Zen Mind

Transformation through Buddhist practice includes changing our habits/karma. Karma refers to the patterns in our life that emerge from repeated intentional action that, through the repetition, gets automated and subconsciously habituated. This talk examines the structure of habits and how they can be deconstructed. It suggests bringing the practice of Zazen into our daily lives by deliberately being present for the disturbing feelings we tend to "medicate" with our dysfunctional habits and, as a first step, allowing those feelings to be there without doing anything about them.

This talk takes up a question many people ask these days in the face of political polarization and climate change denial. How can we have compassion with those we disagree with? Usually, we try to establish community on the conceptual level—through an agreement about ideas, opinions, and values. A more fundamental connectedness occurs through "resonance," the bodymind's capacity to "feel with" everything that happens around it. This is the root of com-passion. A deliberate practice of resonance allows us to stay open-hearted in the midst of disagreement.

How can we use the 16 Bodhisattva Precepts to study our own experience and transform it? Buddhism tells us that the root of unwholesomeness (harm, evil) in our own experience is the Three Poisons: greed, hate, and delusion—or more subtly, the moment-to-moment mind-gestures of grasping, resisting, and the delusive replacing of direct experience with conceptual knowledge. Practicing the precepts means to refrain from re-enacting these gestures and instead to commit to the cultivation of a non-reactive mind that allows the flux of pleasant and unpleasant sensations to be the truth of our human experience.