Good morning. As I'm sure most, if not all of us know, this is the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and what comes up for me, came up for me this morning as I was sitting was a a statement by Paul Reps, who some of you may know, a very eccentric Buddhist. One time when he was visiting at Gringolch at work meeting, he said, you people are meditating too long. One minute is probably the most you'll have of real presence. Yeah, I think so. Anyway, one of his calligraphies is drinking tea, I stopped the war.

[01:08]

I think we might all consider what he was pointing at. And in not all of the Buddhist world, but in much of the Buddhist world, especially in the northern part of East Asia. Tomorrow is the day that is set aside for commemorating the enlightenment or full awakening of the Buddha. I always enjoy this juxtaposition of December 7th and December 8th. Two people that I have quite a close connection with killed themselves in the last couple of weeks.

[02:10]

So I've been sitting with the kind of puzzle paradox of such an action for someone who has declared themselves as a follower of the Buddha's teachings. And what I come to is that if we keep anything hidden, if we keep anything hidden, what Jesus said was so right. If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. Wonderful quotation that some of you know from the book of gradual sayings Hard rains the rain on covered things No rain rains hard on open things So open ye the covered things and no hard rain will rain on that But what are the covered things?

[03:51]

In that context the footnote says the covered things are our faults. My experience is that we all have something about ourselves that we don't want anyone else to know. And I have been particularly recently really struck by a kind of energy that's released when someone tells what they don't want anyone to know to one other person. Energy that has about it the quality or capacity for release. One of the terrible things about gunny-sacking, you all know what that means.

[04:59]

Stuffing what I don't want to acknowledge or talk about into a big sack that I drag around. I keep it closed, but I drag it along behind me. You know, gunny sack is a big sack that you put gunnies in, whatever gunnies are. Stuff, you know, you just put stuff in it. This time of year I put leaves in it to dump into the compost pile. You know, you could put anything in a sack, but if it's the same thing that stays in the sack without light or air, it gets very funky. Very funky. So I'd like to, on the eve of the day that in the tradition that is Home Path for me acknowledges as the day of celebrating the Buddha's awakening, I'd like to talk again about the answers to this question, exactly what am I doing in meditation?

[06:17]

Do I know what I'm doing? If I don't know, am I willing to acknowledge that I don't know? A couple of years ago, an old friend of mine, someone who's been practicing for nearly 30 years, admitted, I actually don't know what I'm doing in my meditation. This is someone who regularly sits in the teaching seat. such a heartbreaking acknowledgement. This question about what am I doing in my meditation and do I understand what meditation in the path of the Buddha's teachings is really about.

[07:21]

has a kind of sharp edge for me today, because one of the people who killed herself was a follower in the Zen tradition, fiercely against violence, almost stridently so. had a gun, which her husband did not know she had, and shot and killed herself while he was out walking the dog. So I sit in my grief for her passing, asking myself, what did she hide from herself? I can only imagine.

[08:24]

But what keeps coming up for me is that what I know out of my own practice and practicing with others is that whatever reactive emotions we have, if we drop deep enough, what we will come to eventually is fear. And for many of us, we have this idea that we should get rid of fear. For many of us, we think that the point of meditation is to be calm and serene. And I think that's a big mistake. It may be that out of the cultivation of a meditation practice, we have the experience of calmness or serenity sometimes. But then what happens is we see the fruit of meditation as the point of meditation, and it isn't.

[09:30]

The point of meditation is to develop our capacity to be present with whatever arises even if it's smelly, stinky, stuff I feel ashamed of, stuff I don't know how to be with, the whole show. This is a pathway for studying the mind, that is, studying the mind as it is this morning. Imperfect, flawed, whatever our judgment is about our mindstream. And to begin to be able to distinguish between what is characteristic of an untrained mind, among other things, being very busy, like a monkey jumping around from one bush to another.

[10:32]

People keep telling me, What a terrible mind stream they have because their mind is so busy. It's not a terrible mind stream. That's a mind stream that is doing what the untrained mind is up to. Looking at this and this and this and this. Distraction. And then there are the patternings in the mind stream that arise that we call reactions that come from our conditioning. from our experiences from even before we were born. And of course we can go so easily to despair when we begin to see what's actually true about our mind stream coming from our conditioning, our habits, we can get very discouraged. if we don't have somebody who's a little bit ahead of us who has actually discovered that I can study and dismantle conditioning and I can train the mind for wholesomeness.

