I vow to chase the truth of the Tarkata's words. Good morning. Well, it's very nice to be here celebrating the solstice or the day after the spring solstice? Equinox. It is today? 1229. We're really here. That's wonderful. But we can celebrate it this way. We could be outdoors, walking, and we're just sitting around outdoors, enjoying spring, and we have chosen to enjoy spring here. Now Dogen says that time flows.

[01:01]

We imagine that the period will be over in X amount of minutes, and there'll be a break, or there's a past and a future, but time flows, and you never get out of it. And it's like, same way, spring flows. So wherever we are, we're in spring, and sitting in here we have a very quiet and still appreciation of the flow of spring. So I wanted to talk today about confidence.

[02:02]

Talk about it somewhat from a woman's point of view. And the fact that we are all here at this women's sitting is an expression, kind of an expression of confidence. Our confidence in being together as women. The last couple of decades in our practice, we have had, we've seen a lot of the fruits of women practicing in what came to us as essentially a men's practice. There were the teachers, Maureen Stewart, and Joko Beck, and Tony Packard, and locally, Yvonne Rand, and Catherine Thanos, many others, who are finding their own forms and who are opening the practice in their own way, in their own particular finding of the form, making it more available to everyone.

[03:19]

And there are the changes that we have made here at Berkeley, the changes in the chanting, The effort to keep a good process going in the Sangha, to balance the hierarchy with good process, the little changes, like not using the kiyosaku as hitting sticks so much, and sometimes substituting back ropes for hitting sticks. What we don't know is what this practice would have been like if it had been designed by women, if it had come to us as a woman's practice. We just don't know what that would have been like. We don't know what that would be. So that not knowing, it gives us a little space and we're always balancing

[04:32]

knowing mind with not knowing mind. And the knowing mind knows what to do. It knows that in kin-hin you walk. You go to the bathroom and you come back and you walk inside the zendo. And not knowing mind goes out, goes to the bathroom and sort of lingers outside a little bit. does some exercises and then comes back in kind of just falling into its own form which is not exactly the form of the day but a knowing mind just falls into it So I'm glad that we can keep appreciating this space of women's practice, not knowing exactly what the form is, but feeling something and continuing with that.

[05:48]

I want to go on to talk about confidence in a more personal way. I came across a woman's koan in a periodical called Mama Bears, the bookstore puts out, and it's a brief, it's the beginning of a brief essay by Alice Walker. And it's very much the kind of teaching story that our tradition provides, Blue Cliff Records and so on. Once upon a time there was an old woman, blind, wise. In the version I know, the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. The honor she is paid, and the awe in which she is held beyond her neighborhood to places far away, to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is a source of much amusement,

[06:56]

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe that she is. They stand before her and one of them says, Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead. She doesn't answer. She is blind. and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender, or homeland. She only knows their motive. The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally, she speaks, and her voice is soft but stern. I don't know, she says. I don't know whether the bird you are holding is alive or dead, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.

[08:04]

It is in your hands. So it is nice to hear a confident woman speaking from this one down position. Nothing to lose. She already doesn't meet any of the standards that are held by, say, the people who live in town. She's being tested and the only thing she has is her own confidence and her dignity.

[09:11]

The dignity of knowing one's place. She knows where she is. Again, Joe Cohen, when you find your place, where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When one person holds their place, really holds it, everybody else knows, and we know, we know when we are on our ground when we are holding our place and yet how easily it is that we move off our ground that we hear what seems to be the voice of reality

[10:29]

telling us that where we are isn't right, is dangerous, needs to be fixed. All the numerous messages isn't enough. All the standards that we pay attention to that appear to come from the external world that are broadcast internally with such an authoritative voice that they absolutely sound like reality. You've got to get going. You don't really know what's going on. They sound like reality. and to dismiss them feels terrifying, stupid, as if we've somehow relinquished the most important thing.

