Recap and Questions:

• Class 1

• Class 2

QUESTIONS?

Coming Back to Practice:  Verse of the Han:

Great is the matter of birth and death;

All is impermanent, quickly passing.

Awake! Awake!

Don't waste this life.

Posture

Beliefs About Posture

What posture should we use?  Do you believe one is better than another?

Not about any particular posture, but it is about paying particular attention to our posture

• Concentration:  Attending to our posture is a concentration practice

• Mindfulness:  Training in mindfulness - slouching when we drift away

Head Follows the Body

Not only does the body follow the head (gymnastics truism), but the reverse is also true - the mind follows the body.

• Suzuki Roshi - "These forms are not the means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind. There is no need to obtain some special state of mind."  from ZMBM chapter 1.

Dignified Posture

• Facing what arises with dignity

• Dignity (Attitude):  We enact the ritual of being upright with what whatever is happening right now

• Dignified posture and dignified attitude:  “Thank you very much, I have no complaints whatsoever.”

• Dignity within the gravity of the situation

Sitting Positions

• Lotus (full and half)

• Burmese

• Kneeling (Sieza)

• Bench

• Chair

Forms in Zen Practice:

Getting the Teaching In Your Bones

• Care:  Taking great care of things.

• Attention:  Just paying attention to what you are doing now

• Judging Mind:  How does it look to you?  Like acting?  Playing Japanese?

• Practice of judgement - watching arrogance arise to those who aren’t

• Embodied:  Most importantly, we enact it with our body - not just thinking about it..

Entering with Intention

Taking the One Seat

• Sitting down:  Taking the One Seat

• Acknowledging that we’re in this together

• Not Self Centered: Bowing when others arrive.  This practice isn’t about you

• Attunement: Bow when others bow.

• Bow as you enter, bow to your cushion, bow to your spiritual friends supporting you

Walking Meditation

• Blurring Boundaries:  Practice isn’t just something we do on the cushion

• Doing Something Fully: Not cutting corners - literally, in the room

Bowing

• Not bowing to anyone else

• Bowing to get rid of our ideas of ourselves

Important Concepts:

Oneness

The waves aren't separate from the Ocean, and is "one" with the ocean. Each of the waves are different. All part of the ocean, and it is the ocean. To know the ultimate oneness referred in Zen, is to know that you are the ocean, not the separate identity of the smaller waves. The ocean has the pure potentiality to express itself as any kind of wave. To be the ocean, and to know that you are the ocean experientially, requires one to let go of the "wave" of "ego", and merge with the oneness of the Ocean.

Emptiness (Shunyata)

• The absence of an independent and substantial "self"

• Though we perceive a world of concrete and discrete objects, these objects are "empty" of the identity imputed by their designated labels.

• Diamond Sutra:

"Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;

Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream."

"So is all conditioned existence to be seen."

• Ego refers to the idea that there is something that is changeless

• Shadow side is: Nihilism

Aperspectival and Provisional

Thumb and Forefinger Touching

John Tarrant:

Awakening undermines the stories you live by, as well as the way you make stories – or what you call a story.  Switching thoughts is like switching rooms in what is essentially a prison the mind has made.  But in awakening you can’t find any walls or bars.  Changing your beliefs about what’s bad and what’s good could even be an indicator that a more fundamental change has not taken place... Zen people talk about emptiness because when you awaken, the maps that hold your beliefs are suddenly gone. You also notice that new maps appear in the mind, even without encouragement from you.  And as new maps appear, you can take them as provisional.

This capacity to take things "as provisional" is a fundamental key to realizing freedom from the prison of our own narrative.  Peter Hershock says, "We do not suffer because we are in pain.  We suffer because something has gone wrong with our story — wrong enough that it threatens the structure of our narration."

Next Steps:

Discipline is Remembering What You Want

Adopting a daily practice of meditation is a practical commitment to this decision to live fully and responsibly in the present.  I once asked my teacher John Gladfelter for his definition of “discipline” and he replied, “Remembering what you want.”  In this sense, being disciplined about spiritual practice is not a promise made to someone else to be "good."  A promise too easily invites us to take the role of a child trying to please a judging parent.  True commitment and mature discipline is also not a burden to be endured in the hope of improving one’s self or becoming a “better person.”  Discipline is, instead, a clear adult decision to be self-responsible - to remember, again and again, where we have chosen to invest our energies and how we have decided to share our gifts.  Our deepest aspirations and heart-felt wishes for a meaningful life can be fully expressed in the simple act of sitting in meditation. In this very direct manner, commitment to spiritual practice is embodied as an ongoing willingness to remember what is most essential and what is most important in our brief lives. And, as another wonderful Zen teacher Joko Beck reminds us, "We get good at what we practice." - Flint (Practice Path Class #1)

Work With A Teacher

Closing

Let us be respectfully reminded:

Life and death are of supreme importance.

Time swiftly passes by, and with it our only chance;

each of us must strive to awaken.

Be aware! Do not squander our life.