Angela's suggestion, we'll do kin hin. And of course kin hin is sort of like slow walking. And it's a way you extend in sashin or monastic life. So where you extend your sasen mind into walking. Now, of course, you can just simply walk along. You can pay no attention to what I say. But it's interesting to me to say something more detailed about it. Because one of the things that I think is a dynamic of Zen Buddhist yogic practice in the West

[01:19]

For many people, it comes to them through the martial arts. Yeah, but because it's really a different concept of the body than we have. And so I'm going to give you sort of like traditional instructions about Kin Hin. Not so much to suggest how you do it, But as another illustration of another concept of a body. Now, one way to say something about it is that you could call it each moment yoga.

[02:26]

is that each moment is an opportunity to practice yoga, something like that. That seems perhaps rather tiresome. There's lots of Zen stories, but, oh, boy, I just straightened my legs on that cigarette. The hell with Zen. Well, they don't say cigarette. Where's the latte? Okay. So, and I say traditional instructions... But really, if you practice Zen in Asia or you practice Zen with Sukhiroshi, there's about 5% instructions, the rest is example.

[03:43]

But I just haven't, I just find that doesn't work in Europe or America. For a lay practitioner. For instance, we practiced for the first full year, we chanted every morning, and he never said one word for a year about how to chant. We just watched what we did in relationship to how he did. And after a year, he felt we got enough of a feel about it that he could fine-tune it a little bit, or grossly tune it. So, after that introduction, what's going to happen?

[05:05]

All right, now if you do it rather fully, The idea is your body is an opportunity to fill it with energy and attention. And that body filled with energy and attention Attention is a kind of vitality or energy that's in almost every Buddhist list. So your feet are usually more or less parallel. Your feet are usually, the ankles are usually exactly a fist apart.

[06:24]

And you tend to measure the body with the body. When you do this bow, this distance is the fist. Occasionally after somebody's been sat with me for a while, a year or more. I'll try to show them their hands are like this while I walk by and I'll try to show them and I put my fist there and... It's usually a man. So, your feet are that far apart. And your hands, you put your thumb into your palm of your hand, the left hand. And there's a whole yogic thing about the palm of the hand, the energy and the feel of the palm of the hand.

[07:41]

And you can notice in these statues the posture of the hands often has more detail than the face. And when I was in high school, we had the various former high school principals had busts of them, busts, the statue cut off here. I always thought it was very funny. They cut off their head and they put them on the shelf. You never see a statue in Japan with just the head. It's always the whole body. And if you're giving a talk at a conference, except when they imitate the West, you never have a lectern here, because they should be able to see your whole body.

[08:57]

So you put your left thumb in your... in your palm of your left hand. And then you put your right hand over the top of your left hand. And then you have the lower part of your arms parallel to the floor. And you lift your arm slightly away as if you could support an egg in your armpit. And then you turn the hands up slightly. Sukhirashi considered this too rigid and this too relaxed.

[09:58]

But there's a little bit of alertness when you turn it up slightly. But there is a certain alertness, a certain alertness when you turn it up a little. And then you step forward on the exhale, half a step, so your heel comes to about the arch of your foot. So when you exhale, you go half a foot forward, so that the heel is about in the arch. And you step forward in the exhale, usually first with your left foot. And then you lift the heel of the right foot. As you inhale.

[11:01]

And then as you exhale, you bring that foot forward on the exhale half a step. And then you lift your foot and step up. And step forward on the exhale. And in some senses every breath, but at least intentionally a few breaths. As you lift the heel with the in-breath, Then you bring the subtle breath, which is the feel of the breath breathing. Up through the back of the leg, through the spine, over the head, down through the front, and then you step forward with the exhale.

[12:08]

Do you start exhaling when you come over the head, or do you start exhaling when you're already on the ground again? Good. You inhale as you're bringing it up, and as you bring this energy over, you step forward with this energy into it. And when you are doing that you are beginning to open up the channels which in turn open up your chakra system. And you walk as if your center was here in your heart, below your navel slightly.

[13:19]

It's quite difficult. I mean, people I know, even practicing with Suzuki Hiroshi in practice for years, they just walk. They just walk. They don't actually slide forward with the torso remaining still. How we walk is really culturally shaped. Around Johanneshof, there's quite large forests. And there's tourists, quite a lot of tourists. And sometimes I'll be walking by and say, oh, there goes a British couple.

[14:22]

They're striding along. And there goes a German couple and they're moving a little differently. If it was a Japanese, they'd be sliding forward. I'm still working on how to move only from here. It's like you go up to the refrigerator door and you open it this way. So I'm still practicing how I can only go from here. It's like going to the fridge and opening it like this. So that's the forward step with the exhale. Lifting through the back heel. and if you want all the way up through the body and then stepping forward sliding forward the torso with the exhale and then continue and it's also a way of taking consciousness out of verticality.

[15:52]

Architecture of the West is divided up into sleeping rooms and standing up rooms. In the horizontal position you sleep, And in the vertical position you try to stand up and not fall over. And you need consciousness to do that. To avoid BMWs and Tigers and things like that. When you're crossing the street. So consciousness is required by verticality. But consciousness interferes with samadhi and yogic awareness and so forth. So kin hin is also a way to be vertical but not exactly conscious.

[17:00]

And if Geralt leads you into the pond, you're just led into the pond. Splash, splash. Because you just feel the person in front of you. And you feel the person in back of you. And you maintain that distance as much as possible. Even when you go fast and run, you maintain that distance. The leader should be someone who can feel the whole line and know if some people in the back are going too slow or fast. So Kinyin is also about establishing a resonant bodily field.

[18:12]

And I know that's a whole lot of stuff. In between two steps, how is the weight balance? Is it on both feet equally or more on the front and more on the back? There's little pause. Well, I mean... you're moving forward the weight and it's almost entirely on the foot that's flat. There's other ways to do it even slower, but I'm not showing you. But I think as an example of a rather different way of experiencing and developing the body, this is interesting. But as an example of how you can feel or develop your body completely differently, this is a good example.

[19:23]

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