They're for me, and the cushion, and the stand, and the microphones. It's called Wired for Sound. Good morning. Good morning. Well, we are taking refuge in the fog. I don't know what it's like over the hill, but I can imagine. Hotter than here. This morning, I would like to talk with you a bit about healing, and what is it that constitutes

[01:07]

healing, what are the elements, or at least to begin looking at some of that. And as a way of doing that, I'd like to tell you a little bit about what I did yesterday and have been doing this past week, because the subject arises out of some activity. Yesterday, the Jung Institute sponsored a one-day kind of symposium on the heart of helping, looking at the relationship between inner development or spiritual life, the cultivation of self-knowledge, and the activity in the world of service. There were five of us doing presentations and engaging in some discussion with the people who came for this day of talking and thinking together about the heart of helping.

[02:13]

Two of our group were Jungian analysts. One person is an artist. One of us is trying to be an artist. Two of us are meditation teachers. One of us is involved quite significantly in working with patterns and problems arising out of addiction. And we all have a meditation practice. So there were several people in this group of five of us who had some pretty interesting combinations. One man, who is a dharma teacher in the Korean Zen tradition, is a doctor working with addiction and is also a Jungian analyst. Combinations like that. It's pretty interesting. And there were about 150 of us all spending the day indoors, beautiful sunny day.

[03:20]

And we stayed pretty engaged with each other. And I think it has something to do with this topic, where what we were looking at and what I think comes up for many of us here is the struggle or tension that we experience in our lives between our activity in the world and our inner life, and our continual renewed intention to bring the two together. The other background to what I want to say this morning has to do with a 20-year-old boy that I've been spending time with for the last almost a week and a half. We met on Friday a week ago, this past Friday. He's just 20, and he's very close to dying. He has AIDS. He was diagnosed HIV-positive when he was 14 and was quite sick within less than a year

[04:31]

of his being tested HIV-positive. He is quintessentially a kid. There he is with his bleach blonde hair, and the back part of it is longer than the front part of it, and it's all different colors. And he's got this baseball hat on, which he insists is part of what he wants on his corpse for his open casket funeral. I want my hat, he says. And he's also got a teddy bear that says on its pouch, hug me. Until he was hospitalized about a month and a half or two months ago, he spent the last couple of years going around to schools, talking to any teenagers who would listen, saying, look at me. I'm an illustration of the text that says this could happen to you.

[05:35]

This is what happens if you're not careful with your sexuality and if you don't pay attention to your drug use. When I met him a little over a week ago, we talked for about an hour or so. He was surprisingly candid with me about a good bit of the detail of his life and what was happening to him. And he was almost screamingly candid about the fact that he's terrified. He made it very clear that he doesn't want to die, that he's afraid of dying, that he doesn't know what's going to happen to him, and that he wants to know. At the same time, there would be these periodic moments of expression of a kind of cynicism, a kind of toughness, a very odd combination of qualities that he expressed during that hour or so

[06:38]

that we spent together. And as I was beginning to rouse myself to say goodbye and leave, he leaned over. He has shingles on three of his nerve trunks, down one arm and down his back in two areas. So leaning forward was not an easy thing for him to do. He leaned forward and he said, Is my mother paying you to come and talk to me? I realized yesterday in this dialogue that we had that there was a kind of moment of truth for me in that question. Because of course his mother and I hadn't talked about it one way or another. And when he was asking me that question, what I realized was, I can't sell this, my willingness to come and hang out with this kid.

[07:42]

But he definitely helped me see that. So I said to him, No. With some relief. I had accidentally stumbled on the right mode. He thought for a moment. He said, Really? And he was quiet for maybe a minute. He said, Well, then that means I can really talk to you. Then that means I can really tell you some things that I haven't been able to tell anybody. And we then spent a few more hours together, talking in great detail about the dying process and what I could share with him about what I know of that process

[08:43]

and what my experience has been in being with people. He wanted to know about, Well, then what happens? And what do you do with the corpse? And what about cremation? And is cremation better than being buried? He had so many questions. The kinds of questions that made me see very clearly that he had been thinking about the subject hard and kept running into his fear. So one of the things that we talked about was the practice of letting go. And in those several hours that we spent together, we practiced letting go. And we did it lots of different ways. We talked a little bit about what happens when you sigh. And then after we sighed together for a while,

[09:46]

we began to say, Ah, pretty close to a sigh. So he made that sound on his exhalation for quite a while. On one hand, on his left hand, he had the kind of leather glove that you wear if you're bicycling without any fingers. And I later found out that it was one of a pair of gloves that belonged to a nurse who had taken care of him in the hospital that he had been in prior to being moved to the hospital he's in now. A nurse who was the day nurse at this previous hospital and who had so fallen in love with this boy that she comes to see him every day. One of the times when I was visiting this boy, she came after she'd been away. She came in the evening.

