I'd like to begin again with reading this quote from the Buddha that Sharon Salzberg uses at the beginning of one of the chapters in her book on loving-kindness. The thought manifests as the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into habit, and habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, and let it spring from love, born out of concern for all beings. So our anchor, what we're roping our mind to this weekend is watch the thought and its ways with care. What I'd like to do is describe some experiences that I had yesterday as a consequence of this focus.

[01:15]

Some surprises for me. Sometime yesterday I read a fax from our friend Priscilla who translates for Hirata Roshi, some of you. I remember her. And in her facts, she told us about the passing of a great Zen teacher, Soko Morinaga Roshi, who was in the next generation after her first teacher, Momon Yamada Roshi, who was Hirata Roshi's teacher. She asked me if I had ever met him. I was quite struck by my response to this news. He's not someone that I ever had the good fortune to meet directly, but I have read one or two of his teachings.

[02:21]

But I feel like I met him through his niece a few years ago. Bill and I went to visit some friends in New York, and they took us to Princeton to meet their friend Akiko Kolkat, who's a potter. She made this celadon pot that's there on the stairs and over on the altar, the Vajrasattva altar, the plum bowl. So we went, drove to Princeton and went to see her. She has a big studio and she does some teaching, but mostly she is doing her own work. And you know how it is sometimes when you meet someone even only once, you feel some, a deep connection with them. And I certainly had that feeling with her. partially because one of my first loves was a potter who was throwing pots.

[03:27]

And so I was really thrilled to see someone doing it so wholeheartedly. In the course of our visit with her, she told me about being Morinaga Roshi's niece and how she had, in some way, become his heir. And my sense was that it was as much his Dharma air as his air in some temporal way. And she described what is now a kind of hazy conversation in my memory, but I remember the feeling tone quite clearly about how he had asked her to make a pot for his ashes. And that that was one of the sort of secret practices that she has. This is one way to meditate on emptiness, isn't it?

[04:30]

To get one's urn for one's ashes ready. It's like writing your death poem or picking out the photograph every year that will be the appropriate picture to be used at your funeral. These are the kinds of things that Zen practitioners do. So Morinaga Roshi wanted Kiko to make his ashes urn for him. She makes very beautiful ashes urns. But she doesn't advertise. So she subsequently sent me a book of Morinaga Roshi's teaching, which I treasure. And I have thought for a while, oh, the next time I go to Japan, I hope I will be able to go and meet him.

[05:33]

So now I will get to discover how to be satisfied with meeting him in the way that I have. So I read this communication from Priscilla and I felt quite struck, almost physically, by the news of his passing. I was quite surprised. So during the rest period after lunch, I went and I lay down on the bed and I let myself really feel lying down on the bed and paid as close attention as I could to whatever I noticed in thoughts and in sensations and whatever the range of responses were that seemed to be coming so quickly.

[06:41]

And of course very quickly what I realized was, oh, here is another passing of this generation of great practitioners and teachers. who were born into a different world than I was born into and that each of you was born into. He died by my measuring rather young. 70 is beginning to look young, younger with my own rapid approaching 60. 70 seems like it's barely around the bend. So there's always, and again yesterday afternoon, I noticed my own mortality arises upon the news of someone's passing. But mostly what I was aware of was this sense, very palpable sense of the passing of

[07:57]

The teachers who came forth, who bloomed out of a time when training and practice was possible in a more coherent way, when the world itself seemed, at least in hindsight, more coherent. Ussula said, he was my favorite one of that generation of teachers after Umanya Mataroshi. even though Priscilla is very positive about everything, she doesn't make a statement like that, casually. So I allowed myself to experience a whole range of responses to this news of Morinaga Roshi's passing. Some shifting in noticing whatever thoughts arise, whatever sensations or emotional states arise.

[09:02]

During the walking period last night, right after dinner, when we were all, I think it was the first time yesterday, that we were all walking together in the room. So we were a little closer together. There was a sense of Zuma had finally herded us all into one spot. Those of you who were here when Zuma was joining us for meditation, our friend who is an Australian sheepdog who likes it when we're sitting but doesn't like it when we're walking because he wants us to all be bunched together. Here we all were together. And I had this sense, especially during one turn when I stepped off the Mexican pavers onto the wooden floor, and I had this sense of one person turning towards me. It was like we were doing do-si-do, kind of dancing.

