Sunday Sitting Group, In person, 3/31/24, Trudy Goodman, Jack Kornfield

introduce my co- teer who happens to be my Amar esposo my beloved husband Jack um yes thank you dear so yeah you want to say hello yeah I do I want to say a little bit um first of all I am just so happy to be here with you and I look around and I see people oh I know you and you and you and you and it it just feels so great to be both back in this space and back together with Community um and it's it's something after all the little squares hi we love you and it's really nice to be back together and I hear us clapping and I think about this little story of a seven or eighty old girl Carmen she went out to the park with her mom in Seattle um and she'd got a president of a new Jump Rope and so she was trying to learn how to jump rope it's kind of difficult and then her teacher um Miss Jennifer walked by was out in the park and greeted the mom and Miss Jennifer was young enough as a teacher to say oh let me show you how to do jump rope so she was sort of teaching Carmen how to do it and um Carmen started and then they began to clap like you all did for one another and all that and after a while they clapped and up and she could do jump rope and so she took her jump rope and went off to play Miss Carmen and Mom were teaching and she came back about five minutes later dragging the jump rope and she said Mommy I can do it but I need lots of clapping and I think there's something about coming together yes we can do it at home yes we can do it on the screen thank you for joining us it's beautiful and there's something about being able to support one another especially in this crazy world um which it's kind of demonstrating craziness in case someone had sort of not noticed that it's got unbearable Beauty and wackiness you know and we need this we need to clap for one another to respect one another to make a place where we can practice these trainings that steady the life are alive cuz otherwise you're like a boat without a Rudder and you get pulled around in the society by all the different forces and here we get to Center ourselves and see in a different way with compassion steadiness love wisdom all those things what a beautiful way to come together so thank you thank you my beloved one could I have a glass of water thank you just seeing old faces and people who been here volunteering in different roles forever it just is it's a great joy to be here and so actually let's meditate together now we begin with meditation and I want to encourage you yeah find a posture that's right for your body many of you have received instructions on how you're supposed to have your body and uh so just ignore those and find the way that your body wants to sit because if you're not comfortable uh well you're not comfortable and then it's hard to relax oh thank you so much thanks so just making yourself comfortable in whatever way your body wants actually my feet would like to be on a cushion thank you as long as no one's there great yeah because everybody's body is different and we really want to be sensitive to the needs of your my particular body we usually begin our meditations you know eyes closed eyes looking down some people like their eyes open I know Pepe likes his eyes open uh but we usually Begin by taking three deep breaths take a deep breath in and releasing relaxing and one more time deep breath in and releasing any tension as you breathe out and then letting the breath move in its own natural Rhythm just sensing and feeling the sensations that come with the movement of the breath in the body movements of expansion and contraction along with the E and flow of the breath in the body and you can imagine your breath flowing down to about 2 in below your belly button and you can place your hands on your lower belly on your womb if you have one and just focusing on this Energy Center in the lower abdomen this area traditionally called the Hara in Japanese or the danten and Chinese martial arts the energy Garden the womb and right below the umbilical cord place that attached us to our mothers and now it's like an ongoing connection to the Mother Earth and all our ancesters and I want to invite you if you feel like it just to very very gently as you breathe in gently rock your pelvis back very slowly very gently as you breathe out just letting it Rock very gently forward and just feel very gently slowly rocking your tailbone back as you breathe in and forward as your belly moves in toward your spine could be barely perceptible movement and then resting in Stillness for for for and whenever you notice that your mind has drifted back into the past or is Imagining the future just gently shifting your body back just a half an inch or an inch into this posture of receptivity just sitting stepping back a little to receive this moment to receive this breath no need to tip forward to look for the next moment or to try to remember the last one just leaning back and receiving this breath and this particular moment in all eternity for e for e for just feeling the pleasant relief of letting your shoulders relax down jaw relax and whenever you're distracted by a train of thought again just gently moving back just a half an inch to receive each breath e for for for for e breathing in the aliveness of this moment receiving the gift of presence you're offering to yourself and then breathing out letting it all just dissolve into this open space of awareness for and whatever is happening for you however it is for you just sprinkling A Little Tenderness so that the mindfulness the mindful awareness so that it's really a loving awareness just life in the form of this moment however it is for for e for for for for e for for for [Music] for there's so many things that I want to share with you this morning you might have to do some might have to put some of it to next week I have lots of notes um and I'm having my notes also some of you know I was really I I went on retreat in Costa Rica