[11:48]

I can train the mind for the capacity slowly and steadily to be present with what I'm accustomed to saying, I can't stand it, I can't be with this, I hate it, I want to get rid of it. which of course just feeds the reactive patterns. One of the things that happens in the practice of meditation in this tradition is that we begin to have the experience, not in the head, but the actual direct experience of the inseparability between what's going on in the physical body, what's going on in our state of mind, what's going on with our breath. So, for example, I may have certain physical habits. I have for a long time had the tendency to have my left foot slightly farther forward than my right foot, as it is right now.

[12:55]

So I sit on this carpet where there's a line and I keep adjusting. Can I do that noticing and adjusting without judging and criticizing, but oh, can I do the same thing with habits in the body, the tendency to sit slightly leaning forward or with the head to one side or the other or the chin sticking out or sitting a little bit out of alignment, whatever. There's this intimate relationship between what's going on in the physical body, in the mind, and in the breath. And the whole focus is particularly harped on in Zen more than the other traditions.

[13:58]

But I think as long as there isn't too much rigidity, the attention to the alignment of the head, the heart chakra, and the hara as the arrangement of the physical body that accompanies attention. Just begin to pay attention in the course of the day. When you're out of attention, just check your posture. Oh, I've got the window rolled down on the car and I'm driving with one hand and I'm listening to the radio and how present am I? What happens if I turn the radio off and I have both hands on the steering wheel and I have my legs aligned so that I'm actually upright I notice immediately a difference in the quality of attention as I'm driving the car. So the through line, I don't care whether you're practicing in the Theravadan tradition or in Zen or in Vajrayana, the through line in all of the schools of meditation in Buddhism

[15:17]

has to do with the cultivation of attention, which in time is stable and has more and more energy. What's the point of that? Well, if we begin to have a few small tastes of being present, we discover the benefits of being present. suddenly I see the situation I'm in more clearly and it may be one in which I might say, excuse me, but it's time for me to leave. Or, oh, look at that, I'm running around minding everybody else's mindstream. A very big attraction. Let me mind someone else's mindstream so I don't mind have to mind my own, which is of course the only one I can mind.

[16:23]

And conventionally in the Buddhist tradition, but not exclusively, the focus for placed attention is the breath. Or I would propose more fruitfully, the alignment of the upper torso and the breath. How many of you think, oh, my meditation is crummy because I can't stay with the focus of attention? Oh, I want to be able to climb Everest in the first week or a year or first 10 years. So what we're doing is we're training for more and more moments of attention, not right away, attention and stay there.

[17:29]

It's just, it's not in the cards, it's not realistic. This is why the first stage of meditation is called constant placement, because I place attention on posture and breath, and then there's wandering. And you know, half an hour or a week later, I know, oh, where have I been? Just notice, oh, wandering. That's the point at which the harping judge leaps in. So I'm also training for noticing without judging. Noticing and returning. Both in formal practice and in the course of the day. You may notice that the impermanence altar which I usually take down by the beginning of December. I can hardly bear to take it down. It's pretty good this year.

[18:29]

I think what's going to help me is that I have a beautiful turquoise Tiffany box into which I'm going to put the desiccated mole. So someone who practices here who's been a reluctant meditator on impermanence, quite reluctant, wrote to me recently that a bird flew into the window of her office where she just recently put in a big sliding glass door into the garden. And of course the bird broke its neck and fell dead to the deck right outside the door. She had it on her altar, and then she said, well, I think I'll take it up to my studio. She's an artist, and I'll draw it. And of course, what she wasn't planning on was that along with the dead bird came maggots.

[19:32]

So I kept getting these emails about how much she hates the maggots. And what's going to happen, pretty soon my whole studio is going to be filled with maggots? Thinking. Because after a while, you know, the maggots had done their job and then they were, you know, a cluster of dead maggots on the floor. Be careful. If you meditate on impermanence long enough, you'll get to the point where you'll be completely enthralled with maggots. I can testify. But what about what I see as a maggot in the mind? What about certain reactive patterns that I'm not so thrilled to see? That I jump on with judgment and aversion?

