This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Realizing Our Embeddedness in Nature with Chris Ives. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Realizing Our Embeddedness in Nature - Chris Ives

The following talk was given by Chris Ives at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on October 15, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Realizing Our Embeddedness in Nature

Thank you, everybody, for devoting part of your Saturday morning. I am here in Pequossette¹, which is the indigenous name that can be rendered "the meadows at the widening of the river." The river is what colonial settlers call the Charles River, and Pequossette is otherwise known as Watertown, Massachusetts. It is good to be with you on the homeland of the Pequossette band of the Massachusett people.

It is a beautiful day here. I hope you've been able to get outside in your day. After our time together, I am actually going to head out to Walden Pond for a long open water swim, which is one of my ways of plugging into nature. As you know, that is our topic for today. Over our time together, I would like to explore some resources from the Buddhist tradition, especially the Zen strand of Buddhism, for not just reconnecting with nature, but realizing that we are always woven into nature at any moment. I often talk about this as realizing our embeddedness in nature as nature.

I wish I were there with you wherever you are, and we could go outside—be out in the desert, in the woods, or on a beach. There are a lot of guided meditations that work very well in our bodies together outside, but alas, here we are on Zoom. We will do a few guided meditations, and I will offer a few comments. For some of the more doctrinal things, I have a PowerPoint, though I won't rely on it too much. We will take pauses; it won't just be me talking endlessly.

Before we get going, let us take a few minutes to settle rather than just diving into talking. I know some of you may have had busy mornings, or maybe you have been dealing with some crises. So let's bring our attention to our time together. Take a minute or so, whatever form of meditation you do, or simply sit with your breath. I have a little bell here. I will ring it, and we'll come back in a minute or two.

[A brief silent meditation follows.]

The Illusion of a Separate Self

As you know, with our busy lives, our entanglement in technology, our multitasking, and our time spent indoors, our sense of connection with nature is quite thin these days. Many of us feel psychologically disconnected from nature. You may know the book by Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods, where he coined the expression "nature deficit disorder." He also wrote a follow-up volume about adults and our sense of disconnection from nature.

We often forget—and you don't necessarily have to be a Buddhist to realize this—that we are always interconnected with nature, fully embedded in it. This ties into the Buddhist analysis of the nature of the self. Think about dependent arising², or what Thich Nhat Hanh³ calls "interbeing," in relation to the Buddhist doctrine of "no self" (the idea that there is no permanent, separate, essential self or soul).

Our normal felt sense of self is that we are some separate entity that dropped into reality in the moment of our birth. I might feel like a separate entity that dropped into reality back in 1954 and was named Christopher Avery Ives by my parents. Since then, I have been interacting with various things: my mother and father, the dog that licked my face, my brothers, my environment. Our felt sense of self is like we parachuted in, and we have been doing our thing ever since.

However, with the doctrine of dependent arising, Buddhism offers a different way of thinking. Reality, nature, and all of these inputs came together to generate this localized focal point in the great web of life that we now call Chris Ives. The DNA from my parents, what my mom ate when she was pregnant with me (she smoked Kent cigarettes when she was pregnant with me—I don't know if that accounts for any quirky parts of my personality!), the food I ate growing up, my neighborhood, the woods I played in—all of these elements converged. In turn, I have been affecting the world around me. We are embedded in a constantly shifting system of interconnectedness.

Often, we feel like a billiard ball on a pool table with a separate integrity, bouncing into other balls or the cushions. But we are actually a focal point in an energy field, a little knot in the net of nature. Obviously, we don't normally see ourselves as this product of reality, especially nowadays with self-branding, social media, consumerism, and societal competition, which all contribute to the sense that I am a separate being apart from everyone else.

Buddhism teaches that our obliviousness to this fact contributes to our suffering. Zen talks about how this felt sense of self is experienced as existing over and against objects of experience. This dualistic mode of experience—the "me" over here, the "not me" over there—leads to greed and ill will. Insofar as we position ourselves as separate entities that need to be protected, we build a castle around our egos and get caught up in basic reactivity: like and dislike, attraction and aversion. As Buddhism teaches, this leads to a sense of dissatisfaction, or dukkha⁴.

But we don't have to stay stuck in this sense of separation.

Guided Meditation: The Breath and the Trees

Let's try a guided practice right now. Wherever you are, take a second and direct your attention to the room around you. Note where your attention lands. I would wager it probably landed on an object—a beautiful plant, what's outside your window, or a favorite stone on your desk.

Now, I want you to attend to the space—the empty space. Often, our attention goes to objects, not the space between them. There is probably open space around your head, down by your feet, and under your desk. We often think of the space in our room as an empty void. But our space is filled with gases: oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide. We are breathing this gaseous matter that has substance, taking it into our bodies moment by moment. Without it, we would pass out in a matter of minutes.

