I vow to taste the truth and not to talk those words. Good morning. Good morning. For those of you who've sat up here at times to talk, cutting through the silence that we've had in the Zendo is quite a chore. It feels almost terrifying. And I'm glad to be here with you as a beginner. And I wonder how many of you are sitting your first full day session? Anyone? A few. And others of you, is this maybe your first full day at BCC? But not a first session? Well, I, in thinking about beginners and beginner session, I was, of course, searching for the perfect words of wisdom to share with you.

[01:18]

And I was reminded of the very succinct, perfect words of wisdom that business people use when talking about real estate transactions, which is location, location, location. but that didn't seem to fit, because any student of Zendo will work here. So then I thought about Master Ikkyo, who was asked to do some calligraphy of wisdom, and he wrote, attention. And the student said, well, you know, can't you say any more? So he wrote, attention, attention. And he said, you know, this isn't enough. So he wrote, attention, attention, attention. And then he was asked, and the student still said, but what does attention mean? And he said, attention means attention. But in thinking about those words of wisdom, they seemed a little bit cold for what I had to say to you today.

[02:25]

So I go to my own experience of sitting, Sashin, And my words of wisdom for you are pain, pain, pain. And I, on that cheerful note, I thought I would talk about the three kinds of pain that I experience in Sesshin, and maybe you have some others to offer. But it's pain that brings us here, and it's pain that we work with, and it's pain that we uncover as part of our lives. And the kinds of pain that I experience are physical pain, of course, emotional pain, and existential pain. By that I mean, really, what's the meaning of my life? And I have this time between birth and death, and I can't seem to find quite the right way to be in it.

[03:27]

And that's very painful. But, I was most encouraged by the story that a young woman told, who was a beginner, about what brought her to practice. We have a wonderful ritual here at BCC where people who come into our practice give a talk fairly early on called, Way-Seeking Mind, and they talk about what brought them here. And this woman, I hope I'll be at least true to the intention of the story, I know I won't get all the facts right, This woman told a story of coming out of college and being very successful in her career and doing very well and really feeling pretty devastated as she chugged along in her very successful career life. So, of course, she asked for the words of wisdom from her friends and they didn't tell her pain. They told her, take some time off. You know, you need to get out and do something.

[04:30]

So she did, and she took some time off. And that felt pretty good. She came back to work, and that felt pretty terrible. So she said, well, that didn't work. I said, well, this time when you take some time off, get a massage. And so she did, and that felt really good. And again, it lasted for a certain amount of time, and she came back to work. And again, she began to feel very unhappy. And finally someone said, now I can see, you know, you're a difficult case. And she asked for wisdom again. And she was told, what you need is the works. And the works is what happens when you pay a great deal of money to Elizabeth Arden in San Francisco. And you go over to her salon and you are treated to everything I think that's legally possible.

[05:32]

Where you have a massage and a facial and you're steamed with herbs and made over in whatever ways you could be made over. So this was really going to be the cure because after all this was the ultimate, this was the works. But it only lasted so long and of course you know the result of her having gotten the works and that failing was she had to come here. And so, on the one hand, she was very lucky to find her path, but on the other hand, this is an extremely difficult path, and not nearly as pleasant as the works. And it's, you know, so I commiserate with all of you who have found your way here through your pain, because I know that nothing else worked or you wouldn't be here. And most of us have tried about everything there is, whether it's fast cars or, for me, horses or hiking or indulging in career or relationships, arts.

[06:41]

Most of us have tried everything to find that meaning in our life and have come here because the works didn't work. So here we are and we enter this practice. And one of the things that happens after we've begun to sit for a while is that we come to sit for longer amounts of time to really kind of get the hang of it. And of course, we have the experience of physical pain, which is our great teacher in these long sittings. And unfortunately, for those of you who may be beginners and think that As you sit longer, it doesn't hurt so much. I'm sorry, that's not the case. It's just a different, it's a different kind of pain. But I think in our culture, we have some very definite ideas about pain and coping with pain, physical pain.

