I want to remind you once again how well you're doing. As my friend said, you know, if we're still above ground by next Sunday, I'll see you then. Or, you know... So not only are you above ground, but vertical. That also means, you know, maybe how well you're doing is not the right expression, but It's rather unusual and remarkable actually to sit like this or to spend a day in silence.

[01:06]

A friend of mine the other night said that her daughter moved to Dallas. She had a friend there and she moved into a house and then when she went to do that then the another one of the occupants of the house told her she had to move out because it would, you know, do the devil's work or something. Dallas. This is America. So, you know, I think we sometimes take for granted or forget how unusual it is to sit quietly, experiencing our experience, actually tasting and knowing, touching our lives.

[02:17]

And to sit in this way and to walk and to spend the day quietly is to experience ourselves in ways that we don't usually have the opportunity to do whether it's to notice in more detail or to be more still and quiet or to feel our feelings or to notice how our mind races. Usually we're rather engaged in our life and we're not quite so aware and we don't touch or taste or experience so intimately our experience. So actually whatever your experience is today, you know, this is awakening. You know, this is realization.

[03:23]

We have the idea, of course, various ideas about what we might attain or accomplish. You know, some special experience we might have that was particularly peaceful or quiet or particularly brilliant or dazzling. And of course, you know, people have from time to time such experiences. And then what? You know, usually you'll just want another one. And after you, when it doesn't last, you'll wonder, what's wrong with my practice now? Yesterday I had such a great experience. Or maybe you tried to tell everybody, I've had this great experience.

[04:30]

I expect you to bow to me from now on, honestly. What, you know, in effect, you know, what will it do for you, you know, even if you had something? And any experience that can arise and appear and you can define, you know, is one that will disappear. So it will be just one more experience, and all the experiences that arise will disappear. And actually, it's not possible to have any experience that would make all the difference in your life from now on. Do you understand? It's tempting to want to have the one experience that will make all the difference from now on. And usually we think, you know, if I just could get rid of my anger or my desire or, you know, sit more still or be more concentrated or be more settled, could I catch it?

[05:52]

Then I would get the experience that would make all the difference in my life from now on. Do you understand how difficult it is? Not only is it difficult, but it's impossible. So, in other words, it's a mistake to try to have, to try to get that kind of experience. So and then, of course, we encourage ourselves to have the experience we're having, to let the experience come home to our heart, to be touched by our experience, to let our awareness touch our experience, to be touched, to be moved by our experience, and to respond to things And of course, I think the biggest burden in our life is that we don't like ourselves.

[07:21]

The biggest painful thing in our life is not accepting or not liking ourselves. So what's the problem? Why would we be so convinced to not like ourselves? to not accept ourselves, you know, basically our humanity. Why would we do that? And usually we think then that in order to like myself, in order to respect myself or to love myself, accept myself, you know, I would have to improve a lot. Because if I was If I could meditate better or if I didn't have so many problems in my life, then at last I could like myself. I could like somebody who was successful and, you know, calm and enlightened and compassionate and kind and buoyant and cheerful.

[08:34]

I could like somebody like that. Actually, you know, those people are pretty disgusting. Usually we feel they're hiding something. But you get my idea, you know. Usually we think we need to improve a lot before we get like ourselves. And we forget that we actually could accept or appreciate someone who's quite sincere. with some good intention, you know, with a good heart, who doesn't always do, you know, who isn't perfect, and we could actually accept ourselves. So sitting like this and practicing like this today, you know, we're actually in moment after moment, we're practicing acceptance.

[09:45]

And sometimes we have good practice of accepting ourselves, and sometimes we're not so good at it. And we encourage ourselves to even accept somebody who's not so good at accepting themselves. So for this reason, you know, some Buddhist teachers many times will say, you don't have to practice for 10 or 20 or 30 years to accept yourself, to finally, you know, to any time you can have a slight smile for yourself or decide to accept yourself or forgive yourself, to forgive others, you know.

[10:48]

You could decide to just sit and be with yourself. You could decide to receive your breath and the light and the presence in the room with you. You could, you know, we can do that. This is not, you know, so this is not usually the instructions, you know, that we have for meditation. Sit there and, you know, appreciate yourself. Sit there and accept yourself. It's too hard. It's actually a big challenge, you know, and most of us aren't ready. So we say, why don't you follow your breath? And sit up straight and don't lean to the left or right.

