We suffer, we have misery. So the Buddha described a way of balancing the clean experience without grasping them. Philosophically, these extremes can be the extreme opinion that things exist, or the other extreme that they do not exist. Grasping either of these extremes, we get in trouble. Another extreme we can grasp, or two other extremes, are the extreme view that things are permanent. or the other extreme, that things are completely destroyed. Grasping either of these extremes also leads us to two different varieties of nuclear.

[01:09]

In terms of our daily conduct, there's some examples of extremes, or the extreme of taking things seriously. Or the other extreme is denying them. Or the extreme of trying too hard or being lazy. And we can go on. In almost all moments of our life and thinking, there are extremes. And it's easy to grasp the extremes. because there, things are dead. We've reached the limit of ignorance, and you can get a hold of it. But in the middle, in the balanced place between extreme position, we cannot grasp.

[02:16]

And since we cannot grasp, we are free. So the good way is to find the middle where things are unwrappable. And we're free from cleaning. And therefore, free from suffering, which in right is from cleaning. OK? Did you understand what I just said? Now, a concrete example of this I'd like to give you tonight, and that is the balancing of the body I started a practice period. Now I will be sitting. I'd like to talk about how to balance the body. And as I talk about this, I can only talk about it from the point of view of my own experience.

[03:25]

So please bear with me. You don't have to do what I'm telling you I'm doing and what I do. Just listen to it and see how what I say applies or doesn't apply to your body. Once your legs are crossed or however you put your legs, There's not much balancing you need to do with your legs. The balancing starts basically from your pelvis up. Your pelvis and basically your spine up. From there, the balancing. That's what I'm going to be talking about. And I'll talk about the pelvis first and basically what I would suggest. is that you try to make the pelvis vertical, perpendicular to the ground.

[04:36]

The human pelvis, as you may know, if you look at gorilla pelvises or chimpanzee pelvises, the way that they work, and also dog pelvises, I think, and cow pelvises, most animals are somewhat similar to our skeleton, but who walk I had four legs, a good share of time. Their pelvises are more bowl-shaped. They're more like this, with the animals walking around like sit. And they have more bowl-shaped structure. Our pelvis gradually evolved, so it came up and flattened out. And it kind of, you know, degreed like I said. So the pelvis still has a kind of cup-like quality to it. But basically, the pelvis of a human being is fairly flat. And it actually can be balanced on the .

[05:40]

Part of the pelvis is what we sit on. And then the pelvis can like that. And you can actually basically kind of put the pelvis so that it's balanced pretty much forward and backwards. Most of us sit. with the pelvis tilted backwards or forward a little. People with big upper bodies, men tend to be a little bigger than women, tend to have their pelvis tilted back more. It may be easier for a small person to tilt their pelvis forward. Generally speaking, I'm recommending this to make the pelvis as much as possible vertical. In other words, balance it. It's hard to find the balance point. So what sometimes helps you find it is sometimes you go a little bit beyond balance.

[06:46]

So you look slightly curved at the back. That sometimes helps you find, for me, when I get a feeling of arching my back slightly, my back is actually straight. That's just for me. So I make a little effort to curve it, and then I check occasionally to see if it's actually curved. If it's curved, then I straighten up a little bit. Curving it for a long period of time, my back hurts. But for me, to actually make it vertical, I had a feeling of arching my leg, because you're not going to see this, but it's logical. I make an effort to push the top of my pelvis forward that I don't actually look at when I'm making that effort vertically. And when I do that, I do a little pull around the muscles in those two bones that push up in the lower back. I do a little pull and I actually straighten my cuffs.

[07:50]

Each person will be different. Some people naturally sit straight. And if they make this effort of arching, they'll actually arch. Some people actually arch too much. Statistically speaking, it's less common for people to arch too much than to do the other way. Both of them are a bit extreme, because both of them are kind of using muscles to hold up. The balance points, you don't need much muscle. You can actually be . And it may be that some of us have to do some stretching exercises in order to actually be able to tilt the toes up. You may have to stretch your hamstring and do some kind of hip stretches, both in front of your hips, the muscle at the hip flexors. You may have to stretch your buttocks and canister and so on in order to actually allow yourself to hold it back straight.

