Many of us have just returned from summer sesshin, our annual retreat upstate. I find that this weeklong retreat, when we sit in meditation from dawn to dusk, is a fertile time for my personal writing.

That includes ideas for these senior student talks. That was true again this year. When I left for sesshin in early June, I was out of ideas.

One hot afternoon in the barn that serves as our meditation hall, when I was supposed to be focusing on my breath, my back aching and flies buzzing around me, I had a burst of ideas for several talks.

After the sitting, I scribbled them down in a notebook. I also wrote down a bunch of ideas for another project, a novel.

Now, I must confess, a voice in my head scolded me and said I should have been focusing on my breath on the mat, not brainstorming.

But this burst of thinking hadn’t taken a lot of time, and I didn’t indulge it. It just happened.

I remembered something I once heard about Allen Ginsberg. He had developed a habit of interrupting his zazen to write down ideas for poems. One day his teacher was visiting and saw the notebooks next to his meditation mat and scolded him. He told Ginsberg he was training his mind how to interrupt his zazen. At least I wasn’t that bad. I waited until after the sitting was over to scribble the ideas on a slip of paper, and later in my room I expanded on them in my notebook. I rationalized that this would keep me from thinking about them. And that mostly worked.

The next day, I brought the notebook to daisan and described the ideas to my teacher, Sensei Marisa, who encouraged me to work on them.

This talk was the most developed of the ideas.

Usually, I spend a month or two writing and rewriting these talks. But after sesshin, my wife and I flew immediately to Dublin, where we celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary and attended literary events centered around James Joyce and his book Ulysses, which takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904. They call the anniversary Bloomsday, for one of the main characters, Leopold Bloom. Many people consider it to be the greatest novel of the 20th Century. Maybe.

This was inspiring, as you might imagine, and during the trip I worked on my own novel a little bit. But I didn’t give any thought to my next talk, until I got back to New York and realized I would be sitting here in just two weeks.

Whoops.

If this talk turns out a little loose, that’s why. I reasoned that a faster writing process would keep the talk closer to sesshin experience, and to my intuitive mind, to something real and true.

You’ll have to be the judge of that.

And please hold onto that word, Judge. I’ll come back to it.

Back in the barn, the main idea I had on my cushion, when I should have been focusing on my breath, was about the narrators in my head.

This started with a point of view problem I was having with the narrator in my novel.

Writing fiction, and reading it, is a practice of empathy. That is the ideal, anyway.

You must imagine that you are in the minds and hearts, of another person or people, who might be very different from yourself.

My book has a first-person narrator. He is not a journalist. He is not a Zen practitioner. He resembles me but he is not me. Or so I tell myself.

The specific details of the narration problem are not important. After sitting a couple of days on sesshin, after my concerns about my daily life and the ongoing political mess had mostly dropped away, I discovered that my subconscious was working on it.

The main character began speaking in my head. Narrating a whole section of the novel. I listened for a while without judgment, until his voice petered out.

It was good stuff. If I had been sitting alone with a notebook, it would have been tempting to do an Allen Ginsburg.

Instead, I returned to my breath. And after a few breaths, the Writer in my head said, you know, there’s an idea for a talk in here. I remembered that early in my practice my inner monologue, the many narrators in my head, had made zazen quite hard.

There was the Skeptic. I’ve mentioned in talks how he felt about bowing and chanting. There was the Writer, who was tapping on my shoulder at sesshin. There was the Editor, always revising and correcting grammar and usage, including my own.

There was the Scold. The Scold thinks I am lazy and should work hard harder to make myself useful and busy. The Scold’s nagging has made me successful in many ways, but let’s face it, the Scold makes it hard to relax. He’s a bit of a jerk.

The Scold nags me about obligations to family, work, the zendo. He tells me I should sit straighter, pay better attention. If you had worked harder on your novel before sesshin, the scold says, you wouldn’t be thinking about it now. If you had worked on your talk in Dublin, you wouldn’t be rushing through it now. And so on.

The Scold has a cousin, the Critic, who is willing to go on in even greater detail itemizing my many shortcomings. They have a good friend, the Judge. Remember the Judge?