[20:41]

Fear. Oh, I'll always be like this. Oh, really? What else will always be filling the blank? Anything? So if I show up and sit down on a regular basis, I begin to see the aspects of the mind that I had taken as a given and as truth-telling, and I begin to see, oh, this is really Swiss cheese. I can hear some of you say, yeah, [...] that's what you say. But I know this from my own experience that my relationship to the conditioned reactive patterns in my own mind stream are not permanent, can be dismantled through the placement of attention for a moment on that reactive pattern at the point at which

[21:52]

my capacity for attention has begun to build a certain degree of energy. That's what the Buddha meant when he talked about there is not only suffering, but there is a possibility of the liberation from suffering. Suffering is what we add to pain with reactivity. Some in sitting, if the head's going to be really balanced on the shoulders, and I want my eyes to be at about a 45 degree angle, a few of you then sit like this, as though the head and the eyes were not able to function separate from each other. And of course when I do this, I close off the breathing here, I get a crick in my neck,

[22:53]

I'm no longer having the alignment of the head, the heart chakra, and the heart. And that's likely to be a habit. And anything that is habitual is going to be difficult to see. What is familiar will be difficult to notice. One of the reasons for sitting regularly or doing a combination, I think, ideally, of sitting and walking, is I begin to develop a capacity to notice what I haven't been noticing because it was so familiar. So for those of us who've grown up with the cranky judging habit, it's so familiar we don't even notice this radio station in the mind, which nevertheless has a quite potent effect on us in terms of our energy.

[23:57]

Tune into that station and watch your energy sink. You always and you never and you're a creep. My advice is don't listen to that station. The airwaves being what they are, those thoughts will come, but do I need to entertain them? Do I need to invite them in for tea? Or can I let them come and go? Or for some of us, can I do an antidote practice? Can I actually pick up attention or inattention in the familiar groove of judgment and put it on the groove of quick, 10 things I'm grateful for. It's like discovering sugar for the first time.

[25:02]

Oh, wow. I like it. How quickly we forget about gratitude and appreciation It's like the dial on the radio of the mind keeps flipping to negative thoughts. So I have to be dogged and patient about, oh, that's where the mind is wandering to. Come back to aligned posture of the upper body and the breath. Wandering placement. Wandering placement. Wandering placement. For those of you who are kind enough to periodically send me weather reports, I am struck by how often I hear, well, I wasn't able to stay in attention. So, I was only able to stay in attention for a couple of breaths.

[26:08]

That's cause for celebration. Oh, I forgot about a certain mindfulness practice. Did you give yourself some little reminder, some little sign or picture or... Oh no, I just thought I'd remember the practice I said I was going to do and then three weeks later I realized I haven't done it once. And then what do I do? I kill myself with beating myself up because I didn't remember to do what I said I was going to do. The source of undercutting our confidence and our ability to do what we say we're going to do. I know I'm not going to remember what it is I want to remember unless I give myself some little reminders until that new groove begins to get set a little bit.

[27:15]

I have a very good time, actually, dreaming up ways to remind myself of what I want to remember but have a habit of forgetting. Keep in mind that the template relationship in the Buddhist tradition is that of a mother with her only newborn child. I could just hear certain radio stations going to, not my mother. But how many of us whose mothers weren't very good at mothering and actually discovered our ability to mother our own children or a child that was maybe not even related to us. With tenderness, with interest, with curiosity. One of our little dogs is

[28:29]

having quite a hard time and barks a lot. And she's on some, a series of medications that make her need to drink a lot. And of course, then it means she has to pee a lot and her legs have given out on her. So I have to hold her to do peeing and pooping. She's lost all her hair off her back end. I looked at her the other day and I thought, oh, preview of coming attractions. Not just for her, but moi. Those of you who've read Tuesdays with Morrie know, you know, Morrie said, I'm out of here when I can't wipe my own ass. He did change his mind. reluctantly, kicking and screaming, but came to swim in the kindness of those who took care of him as he was dying.

[29:45]

And I noticed with Little Bear that my initial reaction to this regular and frequent barking was, ugh, put it on tape, you know. But of course, every time she barks, it's because she needs some help with something. She's not barking just to bug me. Not at all. Am I willing to be interested in the reactivity that arises in the night when she's barking for the fourth or fifth time and I haven't gotten enough sleep? Am I willing to use any situation in which some reaction arises as the occasion for studying that horizon?

[30:55]

not thinking about it, but simply noticing, oh, impatience, fear, judgment. I cannot heal I want to encourage those of you who are new to meditation to pay attention to your posture, but please don't be too strict. The strictness will drive away the quality of ease. And one of the things I've learned over the years is that I do not have what I call the accidents of insight. the accidents of some dropping into a moment of wisdom, of seeing clearly, unless I'm cultivating the quality of ease.

