I have a simple topic today. The topic is balance. Each of us sits in our place right now and we are at the... Am I not speaking loudly enough? Each of us sits in our place right now and we are at the focus of our life, we are at the center of many dynamics.

[01:16]

And so the question or the issue for me today is that of how to balance with all these many forces coming together upon our life. For example, for several days there's been, and there still is, on the altar here some little memorial plaques. One to a 25-year-old man whose name is James Scott. And one to a prematurely born baby whose name is Jamie Scott. And one to a woman who died, must have been 80 years old, Lama Govinda's wife, Ligo Tommy.

[02:33]

Her name is on the altar now too. When I offer incense to those, to the Manjushri Bodhisattva and to those recently deceased people. Now every day I do that, the thought crosses my body and mind, just a little bit longer and I too will be dust. Just a little bit longer, I'll be gone. And all my friends too will be gone. There's just a little bit of time left. It's passing very rapidly. And at the same time that I feel that way, I also feel like how wonderful to have these few minutes.

[03:46]

to have these few hours or few days left. Life really is wonderful to...it's wonderful to be alive, to see all these other living beings, to have a morning like this. And I think there's nothing to worry about. Just experience this. a fleeting and exquisite life. And thinking of these deceased people and remembering my own impermanence, I feel quite relaxed and happy. I feel relieved because I don't take myself so seriously and yet I take life seriously moment by moment when I think that way.

[05:02]

Not seriously, but just I appreciate it. I feel grateful to it. I can taste its preciousness. But, or and yet, Life is, part of the wonder of life is that it's very dynamic and it has lots of energy. So on one side I feel relaxed, but then I say, wait a minute, maybe this is too easy. What about all the other people who... don't get to remember their impermanence and are so worried about many things that they don't even have a chance to stop and taste life and experience it. What about these people? So maybe it isn't so easy for me just to sit back and experience it.

[06:08]

Maybe it's a little bit more complicated than that. So then the issue of balance comes up. What's the balance between me just moment by moment experiencing life and moment by moment being concerned for are other people able to do this? So then a balance issue comes up. There are certain things which we can only do for ourselves. No one else can do them for us, and we can't do it for anybody else. Only I can experience what it's like to be affected through this body. That's my job, and same with you. You have the job of tasting your life through your body and mind.

[07:16]

But we're not just introverted people. Part of our nature is that we also somehow care about other people and need other people. So what about them? So here again is the issue of balance between inward awareness of appreciating this fleeting life, this wonderfully fleeting life, and outer awareness appreciating that what we really are is not just this inner experience, but we really are also all these relationships we have. What's the balance between this inner awareness and this outer awareness? Some people are too outer aware. Some people are very concerned for their relationships, and because of that they don't even have time to notice that life is fleeting for them. They're very concerned about maintaining and taking care of their relationships with their friends, but they don't take time to see how they feel about what's going on.

[08:34]

This is too outer directed. And some people are good at keeping track of how they feel and what's happening to them, but lose track of their relationships with others. That's too inner directed. So health The health of life is some kind of balance between inner awareness and outer awareness. It is also possible to spend certain times when you might emphasize one side or the other. Like you might go to the mountains and maybe spend many hours or many days even where you're very inner-directed to go more deeply. And you might go to the city and spend many hours or days or years being very outer-directed to go very deeply into relationships. On the other hand, most people, practically speaking, most people who are out in the streets helping people, most of those people on a daily basis go back inside.

[09:48]

Most people who are really out there in the world and quite effective need a daily drink, a daily drink inside. So maybe only a minute, maybe only ten minutes, or maybe they need an hour. But from the stories and the people I've met, most people who are really effective in helping check inside for balance sake. And vice versa, most great yogis who have attained great insights test their insights and express their insights through their relationships on a daily basis. So what I thought I'd do is just talk about several different kinds of balance.

[10:57]

That's one of them I just talked about. Another one is... I was going to talk about the balance of the body, but another one jumped up in my face, and that's the balance between effort and effortlessness. I didn't say between effort and no effort. I guess you could have a balance between effort and no effort, too. I'd rather say effortlessness. Maybe I'm wrong to say that. Anyway, what's the balance in your effort? I guess I would propose that the way life looks to me, the way I see it is that I don't see any life that's not effortful.