[10:16]

We were coming towards each other and someone was turning. We were engaged in this lovely, slow dance. in which I had a sense of all of us connected. And the word, the thought that arose with this label was wonder. And I suddenly had this sense of the day having felt to me like it was full. of wonders. And then that thought, oh, that's what wonderful day means. A day full of wonders. And wonders are not just good news. I realize. So then there was this cascade of noting the wonders of the day.

[11:17]

I think, Kathy, you were out in the garden when I was in the morning, when there was a swarm of bees that moved through the garden. And when I first heard them, and I looked up in the sky, and there was this big swarm, and fear arose, and then wonder. You said wonder comes from the German word that means something like Your hair standing on end? No. It comes from a German word, Wunder, and nobody knows where that comes from. We can make it up. You can. You can try anything you want. Excellent. Well, at some point when you weren't quite awake, you said something about those circumstances or experiences where the hair stands up. That's horrible. I'm talking about horrible. I'm talking about wonder. So I just stood there and watched the swarm.

[12:22]

And they went into the big red cedar that's there where my precious new potting bench now abides. And they kind of were there, caught in the tree. And this intense buzzing, the sound is so remarkable. I remembered the day we had a swarm that was at house level, that covered from the fence line beyond the Baba Yaga hut over to the road, one single swarm. So this cascading of bee swarm memories kind of collapsing into that, those moments of being with the bee swarm yesterday morning, and then they were gone. And the silence after that intense cloud of buzzing was so sweet. The wonder of what I call the watery flute song.

[13:32]

Even though I know the name of the bird, for me it's the watery flute singing bird who comes in the summer. And last night when the watery flute singing birds were singing, I realized that sound registers in my body, not in my mind, not in thought, but in my physical body. So I know this is summertime. Suddenly this noticing thoughts becomes much more complicated. What is and what isn't a thought? What are these different fields of awareness that we can begin to have as a consequence of our willingness to bring attention to thought? And what I realized was happening as a result of our practice yesterday was a kind of vividness of experience, of seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching.

[14:49]

By allowing the mind to rest with one focus and to keep staying with that focus, there are very helpable consequences. If we're willing to come awake to each thought as it arises, we actually are cultivating the capacity to be awake in each moment. Not dominated by that chattering sequence of thoughts that tell us what creeps we are, or how miserable we are, or how awful we are, or how great we are. any and all of the above. I only walked outside a few times yesterday but I was really struck again. I think this is partially because I started propagating some plants and so I'm paying attention to the way Mother Nature propagates herself.

[16:01]

There's certain plants that I remember two or three seasons ago as a single plant and suddenly they're everywhere. Is that the definition of weed? When suddenly some plant is everywhere? Mother Nature is very generous for the sake of survival. thousands of seeds scattered from a few plants. And the next year, you wonder, where did they all come from? So this year, I can see the little seeds waiting to just burst out in every direction. I, of course, can say, oh, more work. But there's another part of me that realizes, oh, this is about abundance and generosity. My friend Skip told me the other day that we should watch out for these ostromeria, which I've been nursing and tending and nurturing since we dug them out of Bill's mother and father's garden, hoping that they would take hold.

[17:20]

He said, they've taken a hold and you better watch out. Pretty soon, they'll be everywhere. I suggested yesterday afternoon that everyone go outside and sit in a chair and do a little sky gazing. And then the next time we were walking, as I turned at that end of the room and my eye went to the stupa that Ken Sumten painted. 1989. 1989. The wall was barely dry before he was painting on it. And I suddenly realized, oh, he's put on the wall a little bit of the blue of the sky.

[18:20]

The Tibetans love to paint the ceilings of their rooms that color. And that thought of, oh, that's the color of the sky, Oh, Gensonten's hand. And this cascade of thoughts called memories of him sitting in this room when it was freezing cold. No floor, no windows, just plastic on the windows. Wanting to paint on the wall. rummaging around in the fireplace and getting a piece of charcoal and making a chalk line with the charcoal and some string so that he could put the grid on the wall that would allow him to do the stupa in the proportions that are part of the practice called painting a stupa.

[19:24]

He started with what was right under his nose. Inspiration. So I think that for some of us, this practice of noting, of paying attention to each thought, at least initially, seems rather dreary because we are so aware of all the thoughts that are troublesome, all the thoughts that lead to suffering, all the habitual thoughts that have to do with judging or blaming or feeling badly, whatever it is. But of course, the thoughts No, no bounds. There are many, many, many, many thoughts to note. And what I realized by the end of the day was that with this practice of noting, that brings with it the cultivation of allowing whatever arises to arise.

