Confession as a Fresh Start Instead of a Moral Ledger – Judith R.

on and I need to see if the battery still works okay so we're going to start sitting so find a position you can hold for about 15 or 20 minutes you can always sit in the chair So I'm just going to give a little bit of instructions. for sitting. So if you need to stretch your legs or stand up for a second, that's okay. Does anybody want to ask a question about meditating? Or make a statement about it. You said, if you see, if your mind wanders to the past or the present go back center, go to that focal point it can be renamed three or four things. Is it best for a person to have their favorite one of those Well, I think you can explore the different focal points. I think when you do sit in silence in what we call a shamatha practice, a concentration practice what it is is to try and help your mind train to relax and to stay with something the ability to place your mind and there's a certain power in that when you're not scattering your energy but you're actually focusing your energy so when you are doing that type of a practice, you should pick one focus for the whole meditation and stay with it. And just keep bringing your mind back to the breath. I really have worked on the breath for 30 years. I've always worked on my breath. Now I'm slightly changing, except my breath is so I'm so used to being with my breath but now I'm listening sometimes to sound and sometimes I'm trying to do no focal point that's also a focal point you know what I mean no focal plane is the focal point but I think for if you're just starting it's better to have a kind of a concrete thing you're doing so that you know where to come back to. Returning to silence is another, you know, you just come back to silence. This is to help your mind learning how to let go, mentally let go Now it's slightly different type of a practice than the loving kindness practice we were doing, right? Because in the loving-kindness practice, you're actually actively doing something, cultivating something, and you're bringing different people into your mind. So that's a quite different type of practice. A concentration practice is, though, a very basic practice that I think everyone should be working on. and then you know when i teach loving kindness i say the same thing loving kindness is a very important practice that everyone should be working on but in terms of learning how to concentrate it's best to pick one thing and to do it for your whole sitting do you get what i mean in termsof concentrating now i don't always do that now but I also sometimes I do it you know for seven days I don't let myself do anything but my concentration point now sometimes I float around I listen or I come back to the breath but I think it's important to learn at least how to get your mind to stay kind of like a dog you know, stay did you have a question? Do you find that you use different practices at different times to unify your emotional state? Absolutely and where I am right now which is after many many years most of the time you know don't let the boogies get me you know. Most of the time I'm pretty clear these days. You know, I'm just doing what I'm doing in the present moment. And then sometimes I'll notice, now I can notice physically, I physically notice when I have gotten hooked and I'm in emotional turmoil. I can feel it in my body I don't even have to hear it in my mind I mean I feel the shift like oh I'm not very present anymore I'm hooked on something something's really bothering me and usually at that point I'll switch to a more of a Tonglen or loving kindness practice and if I stay with that I can unhook myself and get back to a larger space and when i'm in a larger space i can switch back to i'm just doing present moment in the end present moment practice is the goal that you can continuously just be what life is offering you right now but we get hooked mentally and emotionally and we go for little rides and i think in the beginning of recovery you're almost always on a ride right it's really hard it's very emotional you're never very peaceful you know so but as you begin to stabilize spirituality that should start to reverse where you're more stable you have your serenity more often than not and then the not part you switch what you're doing and i was i also think you know when i've lost my clarity sometimes i call it clarity or serenity or ability to be in the present moment well that's when i have to work the steps right i've something's got me going here So if I do, I guess that's step 10. If I do a quick inventory, I can kind of figure out what's up. You know, how did I get hooked? Am I resentful? Did I lie? You know you can do inventory work and figure out what you need to do next. And in meditation it's similar. So I change. I was just speaking to someone though you know especially people who have a shame based background which i think a lot of alcoholics and addicts do again i think we could do loving kindness for ourselves for years i really do think so you know because i think um the combination of difficulties in our past and then the havoc and wreckage of addiction makes there be a lot a need for a lot of kindness love and healing and you know the program provides i always call it kind of like a womb environment if you're really like going to a lot meetings you have a very protected space to heal and I think it could be augmented by doing this type of the kindness meditation a lot piece of paper besides me and i just when something is bothering me i just like write it down and then somehow i can come back and then like it goes away so is that okay well my philosophy is you do what works so classically you would not come to a zen center and have a little pad and write it down, but if it