[12:26]

As soon as a baby's born, I see effort, and I see effort in living being until the moment they stop being alive. Some people radiate a lot of vitality, but those who don't radiate a lot of vitality, I can still see that they're very vital. It's just that their vitality is sometimes at odds with itself, that the forces, the vital forces of their life are in conflict. So you may not feel that they're very vital if you see them, but actually they can be seen as very vital. For example, a person with a disease may not seem to be very vital, but actually you can see a tremendously vital scene there. It's just not organized in ways that we're comfortable with.

[13:37]

So sometimes people's vitality is very hard to settle with. But I feel beings are effortful, are enthusiastic about what they're doing. And I guess what I'm concerned about is can I for myself awakened to my own enthusiasm, the enthusiasm that's there all the time. I got the image just now of a puppet. And particularly, I always think of the puppets, the Japanese puppets, which are called Bunraku.

[14:47]

And these puppets are fairly large, maybe three or four feet tall, and very lifelike in their face and in their clothing. And they're operated by, I believe, four puppeteers. a master puppeteer and three apprentices. And the puppeteers wear black. But they stand right out there next to the puppet, underneath it. So you can see them if you look. And all these people, these four human people, are putting their life energy and skill into making this puppet come alive. And when they do, the puppets really do come alive. And when the puppet's not on stage anymore or not a major figure in the play, the puppeteers relax or walk away, and the puppet goes limp. And then the four come back again later and animate the puppet.

[15:50]

But if those four puppeteers want to make the puppet look, you know, extremely angry, they put their energy into the puppet and make the puppet look extremely angry. If they want to make the puppet look, you know, full of energy and bristling with vitality, they put their energy into the puppet and make it look that way. But they can also make the puppet look tired. They can also make the puppet look depressed and discouraged. And for them to make the puppet look discouraged takes as much, or even more maybe, than to make the puppet look enthusiastic. Does that make sense? You could imagine how skillful you'd have to be to make a puppet look dejected or depressed. The energy that goes into making you depressed

[16:59]

or happy or feeling good about yourself or feeling bad about yourself is always the total energy of your life. The labels, the evaluations may change, but you're always just one package of life. You're never more alive or dead. You're always alive when you're alive and dead when you're dead. It's a question of appreciating this vitality, waking up to it. It's sitting right under our noses all the time. This vitality, this living as such, is the best guide for living. Life is the best guide for living. Life is the best indication of what to do. At least that's my proposal.

[18:05]

That's my belief. That's the way I try to live. So now I would like to talk about balancing the body. I sit like this right now and I sit like this a lot and sometimes people come and talk to me about sitting like this and I often get the question, what is correct posture?

[19:14]

What is the right way to sit? is there a right way to sit? Do you have to sit in the right way in order to be awakened? Do you have to be a great athlete to be a Buddha? People ask me these questions. And As you might guess, some of the people who ask me these questions, for example, some people who ask me, like last week, a person, I don't know how old he is, but anyway, he's not so young anymore. He asked me, do you have to be a great athlete? Is it required that you be a great athlete, a great yogi, in order to be a Buddha, in order to wake up? Another person asked me a week or so before that, a real big man, not so old, about 35 or 40, but he has scoliosis.

[20:21]

And he said, I noticed you're very concerned about posture and I wondered, what is the right posture? Do you have to have a certain posture in order to practice Buddhism? And I said, Or sometimes we talk about a straight back. But the question is, what is the meaning of a straight back? That's the question. So this little stick here, it's actually shaped a little bit like a spine. If you look, isn't it? And... almost no one's spine is shaped straight in the sense of the shortest distance between two points. Almost no one. Actually, I met a little boy a while ago that his back is real straight, but that's because he has, I think, meningitis.

[21:25]

And they put a steel rod in his back to hold his back straight because the muscles go and then the spine caves. So they put a They put a steel rod or some kind of a metal rod in his back. His back is actually almost perfectly straight in the sense of geometrically the shortest distance between two points. But most people's backs, of course, have some curve in them, almost always, and the curve varies. So a straight back or correct posture does not mean necessarily any particular geometrical pattern. A straight back or correct posture, as I understand it, means an awake posture or a posture that the living being is awake to or aware of. Correct posture is a posture that you're aware of.