[20:35]

comes this capacity for wondering and a sense of wonder. And, oh, today was a wonderful day, full of wonder. Not full of bitterness or beauty or sweetness or sourness or whatever, but the whole works. The whole works. Kadagiri Roshi sometimes talked about the whole works, not picking and choosing. Out of fear for what we don't want to see, we then come to the place of not seeing what we do want to see as well.

[21:44]

Because if what I'm practicing is not seeing something, what I get to practice then is not seeing. Picking and choosing has its consequences. I decided last night, I think it was towards the end of our evening sitting, just in the last light of day, Joe was sitting on the wall just back here, the orange cat. And I suddenly realized that we had spent the day being more like Joe than anybody else, just sitting around, looking at this and that, not doing much. Cats do that a lot, don't they?

[22:52]

They just sit around. They sleep. They're awake. They look out the window or if they're outside, they just sit waiting. Suzuki Roshi loved frogs, and he said we should all be more like frogs. You know, they sit on a rock out in the middle of the creek, looking like they're sound asleep, and then a fly goes by and all of a sudden this tongue whips out, catches the fly. He said, it looks sleepy, but actually they're very awake. Joe is like that. He looks like he's taking a nap, but if there's just this little wiggle of some critter pounce. But most of the time, he's pretty relaxed, just sitting there.

[23:54]

So there's Joseph just sitting there out on the wall, and there's us just sitting here and here, not doing much to write home about. What I want to underscore is this quality of the mind which is allowing that is the consequence of just noticing. That if the noticing of thoughts, for example, if noticing of whatever arises in each moment is brief enough and free enough of judgment, what blooms is a capacity for allowing. everything about the cultivation of ease.

[24:59]

This is not about trying hard. The very minute we start to effort, we're in the soup. So I hope you are having a wonderful day. I felt like a little kid with this, oh, that's what wonderful means. A wonderful day is a day full of wonder. How often have I said, oh, it was a wonderful day, just as a kind of blah, blah, blah. What's the difference? How come yesterday Yesterday evening, this sense, not a thought, but what arose first was this sense of a full day with many wonders.

[26:03]

I find that very interesting. I think depending on where we are in our spiritual practice, we can feel like what we're doing is such hard work. We can wonder, what on earth am I doing here on this beautiful day? Everybody and his third cousin is out there going to the beach. But of course, part of the wonder of yesterday was the absolute of a package of the endless cars going to the beach with their radios blasting so loud that we could hear what they were listening to. Streams of cars, and that at some point in the day there would be the sound of an ambulance. They go together. The sense of people speeding by looking for a good time.

[27:16]

And the suffering that can arise from that speeding along looking for a good time. So I have a feeling of great gratitude that I have such good company in being willing to stay within the confines of our fence and just be here, practicing being like Joe. Joe carries a lot of teaching for me. Someone finally admitted to me after Joe had been here for about a year that he had actually dumped Joe over our back fence in hopes that we would adopt him. And Joe is actually a kind of wild, marauding cat.

[28:26]

for quite a while and I kept, you know, spraying him with a hose and telling him to go away, etc. And he didn't, so I finally decided, well, I'll get a Havahart trap and I'll catch him and I'll take him to the vet and we'll get him neutered so he doesn't make more feral cats and we'll get him a shot so he doesn't get rabies, etc. And then we'll let him loose and he'll just fend for himself. So I took him to the vet with you know, instructions. And then when I went to pick him up, he had a cold. He'd caught a cold at the vet's. So it meant I had to keep him in the bathroom for 10 days, long enough to administer his antibiotics for his cold. But also the vet said, you know, orange cats are always sweethearts. The gene for orange goes with being a sweetheart. The vet has an orange cat named Orange Juice, commonly called OJ.

[29:35]

So I thought Joe would be Orange Joe. But I thought, oh, orange cats are sweethearts. I don't like orange cats, but if he's a sweetheart, maybe I'll get to like him. And of course at the end of 10 days of giving him his pills and he's living in our bathroom, my goose was cooked. Joe had become our cat. Or as Bill says, my cat. Bill says he doesn't do cats. He does dogs, not cats. And it's true. Joe is a sweetheart. Joe also thinks he's a dog. So he'll walk with you in the garden. You may have had that experience. Let's go see what there is to see together. All my ideas about orange cats and this cat in particular had little or nothing to do with what was so.