Let's sit with our breathing. Let's all take a few breaths.

As you breathe in, see if you can really get a sensation that you are breathing stuff in. As you breathe in through your nostrils, you may feel the air gently contacting the inside of your nose, like a little breeze. Really tune into the fact that you are breathing in gaseous matter.

Now, use your imagination. Imagine that oxygen coming from plants, including the trees around where you are. Each time you inhale, imagine pulling it from the trees around you. Breathe it in as a gift from those trees.

As you exhale, some of your exhalation is carbon dioxide. Imagine your exhalation extending across the room, outside to those plants and trees. Through little pores on the underside of leaves and pine needles called stomata, trees and plants are effectively inhaling the carbon dioxide you have offered them. They grab the carbon atom out of each CO2 molecule to build new leaves, branches, and roots, and then release the gaseous oxygen back out into the world.

For the next minute, sit breathing naturally. Each time you inhale, receive that oxygen exhaled by the trees. As you exhale, out of gratitude, offer your carbon dioxide to the trees. Feel yourself woven into this reciprocity, existing together with the trees that need the carbon from you, just as you need the oxygen from them. Feel yourself embedded in that exchange.

[A period of silent meditation follows.]

As we end this meditation, offer your gratitude to those plants, trees, shrubs, or grass around your abode in whatever way feels natural to you.

Reflections on the Body and Ecosystem

Sometimes when I am out backpacking, purifying water from streams, sweating, and leaving my waste in the woods, I think about how we are woven into the hydrological cycle. Our sweat, our perspiration, and our urine make it into the local drainage and streams. That water goes down to the ocean, evaporates, rises into the jet stream, and comes back our way in clouds that drop the rain we eventually drink. Our bodies are deeply woven into that cycle.

We also often lose sight of the fact that we are animals. When you are out in the woods at night by a campfire, instinctual reactions get activated. When we hear a branch snap in the darkness, there is a shot of adrenaline preparing our bodies for the fight or flight response. We are also part of the food chain; out in the wilderness, we could be another critter's lunch.

Even separate from the macro wilderness, our bodies themselves are ecosystems. In our microbiome, we have trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Our body is an ecosystem for these tiny microbes, which are living their lives inside of us. To them, our bodies are vaster and wilder than the Alaskan wilderness is to us. We literally rely on these organisms to survive, breaking down food and performing essential functions. We have multiple mini-ecosystems: what's happening in my ear is very different from what's happening in my gut or on my skin.

My primary Buddhist practice is in the Zen tradition. Sitting in meditation is an extremely physical experience. Sometimes people think meditation is just sitting back in a comfy chair and leaving your body to go to some peaceful astral plane. But Buddhist practice is profoundly physical: sitting in a posture, feeling the physicality of breathing, doing walking meditation, or performing chores around the monastery.

This leads to an idea that echoes in my head: Our embodied-ness in our bodies and our senses is the gateway to realizing our embeddedness in nature as nature.

I use "realizing" in two senses here. First, realizing in the sense of waking up to something, picking up on the fact that we are interwoven into reality. Second, realizing in the sense of making actual or actualizing. We confirm and make real our connection through our physicality—getting out into nature, attending to our breath in sync with the trees, feeling ourselves in the hydrological cycle, and feeling ourselves as animals moving through the woods.

Guided Meditation: Checking in with the Senses

Let's try a practice I often use when I step outside for a walk. I do this as a transition, a little ritual marker to move from my to-do list and worries into a sacred space where I pay attention to my natural surroundings. I call it checking in with my senses.

Let's all sit up straight. I will ring my bell. Take a couple of breaths to settle. If you feel comfortable, please close your eyes.

Direct your attention to your body and the sense of touch. Feel your body contacting the chair. Feel the bottom of your feet contacting the floor. Do you feel warm or cool? Might you feel any air moving through the space? Does your abdomen feel relaxed? Is there any tightness in your upper back?

Now turn your attention to your sense of smell. Breathe in a couple of times through your nose and see if you can detect any smell in the space you are occupying. What does that space smell like?

Direct your attention to the sense of taste. Is there any taste in your mouth? Maybe traces of coffee or your breakfast. Feel your saliva with your tongue and see if you can sense any flavor there.

Direct your attention to the sense of hearing. Take a minute to monitor any sounds you are hearing. Sounds that might arise, continue, and then disappear. Feel your mind as a spacious expanse, and just attend to sounds as they arise and disappear.

Now, open your eyes and gently receive whatever you are seeing in front of you through your sense of sight.

For the next minute, see if you can settle back into your sense experience—the feelings in your body, the sensations on your skin, what you are smelling, tasting, hearing, and seeing. See if you can let go of thinking and just attend to those senses. Settle back into your sense experience in this moment, just like you might settle back into a really comfortable chair at the end of the day.

