Mindful Respect

tonight the theme of the talk will be respect the teachings of many of the texts begin with the phrase o nobly born o you who are the sons and daughters of the awakened ones remember who you really are treat yourself with respect honor as martin luther king said if a man or a woman sweeps streets for a living they should sweep like michelangelo painted like shakespeare wrote his plays like beethoven composed his music and one of the beautiful things in the forest monastery where i lived with aj is everything was done with that spirit of mindful respect folding the robes how you cared for your monks bowl the bowing before you eat when you meet your elders before you chant the sweeping of the path through the forest as the trees would lose their leaves sweeping like michelangelo painted oh nobly born you who are listening my friends meditators remember this sense of respect now what's true and i can't bypass it is the recent supreme court decisions especially the decision about abortion and making it illegal or allowable to be illegal in so many states that will that will impact especially women who are poorer people of color and i think about how long it's been the march for women's empowerment when i had to fight to get the vote they've had to fight to not be a slave to not be raped by the person who enslaved them or not be somebody who's just producing more babies for the man not be the person who is under the thumb of their husband they had to fight to get contraception women have had to fight just to get equal pay and it still hasn't happened and equal opportunity when i think of delor dolores huerta where she says why is it the farm workers and the farm worker mothers feed the nation but they can't get food stamps and food for their children i am someone who really respects life all phases of life from the very beginning more than that i respect that each woman and each person should be able to decide and live their life for themselves so i want to tell a story to continue with this talk tonight on respect it's an old story that goes back to the time of king arthur and it's a story of one of his great knights sir gawain so it turns out that sir galwayne and some of his fellow knights were out on an expedition across the countryside and so sir gawain took a path that led him into a deep and dark forest and he continued to ride see what was there and gradually it got darker and darker and night fell and as night was falling sir gawain found himself in a clearing where there was a beautiful almost magical well and being thirsty he dismounted from his horse and drank the waters of this well and began to rest when all of a sudden at a distance he heard the sound of horse hooves and a horse came toward the well now it was nighttime and the moon was shining and this gorgeous white horse appeared with a woman veiled in a scarf who took the scarf off and looked at him and she was a fright she was the woman who in india we call kali and in russia she's called baba yaga the mayans have a word for her she is the fierce ancient feminine one eye on him and the other kind of drooping out and looking another direction wild looking and she said who gave you permission to drink from my sacred well he didn't know what to say she said you got no permission you came here and took what was mine what will you give me night and being a knight and trying to be an honorable man he said i will give you what you wish madam i'm sorry i have caused a friend and she paused for a while and said well night i've been alone a long time and i need a husband what i would like is to marry you this po took poor so sir going back a little bit he was ready to do kind of whatever she wanted but this seemed a little bit much he took a deep breath and reflected and said is there not anything i can do to offer you instead of this wish this demand that i marry you and she said yes she said there's one other thing if you can answer a question for me then i will release you from this request and you said why certainly what is your question she looked down at him from the horse and said the question you must answer is what is it that women want you get one chance many chances he began to think he began to imagine he said may i have a little time to reflect on this being a meditator as he was and she said yes i will give you a year i will lead you out of the forest and i expect you to return in one year with an answer to this question or else we shall have a great wedding feast sargawin mounted his horse he agreed she laid him under the moonlight out of the forest and he hightailed it back to the castle and found king arthur and some of the other nights and said let me tell you what happened to me they all heard his story and said go to sleep sleep on it first we'll find out what women want and the next morning the king and the knights went out across the countryside and they deputized others and they had these great leather-bound books and they began to write down from one woman after another what it is that women want they want children they want love they want land they want money they want music and joy one possibility after another and the books began filled with what women want sir gawain relaxed a little he said we must have the answer somewhere in here he lived his life but then a year started to come up and he realized i have to go back i swore as a knight that i would return and on my honor i will do so so he