[22:34]

That's what we mean by correct posture. Such awakening or such awareness of your posture that, excuse me for saying so, is required to live an enlightened life. Nobody gets to skip over awareness of their body and still be happy and still be helpful. Nobody's so wise that they don't have to pay attention to their body. Nobody's so compassionate that they get to not be aware of their body. As a matter of fact, compassion is based on awareness of your body. Your body doesn't have to be some particular shape or size or weight or color. Whatever your body is, what is required is that you be aware of it.

[23:43]

So you don't have to be any different from what you are, but you do need to be aware of what you are. So yes, there are requirements, but this is simply the requirement of what you are. The same question has been asked about the breath. Is there some particular kind of breath you have? Now, it would be nice to have calm breath, deep breath, regular breath maybe when you're sitting in meditation. But again, there's no particular breath that is required. What is required is awakeness to the breath or awareness of the breath. That is required. So it's not that you should breathe some particular way, but rather, what way are you breathing now? What way am I breathing now?

[24:52]

As soon as I start to become my word, just as I told you, just as I asked you, what is your breath now, of course I started to notice what my breath was. And I felt different as soon as I asked you the question, what is your breath now, and noticed my own, I felt different. I think I felt, I didn't start to cry, but my eyes started to water a little bit because I felt, I think I felt a little bit sad when I started to pay attention to my breath. And that sadness, I think, has to do with what I said at the beginning, and that is, on one side, life is fleeting, and therefore, let's enjoy it, let's experience it.

[26:37]

But on the other side, well, but right in there anyway, not necessarily on the other side, is that as soon as I start to enjoy it, and see how wonderful it is, especially when it's really wonderful, at that very moment I have trouble actually letting it go. So right in the place where I watch my breathing, I see the wonder of breath, but I also see the breath going away. And if there's a little bit of clinging to the wonder of the breath, then it hurts a little bit when the breath goes. When something's beautiful, when we can see the beauty of our life, then as it becomes more and more beautiful, it becomes more and more difficult just to let it go.

[27:49]

One time Suzuki Roshi was looking out of a window in a house in Vermont on a snowy afternoon and he said, it's so beautiful here I almost forget to die. So there's this balancing thing there between knowing that life is fleeting, knowing that that this wonderful opportunity is shooting by, we appreciate it. We see how beautiful it is. Knowing how beautiful it is, we maybe have trouble letting it go. And then because we hold on to it, we lose the beauty. We start to choke it because we can't die with it. So the appreciation of the beauty, we still have to grieve for it.

[29:00]

Even the appreciation doesn't relieve us from the grieving. So another balancing act is between appreciation and grieving. If I can grieve this moment completely, then I get a new fresh one. If I can let go of this one, another fresh one comes right back. So beautiful. But then I have to grieve that one too. Otherwise this fresh, new, lovely moment will be, I will suffocate myself with it by holding on to it. So poignancy is part of life and joy is part of life. Or the joy has poignancy built into it. It's a dynamic joy. It's not just the smile of the baby's face, it's also the smile of the baby's face and knowing that the baby will die and letting the baby die and be a baby that's one minute older.

[30:08]

Letting the child grow, not holding the child in its present state of beauty. Each breath is a new baby. And if you let go of the last breath, you can feel how wonderfully fresh and lovely that baby breath is. Each moment of your body is a new baby. You get a new body every moment, caused by the old body, but still new, fresh body. If you can let go, if you can grieve and let go of your old body and get a new one, all the more tempted you are to hold on to that new one But still the job's the same. You must let go of the old one, and then you get another new one, a new fresh one, completely clean. But there's a price there, the price of grieving. So my little grief at these people on the altar gives me a little relief, but then I hold on to the relief.

[31:20]

So the relief too, I have to let the relief and appreciation of life, let that go too and even forget that I can appreciate life. Another balancing thing. This is the balance between birth and death, between life and death. One time also, Suzuki Roshi said, most people are pretty good at arriving. They're not so good at dying. And actually, he didn't say arriving, he said aliving. But his accent, it sounded like arriving. But it's true. We're good at aliving. Aliving. And we're not so good at dying.

