Mary has had many, many positions here. She's currently our board president. She has many skills, many and varied different skills. Thank you. Good morning. Such a nice group of people here. Good morning, friends. It's a beautiful fall morning. About six months ago, I was directed to Metta practice.

[01:24]

And probably most of you know what metta practice is. It's the practice of developing compassion or loving-kindness or open-heartedness. And actually for this talk I went back and looked at my notes and I was actually more specifically directed to sit with a koan of the metta sutta which is a little bit different actually. and maybe more subtle. But it has led me down a variety of detours and paths and what I would like to do is take you on the circuit of where I've been since then. So, you know, Metta Sutta is the chant that probably is the most accessible chant we chant here, excuse me, on Monday mornings. And Metta practice, As I was practicing it in the beginning, is the practice of saying to oneself, may I be happy, may I be well, may I be safe, may I be at ease, may I have equanimity.

[02:50]

And then doing that same thing for someone who's easy to do that for, that it comes naturally to do that for. And then doing that for someone that you feel neutral about, that I feel neutral about. And then doing that for someone that is difficult to feel, to bring up those feelings for. And the traditional instruction is that you start in the easiest place. which is oneself, or at least that's what the Eastern tradition says. That actually was not true for me, and I think maybe it's not true, I can see maybe it's not true for other people here. So when I mentioned this to someone, they said, well, start easy, start somewhere else. I didn't do that. Actually, what I got caught by is that moment at which that objection arises, like that feeling of, I would call, what I've been calling it is unearned, unearned worthiness, or inherent unworthiness that I have been living with.

[04:16]

And that led me into some teachings about mindfulness and to... And one of the things I did, by the way... Excuse me. was that I listened to talks that people gave here years ago. I don't know if you know that there's a gold mine of teaching in Dharma on our website. There's almost 10 years of talks. So you can go back and actually listen to people give classes, give talks and so forth. And so I listened to Catherine Cascade and Jerry Oliva give a talk on mindfulness. It was wonderful. But I noticed that what they, this is not unusual with them, but what I've noticed is that mindfulness is defined as the non-reactive attention or awareness. And I wanted to unpack that non-reactive.

[05:22]

I mean, I think we sort of just say, like you do in exercise, just do it. But actually, I didn't find that that easy. And I noticed that as soon as one is aware of something as it comes up, there can be a voice that comes, or in myself there's a voice that has an opinion about that, about whether I like it, whether I don't like it, whether I approve of it, whether I don't approve of it, whether I want to shove it away. And sometimes the whole Zazen period can be like Like a game of whack-a-mole, like whomping the thought or the feeling that comes up, right? Now, I've spent a lot of time with this voice in myself, a lot of years in therapy and in this practice.

[06:24]

So I'm very familiar with it as a psychological phenomenon, as an inheritance of one's particular growing up, if you will. Pages are out of order. No wonder. And the question I have often had is how do you not use the voice to still the voice? How do you not be critical of the critical voice and just pile on, you know, higher and deeper, if you will? And there is some interesting cognitive research about how we scan the world cognitively, how we process information. And there's some data that there is a survival function that we have to scan the world and ourselves for negative stimuli and to over count it, to see it as having more valence and to see it as more prevalent than the positive stimuli.

[07:36]

It's called the negativity bias. There's some interesting potential research on the horizon. I mean, psychologists like to look at the dark side of things, so they do the negativity bias first. There's some suggestion that we actually process positive stimuli completely differently. And there's some tantalizing things about that, but I don't want to get caught on that. But anyway, it's a survival mechanism. We are looking for danger. It's our anticipatory reflex. It's how we use what we learn in the world about what's dangerous and what's safe. But what does this sound like in our Buddhist ears? It sounds to me like what we call ego. It sounds to me like the part of ourselves that we see as separate, as threatened or threatenable, especially from injury and death, physical or emotional.

[08:40]

And it's our protect and defend function, right? And I know in myself, it even tries, to keep me safe even from incoming criticism by standing outside myself and looking at myself and seeing what other people might see and then trying to correct before somebody else gets to it what they might be about to say. So in this foray into this stepping away, I thought, from the metapractice, I did notice a shift from understanding this voice as sort of part of my own peculiar psychological makeup to the part of myself that is operating under the delusion of separateness. And that led me to a shift from trying to change it to trying to get rid of it.

[09:42]

to try to erase that tape, if you will, to trying to bring some nurturance to it with the understanding that I'll be living with this for the rest of my life, this part of myself, and that maybe what I need to do is figure out how to make friends with it rather than trying to shut it up. So the real task is to figure out how you know, to pry the fingers of this part of myself off the wheel that's driving this bus. So how to do that? So that led me into another detour, which was around acceptance practices. I was looking for a kind of hands-on way of developing non-reactivity. And the practice I found most helpful was, you know, in that moment when something arises, to say to that something, yes, you are here too, yes, this is, yes.