took a stack of the bound books with all the answers and he went back on his horse into the woods and there in the dark forest by the well he waited and sure enough after it got dark and the moon rose he heard the hoofs of the horse and sure enough the great white horse and the woman with the shawl unveiled herself to be one of the ugliest women he'd ever seen one of the least desirable of women he'd seen because when you are baba yaga and when you are kali and so forth you can take any form and she said do you have an answer fine night that you are and he handed her the books and she began to leaf through them no no no no no and finally she put them down and said this is not the answer and he said so what now and she said we will have a wedding you will take me back to the palace and we'll have a wedding and he said all right how soon she said tomorrow he said could we have it at night please and he said no no no we have to do it honorably i want banquet i want all the knights to attend i want people to know let us do in the daytime and the next days bring them all together so he went back with her they gathered a banquet and everyone came to see sir gawain marrying this old hag as she was called she was called the hag of bera in the irish mythology baba yaga and once the wedding took place and everybody was talking about it but they all respectfully watched then sir wayne and the lady he married retired to the bridal chamber and she looked at him and said well it's time for us to do our wedding night love making and he was somewhat taken aback and she said you're a great knight are you frightened to kiss me so he took all of his nightly powers and stood up and walked over to her and planted a kiss on her lips and the moment he did she turned into this beautiful princess more beautiful than he could have imagined and explained that she'd been under a spell and he had now broken the spell in part by his willingness to kiss her he had broken part of the spell he of course was thrilled okay i've married someone and look who it turns out to be she said but then to finish the spell here is the dilemma if you would like me to be beautiful like this for you at night time then i will be the hag in the daytime for your broken half the spell on the other hand if you would like to have me go around with all of your friends and all in the court in this beautiful way i will do so but then i must turn back into the hag at night which will you choose sir he sat quietly he did a little mindfulness meditation reflected some meta compassion practice and finally he looked at her and said i cannot choose really my dear it is up to you and the minute he said this a great smile broke across her cheeks her face and she said you have broken the spell when you have offered to me the answer it is up to you you have granted me something that answers the question what women want and she gazed at him and said what women want is their own sovereignty sovereignty means to be the lady the lord the the person who's in charge of their own life life not under someone else's rules to be the queen of their own life the one who decides and this is what women want this freedom sovereignty is a loving respect to awaken that and respect for the buddha nature the secret beauty of every being and it's interesting when i look at the buddhist texts that mirror this story often people would come to the buddha with questions and issues and problems and he would listen to them and then give teachings or advice question them get into dialogue help them see in a new way and very often at the end of those texts when all was done half of the time someone had some great amazing revelation or breakthrough or enlightenment but not always when the dialogue was finished the phrase the buddha used was now it is time for you to do as you see fit he didn't say follow these teachings do what i told you none of that they had their dialogue there was something illuminated now it is time for you to do as you see fit and you can feel the level of respect of sovereignty if you will in this every being loves respect i think of the story of a little seven-year-old boy who went out to a restaurant with his mother it was dinner time they got the menus the waiter came and said what would you like she ordered and then she said let me order for him uh he would like mashed potatoes uh peas and maybe a little bit of chicken he looked at the waiter and said what i really want is a hot dog and fries the waiter looked back at the mother then looked at the little boy and said would you like ketchup with your fries and then turned around and walked off and the little boy turned to his mother and said he thinks i'm real we all long for respect our employers and employees adults children elders our garden the fields around us the quail and owls and rabbits and bugs i love this poem from lloyd reynolds who was the greatest american calligrapher he was the person who taught steve jobs before steve started at apple taught steve the elegance of language a bug crawls over the paper leave him be we need all the readers we can get i remember when the dalai lama had come to spirit rock along with mahagosananda the gandhi of cambodia and they were old friends and they saw each other and this great smiles crossed their face and they approached each other and each one began to bow and the other bowed and then the dalai lama bowed lower it goes not about lower until finally they were