The Judge has a lifetime appointment. He doesn’t just judge me. He has firm opinions about the world and all the people in it. He would change many things if he could. It’s not all negative. His positive rulings are also a problem. They make him self-satisfied and complacent. Once he decides he is right, it is tremendously difficult to change his mind.

The Judge leans heavily on long-ago precedent. I hear him repeating things said by my father or mother, some old boss, an old teacher, a friend, some book or article I read years ago.

NINE

And sometimes the judge’s words come out of my mouth before I can stop them. These days I am more likely to ask: Wait, do I really believe that? And it turns out to be an assertion or belief about myself or others that has been buried in my mind, unexamined, for a long time.

Maybe you have a Judge, or a Scold, or a Critic in your head.

When one of them makes a pronouncement, I’ve found it helps to ask: Says who? Who appointed the judge? Who assigned the critic? Who is scolding whom?

Thanks to zazen, the Judge and other voices no longer have the hold on me that they used to. I recognize them. I name them. I see them for who and what they are.

Most of the time.

The oldest narrator of the bunch is The Child. The voice of the ego. Me, mine, my.

I want THIS. I do NOT want THAT. ….Hey, someone took MY seat… Hey, we were hdere first… Hey, we sat down before them… …I can’t believe they are making us wait… It’s not fair.

The Child doesn’t really care about anyone else. The child can’t imagine what it is like to be someone else. Its needs always come first.

There is also the Adult. So responsible. He carefully maintains his public image. He used to be the Boss at work before I retired. The husband. The father. The Adult likes to come up with explanations. He layers narration on the world around him.

When the Adult is narrating, I am not just walking, I am telling the story of my walk to myself as I walk. Endless chatter.

This is a pretty street…why don’t more blocks have trees? … I think there used to be a bookstore on that corner…I bet I’m getting a lot of steps today… Wow that driver just went through a red light.. I should stop at Duane Reade and check on my prescriptions… I wonder if there are any good movies playing.

When this narrator has been on duty, I discover myself in front of my building or the zendo with no memory of the walk itself. My body has been on autopilot while my mind tells me the story of me. Thanks to my practice, especially kinhin, I have learned to gently turn this narrator’s attention to the foot before and the foot behind in walking, and let the words go.

A few years ago, I was surprised to learn that not everyone experiences inner monologues. In 2023, The New Yorker published an article about people who claim to have no inner voices. Many of them think visually, in images, but some claim their minds are just empty. I’m a little jealous.

This claim was hard for my friends and other literary types who read The New Yorker to believe. They love words and they live in their heads, like me. They are like characters in Joyce’s “Ulysses,” who wander around Dublin for pages and pages without commas, jumping from word to word to idea in a literary style he basically invented called stream of consciousness.

The New Yorker writer, Joshua Rothman, quotes Joyce: “Our mental life, like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

We all know what a Zen teacher would say about that metaphor. Don’t build any nests.

Psychology Today cites research that only about 30 to 50 percent of people report having inner monologues and that those people tend to be more self-centered.

Well.

I don’t know about you, but my mind is a bit more complex. It’s not all narrators. Sometimes I daydream visually, or replay memories, or re-experience random sounds and smells. Sometimes my head also seems empty… usually right after my wife asks me what I’m thinking. NOTHING.

Like all of you, I also have experienced present moment awareness, just soaking in it all with my bodily experience.

An important point in my practice arose when I realized I could turn present moment awareness on the narrators in my head.

On the mind itself.

That’s when a new narrator showed up. The Zen Guy. He knows a thing or two about Buddhism and meditation. He likes to tell me about it. The Zen Guy can be a little pompous, satisfied with himself, a know-it-all. He’s like a lot of monks in the koans who think they’ve figured it all out. Their teachers warn them about getting caught up in, quote, “zen stink.”

The Zen Guy’s favorite go-to comment is, remember this for daisan. See that light glittering on the grass. Bring it to your teacher. Make a note. Put it in a talk. Take a picture with your iphone.

I have come back from retreats with pictures of grass and trees, and notes in my journal that say: “Light streaming through the clouds. Must remember.”

You can’t put a cloud or a rainbow in your pocket, but this Narrator sure tries.

The Zen Guy has a bit of the Critic in him. He notices when other practitioners are not showing up. Sloppy bows, forgotten bells, late to the mat. He is toughest on me. He might even call up the Judge for a quick verdict or unleash the Scold on me.