[11:03]

And even then, if there's a judgment about that, to say yes to that too. Just yes. The implicit context is the context of pausing, not doing anything about either of those things, not taking it anywhere, not elaborating the story. and creating space to investigate what that is with the ultimate goal, I think, of figuring out how to choose a non-habitual response to the moment, a non-usual way, but a fresh look at what this moment is. An analogy I used with my mediation clients a lot was the analogy to explain something about anger, that anger is like the noise of a fire alarm, the kind that are up on your ceiling, and it's very annoying and very loud and very attention-getting, and it by itself does not put out any fires.

[12:24]

you actually have to figure out what the matter is. You have to stop and say, okay, is there a fire, or is there smoke from the kitchen, or is the battery low, or is this a gas fire, and so forth and so on, and figure out what is needed, figure out what is, and then figure out what is needed, and kind of two-step operation. So, and I would say, just, I don't mean this as a throwaway, because I want to come back to it, but you're not, one is, I'm not saying yes to the circumstance, I'm not saying yes to the thing that's wrong, to the fire. I'm saying yes to my response to that, to the noise, and to the noise, and to the alarm. And then figuring out what's needed is what is the reaction to the circumstance. So when dealing with habit energy, the idea is that there is this structure of noticing, notice and pause, create space and introduce the possibility of doing something different and then doing that over and over and over again for the rest of your life, the rest of my life.

[13:58]

Um, so that, that led me into the third detour on this meta search, which is a kind of favorite koan of mine from forever, which is what is right effort? I mean, I'm a person who tries hard and that's when I'm, So what is direct effort and how to manage it and how to do that without gaining mind? It's been suggested to me that the effort comes paired, in the Paramitas, effort comes paired with patience. And I've been told that to think of patience as the radical acceptance of things as they are, as it is. rather than making an effort to get it right or to get anything or anywhere. But I think this is, for me, this is a fundamental contradiction in Buddhism, which is the tension between practices if your hair were on fire wholeheartedly, throw yourself into it, and no gaining mind.

[15:16]

Progress is not a matter of far or near, as the Sandokai says. Now, for another reason, which I'll get to later, I was directed to the Tenzo Hokkien, the instructions for the cook. Dogen, our 13th century ancestors' instructions to the cook. But I found something relevant to this in it, which I'd like to share with you. In Buddhism, the view which only sees living in the world as impermanent and are trying to accumulate anything as useless is referred to as Duncan. Whereas a way of life which assumes that things must be accumulated and is based solely on setting up the limited goals of wealth, good health, and our offspring is called Joken. By the way, this is Uchiyama's commentary and this is Uchiyama speaking.

[16:19]

Both of these views are understood to be one-sided. This is the understanding that brought about the exposition of the middle way. The middle way does not mean halfway, nor does it mean some sort of watered down, defeated compromise. Rather, the middle way means to accept this contradiction of impermanence and cause and effect within your own life. To accept this contradiction means to forbear and overcome it without trying to resolve it. At its very essence, life is contradiction. And the flexibility to forbear and assimilate contradiction without being beaten down by it, nor by attempting to resolve it, is our life force. To express this concretely in terms of our daily attitude, it means to live without projecting goals,

[17:23]

while yet having a direction. So I love that. It tied right in to the developmental notion of how we get to be adults, the development from adolescent to adulthood. And there are two things at least happening in the brain at that time. One of them is that There's a sheath, a fatty sheath that insulates each neuron in the brain called myelin. So there's a myelinization that goes on through adolescent, is completed at the end of adolescent. And the sheath actually, the insulation speeds up the firing of the neurons, the processing capability. Together with that, we know you have two hemispheres and they actually operate kind of differently. They have different kinds of thinking capabilities. But between them is something called the corpus callosum, which is a bundle of nerves that connects and integrates those two halves.

[18:30]

And that isn't actually completed in its formation until young adulthood. So together, those two things suggest that What's suggested is that the adolescent sees things as more white and black than an adult does. An adult capability is the ability to understand and know that she feels the opposite things about the same thing, love and hate about the same thing, or fear and excitement about the same thing, and be able to put those on the same page and tolerate the anxiety of that contradiction without having to resolve it. The adolescent, not so much. The adolescent sees somebody they love very much do something they don't like, and that's called, you know, a fall from the pedestal right there.

[19:33]

You know, very idealistic kind of way of saying. So when I read this, I thought, oh, Buddhism is about growing up. So here we are growing up. Now all of this detour is happening, of course, in real time and in the real world, and the real world intercedes as it does. And I started to have a really hard time with what was happening in the world. I mean, there's lots of things I know we are all reacting to, but the thing that I particularly, that dropped me to my knees was children being separated from their parents. Some of them forever.

