sitting for long periods of time without moving, not so easy. So I want to talk a little bit about it. In order to sit for long periods of time without moving, it's necessary to have flexibility. If you have rigidity, then you can't do it easily. I don't know about easily, but you can't do it easily. So it's important to find the flexible way. So there are two things. One is our body, and the other is our so-called mind. to have a flexible body and a flexible mind.

[01:04]

So what creates a flexible body is a flexible mind, because body and mind are not two different things. Body and mind are one. So how the mind works affects how the body works, and vice versa. The mind learns things through the body, and the body learns things through the mind. So, you can do various exercises to loosen your body, to loosen the muscles and ligaments on your body. And you can also do various, I guess you'd call it exercises, to loosen the mind. So, I'll tell you what I do. When I find some discomfort in my knees or my legs, that tells me something that says, now is the time to do something.

[02:17]

Actually, before that happens, I should know now is the time to do something. Because as soon as you sit down, when you sit down in the beginning of a period, You may have a little discomfort, but basically, you know, it feels okay. But as time, as the period progresses, suddenly there's this pain. Then it's almost too late. So when you sit down, when I sit down, I adjust my mind to relax. I adjust my mind to think about my body, what's happening in the body, because I give myself Zazen instruction.

[03:23]

And so my mind is concentrated on the body. And so then I think, open your body. Open your legs. Now my legs are like roots planted in the earth and they're not moving. But I have to open them. Open them up. Whatever sensation is there to open it. In other words, to let it be there. To be aware of whatever sensation is there, even when it's not hurting. To always be aware of whatever sensation is there and to accept it. And then as the period progresses, the sensations change or become more intense. And as they become more intense, each intensity you open to.

[04:29]

so that by the time you would ordinarily get caught by pain, you're already open to the sensation and it's no longer dominating you. When I give a talk like this, I can talk for a couple hours and not even know that my legs exist. Why is that? I just hop off the top, the end. Because I'm not attaching to the sensations. So we attach, the problem is that, not that there's pain, but that we're attached to the sensation. We're attached to the sensation because we don't like it.

[05:33]

As soon as I don't like this, we're caught. So this is called Zazen. The teaching of Zazen is non-discrimination. Non-discrimination means don't get caught by rejecting and attaching. So rejection or Aversion is attachment. Grasping is also attachment. These are the two forms of attachment. Grasping and rejecting. So, Zazen, Buddha's teaching us something. Zazen is Buddha's teaching. That's where we get our teaching. The teacher may say things, but it's really Zazen is the teacher. It's teaching us to be careful not to attach to aversion. So the more aversion we have, the more pain we have.

[06:42]

Even though the pain is really the same, it's just that we experience it more intensely because of our attachment. You know, a little, oh, a pee in the shoe. Eventually, we'll make you scream a bit. So, what I think when I'm sitting Zazen is, and I'm aware of the sensation, and if the sensations become more intense, I say, open up. Open. Open. Open, open. Because our conditioned response is close down, close down, close down.

[07:47]

So it's counterintuitive. Our usual response is dualistic. Our usual response is discriminating. So counterintuitive means stop discriminating. That's the teaching. That's Buddha's teaching. Stop discriminating. Discriminating mind is what creates our problem. That's why in Zazen we let go of discriminating mind even though we think that discriminating mind is something that we should cultivate. It's almost impossible. It's really almost impossible.

[08:48]

But it's possible. So we all have problems. I have pain, you know, just like everybody else. But, you know, I'm used to it. But you get used to it. So there are a lot of factors that are When I feel some pain, I can go various ways. I can think, Oh my God, I'm going to have to do this for the rest of the session. That's looking down the road. You can't look down the road. As soon as you start looking down the road, you're lost. Stop looking down the road. Oh my God. Then you're conditioning your mind. conditioning your mind to say, oh, I know how it's going to be. That's called foretelling the future, which is a no-no in Buddhism.

[09:55]

Fortune-telling, telling the future is not a Buddhist thing, although we do have a pretty You just have to be right here. It forces you to be present. So, what we think of as an impediment, called pain, is actually a present, because it's giving us the opportunity to just be present. So, it's not a bad thing. If you think it's a bad thing, you can't do it. It's just what it is, a sensation. sensations, one sensation after another. So we experience one sensation after another, we experience one thought after another. And we can let the thoughts go, more or less, but how do you let the sensations go?