[10:48]

She climbed up onto the bed. She reached out and gave him a big hug. She held and fondled and rubbed the back of his head. There was such love between the two of them. It was palpable. Anyway, she routes her bicycle around town. That's how she gets to work. So she had given him her gloves, and he had one of them on his left hand. And he kept his money in his glove. He said, there's only one person that knows what's going to happen to this money, and he's the only one that can take it, and he can't take it until I die. And he knows exactly where it's supposed to go and what's supposed to happen to it. So it was with this hand, which is gloved, with his money in it, that he began doing something I suggested to him, which was to pay attention to the difference between having his fist clenched and letting it be open,

[11:52]

and to do that movement towards openness, an open palm on the exhalation. So in our visits, subsequent visits, he would just be doing this. Sometimes he'd do it three or four times, and then he'd stop, and then he'd do it again in a while. The second night after I met him, I couldn't go into the hospital, so I called him to say hello and see how he was doing. And he yelled into the phone, This works! Last night after you left, I did some sighing and eyeing and moving my hand, and I went right to sleep, and I slept all night. By the third time I saw him, his second lung, his first lung was collapsed, and he has a tube going into the lung.

[12:54]

And about 20 minutes before I went to see him, the third visit, the other lung had collapsed. No one quite knew why. And the doctor who was on duty was pretty blunt with him about what that meant, and among other things said, This means you could die at any moment. We're now down to the homestretch, so to speak. This kid just freaked out. He yelled, he hollered, he carried on. And then he remembered about letting go. And I got there just a few minutes after he began to calm down a little bit. And I could see him. He'd really been working. Subsequently, his mother told me

[13:55]

that even when he was fairly heavily medicated with morphine, when they were changing the tube in one of the lungs, in this heavily sedated place, he was still doing this. The last couple of times I've seen him, he's been very heavily sedated. And yet there is some presence, some consciousness that's there. So when I went to see him last night, I said, Hi, it's Yvonne. I'm sitting here in the chair next to your bed. And he kind of did something with his eyes and did the movement again. I find it pretty interesting that we can learn the lessons we need to learn when we need to learn them very quickly.

[14:56]

I had never met this boy until a little over a week ago. And in some way that I find a kind of mystery. He dropped into my life, into my belly and my heart in a way that I find quite stunning. I find myself thinking about him almost all the time. I find him in my dreams and in my meditation practices. And I find myself really inspired by his courage, his courage that is arising even though he's terrified. One of the presentations yesterday by a woman who's an artist

[16:05]

included her description of a collaborative project she did in Santa Barbara. She was invited by the city to collaborate with whoever she wanted to to do an exhibit of her choice. And so she and another artist decided to do a piece using entirely non-biodegradable garbage which they collected on the beach. And they spent weeks hauling up and down the beach with big bags, filling them with everything that they could find that's non-biodegradable. Styrofoam food coolers, rubber zorries, tampon tubes, fishing net, plastic fishing net, the loop beer can,

[17:09]

grids that hold the cans or bottles together. You name it, they picked it up. And they took it all back to this gallery and they made sculpted pillars out of styrofoam food coolers and bottle holders, etc. They made a kind of cloud, ceiling structure that was clouds of plastic bottles and rubber zorries and all that stuff. They littered the floor with all the little bits and pieces of styrofoam cups and then they dusted it all slightly with white flour to enhance the quality of ash as in after a nuclear bomb was dropped. That kind of nothing is going to grow here environment.

[18:13]

They painted the four walls to mark the four directions. They were quite beautiful, actually. One wall they asked everyone who came to the exhibit to write everything that they were afraid of. Write down your fears on the wall. And on another wall they asked everyone to write down their dreams, their hopes, what they wanted. And in the middle of the room they made a big fire pit where they burned incense, had a kind of burning incense from juniper branches and things like that from the forests. And then around the incense tub there was a kind of circle mound. And they had an altar in one part of the exhibit and they invited people to sit in this little altar area and take sticks and make their own prayer sticks

[19:17]

and wrap them up and stick them in the mound around the incense pot. And then they had mats like these grass mats that we're sitting on here placed around this whole area so that people could come and sit and meditate. And the woman who conceived of this whole project would sit practicing meditation every day for about a half an hour and then she would just stay around and talk to people. And she said over the weeks that the exhibit was up more and more people came. More and more people came repeatedly. And everyone was invited to attend the exhibit in their gardening clothes so they wouldn't get dirty. Except for one woman everyone came in kind of grubby clothes. One woman arrived an elderly Santa Barbara matron type dressed dressed up and she stood at the doorway