[32:29]

But if you're not good at dying, again I say, it cuts into your appreciation of your aliving or your arriving. What does Shakespeare say? He says, one should go hither as one comes hence. Is that it in Macbeth? Yeah, one should go hither as one comes hence. Come on. Let's go. Ripeness is all. Is that right? Something like that? Do you know that? You should die just like you were born. Let's go. Come on. Let's move along here. Let's get going with our life. Ripeness is all. The moment is ripe Each moment is ripe.

[33:33]

But if we're not as good at going as we are at coming, we miss the ripeness of the moment. Let's get going. So the posture, the posture of sitting, I sit and I lie down and I stand and I walk And I run, and I swim, and sometimes I even try to dance.

[34:41]

And hopefully I'm dancing in all those postures. That's my intention. Sometimes a rather somber dance, a grave dance sometimes. Particularly in our formal, somewhat Chinese-like ceremonies we do. But when I'm sitting cross-legged or when I'm sitting in meditation, I try to sit in a way where I'm balanced. Now when I sit in a chair, sometimes, it's not that I'm not balanced, but rather that I lean back against the chair. And I'm sort of balanced there too. I mean, I'm not falling over. But I'm not experiencing the balancing because of leaning against the back of the chair. I don't experience the balancing act. The balancing is occurring.

[35:46]

I don't know where it's occurring, but it's hard for me to appreciate it. But when I sit like I'm sitting right now, I can get into the fact that I'm actually balancing up here, especially when I move my arms away from my...especially if I don't lean on my arms. And now I'm reaching inside my robes and pushing this kind of waistband I have. I'm pushing it down a little bit to get into my balancing a little bit more here. So I guess most of you have had instruction in sitting meditation here. And those of you who haven't will receive a little bit of it now. I will talk to you somewhat introspectively about how it is for me and what I do when I sit.

[36:49]

The main thing I want to emphasize today, because I'm talking about balancing, is I want to emphasize how I hold my arms and hands when I sit. And the way I hold them is I... Actually, I alternate the way I hold them. Sometimes I hold my left hand on top of my right hand, and sometimes I hold my right hand on top of my left hand. I alternate, I balance that way. For about, I don't know how many years, but maybe for about 15 years, I just put the left on top of the right, because that's the way it says to do it in the meditation manuals. After many years of yoga students asking why we do it on one side all the time, why we don't balance the other way, and thinking about it, and also by reading some other meditation manuals where they say to do it the other way, I decided that it would be all right to switch.

[38:17]

So now I switch back and forth. And the way I understand now is that the meditation manuals, none of the meditation manuals say you can switch. But I think the reason why they say just one way is because it's much more elegant just to say one way rather than to say, well, you can put this one on top or that one. So I think just for clarity, they emphasize one side or the other. Each side has certain advantages or different qualities. The left on top of the right tends to emphasize passive over active. The left on top has a more passive or calming aspect. The right on top is more active or benefit bestowing quality. They're both meditation mudras but they have that slight difference in quality. So in this case I'm going to because of the way I have my legs crossed

[39:25]

which is my left leg on top, I'm going to put my left hand on top of my right hand, just like my feet. And I join the thumb tips, and then I place my hands against my abdomen. And I place my hands against my abdomen so that my little fingers, these two little fingers here, are on top of each other, and they're touching they're touching the abdomen. And they are below my navel by about three inches. And the thumbs come together at about the height of the navel. One of the key points I want to make is that while I'm doing this, my hands are not resting on my thighs or on my feet.

[40:37]

My hands are not resting on my lap. If I put my hands on my lap, or on my feet or on my whatever, then I'm in something of a tripod posture. And being in a tripod, I don't necessarily need to feel the effort to balance. I'm still doing it, but the balancing aspect is not so clear. Like walking on a tightrope, you just have to put your feet in two spots. You can't put your feet in three spots. Or if you're walking on tightrope and you could have a pole to steady yourself, it would be quite a different experience. But if you have your hands against your abdomen, you're not using your hands or your arms to balance yourself, you can experience, or I can experience, the balancing quality

[41:51]

balancing activity that I'm going through to hold the spine and head up. I actually touch my lower hand to my foot, but I just touch it there sort of to locate it. I don't rest it on my foot. If there were an ant between my foot and my hand, the ant would not be hurt. But the ant might have trouble moving. So it's just contact. It's not really that I'm using...it's not that I'm resting my hands on my feet or on my thighs. So I'm... I don't know if... I'm sort of exaggerating a little bit right now, but I don't know if you can see me, but I'm sort of... I'm sort of... Can you see me?

