Emptying & Repairing Your Cup With Gold - Talk & Meditation

Wind is your breath. The open sky, your mind. The sun, your eye. Seas and mountains, your whole body.

In this session John invites you to sit like the ancestors of Zen and Chan practice: upright, present and with an empty cup. He begins with the classic Zen parable of the overflowing teacup and a candid story about meeting someone whose mind was already full of preconceptions. From there we explore how meditation is really for discovering the true light of your own being and help you in letting go of false identities.

John then guides a simple Zen practice to bring you a transmission of deep rest in the open space and light of self and awareness.

Transcript

For today we're going to do some zen practice.

I shared a practice elsewhere the other day and then got a beautiful email from somebody and we were talking about the transmission of zen and the teacher's job kind of being to hold the space so that you can actually meet the teacher of your own wisdom within yourself and I thought that was really cool and then a little while ago yours truly did something that he doesn't normally do which was that he went to a party and the usual thing happened which is one of the reasons I don't go out to things a lot of the time when somebody finds out who you are and what you do so the host introduced yours truly to this other person and then that person decides to play games with you and I don't know if you know the story of,

It's an old zen story,

There's a story of a teacher and it's his day of the week for having meetings with the students and a particular student comes in sits down opposite the zen teacher and they've got two tea cups in front of them and the teacher picks up the teapot and starts filling the student's cup and when the cup is full he just carries on pouring and the tea starts to flow everywhere and the student says to him hey hey hey what you doing what you doing the cup's overflowing and the teacher just looks at him and says exactly how can you receive the tea how can you receive the teachings when your cup is already full so this person who sat down with me with their very full cup the other day then proceeded to try and kind of give me give me what you do tell me what you do how do you help people how do you do this how do you do that and of course as you know from from sitting with me it's not as simple as saying meditation is this meditation is that and this person was a counselor or a psychologist or something like that and considered that that the only thing was the only the only the only thing that meditation was for was to help you focus and to help you have a clear mind and um and perform better and to heal and things like that and missed out entirely had no understanding at all of what it's really for of what meditation is is really about which is to allow you to refine the true light of yourself so that you don't have to live a false life so that you don't have to live through conditional things and things added to oneself and false identities you can live in any way you want but as an expression then rather than an assemblage and no matter what i said this person had a yes but and uh some people have a have a have a question for every answer and because they can't hear the answer they have to have another question and they were stoned out of their box this person too so there was no way of well the cup was full shall we say so how could i put any tea in this person's cup i would love to put some tea in the person's cup and not i don't set myself up as teacher this and teacher that as you see uh from the these sits here uh i don't give myself status when i go out in the world i don't broadcast what i am and and try to kind of lord it over anybody but if somebody genuinely asks me for a teaching because people find out who you are of course you try to be of use of service and introduce them to the teacher within themselves but if somebody asks just because they want to compete with you then of course you know you can handle that in different ways and so the zen master in yours truly arose in that i became like a block of wood i was actually saying the truth of things but because this person had no ability to actually penetrate what was being said it felt like i was being kind of um difficult or i think it felt to this person that i was being difficult with them when actually i was just sitting quite quietly with um an elderflower cordial wanting to to celebrate the reason for this person's party that i was at uh and just wish them well for an hour and then then head away so i thought the story of the overflowing cup uh is a really useful one for us to consider that unless we turn up with a vessel that can receive there's nothing that we can receive and when it comes to our meditation and so on if we sit down and we're already full then unless we learn that kind of empty place within ourselves that can actually be filled by the meditation not that you have to kind of get rid of anything but you have to allow a space within yourself to receive from the meditation then there's no benefit from it whatsoever um and we'll go through the world thinking we're very clever and we can tell everybody else how clever we are you know as with this poor person's case well i've learned in my uh aging uh to sometimes just leave leave people to their karma so i just left this poor soul to their karma so we're going to have a little zen sit but i wanted to read you a tiny little zen verse actually i'm in a very zen mood and uh and this is a lovely zen idea i don't know if you've come across this idea so zen appears in the 13th century in japan it's called chan in china before it comes to uh japan and when you were admitted to the zen temple and this book is based on this this way of doing things when you were admitted to the zen temple you were given a little volume of poems what you would do is you would sit and contemplate a verse until it revealed its truth to you and then when you had your weekly or monthly interview with the teacher and your cup is empty enough to receive the the teacher would ask you what your understanding of the verse you were looking at is you would say what you felt and that would tell the teacher a great deal about you know your journey so far so i find this a really beautiful way i did this a few years ago a long time back actually maybe 15 20 years ago actually but it only seems like yesterday and and so this little book is kind of based on it and it's it's called the zen harvest and it's got a wonderful forward by um roshi robert aitken and it's compiled by wonderful little thing i wanted to share this with you so if you would set up for your practice take your meditation seat allow yourselves to become comfortable allow your cup to be empty or allow yourself to look in your cup and see what the nature of your cup is and then this is a rather beautiful little verse wind is your breath the open sky your mind the sun your eye sea and mountains your whole body so inviting you to allow yourself to physically be here and so this is how we empty the cup we allow ourselves to physically be here to feel the life in the body and to notice if we're filling our cup by if our cup is overflowing because we are pushing into the future or if we are caught up in the past or running from the past in some form if we're lost in our mind if we're lost in our emotion if we're lost in thoughts of our phone or the day and the alternative to those things is to simply be here and be present we can make plans for the future but we don't have to live permanently there and we can be aware of the past but we don't have to keep one foot back there just in case so allowing yourself through coming into awareness of your body however you're sitting or lying down to allow yourself to be an open vessel an empty cup just be the vessel that you are feeling the feeling of life in your body and because this is a lovely zen practice we allow ourselves to feel the breath moving naturally down the front of the body and moving in up the back so out down the front under the perineum in the space and then as the breath naturally comes in it comes in up the back of your body and in the space goes over the top of your head and then as the breath moves out it goes out down the front maybe 10-15 breaths in this way and allow your cup to empty and what's interesting the cup is never empty because even if there's no liquid in it it's full of space space around you,

