I think I know most everyone here. I'm Susan Marvin, and I've been practicing as she's so during the practice period. And the koan that I have been given, which most of you are now familiar with, is, Umang's every day is a good day. And so I'm going to talk once again about the koan from a slightly different angle. I've talked about where I think the koan is pointing beyond our ideas, our ordinary ideas of good and bad. But I thought particularly because we're sitting this long Sashin, I would talk about the question of how to practice with the koan if we don't really believe it. Or if we don't really understand it, we can talk about it intellectually, but we don't really understand deep in our bones what it means to practice with every day as it is.

[01:16]

Or we get stuck. We think we know what it means, and we have experience with moving through adversity as we sit, but then we get stuck or something comes up that's distasteful or uncomfortable or just drives us nuts and boom, every day's maybe not such a good day. So, I was thinking, even if we don't believe in the koan, how do we practice with it? What can we do right here in our practice to practice with it?

[02:23]

And culturally, I think we have some aversion to practicing something that we don't believe in, or doing something that we don't believe in, or taking instruction in our lives when we don't believe in what we're doing. But our practice is really pointing us in a different place, and so is this koan. It's asking us or inviting us to practice as if we believe every day is a good day, even if we don't, because through the practice itself, we may be able to discover that place where the koan is pointing. So, I'm going to tell you a little personal story. Some years ago, before our daughter was born, before she was born,

[03:27]

far away in another country and became our daughter. I was pregnant and I was carrying twins and I had a miscarriage and it was a great shock actually because I was very strong and felt great and was totally prepared to have a family. I experienced a lot of sadness, really deep, deep sadness, probably more than I had ever experienced before. And I was in my 40s, so that kind of experience wasn't so uncommon, miscarriage. And probably in addition to the loss that I felt, or the grief that I felt, and that my husband and I felt together, was some kind of realization of the arrogance of living in a way that was kind of like, well, we'll get around to it when we get around to it.

[04:51]

We've got plenty of time. and I thought I could have a child anytime that I decided to have one. So the feelings were deep and dark, and I didn't know what to do with them. They were so strong. And so I decided to start a practice of offering up all that sadness to my heart. And then when I would breathe out, I remembered that Sojin said in a lecture one time, what do you actually want to offer the world with your breath? And so I thought, well, I'll breathe appreciation into the world. So I breathe in all the sadness into my heart, and I would breathe out appreciation. And what I noticed right off was, certainly must have been Manas, this little voice that said, Why would you want to offer appreciation?

[05:52]

You just lost your pregnancy. What do you have to appreciate? But I kept up the practice despite that. And over some period of time, what I discovered that there was that there was actual appreciation bubbling up. and it was appreciation that I had even, that we had had this experience at all, that we'd had these wonderful months of pregnancy, and that no one could really take that away from us, or losing it couldn't take that away from me. So one day, after Zazen, Sojin said to me, well, how are you doing? How are you feeling? And I said, well, I think I'm doing okay, but I've got so much sadness and I don't know what to do with it. So I told him about the practice that I was doing, breathing in my sadness to my heart and breathing out appreciation. And he listened and he said, well, it's good to offer it up, but I have a suggestion.

[06:58]

Instead of saying you're offering sadness to My heart, why don't you say, I'm offering sadness to Buddha's heart. And I think I left that day thinking, oh, there he goes again, messing with words. And I don't think I really knew what that meant, and I was probably annoyed because I thought, why should I offer it to Buddha's heart? It's my heart that's breaking. But I changed the practice and I started doing that. I started offering the sadness to Buddha's heart and still breathing out appreciation. And I kept that up for a long time. And actually over the years, I've worked with the breath in that way to offer whatever's coming up, whatever problems arise in Sazen or daily life, offer it to Buddha.

[08:10]

And I noticed over time a kind of great shift in the perspective that I've been able to develop about our practice and about this preoccupation we all have with me, my, mine, I. And I don't think any of who we are or what we go through goes away. It kind of gets held in a bigger way by this deeper place that the koan is pointing to, this place of Buddha's way, which is the human way, our human nature, our true nature, which we all share.