works, it's okay. Now I think as you get stronger, you'll be able to do that without writing it down. You just note. That's what it's called, bare noting. You just know I'm angry at Sam and then you come back and you stay, stay, say I'm doing the grocery list come back oh that's my mother's critical voice do you know what i mean so pretty soon you get to you can name you can named what's passing through your mind stream and then you just say well it's a fantasy right my mom isn't here sam isn't here what i'm doing right now is relaxing in the universe in the bosom of the universe if you will and just being one with my the god inside me and those things i have to let go of and let god you know let go and let got on those things. So I think as you get going, you don't need to write it down. You just know that you can let them go and come back. But if in the beginning it helps you to write it down and you're not in a place where you're interrupting anybody by writing it down, then I think that's okay to do. It's not uncommon so I might have said this before but it's fine to repeat they're called there's two sides to meditating one is falling asleep that's at this end then right here is being dull you know have you ever met even and you're kind of dull you're not really present but you're not exactly sleeping. You know, that's the whole dull side. Then there's the whole side of excitement or agitation where, you know, like you're so nervous or your mind is racing and that would be on this side. And you actually have a little, there should be, as you get better at meditating, you have a little meter you're like checking am i too dull am i too agitated and when you're dull you try to excite yourself like strengthening you know sometimes i try and sit two inches higher or i open up my eyes or i bring in a dharma teaching or i might use a slogan at that point or I use a koan I haven't introduced koans but like what's the sound of one hand clapping and that kind of agitates your mind and your energy. Do you get what I mean? You do something that brings more energy into your body If you're agitated, you have to do something to relax more consciously. You have to exhale you have to invite your body to relax you have to help your mind open and be softer so you can see where you're at there are things so I'm just so that's the basic thing that that you monitor your attention because a really good awareness or attention should be alive alive and present but not too active right you know it just has a certain i'm here quality and you're and you can get off in either way if you're falling asleep sometimes you're just plain old tired and maybe you should take a nap you know that kind of thing or reevaluate am i getting to sleep early enough is it my lifestyle what's going on that i'm always tired so that's a question um there are things you know if you're tired you can wash your face with cold water you can do walking meditation outside try and wake yourself up before you sit down um you know there are ways to try and stimulate yourself so you don't fall asleep and then the last thing i'd like to say is what katagiri roshi says if all fails and you're just tired and nodding you know i don't know you guys haven't seen meditators enough but there's a that's the sleeping nod you know you're you know sleeping right right if all else fails and there's nothing to do you just do your sitting sleeping and when the bell rings you just say sleeping buddha you just accept where you're at and go on and i think that acceptance is critical of meditating if you judge your meditation you just will not meditate because you never judge it well even now i've been sitting 30 years and i could get up off the cushion and say wow you were thinking the whole time you know what's with you i you know but that's not it doesn't help so don't judge your sitting just be happy you sat even now I feel that way you know if I set out to do a certain amount of sitting and i do it i just say good for you you did you stopped the world anyway by just sitting down and you couldn't stop your internal world but that's okay you get and sometimes you can do both and then you say oh that was a good sitting but good sitting or bad sitting and that kind of goes into what i want to talk about today um the whole idea of good and bad in a non-dualistic religion they're just different sides of the same coin. Even a bad moment has Buddha in it, right? If Buddha's in everything. Even the character defect is an expression of the whole of this moment and that's very hard to get to i mean i'm so trained and this world trains us to say that part of life is bad and that part myself is bad and um i should try i'm a bad person if i'm in that state and i should try to move myself over to this state but um that only goes so far it doesn't totally work that kind of tension in fact in buddhism they say if you keep the opposites fighting each other you never will have peace you will never have peace If you're constantly doing good and bad, good and bad. I did this good, I did this bad. Because they fight with each other, the opposites. But in Buddhism we say they dynamically work together. They're whole. They contain each other so that you're able to accept and settle into the moment the way it is. Just the way it is and you can intellectually label this is a good moment and this is the bad moment but whether whatever you label it it still is the moment so what if it's a good moment or a bad moment it's still your moment right so with that being said we can go into i wanted to work on step five today you know i just wrote it down by memory so i might be off a word or two admitted to god to ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs is that right so this is a very big step admitted to