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the pain of frustration, understand the pain of continually struggling and trying to escape
where you are to get to some other situation in which thing are going to be ‘better’.
Understand your own pain, and thus understand that of others. Understand how
contracted and narrow our experience becomes when we are living a pattern of
avoidance. Allow the pain to practice. Don’t avoid it. Don’t indulge in it. Just simply feel
it. 
If you find the posture to be difficult, then sit in a different posture the next round.
During this round, if you find the pain to be very difficult and you find yourself to be
unable to allow the pain to practice, then simply and gently and compassionately come to
gassho, become aware of what you are doing and shift the leg or move the back.
Otherwise there should be no visible movement. In your practice of the posture you must
realign yourself with the posture constantly. Finding and coming back to the balance
point of the breath or the koan as the mind wanders into confusion or sinks into dullness,
the posture is formed in similar ways. Recognizing the mind of sinking or wandering, one
realigns oneself with the mind of the practice in this moment. In the same way, one
realigns one’s posture. And so therefore one might straighten the neck, drop the scapula;
bring the mudra in closer to the belly. Other than that, there should be no visible
movement. 
The more truly that you practice the posture the more that you will understand
shinjin gakudo: how to study the Way through bodymind, and the more that you will
understand your own suffering and the suffering of beings. Understanding this, you will
be able to open the heart of compassion, and in opening the heart of compassion, begin to
open the heart of wisdom. 
The more that you continue to practice, the more that you become sensitive to
how the bodymind is in this moment, you will begin to find various phenomena arising -
for example, waves of energy running and coursing through the body, through the mind.
You might find a tight band of tension in the belly, and then suddenly it shifts into a
flowering deep in the belly, deep in the heart. You will find the chest opening. You will
feel the ribs cracking. You will find tension arising in the jaw and then opening, and then
pressure on the cheeks and the forehead. And then this drops. Witness this display of
bodymind. Study this bodymind most thoroughly because this is the practice. This is not
a matter of some model of discipline; this is a matter of attention; this is a matter of
compassion. 
Again, technically, the more that you understand how intimately body and mind
are related, the more that you will understand how the muscles, the bones, the marrow are
intermeshed so that when there is a deep pain in the lower back or the upper back or the
shoulders or the neck, you will find that through slightly moving perhaps the knuckle of
the right thumb, the pain drops. That muscular contraction can slide away, not through
shaking oneself or moving or shifting or squirming or wriggling, but through simply
moving the thumb so slightly. The thigh is locked. Moving back the left shoulder, the
thigh opens. 
Please, attend to this bodymind; study this bodymind. Do not suffer. Do not
indulge. Simply practice as this bodymind. 
I know that these might seem like many hours of practice to you and I understand
that. And as I said this morning, I am deeply moved by the sincerity of each and every
one of you. Yet still we must allow ourselves to become yet more sincere. We must come