[09:12]

And I guess maybe we're afraid or I feel afraid sometimes to offer it to Buddha's heart or just to offer it to Buddha because I'm probably afraid I'm going to lose some idea I have of who I am or who I represent or who I think I am. But actually, that koan is asking us to go to that other place because it's where we realize that we're all connected. And I told you last time, I think, that I've been reading all these Suzuki Roshi lectures in which he refers to this koan. And he talks about when we touch that place that's at the bottom of our practice, that's Buddha's way, Buddha's nature, Buddha nature.

[10:19]

We connect with the universe and we realize in a very deep way that we're no different. And I remember there was one line where he says, If we realize that, then we understand the real meaning of do not kill. And how can we kill if we're all the same? If you're Buddha and I'm Buddha and everybody's Buddha, then we take care of one another. So I think this kind of shift takes place very slowly over a long period of time. And so it helps us to develop our patience.

[11:22]

Sometimes when we're sitting in these long sushis, we lose our patience. We want something to happen while we're sitting here for days on end. But actually something is happening. There's so much great effort happening in this room. during these days, and we don't see what's happening. So, oftentimes, in those experiences we have of adversity, there's some jewel buried deep inside what we characterize with the ordinary mind as bad. in my own situation, that experience of miscarriage and misfortune led to that jewel that became our daughter.

[12:23]

She's quick to remind us. She'll say something like, no offense guys, but if you hadn't lost that pregnancy, we wouldn't be a family. And she's absolutely right. And each of us, we could go around the room, we all have some kind of experience of something that we don't like, but buried inside that, somewhere, there's a jewel that emerges. Sometimes it takes a long time for that jewel to emerge. I think of what we're doing here as kind of layering the parts of our lives that give us trouble, layering them with our forms, our work with breath and posture, taking the advice of our teachers and practice leaders and layering all these things

[13:34]

our ritualized activities of chanting, and service, and lay ordination, and chitining, and cooking, and sweeping, and cleaning the zendo. We layer all these things with the parts of our lives that we're sitting with kind of like a big compost pile. Something mysterious happens. I, just last week, before we started this machine, I had two big compost piles I wanted to turn. And the first one had been sitting a long time, been turned several times, so it was ready to use. I just had to sift it and then applied it to the various vegetable beds.

[14:38]

And as I was sifting it, I couldn't see any trace of what had gone into the pile. It was so beautiful, you could stick your head in there. It was just beautiful compost. And all the muck and rotten food and moldy stuff and twigs and greens from the from the yard and straw and there wasn't a trace of it. And then the other compost pile was fairly new. It was just the first time that I was turning it. Some of it had started to break down and there were lots and lots of worms in there doing their thing. And, you know, I could see, remember the various food items and various clippings from the yard that had gone into the compost and were layered. And I thought, oh, that's just so much like our practice, you know, both piles.

[15:39]

The first pile is like transformed at the base. Beautiful compost, like what we do with all the muck of our lives. And then we offer it up to the world around us, and the world needs that. It needs our transformed muck. And then the other compost pile, the one we're working on, day by day, week by week, the things we're going through now, it's hard to talk about them because they haven't composted enough. I thought, oh, if I talk about that miscarriage, people are going to think, why is she talking about something that happened so long ago? But, you know, the events of our lives, the things we go through, we have to work with it and we have to layer it with what the practice is giving us and we have to let it sit and ripen.

[16:43]

And it's healing for us to do that. And so I want to talk a little bit about this notion of healing. And I'm not really talking about healing from something, but healing as an activity of itself. I've been reading and studying a book with another Sangha member. Maybe some of you have read it. It's called Bringing Zen Home, the Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals. It's written by Paula Arai and it's about a group of middle-aged women in Japan who practice with a teacher but they don't have a zendo, a temple.

[17:52]

And their practice is really focused on ritualizing the everyday activities, ordinary activities of everyday life. and they're Zen practitioners and it's a wonderful book. I really recommend it. I'm just going to read just some kind of snippets of the ideas that they have about healing. And I just want to say that the activities that they're involved in aren't any different than the activities that we are involved in. They are treating their everyday activities of home life and work life and sickness and loss and

[18:57]

difficulties in relationships with family members and friends as activities they work with in ritualized ways by bringing their attention to those activities. The way of healing of my Buddhist women consociates is most fundamentally a path of retraining themselves to act in harmony with the way that things are, impermanent and interrelated. Healing here is not a result of action. It is rather a way of acting, seeing, thinking and holding your heart. It's an art to seek out ways to heal and not suffer. More specifically, it's an art of choosing to be grateful in the face of fear-driven and torment-ridden possibilities. This way of living and interpreting the world, self, events, and others requires practice and discipline.