and unbeknownst to me I was I had an infection when I got there and anyway I was alone in a very rural area and I got really sick and I'm better of course I survived and I'm recovering but um Jack and I could not stop laughing cuz I went to I still have to go to the doctor and I went to the doctor and one of the questions that I was asked is um oh hi is do you have brain fog and I was like well yeah actually I think I have brain fog um and he said oh that's okay everyone has brain fog uh so I I don't know if I was supposed to feel better or my doctor has brain fog anyway um so I have my notes with me just in case um but I really I don't know did we deliberately plan this to be on Easter we didn't but it's so appropriate really I'm trying to learn Spanish um Pepe where's Pepe stop Pepe don't stop Pepe oh he had to leave well it's Easter Pepe is my Maestro teaching me Spanish and um and so I've been listening to Spanish radio my sister was like you should listen to Spanish so I've been listening to this radio station that's called it's the virgin Guadalupe Radio station so of course I'm listening to all these prayers and everything in Spanish and so I'm very aware of Easter in a way that you know I'm not Catholic I'm Jewish uh Buddhist Jewish Buddhist um but I hadn't been and um yeah I know Jack always quotes Romos saying I'm only Jewish on my parents [Laughter] side but then I found some teachings of the bo bud about that are really relevant to Easter and and the Buddha taught um it really was one of the I mean it's a very popular sort of natural image for a time of renewal or rebirth is um you know eggs chickens and eggs and when he was speaking once to a Brahman priest you know a priest from the Hindu tradition um he was trying to sort of capture the immediacy of his experience of Awakening and he said um that he felt like he was an egg born being you know a a being that had like a baby chick you know broken through its shell and emerged and it's a beautiful image because in some ways that's what we come here to do to break out of our shells of separation and of our various neurotic Hang-Ups um to come into a much much more peaceful and inclusive experience of what this self is and can be when we're not lost in you know our preoccupied thinking about ourselves and so here the Buddha is is calling the shell ignorance which in Buddhist practice and psychology most of you know it doesn't ignorance doesn't mean not knowing stuff it really means ignoring who we most truly are ignoring what reality really is because again we're kind of in our shell um and so and he compared to his post Awakening life he said you know it's like a compassionate uh a life of compassionate action because when that chick hatches from the shell the mother takes careful tender care of that fuzzy fuzzy little being for a while and we can think of our our meditation practice um he said sitting on properly warming and properly hatching the eggs and and we're doing this out of our compassion for all the living beings of the world starting usually with ourselves and our own suffering that's the best place to start because it's really authentic and very real um to help us emerge from the ways that uh you know our Clarity gets covered over our Clarity and our ability to live um with loving awareness to live from our hearts um there's a beautiful quote um from a terava teacher named deep ma who went through terrible suffering in her life she lost her husband she lost a child she really didn't want to live she was in such deep grief um it's a woman who lived in Kolkata in the last century and she I guess one of her friends said go to a Meditation Retreat she was in such bad shape she had to like crawl up the steps uh we you know that feeling figuratively of arriving at a retreat and just crawling up the steps to get there um and anyway she became this amazing practitioner and uh she came to Massachusetts I was living there but I was a Zen student there but Jack can tell you he met her I never met her but she said for our practice um which I think is a really good foundation for our practice she said the first thing is to love yourself we have classes on that here you know self-compassion classes because we kind of have to learn to love ourselves it doesn't make sense but there we are just our conditioning makes it hard to love ourselves and she say you can't really progress by self-doubt and self-hatred and most of us our default setting I mean I've worked with thousands and thousands really of people over a a long life of being a psychotherapist and a meditation teacher and if there's one common thread I think it would be how hard we are on ourselves how hard people on on our are on themselves and then of course if you're that hard on yourself you know it's axiomatic that we treat other people the way we treat ourselves at least when we get close to them and uh yeah so that's another reason she said you can only progress by self-love so I like this image of the chick and and the Egg um because I feel it's very it's sympathetic you know it's sympathetic to what it's like uh when you sit in the teacher seat you're like the the mother hen kind of tapping on the Shelf from the outside and you know when you're immersed when I'm immersed in my practice then I'm the baby chick you know tapping on the CH shell from the inside and they both have to happen for that shell to Break um and we can feel you know I I mean we can feel that sense of being in the Shell that sort of small compressed suffering feeling of yourself and then that wish to be free that just wish to break free we can that's why we're here all of us together besides celebrating uh the opening of Olympic um you know and here you know this was again from the Buddha he said oh oh that my heart may be free and Unbound that I may know the release from all clinging and the cool thing about this is that even if you don't take care of your eggs properly doesn't matter what you're meditation is like if