[42:56]

Anyway, I'm just... I'm balancing here. And I experience in myself... I'm slightly moving constantly in this balancing. Just like... I'm just like this. Just like this stick... except I'm a little bit better at sitting up than I am at holding the stick. But I think that sitting up, I would suggest that sitting up is as much of a feat as this. As much of a feat. Maybe even more, because there's a 25-pound head on the top. But from the time that we're quite young until now, we've been doing this balancing the spine, so we're quite good at it. And most of us, if we put the same effort into balancing sticks, we could do amazing feats with the sticks too.

[43:58]

When you first see a child stand up, if you've ever been there at the moment, when they first stand up and first walk, you can see how, well, you're thrilled, but they're also thrilled. Have you ever seen it happen? It's a thrilling thing to see that success at balancing. And leading up to that moment when they're able to stand up, a lot of their energy is dedicated to learning that. They really want to learn how. And when they learn how, they're very thrilled and then for some period of time, a week or I don't know how long, a week or Two weeks, they still keep being thrilled at their new skill. And then little by little, they get used to it, and they forget how thrilling it is to stand up and walk. So part of what I'm talking about is reawakening to the miracle of being able to sit up and stand up.

[45:09]

to all that you go through, to what an amazing organism you are to be able to walk and stand up. And when sitting, it may sound right now to you that, I don't know how this strikes you, that this feeling of balance is, that I do really feel this, that I'm balancing almost like holding that stick. But as I do this for a little while, the balancing becomes, in a sense, more difficult. While it may be somewhat enjoyable. But to keep it up requires just as much attention after five minutes or after two hours as it did at the first moment. So I believe, see I have a faith in this balancing act because when I'm doing this balancing, although in a sense it's boring, I am experiencing the balancing of my body.

[46:24]

In other words, I am experiencing my life activity. This simple act of balancing...through this simple act of balancing I tune into...it gives me access to my vitality. It gives me access to something which I'm doing all the time, but which I don't necessarily notice. We have an expression in Zen meditation to sit still.

[47:33]

And if you watch an experienced meditator from a distance, they may look like they're sitting fairly still. My experience is that the experienced meditator that looks like they're sitting very still is the person who knows most vividly and most momentarily or moment by momently that they're moving. They experience that each moment their body changes. that if we don't experience that instant by instant vibration or that change, then we look to others like we're not sitting so still.

[48:48]

But the one who looks most still is the one who feels the most movement. If you think over moments, of course, there's a lot of movement. Blood's flowing through you. Food's being metabolized. The breath is moving through the body. There's a lot of movement. So sitting still does not mean that this person sits down and doesn't move for the next five minutes. Sitting still means sitting still can only occur in the present. You can't sit still in two presence, in two moments. You can only sit still in a given moment because that's temporary and that moves. That doesn't move but just goes away and then you get a new moment. So the sitting still is not something you hold yourself to for some period of time.

[49:52]

Sitting still means tune into the present where you never move. So sitting still occurs in the present and it always occurs in the present. It never occurs any place else and nobody ever moves in the present. So when we talk about sitting still we mean wake up to the fact that you never move in the present. and that your sense of movement comes totally through your imagination. By experiencing balancing, you tune into that present moment where you are balanced. And that's fleeting, and then you have to find it in the next moment. That's what we mean by sitting still. So sitting still is the initiation into reality of the immovable present, which is also awakening to your body.

[51:06]

In each moment we are balanced. In each moment we're like a baby sitting in his high chair eating a spoon of oatmeal. We're right there completely having that experience, not the least bit having a previous experience, not the least bit having a future experience. Just being there, that's actually where we always are. but it's fleeting and then we're in another one. Experiencing balance in various dimensions tunes us into that place. So the part of the problem is how to how to be vulnerable or open to this issue of balance.

[52:24]

Because otherwise we don't notice, we have trouble noticing what's happening. So how can I place myself in a situation where I will be able to experience the balance of my life or experience the transiency of my life? This is the kind of question that poses itself every moment. May all...

[53:46]

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