Amnesia and Anesthesia: Remembering To Remember; Feeling Deeply
Insights Into Practices
3-Month Online Practice Period (beginning January 8th)
A Favorite Quote
What I’m Watching
Two core ills of our culture are amnesia and anesthesia, forgetting and not feeling. This comes from Frances Weller’s beautiful book The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
Strange, isn’t it, what we remember and what we forget?
I remember walking through a cemetery on my way to grade school in Colonia, New Jersey but have little memory of walking to high school.
I remember holding my mother’s hand and breathing with her as she took her last breath, on my living room couch, in 1995.
I remember witnessing my son and daughter being born, emerging from their mother’s body.
I remember walking into the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center courtyard for the first time when I was 22 years old, and hearing laughter emanating from the kitchen, the sound of the creek, and the bells coming from the meditation hall. I immediately felt deeply at home (and then lived at the Zen Center for 10 years…)
Mindfulness practice, mindful leadership, and Zen practice could be described as practices for remembering and feeling. The core practice of meditation is creating some time and space each day to remember who you are and to allow feelings to emerge, raw, unedited, with no agenda. Nothing to improve. Nothing to gain or lose.
· It’s easy forget your true nature (as well as your keys).
· It’s easy to forget that everything has been given to us, including our bodies and minds, the air we breathe, and each other.
· It’s easy forget that we are alive for a rather short time.
· It’s easy to avoid feeling the depth of our loneliness and sadness, to avoid the pain that we will lose everyone and everything.
· It’s easy to not feel the immense joy and comfort that we are never alone, that we are not separate from nature, from this awesome, mysterious, and sacred world.
This statement is chanted three times every morning in many Zen practice centers. I think of it is a practice of remembering and of feeling:
“All my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow.”
The word avow means to affirm, with a sense of remembering or calling out. In this statement it is a way of acknowledging and transforming our own and the world’s greed, hate, and delusion.
Practice:
Remember to remember - during meditation, journal writing, or simply pausing.
Remember to feel - allowing strong feelings of sadness and grief, joy and appreciation to arise.
(Sunrise in Mill Valley, California, from my living room)
Appreciating Your Life: A 3-Month Zen Practice Period
January 8th - April 2nd, 2025
Online
I’m happy to announce a 3-month Practice Period beginning January 8th, 2025. This is a great way to begin or deepen your mindfulness and meditation practice and cultivate ways for integrating mindfulness practice with your work and all parts of your life. Each week there is a suggested reading, short talk, and discussion from the book Branching Streams Flow In The Darkness, a collection of talks by Shunryu Suzuki.
Online meetings are Wednesday from 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. PT. We will begin each session with 30 minutes of lightly guided meditation, followed by a short talk, as well as small group and large group discussions.
The theme for the Practice Period is Appreciating Your Life. This is the underlying theme of meditation practice and Zen practice - seeing and feeling everything, the good, bad, ugly, beautiful - as gift and an opportunity to learn, grow, and engage. It's the practice of feeling deeply, opening our hearts and minds, with a mindset of appreciation, and of being of benefit, through our ability to see more clearly, to accept what is, and work effectively with change and for change.
Our primary reading for the practice period is Branching Streams Flow In The Darkness, Zen Talks on a poem called the Sandokai, or the Harmony of Difference and Equality. This is an excellent primer on the non-dual teachings in Zen practice and how to apply them to your wellbeing, relationships, work, and social and environmental responsibility.
Being part of a community that meets weekly is a powerful way to find more clarity and connection as we begin a New Year.
To register and for more information.
A Favorite Quote
from Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement speech
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
What I’m Watching
My Brilliant Friend - Beautiful and deep storytelling. Season 4 is now being released. It follows the lifelong friendship of two girls, Elena and Lila, growing up in a poor neighborhood in Naples, Italy. Their lives diverge as they navigate education, family, love, and societal expectations, reflecting Italy's changing post-war landscape.
Warmest wishes,
Marc