you just sit there they'll stay warm they'll hatch whether you want them to or not the hen doesn't have to want the eggs to hatch if she just sits there they're going to hatch and it's the same with us if we do these practices of mindful awareness following the eight-fold path you know developing compassion uh tuning into our brain our brain belly here our gut instincts trusting our intuition trusting our instincts you know it will happen um whether it happens where the shell breaks and you have an aha Insight moment or just some of us it's more little by little without actually noticing any big huge experience it's more like maybe like the experience of molting you know if you've ever watched a snake mol it's like they just squirm little by little out of their old skin um or like hermit crabs U my daughter had hermit crabs as pets we were living in an apartment where we couldn't have pets but hermit crabs if you look at them closely you know when they outgrow their shell they have to they have to leave that shell and find a new one and that's a really vulnerable time that's when a seagel you know any kind of bird can just come and yum pick them and eat them and so they kind of scurry to try and find that new shell and that I don't know about you but whenever I'm in a vulnerable life transition I'm definitely wanting to Scurry into that next Shell right it's hard to be vulnerable and to be open but luckily here we don't have predators waiting except in our minds waiting to swoop down swoop down and bother us um so yeah that was um to me that was also very freeing that to remember that you know this Clarity this goodness this compassion this wisdom it actually is innate in us we just don't you know it gets too covered up and we don't trust it and so the idea that if you just keep practicing it will happen is very appealing you don't have to make it happen most of us have worked hard all our lives it's not something we have to make happen or create in that way um it's a natural process and we're all sitting on our eggs and we're the eggs and we're the chicks and we're the hens and and it's just a natural process and I think it's reassuring to know that just by working with these practices it will happen just by doing the practice and that's why I think in Soo Zen they say uh their great teacher dogen Zen she said practice is Enlightenment and you're sitting there and you're restless and maybe you're itching and maybe you know in a deep deep fantasy and it doesn't feel like Enlightenment does it uh in those moments so I think this is what he meant that practice is Enlightenment because it works in US it just works in us whether we see it and believe it or not I know I have to leave some room for Jack to talk but I'm just so happy to be here I look I have so much to share with you oh gosh okay um just the fact that this happens whether we're aware of it or not I think that's a you know very Central message of what I want to share with you today and also as I had to face you know in the summer when inside La definitely took a deep nose dive um kind of crash into the ocean um and I want to just deep deep thanks to Melissa she's very you know I'm serving as Ed right now she saved our butt and I want you to know that she served as Ed yeah yeah yeah and she served as Ed pro bono for months and this is not like you know a super wealthy woman who is just looking for a pet project I mean she really she just gave and it does seem fit that it's Easter and it will be Passover and it's this season of renewal um so a couple things to add to what Trudy was saying in some way we meditate kind of to keep it simple because it's a way to quiet the mind that crazy instrument we have to quiet the mind and to tend the heart so that we can live as Trudy was saying with some greater graciousness and wisdom and understanding especially in a culture that is almost defined by the absence of the Sacred in a lot of ways it's such a busy Speedy consumer oriented get this do that complete this to be able to stop I hear sirens and I do meta whatever your problem is may be safe and well may you be all right you know who's was ever there so we quiet the mind and quiet ourselves so we can listen deeply and live from a live from a different place that's not just on automatic so I was in the Miami Airport some years ago and a guy came up to me and he said Jack it happens once in a while and I said hi he said remember me I sat a long retreat with you in 1978 well okay wait you know we've all gotten older okay what's your name oh yeah I think I do you know whatever okay and he said well I didn't think I was a very good practitioner you know I did that and I did some Retreats and things like that and I just got busy in my life but last year um I had a major heart attack and they were Wheeling me I was in the hospital and they prepping me for for major surgery he said and it all came back I didn't think that I'd you know really learned something and that's where I went I had all that capacity to Center and be present and to be open and with he said it was physical pain and fear and all that and my practice was there and he said I just want to thank you I said of course you know you hatched yourself whatever you did good um but I say it because yes it's good to quiet ourselves and kind of live from our own values in the deepest way to practice is to be able to live well and die well you know to love fully to be present for life and to be not afraid and not afraid doesn't mean you won't be afraid by the way I'm just talking with ramdas about one point I I had this misdiagnosis and I thought I was going to die soon or whatever and then they said oh yeah and by the way your body will fall apart and you'll have dementia and I got a little scared in fact I got quite nervous about it and I talked to him I said I you know I sat in the charnal grounds in the monastery with bodies that were burning and did all these death practice I thought I was cool with death but then