Absurd. Beautiful. What a busy and creative mind. All this to avoid the present moment.

So many narrators. For a long time, I confused them with my self, my true self. But now it is a lot easier to call them on their bullshit, and they have quieted down.

With the Child, I like to repeat a rhyme I learned 20 years ago at my daughter’s nursery school:

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.

Marvelous. Even the Zen Guy loves it. He thinks it’s a koan. He may be right.

Phrases like this can be great reminders. There’s another one I have used a lot. It’s the title of a book I found in the late 90s in a long-gone Los Angeles bookstore called the Bodhi Tree.

It was a meditation guide called “Breath Sweeps Mind,” by Jean Smith. I don’t remember much about the book, but when I was struggling to meditate without leaping up from the mat after a few minutes, this title helped me.

Breath sweeps mind.

What a great phrase. It still pops up now when I need it.

Back in the barn during sesshin, when I was supposed to be focused on breathing, that was the final idea I had for this talk.

Breath the Narrator.

The Narrator with the Broom.

Is the Critic listing my shortcomings? Breath says, here, take the handle of my broom.

Is the Scold nagging me? Sweep.

Is the Judge issuing rulings from the bench? Sweep.

Is the child whining? Sweep. Is the adult adulting? Sweep.

Breath sweeps mind.

Now, of course, this is not really what it is like.

I am using words to describe this, because words are the tools used to give a talk, which is itself a type of narration.

This broom metaphor personifies Breath as a concept outside and separate from my body and my mind. And it is not.

Breath doesn’t narrate. Breath just breathes.

Breath is not a broom.

It is more like sweeping itself, the motion of lungs and muscles and other bodily tissues, the sounds and sensations of air moving in and out, from moment to moment.

[PAUSE AND DEMONSTRATE]

Thought arising. Lungs inhaling. Thought falling. Lungs exhaling.

For a moment, my mind is without words, without narration. Sometimes it tries to hold on. It might grasp for an image. A broom sweeping dust out the door and onto the street.

But breathing continues. Even the metaphor can’t withstand its narration.

Breath is not just the broom. It is the door. It is also the dust. It is also the street. It’s me. It’s you. It’s everything.

Of course, the mind is tricky. Sometimes on the mat, when I was supposed to be focused on breathing, I was really just thinking about breathing.

Ironic.

There is something I’ve said a few times now in this talk: “when I was supposed to be focused on breathing.”

Says who?

There’s no “supposed to be” in zazen. Zazen contains everything. Whatever happens on the mat, that is my zazen.

The story I told myself in the barn about Breath the Narrator, the story I told myself about this future talk, only lasted a minute or two. Then Breath swept it away.

The dust went out the barn door. Then I had a few moments. ….Then some other idea probably came up. …That’s how it goes.

One of the hardest things I had to learn to recognize on the mat was when my mind was beating me up over what my mind was doing to me.

I could listen to these narrators, but I didn’t have to indulge them, or judge them, or nag myself about them.

Zazen contains all the narrators. And everything else. It is the heat in the barn, the fly in your hair, the pain in your back. It is the light in the clouds and the grass. It is war and the dropping of bombs. It is run-on sentences and made-up words in hundreds of pages of Joyce’s Ulysses. It is delight and boredom, sadness and joy, birth and death.

And without all that everything, we would not be here right now, breathing next to each other in this singular moment.

A couple of weeks ago, when I sat down to look at the notes I had scribbled on sesshin, I was surprised to find only a few sentences.

The real talk was still stuck up here in my head somewhere.

The Child whined that two weeks was not enough time. The Scold wagged his finger at me for not starting sooner. The Writer went to work and finished a first draft.

The Zen Guy took a look at the draft and said, Not Enough Zen.

So then I spent a few hours paging through sutras and koan books and added a new section.

The Judge said that made the talk too long. He was right. I gave the Editor a knife, and he started chopping.

[LONG PAUSE, BREATHING]

And then, when the talk felt done, I sat on my cushion.

And I showed it to Breath.

[A LONGER PAUSE, BREATHING. TALK ENDS WITH A SILENT BOW.]

I gave a version of this talk on July 1, 2025, at Still Mind Zendo (34 W. 15th St., near Union Square, Manhattan).