[12:02]

Don't lean forward or back. Why don't you just sit in the middle of your life? See what it's like there. And we can have, at times, quite elaborate instructions. But to accept yourself or to receive yourself, to love yourself, this is, you know, one of the last things we will do

[13:05]

I ought to be a success before I do that. If I accepted myself before I got somewhere, I wouldn't have any motivation anymore. A lot of us are busy motivating ourselves by rejecting ourselves. Good for you. Oscar De La Hoya, you know, was quite a good boxer, apparently. He was on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago. He's a very charming young man. Very bright face, bright spirit. Apparently he's, you know, one of those kinds of people who, you know, when he's on television like that, he's kind of like an angel. And then when he's in the boxing ring, he's like a savage. But he said his father has never told him he did a good fight.

[14:11]

I don't think he's ever been beaten. Or anybody who's beaten him, he's beaten them later. But his father's never approved. And Oscar De La Hoya says, they asked him, well, why doesn't your father approve? And he said, well, if my father approved, he's afraid that I would lose my motivation. I try very hard, and I train very hard, and I fight very hard to win his approval. So would he be as good a boxer, you know, if he didn't have that kind of motivation? So many of us are not so different than, you know, we've ingrained, you know, we've incorporated into us, you know, some parental rejection or some rejection of our parents.

[15:23]

And, you know, it's a motivation to push us in our lives to do various things, to accomplish things. So it actually can be, you know, quite beneficial, or if not beneficial anyway, it's certainly a stage of our life. We don't grow up without having some degree of self-rejection that motivates us to strive in our lives. But at some time, of course, we realize also the limitation of this kind of way of going about things. And we wonder, how will I actually ever arrive? Could I finally be accepted?

[16:29]

Could I finally accept myself? Can I finally sit in the center of my life? And we decide, you know, I will. I will sit in the center of my life, accepting my experience, accepting myself, you know, my strengths and my limitations, the blessings and curses of my life. And we're not sure which is which. So again, it will be a kind of mistake to think that by improving little by little and over time, accumulating some great and wonderful experiences, you know, we would finally be worthy of acceptance or approval or love.

[18:10]

You know, that we could earn it. This is a big problem, you know, also in Christianity. And why, you know, in various ways and in various traditions of Christianity, you know, one receives God's grace. It's a gift. It's not something you can earn because you lived a certain kind of life. God's grace is said to be there, as far as I know, for everyone. But anyway, I'm not much of a Christian, so I couldn't tell you that much about it. But, you know, the idea is that forgiveness or grace or acceptance or love is not something you earn. It's something you just give. It's something that's just given to you and you can. And at some point, we're just willing to give it to ourselves.

[19:15]

And in the small way it is, you know, to spend a day in retreat is to give ourselves this kind of attention, give ourselves this kind of love, this kind of interest in our experience, this kind of care. We're giving ourselves this wonderful gift, actually, of our awareness, of our good-heartedness. And actually, of course, when we sit together in a group like this, we're also giving it to one another. Together we create this kind of present earth space. All of us can sit in the midst of it.

[20:19]

So we're not just sitting for ourselves. But sitting for one another, our presence and awareness is a gift, actually, that we share. There are many ways in which our lives are very challenging.

[22:51]

Quite stressful. People in our lives, you know, become sick and people die. And there's the challenges of relationship and where we live and work and uh you know it's actually not particularly easy being a human being this is something you know that uh here in america the american myth is it'll be easy and you If it's not easy for you, something's wrong with you. This is kind of the idea of our culture. If you don't have as easy and silly a life as the people on Seinfeld, what's your problem? They make a joke out of everything, and it's a whole lot of fun, and they don't seem to need to worry about money.

[24:04]

The jobs are all making a couple million a week. I mention this because the fact that our life is difficult and challenging in many ways means that one of our tendencies will be to look for help and want someone else to take care of it, perhaps, to make it all work better. Whether we look for a partner, or we look sometimes to our children, to our parents, to teachers, to spiritual teachers, someone will make the difference, make it all work better.

[25:11]

Zen tends to emphasize the notion that you can rely on yourself and trust yourself, and that the difficulty of your life, when we respond to it, brings out our resourcefulness and our resilience. So we have the kind of understanding, you know, not to look outside or look elsewhere, but to, in a certain sense, look within. So, you know, Susipji Rinpoche mentioned when you're dying, nothing will help you. Not even enlightenment will help you, you know, when you have no more moments to live. So on this moment, you know, realize yourself fully, express yourself fully.

