Jomon: 00:00

Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.

Jomon: 00:27

So I was kind of like, well what am I going talk about? We're done with Ongo and Boncho suggested how about Appreciate Your Life and that's a perennial favorite. Appreciate your life. This is something that my dharma grandfather, Taizan Maizumi Roshi, would often say. He enjoyed the process of translation of what he had come to understand in Japanese and to impart that in English.

Jomon: 01:00

And the word appreciate has so many different meanings, different ways of being understood and so I enjoy also considering it that way that we can appreciate a piece of art, you know, by really looking at it and looking at it closely and becoming curious about it or appreciate a meal or appreciate, something someone does for you. It has a little thread of gratitude in it, doesn't it? As well as this sense of awareness. But I don't think that he's got a corner of the market on that particular teaching and it caused me to reflect on some of the other exemplars that I have drawn from in my own life, Some Zen adjacent or Buddhism adjacent people or people who have been Buddhist practitioners or not that are really also pretty honed in on that teaching of appreciate your life and what that means. So I'd like to start by sharing a koan that Maizumi Roshi talks about in this book and I'm going to read pretty much from his teachings in here.

Jomon: 02:22

These are recordings of his teachings, of his talks, and so I'd like to share in his words his reflections on this koan so that you can hear them. And then I'd like to share a little bit about three other exemplars that have been deeply impactful in my life. That is Carl Rogers, who was an early founder, theoretical founder of humanistic psychology, but he that sounds really dry and boring, but he really brought a lot of life and love and compassion into the practice of counseling. Marsha Linehan, also an originator of a mental health modality called dialectical behavioral therapy. She is now a Zen teacher, a Roshi, and John Cabot Zinn who originated the practice of mindfulness based stress reduction, an eight week class that is secular and really has changed the face of the world.

Jomon: 03:33

All three of these people have changed the face of the world with their authentic being, just bringing out what they wanted to share, what only they could share. Actually it'll be in a slightly different order, so the Miyazumi, Carl Rogers, John Cabotzen and Marsha Linehan, that's kind of in the order that they began to offer themselves widely. So Miyazumi in this book Appreciate Your Life talks about the story of Gensha and Gensha grew up in the late Tang dynasty China. Both he and his father were fishermen and one day they were fishing and together on the boat and there was an accident and his father drowned. Gencha was understandably distraught and stopped being a fisherman.

Jomon: 04:31

He took refuge in a monastery, a Zen monastery of Master Sepo who had a renowned reputation and a huge monastery of maybe 1,500 monks. And so Gensha was maybe 30, in his 30s, was old at that time to join a monastery, but he was really up against this question of life and death and what is this life? So it says, and this is in Maizumi's words, his telling, After two years, Gencha embarked on a pilgrimage to other monasteries. While walking, he stubbed his toe on a sharp rock. Gencha cried out, Where does this pain come from?

Jomon: 05:17

The body is empty. So where does pain come from? When we stub our toe, don't we usually shout, This dumb rock! Or I'm so stupid! What kind of awareness do we have?

Jomon: 05:31

Yet in Gensha's case he asked, Where does this pain come from? And at that instant he attained realization. Gensha immediately returned to Master Sappho. Seeing Gensha limping, Master Sappho said, Why aren't you on your pilgrimage? Gensha replied, Bodhidharma has never come from India and the second patriarch has never gone to India.

Jomon: 05:57

Bodhidharma and I are walking together hand in hand. Bodhidharma is no other than myself. I am the second patriarch, going nowhere, being here is my life. Shakyamuni Buddha and I are sitting together, sharing life together, living together, breathing together, counting together, being drowsy together. Now we all know that Bodhidharma came from India and that his successor, the second patriarch in China, never went to India.

Jomon: 06:32

So what did Gensha mean? Gensha became one of the best of Master Sappo's many successors and yet he had a very difficult time in practice. He was determined to resolve his doubts and his questioning was most important. You may be asking, will this happen to me? How can I confirm myself?

Jomon: 07:01

Gensha realized himself as Shakyamuni Buddha, as Bodhidharma, as the second patriarch. This is true for all of us, regardless of whether we realize it or not. Our life is the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. We are sharing that life together. Gensha realized this by not confining himself to the usual ways of thinking.

Jomon: 07:25

Now you'll hear that Maizumi, as he would often do, asks a multitude of questions. That in fact there was one of the members of the White Plum which is the lineage of Maizumi Roshi, they compared his dharma teachings to any other Zen teacher and kind of the ratio of questions to statements and Maizumis are just always and routinely full of questions which is a beautiful way to give a dharma talk I think. So here they come. We are all on some kind of quest. We have some determination to know who we are or how to pursue our life in the best way.