[11:02]

That's harder. But we can let the sensations go. So this is the process. The sensation comes and we open to the sensation just like we open to our thoughts. And then we let the sensation go. Because we're opening, opening, and then you expand to cover the universe. And you feel good. You feel joy. The sensation is a balanced sensation, you know, and I don't know what it is. It's just a sensation. But it feels wonderful. But if I discriminate, it feels terrible.

[12:05]

Well, what if you have pain that persists for many hours after you're done doing Zazen? So there's no formula for how you deal with it. But I've had every sensation that everybody else has had in my 50 years of practice. I have suffered. But it always goes away. It always goes away. So somehow our attitude makes a big difference. feel that I've been hurt, then that's one kind of attitude.

[13:15]

If you feel I've been hurt, but I don't think that... I hurt, but I will not worry about it. That's another kind of attitude. My attitude... I can only tell you about my attitude. I really can't tell you about what to do. My attitude is as soon as I stub my toe, I go, ouch, and then I forget about it. And it's gone. I don't feel anything after it. This is my way of dealing with pain. Ouch. And then I just go on and something happened back there, but I'm not carrying it around with me. There are pains that we carry around regardless of how we think. But there are pains that we carry around for various reasons.

[14:19]

And we can make them into something. We can use them in various ways. It all depends on our attitude. receive, hold, and deal with. Attitude is such a big factor. If I have self-concern, then it becomes a big deal. If I don't have self-concern, it's not such a big deal. So my particular way of dealing with these problems is not to have self-concern, to let go of self-concern. When I first started to practice, my teacher was so inspiring and I had such terrible pain.

[15:27]

I mean, I understand the suffering that we all go through. I vowed that I would stay in my position even if it killed me. So I just threw myself into that. If it kills me, it's okay. This doesn't take care of everybody's difficulties. I'm just telling you about my attitude. John? You know, at the highest level of competitive endurance sports, there's also considerable pain. In fact, it seems as if The people who win are the ones who can endure pain, the greatest amount of pain, and you can see it on their faces. Right.

[16:28]

But that seems really different to me because they're really striving for something. Right. Yes. You know, my attitude was I was striving to find out how to finally get through the barrier so that I would relax. So you strive, you have to strive, you have to strive until you get to the point where you go through the barrier and then you can let go. And it's not, you don't have to strive anymore. But, you know, there's, Zen practice is done by the long-distance runner, not by the sprinter.

[17:30]

The sprinter wants to have some strive to do something quickly and with all your energy as fast as you can. That's not our Zen practice. So striving is not to get someplace. But when you're confronted with the problem, you have to get through the problem. You have to deal with the problem. It's not about trying to get somewhere. It's about, how do I deal with the problem? It's not sports pain. It's that when you sit down and do Zazen and don't move, pain is there. But you're not trying to do something that causes you pain. You're not doing something that causes you pain, trying to do something.

[18:37]

It's just that pain is there. And in order to get to the other side, you have to persist. The other side means how you Let go of your discriminating mind. That's the upside. I believe I understood what you said about you stub your toe, ouch, and move on. When we watch the news or we read the paper and we experience ouch of the world, I don't think you're advocating moving on. Yes, I am. Otherwise you get stuck there. Everybody dies. Everybody gets sick. Everybody has pain. Everybody suffers. How do you get free of that? If I read the paper and I wasn't free, it's like freedom doesn't mean you ignore.

[19:52]

I mean, you take it in, but you don't... If I couldn't go on, I'd still be sitting at the table with my head down. That doesn't help anybody. That does not help. You can't get stuck. If you're going to help people, you have to move on. You can't get When you're pulling people up the ladder, you also have to hold on up here. You can't fall down into the pit. You can fall down into the pit, okay, that's fine. But to be effective, you have to be able to pull yourself up. So yes, you have to move on. It's just like Zazen.