[32:11]

And it's very, very easy to get caught by the forms in meditation. and some sense of strictness without the accompanying quality of ease and relaxation. How easily I can go into the reaction of forcing and pushing to sit a little longer than is perhaps appropriate before I move or adjust my posture or stand or walk, whatever. The cultivation of a tender, open heart with whatever arises within the mind will help me not go to fear and its covering emotion of anger, will help me not go to war.

[33:20]

will help me begin to see some possibilities for connection and at the same time be clear about taking a stand about actions that lead to harming. Individually and collectively. So please don't get sidetracked with the qualities that arise from meditation of calmness or serenity, sometimes, as what you're going for. I would argue that what we're going for is our capacity to be present even with the firestorms of the mind. And sometimes we try to stay with what's arising that has a lot of energy sitting still when what would be kindly and actually more effective is to get up and walk.

[34:37]

We can stay with difficult states in movement and out of that develop our capacity to stay with a difficult state of mind, a difficult emotional state sitting still. Oh, I want to have a daily practice. If you can't cultivate sitting for 30 minutes, start with five. So that we can build on success, we don't build on failure. And if we beat ourselves up about what we are doing, we're going to stop doing it. In some meditation circles, there's this statement about no pain, no gain. Pain is not the problem.

[35:41]

It's the suffering of our reactions to pain. Pain just goes with having a body and being alive. Okay, I think that's enough from me. So I wonder if you have questions or things you'd like to bring up for us to talk about? Yeah? When you said the person who you referred to had been practicing for 30 years and talked about not knowing what meditation is about, why did you say that was heartbreak? Because this is a person I know as being very dedicated, very sincere, and that kind of wandering in the foggy mists in the wire patch is a horrible waste of time for someone who actually has some intention to wake up, but hasn't had access to the kind of guidance for how to do the waking up.

[36:57]

that there is a very clearly articulated pathway. And one of the problems, this is somebody who's been practicing in the Zen tradition for a long time, and one of the big problems in Zen as it's practiced in the West, particularly coming from Japan, is that the teachings are all there but they're implied. because in Japanese culture, which is a body culture, people communicate enormously effectively non-verbally. We are not a body culture, we're a mind culture. And I for a long time thought there was something wrong with me, but when I discovered a teacher who could talk about the territory and the mapping of meditation, the details of the sequences of practices and cultivations was an enormous relief and it was only later after I had practiced in both the Theravada tradition and in Vajrayana that I could see all of that is there in Zen.

[38:06]

But it wasn't unpacked, it wasn't articulated. So for me the heartbreak is for this person to feel terrible about his own practice. What he said to me that day he had never said to another person because he was afraid to. Because that was the part of it that I guess I responded to was that after 30 years where he seemingly had a practice that you thought was, you know, had some substance that he could acknowledge. And then from that point on the possibility of changing was there. Well, only if the person responds to the possibility of, oh, a map? Tell me about this map. Oh no, it's not Zen.

[39:09]

And I think we have to take our instructions from wherever we can get them. And I know for me, studying particularly in the Theravadan tradition and seeing how much of the teachings from the tradition of the elders is embedded in the forms of Zen, I began to see, oh, the forms are about the cultivation of mindfulness. And if you are in a situation where there's too much strictness about their rules about what you do and what you don't do, and they're presented as rules to be hung on to rather than vehicles for the cultivation of mindfulness and awareness, which are the elements that lead to what I'm talking about with respect to stable, energized attention. It's not a mystery. John.

[40:15]

Good morning. Good morning. Could you say more about bringing forth what is there and what we may be hiding? One of the reactions I had to it was the idea of someone being overly neurotic and kind of being the center of the universe and I'm responsible for causing this and that and all kinds of things. Is or isn't responsible. Is. taking on too much responsibility for what happens to themselves or their world. So I guess what I'm asking is, what is it that we need to be able to face ourselves and reveal? Well, it varies from one person to another, and I would be very careful of those kinds of very general statements that help me stay away from something in particular.

[41:20]

You know, the labeling of, oh, I'm just neurotic. Well, maybe I'm neurotic, but maybe I'm puffing that up. I mean, I can give you an example. When I was, I had three sons, and when I was younger, I don't think I was a particularly good parent, Right And that's something you feel badly about now I have regrets, you know well See, I think one of the very interesting kind of through lines in the Buddhist meditation path has to do with This question that gets posed in lots of different ways, which is What do I regret with the longer term aiming of can I begin to live in such a way that at the end of the day I don't have anything I regret. But of course for most of us we've got that gunny sack full of old regrets and we then get to go through the details of those regrets and ask ourselves is there something I can do something about and is there

[42:40]

And this is a regret that I have now, but I can't undo those past actions. I think for any of us who is a parent, I've not yet met anyone who has children who doesn't have regrets about the kind of parent they were with their children, especially when they were young, especially with our firstborn. Can't we throw that one away and start all over again? Firstborn wouldn't like that. And, you know, this is where the practice of confession, expression of regret, renewal of intention, even if I'm going through the steps, gritting my teeth, dragging myself, kicking and screaming, going through the motions, begins to unlock a kind of compassion around whatever it is that I regret.