[07:42]

As a child, and we have our first injuries and fall down and bang ourselves, we are taught really to isolate ourselves from this injury, and to find it, you know, and name it, we have a boo-boo, and it needs to be treated, and it's something that's apart from us. You know, we put some medicine on it, and a band-aid on it, and we're reassured that that's the boo-boo, but we're okay. So immediately we set up a relationship where we are distancing ourselves from this pain, and from a part of ourselves. I bet most of us got also the words of wisdom when we were instructed in boo-boo wisdom, which was, Mommy's going to kiss it and make it better. Everybody get that? It's treatment for their wounds. Well, I haven't checked the list of positions, but I don't think we have that one down here. I don't think we have anybody who comes around in this practice to kiss it and make it better.

[08:49]

Actually, it would be a good position. We do. We should. Yes. I was thinking about it when I was getting ready for this talk. We have somebody who comes around and hits it with a stick, okay, just in case you didn't get enough pain. But we don't have a boo-boo kisser, so we might want to talk about that in the practice committee. But it is a little bit contrary, this boo-boo kisser position, to our view of practice, which is, this is your life, this moment, this pain, and what you're experiencing. So immediately when we feel this pain, it's like having your feet in a shoe that's too tight, you know, you kind of pull your toes back, contract a little. And that's our first reaction, you know, we need, and then we need some Dr. Scholl's whatever to put on it, and someone to kiss it and make it better. But in here, we don't have that opportunity.

[09:53]

On purpose, we don't have that opportunity to deal with the hurt in that way. So we develop a new relationship to pain, and it's really quite, for me, quite the core of my practice and also my life, because this is not the only place that I have pain. And so when you begin to feel the pain, which oftentimes will be in your knees, your hips, your ankles, your shoulders, I guess I could just keep on naming the places where it could hurt. The practice can begin with experiencing that in the zazen, making space for this pain in the zazen, and really truly experiencing the sensation without putting the name pain on it necessarily.

[10:56]

For example, with the knees, feeling, the muscles, the tendons stretching, and they're really doing a fantastic job to open up for you, for your life, for your practice. And really experiencing the stretching without calling it pain. There's also a possibility of just making more space as you continue to breathe, making more space for your knees to be as they are, for example. There's a way of also trying to be one with that knee that's stretching. So these are all this opening up, this experiencing without naming and separating, this being with without any separation,

[11:57]

These are all core principles that we practice with in our life and in each moment. Another possibility, although this one, I don't know, it doesn't always work so well for me, is just feeling the pain in the legs, without them being my legs, but perhaps all the legs in the room. Sometimes I have to make it worse to feel all of the hurting that there is, all of the stretching that's going on in the room. But one of the things that you can do during this session is practice with your pain and begin this new relationship with your pain. And that really is a major transformation because not only have we been taught to separate from pain, particularly physical pain, but also we've been taught that pain is bad and And not only is it bad, but it may mean that you're bad.

[13:02]

You must have done something wrong. Mommy told you not to run across, and you did, and you fell, and that's how you got hurt. Or in some way, your practice isn't protecting you. In some way, you've done something wrong, and you're being punished. And we all have a very strong correlation in our minds between pain and badness. So I think it's really another avenue into understanding ourselves and being in our lives, to just experience the discomfort without the judgments that we have so often put on pain, and on ourselves for having pain, and on our bodies for letting us down. So, in talking about emotional pain, I want to say something about physical pain before I go on. There's also a moderate amount of pain that's right.