[20:55]

You have the pain, but you can't get stuck there. Everybody is suffering. That's the nature of human life, one way or another. I guess I would like to ask you to discriminate between the lack of self-concern and lack of self-awareness. I'm thinking specifically about my mom, Hilda, who just turned 79 yesterday. And she has in really poor health now because of decades and decades of lack of self-awareness, to me it seems. You know, like she would never buy shoes that fit because she always wanted to save money. And as a result, now she can hardly walk and she's had like four foot surgeries because her feet are so bad. I mean, you all don't want to hear my mother's medical report, but I could give you many other examples of that.

[21:59]

So in my own practice, I carry my mother's karma, a tendency to be lack of self-aware. And so I ask myself, what is the difference between having no concern with myself and being so unaware of myself that I There's something over the top that's called self-concern. There's something over the top of self-awareness that's called self-pity. I didn't want to use that word, but I will now. It's called self-pity. Oh, my poor me, poor me, poor me. That just leads to say, oh, as soon as you see a problem as your jewel, there's no more self-pity and you're free.

[23:07]

I'll have a look at your diary with a thousand. What I heard where you began, though, was actually with self-awareness. awareness and self-care. Yes, absolutely. So I just wanted to bring it back to where it was. Because that was your starting point, but how do you take care of your body when you sit down? Yes. So just bringing that back. Thank you very much. How do you take care of your body and your mind when you sit in Zazen? Which means always, everywhere. Freeing yourself from yourself. Freedom, it means freeing yourself from yourself. That's what it means. Because you're the only one that keeps you in bondage.

[24:18]

Nobody else keeps you in bondage. We keep ourself in bondage. I know how to keep myself in bondage. And so do you. But how to free yourself from that is more difficult. But that's what Zazen is about. Freeing yourself from your own bonds. How do you keep yourself captive? I'm curious about this problem of aversion. Aversion. things all fall into their own proper perspective. Pain, whatever. As long as I'm, the moment I try to keep something out, say, no, that felt not good, or this sensation's not good, then everything turns to shit, basically.

[25:23]

And so what is it when, how do we avoid going to a person Accepting right away. That's what I was talking about. As soon as you sit down, you accept everything right away. You don't wait until something bad, go-and-go happens. You don't wait until something. You accept everything from the beginning. That's what I'm saying. That's how I started out. You accept every sensation from the beginning, without discriminating it. So that by the time you get to the sensation that you want to discriminate against, you're already not discriminating. So it just falls into place as another sensation. Whereas if you didn't do that, you would start screaming. Silently. Tina?

[26:25]

As Ross was asking this question, it reminds me of what you were saying about great artists who take in, take in, take in, and then act and respond. So just to say that a response, having let go of the immediate emotional impact or whatever, A response can still happen when you read the paper. Exactly, yes, yes. We're always responding, yes. You feel the impact of everyone suffering. That's Bodhisattva's way, is to suffer with other people. Karuna means to suffer the suffering of everybody. That's what it means.

[27:37]

So we do that. But that doesn't mean you get caught by it. That's the difference. We have to have a larger vision of what suffering is. So that we can not ignore it and deal with it and feel it and at the same time be free from it. Being free from it doesn't mean ignoring or running away. Within our suffering is where we have to find our freedom. Not outside of it. So we say that the first noble truth is that being suffering.

[28:40]

And so Shakyamuni says, the only thing I teach is suffering and how to be free from it. So it sounds like you escape from suffering by avoiding it. In a sense that's okay, but the way you free yourself is by entering it. The way we free ourselves from our pain, as soon as you start to run away from it, it chases you. It just gets worse and worse. So you have to be one with it. So what I'm talking about is being one with the pain. Being one with the pain means to open it up. So that instead of it boring a hole in you, you expand it. You blow it up. Yeah. How do you be one with sleepiness?

[29:45]

I see it all around me. We see it all the time too. It's the Zen student's disease. But seriously, I mean, you open to pain. Do you open to sleepiness? Sleepiness is much more difficult. It's actually harder. Is there something we should do? Well, you know, this is the perennial, unsolvable problem. There are many, you know. People say, why do you do this and do that? But none of them help. Well, yes.

