Welcome, everyone. City Center.

[10:02]

Her name is Judith. The Zen lineage of Category Road. Shoran, you're going in and out. know that? That might be helpful. Sorry, maybe I'll have better luck. Is my audio okay? And my internet? Great. I am in a spot of my room that gets good Wi-Fi.

[11:13]

I apologize. Heather was introducing Judith because they know each other, and I have yet to meet Judith, so this is quite a treat, though I know Judith is in Katagiri Roshi's lineage and was heavily involved in the Clouds and Water Zendo in... the Twin Cities in Minneapolis, which I think our very own Steph Wendersky started out there. So I'm very excited, and we're all very excited to invite Judith to give the talk today. And for those of you who don't know, Katagiri Roshi was one of the abbots of San Francisco Sun Center, and he was one of the Japanese teachers who came over to help Suzuki Roshi start San Francisco Zen Center before eventually moving to Minneapolis and teaching there. And he has many Dharma heirs still in the Minnesota area. And so now I will offer the opening verse and then Judith can begin.

[12:16]

An unsurpassed penetrating and perfect Dharma. It is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. And is my voice okay? You can hear me? Good. I'm in Minnesota in the basement. And I'm very, very happy to be here. It's kind of an auspicious occasion for me.

[13:19]

I never dreamed that I would be talking at San Francisco Zen Center. And you have been in my psyche since the 70s. And I just thought I would start that out because it's the first paragraph of my book. I guess the reason I'm here is I'm talking about my book called Untangling Karma, Intimate Zen Stories on Healing Trauma. Tia, who has been a good friend of mine, recommended that I talk here. And I'm, oh, I feel so honored, really, to talk at what we jokingly call the mothership in Minnesota. So I don't know, are any of you old enough to remember this? And my husband very nicely enlarged it.

[14:21]

This was on the back cover of the first Tassajara cookbook. And this is what I would, Katagiri Roshi used to say, you have an original bodhicitta, you have an original reason for your spiritual life. And this photo was my original reason for my spiritual life. I wanted to be like that in the kitchen. And the person has a kind of smirky, funny smile on his face or her face. So that is a connection, a deep connection I have with your lineage. So I'd like to start with gratitude.

[15:23]

I wrote a book about healing. And mostly I wrote it because I needed a lot of healing in my life. And what happens in Zen and in Buddhism in general when you come into the practice with a very disturbed emotional body? I kind of think, excuse me for saying this, but I kind of think that Zen is a little underdeveloped in dealing with people who have had a lot of trauma in their life or who are very emotionally distraught. We have a lot of incredible, incredible gifts to give to the world, the Zen practice. But I wrote this book because I had to find other ways as well as Zen to help me navigate my emotional life.

[16:36]

So I'd like to express gratitude about my healing. I had the time and the money to do Zen practice. I had the time and the money to do a lot of psychotherapy. I had the time and the money to. Study nonviolent communication. I had the time, but you don't need money to do 12 step recovery. And. In a way, I could call this a deep, deep gratitude, and I do. But in another way, I could say this also came from my privilege in my location in society that I had the time and the money to do all these different modalities. And I'm so grateful for that, really.

[17:46]

Not odd, actually. It's very telling that the 12-step recovery program, which is free and is highly accessible, is a little bit dismissed in our culture. So I just like to honor that. I used a lot of different modalities to heal with, I would say, Zen as my base. And I was very, very fortunate that my karma led me to weave all these modalities together because I needed them. I needed them. I did a podcast with Shorin that's up now on Spark Zen. And the first question she asked me was, why did you write such a frank? vulnerable, exposing book.

[18:49]

And it is terribly exposing if you read it. Now, unfortunately, now I have to talk about it. I didn't have to only write it, but now I have to talk about it. And when I was, I've been an artist my whole life. And when I was a teenager, I got this principle. about art, that if you go really deep, if you scour the bottom of what you're dealing with, that that will make what you're doing artistically available to kind of, it'll make it universal or more open to humanity. Lots of people will be able to relate to it because you went as deep as you could And whether that, I don't even know if that's the right philosophy or not, but I've had that philosophy about art since I was in high school.