[08:58]

But I would suggest you work towards trying to find your pelvis in position, put your pelvis in a vertical position. If any of you try this and have trouble, I'd be happy to show you some exercises that would help you be able to do that. The main exercise that helps though is to sit and try to do it. But if you try, you'll be able to do it eventually. So from there, the next thing I would like to pay attention to is the spine. And you may have heard in Zen, or Buddhism anyway, about sitting with a straight back or a straight spine. And when we say sit with a straight back or a straight spine,

[10:04]

We don't mean exactly the shortest distance between two points. If you could actually steer it in the back, that steering probably wouldn't be the right for most people. I've made a run of anybody that has a perfectly straight back. It's actually a natural curvature of your spine. So when I say straight back, I don't mean straight like this. What I mean by straight back And what I think other Buddhist practitioners mean by straight back is an awake back. Sometimes people, sometimes old people ask me, sometimes people who have scoliosis or some other kind of back deformation ask me, is it necessary to have to have a certain shape spine in order to attain enlightenment.

[11:11]

And I say, no, it's not necessary to have a particular shape spine in order to attain enlightenment, but it is necessary to have an awake spine in order to attain enlightenment. So the correct posture in Buddhist meditation, whether you're sitting or standing or lying down, the correct posture is what we call the posture of suchness, the posture as such, the posture as it really is. Whatever posture you're in, your posture as it is is the correct posture. But your posture as it is is not just some objective phenomenon. Your posture as it is is a posture that you're aware of as it is. So the correct posture is a posture that you are awake to. The correct spine is a spine that you are awake to, that you are aware of.

[12:20]

And aware of the whole thing. So no matter what shape your spine is, no matter what your karmic background, no matter how much you weigh and no matter how old you are, arguably, it is possible for you to wake up to your spine. And if you try to wake up to your spine, you may notice that you can feel or imagine. Imagining is okay, too. That you can feel and or imagine your spine, some part of your spine. But I would guess that if you try right now to feel your spine, the entire spine, from the face to the top, up to the top of your head, you have to feel the whole spine to wake up to the whole spine.

[13:26]

I would guess there's some parts of it that you're more aware of than others. Is that right? Anybody equally aware of the whole thing? If not, that's fine. You're aware of the whole thing. I don't begrudge you that. But just to say that most of us usually find one part a little darker than the rest. So what is possible? Work towards trying to feel your pulse count from the top of your head to the base of your spine. Try to wake up to it. It's there. And if you can wake up to it, then you also can come and feel a little bit, whether you feel like you're leaning forward or leaning backwards or side to side.

[14:28]

But actually, it may not be so easy to feel your balance unless you hold your hand a little bit in a certain way. And so the main thing I'm going to emphasize tonight is how to hold a hand and arms. Right now, if you look at me, see how I'm holding my hands? This is a cookie. I'm holding my hand, and Paul is going to chat with me. But there's nothing wrong with this. But with my hands like this, I'm not so acutely aware of my balancing could still feel somewhat correct on my spine and balance, but my head is balancing. What I'm going to recommend is a way that I pull my head that heightens the activity, that heightens the awareness of the activity of balancing.

[15:40]

So as I say, right now my hands are basically resting on the feet. And some weight from my forearms and my hand is picking up on the feet. In other words, I'm slightly leaning on the feet. And therefore, the balancing act of my spine is not so long. I'm not balancing my spine because I'm even leaning on my feet. Just like if you're leaning on the chair or the wall, you may not be aware of balancing so much. So I'm going to talk about, actually in a few stages, how to increase the sense of balance. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to, my hands are just kind of clapped, and I'm going to make a mudra. And I'm also going to start by balance.