[14:04]

The kind of pain that I'm talking about, I usually experience in the last little bit of the period I'm not looking at my watch, and hopefully you weren't either, But there's the last few minutes of the period when you're sure that this period has lasted for three hours, and that someone has forgotten to ring the bell, and that you're going to die before the bell rings. That's the pain that I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the kind of pain that could happen from the time you sit down on the cushion at the beginning of a period where you had a sharp, terrible pain. That kind of pain ought to be dealt with, or you might want to think about sitting in a chair or finding out, you know, getting some help, because this is the middle way. While we don't want to indulge ourselves, we also don't want to torment our bodies and ruin them any further. So, there is a moderate amount of pain that we should all attend to and not insist on, for whatever reason, being a star.

[15:12]

A friend of mine recently said, that Thich Nhat Hanh in one of his first trips over here said, you know, to be a Buddhist doesn't mean you have to be a hero. And I think he was referring to this intense physical macho practice that we can sometimes get into, which takes it a little bit out of the realm of what I'm talking about. So in talking about emotional pain, I wanted to talk about several things. One is that in the same way we've been taught to deal with physical pain, we have had very few lessons in a certain way, explicitly, about emotional pain. And emotional pain, we have all been traumatized as children, no matter how wonderful our parents were, and some of them were not perhaps so skillful as others, and some of them in fact perpetrated terrible abuses on us.

[16:18]

So I don't mean to belittle the fact that some of us had a very difficult time, but all of us had some difficulty. And when we had this difficulty as children, we had the idea that we would be annihilated, we would be destroyed, we would lose everything if we faced this fear directly, and so we found ways to get away from this discomfort and fear that something was wrong and that something was terribly wrong. And these ways that we found to not feel our emotional pain, to get away from it, are ways that we have contorted ourselves, and in psychology we refer to them as defense mechanisms. like what they are, they defend us from our pain, but they also have us contorted in quite the awkward positions, just the way you would pull your toes back in a tight shoe.

[17:24]

You pull back emotionally and are not experiencing your life as it is, but you have ideas about and ways that you block your experience. Well, in Zazen, you're given this vast emptiness to practice in, and you will soon see that while you have this wonderful space, you begin to contort and take on these positions, and you can see them in your thoughts. Anyway, the habits are so strong. I want to tell a little story about contortion in the form of a joke. a man was out looking to buy a new suit, and the name was Joe, and he went by a store at his lunch hour, and he saw a beautiful suit on sale in the window. And he looked at it, it was a perfect color, and what could be better?

[18:26]

It was already marked down, and it looked like it might even be in his size, so he went in to try it on. And when he went in, and the salesman gave it to him, he put it on, and lo and behold, it fit him, pretty much perfectly. Well, this was a great occurrence to find just what he was looking for so quickly on his lunch hour and in his size. He said to the salesman, you know, this suit is really gorgeous, the fabric is fantastic, the cut is terrific, but there's something wrong here in the collar. And the salesman said, well, you know, if you just put your chin over here, you know, you can keep the collar down. So I said, well, you know, I looked in the mirror, and he said, you're right. So he said, OK. I said, but you know, there's something else about this suit. He said, you know, one of the sleeves is a little longer than the other. The salesman said, well, you know, all you need to do is just stretch out one arm and sort of hold back the other, and it'll be perfect for you.

[19:29]

So I said, looked in the mirror, and he said, OK. You know? It's a gorgeous suit. So he said, but there's one other problem. He said, you know, there's something about the way this crotch is that, you know, it just doesn't lay evenly on this side. The salesman said, well, just grab it with your other hand. This Joe said, well, this is great. Let me write you a check here. And he bought the suit, and he went out walking down the street. And he ran into a friend of his, Sam. And he said, hi, Sam, how are you doing? Sam said, great, Joe, nice to see you. Sam walked away. He said, jeez, I didn't know Joe was sick. What happened to him? And his friend said, I don't know what was the matter with Joe, but it was a gorgeous suit. And this gorgeous suit is what we try to present as our life.