[20:20]

and looked in and said to Ciel what is this? What have you in there? And the artist said we have an environment that we made from non-biodegradable garbage from the beach. And this woman said how disgusting. So Ciel said well do you ever buy plastic? Do you ever buy anything in styrofoam? Oh yes, yes. But I throw it away. She said oh I think you should come in we have something of yours in here. But the woman chose not to go into the exhibit. And instead of having an opening for this exhibit they had a closing. And they then took something more than

[21:21]

thirty of the super extra big size dumpsters of garbage when they dismantled the exhibit. Ciel said unfortunately we had no place to take the stuff except to the dump. But one of the consequences is that Santa Barbara now recycles plastic. And the city council is currently considering having Santa Barbara as a styrofoam free environment. Styrofoam free zone. For me that is a story about healing. As is my experience with this young boy. So the thing

[22:25]

that sort of story I want to tell you about is as some of you know I have a kind of fix on Juzo Bodhisattva or maybe more accurately Juzo Bodhisattva has a fix on me. This Manas Bodhisattva who is the protector of travelers and children and whose image is placed on grave sites in Japan or whose image is carved in stone and put on the side of the road where someone has been killed in an accident. Anyway, I love Juzo Bodhisattva and I am quite involved in studying the iconography of Juzo and the practices that accompany Juzo Bodhisattva and the way particularly in Japan people have over time practiced with this Bodhisattva.

[23:26]

And in my investigating this particular Bodhisattva I discovered that there is a version of this Bodhisattva in Japan called Mizuko Juzo that is water baby Juzo. Juzo who is in particular the guardian for the spirit of a fetus who dies before it is born. So the protector, the guide for fetuses who die through miscarriage or stillbirth or abortion. And there has been apparently in the last 25 or 30 years coming from very much of a kind of grass roots movement in Japan an uproaring of attention and practicing with this water baby Juzo. No accident

[24:28]

because in Japan abortion is the standard means of birth control. And they have something more than three times the number of abortions in Japan than in the United States. And there are now beginning to be some issues about the consequences for people particularly women but not exclusively women as a consequence in particular of this widespread practice of abortion. And there seems to be some possibility anyway that the growing practice of doing a memorial service for the child unborn whose life ended helps the parents, the would-be parents of this unborn child

[25:30]

find some resolution, some ability to acknowledge what has happened to express, to come to a capacity for forgiveness, understanding and forgiveness that has led them to go through an abortion and to have some healing occur in their lives. And what's interesting to me in studying the studies that are being done around this grief and healing that seems to be what is occurring with Mizuko Juzo is the detail that has to do with healing occurring in many instances many years after the abortion was performed. When I talked about this Mizuko Juzo practice yesterday, afterwards a woman came up to me

[26:31]

and she's a nurse and she said, you know, I had an abortion about seven or eight years ago and the last few years I've started having dreams, she said, particularly when I'm on a 24-hour shift and I take a nap in the hospital during the night. I have repeatedly the same dream of this child, she said, it's always a boy who is coming to me and wants my attention, is calling me and is listening to me. And she said, it keeps happening and I wonder if we might do a service together. There's a man named Barbara Smith who's a professor at Carleton College who's been studying Mizuko Juzo in Japan since 1983 and in the papers

[27:31]

he's written on this phenomenon he said that it seems that the crucial element is turning to recognizing, really holding in one's hand in detail the fact of having gone through an abortion, the fact of having had a miscarriage, not turning away from it at all, and that in that very turning to the detail of the experience lies the capacity to put it down finally. So the last reference I want to make has to do with a precept that some of us have been working with

[28:32]

for the month of April. I sit with a group of people at the Congregational Church in Tiburon on Friday mornings and for the month of April we were working with the precept about a disciple of the Buddha does not intoxicate mind or body of self or other. And my sense was that there was a certain upwelling of okay, let's quickly go to full abstinence of whatever intoxicant of choice may be. But in fact what we did was to hang out in the realm of using but noticing. A little longer than everyone wanted to actually. And I found what we noticed individually and collectively pretty interesting. One of the things that I noticed was that

[29:32]

we didn't have at least from what I could tell so much need to beat ourselves over the head around stopping certain behavior to the degree that we were willing to notice in very particular detail the consequences of whatever that behavior would be. So for example one woman noticed around her going for sugar as a consolation that whenever she would feel upset and she would console herself with a latte and a chocolate cookie or something like that that she would be in the grips of some experience of craving that took on a life of its own

[30:33]

and that she felt like someone else was driving the car. To the degree that she noticed the detail of that she realized that if she didn't eat the cookie or have the coffee that that cycle didn't start and so she didn't lose herself in quite the same way. I noticed for example that if I have something to drink in the evening what I really notice is a change in my energy early the next morning and I treasure my energy first thing in the morning so that the discussion ends in a way or at least it ends substantially in my noticing what I'm losing and what I have to take care of around my energy.