[16:50]

I still have my hands on my feet. And then I'm going to start balancing my hands, promoting themselves. Mainly, I'm going to put my left hand on top of my right. And then I'm going to touch my thumb tips together. I'm going to just touch my thumb tips. I want to push them together hard. But I'm not going to think that they're definitely touching each other. I can feel them touching. If an ant is between my thumb tips right now, the ant would not be hurt. But the ant couldn't get away. This is when Suzuki Roshi gave instruction about how to hold the thumbs together like this, he said, You know, you hold it together just enough to hold a piece of paper up. But his English was, especially about sort of practical details, his English sometimes was a little bit hard to understand.

[17:55]

One person thought, he said, hold your fingers just the distance of a piece of paper. That person had very intent. I missed the instruction, but he tried to hold his fingers at the distance of his face. So I would suggest that kind of attention that he's doing, but actually touch them. Touch them gently, but definitely. And again, don't let your thumbs go up like this. Don't make a mountain with your thumbs. or valuing people's. Making a mountain again goes towards, maybe you could say towards the extreme on taking things a little bit serious. Making a valley is taking things a little bit too light. So I balanced the mudra itself.

[19:15]

In the mudra, try to balance your awareness so you're aware here and throughout the mudra. So you have a feeling, bring your mind into the mudra. Bring your attention into the mudra. Put your attention throughout the mudra, all the way around it, as much as you can. Now so much more awareness at the mapas. Let's try to have a little bit of round awareness. This is one kind of bouncing. Just that you can keep the mudra like this. This kind of like turns your mind, unwinds your mind. or I should say high experience of that work. Another anecdote is that when I first started sitting at Soko Jeet, a man named Robert Pagliotta sat next to me almost every day. He's the one who did the stained glass window at the end of the hall, and those hands from the dining room door with the stained glass eyes.

[20:20]

He invited me over to his house one time for dinner. And over dinner, he said, have you noticed that in God, there's a kind of clicking volume? And I said, no. He said, they sort of made the sound. And then I recognized what the sound was. It was the sound of me going like this. Oh, my God. I didn't realize I was doing it, but when he made the sound, I realized that I can sort of just . That's too much. Too tense, too big. But then, of course, other times, my mood goes like this. It usually doesn't come from . So if a person would do that, the hands usually aren't like this when they're asleep. And the hands usually aren't like this when they're tense.

[21:24]

Or rather, if I'm making my hands like this, I won't usually... If my hands are like this, I won't go to sleep. Or if my hands are like this, my tension won't go away. Because we put a statement in something. However, I'm not guaranteeing anything because everybody's very ingenious and shit. Some people can sleep like this. It pretends like this. I'm not pinched. So anyway, just holding my hand right here on my feet, making this mudra, already I'm starting to develop a sense of balance. And also my awareness is slightly intensified. I'm waking up to my posture. I'm waking up to my hands. My hands are waking me up. As you know, Doge's energy sometimes says, put your mind in the palm of your left hand. And I would say, it's okay also to put it in the palm of your right hand.

[22:27]

Anyway, put your attention. Now, if you're doing that, if your hands are resting on your feet like the morning, or otherwise, the next thing I would suggest And when you do, I suggest, some of you already did before I suggested it, when you do this, try to feel the difference in how, try to feel the difference in your sense of balance and try to feel the difference in the state of mind. If you just move your hands and rest them, to lift them off their point of support and place them again, get out of them without letting them rest on you. Just try it. Just feel the difference in your awareness. And also, see if you can feel the difference in how more simple you are to balance. When I do this, when I have my hand down here, I can feel myself balancing.

[23:33]

But when I move my hand up to my abdomen, I feel much more precarious. considerably more . So what I'm trying to do is to show you a more precarious posture. And then one more step. Your hand against your abdomen and not resting it. But this hand here, my bottom hand, it's touching my heel. But it's not resting it. Again, if it was under my hand, it wouldn't be hurt. I couldn't get away. I'm not pressing down. And sometimes you may see people sitting like this, their hand like this. Have you seen that?

