind of as an overlay for a lot of fear.

[52:56]

And I certainly, I'm an only child, I grew up well-trained with a fearsome critic, a kind of nose for what's wrong. The one little, you know, that blind isn't closed the way the one next to it is. to the point where I would always see what was wrong, always, there was that, always, but for a long time. My tendency would be to primarily see what was wrong and not see what was right or what I could appreciate. So it was always this kind of out of balance lens through which I would see the world. And of course, it's not that the world is any different now than it was 30 years ago, but I see the world differently.

[54:11]

I don't see it just from this, the side of what I'm calling the reactive habit of judgment. And I would say that a significant dismantling of the habit for me has come about through doing the kind of work that I'm talking about you doing. It's been significantly the consequence of working with language in speaking and in thought. But that means being very persistent and consistent and dogged for as long as it takes to begin to have the dismantling take place. Now, probably the most, well, I can't say.

[55:17]

Habitual judgment has a tenacity, maybe unique to itself, I don't know, but the dismantling isn't going to happen very quickly. And so, which is why I'm framing the proposition that you take this focus for the next two months. From the habitual judgment standpoint, two months might be like a drop in the bucket. Hopefully you might stay with it for six months or longer. And I also hope that I can describe other practices sufficiently so that you can then go back to your notes and pick up any one of other practices later on. With a number of the practices that I'm going to be presenting, I've worked with a particular practice, as I said earlier, for example, with not lying, for a year and a half, and I've done that several times.

[56:31]

So keep in mind that for the practice, any one of the practices that I present, to really go deep may take You know, like Chinese water torture, one drop and then another drop and then another drop over an extended period of time. So, there comes a certain place where you have the felt sense, it's almost a body sense of, oh, this practice feels rung dry. Now I'm ready to move to another practice. And I think you can trust yourselves to know that, and you'll periodically then circle back. Yeah? What happens when you're done? I mean, I can't say in the States that you go back to it, but I mean, when you know that you're ready to move on, you no longer judge yourself?

[57:36]

Well, you know, it's not so much a matter of no longer judging myself, it's a matter of not listening to that voice. So it's really changing my relationship to that pattern. And when I don't listen, when the judging voice is no longer in the driver's seat, then my relationship to that voice has begun to shift. And when my relationship to that, those thoughts, has begun to shift, those thoughts become more and more faint and fade. But for a long time, it's not that I don't have habitual judgment towards myself or others, but I'm not caught in the same way. And I think that's very, very important to understand because for many of us, when we recognize some particular pattern that has a lot of suffering attending to it, we have this idea, well, I have to get rid of that habit.

[58:57]

I have to get rid of that way of speaking. Well, certainly not speaking the habitual judgment, Every time I say something that's a habitual judgment, and I say, well, now, how could I say what I just said and have it be specific and descriptive? For example. We get caught by thinking, oh, well, but I have to get rid of that habit. And what I think is really going on is the willingness to change my relationship to the habit. Now, I do think that there is a crucial shift that happens when I stop expressing out loud habitual judgment. The shift to working with thoughts is, that's a more difficult piece of work, I think. but not saying out loud, you know, not letting that habitual judgment leap over the hedge of my teeth, so to speak, will make a difference.

[60:12]

And then this is where having some antidote practices, and this is where going to what is specific and descriptive is a very effective antidote to habitual judging statements. Okay? Yes? I'm a little confused by that because sometimes, you know, I find myself, you know, about to come out with a very familiar criticism and sometimes I'm very creative about how I couch it and it's very specific and it's very habitual. You know, like habitual. Like, you know, I'm thinking about it. Can you give me an example? like my fiance and I having friends over for dinner, and me having feelings about his relationship to our guests' wine glasses and how full they are.

[61:21]

Something like that. And very calm and very, you know, me having judgment about his conduct. He's not doing it right. He's not doing it right as far as, you know, my idea of how to host guests. Right. And so this is something that comes up periodically. And I I've learned not to say, oh, you always blah, blah, blah. So I make it really specific. But, you know, it's always the same. Well, but I want to hear. I don't want you to tell me about it. I want to hear an example of something specific you say to him which still carries the judgment. I think it's in, I don't know, that we're talking about there being a right way to do it. A right way to do something. That's still a generalization. Yeah, I get to that.

[62:23]

Yeah. Even if it's about a specific instance. There's a right way to take care of our guests and their wine glasses. Well, it may be a generalization about a specific evening with specific guests, but the generalization is still in there. OK, so that's helpful. Thank you. Yeah. And You know, it was interesting listening to you struggle around, you know, always, always and never. I think getting our ears for what I'm wanting us to get our ears for will take a little feeling around. And if we're not pretty kind with ourselves, we're gonna think, you know, every time we notice something. Now, I also want to suggest that judgment that is projected out tends to be an arrow with a point at both ends.

[63:38]

So, for those of us who have a certain readiness for judgment We may not be particularly in touch with how critical of ourselves we are, but if we drop enough and pay attention to the inner dialogue, that's virtually what, that's the ground. That's the ground. Okay, any other questions about what I'm asking you to do? So, I want you to quick, pick a swim buddy, exchange phone numbers, and while we're doing that, are there any questions about what I want you to do? I want you to specifically pay attention to generalizations and bear noting habitual judgment.

[64:43]

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