[30:41]

So this looking out the window last night and seeing him sitting there and thinking, What's different about what he's doing and what I'm doing? Not much. I thought, oh, here's a teacher. So let's keep focusing with Watch the thought and its ways with care. Emphasis on the with care part. Notice whatever arises with care, with brevity. So I wonder if anybody has anything you'd like to bring up before we go back to our hanging out activity.

[31:44]

Yes. So the cloud of bees was so dense. I don't know how many, I was sort of watching and they were moving so quickly. Yes. And so it may have just been a few that was enough to make this sort of swirl of light and shadows. Yeah, for me it was the sound, and then I looked up and saw him.

[32:56]

That's interesting. I wonder. Linda. You know, in In the 1960s, there was a Catholic nun. She was a nun in the order of, in the Immaculate Heart order, an artist. She taught at Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles. Her name was Sister Mary Corita. And she really revolutionized silkscreen art in the United States. And I remember one of her early, at least one of the early silkscreen prints that she did that I saw was a silkscreen print of the wrapper from Wonder Bread with, you know, wonder on the side of it.

[34:11]

Now, I don't know what your associations are with Wonder Bread, but I remember at the time that mine were almost entirely negative associations. You know, nutritionless white bread filled with air. But she just saw, she was seeing the wrapper as though for the first time. And what she saw was wonder. And then, as she did with most of her pieces, she had then written in hand, by hand, quotes from various writers that were about the spiritual world. So she was presenting the Wonder Bread wrapper in a way that would allow the rest of us to see it as though for the first time. I think that was the first kind of turning for me with the word.

[35:18]

What strikes me listening to you is how fully, if not all, many of the physical senses The scientific name for the grizzly bear is Ursus horribilis. And when you meet a grizzly bear, your hair stands on end. And it seems to me that this quality of wonder, perhaps also awe, has that about it, that it's essentially corporeal, it's not mental.

[36:41]

Well, I think what was so striking for me by the end of the day yesterday was that with noting thoughts, There's a way in which I wasn't caught by thoughts. So thinking ceased to be dominating everything. And it is in that process then that other levels of consciousness and sense experience begins to be possible. So when we do walking meditation outside and we let our eyes drop a little bit, How much do you experience the other senses as kind of coming alive? Suddenly you hear things that you weren't hearing before, or you smell, or you feel the breeze. I think that the eyes dominate the senses in the way thoughts dominate everything.

[37:44]

It's like this big blanket. Particularly if the thoughts are habitual and we are used to listening to them and believing them and saying, oh yes, yes, that's right. Even more, this kind of dominating of thinking in such a way that we're not present in the moment. We're not present in the moment. We miss our lives. When you were describing the time of the teachers that have passed away, you said that it was a more coherent time.

[38:44]

And maybe this is just how it strikes me, but there's this whole realm of that I think of a time, a place, I don't know, an environment or a state of mind that makes practice easier or more accessible. And just recently in my life I found that this feels like this time of the world feels coherent. That I have assumptions about somewhere that I I have never been, or may never be, like, for example, practicing in a monastery, or kind of the assumptions that I have about a slower lifestyle, or living in the, you know, many of us from the 60s living in the country, was it, or somewhere over there that's going to be more coherent.

[39:44]

And I have recently found that for myself, I don't know if it's the amount of time that I've been practicing or my focus on practice or something, but things are starting to kind of, like a gear, clunk in. Well, I agree with you. I think that we don't yet know what is possible out of the circumstances of our lives now. What I mean and didn't unpack is that... So Morinaga Roshi must have been born in 1925. 24, 25. I think about the generation of teachers from Tibet that are now in their 70s or 80s.

[40:59]

This Tar Rinpoche's generation. This is the generation, we're kind of in the middle of the last generation or generation and a half of great teachers who lived at a time when their culture of origin was relatively intact, where you have a traditional and cohesive traditional culture, where training and practice was intact, and seemed to produce a significant number of remarkably realized practitioners. And there's a difference. in my experience of teachings from some of those teachers who cooked in such a circumstance where the world was smaller, where their culture of origin was still cooking in a wholesome way, not unraveling.

[42:09]

There will be insights and cultivations that will arise out of our time that we don't see so clearly yet. I completely agree with that. But there is something about these old, mostly men, in their 70s and 80s, who as teachers have something to offer us that we probably will not see again. We'll read about, but we won't experience directly. in quite the same way. And the challenge is for us to find a way to cook deeply as practitioners in the world as we know it. Certainly the realms of suffering we have access to in a way that's never before been quite the same. But for someone who has lived in a traditional culture that was intact, lived in the same district all their lives, many generations of family living in that place, there was an accessibility to a certain kind of wisdom that produced a lot of really remarkable teachers.