[20:04]

It's more an orientation to living than a clearly delineated and consciously followed course. There are no absolutes. It's mostly in hindsight that one can see that there have been consistent values, attitudes, and activities that when taken as a whole constitute a way. I thought it was interesting that she says it's mostly in hindsight that we can see these things. I think we all share in that experience. We come here and we practice for a long time and sometimes we may think that nothing's happening or sometimes we may think that we want something to happen. but our instruction is no gaining idea, practice for the sake of practice, and yet we do look back and see that certain things happen. Once I remember someone who no longer practices here said to me, how do we know if we're really growing and maturing and deepening in this practice?

[21:18]

How do we know it's the practice? How do we know it's not just that we're aging and it would happen anyhow. And I said, well, that sounds like gaining idea to me and who cares if it's the practice that's making it happen or it's maturing and aging that makes it happen. It doesn't really make any difference. We're having so much fun. Conceptually, interrelatedness is the flip side of emptiness. Interrelatedness stresses the connections and mutual causality of phenomenal reality. Emptiness highlights the view that everything is empty of intrinsically individual substance. For example, the human body is made up of the same elements such as carbon that make up the stars.

[22:20]

It's difficult to find something that we're not related to in some way. It's this cosmic sense that everything is interrelated and empty of independent existence. It's wonderful to think of us being related to the stars. You know, we walk around in Berkeley, we don't think about that so much. We go out into the wild, we know it, we can feel it, but it's wonderful to imagine that and to, even if we don't believe it, to imagine it, to practice as if we believed it, and then watch and see what happens. In order to experience the universe this way, any focus on desire, hatred and fear must be dissolved. The attachments that derive out of these foci obscure the interrelationships, invariably resulting in suffering."

[23:23]

So, we put ourselves in the hand of Buddha, or we offer our stuff to Buddha's heart, or we just breathe Or we follow the breath by counting the breath. I think it's all the same. Whatever, you know, I like that image of breathing, of offering something to Buddha's heart. But I think any way that we work with the breath so that we stop saying, me, my, and we put that inside the bigger container is what's helping us move towards where that koan is pointing us and what our practice is all about. Part of cultivating gratitude involves developing an accepting heart

[24:34]

Healing requires accepting reality as it is. That means putting no conditions on healing and rejecting nothing. Accepting everything that occurs in your life, however, is extraordinarily difficult. Several of the women said if you actually accepted everything, you would be a recognized Buddha. Rejecting your actual situation and condition, however, Consumes vital energy. And I'll bet we all know what that feels like. Consumes vital energy. Being consumed by something. Wishing things were different from what they are causes suffering. If we fight within ourselves, we cannot relax. If we're not relaxed, then there's stress, which weakens our immune system. If you can come to accept how you are in any moment, it feeds up huge amounts of energy that can go to healing.

[25:42]

One of the women says, she knows this to be so, but she's come to this understanding through her own Buddhist practice. Once I realized that the point is to be here, there's no reason to rush or to be anxious. Ride the flow of nature. If you don't do this, you suffer a great deal. With this, I saw how I didn't have to suffer. It's very difficult. The reasoning is not so hard to understand, but to do it is difficult. To accept everything is the final and highest form of humanity. You complete life when you can do this. The image that guides me is an image of a woman simply bowing, hands together in prayerful gesture. She receives all without judging and without anguish. This is the image of Kanan, goddess of compassion. Kanan's heart accepts everything.

[26:49]

Healing as awareness requires acceptance of impermanence. Expanding your sense of time is a way to help the heart become more accepting. There's a larger framework in which the significance of something often be more easily understood. For example, if you're in a closet, you can stand or sit, but there's little room for anything else. However, if you're in a gymnasium, you can sit, stand, dance, or even do handsprings and a back flip. The same happens with the heart. The bigger it is, the more options there are. She explains how she thinks of accepting things in her heart. She says that if a flame burns straight up, it will burn out quickly. However, if it has a chance to dance, it will last a long time. The logic these women use is that since everything is interrelated, there must be something positive going on.

