Zen’s focus on posture is very helpful and very wise. Because it is getting to something we don’t know how to get to on our own. Until we sit down and take a shape we are not accustomed to, we will always take the shapes we are accustomed to. And as long as we take the shapes we are accustomed to, we will never see them. And so we have to take a different shape. Our ancestors and teachers are asking us to take a different shape. And in taking a different shape we see personas, we see mental postures.

Wisdom is nowhere other than in intimate relationship to what is happening.

Are we going to embolden white supremacy or are we going to embolden healing and transformation?

When we come together in these spaces [physical zendo], our spaces for zazen are going to look very different. Here’s the opportunity to drop all the assumptions and, with beginner’s mind, come together at that altar and just pass incense and let go of those ideas of who is doing what.

 If we think of all of these as training — meditation, the precepts, the realization of our interconnectedness and enmeshment in sangha — that begs the question: what are we being trained for? What are we being trained to do?

Everything moves like the breath. Everything in the world is like the breath. It exists for a moment and then it’s gone. It’s full of impermanence, we can’t find it. It’s sometimes subtle, sometimes clear, sometimes hazed over, sometimes lost to us, sometimes the only thing that is.

Attuning to the body – more and more I feel for myself and I see it in my own experience and I hear it reflected from so many different places – when we attune to our body is an amazingly transgressive thing. Particularly in this country, I would say. Particularly if we have been really saturated with white supremacy culture.

How do we work through our pain, through our numbness? How do we regain a sense of aliveness?

Let’s all care for the grasping of our minds. Let’s listen for the silence of the Earth with our whole bodies. And let’s care for the relationships that are our lives.

To be able to free other beings, what we do is we actually just free them in our minds.