Jomon: 08:09

What is the difference between Gensha and ourselves? What creates the obstacles that keep us from seeing what Gensha saw? What creates the hindrances that prevent each of us from seeing himself or herself as the one who is constantly dancing, singing and talking with Shakyamuni Buddha. All of us must see this for ourselves, no one can do it for us. How do you confirm yourself as Shakyamuni and I are practicing together, living together?

Jomon: 08:41

In order to experience this you need to do something with your busy mind. Now there's a statement right there. In order to experience you need to do something with your busy mind. By counting your breath you can trim off busy thoughts rising like bubbles one after another. Are you practicing with bubbles instead of with Shakyamuni Buddha?

Jomon: 09:02

By counting your breaths in cycles of 10 all these numerous thoughts are reduced to 10. By following the breath you reduce it to two, inhalation and exhalation, but it is not simply a matter of two, ten or 100. Don't forget breathing is life. By breathing genuinely in this way you begin to live in this way. In what way?

Jomon: 09:31

You appreciate intimately the life that you are living in this very moment. When I was in college I lived in a dormitory where I studied with Koryu Roshi, so that's one of our you know great great grandfather, dharma grandfathers. Koryu Roshi, who by the way was a lay person. Kory Uroshi often said, when you breathe in, breathe in the whole universe. When you breathe out, breathe out the whole universe.

Jomon: 10:04

Breathing in and out, in and out, eventually you even forget about who is breathing what. There is no inside, no outside, no this, no that, everything is all together disappearing. So what is there? You can answer nothing, but when you truly sit you can also say everything. When we understand Master Gensha's statement, all of our questions about practice will be resolved.

Jomon: 10:34

Have trust in your life as the way itself. Have trust in yourself as Shakyamuni Buddha himself. I want you to appreciate this. This is not a sophisticated teaching. Your life is Shakyamuni Buddha and I are practicing together.

Jomon: 10:55

Please have good trust in yourself. Please have good trust in yourself. Now there's a lot in there to carry forward or to just allow to be absorbed, but also hear the confidence that Hogan Roshi often speaks about, have confidence that we all have the same capacity, nobody has more or less, it does not matter what our level of intellect, what our station in life is, we all have this capacity. So some of the other echoes of this are revealed in other ways through other teachers So I just want to share about some of those tonight in the spirit of appreciating your life. Carl Rogers, he lived, he was born in 1902 and lived until 1987 and his professional impact occurred in the 50s, 60s, thereabouts.

Jomon: 12:23

Prior to his involvement I think that therapy was very psychoanalytic, very, you know, with the laying on the couch and the therapist as a blank slate, maybe not even making eye contact or anything, or very medicalized. But Carl Rogers really brought a relational, that the therapeutic relationship was in fact a relationship and that this very body, mind and heart was in fact the instrument. And that it was genuine. Genuineness was a big part of his teaching. And I was introduced to him by my high school guidance counselor actually, Dennis Butts.

Jomon: 13:10

He is deceased now but he probably saved my life. As many high school guidance counselors apparently do, you know. So he taught high school kids how to do peer counseling. So I was in a peer counseling program when I was 15 years old. So I've been a counselor for a really long time, if you count that.

Jomon: 13:37

We did retreats, we did weekend retreats, so that retreat mind got into my bloodstream early. And so what he was teaching us to do was offer what's called Rogerian listening, as in Carl Rogers, in this reflective way of listening, active listening. And I'll share with you also one of Dennis Butts' favorite stories which you've probably heard is the starfish story of, you know, the little girl is walking on the beach and the tide has washed in a bunch of starfish and thousands of them on the beach and she's just throwing them back in the ocean and some guy comes up to her and says, What are you doing? There's no use. There's no way you're going to save all these starfish.

Jomon: 14:19

And she said, Yes, but for this one it really makes a difference and throws it back. And so he had me make these little buttons of a starfish and it said, I make a difference. I mean really, he was the real deal. The other teaching he would do on these retreats, you you'd get a bunch of surly teens together on a Friday night, gonna spend the weekend together and the eye rolling and the gathering together and you know being all judgy and stuff, he'd say, Okay, you can go home, but only if you promise to really practice, this is it. And he would go through the whole thing of like, we're always waiting for, you know, when you get to high school and then when you get your driver's license and then when you go to college and then when you graduate college and then when you get a job and it just like on and on, the next thing, the next thing until you die, but very rarely do we practice this is it.