[20:31]

Our life is together. Our life, we try to walk around with me. I'm doing great. My life is so well put together. I have everything covered. And we're all contorted in these positions because there's something about not allowing this pain to express itself that's more important to us than getting out of this position. And I wanted to share a little bit with you about what Joko Beck says about this kind of distortion. We have many ways to cope with life, many ways to worship comfort and pleasantness. All are based on the same thing, the fear of encountering any kind of unpleasantness. If we must have absolute order and control, It's because we're trying to avoid any unpleasantness. If we can have things our way and get angry if they're not, then we think we can survive and shut out anxiety.

[21:40]

If we can please everyone, then we imagine no unpleasantness will enter our life. We hope that if we can be the star of the show, shining and wonderful and efficient, we can have such an admiring audience that we won't have to feel anything. If we can withdraw from the world and just entertain ourselves with our dreams and fantasies and emotional upheavals, we think we can escape unpleasantness. If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won't be threatened. If we can submit to an authority, have it tell us what to do, then we can give someone else the responsibility for our lives and we don't have to carry it anymore. We don't have to feel the anxiety of making a decision. If we pursue life madly, going after any pleasant sensation, any excitement, any entertainment, perhaps we won't have to feel any pain.

[22:45]

If we can tell others what to do, keep them well under control, under our foot, maybe they can't hurt us. If we can bliss out, if we can be a mindless Buddha, just relaxing in the sun, we don't have to assume any responsibility for the world's unpleasantness. We can just be happy. So I think maybe we might have covered everybody and their ways of avoiding dealing with emotional pain in this list of things that people do, either through control, through anger, through greed for pleasure. All of these ways that we have of avoiding pain and avoiding our basic emotional wounding are things that we will encounter in our Zazen. And when we do, this is the time for us to just experience them as an observer,

[23:52]

again, to be part of them, without dramatizing. And even there comes a time, or there does sometimes come a time, when this unlayering that we do as part of this practice makes it so that we may have to seek professional help, because sometimes the damage is pretty profound, and these defenses that we've put into place have been absolutely necessary to keep us on the road. So this is something else that may become part of your practice, is the unfolding of the emotional pain and realizing that the intensity or the depth of the wounding. And the last kind of pain I wanted to talk about was existential pain. that we're here for.

[24:53]

And what is the meaning of our life? It seems like it's a little bit like the myth of Sisyphus, you know, that we every day have to get up and push this rock up the hill and it comes down again every night. Every day we have to push it up again. And finding our meaning in that is quite remarkable. And in a certain way, I think Sachine helps to replicate that in a very small way in that we have over and over again the same form, the same rituals, the same number of sittings, we do the same chants, and yet we do them completely with this full effort. And I can't give you the answer, unfortunately, I can't give you the answer to the question, what is the meaning of our life? but instead we offer you this practice in which you find it for yourself.

[25:53]

It's very interesting. It's quite contradictory that when we talk about Buddhism and, in a sense, losing the self, we talk about only you are able to find the meaning for your life. So we neither totally lose the self nor do we indulge ourself in our own selfish ways. So there's something in the middle. I wanted to share with you something that Uchiyama Roshi said in Refining Your Life about what Buddhism offers and what it doesn't offer in terms of the relief of this pain and suffering. The fundamental difference between Buddhism and other religions is that Buddhism has no god or gods before whom people bow down in return for peace of mind, the spirit enmeshed in Buddha's teachings refuses to offer a god in exchange for freedom from anxiety.

[26:56]

Instead, freedom from anxiety can only be found at that point where the self settles naturally upon itself." So, this responsibility of what to do with your life belongs to you. And it's very much in contrast with other kinds of religious practice, where you can come to the practice and be told what to do in order to not only have a good life in this life, but not only that, they'll reserve a space for you on the other side. And that's a pretty good deal. And we don't offer that. And instead, we offer an opportunity for you to tap into this very deep source of meaning, yourself.