[11:47]

So on the one hand we have the the voice of what we ought to be doing instead of what we're doing now, and all those versions. And on the other hand, we have the softer voices of daydream, if-only's, when's, so easy to slip off into the dream of what we would like, So our process is that we do know where we are and we're slipping off. And each time we slip off, it seems like it's where we ought to be. Where we ought to be, where we want to be. It seems like the reality. I'm happy to come back. And how important it is

[13:00]

for us to notice these voices. And every time we notice the voice, and it may come up ten times in a minute, every time we notice the voice which is telling us that we are not on our own ground, that we ought or want to be somewhere else, every time we recognize that voice and come back and claim our own ground, a teaching has happened. and it seems very small, but a teaching has happened. And the maturity of our practice is built on these minuscule teachings, the recognizing, the coming back, recognizing and coming back, hundreds, thousands, probably millions of times. That's the maturing ground of practice, very slow, very small, very humble, continuous work, which is probably exactly the kind of work that this old woman has been doing all her life.

[14:17]

So, it is in your hands, she says. What is in your hands? What do we hold, each of us? We hold this knowing of the ground that we are on. We know this relationship with it. When we chant the For our meal service, in the Meal Chan, we talk about the natural order of mind. We know the natural order of mind. This is what we continually come back to. The natural order of mind is the mind that just accepts what comes up. It just is there to meet whatever comes, whether it's something we want, whether it's something we don't want, mind will meet it quite naturally.

[15:33]

Bankai's book, Unborn Nature of Things, is about the natural order of mind, what we come into the world with. The beginning of this book is somewhat off-putting because he is a very His approach seems, has a raw kind of confidence to it. I am the only one who has this kind of insight, he boasts. Seems like he boasts. Seems quite arrogant. And by the end of the book, the confidence is much more humble. And he appreciates teachers, and he appreciates the people that he's learned from. I don't know how the book was compiled. I suppose it was compiled over time, and so one sees his development. And we do come. You know, a child has a kind of bright, edged, innocent confidence.

[16:46]

And over a lifetime, confidence matures. So it's helpful to see that in others, as well as ourselves. But he describes several, all through the book, in different ways this natural order of mind, also of course called Buddha mind. Well then, what does it mean? You're endowed with a Buddha mind. Each of you now present decided to come here from your home in the desire to hear what I have to say. Now if a dog barked beyond the temple walls while you're listening to me, you'd hear it and know it was a dog barking. If a crow cawed, you'd hear it and know it was a crow. You'd hear an adult's voice as an adult's and a child's as a child's. You didn't come here in order to hear a dog bark, a crow caw, or any of the other sounds which might come from outside the temple during my talk.

[17:50]

Yet, while you're here, you'd hear those sounds. Your eyes see and distinguish reds and whites and other colors, and your nose tells good smells from bad. You could have no way of knowing beforehand any of the sights, sounds, or smells you might encounter at this meeting. Yet, you are able nevertheless to recognize these unforeseen sights and sounds as you encounter them without premeditation. That's because you're seeing and hearing in the natural order of mind. What you see and hear and smell in this way without giving rise to the thought that you will is proof that this inherent Buddha mind is unborn and possessed of a wonderful illuminative wisdom. So it's this very simple responsiveness. that has a very large awareness Thich Nhat Hanh talks about having a kind of vision in a meditation he was doing of a wave appearing that if the conditions are right on an ocean a wave will arise and you can see it it's there as your, our body-mind is here now

[19:30]

because the right conditions arose, and when the right conditions cease, the wave goes back into the ocean, no longer visible, and nothing is lost. That's what this natural order of mind knows. We make up our stories about the visibility of the wave, and then the return to the ocean. Natural order of mind knows it without any stories. Natural order of mind, like the old woman, is very simple. It just dwells in the present. So, we come to cultivate it on a day of sitting.

[20:42]

Because natural order of mind is easily cultivated in zazen, the practice of staying in the present. Keeping the backbone long, arch in the lower back, Chest open. It's very hard not to be confident when your posture is good. If your backbone is long, your shoulders relaxed, your chest open, you are confident. See how miserable you can be in this posture. You can't do it for very long. Now, when head begins to go, when shoulders begin to go, then we can really suffer. But when the posture is really straight and confident and easy,

[21:56]

Suffering doesn't come naturally. Paying attention to breath, staying in the present. Attention to breath and body sensation, sound and posture. So we've got those four factors. We're in the present and we are in the natural order of mind. And How long do any of us choose to stay there? So the natural order of mind doesn't know these separate distinctions. It doesn't know its separateness. It's more conscious. It's more a wave body than a separate body. So, who knows what thought, feeling, sensation is going to come across body-mind as it's sitting.