Jomon: 15:22

So can we just practice this is it and if you do that until Saturday night, I will take you home and if you still want to go home. And no, he never had to take anybody home, But that's like a Zen teaching right there. This is it. This is it. So I'll just, I'll harken back to some of those Maizumi teachings throughout this.

Jomon: 15:50

One of the ones that caused me to connect these two, at least in my mind and heart, is that part where Maizumi says, Don't forget breathing is life. By breathing genuinely in this way you begin to live in this way. In what way? You appreciate intimately the life that you are living in this very moment. So Carl Rogers was born in Illinois actually when Northern Illinois was still farmland and he was a sickly kid and kind of a little bit of a deep thinker and had a scientific mind.

Jomon: 16:25

His family was farmers and he somehow got in the practice, the hobby of raising luna moths. I guess you could send away for a chrysalis or something, I don't even know how it worked, but he would basically raise them and the way to do that is you have to create a proper environment for them. There's actually nothing you can really do for them. They're the ones doing the work of transformation. But to create the correct environment, to give them what they needed in order to thrive, in order to transform, in order to flourish, that's what he learned how to do and carried that into his offering as a counselor and a teacher of counselors.

Jomon: 17:14

He says, We cannot teach people anything, we can only help them discover it within themselves. And that to me is just like my zoomies like, Please have good trust in yourself. That's really what this is about. Some other quotes from Carl Rogers that do not contradict any dharma teaching I have ever heard. Here's a few great ones: The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

Jomon: 17:44

The only thing that's ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment and humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less. That's so good. And finally his description of the good life, he says, The good life is a process not a state of being. I mean that's dharma right there. That is, it's impermanence.

Jomon: 18:12

We're not and it's also non self. The good life is a process, not a state of being. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be.

Jomon: 18:31

It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. So I could go on about that but I need to move on to this is a talk where I put way too much in so I'm already noticing that. The other person I want to share about today is John Cabot Zinn, and he's still alive and with us. He's 81 now. He was born in 1944, And he was a I guess he still is a molecular biologist by training and trained at MIT.

Jomon: 19:08

And it was there that he attended a talk by Roshi Philip Keppelow, who was in fact Hogan's root teacher. Roshi Keppelow gave this talk, there was like a flyer on the wall at the school or on a bulletin board or something, and he went to this talk that was about Zen Buddhism and he said there were only like three people in attendance. But what he heard there was completely life changing, really met some deep questions or evoked more deep questions for him and he started exploring Zen and Buddhism. He had also been practicing yoga. He then went on to study with Zen master Seung Son, a Korean Zen teacher and also practiced deeply in the insight meditation tradition.

Jomon: 20:09

And he didn't ever talk about this in the early days, but apparently what happened was he was on a retreat and he basically received a vision, kind of a download of what the mindfulness based stress reduction curriculum would be. This eight week class, all the components, it just was immediate. He just knew right away how it would be, what it would look like, where to do it, how to do it, like all of it was just right there totally clear. It's good that he didn't tell people that right away because this was like in the late seventies and you could not buy a yoga mat at Target then. Could not like buy a Buddha statue, you know, wherever.

Jomon: 21:01

It was seemed weird. Yoga was weird. Maybe there was like that lady on public television for a little bit, but like hippie stuff. This was not mainstream at all. And so a lot of this kind of practice people were doing on the down low, especially people in the sciences.

Jomon: 21:25

So having had scientific training, he knew how to structure the class, the offering such that he could then study it, do measuring, and that data that he acquired was what legitimized this practice in the world of science. There had been Doctor. Benson who was a cardiologist who did that a little bit beforehand with transcendental meditation which fell out of favor thanks to the Beatles, you know, but so then they called it so he called it mindfulness. And the first study of mindfulness was published in 1980 and it was a result of the experiences of people in this mindfulness based stress reduction program. So this legitimized mindfulness and his definition of mindfulness, it's important to note, is paying attention, there's these different elements, basically paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally.

Jomon: 22:36

Those four elements. Sometimes he adds a fifth as if your life depended on it, which it kind of does. Paying attention on purpose in the present moment non judgmentally. And so getting to teach this was just wonderful. I trained I did not purposely like I did not have the intention to teach MBSR.