[28:03]

And when I read that last statement, where the Self naturally settles upon itself, that was a capital S Self. So that makes a difference too. in a certain way that I experience as when I sit down. It's almost like I'm the plug going into a socket and being connected to this wonderful source of inspiration and wisdom. And I want to make sure that you've heard that correctly too, because I said, instead, freedom from anxiety can only be found at that point where the self settles naturally upon itself. He didn't say freedom from pain. He said freedom from anxiety. So, even with the self settling upon itself, when I'm talking about freedom from suffering, we're talking about the anxiety that we generate on top of our suffering.

[29:09]

How do we make it worse? How do we add drama and more intensity than is necessary? to what is our ordinary share of suffering. So even with that, I'm sorry to say that it almost sounded like I was giving you some recipe for being pain-free, but I wanted to point out to you that I wasn't. So, in working in Sashin, the sitting and having the self settling naturally upon itself It's almost, well, he says self settling upon itself. It's the big self. So it's almost like it sits down on us. And we, in some way, begin this relationship with something that is much bigger than who we thought we were. And in that way, we begin to find our place

[30:11]

And of course, I'm only speaking about this for myself, so I don't want you to think that I'm going to give you an answer here to the meaning. This is something you find for yourself. But for me, the settling and the relating to the Self, with a capital S, is about finding my place harmoniously among all of you and in life. And through that, I find my meaning, and I think you will too. So I think that the principles that I've talked about for working with physical, emotional, and existential pain are about acceptance, observing, making space, opening up to, being one with, are most applicable to every situation that you will encounter.

[31:18]

One of the problems that people talk about is, yeah, but when someone hurts me, what do I do about that? Because, you know, you're teaching me how to open up to this pain, but how do I protect myself from it? My therapist is telling me that I should, you know, get angry, strike back, and there may be a place for that at times in your life. But what I'm talking about does in a way, although you may need some fine-tuning here, cover some of these experiences too. Because the first thing we need to recognize when someone is coming at us is in fact that it's happening. And our first cue is what we're experiencing, that we are in somehow, some way, being injured or being hurt. And one of the things that happens with people who've grown up with a defense against it, oh, I'll just be nice and that will lessen it, is that they block out the sensation even of the pain because that is what enables this whole reaction of being hurt to continue.

[32:29]

So yes, you can open up when someone is hurting you to the experience that, oh, I just felt something there. Someone just spat and it wasn't rain. You know, you have to really distinguish what happened. What you do about it then depends on the situation. But I don't think that Buddhism is asking you to be a doormat and to blank out your feelings when someone is coming at you in a way that's hurtful. So I think that's also important to put into perspective as we talk about opening up to pain. I think that's all I want to say for now, because I would like to leave some time for some questions. Yes? What gets damaged? You talked about damage. What is it that gets damaged? Well, there's something here, isn't there? What asks the question? Something hurts?

[33:31]

Yeah, but something in you asks the question. And that's what gets damaged. It implies that there's some thing that gets damaged and stays damaged over time. And it does, actually. I have my experience. And yet, Buddhism talks about, these are just thoughts, these are just feelings. They come up, they're born, they grow and they live and they fade away again. Yes, that's true, that happens. But we feel them while that's going on too, don't we? I think that it's important to note that the pain occurs, and that's the first step in letting go of it. It's my experience. To say that it doesn't happen, to retreat to some ideal, that there's nothing there and there's no way to get hurt, doesn't work for me. First of all, I'll acknowledge it, and that's the step to letting it go.

[34:35]

It seems to me that you can actually, you know, put your hands on a fire and you can see the damage to your fingers in the same way if we could see psychically what's happening. I'm sure there's a some corresponding experience. Now, we can continue to hold it down there and continue that damage or we can take it off and put some cold water on it and let it go. Is that helpful? I hope that some of you may share your ideas about ways that you think you might need to work on this issue. Great suit.