[24:34]

You see that? In other words, they formed a contour of the heel. Because they're resting their head, they won't. Just keep it there and place it against your abdomen so your thumbs are about the level of your navel. And your palms are two or three inches below your navel. You can move this around according to your own body. But basically, I'm suggesting keep your hand below your navel. Find a comfortable place there. The next point I'd like to suggest is that you bring the edge of your baby's fingers. Bring them in front of the abdomen, too. Now, I can bring my mudra in contact with my abdomen and let this part of my hand touch. If you look at me, that's like this. But when I bring the baby fingers in contact with my abdomen, watch what happens to my arm.

[25:41]

You see that? In other words, by bringing the baby fingers in contact with the abdomen, you naturally create this space under the armpits where the egg is supposed to go. So rather than lifting your arms away from your body, All you have to do is bring your finger in contact with the abdomen, and it naturally will bring them around the leg and the bottom just right. And there again, see, you can notice the difference between just touching your hand like this and bringing your baby finger down like that. See, you can notice that there's an awareness. You'll be able to see it. Thank you. And if you sit this way for a while, the sense of the balancing may become more and more, and you may become more and more aware of the balancing.

[27:01]

As time goes on, the longer you sit this way, the more you may tune in to the balancing. And also, as you sit longer and longer in this posture, this posture will reveal to you If you have any kind of pain in your upper body or any kind of habits of pulling your shoulders in certain ways, this type of posture will show you these areas by means of tape. At that time, you may have a problem. And you have to decide what to do, whether to continue in this posture and try to figure out how to hold yourself in such a way that the muscles will relax and stop working, or whether to rest or get back to you.

[28:08]

When I sit in this posture, what happens often is my hands start slipping down away from my body. And at that time, I bring them back. Well, I don't always bring them back. Sometimes I sit down there. Sometimes I stay there for a little while. And then sometimes I take a nap, too. I'm not able to hold my hands and sleep at the same time. I'm not getting it. I'm learning it. Or I can sleep very nicely like this. And sometimes I do intentionally take naps like this. In my room, of course, on bricks. I'm very restful just to sit like this. I have my hand dressed in my lap. And just to see. Because when I talk to my leg, my feet get nice and warm. They're cozy. I do actually take naps like this. But I cannot take notes like this, because as soon as I fall asleep, my hands just put me down.

[29:28]

But I can take notes like this with my hands on here, and I can keep the moods up. I can. And it looks just like a, very much like a white person, except my eyes are shut, and the person may be sorry. But I can't. I cannot. And not very many people can hold their hands up here. Maybe somebody did, but I didn't relate to it. Because the level of awareness to do this, it's so awake that it's difficult to. And I'm telling you about this, and I can imagine that some of you are resistant with this practice, and some of you are not. And some of you are resisting by being openly receptive. But anyway, I try to mention this to you gently because I want to tell you that in the 21 years that I've been sitting here, there's not all 21 years that I've been sitting with my hands like this.

[30:39]

I'm telling you not about what I have done, but what I can sometimes do and find very helpful. But particularly in sessions, I tend to do this because the level of effort in sessions is higher. Sometimes in daily practice, I'm just like this. I really find that the level of awakeness and the level of sense of balance in the posture is really heightened. So I recommend that you at least try. And if it's too hard, And remember, for some time when you have a lot of energy and you want to take your energy up, it's also good for goodness. Well, this is basically an instruction to help you get a sense of balance. And now I put my hand right in the air a little bit.

[31:44]

And I'm going to do a little bit of balancing and talk a little bit about why we don't like to balance. I find that balance, like my wife just walked in, and that reminds me of something she told me a while ago. And that is, just recently, two people sprained their ankles. One really sprained it badly, and that person had also sprained his ankle not too long before that. Another person sprained her ankle, and she's also sprained her ankle before. And what I heard is that once you sprain your ankle, it's more likely that you'll sprain it again. And some people think that what happens when you sprain your ankle is your ankle, the tissue in your ankle, loses some of its ability to balance.