Jomon: 23:03

I had just pretty much started Zen. I was in that for a few years and one of my friends who was also a counselor was going to this week long experience of training of MBSR. I was already teaching dialectical behavior therapy and I was like, I'm good. I don't need another thing. But she was going and I got this completely uncontrollable case of FOMO fear of missing out, and I was like, well, I'm signing up for it too.

Jomon: 23:32

And so that's what I did. That was my whole entire intention was I don't want to miss anything. And it was with Jon Kabat Zinn, it was when he was still doing those, and Saki Santarelli, the two founders of the stress clinic. And here they were, these like super even like visions of equanimity. I mean they're funny and smart and everything but it was just like and I got a lot out of it.

Jomon: 24:02

I really could see like, oh I could see what he's doing that this is just much more widely available to the world. That DBT is a pretty, you know, had at that time really very specifically available for a specific population. But this was kind of for everybody was really making it accessible. So I want to share a little bit from Jon Kabat Zinn. This is his first book, Full Catastrophe Living, which is a great title, and this is a book about the eight week class and basically takes you through the whole process, but I really want to share with you some of his words now on these will perhaps also evoke some of what Maizumi was saying as well.

Jomon: 24:53

He's talking about the students of MBSR, he says, The interesting thing about this work is that we don't really do anything for them. If we tried I think we would fail miserably. Instead, we invite them to do something radically new for themselves, namely to experiment with living intentionally from moment to moment. When I was talking to a reporter she said, Oh, you mean live for the moment? And I said, No, it isn't that.

Jomon: 25:19

That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean live in the moment. The that goes on in the stress clinic is deceptively simple, so much so that it is difficult to grasp what it really what it is really about unless you become involved in it personally. We start with where people are in their lives right now no matter where that is. We are willing to work with them if they are ready and willing to work with and on themselves.

Jomon: 25:49

And we never give up on anyone, even if they get discouraged or have setbacks or are failing in their own eyes. We see each moment as a new beginning, a new opportunity to start over, to tune in, to reconnect. In some ways, our job is hardly more than giving people permission to live their moments fully and completely and providing them with some tools for going about it systematically. We introduce them to ways that they can use to learn to listen to their own bodies and minds and begin trusting their own experience more. You hear that echo?

Jomon: 26:30

What we really offer people is a sense that there is a way of being, a way of looking at problems, a way of coming to terms with the full catastrophe that can make life more joyful and rich than it otherwise might be, and a sense of also being somehow more in control. We call this way of being the way of awareness or the way of mindfulness. I don't know about that control part but That we can make a decision to accept whatever the moment is offering us I think is the choice that we always have and we can make that choice over and over. So just a couple more words from Jon Kabat Zinn. In our culture we are not so familiar with the notion of ways or paths.

Jomon: 27:29

It is a concept that comes from China, the notion of a universal law of being called the Tao or simply the way. The Tao is the world unfolding according to its own laws. Nothing is done or forced, everything just comes about. To live in accord with the Tao is to understand non doing and non striving. Your life is already doing itself.

Jomon: 27:54

The challenge is whether you can see in this way and live in accordance with the way things are, to come into harmony with all things and all moments. This is the path of insight, of wisdom and healing. It is the path of acceptance and peace. It is the path of the mind body looking deeply into itself and knowing itself. It is the art of conscious living, of knowing that your inner resources and your outer resources and knowing that also fundamentally there is neither inner nor outer.

Jomon: 28:27

Isn't that beautiful, how they echo each other? He kind of talks a little bit about wouldn't it have been nice if we had been taught this in school? And I would get that also from when I taught dialectical behavior therapy often with adults who really had very painful and difficult lives. That would be the thing they would say, I wish someone had taught me this when I was maybe eight years old or something. How to just I'll read that part, it's beautiful.

Jomon: 29:10

It says, It might have helped us considerably to have been shown perhaps through some simple exercises in elementary school, that we are not our thoughts, that we can watch them come and go and learn not to cling to them or run after them. Even if we didn't understand it at the time, it would have been helpful just to hear it. Likewise, it would have been helpful to know that the breath is an ally, that it leads to calmness just by watching it, or that it's okay to just be, that we don't have to run around all the time doing or striving or competing in order to feel that we have an identity. Yeah, what's that line about the breath? Don't forget breathing is life.

Jomon: 29:53

By breathing genuinely in this way you begin to live in this way. In what way you appreciate intimately the life that you are living in this very moment. Finally he says this, there is no way to fail in this work if you pursue it with sincerity and constancy. Meditation is not relaxation spelled differently. If you do a relaxation exercise and you aren't relaxed at the end, then you have failed.