kind of horizontal and their tops of their heads touched there was so much loving respect between them this is what mindfulness offers when you sin and you name what comes the sadness the excitement the fear the longing the sensations the stories and you meet them with loving awareness and a vow and you become the loving awareness that can honor things as they come and as they go i remember going with my teacher ajah to visit a temple on the border of cambodia the forest monastery where i practiced this forest monastery was near the border of laos in cambodia and it was a fairly long ride across the province and then through this dirt mountain road to get to near the cambodian border and as we went the driver who had picked us up in a little toyota or whatever it was started to drive really fast he was a young guy and he liked to show its stuff but it was a one and a half lane dirt road winding through the mountains and you couldn't see around the curves and he was speeding through it and periodically not very often there would be a big bus or a logging trunk would come by and he would go fast and we said please slow down please slow down but he didn't listen it was quite a trip you know speeding around these blind curves hoping there wasn't a bus or a logging truck i got rather frightened about it and then i looked over at ajincha and i saw that his knuckles were white and somehow it reassured me somehow i wasn't alone in it we finally made it to the courtyard of this cambodian temple and he turned to me and he said scary ride wasn't it it wasn't as if he was supposed to be i'll never be afraid or some kind of idealization scary ride wasn't it it was as if he was bowing to it you know people go to the amusement park and get a ticket for a scary ride it's just the way it was so mindful loving awareness offers a bow of respect to what arises respect for the body as the poet eduardo gagliano wrote the church says the body is a sin science says the body is a machine the marketplace says the body is good for business the body says i am a fiesta so with loving awareness not obsessed and clinging to your body and not avoiding it and ignoring it but with the curiosity and interest of loving awareness you can begin to pay respectful attentions to your body close your eyes just for a moment and ask what in your body is wanting respect you can know and let your eyes open gently it's this loving awareness this mindful loving awareness that can offer respect that can listen and tune you to your own body to the fiesta of your body but what if your body's in a lot of pain i think of my dear close friend john kevitz in who started mindfulness based stress reduction decades ago in the basement of the medical school in massachusetts and he went into the hospital he got it done his you know doctorate at mit and was a scientist but he'd also been practicing intensively mindfulness and he knew its power and he opened a clinic in the basement and then he went upstairs and had rounds of ground rounds with all the physicians and some of the nurses and said i'm opening a clinic in the basement for all those patients that you can't help that you've had a struggle with because they have too much pain too much anxiety too much fear and you've been unable to help them send them down to me later he said to me because i knew i had the great medicine people began to come down and they'd been struggling with their illness and struggling with their pain and struggling with how it was going to work out a lot of stress and struggle and the main thing the first thing that john did in the training that they had was to say take their seat and stop the war stop the struggle against the way things are trying to fix it and change it and make it and all that they'd already done all the medical things possible and when they stopped he said let's pay a respectful attention to the pain to the stress carried in your body to the difficulty you're going through instead of trying to fight against it what happens if you wrap it with compassion and kindness and loving attention and of course much of the problem came from all the resistance and fear and the experience and when they were allowed all those difficulties were held in a new way with care and respect but it's the same kind of respect for the earth itself the body of the earth rachel carlson writes if i had influence with the good fairy who's supposed to preside over the birth of all children i would ask for gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout life and as just as we can become the steward of our body just as we can respect what's here in our body we can also listen to what the earth is calling you and me and others to do i think of the monks who were terribly aggrieved when the great forests around the forest monastery were being cut down and the teak trees sold the environmental destruction so they went out into the middle of the biggest remaining parts of the forest and took the robes and wrapped them around trees you've heard this story and did a whole long ceremony to make the biggest trees the abbots of the forest and made it a shrine that they created there and the lagers wouldn't go anywhere near it because it became sacred again this is the body of the earth that asks for your bow of attention your care what is it asking of you even now and then there's the feelings that we have william o douglas supreme court justice from previous generation said at