[28:06]

Otherwise, there would be no life. I really like this line. The logic these women use is that since everything is interrelated, there must be something positive going on. So even in our days here in this long Sashina, we can remind ourselves when we're feeling terrible, when our back hurts, when our legs hurt, when we have emotional or mental anguish, that there must be something positive going on. And we can remind ourselves and see what happens. The same woman says, It's taken me into my 60s to be able to do this. There are good things and bad things. Both are okay.

[29:07]

There's no such thing as all good things. This is natural. Be natural. I can now say this having reached this age. The foundation is to be patient. It's about how to respond. If you take the events as resources for growing, then your perspective is expanded. Patience is a key ingredient in seeing from a larger perspective. Ritualized activities of daily life that help calm are useful in many ways, including that they help people find the patience to see more broadly and hence make better decisions about how to respond. So here, sitting Zazen, we have all of today and all of Saturday and all of Sunday.

[30:18]

We can remind ourselves that we're part of a larger container. We can put our problems, our difficulties into the hands of Buddha. And every time we do that, every time we hand over what's going on to Buddha, we stop focusing on what's happening to me. And even if we don't believe that we can do that. Even if we don't want to do that, we can try. And as we try, we can watch to see what happens. And then if it doesn't work, we can throw it away, but we'll never know if we don't try.

[31:20]

So I want to encourage us all, as we sit with the difficulties that we bear, to put ourselves in the way of Buddha. I think we have a little bit of time for comments and questions. Thank you very much. So, Janemi, you want to say something about the breath? I have something that I've been thinking about backyard. And my idea of practice, because we were just starting with Zendo, my idea of practice was to sit dazen and to spend all day cultivating the ground.

[32:33]

And this enormous vegetable garden. And that's where I spent all day. And I even grew enough stuff to Holy Foods was on the corner of Ashby and Shack. It was just a little place. Local backyard gardeners, you know. So I used to sell chard. I built a little greenhouse for her, and she grew sprouts, and so they co-op. We had to co-op in those days, three co-ops. Right, all those earthy activities. Yeah, all these earthy activities. And I thought, that's the way to practice, you know.

[33:37]

You're in touch with the earth, and you're sitting in heaven. Your feet are on the ground, and you're... sweet-smelling soil. And I'd go around to where they would mow the median, the median in the middle of the street, and get all that grass and stuff and put it in the compost. I was crazy. Sounds pretty good. Anyway, I don't want to talk about that. Okay. Yes, I'm sorry, I don't know your name. Pat. You told a beautiful story about your experience that touched me about death and loss. And it's very, very relevant.

[34:39]

Thank you for that. You're welcome. And when you got to total acceptance, I found myself resisting. What would that mean for like a human invention like slavery? What would you do with that? I mean, acceptance? Well, I can only say that it has to start here. The acceptance that each of us finds in ourself, tapping what is human nature, is what moves us to act as we go out the door.

[35:40]

And I'm not sure that's what you want me to say, but of course we know that slavery is wrong. There are lots of things that are wrong in the world today. But I think the only way those things will change is through our our efforts individually in our communities to find that place where we see that we're all connected. The only reason that happens is because people don't see that we're all interrelated. Otherwise it wouldn't happen. But maybe somebody else has something to say about that. Who's, I can't see my glass. Oh, Kate. Just a quick thought that sometimes I think acceptance means accepting that it is, that it exists, not accepting that it continued to exist.

[36:54]

That's good. Alan. a few months ago, where she said, well, maybe it's too late. This is, like, perhaps the most hopeful person that I know on this planet. And she said, maybe it's too late. And I just left it there. And then we had another conversation the other day, and I said, you know, I wanted to ask you about that. And she said, well, yeah, maybe it's too late. We're in the middle of the great unraveling. turning towards life, turning towards redemption, and turning towards saving ourselves.