[23:09]

We have no way of predicting. Because the energies of thoughts, the energies of sensation, the energies of feeling are not ours. They just come. They pass through us. And as we sit, We host these thoughts, feelings and sensations for a while momentarily actually, as they move through us. Natural order of mind knows this. So what we can do, there is a method of returning. The method is this constant noting of the departures. And it's also the transformation of thought down into the body.

[24:12]

And somehow we think of our body-mind apparatus, it seems as if the head is the center of the whole business. Often feels that way. Well, is it possible to think of the heart, or maybe the heart belly, as the center of the business, and the head just as a kind of spoke, the way arms and legs are spokes, and the real center being here. So, thoughts come. And particularly if they are thoughts that have an emotional tag, particularly, well any thought does, if you really look at it. Can you turn off the tape and come into the body sensation feeling of that thought?

[25:23]

That's taking the separateness out of the thinking. Difficulty with thinking is that we feel that we're separate from the world, even from our own bodies. And when we come back into the feeling sensation, we're no longer separated. So very important to know as we sit, what is the background body-mind-mood? What is it? Are we appreciating the spring? Are we enjoying the little breeze and the birds? Is it peaceful? Is it something agitated? Is it something fearful? What is that body-mind-mood? and just breathing with it, keeping with it, and watch the shifting. The resistances that we have to the natural order of mind are in fact our guides.

[26:36]

Now every time we leave the natural order of mind in order to drive ourselves into busyness, in order to act out fear, in order to prevent some kind of grief there's energy in that and if we can just see what we're doing and be with the energy we come back in a more alive way I have quite a reliable experience when I sit of feeling tension in my shoulders I've had quite a lot of body work done. It took me some time to learn to feel attention. I guess for most of my life I had it and had no idea it was there. Now I've learned it, so I can feel when I sit, feel tension, like the orange patches and red-winged blackbirds.

[27:42]

So I know there's this energy there. So I sit and put my attention to that tension. Just watch it, breathe it. And after some time, it shifts. More in the shoulders. Something's going on in the lower back. The kind of clenchedness has opened. And often by the end of the period, I can feel the energy in my body that was knotted up here to begin with. With pain, this isn't really a long enough session just to get into the nitty gritty pains that one can in three or five or seven days, but a fair amount of it may come up.

[28:49]

So if you really stay with pain, just face to face with pain, breathing it, the energy patterns will change. One way of dealing with pain is to be in touch with the larger context. The knee that hurts is part of the whole body. So the hurting is just one part of the whole. That kind of experience with resistance, with pain, helps us get out of our habit. Helps us enlarge our point of view. Actually helps us a great deal when we step off the pillow and leave the zendo.

[29:53]

And if you go on with pain, you probably find in a longer sitting, if not today, you can get in touch with the energy in it. You can get in touch with this energy that's coming through, passing through. So how do we keep in touch with the natural order of mind? Even when we are falling into these resistances that are all around. How do we turn the resistances? How do we discover the energy that's in the resistances and turn them back into practice? So as we do this in our sitting, as we do it in our lives, a feeling of joy arises.

[31:07]

You can sit and you can feel all the small hubbub that's going around thoughts probably don't stop but the interest in them and the attachment to them cools down and you can be aware of a settling down on the periphery things settling like a kind of soft snow, just settling and falling. It's kind of background, maybe foreground, kind of background quiet joy that doesn't have to do with what comes up, that doesn't have to do with events and situations. but that's pervasively there, no matter what happens.

[32:13]

Quiet, maybe, but there, part of the background. So in sitting, We can think of this old woman who had the confidence to just hold her ground, to enjoy her ground, had the dignity of her ground, had the ability to wait, Not to push the situation, just to wait quite a long time until the situation came together for her in its own way.

[33:25]

Just having that confidence to wait for the moment of right action. Not wasting any kind of speculative energy. just collecting the energy around until it was time to speak, until it was time to act. This old woman who did not need to move out of her poor situation for whom poverty was not something to be avoided. Poverty is the situation of not controlling things, of just knowing that whatever arises is sufficient

[34:40]

so that there's no need to control, which is not the same as not acting. It's not a passive position, not a passive position at all, but it's a position that doesn't need to control and that accepts wholeheartedly everything that happens. A very powerful physician. So I'd like to end by reading a poem by Czesław Miłosz, Polish writer. And I'll read it twice, it's not easy. It's a woman, a kind of mythic woman, is instructing a man. is instructing a man about poverty and giving.