the supreme court level where i work 90 of our decisions are made on an emotional basis the other 10 is our minds used to rationalize those decisions we can see that even now it's really led by feelings what people want what they believe what they don't want you know all different kinds and yet mostly we're unaware of we're lost in our feelings each one comes each perspective and we don't know how to step back and be quiet and listen more deeply in a connected way to what will serve everyone but it's not just the supreme court you too carry the ocean of tears sadness and fear and you carry the unbearable beauty and joy and love of this world all in you how do you treat this do you treat your heart your feelings with respect you listen deeply during my second month of nursing school our professor gave us a pop quiz i was a conscientious student and a breeze through the questions until i read the last one what is the first name of the woman who cleans this classroom and this corridor and the rest of the school surely this was some kind of a joke i'd seen the cleaning woman several times she was tall dark-haired in her 50s but how would i know her name i handed in my paper leaving the last question blank before class ended one student asked if the last question would count toward our quiz grade absolutely said the professor in your careers you will meet many people all are significant they deserve your attention and care even if all you do is smile and say hello i've never forgotten that lesson i also learned that her name was dorothy what does it mean to pay attention with loving awareness and respect to one another take a pause listen inside what in your heart wants respect and what in the feelings of others around you wants respect in this difficult time we have to learn to listen to each other in this divisive and fraught moment in our history in the us and elsewhere in the world we can't afford to not offer respect to one another and to try to listen in a different way because it's not them as alexander solzhenitsyn said if only it were all so simple if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and that were necessarily necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart heart there he was writing from siberia and the gulags with this great heart of wisdom nobel laureate that i believe he was this is us this is human beings we need to find a way to listen to all the parts of one another then there's respect for the mind wow who is your enemy says the buddha mind is your enemy who is your friend mind is your friend no one can help you more than a mind trained not even your most beloved friends and no one can harm you more than a mind untrained so you begin to pay attention and with loving awareness you see that the mind creates everything as one of great llama to kenzie river she says the mind creates both samsara and nirvana yet there's not much to it it's just thoughts once you see deeply you'll see that thoughts appear and disappear they're empty like clouds and the mind will have no power over you so you have to see the mind the thinking mind the planning mind the remembering the judging the doubting mind say oh yeah thank you for those thoughts thank you for trying to keep me safe i'm okay you offer respect and see you new and see clearly who are you this invites a shift of identity from being lost in the thoughts when i was at uc berkeley at the law school as part of a conference invited there was this man who had been a judge he was actually invited he was a meditation practitioner invited to sit on the bench and he thought sit on the bench i know how to sit he'd been meditating for a lot of years i can do this and then here's the instructions he gave to his jury i want you to listen to what will be presented in this courtroom with total attention you may find it helpful to sit in a posture that embodies dignity and presence and stay in touch with the feeling of your breath moving in and out as you listen to the evidence be aware of the tendency of your mind to jump to conclusions before all the evidence has been presented in the final arguments made as best as you can try to suspend judgment and simply witness with your full being everything being presented in the courtroom moment by moment if you find your attention wandering you can always bring it back to your breathing and to what you're hearing again and again when the presentation of evidence is complete then it will be your turn to deliberate together as a jury and come to a decision but not before and you could hear his wisdom in this the respect he wanted the jurors to offer all that was going to happen so we listened not with how it's supposed to be but with a gracious loving awareness and as we do instead of filtering in our thoughts there's a kind of beginner's mind that opens and we can see a new i remember this cartoon that showed two generals striding down the hall of pentagon with all their medals and so forth and one of them said to the other it really shook me i dreamed the meek inherited the earth we all have our perspectives of how things should be but what does it mean to live with beginner's mind with an open heart to value the sovereignty the nobility of all who you are is loving awareness you have an original innocence that was born into you and even with the conditioning and such common self-doubt and self-judgment and unworthiness when you practice mindful loving awareness you listen in a