God to ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs now I'm very used to and very comfortable doing this but when I started program I was not comfortable doing it because I had hid my whole life and I never admitted I was wrong or had made a mistake. I didn't know how to admit I was wrong or made a mistake. It wasn't allowed to be wrong or make a mistake and so I hid or was very defensive or was very aggressive when a situation came up where I was revealed. So I think it's quite a big shift to learn how to accept your shadow, it's sometimes called how to accept your mistakes and your the places where you're weak how to accept certain experiences of your past and to do that acceptance without shaming yourself or self-denigration just to be able to admit your humanity and accept the whole of yourself which includes your weaknesses and mistakes now we're going to start on this I want to do two things I want give you a little bit of the philosophy of how you would do this non-dualistically do you get what i mean by that not doing it good bad and i also want to tell you a little bit about um how well confession the idea of confessing is in every religion that there is it's a universal spiritual principle i think i haven't found any place any religion that doesn't have a component of saying out loud what you have done that's very important so maybe I'll just say in the Zen tradition which is the tradition I'm from and this temple is there's a tradition of confession on the new moon and the full moon there's a ceremony that happens on the new moon and the whole moon And it's very pretty because the name, the ceremony is called Starting A New Ceremony or Fresh Start. And what you do, the formal ceremony that happens in a monastery, now it doesn't happen in city centers because people aren't intimate enough to really say their stuff out loud right like even though we are going to meet and some of us now have been reading once a week still we're not intimate enough to say our mistakes to each other you know would you I wouldn't I mean, even though I love you and everything, I don't know you well enough. I don' t know you well enough to tell you my most deepest things. But if you're in a monastic situation, right? If this group was living together, working together more like a family, then you could as a group own up to things. So in the monastery at this new moon and full moon ceremony, Sometimes they even have things where if people are having disagreements, they get up in the middle of the group and they process it out. What's happening in front of the whole group? Or if you've done something you need to apologize, you do it in front OF THE WHOLE GROUP. So there's a very strong tradition in the monastic tradition in Zen of this kind of exposing of where your greed, anger and ignorance has really caught you up where you've been stuck or where you have gotten hooked and the other thing that we do in a Buddhist tradition is every morning you say a prayer so maybe I'll start with that oh, I'm hardly going to get to everything I thought I was going to get to again and again it's the same okay at the top of the prayer of the page is this little prayer that we do every morning and I more and more and more and I I'm into repentance or confession because as I mature as a spiritual person instead of saying I'm more and more perfect or more and more I feel like a saint actually because my awareness is getting crisper and clearer I actually notice more and more subtly how much I fail how much I'm driven by greed, anger and ignorance how many times in a day I choose my own needs over other people it's actually as you get clearer you actually see your faults more because you see your humanness it stops becoming I'm such a bad person it's more like all right there it is my egocentricity you expect it almost because it's part of human life so uh katagiri roshi was very in the end of his life oh it makes me feel in the End of His Life he said that daily repentance was one of the most important things especially as you get to be a spiritual teacher because then people look up to you but you're still working out of this frame of greed, anger and ignorance quite a bit and the more you meditate for me the more subtly I see even the characteristics that are grossly have been lifted from me i still see them in their more subtle way how it's coming out so every morning i do a small repentance ceremony so the the first one is the main one that most zen places will use in the morning service and there are different translations i took my favorite translation which says all my ancient twisted karma is the first uh they don't all uh put twisted in it but i like twisted all my Ancient Twisted Karma ever committed by me through body speech and thought I now make full open confession of it and I put a different translation I now atone with it all and you repeat that three times with bows if you're doing it formally so let me just say that in Buddhism if you have a body and we all do okay, until we die we've got this body if you are in the form world and you have a body and you has a mind greed, anger and ignorance arise endlessly all the time now when you're practicing you don't buy it as much you know that you don' t need to live your life from that perspective of self you learn how to lead your life from a larger place but still greed, anger and ignorance arise in the form world endlessly so you you have to just let go then, right? You just have to let go and lead your life as best you can in the present moment. And I wanted to just say atonement, atone is really at one. So everything becomes the one I'm at one with this moment and in this moment I'm asking for forgiveness for this endless quality of human beings to prefer themselves over other