Jomon: 30:24

But if you're practicing mindfulness, then the only thing that is really important is whether you are willing to look at and be with things as they are in any moment, including discomfort and tension and your ideas about success and failure. If you are, then there is no failure. And that is real, that is true, but we have to see that for ourselves, we really do. And finally Marsha Linehan, she also is still with us. She was born in 1943.

Jomon: 31:12

What's that make her 82? That's remarkable. Yeah, Marsha Linehan, founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. She was influenced by Jon Kabatzen which is why I put them in sort of that chronological order rather than the order of my own experience. She was influenced by the impact of Jon Kabat Zinn and mindfulness based stress reduction which provided people with the tools of mindfulness in the healthcare setting.

Jomon: 31:40

He started out teaching in hospitals. Some people would just be wheeled in on their beds to come to MBSR class. But she brought mindfulness into the mental health realm where it had not been before and she too had to be on the down low about her own Zen practice. She wanted to call it Zen Therapy but again, even by the 90s that was like not cool, you could not talk about Zen or Buddhism or anything. This was only science and the amazing thing about her is she was a trained behavioral psychologist.

Jomon: 32:15

She knew how to set up a study and gather data and that's exactly what she did and just slam dunked this into the whole of mental health and utterly changed everything with this. So I was exposed to this modality in the early 90s. I was working in Southern Illinois at the time and my clinical director went to the exotic locale of Seattle where she had been working at the UW and came back and brought it back. Was amazing. It had both the elements of acceptance and change, which in the early 90s in mental health, this is a little bit of insider baseball, but that's when insurance and managed care started encroaching on therapists and how we did things in mental health and so it had to be like brief solution focused therapy, everybody's better in 12 sessions or less, Get them out of your office.

Jomon: 33:18

And so like we had to like demonstrate in every session how are we getting closer to the goals? How are we, you know, like fixing people? And we couldn't even talk about like, I'm getting to know this person over time. I know they're not going to tell me the hardest thing about their life if I'm like, Well, okay, how are we doing on our treatment plan? 12 sessions, we're down to two sessions, hurry up!

Jomon: 33:47

That's how it was though. But this modality, half of it was acceptance. Half of it was just validation of the person's life in front of you. Half of it. And I was like, You mean we're allowed to do that now again?

Jomon: 34:06

Like we get to do that? So I was into it and it was very and it is very practical. It has a structure. It's fabulous. And it did transform mental health, bringing mindfulness to where it had not previously been employed.

Jomon: 34:22

So before she was this famous researcher and originator of this practice, she was a deeply, deeply troubled person. She had a shift around high school and whether it was her, you know, she describes it as the biosocial theory wherein she had some probably biological predisposition and then her invalidating family of origin. She ended up being hospitalized for back in the 60s when they would do this for like two years and she writes about it. She has a book called A Life Worth Living and that's really what DBT is about, building a life worth living and that's another way of appreciating our life, isn't it? So she lived just in this desperate, desperate pain, one of the most troubled patients they had ever seen in this hospital and she just somehow like clawed her way out and she ended up going to undergraduate school in Loyola at Loyola in Chicago.

Jomon: 35:34

And so you can read about her awakening experience and actually you can hear her talk about it in her own words. She did an interview with the New York Times and just like came out about everything, not just the fact that she was a Buddhist but just also that the fact that she had her own history of illness which she never could have done. She never would have been taken seriously before. It had to be kept secret until she became this complete rock star of mental health world. But she had this awakening experience in a small chapel in Lincoln Park, a neighborhood of Chicago and I just want to give you some background about the place and then about her experience.

Jomon: 36:17

So she and many others have a dual spiritual practice of Catholicism and Zen. So she says, The chapel was run by the Cynical Sisters, an order founded by Sister Therese Cordurque who had a vision which she described in a letter in 1866 and this is Sister Therese's letter, her experience. I saw as in letters of gold this word goodness which I repeated for a long while with an indescribable sweetness. I saw it, I say written on all creatures animate and inanimate, rational or not, all bore this name of goodness. And this is to my mind a little bit of how we practice with the koan mu and we can talk about that later, it's m mu, it means you know no or emptiness or nothing or we apply it to everything, see it in everything, in every object, in all the space just repeating this moo.