[35:50]

And we can say, we can imagine that it's a woman instructing a man and we can also imagine that it is the natural order of mind, our unknowing, our non-knowing mind speaking to our knowing mind. So it's the woman who is speaking to the man. You talked, but after your talking, all the rest remains. After your talking, poets, philosophers, contrivers of romances, everything else, all the rest deduced inside the flesh which lives and knows, not just what is permitted. I am a woman held fast now in a great silence. Not all creatures have your need for words.

[36:53]

Birds you killed, fish you tossed into your boat. In what words will they find rest, and in what heaven? You received gifts from me. They were accepted. but you don't understand how to think about the dead. The scent of winter apples, of hoarfrost, and of linen. There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth. You talked, but after your talking all the rest remains. After your talking, poets, philosophers, contrivers of romances, everything else, all the rest deduced inside the flesh which lives and knows not what is just permitted.

[37:56]

I am a woman held fast now in a great silence. Not all creatures have your need for words. Birds you killed, fish you tossed into your boat, In what words will they find rest and in what heaven? You received gifts from me. They were accepted. But you don't understand how to think about the dead. The scent of winter apples, of hoarfrost, and of linen. There are nothing but gifts on this poor. Now we have about five or ten minutes if you have responses or questions.

[38:59]

Yeah. I really liked your image about the wave arising when circumstances are right and then going away. And I was wondering how you could, or if you were when the wave arises, it's there, sort of like when we're sitting by the lamp, and then it goes away, and there's nothing lost, but then at the same time there's nothing gained. So I'm wondering if you had any words about that. That's right. Well, that's the situation of poverty. Nothing lost, nothing gained, everything coming as gift. Yeah. And of course it's our life too, you know. We have this shape. And then it's gone. Nothing lost, nothing gained.

[40:00]

Thelma? I have quite a few thoughts, but from the beginning, you're talking about confidence, I thought of going bad before that, too. To me, what comes to mind is the initial intuition, and then One needs to trust that intuition, which is, I think, where the confidence would develop. But I think one does learn, in my experience, to distrust one's own intuition. And it seems to me that the process is relearning to trust, at a very deep level, one's own intuition. And one can gradually gain the confidence that maybe one never had. I was thinking in terms of the way, but I was thinking in terms of physics, where the understanding of the wave and the particle, you know, are really all part of the same process.

[41:12]

And it struck me that the thought is like the particle. And there again, I think we learn to distrust that. The way, you know, called the way, or the unknowing. But it's from that that the thought came originally. But then we get attached to that thought, and then we lose the way. So, I mean, I think it's all very... I want to thank you for your talk. Martha? Completely. But I wanted to ask, I guess, about something that you said in the beginning of the talk, which was about this, how over and over again, hundreds and thousands of times, we see something and then come back, or we notice something and then come back to ourselves.

[42:19]

And that was, I think, But for me, there's a whole huge thing between what I notice and then coming back to myself, which is a lot of other stuff, which is, I guess, the emotion or reaction or a lot of things in between, where I judge, where I get angry, where I get sad, where I can go through all sorts of things before I do have to come back. I mean, that's why I'm doing this practice. It's because I need to come back and be reminded to come back. But I don't see that as really confidence. It's something else. It's something about, I don't know what the word would be.

[43:23]

I've been trying to think about the word. I guess that's why I miss the wave. Well, you know, Joko, have you read Joko's latest book, Nothing Special? It's a lovely book and she talks a great deal about the drama that we make, our drama. And how all of us have this urge to get into a closet, shut the door and have our drama. And how long it takes to open the door and to get tired of the drama. You know, tired enough. Well, eventually, as you said, eventually you get tired of it. And as practice goes on, you get tired of it. Your tolerance, your appetite for it decreases. And as your appetite for it decreases, a kind of confidence that increases about the base, about what you come back to.

[44:31]

Because what you come back to, the ground that you return to, every time you return, that ground is somewhat strengthened. And you are just more willing gradually to be there. And so when the drama comes up, it's in, you know, it's in 10 minute segments, not half hour segments. Because the ground really, you know more and more that the ground is where you belong, not in the closet. So, I see that as a process of confidence. Thank you.

[45:21]

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