this came along and then they threw in dimension and ramus looked at me he said oh yeah I've flung the course a few times you know like relax it's just being human cuz the body has its own it wants to live but the the reason I tell the Miami story is that it's true for you it becomes a kind of deeper resource when you meditate to be able to actually Center yourself in the midst of the 10,000 Joys and the 10,000 Sorrows of life and you know how to do it because you discover that awareness is big enough to hold it all mindful loving awareness can you can step back and become the space of awareness that holds the unbearable Beauty and the ocean of tears and says yes this is our human life this is what we're born into the heart is big enough to hold it awareness is big enough to hold it and in some way then you become what aan cha called the one who knows the person who has wisdom in the heart couple more things to note from this and from that story in Miami it's never too late to start again in some way the whole game of practices to as Suzuki roshi said the goal is to have beginners mind to be able to start be present be fresh and to start all over again so the Redemption whether it's from Easter or whether it's Passover and the interesting thing in the Passover service which is sort of overlaps with Easter because they were originally quite connected is um that in the Passover service you you speak in the first person in the present tense and you say um I was a slave in Egypt sorry to the Egyptians in the room is this is metaph orical believe me um but I was a slave and I have been freed and when you understand it in the poetic and metaphorical sense it's saying this is our human lot we can be caught in our fear in our confusion and our sense of separateness as Trudy said and we can be free and that's the Deep invitation of meditation and Redemption and um don't think it's not possible for you you actually know it you can be caught in all this stuff you know you have we know this about you we can see it right because we're human and then there's that moment where you wake up and you go wow I'm really caught in this aren't I the anger the fear the whatever the story is the and so forth that moment is really the Revelation that who you are is not the stuff you get caught in you are cons your awareness having a human experience and saying wow this is an extraordinary thing way Davis a famous explorer said despair you know feeling like you can't do it despair is an insult to the imagination I mean especially in these tough times this is a really important teaching despair is an insult to the imagination and by imagination he really means the Deep knowing of the heart that you are free and that we are free to create a better world and it comes out of us and from us in the most most deep and beautiful way and I remember my teacher aent cha in the forest Monastery people would come to him with all kinds of problems my child died you know my farm my house burned down um I've been drafted I have to go into the war um I've got a diagnosis or I'm sitting in meditation and I feel like you know I've hit a place where everything's out of control and I'm terrified or so other kinds of problems or you know I'm sitting in meditation and I dissolve my body into light what do I do now right or somebody who comes with this great philanthropist what do I do with all this money that I just inherited didn't matter and he would sit back he'd smile the Dharma was the medicine of ethical moral living to not cause harm not not cause harm through words and deeds the Dharma was the medicine of compassion to see all beings want to be happy and even when I do meta I'm doing a year of meta practice I can do Meta Even for the worst characters in our public world you know I can wish and you fill in the name we have the names may you be free from Fear may you be free from hatred may you be free from from pain and suffering um I can wish that for anybody and so the medicine of the Dharma says you where you are this is the place that compassion can grow that freedom is available to you through your practice and what we're doing in that way is establishing the world that we want to see and establishing ourself in that place of of love and wisdom and Trust despair is an insult to the imagination that there is something that's possible for us and we know it you know it's so clear that no amount of computers and technology and internet and Ai and biot technology and space technology is going to stop continuing Warfare and stop climate change and stop racism and stop tribalism and so forth because they're all born in the human heart and so the outer developments of humanity now connected as we are have to be matched by the inner developments we have to be able to live in this world and not expect the outer to solve it because it comes from the human heart so the work that you do here to be that person who can navigate through the ups and downs and the joys and Sorrows also is your gift to the world and to be able to be at inside LA and come back together as a community so we support each other and clap when we're doing our jump rope or whatever that there's way we need each other to do this um and what a better thing to do on Easter you know and to come in renewal alog together as we have so thank you we rise We rise We rise

Channel: InsightLA Meditation

Views: 246

Keywords: meditation, buddhism, truth, inner guidance, mindfulness, trust, mindfulness meditation, sobriety, anxiety, stress reduction, wellness, depression, guided meditation, buddhist, health, buddha, religion, communication, insight meditation, vipassana, trudy goodman, trudy goodman Kornfield, self-compassion, trudy goodman meditation, jack kornfield, kornfield, joseph goldstein, sharon salzberg, sharon salzberg meditation, jon kabat zinn, jon kabat zinn mindfulness, los angeles, california

Id: JhoOrLkXyrA

Length: 53min 44sec (3224 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024