Our relationship to our ancestors is complicated because we may have ancestors that engaged in violence, we may ancestors where one group of the ancestors actually treated the other group of the ancestors badly. We may have difficulty honoring ancestors, even though they have given us everything.

We have to take seriously the vows of the precepts, we have to speak them often – again and again.

We are healing ten thousand years, transforming ten thousand years. We are working through this relational suffering that has shaped my isolation, my disconnection, and my individualism.

When we come together, with all the trauma bodies in the room, it’s not just me, it’s not just Ian, it’s not  just us – it’s all of the ancestors, all the people that came before us.

When we return to our breath one of the things we are doing is we are returning to our relationship with all things.

Bring your attention to your heart area. How does it feel, to give, this moment, to ourselves, completely to ourselves? Wherever you are, with your thoughts and feelings, painful or joyous… how is it to give, completely, to what we are feeling at this time?

For Dogen, that dropping away of body and mind that he considers awakening, is the dropping away of that center of experience.

It is often spoken about that this meditation, this sitting, is a practice to meet our own death.

In some ways, being in conversation is the only thing we can do — one long groundless conversation. That’s this life.

I have seen this happen, when some tinny little thing will happen in my relationship and the intensity of the response is so tremendous because it is connected to a whole stream of unforgiven, unnamed, unfelt pain.