[43:37]

And the challenge will be to see who and what flowers out of the sea that we swim in now. I think that one point that is implied in what you say is the tendency to idealize the old times. But you know, I remember One time when Kadagiri Roshi was asked, why on earth do you want to buy this land and start a monastery based on such ancient ways in northeastern Minnesota? And his response has stayed with me ever since. He said, as times get harder, as people's suffering increases, as the world unravels more, People will want a place they can go and taste the old ways.

[44:42]

Ways that have to do with being tied to the cycles of the moon and of the sun, the rhythm of the natural world. Living in a way that is different from the world that's dominated by technology. And the kind of delusion that comes from our sense of having access and control, a real illusion that we have access and control with everything. And we have a lot of those illusions about what we can control, particularly. I remember the first time I went to Japan and I realized that so much of the life of the Zen world, as I knew it, was based on the old-time life of fishermen and farmers. It really had absolutely to do with that rhythm. You know, if you go to Tassahara at night, someone goes through

[45:55]

the valley about 9 or 9.30 with wooden clappers going like this. Like that. Going around, blowing out all the kerosene lamps. If anybody has a lamp on, asking them to turn it off, it's time to go to bed. Well, I remember the first time I was in Japan, and I was up in this little fishing village on the Japan Sea. And, you know, there at 9.30 at night comes somebody with these big wooden clappers. Because, you know, there we are in a village, it's entirely wooden buildings, lights are with kerosene. This is a very real thing, you know, taking care that somebody doesn't go to sleep and leave a fire burning inadvertently.

[47:00]

And there's something about those practices that have been the sound markings in human lives over a long period of time that brings us back to some kind of sense of groundedness. If you ever read Holmes Welch's book on China, he's written several, but there's one in which he talks about how the Buddhist monasteries were a combination of, in modern times, a sanitarium, A place where you'd go to heal. A place where you'd go if your mind had unraveled. A place where you would go for a retreat when your mother or father had died. A place to retire from the world, to be refreshed by hearing the sounds of this very regular life that the monks followed. The sound of the bell that would wake everybody up. The sound of the Han. The hammer on the wooden board marking the beginning of meditation.

[48:05]

The sound of the drum announcing work. The kind of soothing that comes from hearing the sound of this very regular life that's been followed for centuries. And somebody like Morinaga Roshi was still living in a world where that was more usual than not. So there's something about the tone of practice and the tone of cultivation from some of these practitioners that are now beginning to die off that is worth noticing. I also think that part of my own response yesterday is as every one of these teachers goes, It moves me to a kind of frontier in the way that the death of our parents moves us to a frontier. There's nobody behind us or ahead of us.

[49:06]

We become it in a certain way that's different when our mother and father has gone. And these are my mothers and fathers. So there's some of that too. You know, this wonderful array of teachers that's up there on the mantel, but there's only one of them who's still living, at least in this usual form. None of this is to say that there isn't flowering happening now. It's very important to remember that. joy born in this realm, the human realm, being citizens as we are of a relatively stable society where our material needs are met, where we have the opportunity to encounter the Buddhadharma and to encounter

[50:25]

It comes in the early part of the Tibetan curriculum on the conditions for appreciating the precious human life. One of them recognizes that there are times when there is no teaching available. And of the king in Tibet early on in the 9th century who hated Buddhism. And did his best to root it out in all the troubled times and civil wars in China. Buddhists were persecuted and monasteries destroyed. And now what's happened in Tibet? But you know at the same time I think that

[51:39]

I don't know if you ever looked at the book I have on the hermits in China. It's very encouraging. There are all these nuns and monks who are hermits in caves in China who have been practicing all during the Cultural Revolution, all during the whole flowering of communism in China. and you ask them about, you know, all of the civil wars and fighting and all this stuff, and they say, huh? They've just been there in their caves practicing for the last, I don't know how many decades. And there are lots of them. And the Red Army never found them, you know, because they're all tucked up in these remote, isolated, impossible to get to caves. where, you know, it's worth your life just to get up the steps that go to the cave that's up there 2,000 or 3,000 feet. And, you know, some westerner went and trekked around and found a bunch of them and discovered there are a lot of them.