[26:20]

Have the fullest experience of your life Lately I've been using again my expression, you know, like getting married to yourself. Will you have this body and mind? And sickness and health and difficulty and success, you know, and health and sickness, you know, and health, wealth and poor, poverty. Will you have this body? Will you have this life? And when we say yes to the degree we say, yes, I will. I will have this life.

[27:25]

I will have this body. I will have this mind. And where else, you know, you don't need to look anywhere else for some answer, you know, for some solution, some way out. You've accepted this body, this mind, this life. And then you can find your way. As long as we're trying to get out of our life, you know, it's very hard to find our way, how to go forward. And we want our life to be without the problems it has, or to look like we think a life is supposed to look. This is very difficult for us. So this, will you have this body, will you have this mind, this is, again, very similar to accepting yourself, appreciating or loving yourself.

[28:40]

You know, no longer busily rejecting yourself as a motivation to succeed or get somewhere. Again, thank you very much for being here and creating this wonderful space and taking the time in your life to be with your experience and the way we can do it in this quiet space. We'll be going outside in a few minutes for outdoor walking. But you want to do yoga at all?

[29:43]

Okay. And Patricia, for those of you who would like, Patricia will offer a short yoga time. We have about 25 minutes or 30 minutes for this next period. So if you'd like, you can do, you'll do restorative. We'll have a half an hour of restorative poses. Or you can go outside and walk. I sat on the bench outside and put out some various flyers. One is on Thursday nights of a meditation group in Centerfell, so the information is there about that. Two, around Thanksgiving, at Thanksgiving time, Patricia and I are doing a Zen and Yoga workshop at Santa Sabina Center, which is in Centerfell. The retreat actually starts on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, but if some of you need to, if anyone needs to have Thanksgiving plans already, you can always come Friday morning.

[30:47]

We're making it possible for people to invite a limited number of spouses or friends people that you might otherwise have Thanksgiving with, we're actually going to go ahead and have a Thanksgiving dinner and, you know, visit and talk. And then we'll go back into silence for our retreat, you know, our silent retreat. Anyway, if you're interested in that at all, there's a flyer. And, you know, this day we do here at Gringotts has more emphasis on sittings. The retreat at Thanksgiving will have about equal emphasis for, you know, as many hours probably doing yoga as doing sitting. So there will be an increase. Also in December, some of you may have been to our workshop at Tassajara. There we have marks on yoga. So this is more like, it's going to be yoga and Zen. We'll see what happens in that. But...

[31:49]

This is our intention, you know, is to have both yoga and Zen in about the same amount of time, and also there'll be some talks and everything. And the Sunday after, at the end of that retreat, I'm doing a lay ordination for some people who have already talked to me about it, so people who come to the retreat can also stay for that. That's also to say that during the retreat I'll be giving some talks about precepts and lay ordination and things, which those of you who, you know, if you're interested, you could come to that or not, but you're certainly welcome to come to any of the talks or lectures and classes and so forth. Or you could, you know, be doing something else if it's not to your interest. We try to be flexible, you know. We try to think, yes, of course, For you, we'll do that. But of course, you know, we can't save everybody.

[32:53]

So... Anyway, so Thursday, Thanksgiving, and then in January, we have a Zen and Yoga workshop at Mount Madonna. So we have a... There's a brochure for Mount Madonna out there. If you think towards the end of January would be a better time for you to do Zen and Yoga rather than Thanksgiving. And there's also... I still have the quote from Suzuki Roshi about the frog with the poem from the movie about the water wheel, so you can pick up one of those if you'd like. I have a whole section of things to spend the rest of your afternoon reading. Anyway, finally, there's a donation basket here by the door inside here. Patricia and I offer You know, the teaching here today, without charge, the fee you pay to Green Gulch, all is to support Green Gulch and the meditation hall here and the activities of the center, the gardens, and so forth.

[34:00]

You know, lunch, etc. So if you would like to make a contribution, we invite you to do any donations you might like to offer to place them in the basket here. it would be to support Patricia and I. And I'd like to express my appreciation and gratitude for both Patricia and I for your support. You're very kind and generous. Thank you. So again, we'll be going. You can either go outside now and walk or stay here for some yoga. Thank you. Oh yeah, and the last thing...

[34:46]

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