[32:54]

You know, there's many, many bones in the foot, right? And lots of little muscles connected to them all. And a lot of what's involved in balancing and standing up is done in the feet. In the fact that balancing feet are very awake. And so when you sprain your ankle, the trauma of the sprain, the trauma to the tissue actually seems to decrease the tissues and the nerves intelligence. And you can't do much, you can't build the muscle up, building the muscle up, but you can build the muscle up. But after the tissue's swollen and worn down, it's not a matter of strengthening the tissue by hand, building the muscles up by exercise, but strengthening it by lifting weights or something. I'll leave it at that too, but one of the main things that you do is stand on one foot.

[33:58]

Because when you stand on both feet, if one foot that's hurt is more asleep than the other one, the more awake one will do more work in the sleepy one. But what you do when you're bottling it, you can light a steel, if tried rather than trying to comfort. And standing on the force of that foot, you can really get into balance, as most of you can sense. Stand on one foot, you're more aware of the balance. And that awareness of balancing gradually wakes the anaphylopathy, at least that's what some people say. And basically, that's my proposal to you, is that if you spend more time in a state where you're balancing, for example, where you experience your spine balancing, this is the way to wake your spine up. and particularly wake up the part of your spine that's most sleepy.

[35:05]

Most of us have sprained heart, so they're quite sleepy. So you look at some people's back, and you're pumped here or caved in there. These are indications that there is a little bit more or less awareness. Another thing that I propose to you is that when we're children and we first learn how to stand up, I don't remember exactly myself, but I can imagine And I can certainly remember when I learned to do a few new things in later years. That's a drill. And if you don't watch a kid when they first stand up and first walk, you can see what a drill, the mastery of the balance, they're totally delighted. And they're wanting nothing more than to try to do it again and again. And they keep enjoying it. And then they start running us out of that, and they enjoy that too. And little children walk around in this state, but it's not very fun.

[36:10]

I would propose that when you're in a balanced state, you are, as I said before, I don't know what I said. Anyway, when you're in a balanced state, you're easily disturbed. When you're in a balanced state, you are easily knocked off balance. When you're balancing, you're easily knocked out of balance. When you're balancing, you're quite vulnerable. You're vulnerable to change. A lot of the time, we spend our life in positions where we're not vulnerable to change or sensitive to change. And when we hear about change or impermanence, we think, oh, that sounds reasonable. But we can't actually deal with our . Also, we know that certain types of thinking probably aren't very wholesome, and others are wholesome, but we don't necessarily experience the impact, the difference of impact between wholesome and open thought.

[37:53]

We don't necessarily experience the difference between a balanced thought and an unbalanced thought. But I further propose to you that in a state of physical violence, there's certain types of thinking which, if you do them, you will find you lose your balance. And there's other kinds of thinking which you will find you will not lose your balance. I would propose to you that if you think, if you meditate, for example, on impermanence, you will not lose your balance. You will be able to meditate on impermanence and continue your balance without balancing your related intent. But if you put your hand underneath or if you lie down, you may not be aware of how impermanent that posture is because

[39:03]

you feel fairly stable and you don't feel like you have to balance all the parts they want on your back, for example. If you're leaning like this or leaning back on the chair, you may not feel how kind of fragile and impermanent your body is. So meditating on impermanence, it's good to have something impermanent around to medicate. So you're not just meditating on the idea of impermanence, but you can actually heal. Now if you're sick, or if you're rotting, this tube is a good thing to meditate on. It's not theoretical anymore. For example, if your teeth are rotting, or your hair is falling off, or you're going to go on and get cancer, then you can actually meditate on the actual state of the illness. But if you're not particularly sick, and you don't have right both hands, some concrete example You have to choose the permanence.