[52:50]

Alive and well, the Dharma alive and well with some of these folks. So... How blessed we are here in these United States. Absolutely. I wonder what Dharma practice is like in Rwanda or Sarajevo or... in the housing project up the street from the Zen Center in San Francisco. We're just staying alive. is the question. So we are very lucky. Okay? This of course takes us back to the line that some people have over time found so troublesome in the Heart Sutra about sons and daughters of noble family.

[54:25]

But that phrase is referring to exactly what you're describing. Having the circumstances, the causes and conditions that allow us to practice. to not have our backs so up against the wall in terms of a place to live and enough food to eat and all of that. These endowments that allow us the possibility for spiritual practice. That's what that phrase means. And I think it's a state of mind as much as it is an economic place because I'm reminded of the verse in the Bible that says it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle.

[55:30]

Which in Jerusalem there's a gate called the eye of the needle and you'd have to get down on your knees as a camel to get through this particular gate. But I think it is a state of mind. I've certainly met many poor people who have that state of mind. You know, Robert Coles talks about this a lot, and when I went to hear him speak a month or so ago, He was talking a lot about the family that Rosa Parks, not Rosa Parks, it's the little girl that was the first child to desegregate the schools in New Orleans. Was it Rosa Parks? No, she was the bus, she's the woman on the bus. I can't remember the little girl's name, but Coles was part of her support system during that first year when she went, you know, with the guards protecting her to get her into the school with all these people yelling at her about how they were going to kill her, etc.

[56:33]

And he described at some length her family and the family that she has now raised. She grew up in a very poor family. Her mother and father were both illiterate, but they clearly were people with great spiritual cultivation and great integrity who raised children with remarkable integrity and fortitude. So he said, you know, here's this little girl going to first grade and one of her first observations after a few days of going through this screaming mob was how much suffering they must be going through and how much trouble they were in spiritually to have this much anger and hatred coming up from them. How remarkable that she as a first grader had that insight. She is indeed a child of noble family, no question about it.

[57:37]

Patricia? Now, you have to describe your trip, Patricia, or we'll all think you've been on drugs. Which maybe you have been, but we haven't discussed that. No, I took almost three weeks. I took to England hiking, and I shared with Yvonne people's gardens, the availability that people like me have, walking and enjoying them. And I thought of Bill, because of the brood, and the fact that they're standing from 10 o'clock in light, and it was, when you were talking about feeling it inside, it was that sense of absolute feeling, I could feel,

[58:59]

You have a body memory. Yeah, yeah. What has come up for me yesterday, and you mentioned it, is the effort that I make with my body when I'm sitting. And I think, you know, I want to relax, but I'm afraid I relax, I'll collapse. And I can feel the rigidity. That's part of how I live my life. I feel if I don't empty it, you know, I won't do enough. And, you know, then the verse that Ben taught us, you know, this precious life, you know, I get entangled in, you know, doing enough and being grateful enough so it doesn't take forever. Well, that's your challenge.

[60:07]

For you to discover the detail. Sorry. Sorry, Patricia. I mean, I think that was Tara Rupert's challenge with his wonderful parting shot. Do as much as you can and take it easy. And that edge between right effort and straining, pushing, trying, it leads to constriction. It's a very delicate, subtle edge there, but very important. To discover the capacity to be straight, but with ease. I mean, we spend years trying to find that place in our posture. And especially for those of you who are having aching this or that, backs or shoulders or knees or hips or all of the above, it's that exploration.

[61:09]

Where is there that quality of the spine arranged in such a way that the vertebrae are stacked so that I have alignment and I'm straight, but I'm very relaxed. This is, I think, one of the great advantages in spending a little time with Hirata Roshi, for example, because I think he has a kind of ease in his physical body, which when you look at him, you can see it. But he's very attentive. What does that feel like from the inside? Because it doesn't help me to think about it. I have to discover that combination of qualities. Well, this is where if I note thoughts with care, I will note the thoughts that seem to lead immediately to constriction.

[62:11]

Awareness of thoughts and their consequences allows me to see where to hang out with, oh, exhale. All the thoughts that have to do with you're not doing enough, and you aren't doing it perfectly, and you don't know what you're doing anyway, lead to constriction. Habitual judging leads to constriction. Oh. Certain emotional states, fear and anger, lead to constriction. Oh. What can I do? Exhale. Just keep coming back to exhalation. What is the focus in posture that will allow me to go for being straight without tightening? If I think about lifting my chest up or lifting here towards the ceiling, everything comes into alignment with ease. But if I'm focused on...

[63:16]

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