[30:48]

It's like the hiccups. You put a bag over your head. But I have a meditation chin rest. It was given to me by Noiri Hiroshi. When I went to Japan to have Dharma transmission, I went to his temple. I have it hanging in the hut. You probably don't see it, because it's on the wall next to the door. But I was watching Alan yesterday, or this morning, or yesterday. My auntie was wondering. Yesterday, or this morning. And I thought, I'm going to get my chin rest. And I thought about that. I was like, yeah. At least it keeps your head from falling forward. That's the hardest part, you know.

[31:55]

The question of sleep can get a little dualistic, too. Right? The question of sleep can get a little dualistic. Because you can think, well, I shouldn't sleep at all. That's right. Why don't we just sit all night? You know, what's wrong? you know, sit all through the night and just sleep half an hour, an hour or something. And then you'll be fighting sleep. Well, you can. People do that. Right. But it's a problem, because it's also in Zen, is when you're hungry, you eat. When you're sleepy, you sleep. There are some teachers who say, don't disturb the person they're sleeping. Some people wake you up, wake up. And then some people say, well, poor guy's sleeping. So anyway, we're kind of in between. Since you can't wake somebody up, might as well let them sleep. Well, awakening is not the opposite of sleep. No, in that sense, that's right.

[32:58]

So you can be awakened while you're asleep. Completely asleep. Completely, yeah, if you're completely sleeping. The problem is that... You have bad sleep. Yeah. It's not complete. Yeah, I'm just completely sleeping. It's awake. Well, sometimes you've talked, and it's talked about, that sleep is a hindrance. Sleepiness is a hindrance. Yeah. And that, you know, so how you discern between the sleepiness that is keeping you from paying attention, and sleepiness that's true tiredness. Yeah. Well, yes. I don't know. I don't think I do. But, you know, we live such busy lives. We live busy lives. We're always, you know, rushing to this place or that place. We don't get enough sleep.

[33:59]

Sometimes in the monastery, where people But their lives are regulated in such a way that they don't eat so much. They don't eat so much. The more you eat, the sleepier you get. I mean, that's true. So if you don't eat very much, you don't get so sleepy. And also, if you get enough sleep during the night, you don't get so sleepy in the daytime. And so no seconds. No second. And this is just the vegetable. I have sort of a follow up. So this is over there. It's true.

[35:00]

It's a thousand training. So we have a better death. Well, I don't know better than what. Well I wouldn't say Zazen is... Zazen is to die. Yeah. But who dies? What is it that dies? So you know, ordinarily we have birth and death, and in between the vicissitudes of life, what we call that. But Buddhist understanding is that actual reality of birth and death, there is no such thing.

[36:03]

It's simply continuation of karma. Which doesn't necessarily mean reincarnation. It's continual transformations. So there's nobody within the transformations that keeps transforming. It's simply transformation. So, we set up the problem because we set up a self. And the self is what we call the one who is born and dies. But in the larger sense, there's simply continuation. So it looks like annihilation, on the one hand,

[37:12]

And as if dying is another thing. If you think in Christian terms, you think there's a heaven and a hell and you go to one place or another and then your body is transfigured and so forth. This is not a Buddhist understanding. So we die the way we live. So instead of worrying about dying, we should be concerned about how we live. And the way we live is the way we die. Unless something happens by accident, you know. And nevertheless, in this kind of context, the way we live is the way we die. So, if we live free of ego, we die free of ego. If we live with anger and mistrust and hate, then that's the way we die.

[38:26]

If we live in loving kindness and compassion and free of the world, then that's how we die. So, there's no formula, you know. But because we can understand this with every breath, because every breath is birth and death. It's not just an idea about birth and death, it's actual birth and death. Inhaling is birth and exhaling is death. It's not just an idea. We're heading toward annihilation, not annihilation, but letting go. It's not annihilation. This breath is creating, is leaving, but it's also creating something else called inhaling, which is also creating something called exhaling, which is also creating something called inhaling.

[39:38]

So it's simply continuation, and when we stop breathing, We don't know what happens. It's all speculation. But whatever it is, you can't lose by living this life in reality. You cannot lose. There's nothing to lose. Mary's had her hand up, so I'd like to talk, but I'd like to go to Mary first. I was struck by, well, it seems to me that the energy around this whole enterprise makes all the difference. And I was struck by your saying that you sat with such fierceness because you were so inspired by your teacher.