[A period of silent meditation follows.]

Gujin: Pouring Yourself into the Moment

As we all experienced, even when I say, "Let go of your thinking and settle back into your sense experience," it is easier said than done. I sometimes say that the worst advice you can give someone who is feeling anxious or depressed is, "Don't worry, be happy," as if we have an on-off switch on our ribcage. Our monkey mind is tenacious.

However, there are techniques to help us come back into touch with everything around us. One concept I find very interesting is the Zen expression Gujin⁵. Gujin is the practice of pouring yourself entirely into your activity. It is the idea of giving yourself fully to the act of breathing, or to playing the guitar, dancing, surfing, or throwing pottery. A lot of us have had that experience of pouring ourselves into an action we love. We aren't thinking about work or home; we are fully immersed.

When you sit down to meditate, try to really feel yourself giving yourself over to the breath. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about pausing through the day, sometimes ringing a bell of mindfulness and taking three breaths, especially when we find ourselves scattered and distracted. Out of that pause, we can give ourselves to the action at hand. If I am driving and obsessing, I pause, take a few breaths, and then fully give myself to the act of holding the steering wheel and watching the traffic. If you are hiking and realize you aren't present, pause, take a breath, and give yourself to each step.

This is about being present in the present moment with a specific kind of presence. When I am grieving, the most nurturing thing isn't always someone trying to fix things; it is someone who just shows up and is fully present with me. Thich Nhat Hanh observed that offering our full presence to others is the greatest gift of love. Offering our presence is also how we realize our interconnectedness with nature.

Q&A and Reflections

Elizabeth: This whole thing really resonates with me. Sometimes when I'm outside or inside, I'll go outside and say something like, "Thank you, moon," or "Thank you, bee." I also do that when I'm driving to keep myself where I am instead of listening to a podcast. It's kind of like the Thich Nhat Hanh bell in a way, you're stopping, pausing.

Chris Ives: It is interesting to talk to things around you. When I'm hiking, I'll talk to a beautiful boulder or a bird that flies by. I'll say, "Beautiful little flower, thank you. How's your day going?" I don't know what that does psychologically, but it really deepens that connection to be in dialogue with those things. We are not the only ones presencing; everything around us is presencing in its own way as well.

Deborah: One powerful experience I had hiking early in the morning was when it was very foggy up in the hills in Santa Barbara. I was bedazzled by the wetness and the dew on everything. I stopped walking for cardio, and I was reminded of Georgia O'Keeffe saying it takes a long time to really see a flower. When I zoomed in, a whole dimension opened up that I miss when I'm just walking by. The chattering stopped. But I'm curious: as a Zen practitioner, if everything is one, it seems like there are subtle ways of dualizing when we say "don't think, just be." How do we really have a sense of not always parsing everything in our ordinary way?

Chris Ives: How do we find the balance between realizing oneness and yet returning to being Chris Ives, who has to analyze things to make decisions? One helpful metaphor is the water and the waves. Zen says that at one level, it's all interconnected as a whole, like an ocean. But that whole is always taking particular forms—like the waves on the surface, or Chris, or Deborah, or Santa Barbara. We have to maintain a balance where we realize that oneness, but then come back to deploying our discriminating minds when appropriate (like deciding what to eat for dinner), without getting caught up in obsessive worry.

There's a story from 30 or 40 years ago when Taizan Maezumi Roshi⁶ was leading a Zen retreat in Los Angeles. While he was giving a Dharma talk, a participant suddenly blurted out, "I can see it, it's all one! It's all one!" Maezumi Roshi, without skipping a beat, turned to a senior monk and said, "Remind me not to send him out for groceries." He was basically affirming that yes, at one level it's all one, but don't get stuck there. You still have to get your shopping cart down the aisle without bumping into things.

Ignorance, Spaciousness, and Genjōkōan

I am currently finishing a book on Buddhist resources for engaging the climate crisis. Part of it explores lifestyle changes that help us slow down and deal with the freneticism and distraction that hinder our ability to respond. Our sense of disconnection from nature leads to an obliviousness about the climate crisis. We can look at this through the lens of ignorance—delusion, distraction, blaming others, or obliviousness to our embeddedness in nature.

In Buddhism, we often speak of three areas of karma, or action: mental activity, verbal activity, and physical activity. How can we cultivate spaciousness in these three areas?

Regarding mental spaciousness, many Buddhists compare an open, receptive awareness to the sky. Jack Kornfield quotes the Buddha: "Develop a mind that is vast like space, where experiences both pleasant and unpleasant can appear and disappear without conflict, struggle or harm. Rest in a mind like vast sky." When thoughts arise, they are like birds flying through an open sky. We observe our thoughts rather than getting entangled in them.