different way you listen with the heart and it expands the sense of not only who you are but who we are we weep for all the parents who've lost a child or whose child is ill for all those who are losing their rights we rejoice for all the parents who children succeed for the sovereignty and rights that are growing for human beings we hold them all in our hearts a poem for you called the sleepless ones what if all the people who could not sleep at two three or four in the morning left their houses and went to the parks what if hundreds thousands millions went in their solitude like a stream and each told their story what if there were old women fearful if they slept they would die and young women unable to conceive for those seeking an abortion or a child that was wrong to carry what if there were husbands having affairs and children fearful of failing and fathers worried about paying the bills and women having business troubles and men unlucky in love and those that were in physical pain and those who were guilty what if they all left their houses like a stream and the moon illuminated their way and they came each one to tell their stories would these be the more troubled of humanity or would these be the more passionate of this world or those who need to create to live or would these be the lonely ones and i ask you if they all came to the parks at night and told their stories would the sun on rising be more radiant and again i ask you would they embrace and you can feel this what it would mean to listen to one another deeply i love the quaker project i think it's called a listening project and they've been going around the world now for decades to sudan and libya and north korea and places that people don't go and just saying tell me your story let me understand you you can do it in your family in conflict in your community with neighbors so many ways but it means you have to be somehow flexible you have to honor the sovereignty of each being i remember shortly after i got married to my beloved trudy and today is our wedding anniversary i took her onto the ferris wheel here in santa monica and venice because that's where i proposed to her and i remember at one point early on the marriage she said we wanted she wanted to go somewhere and take this trip and i spent time planning it and trying to figure out how we'd fly there and where we'd stay and so forth and then after a week or so she said you know i don't think i want to go there and i got upset and i said yes but you said you wanted you said blah blah blah blah and i felt that upsetness like and she smiled she looked at me and she said jack women changed their minds of course men changed their minds equally so but there was something in the way that she said it that just touched my heart it's like why would i judge we all change our minds why would i get rigid this is an image from a vending machine that sells bottles of water and soda and there was a a sign on it posted that said not accepting change thanks and then underneath it somebody put another posted on it that says change is inevitable deal with it this is the way this world is it's not fixed and the views aren't fixed and even the court decisions sometimes bad as they are are not the end of the story but the story will change also when we begin to listen to each other try it in your family you'll find out they like it even dogs like it there's the story of this guy who had a doberman and he'd heard that cod liver oil was good for the coat of dogs and he would call his dog and grab its mouth and pull it open and pour in the cod liver oil and the dog resisted and hated it then one day when he was trying to do it he dropped the bottle and a whole puddle of cod liver oil spilled onto the kitchen floor he went to get a mop and when he came back the dog was licking up the cod liver oil the problem was not the cod liver oil it turned out it was the way he was trying to administer it or force it down the poor dog's throat when people ask for a little attention it's not a little thing it's a great thing because the whole path of awakening of quieting the mind seeing clearly opening the heart is based on respect a generous heart it's us not harming ourselves not harming others can we listen deeply a poem for you when someone listens to you deeply when someone deeply listens to you it's like holding out a dented cup you've had since childhood and watching it fill up with cold fresh water when it balances on top of the brim you are understood when it overflows and touches your skin you are loved when someone deeply listens to you the room where you stay starts a new life and the place where you wrote your first poem begins to glow in your mind's eye it's as if gold has been discovered when someone deeply listens to you you're a bear feeder on the earth and a beloved land that seemed distance is now at home within you wisdom and compassion for all that we have to hold as human beings we actually listen in this way to one another to ourself and others as we sit and walk and engage in our community in our society the joys and pains of it because the game is respect and i remember from a men's retreat years ago at spirit rock there was a man we were telling our stories about men who had a blues radio show in los angeles on sunday evenings and he said he'd studied and loved the blues for most of his life and he had a lot of listeners many of whom were incarcerated men in prisons he got a letter