[35:49]

Quite a tailor. Yeah. A tailor and a creator of aggravation. Yes? Thanks for your talk today. Could you talk about the relationship between gratitude and pain? Is this something that you practice with? I try to. Maybe you have something more to say. I didn't really talk much about gratitude today. How do you use it with pain? Well, as I think about my own sense of dualistic thinking, it's really easy to label, well you talked about labeling pain as a habit, and it seems like to get away painful or joyful? And I was just wondering, you know, you've practiced for a long time, do you have experience with that yourself?

[36:55]

I do experience pain as my teacher, and often give it a bow. I hadn't thought about it in those words of gratitude, because thank you very much for that teaching, I needed that. I mean, that's a hard practice. Yeah. But it seems to me that it's a way of getting closer to a neutral place, a middle ground in practice, where I'm less willing to be labeling the experience? Yes. Yeah. And you can make the most of the teaching that's being offered to you. I had a wonderful teaching. Does anybody else have a question? Or I was going to go on. I had a wonderful teaching. I was waiting for a plane And it was one of these Southwest commuting from Los Angeles to Oakland. And the plane was actually quite late, but they had these standards that they want to look like they're on time, so that if they actually begin the boarding process and cram you into the boarding ramp, even though the plane isn't there somehow, that helps them out.

[38:06]

So they had all crammed us in like cattle in there, and then we got on the plane, I have my own angles for those shuttles, which is I sit up in the very front because you can get off the plane quickly. And usually they're very crowded and full of babies. I mean literal babies, little ones, not just primitive people. But anyway, I had both in my little cubicle there. And I was offered a wonderful teaching because the woman who was sitting across from me had a purse about this big, and she had it under her seat, and there wasn't very much room to stow things. So I had, of course, in my usual fashion, brought much more, and was trying to stuff it under there. And so the stewardess said, you know, could you move your purse over? And she was, you know, it's this little tiny thing. She said, well, I guess first come, first served doesn't mean anything. Of course, I was not at my best at that moment.

[39:07]

And I retorted something like, with open seating, first come first served doesn't mean shit. And afterwards, after these words had left, this kind speech had left my mouth, I realized what the teaching was for me in this experience, which is that that's exactly the problem in life. We think we have a reservation, and it's open seating. Anything can happen. Is it time, Doc? I have 11.21. I have more than 30 minutes. I was going to say that, especially that story, points to the thing that came to mind, the question about what gets damaged.

[40:15]

I know for me, it's my ability to respond, my ability to be connected in a way that I find myself alive with other people. The transforming that spot there where you saw what had fallen out of your mouth and then saw through that to a real, for me, that story is very, helps me being more buoyant about looking at death and looking at even when there's a painful kind of, Yeah, what is your expectation about how you were supposed to be protected in this space? Yeah, protected or, you know, avoiding all that stuff is very interesting. Yes. Thanks. You're welcome.

[41:19]

Yeah, that's really how Buddhism differs from others, is that this is for you to find for yourself. Yes, I wanted to thank you very much for your talk today. It meant a lot to me. It was something that I've been observing in my own sitting practice, and that has changed my position of sitting, because I have As I approach sitting now, I'm not so apprehensive about it, but the quality of the sitting has, I think, if I can use the word, decreased because of that lack of pain. And when I came back in here, I sat in a half lotus position, immediately my knee started bothering me, but my foot didn't, but my knee did.

[43:39]

And I realized that I was welcoming that pain because I knew that the sitting would then be, I don't know if it would have more intensity, but have more quality to it. Yeah, there is a balance. Yeah, so the knock pain was not really The absence of it or the lessening of it actually, and that's what I'm saying about finding the moderate amount of pain. Mel talks about it as finding the position that you can stay with. You need to stay awake though. I mean, if you get in a position that's too relaxed, obviously laying flat out, you fall asleep. So there needs to be a little bit of tension that you're working with to stay awake and to stay focused. But too much can take away. Yeah. Yeah. These are endless.

[44:48]

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