Space within you,

Space throughout you experiencing space in the body space in the mind form of the emotions and the space of the emotions form of your body,

The space of your body the room that you're in and the space that is the room itself,

Everybody mistakes the furniture for the room and the walls but it is the space of a room that allows it to be a room and as you feel yourself settling into awareness more and you can let the breath go now if you feel like but if you want to continue with it if that's a lovely safe place for you you're newer to practice and you want an anchor then out down the front in up the back is the basic zen breath if it wants to go the other way then it goes the other way no troubles whatsoever but if you are new to this practice you might just want to keep with that and allow the awareness in you just to be aware of everything going on not trying to change your mind,

Not trying to change your feelings,

Not trying to rewrite time and allowing yourself to be human and as presence fills your cup the zen invitation to let go of everything for the remainder of this practice and by let go of everything i don't mean you reject your life you reject your family,

You reject ideas of who you are it just means that you move from holding on tightly to things that you identify with and there can be all sorts of things from your politics to your money to your idea of belonging to a particular country to your status family values,

Education we're not going to throw those away but can you just open your hand and let them rest instead of hanging on to them for your life that in essence is what zen is this is in essence what meditation is that we experiment with opening our hand a little bit and finding out that we still exist without these things in fact that there might be even more to us than this so this is the art of discovery of the sense of yourself that underlies all of those outward things you don't have to reject them but what you will find is you,

If you're a more advanced practitioner or you've you know practiced for a long time and it's only about the practice it's not about getting somewhere but as the practice continues and becomes real for you you then have choices of how you live through those things you find some things no longer serve you and some things are not even real or that there are better alternatives for you to use as containers for your life or to express yourself through in this simple way things start to get clearer and you'll notice within this beginning to know yourself instead of make yourself up out of stories that the sense of yourself or the light of yourself has a certain set of qualities to it innocence,

Aliveness,

Cognizance,

Beauty,

Radiance,

All unaffected there's a wholeness to you an integrity a naturalness as natural as if you were out walking amongst trees sitting amongst beautiful rocks or sand dunes or near the sea a mountain,

The sun,

The moon wind is your breath the open sky your mind the sun your eye seas and mountains your whole body you're sitting another couple of moments like this not holding on,

Not trying to meditate,

Not trying to get somewhere notice that you are not away anywhere you are not lost and if there are cracks in your cup,

Chips and holes as there is as we go through our lives then the invitation is to fill those cracks with gold to repair your cup with gold and find the beauty of that remaking that you'll be all beautiful for the cracks that you have that you have brought love and awareness to the tenderness of your own heart that is the gold that makes your cup new again let's just close out from our practice allow yourself to be aware of the space of the room around you and feel the life in your body feel this practice throughout your whole body feel like your heart has been given some space to beat of its own accord and allow yourself just to gently come back to daily operating consciousness and while we do that,

I'll close out with our usual dedication which you can join in with should you like may this practice be for our own highest benefit and by being so,

May it be of benefit to all beings

Reviews

A beautiful meditation, John. Much appreciated. Filling the cracks and chips in my cup with gold actually made my heart swell with love. 💖