Jomon: 37:22

So Marsha would periodically attend silent or solo retreats at their retreat center and she was well cared for there, known by the sisters there, but still just extremely miserable. There was this one night apparently that she was so miserable and so hopeless, she was just sitting in maybe a little sitting area. One of the nuns came by and asked if she could do anything for her and Marsha said no, she didn't think anyone actually, just in her mind she's like, No, don't think anybody can help me. She went into the chapel and as she prayed she started seeing and experiencing a shimmering golden light and she says, I immediately joyfully knew with complete certainty that God loved me, that I was not alone. God was within me.

Jomon: 38:09

I was within God. I leapt up and ran out of the chapel and up the stairs to my room on the 2nd Floor. When I was back in my room I stood still for a moment. I said out loud, I love myself. The minute the word myself came out I knew I had been transformed.

Jomon: 38:27

If anyone had asked me up until that point, Do you love yourself? I might have responded, I love her. After I descended into hell, this is her psychiatric experience, which it really is hellish, I had always thought or spoken to myself in the third person as if there were two of me split somehow. Then I said it again out loud, I love myself. I ran downstairs, I was so elated to call my psychiatrist to tell him, but he wasn't available.

Jomon: 38:56

And then I really knew I'd been transformed because I didn't give a damn. Normally I would be upset he was not available, but I didn't give a damn. Not this time, I was me again. I had crossed a line and I knew I would never go back. I know that my enlightenment experience changed my life.

Jomon: 39:13

I would never go back to being that crazy person again. She says, Gradually my personal experience expanded to become a more universal understanding that God is in everyone and everything, loves everyone and everything. It was a recognition of a universal unity, a great oneness, and as Sister Therese said, a universal goodness everywhere. Riding the bus in Chicago, I wanted to scream at each person, do you know you have God within you? I kept my mouth shut for once.

Jomon: 39:45

So let's just recall from Maizumi's teachings, Gensha realized himself as Shakyamuni Buddha, as Bodhidharma, as the second patriarch. This is true for all of us regardless of whether we realize it or not. Our life is the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. We are sharing that life together. So I wanted to include this part too.

Jomon: 40:09

Marcia went on to practice at a Zen monastery, Shasta Abbey in California, and I want to share her diary note from the first day just in case you ever have been on your first day of a retreat at the Zen monastery. She says, End of the first day. No swallow at Shasta Abbey. I am here at a Zen monastery, feel at once very alien and kind of at home. We are to meditate with our eyes open nine times a day.

Jomon: 40:35

Each time, it has been a total struggle against closing my eyes. I keep seeing double, one eye moving to the other side. When I told the director, he said to stop worrying and just decide which eye to focus on and keep going. So I did. In addition, my back hurts at all times.

Jomon: 41:00

I love it that we all start there. We all start there. There's a wonderful book called The Artist's Way. Is anybody familiar with that book? A few of you?

Jomon: 41:11

Yeah. It's an artist recovery program, a twelve week artist recovery program and the woman who wrote it says that there's a danger the inner critic can kill our inner artist and one of the things it does is it compares our creations to that of masters, right? A filmmaker's first film, you're going to compare it to George Lucas' Star Wars. Well, that's not fair. You need to compare your first film to George Lucas' first film which none of us have ever seen probably because you know, he's not probably very good.

Jomon: 41:46

So Marsha says, she was able to experience even in her first retreats that the monastery was set up entirely to shape each person towards living in the present moment, to focus on just what was at hand and bow to the schedule and not always getting to do what you want to do. She says, it is letting go of having to know everything, letting go of what you want. This was the road to freedom. Acceptance is the freedom from needing your cravings satisfied. It's very powerful.

Jomon: 42:18

And then she says, this is the last thing I'll share about from here, she goes on to say this is about Sachin. The experience of Sachin, and that's our seven day silent retreat, The experience of Sasheen is just that, experience. It is nothing intellectual. That is Zen. It's more that you just are.

Jomon: 42:37

The experience of is ness. Maybe you are at the railway station and you look up at the clock and realize that this is it. The is ness, everything just is. There's nothing else. We think of ourselves as being a collection of separate entities that interact in a creative manner.

Jomon: 42:54

But in Zen, in reality, everything is connected to everything else as one. We are an expression of the one, God, grounded being, essential reality, Buddha nature. That's what she has to say about that. And then once again this teaching from Maizumi, don't forget, breathing is life. By breathing genuinely in this way, you begin to live in this way.

Jomon: 43:20

In what way, you appreciate intimately the life that you are living in this very moment.

Jomon: 43:33

Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.