Dōgen, the 13th-century founder of the Soto branch of Zen in Japan, wrote a famous text called the Genjōkōan⁷. One of its most famous passages reads:

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things.

Jan Chozen Bays⁸ speaks of this as teaching the mind to empty itself and stand ready—a relaxed mind waiting for whatever appears. By forgetting the self, pouring yourself into your breath, and becoming spacious like the sky, you open yourself to being filled by all things.

Interestingly, the Sino-Japanese character for "empty" is the same character for "sky" and "space." In Buddhist philosophy, emptiness means that each thing is empty of a separate essence; it exists relationally through interconnectedness. This empty, spacious sky-mind allows us to really take things in.

Dōgen also uses the term Genjo, which means "presencing." When you are completely relaxed and open, you can deeply appreciate things as they present themselves to you in their "suchness." You savor the music, the sunset, or the lichen on a rock. In those moments, the distinction between you and the object drops away. It is just the happening of the music, or the event of the sunset. This breaks us out of our dualistic mode of experience.

Supportive Practices for Connecting with Local Nature

When we talk about Buddhist meditation, we often set ourselves up for disappointment by expecting amazing altered states of consciousness. If we solely rely on meditation to feel connected to nature, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Fortunately, there are other embodied practices that help us realize our embeddedness in local nature.

Gary Snyder, a poet with a deep background in Zen and indigenous traditions, wrote a wonderful essay called "Re-inhabitation." He talks about plugging into your specific place for the long haul: learning the geology, the hydrology, the local flora and fauna, and how indigenous people lived there before colonial settlers. He speaks of the "Great Earth Sangha," recognizing that our community includes other sentient beings, plants, and even inorganic elements like rivers and mountains.

David Abram, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, explores how indigenous traditions view animals not just as instinctual creatures, but as intelligent presences speaking their own languages. Buddhism has historically recognized animals as fellow sentient beings capable of suffering, but often lumps them together generically. I believe Buddhism can learn a lot from zoologists and indigenous wisdom regarding the sophisticated social behaviors and intelligence of the animals we share the earth with.

Other supportive practices include:

• Gratitude at meals: When eating, acknowledge all the inputs that made your food possible—the soil, the farmers, the pollinators, the worms, and the sun.
• Segaki⁹ Rituals: Leaving a small portion of your meal outside as an offering for hungry ghosts (which ultimately feeds the local birds and squirrels).
• Samu¹⁰: Doing physical chores like gardening, raking gravel, or sweeping as a form of meditative practice.
• Appreciating Aesthetics: Traditional Zen temples and gardens are designed to nestle into nature rather than tower over it. Rustic tea bowls resemble ancient, lichen-covered boulders. Landscape paintings show human dwellings blending seamlessly into vast, misty mountains, breaking down the boundary between humans and the natural world.

Q&A and Final Reflections

Deborah: Mark Coleman has a wonderful book called Awake in the Wild, which offers great meditations in nature. Since COVID, living in buildings and cars, this stark separation from nature has become so obvious. Intentionally being in nature seems necessary to rebalance. Growing up camping, it was natural, but now I see how isolated we are, especially with smartphones breaking our attention.

Chris Ives: Yes, Mark Coleman's Awake in the Wild is wonderful. It is rooted in the Insight Meditation tradition, whereas my approach today is colored by Zen. There are many benefits to just getting outside—what the Japanese call forest bathing. Breathing in terpenes from the trees affects our parasympathetic nervous system and reduces negative stress chemicals.

Kristen: For me, a sense of gratitude helps drop me in. Waking up and being aware of the materials from the earth that make up my room brings me back. I grew up backpacking, but I think as much can be done by going locally in your neighborhood and picking up garbage. Taking care of the earth is taking care of myself. It feels a bit more real sometimes than raking rocks.

Chris Ives: Exactly. We run the risk of exclusively privileging "unspoiled wilderness" and denigrating urban nature. Going out and picking up trash helps us realize that nature is all around us. The space I am in right now is not fundamentally different from a beaver lodge or a bird's nest. We need to steward the nature right outside our front doors in the city just as much as we steward the national parks.

Finally, I want to touch on the word for mindfulness: Sati (or Smriti in Sanskrit)¹¹. While mindfulness is often defined as bare attention in the present moment without judgment, the root of the word also means "remembering" or "keeping in mind." Mindfulness is not always an empty mind; it is also keeping certain teachings or intentions in mind as you move through your day. When you are on the trail, mindfulness means remembering to pause and take three breaths, remembering to check in with your senses, and remembering that we are always woven into nature.

Thank you, everybody. It has been great being with you. Let's stay in touch, and I hope we can be together in the woods someday.