[43:47]

And at least what I regret that I can't undo, the kind of parent I was when my kids were very young. I can make some, I can be taught by what I regret in terms of my intention for the day and longer term. I can only express my regret to my children as fully as I can and then they don't want to keep hearing about it. And to be as good a parent, as open-hearted a parent with my children now. Absolutely. And, you know, for me, working this ground eventually led to my understanding something about my own childhood and the kind of parent my mother was, which was everything about the kind of parenting she received when she was little, which I know enough about to know that it was pretty terrible.

[45:06]

So, out of that open-heartedness with limitations, with flaws, with not doing it perfectly, is a possibility of what Winnicott talks about as being the good enough parent. Can I be the good enough meditator? And you know, I think it takes some 10, 15, 20 years to begin to consistently no longer have regrets. But it's certainly one of the pointing out focuses around impermanence, around our own dying. The aiming of, at the moment of death, whenever that comes, may I be free of regrets. Well, if I wait until that moment, I'm in trouble. I have to be willing to work with the regret territory day by day, half a day at a time, moment by moment.

[46:19]

And also, I was going to say, too, the feelings that arise at those times. Hold tenderly and allow them to arise. Don't feed them. They'll rise and they'll be gone. It's the feeding, it's the storytelling, it's the oive going on and on. Yeah. What I'm doing is I'm regenerating and re-energizing a reactive pattern. And we're afraid of certain emotional states. So what do we do? We're afraid of being afraid. What do we do? Let me out of here, distraction. And we have some notion that we should get rid of those emotional states that we have a hard time being with, and it's completely incorrect.

[47:21]

The point is to change my relationship to those emotional states, not get rid of the emotions that will arise. There's a huge difference. And when I can begin to change my relationship to emotional states that I have a hard time being with, my capacity to be present with another person's suffering increases like that. I can't do that until I've changed the inner relationship with myself. And at a certain point, can we be willing to accept that our adult children, it's their story, it's their play. I am no longer fully responsible for everything that's happening to my 42-year-old son.

[48:24]

He's on his own ticket now. Thank you. Because we can get stuck there. It's one of the variations on minding someone else's mindstream. Painful. Painful to be with someone we really care about when they're making a mess of things. Or, you know, whatever. Okay. That's it. Thank you. What would you mean when you said that Japanese culture is a body culture and many of the steps are implied? Are what? Implied? I wouldn't say many. I would say the whole Buddhist meditation tradition is implied. Both Suzuki Roshi and Kadokiri Roshi had teachers

[49:32]

who they kept saying, you know, teach me, teach me. And the teachers each said, stop talking and scrub my back, you know, washing the teacher's back and the hofura, et cetera. Japanese culture is a culture that is, for centuries, quite suffused with the teachings of Buddhism. Quite what? Suffused with the teachings of Buddhism. And there are very subtle shifts in the face and in the body, which Japanese people read with each other very accurately. Not even as gross as a raised eyebrow. I can remember the first time I rode in a taxi in Kyoto, and every time I rolled down my window, the driver rolled down his window, and then I rolled my window up, and then he rolled his window up.

[50:42]

But you know, that was the relational thing to do. I think that the people in our own culture who have this kind of training often are people who are trained in certain sports, and people who do certain creative work and certain kinds of work that's primarily physical. So for example, you learn how to hold a tool in relationship to the weight like a hammer. You learn how to hold the hammer so that in relationship to the weightedness of the head and to allow the weightedness of the hammerhead to strike the nail instead of trying to hit it. So there's a kind of relationship, physical relationship with the hammer and the characteristics of the hammer and you're holding it in your arm, et cetera.

[51:47]

What happens, for example, if you take on the mindfulness practice of walking through a doorway with the foot stepping over the threshold of the leg closest to the hinged side of the door. Pretty soon, every doorway you go through that has a hinged door becomes the occasion for the cultivation of mindfulness. and you're not thinking about it, it begins to be a kind of sensing and being present in that moment that's very much in the body. What's the difference if we walk in the way we're used to walking? I'm not sure I can do this because my hip's a little cranky today, but you know, what's the difference? First of all, if I walk with the ball of the foot coming to the floor first, that's not so familiar.