[38:04]

And I said, look, so what happened to the great turning? And she said, oh, well, that's happening too. And that they actually depend upon each other. That the perception and the reality of this unraveling which is not something that one would ever wish for. I was very moved by that. And I think that it's a very difficult corner that we find ourselves in, but we do as much as we can.

[39:11]

I love that expression from Suzuki Roshi, to shine one corner of the world. where we depend upon the unraveling to make the turning. Right. Thank you. Linda. I'm just thinking that we could take as a koan between this word acceptance and whatever slavery stands for in that question. And maybe it's great koan is every day is a good day. And you remind me of a conversation I had with Joanna Macy. It was a social setting and she was being a little bit lighthearted, but I said, hi, Joanna, how are you?

[40:15]

And she said, I'm in despair about the Buddhists. And did you see the cover of that? Buddhist magazine this month, and I knew what she was talking about. And it was all, I want to be peaceful. I want to be kind. I want to be compassionate. And then it directed you to a page for how you could become each of those things. And she just was pointing out how the Buddhists are, you know, somewhat jokingly, since she's a Buddhist too, have a million hours for examining the niceties of their inner acceptance and so on, but they didn't have time to keep the planet from being destroyed, something like that. Anyway, I think it's really a great koan, whoever, Pat, wherever you are, between acceptance and those terrible things in the world.

[41:17]

Yeah, thank you. Terry. I just wanted to what I was going to say actually ties in in some way. Because one of the things that Paula Arai was talking about was being together with other people. And the power, actually, of ritual, and the power of coming together, and the power of having a discussion like this, the power of sangha, or the power of really strong connection with others, is a way for us to also open in a way that we hadn't. And the rituals that she does. I've been in one of her rituals and it's very, very powerful. There's chanting and there's offerings and so forth, but the power in the circle is what carries people and gives them kind of an inspiration.

[42:18]

Thank you for pointing that out, yes. We have, you know, more power in our community than we probably realize. And more tenderness and more opportunity for extending that than we realize. And it becomes, certainly becomes obvious to us during these times of long sustain when everything breaks down and we become more vulnerable. I told Dean to make sure and get me a handkerchief because I said I'm liable to break down. We're moved and we're touched in very deep ways as we sit like this. And it's really wonderful. Jen? I do want to go back to what you were saying. You mentioned that we take care of each other and I noticed that then you stopped.

[43:38]

I was interested in that. That I stopped? You stopped at that point. Then you looked at the paper. I guess this goes back to my comment yesterday. What is this love that you have in your practice? I don't know. I don't know why I stopped. I feel very spacey right now. You know? But she still doesn't get a job, and I've just been sitting and sitting and sitting. I put my glasses here, and I walked out the door, and I said to Dean, I can't remember if I put my glasses in there. Will you go in and check? We can give you a job. So I really don't know how to answer that, Jim. I'm sorry. And that, of course, in a situation like slavery, we are connected.

[45:18]

We're deeply connected in many ways that produce so much pain. But we need to be able, through acceptance, we can actually access some clarity about what it is that we're doing. Yeah, I like that. You know, the ways that we talk about being distracted through greed, hate, and delusion takes us right away from clarity. So, yeah, thank you. Sojin? I'll tell you a little story. Oh, good. Suzuki Roshi and Kari Giri were sitting was sitting across from them, and were having aduki beans.

[46:19]

Those are little Japanese beans. And I don't like them very much. They like rice and aduki beans. And I don't like rice and aduki beans. So I said, somehow, I don't remember exactly how this came about, but it's a figure of speech. Face the world, basically. Just shut up now. Because good and bad, right and wrong, war and peace, you want to solve it?

[47:23]

I'm backing you. Go ahead. You think you're going to stop it? You think you're going to stop slavery? We enslave ourselves. Unslave yourself before you can think about enslaving other people. We don't understand this, and so we talk about it a lot. You know, as if we're going to make everything good. It doesn't work that way. It's history. The history of the world is war and peace. I mean, but not much peace. Most of the world. Moral is in peace. Peace is in war. Everything belongs to everything else. You know, we don't have to necessarily swallow everything. But when we say acceptance, we think, oh, we only want to accept the good things. That's what we think about acceptance. I want to accept the good things.