one day from a man in prison joe johnson said i love listening to your show and i'd like to see if you can play these pieces from some of my favorite early blues men from muddy waters and blind lemon jefferson and a few others of the masters and so the next week on his show he said i got a letter from joe johnson a man who obviously knows the history of the blues the blues aficionado and it's my pleasure to play first for mr johnson these pieces from blind lemon jefferson and muddy waters and he did and a few weeks later another letter came from joe johnson and he said thank you for listening to me for playing those pieces he said i love listening to that show and more than anything it's the first time i can remember my name being said with respect imagine that imagine that could the palestinians and israelis listen to one another and treat each other with respect and the hutus in the tutsis and the northern irish and the irish and the english and the red states and the blue states but what about the big difficulties racism economic injustice endless wars so many kinds of global dilemmas created by human beings james baldwin writes i imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate and ignorance so stubbornly is because they sense once hate is gone they will be forced to deal with their own pain and so there's pain and insecurity and now you have to have respect for mara mara who appeared to the buddha in the form of greed and temptation and addiction and then that didn't move the buddha and then mara appeared in the form of aggression flaming arrows and swords and that didn't move the buddha and then mar appeared in doubt you'll never get in life this won't work you can't help other people and that didn't prove the buddha because each time the buddha responded saying oh i see you mara i know who you are i see you not with fear not with confusion with a bow is that you mara oh yes mara of doubt the mar of insecurity the mar of fear the mara of greed and aggression these are not small things the power of greed of hatred of ignorance huge civilizations warfare on and on but when we see deeply we listen with the heart underneath all of that to the longings and the fears and the confusion and the pain that james baldwin points to the hurt that's underneath everything else i remember when mahagosananda cambodian teacher and colleague and friend went to the u.s congress to testify on a ban for world land mines and when he came to spirit rock he was raising money for artificial limbs for children who'd stepped on landmines in cambodia and crutches for people who'd stepped on landmines and when he spoke to the congress yes he spoke about voting again voting against land mines voting for the ban but then he got quiet and he said before we can do that the most important thing is to remove the landmines from our hearts to remove the landmines from our hearts the landmines of our aggression and fear all those energies of mara and confusion the anger and blame and revenge martin luther king after his church was bombed we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering we will meet your physical force with soul force we will not hate you but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you as well without mindfulness and loving awareness we get lost in polarization isolation separation aggression fear racism violence the wonderful thing is that there is mindfulness there is loving awareness it is your birthright oh nobody born remember who you really are it is your sovereignty and no one can take it from you there can be laws one way or another but the reality is that it's your heart and your spirit they can put you in prison but no one can take your spirit from you or your choices when you realize this it becomes an enormous blessing william butler yates looking back on his life said i am content to follow to its source every event in action and thought measure the lot forgive myself a lot when such as i cast out remorse so greatest sweetness flows into the breast for we must laugh and we must sing for we are blessed by everything and everything we look upon is blessed we have to live true to our values true to the deepest place in our hearts of what we know is right and wise the actions and thoughts of the wise ones this is what the buddha called them the loving heart the wise heart the strong and courageous and steady are and we must do so and then listen to each other to see the sovereignty and respect it and support it in whatever way we can for all beings for the benefit of all for we are the world we are consciousness we are the field of awareness having this human incarnation this human life and what we do makes a difference when we embody respect graciousness loving awareness for all when we listen deeply we are changing the world person by person piece by piece and this is the only way that it happens we add our voice we add our love we add our courage and we do so with the power of loving awareness and the freedom that it offers so i thank you and i see so many more people on the screen than there had been in previous nights and sadly i'm not going to take time for questions and dialogue as i usually do after these talks because it's my anniversary happy wedding anniversary with my beloved trudy and i just wish blessings and well-being to you that we stand up for what matters and that we do so for the wise and loving heart for all thank you blessings good night you