[40:44]

And it seems to me that I may have a misunderstanding about Zen, but I sometimes feel an edge of fierceness in Zen, which is what it means to be a good Zen student and just do it and sort of kind of tough it to the pain, sort of like the athlete, you know, that has a kind of bodhidharma, prop your eyelids open, you know, that I miss the softness of the compassion or the inspiration in that image. when you think that way, but in your practice you don't. Well, sometimes I treat myself like I'm somebody I'm not, and I feel separated from myself, and I say, you know, just do it, and then I rebel and it's a mess. Well, the last part, you rebel? I rebel. Yeah, well, that's okay, but you get to the point where you don't rebel, and then you feel better. It's not an athletic thing.

[41:48]

It's that you use your whole body-mind. It's like every moment. What Zazen does, what Zazen does, is that you're present totally on every moment with your activity. That's what it's about. Then you lose yourself. It's not about being fierce. giving up yourself. So, also, you have to remember that Zen has always been a masculine, more or less, a masculine-oriented practice. And it has that kind of flavor. In America, America is like the feminization of Zen. Germanization of Zen is one of the characteristics of Zen in America.

[42:53]

So the softer side, if you want to call it that... Call it the humanization of Zen. Well, no, it's all human. It's not inhuman. Some of us are more human than others. Some of us are more human. My teacher was totally human, and he was Japanese. He was the most human person I ever saw. He was the softest person I ever saw, as well as the most determined person I ever saw. So you don't have to say things like that. It's not like we're inhuman. No, there's a misunderstanding, excuse me. There is. Yeah, there is. I don't... I think my outburst was... I'd rather go back to what Mary said, which is that you practiced fiercely in the way you described because of your love for your teacher? No. I said to my teacher, I didn't say this, I said, I'm going to do this in spite of you.

[43:58]

When I was first practicing, I thought maybe And then I thought, I'm going to do it in spite of you. Not for spite's sake, but yeah. I didn't do it for him. I just did it for the practice. Mary's still talking, I think. Well, I guess that's clarifying and interesting. I do feel a gender difference. Yeah, of course it's a gender difference. But what you just said was not different from what I was trying to refer to, which is that you were pulled into something. You weren't trying to force yourself. In my business, the jargon would be a superego kind of directive to oneself to make oneself do something.

[45:06]

It's a different, that's the energy that I was trying to which is that one is drawn into and toward rather than fighting against or trying to make oneself. Yeah. You know, there's a balance of forces. There's always a balance of forces. The assertive side and the accepting side. We used to call it the masculine or feminine. the harmonization of the masculine and feminine. So the masculine pushes hard, the feminine accepts. And so we have both of those forces inside of us. And how to harmonize those two aspects of our being.

[46:08]

So you can't just take one side and say, that's what you did. That part was there in me, and the other part is also there in me, which I'm sure that you all experience my soft side. Sometimes I'm called the softie. So to bring those two sides into harmony, that's what we're working with all the time. So when somebody is too forceful or too masculine, we try to bring out the more softer feminine side. When someone is too feminine, we try to encourage the more forceful side, so that both of those sides are present. I appreciate the fact that I

[47:11]

What makes something viable is that you're willing to die for it. This is just the way the world works. If you're willing to die for it, then you find the ultimate meaning in it. If you're not, then it's harder to find the ultimate meaning in what you're doing. monks of body and monks of mind. Those who are intellectual and those who are practical. Our practice is both body and mind practice. It's not one side or the other. So it's not our preoccupation, it's our occupation. Sitting is what occupies us. It's not preoccupying. We're all here on purpose.