people you know this basic delusion that we're not connected right so so i think of the fifth step now as not a punishment it's felt kind of used to feel like a punishment like oh god i have to go and tell someone this and that and this but now it's become a freedom like in the telling i can let it go what do they call it um laying down my neurotic crimes. I can lay them down. I can let them go. I can be free of the burden of my crimes and I can have a fresh start and if you're really doing moment to moment practice, every moment is a fresh start literally. I mean every day is a fresh start. This is the one day at a time slogan in its best form that you can start over, you can express yourself in a different way in every moment I'm with you on all of it, as I'm reading the Dogen, evil why is that word there? uh-huh well right so um you know most of the modern translators this this stuff is all translated and in the beginning of buddhist life there were in uh english christian scholars did the translation right like Jesuits or you know people and they completely misunderstood they filtered it through their understanding so that was in like oh I'm talking the 1940s and 50s maybe the 30s even they were starting to translate asian texts now we are getting people americans well i'm sure english too but english speaking people who have practiced long enough so their translations are closer to the real thing so sometimes people don't use the word evil anymore so this is probably an older translation but i will say i have come to terms with the word evil because all that that means is um when the intention of the action came from greed anger and ignorance it is a it has a bad effect on the world if it comes from openness, freedom and interdependence then it has a wholesome quality and we're not really repenting our wholesome things we're repenting out choices that were unwholesome now I the one that I use the most is this paragraph the second paragraph although my past evil it says our, I've done it in the my but I'll read it this way although our past evil karma has greatly accumulated indeed being the cause and conditions of obstacles to practicing the way may all Buddhas and ancestors who have attained the Buddha way be compassionate to us and free us from karmic effects allowing us to practice the way without hindrance now this is my favorite but i know it's a hard passage if you don't understand all the terms but one of the reasons i wanted to bring it to your attention is because a lot of people say i think too and this is the hard translation part between buddhism and 12-step is people say well buddhists don't ever pray to a higher being because it's a non-theistic tradition but right here dogan is the leading leading philosopher in zen it's the 13th century spiritual guide and even Dogen does pray he asks Buddhas and ancestors to help him free himself, open up open his heart, open his mind so that you can really be in the present and free and untethered untied to your problems. I guess karmic effects are like these knots in your life. K-N-O-T-S, those kind of knots. How can we open them? I have a question now that you bring that up I've been confused for a while about they talk about the buddhas and buddhahs so is it them and reincarnation is like there's no one you're saying there's like no one god but there's like what well okay i guess that's why i brought this paragraph up let's see if i can articulate it it's very hard to articulate if you open to the truth the boundaries of the ordinary world dissolve that that's that's what they say that our world that we think you and i are separate the world of appearance does not show the world of the truth like quantum physics the world that we're all interdependent and moving and we're not solid we're not fixed so when you begin to move into the world that is underneath appearances where you lose your sense of self and other where you begin to just be a part of the mystery then that is what we call Buddha right so but it's ridiculous because what you're saying what you are calling Buddha has no boundaries you're just putting a name on something that is a mystery and completely unfathomable completely open so in this they're just saying that place that mystery that is completely open please help me know that that's true for me too i'm completely open the basic in buddhism the basic reality is this interdependent openness that is goodness it's complete harmony the world working in complete harmony that's the base and that's called buddha but it's not a person do you get why it's not a thing it's the whole ball uh what did karagiri roshi say the whole dynamic working is buddhah but it is confusing because buddho is also a person right that person it's not they don't do a jesus thing in buddhism buddha the historic buddho was a human being that fulfilled the highest potential of man and buddhas don't have and the dalai lama has said this buddhus don't having any problem saying jesus was a buddhu or Mohammed was a Buddha you know these great fully potentially people now I know the Pope does have a problem with the reverse but Buddhists don't have a problem saying a fully realized person you can call a Buddha but what is the fully realized person? It's a person who has dropped their personhood we all have the potential to be Buddha and you are Buddha right now whether you know it or not you are you are the mystery, complete mystery now sometimes our mental conception covers that up but the truth is you are already Buddha you are a functioning Buddha so the word Buddha has different meanings I'll say I'll go through my little rap about Buddha the word Buddhist has different meaning the historic Buddha is called Buddha Shakyamuni Buddha that's the person who started this religion