[53:22]

So I tend to be more present when I'm walking in that way because there's a kind of freshness. I don't quite have as much callusing in the ball of the foot as I do on the heel. I think you can walk mindfully with the heel first and then the rest of the foot. The big indicator is noise. If there's noise with an activity that I'm engaged in, I'm probably less in attention. That's why when we eat in the more formal way during retreats, you know, for people who are unfamiliar with that particular style of eating, what you get to run into is how often we're out of attention with the details of eating. A friend of ours who just visited was talking about how in her ordinary day during work, she eats lunch at her desk and either works or reads something.

[54:30]

Lots of, you know, keep myself distracted and busy. What happens if we just eat? If you go to a traditional temple or a tea house in Japan, there will often be an arrangement of the stepping stones that affects the pace and size of your footsteps as you enter into the temple. That actually slows you down, has the effect of slowing you down. There's no sign that says, This is a practice path. I mean, I have a little sign there on the front step that says, no shoes on the deck. Well, first you have to see the sign. But you know, for example, especially during retreats, if I'm going back and forth between here and the kitchen, if I take my shoes off,

[55:46]

If I back out of my sandals onto the deck, then when I'm ready to go to the kitchen, they're aimed towards the kitchen and I just step from the deck into the shoes. If I always turn in a clockwise direction, whether I'm walking or turning at my seat or turning around into or out of my shoes, I have a different level of being in attention that's more body-based. It's not, now, what am I supposed to do? It's not, I'm not negotiating by thinking. And I think it's one of the reasons why in Japan there's such a high level of extraordinary fantasy life. You know, read adult comic books in Japan, they're a trip. But I think it's because ordinary daily life happens without having to think your way through the details of how to get from here to there. Interestingly, a lot of that capacity for being in attention just vanishes when you get out of the traditional culture, which is now beginning to be more often the case than not.

[57:00]

They're beginning to live the way we do, fast. I think anybody who's had significant experience with a physical some physical-based activity, you have some sense about what you know without relying primarily on thinking it out. It's hard to talk about. That right in itself is a little bit of a contradiction, not a little bit, a big contradiction in terms. So I think it's a very important time for us to consider the actions that we engage in that lead to disharmony and war, both individually and collectively.

[58:10]

And to be sobered by this anniversary and encouraged by the anniversary that is marked tomorrow. The first time I went on pilgrimage to India, I was in Bodh Gaya at this time of year. I was there for a few weeks. And the main stupa there at this time of year is covered with those little tiny Christmas tree lights strings and strings and strings of them. And then in the garden around the stupa are thousands of butter lamps. So, and people are in the garden around the stupa doing practices 24 hours a day for weeks, much of December. prostrations, meditating, chanting, you name it, it's happening.

[59:25]

With people from all over the Buddhist world. That trip was a very big help and kind of further nudge to drop out of the madness of this time of year in this culture. So my strong recommendation is practice kindness and generosity and enjoy your winter, these winter days. They are not very wintry, but the night is, the night sky is Pretty extraordinary. And I don't know about where you guys live, but the winter birds, even though it's not cold, have arrived.

[60:28]

Bill's been sitting in a chair there on the front pathway, watching sometimes 15 different species in that Himalayan dogwood coming in to get drunk on the fruit. It's pretty thrilling. Nice to see you all. Thank you for coming. Take good care of yourselves. Oh, I have a request. If you are paid for the morning with cash, would you be willing to put your name on the money? It helps the accounting. The accountant will be very happy. Take care of yourselves. A list of some possible practices. I want to thank all of you very much for your attention and participation and willingness to talk about what's come up for you and doing the various practices that we've been working with.

[61:33]

I think there are a few of you who still have tapes, and I would appreciate if I could have them back by the 10th of July, if that's possible. And if there are any of you who did not get your name on an earlier list giving me your, if you have an email address, you can call it to me at 415-388-5572. And when the much promised website is up, I'll send out a message. will be closed for the month of July for retreat. So we won't be having any half days until August. And I want to, again, express my deep gratitude to all of you for your participation. And tell you how much I, once again, in this non-repeatable universe, enjoy these classes and working with all of you.

[62:41]

So thank you very much. Take good care of yourselves.

[62:44]

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