[48:36]

Everyone is here on purpose. I didn't ask anybody to come. We're all here because this is what we want to do, not something that we're forced to do. Yeah. I heard, listening to this conversation, tendency that I often hear in the office when I'm with my patients. And they seem surprised to recognize that they actually have a body. That there's this sense that in our mind we can take control over what the outcome that we want to have. Whether it's to sit Zazen well, whether it's to follow in our teacher's footsteps, whether it's to make a good effort, Whether it's to sit through pain or whether it's not to sit through pain. We feel like our body is really our servant. And that's not what I hear in how you started the conversation at all, but I'd like to just bring us back to how refined, how easy it is to miss the separation we make from really practicing

[49:54]

entirely with our body, accepting where our body is and whatever's happening to it, whether it's old age and illnesses that you have, whether it's a pain in the knee, and trying to discern whether it's something that is something you shouldn't sit through. And I have a friend who ruptured a disc in his back at Tassajara sitting in sashimi. He wanted to be a good student, and now he can't walk. So that's not a skillful way of being in the body, but there is a skillful way the mind's not separate from it, which is this idea of flexibility. Can I really discern what's happening and respond to it? If I stub my toe, maybe I walk to the icebox and put ice on it because that's the thing to do, not because there's a story about how I'm going to be able to walk next week or not. It's just the thing to do. And then it's incumbent upon us to know whether we're actually making right effort or not? Can we really discern whether we're caught in our story or whether we're truly responding to what it is that needs to be done?

[51:07]

Thank you, everyone. This has been a real journey. As one who has aversion to my pity story, self-pity, I am practicing gentleness with it. And it's a story. It's one of the stories. I think Greg Denny talked about the sentient beings and that we have innumerable sentient beings and we take care of them and so to be gentle with the choice I make to move you know to stop the story of I shouldn't have done that if I move and and the whole drama about being the good Zen student or I sit through some pain and as Andrea said

[52:20]

I look at it, and I really appreciate how easy it is to think somebody's doing it to me. And that where the freedom is of choice, there's choice. And I'm always having to step back, take a backward step. Again, what is this? What is this? And not hope there's a right answer. That's another pitch. Anyway, thank you all. It's been very moving. And so it just hasn't even begun to start yet. I just wanted to throw two things into this discussion. One is skillful means. I think that people respond differently to different practices, different traditions. And they find the tradition that works best for them.

[53:25]

And they're all good if they work and find freedom through them. And everyone's not going to respond to find freedom from every different tradition. And the other thing is I indeed have heard very often a teacher, sometimes Sajjan Roshi, sometimes all the other teachers, say, I have to. tell you to keep still, and you have to be OK about moving when you need to. I've heard that a whole lot. And that captures some kind of nice balance there. Teacher says, don't move to help yourself wake up. Student says, I have to move. I'm hurting my body. And that's a kind of nice dynamic. Like Sue said, not to give yourself a trip without needing to move when you need to move. That's when you move. So anyway, just wanted to put those things out there.

[54:33]

Actually, I personally find it impossible to sit still. And I'm always moving. And I... There's this... constantly sort of circling around some spot with my upper body where maybe I can find or get closer to a place where things balance out and the forces sort of cancel. You know, when I was first given Zazen instruction, I was told, don't move. And then about three years after I'd been sitting, I was told, well, actually, it's OK to move.

[55:37]

Why scratch and go ahead? And you know, in the end, it's harder I don't come here to please you, much as I admire your practice, but I come here because I love it here, and I feel joy. We just forget that one. Everybody's just here doing what we do.

[56:39]

We're not trying to get ahead or comparing ourselves. As soon as you start comparing yourself with somebody else, you're no longer a gazette student. Everyone's just too tired of doing what we're doing. And we're not trying to get anywhere. And, you know, the only reason why we do it this way is because we're too stupid to do it any other way. who can't do it any other way. It's like Venice Beach. As a kid I grew up in L.A. but my mother always used to take me to Venice Beach for vacation and it was where all

[57:43]

all the drinks of LA and you'll find yourself at the waterfront because you couldn't drink it all. I used to drink so much. I used to drink one of those drinks. Every week. I used to drink. I used to drink one of those drinks. Roller skating. Roller skating, yeah. Well, that was later. Robert came in later. When I was a kid, Venice Beach belonged to the old Jews. And they had these benches along the boardwalk, which was made out of cement. And all these old Jews would sit on the benches, because the benches were back to back, all along the boardwalk. And they'd talk to each other. It was beautiful. They were just all reminiscing about the old country or whatever.

[58:56]

What's so draggy about that? What's wrong with being an old Jew? I'm not complaining.

[59:04]

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