[40:07]

If you're balancing, you've got it. Because you're balancing, it's impermanent. Balancing cannot be permanent. But in some postures, you may feel very permanent, and therefore it's part of the action. If you meditate on permanence, if you start thinking about permanent things, I would suggest to you that you will not adopt balance. Or you will have to go to a different posture. So basically what I'm saying is that by adopting a posture like this, a balanced posture, your thinking will also become balanced. Or if it doesn't become balanced, you stop balancing or you go down. So this kind of posture is the context in which you start to develop what we call right thought, or what we call the thought of enlightenment.

[41:13]

Now, you can develop the thought of enlightenment by other practices. Let me tell you this. But one of the basic ways to develop the thought of enlightenment is to meditate on determinants, and not theoretical, but action. Meditate. Actually grow and stand kind to somebody dying, or meditate on your own dying, or simply balance. Dogen Zenji says, when you have settled into a steady, immobile sitting position, think of your own thinking.

[42:21]

Now, when he says steady, immobile sitting position, the Chinese character that we usually see there, is taken from the verbal output of the great ancestor . One time was sitting and then he stopped and got up. And his said, what's it like when you're sitting so still? What kind of thinking are you doing? And in Chinese, the characters of what he was saying, ,, what he meant by the words he was saying when he said, sitting so still. ,, the character ,, I'll write it backwards for you. You're a couple horizontal line, middle horizontal line, and then one line coming down like this, and then like that.

[43:41]

So these are like leg, and these are like shoulders and head. So it's an image of like a person sitting, or the image of a ball, you know? So kotsu, and kotsu means still, unmoving. And then you take another goat and you say, goats are goats. So it intensifies the sense of stillness and movingness. But the second meaning of that word is wobbliness. What I propose to you is that the stillness, religious stillness, be really still. But it is a stillness which is . It's a dynamic stillness. It's an impermanent stillness.

[44:43]

It's just like everything else. When you're sitting in this impermanent, dynamic stillness, what kind of thinking are you doing, boss? I'm thinking of that which doesn't think. I'm thinking of the unthinking. That's the kind of thinking I'm doing when I'm sitting still. The W.W. Eliot said, when you have settled into this kind of balanced state, think of that which doesn't fit. Another way to put it is, when you're in that state, When you're in a balanced still state, the kind of thinking you do is that you're thinking of your thinking. You're thinking of your spine.

[45:44]

You're thinking of your balancing body. So you settle into the stillness and you think of something ungraspable. You direct your mental activity towards the ungraspable, towards the unthinking, towards the unknown. And just that balancing automatically do because you cannot grasp a balance. So you should grasp something, it's not balancing, balancing return. You direct your mind towards impermanence, towards the unirassable. That's it. For years, some of you people have been saying, think about what you're going to think about. Think about what you're supposed to think.

[46:46]

And some people have tried to do this, but it's not so easy. It's very slippery that people go and try to say, I can't do it. Well, no, you can't do it. You can't do it. You could only do it through ungraspability. But you can direct your attention towards ungraspability simply by that. I can't very well do some of the neat tricks that I can usually do. I have to drop certain kinds of unwholesome thoughts. I just can't do them. However, I can do them easily if I stop balancing, which is I can do them and go out to the next person. But I can't both balance and indulge in certain unwholesome activities. I can't do both.

[47:46]

Why don't you see a deep end? See if you can sit in a balanced way and be a patient person, be a selfish person. And so try it. You'll find out. Anyway, I recommend you assume this balanced posture is not just positive. And also, I also give you just a piece of good grace that I understand that it's not easy to sit this way. So if you try it and you run into some problems and difficulty, I'll tell you before that might happen. And if you don't push yourself too hard, balance your effort here. And anyway, I'm starting off by giving you a challenging workshop. I hope you get the job. If you have a problem with it, then if you have any difficulties, you have to keep helping with it.

[49:02]

But actually, I find it very interesting to help people who are trying to practice Buddhism. And it's a good thing. It's easy to practice Buddhism. It's simple. It's good for you.

[49:19]

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