[20:35]

So I took this to Dogasan and was directed to the Tenzo Kiyoken specifically and to Magnanimous Mind, particularly Big Mind. When I talked to Sojin about this, he said, you ought to look up Magnanimous Mind. So I did. Courageously noble in mind and heart, generous in forgiving, eschewing resentment or revenge, and unselfish. So, here's Dogen. Magnanimous mind is like a mountain, stable and impartial. Exemplifying the ocean, it is tolerant, and views everything from the broadest perspective.

[21:44]

Having a magnanimous mind means being without prejudice and refusing to take sides. When carrying something that weighs an ounce, do not think of it as light. Likewise, when you have to carry 50 pounds, do not think of it as heavy. Do not get carried away by the sounds of spring nor become heavy-hearted upon seeing the colors of fall. View the changes of the seasons as a whole and weigh the relativeness of light and heavy from a broad perspective. And this is Ujjyama. This metaphor means that you should not be swayed by the values of society, nor get all excited simply because it's spring. finding yourself in favorable circumstances. Likewise, just because it is fall, there is no need to get all upset and have a nervous breakdown.

[22:50]

Rather, see the four seasons of favorable circumstances. Oh, let me do that again. See the four seasons of favorable circumstances, adversity, despair, and exaltation. all as the scenery of your life. This is what lies behind the expression of big mind. Living out your life firmly grounded in big mind does not mean that you become dumb and mute, nor that life is devoid of the scenery of enlightenment and illusion. Heaven and hell, success and failure, happiness and unhappiness. I found a lot of relief in this. I'm not entirely sure I can say why.

[23:54]

I found the words, all the scenery of your life, to be turning words, actually. Something about getting a wide enough angle lens and stepping back far enough to everything. When I was visiting the Northwest recently, I visited a family friend who is 89 years old and very alert and active and I was visiting him because his wife just died. And when he retired, he was a cardiologist for NASA. When he retired, he took up the study of the presidents of the United States, starting with Washington and going down the line one by one.

[24:57]

And when he got done with that, after a couple of years, he started back with the first ladies. Then he did all of those. And then he did all of the henchmen, all the people around each president. And now he teaches that broad view of history at the senior center on Bainbridge Island. And he said, and I don't want to get deep into the, I'm not a historian, so I can't, I can just tell you what he said. He said, we're in the third turning. I said, what? He said, no, there was the first turning, the Revolutionary War, there's a second turning, the Civil War, this is the third turning. And there was something about that like enlarged view that was like, oh, Right, right. It's what the Chinese say about opportunity, about crisis. There's an opportunity and danger both right there. Also, what I got from it was to figure out, at least moment by moment, not for good, but moment by moment, how to let go of the resistance to what is.

[26:17]

So what I mean by that is when you're watching a slow motion train wreck and you can't stand it and all of you goes, no, that's extra suffering. That's suffering. And What it means to do metta practice is to open your heart, and to open your heart means that your heart is broken some of the time. And that's okay. That has to be okay. Because otherwise, what's the alternative? I know what the alternative is. When you try to not feel that, and that's not okay, that's an incomplete operation in your psyche.

[27:22]

Everything goes numb, ultimately, you know? You don't feel anything. And I know a little bit about this from my own grief. Both my parents have died and one grief was wholehearted and another grief was incomplete and resisted. And they were really different. The resisted grief was being stuck in an eddy. You know, an eddy in a river is just going round and round. And the water is foul and you're just there. And open-hearted grief is in clean water rushing with the current. You're swept along.

[28:23]

And it's not that it's easy. It's not even that it's fun. But it's okay. And it's moving. And you know it's going to change, you know? And it feels clean. So, I guess MED is not about feeling all warm and fuzzy. You know, the separation of children from their families is a great grief. And there's no There's no gentling down of that. And so metapractice must be learning to live with a broken heart. And to be open means to be open to everything and not pushing anything away.

[29:30]

And so, you know, I'm back to metapractice after all of this detour. Excuse me. And now I have a new koan, which I invite you to help me with and I would like to talk about, which is how to live in magnanimous mind. but with all the scenery of one's life. So we have plenty of time to do that, I think. Peter. I'm focusing on As I'm listening to those words, I realize that for me, they denote heaviness.

[31:05]

That's a great question. Well, now you have just named the two poles of the dilemma of my own effort, because the trying hard is, you know, how I've defined effort, making it, you know, make it so. When I think about the uncomplicated and open-hearted grief, there was no effort in that. And when I think about that, it does feel like it burns through you and cleans you and is opening. It creates space. So I do live with those two images and ways of being, that's true. Chad. The neuropsychologist is gonna correct me.

[32:40]

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that talk and you walked me through the experiences of my life and all the tragedy and challenges and facing them directly.