[31:35]

So part of what I'm bringing out for us to consider is that there is a very real factor in the process of healing that depends upon our willingness to be present to pay attention to the detail of what's immediately in front of us radically rigorously this old wonderful practice of noticing. The noticing that is free of the editor the judge the voice that compares just noticing and of course it's not so difficult when what we're noticing is pleasant or fits our desired press release or whatever where it's hard is when what we're noticing is not so pretty not so attractive like that room full of garbage in the gallery in Santa Barbara

[32:42]

like this young boy noticing in particular the little waltz from his shingles paying attention in detail to the specific location and quality of his pain and in the middle I'm saying one of the things I'm scared of in dying is being in a lot of pain I'm in a lot of pain right now and I'm handling it oh one of the things I've noticed in practicing accept things as they are right now is that

[33:48]

I can't do that as fully if I am holding to the mind of being an expert this is where my capacity for being surprised is crucial what a Zen teacher I know describes as the practice of cultivating the mind of I don't know how comfortable are we in being in touch with that I don't know place how afraid are we of I won't know when we think we should know or someone expects us to know or we wish we knew and yet there is some relief when we can admit truthfully and honestly what we don't know

[34:51]

it's what I call practicing being as stupid as I am I have a hard time being stupid I'm I'm pretty smart I'm I have some fairly developed skill verbally I grew up in a somewhat dangerous household so I'm pretty alert so I'm a lot invested in being smart and and what I have noticed more and more is when I get into trouble what leads to suffering is when I'm trying to be smart and in fact I'm stupid if I can just let myself know the detail of what I don't know a very very important part of being present with things

[35:54]

as they are and of course what I've discovered is that people are a lot more comfortable being around someone who's a little stupid than they are being around someone who's too smart so if I'm interested in hanging out in the world being a little benign that's one way to do it I remember years ago Zen Tatsu Baker used to say how can we walk down the street and have people see us as if we were holding a bunch of balloons and pushing a baby carriage it's a great image and it took me a long time to figure it out practice I don't know allow the I don't know to be conscious

[36:54]

I spent the last weeks working on an article for the wind bell on the resonance between twelve step practices and the practices in Buddhism and as I know is true for a lot of us I feel a great deal of resonance and I've been trying to figure out a way of talking about what that resonance is one of the people who was part of the seminar yesterday said that the Korean Zen people call twelve step work American Zen I think it's right so I'm reading this essay which I finally realized here after you've written the 23rd draft you have to turn something in and I know there's a 27th and a 35th draft so I said to Michael will you please just put this down as work in progress I've been trying

[38:02]

to unpack a little bit the detail around surrender in twelve step work and in Buddhist practices and part of what I've come to see more clearly is that what is described in twelve step work as admit accept and surrender seems to be on this continuum that we talk about in Buddhism having to do with being present being awake in the moment to things as they are that we're really talking about the same thing in both instances and that this way of being in our lives moment by moment is crucial is a necessary element for healing to occur in our lives in our individual lives in the lives that we share with each other in the life

[39:03]

of our planet as Thich Nhat Hanh says in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness he talks about the meditation that reveals and heals so what I'm talking about is the revealing part can we look at the hard stuff the stuff that is not so attractive the stuff that when we see it fear arises like this young boy when he looks white smack like this to his dying I don't know if he's any less fearful today than he was a week and a half ago I can't tell he's too medicated

[40:04]

for me to tell exactly but I do know last night when I sat with him for a while and followed his breathing he was breathing the breath of a calm mind and I do know that he understands something about letting go he has it in his body because even heavily medicated with morphine I can see his hand moving to this gesture of an open palm he got it and if I wish anything for this young man in his dying in his passing over it is that he continue cultivating his capacity for allowing for letting go and I have some sense that he may be able to do it

[41:06]

so I would invite each of us to pay attention to all of the moments in our lives where we have some sense of healing in ourselves or in another person and to pay attention to our own each of us to our own experience about what makes a difference what is conducive to healing in our lives and what is conducive to disharmony to tension all those characteristics of dis-ease I think if we slow down once in a while and pay attention we all have the capacity to see clearly how to heal but we forget it must be eleven o'clock thank you very much

[42:12]

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