and whose teaching we study Shakyamooni Buddha, that's one The second is the Buddha of omniscient Buddha, which is that everything, this is Buddha. Right? My eyelash is Buddha, I'm Buddha, you're Buddha. Everything without exception is Buddha that's omniscent Buddha. And what's the third one? Ah, ba-ba-ba. And then I think the third one is this idea of that we all have within us the potential for experiencing the mystery. And when you experience the mystery totally, it changes how you participate in the world because you're no longer fooled by the appearance. But don't all of us have moments of that incredible clarity? Yes. yes well I what I sometimes say is there's a screen and when I started like when I was in my addiction the screen is closed basically and then you know you push it over and so you see the light shining a little bit but most of the time it's not there then you keep as you practice spirituality you keep pushing the screen and more and more you see the truth and then i think at a certain point you're kind of 50 50 but when you start to move into um what i call real spiritual being stuff is when you starts to push the screen past 50 50 where most of the time you're identified with the largest self and only sometimes do you get hooked. That's when the screen is starting to get really pushed and you're starting to become a different person letting go of the person you used to be where I think there's a point in spiritual life where you really stop being that attached to the old person and then you're just like a function you're functioning as a shining person do you get what I'm saying so there isn't this great in fact to have a goal like I'm going to be enlightened in 35 years to have gold in the future that is counterproductive to what buddhism means is to be in the present so what we have to do is find the buddha of the present moment you know and i think our i think recovery really does emphasize i mean they in many ways they say it one day at a time you know acceptance this is it there's nothing more than this. Just this day. That's it. And you have to accept yourself. How it's coming down. When I was first in program, I lived in Chicago and there was this weird like 1940s tape that was going around on acceptance. Some father, somebody I don't know, it might even still be going around in AA circles, this tape, you know, from 1940s of acceptance. And there was, I would say there was at least six months where I played this tape in my car every single day. And what I remember from the tape is if it's in front of your nose, it's what God wants you to do. Period. That's it. Whatever it is, you have to accept it and do it and respond to it or something. It's not something other. Spirituality doesn't come from outside. It really comes from your own life and exactly what's happening to you in this day. And that's why I think it's very important to do spiritual practices every day and why I think it's important to do step five every day that you say these are the things that I think I've done wrong and that's bothering me and I let them go. I atone, I become one with them and let them grow. I just want to say that when we're sitting in silence those things are the ones that can come up a lot. When I notice for myself sometimes I meditate in it but it's hard to deny myself because I keep coming out you know and so doing a chest up or even a test up is another way to release that so that you can do more well, in the next few weeks I'm going to teach you or share with you the forgiveness meditations and in the Theravada tradition the first 10 minutes of your sitting you do forgiveness of yourself, of other people there's a three way thing because they want you to clear it up and then go into your sitting so that's an interesting thing but it's true what you say if you begin to have a regular meditation practice and it's a start actually it's the sign that your meditation practice is really taking off you get very very honest about what you are at the in the moment you can't hide your anger you can hide your grief you can add anything you can't find who you're mad at it will just arise as you're sitting so it becomes very clear what your state of mind is when you're sitting you know okay and you know what it's a 15 so ask your question and we'll then we'll stop And she's never stolen anything. But one of her friends, there were like seven or eight kids in there, must have taken $20. And so we talked about it, you know, what to do. And what I'm thinking, I just want to get feedback because she's really upset because these are her friends. And so I was thinking about writing a letter, like a general letter, and just saying, I mean, when you said fresh start, I was thinking about saying the loss of $20 is not significant overall, but what you're left with, whoever did this, what you left with is that feeling of having violated somebody's trust and feeling some level of shame. and you have an opportunity to give it back and then i would give the money to the event center for a fresh start you know um i just wonder what people thought of that i mean i'm just really i feel like i need to do something because these are all except for one or two these are kids that come to our house on a regular basis and it feels really it's troubling And I feel like I want to, I don't want to be punitive, but I don' t want to let it go either, you know? Well, it's interesting because it's also an example for the seven that didn't take it. Yeah. In fact, the one that took it was also going to send the seven who didn't. Right. Exactly. Wondering who is the person and who did it and why. What I'd like to do is say if anyone has feedback to do it after, because it's time to close up now. So, okay, so we need to pass the basket and...