[34:30]

But what I realized as you were finishing up, and I was starting to swim a little bit in the hope of living forward, I realized that I reached out and found how the world was magnanimous to me. And I think that was before I realized that I had gone numb, that was before I had realized that I had really suffered, that there was magnanimity. coming toward me, and it started to wake me up. You know, thank you, you helped me remember something that I was intending to say that I didn't say, I think, which is that metta practice is really not creating compassion in oneself, it's finding the compassion that's already there.

[36:20]

Jerry. I did want to say something blank. You know, whenever anybody says to me, I'm going to do bad practice, I always think of a kind of denial practice. I'm going to repeat, I love you, and I'm going to say how great you are, and how great it is, and wish all these wonderful things. And somehow that's going to make me feel OK. So I love the way, you know, you kind of But the other thing is, I think you answered your call-on by your talk about right effort.

[37:30]

Your talk was what right effort is. You just illustrated it by just continuing to stay with, and stay with, and stay with, Thank you, thank you. Linda. Okay, I would love that. What? I'm in. I have a question. So I'm going to bring one question to you today.

[38:40]

Anyway, I'll ask one question. Which is going to your image of the fingers on the wheel and buying them. Yeah, that was a very good one. So you said, My question is, what if a space does not seem to revolve? Can you stay with them there? What happens if you do that? Right.

[39:52]

Right. In that acceptance practice, there's a number of other steps which I didn't really go into, but one of them is noticing and having noticed, attempting not to act out on it, not to go anywhere. and then to bring an investigative mind to it, and insofar as possible, that the investigative mind is non-judgmental, and maybe even to make an inquiry which pulls up nurturing mind.

[40:58]

What is needed? What do you need? What do you need? What is called for? And sort of bathe that with and interested and curious. A lovingness. Yes, Judy? It feels to me, in some ways, when people come out, that these communities are often very claustrophobic. In my own experience, that kind of viscerally painful, hard-to-stay-in-body heartbreak can be really isolating, and it's actually really hard to articulate what that feels like.

[42:13]

said, going numb, and then being in that moment, it became a speech of pain. And I thought that you had beautifully spoken it, certainly for many other parts of time you've speaked to it, and in a way that, as I feel it, is really connecting in the spirit of peace and And so it occurred to me that maybe the spirit training is about that. And finding new pathways to see that maybe the particularity of the pain that I now touch is the pain that someone else has been living with for eons. as the first noble truth

[43:26]

If you want to. I was actually reading a book. I was thinking about the term open heart. Do you use the term open heart? I do. Do you use it in a way that... kind of necessary or... I'm not sure exactly what. I can't remember the... In order to actually free yourself, you have to break your heart. Yes. Flexible.

[45:10]

That was Uchiyama's word. That was Uchiyama's word. Yes. Flexible. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Bondi. about others who share your feelings and found a way to. Yeah, right.

[46:36]

Well, a colleague of mine sent around, I noticed that, Volunteers were wanted to work with and be with the children in detention, and so I signed up for that. I don't speak Spanish or any indigenous language, so I don't know how useful that was, and I haven't been contacted. So there is a community of mental health people, at least, who are trying to be with the children. I have a friend, and I'm sure she wouldn't mind if I invited you all, is sitting at Roma Cafe on Ashby and College from 3 to 4.30 every Wednesday afternoon writing postcards to our congressman about what you care about. And so that's an opportunity and I've been doing that.

[47:38]

And I plan to be part of the not BGC related activities in several communities that are politically oriented getting out the vote. So I'm going to be doing that. I have to say that And the same opportunity arises around those, which is how to do that wholeheartedly and not be wrapped up in whether it makes a difference. What difference is my little postcard going to make? What difference does it make if I just, you know, there's something you have to actually just do whatever it is that one is called or able to do without thinking about the outcome. Because in between the effort that you put in and the outcome are a lot of things you don't control. You know, including impermanence.

[48:42]

So, that's the hard part, I think. One more and then I think... I think this has a little bit to do with what Rodney, during the talk, I felt like the metta practice or magnanimous view It was great, but it felt like there was something else that needs to come. You sit there and you realize this thing is happening and you've developed a kindness or compassion. But then, often in life, there still needs to be some kind of movement or action. And there isn't time, but I'm really curious how that's decided. Because I often, you know what Jerry said, I thought, yeah, there's actions and there's behaviors and there's engagement and there's a way to live because we still do participate. Right.

[49:43]

And sometimes there is a, maybe a more, a way to participate that is necessary and I think that's the part that I, you know, that's where I get stuck with the Metta practice. I feel great, but, you know, the person's still laying on the ground. Maybe I should go help them. Or I need to, you know, do something. That's where I feel like it gets left. How to put, yeah. Right. Okay. I think we're out of time.

[50:19]

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