[48:26]

When we say acceptance, what are you talking about? You mean I have to eat the bad things? Yes. You have to eat the good and the bad, and the right and the wrong. How do you do that? That's a great column. of acceptance in this world, of how to live in this world. The world is a column, good and bad, right and wrong. That's why we're always pointing towards the oneness of opposites. The only way that it's solved is with the oneness of opposites. But that doesn't solve it. It doesn't mean you have to rise above the good and the bad and the right. That's what our practice is about. That's what it's about. We're always talking about oneness. in duality, you can't change the fundamental thing, because that's the fundamental thing, is strife.

[49:34]

Sorry, not my idea, just my observation. May I ask you a question? Yes. So I haven't become fully awakened and if I go into the kitchen to cook I might start a fire and cause some great harm because I'm so incomplete in my practice. But still I have to go and cook before I'm awakened and still I have to do something about the suffering in the world before I'm fully awakened. Okay, so you act in a way that you want to act as if there was a way to solve it. So even though, that's why you can't depend on a result. You just do the work that you want to do to make to, in your ideal, to make things happen. Yeah, that, so.

[50:38]

Well that relates exactly to what Alan was saying about the unraveling and the turning are happening at the same time. Well, that's exactly what Joanna said about working. She said you do it irrespective of result. And it may not work out. That's why we just do the work. We just do the practice without gaining anything. And then let the compost work itself out. But I was going to say something that's actually fairly similar to what people have been saying. Just I think my own kind of experience that when I feel despair is I'm not looking at what I can do. What's in front of me right now? And that's all I can do. finding an appropriate response.

[52:10]

Thank you. Ken. I think I'm hearing a difference in the meaning of the word acceptance. We can't bring ourselves to accept slavery because in one sense of the word acceptance that means to accept it as normal or to accept it as somehow okay. But I think going back to what Peter was saying, it's to see clearly. And so real acceptance is accepting the violence that's happening. Accepting that violence is happening, or accepting that pain is happening, and acting from there. Doing that means that you can no longer accept that slavery is okay. It takes that out the window.

[53:15]

I remember bringing my nephews who were in Colorado and taking them on a horse ride. You know, they're three and five years old. And I was looking at the horses and they looked the most miserable creatures. They were so bored. from going around this route over and over, day in, day out. And I just thought, this is horse slavery. And yet, it was a ride in a park that everybody on earth would think is okay. But these horses were just, they were not being treated well. So it's about seeing clearly, it's not about accepting as normal. Sometimes I think of it as taking in or allowing in, not trying to push it out of my awareness because I don't like it, but allowing it into my awareness so I can be intimate with it, which can make me very angry, but allows me to see the interconnections as much as I can.

[54:40]

and act, and it's kind of a steadier fuel than the kind of, this must not exist, make it go away right now, unacceptance. But instead, this does exist. What now? Right, I think our practice says that, that acceptance is kind of at the base, and once we accept, then we are able to see what can be done next, or to speak from that place. Judy? You know, when I hear that word right now, what comes up, and talking about time, and the flow of time, After 9-11, every year on 9-11 we had a ceremony that was started by the New York Buddhist Church.

[55:50]

And then the Interfaith Center got involved in Families for a Better Tomorrow and hundreds and hundreds. And we would make, you know, just like here, down by the waterfront, peace prayers. And put them out on lanterns and people from the kayak organization there, they would go out in the water and the blue towers were lighting up and would light up into the sky. And, you know, we were standing on the pier chanting and all these people would come down on the ramps with these lit up lanterns and never alone, always in these groups. And, you know, it's like What acceptance was in that moment was just witnessing and staying open to what we had all... And what I noticed was the chanting and the water going like this and just needing to stay, you know, with that physical experience was all I could do to stay present.

[57:06]

One other thing that comes up is when the premiere of Planetary premiered here at the Elmwood Theater, Joanna Macy and Angel Quijoto-Williams and a couple others stood up after for the Q&A. And what Joanna actually said, very similar, but the way she phrased it is that something about when you realize I guess both those things, unraveling. But when you realize the work that needs to be done, all you want to do is serve it to your last breath. Well those are two, thank you Judy, those are two good images to close with. I think it's time to stop. Thank you very much, all of you.

[58:00]

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