[19:54]

And that's what I did when I wrote this book. And also what I found now that it's written and finished is that it was also a modality for my healing. Although everything I wrote in the book, I had talked about before. I had talked about it in psychotherapy. I had done step four, which is writing all your defects of character, your stories about your life. I had done all of that, but I still felt kind of anxious inside. So what was that, I thought? This is after 50 years of Buddhism. And also as my students at Clouds and Water started to call me Roshi. Ooh, is this how a Roshi feels? I asked myself. So I decided again to, I feel like at that point, my personal karma, my personal history, I had somewhat digested.

[21:11]

You know, what happened to me as a child, what happened to me during my early life. So if I've digested my personal story, what was left that was giving me this anxiety? And that's when I began to explore intergenerational trauma. in a larger perspective, in the system perspective, and in history. And that actually gave me a lot of relief. And I would say by the writing of this book, the metabolizing of it, the releasing of it, I have actually had quite a bit of freedom coming to me now. after 50 years of studying Zen, oddly, I got the freedom by actually going into my stories.

[22:22]

So that's a little controversial, I think, in the Buddhist community. Intimate stories is in the title. And I think, if I may say, I think it's kind of a female way of teaching. that we tell stories about our life and how I actually used the principles of Zen and the principles of spirituality to untangle my stories. But I couldn't only think of my stories personally. I had to think of my stories systemically. And that's when I really began to understand what You know, in some ways, I hate to say this. It's a confession. I think that a lot of my Zen life was about me becoming free.

[23:27]

And I didn't realize, actually, that there is no me. I understood that from transcendental mental states that I got in from sitting for long periods of time. Then I felt that there was no me. But I didn't understand that in terms of my stories. The late Thich Nhat Hanh Dayo Sho, he has this phrase. self is made of not self. I is made of non-I elements. And I just really began to penetrate that phrase because I started to see that I was a reflection of my parents, of history, of what was currently in fashion when I was growing up, which was hippies.

[24:35]

All of those outside factors were how my structure was built that I call an ego. And when I studied all of those factors, I actually could see, could see there was no centralized person, that I was a reflection of my conditioning. And that's the deepest part for me of having written a book all about stories of my life. You know, we talk about, what do they call it in Buddhism? Not depersonalization. Oh, I'm not going to remember the word. But we want to depersonalize our stories. And the irony for me... is that I had to go into my story, deeply into my story, before I could see it wasn't personal.

[25:41]

It was a reflection of all the conditions, the conditions of my birth. I was born in 1951, and my parents were Jewish. And the Jewish community had barely, not even... not even barely, digested the genocide of the previous decade. So that was highly influential in the making of my psychic structure. And until I really delved into internalized antisemitism, which is the first chapter of the book, I didn't get where this anxiety was coming from. And it was coming from being brought up in the Jewish community in the 50s. And not only that, you know, thousands of years of Jews having oppression.

[26:44]

And the scientists are now finding that oppression actually changes your chromosomes. They elongate the telomeres on the ends of the chromosomes. So the next generation is more likely to have symptoms because of that. And I also had a deep hope that if I went into my internalized antisemitism, that that would also register with other people. who were also oppressed. And I've been talking to people, and it seems like it might be true that what I talk about actually relates, particularly that if you're an oppressed person, you know, I'm speaking about race, I'm speaking about religion, I'm speaking about political oppression.

[27:51]

that you carry around self-hate, which is coming from outside. But actually, that's an external thing. And how do we heal that? Heal that so that we can have the clarity of love and the clarity of freedom of choice and the things that come with love. enlightenment or liberation, that has to be dealt with, or at least in my case, it had to be freed up. So the book talks about a lot of things that are, I feel that, well, you're not really supposed to talk about them. You're not supposed to talk about internalized anti-Semitism, and you're not supposed, well, we're beginning to talk about race.

[28:55]

There's one chapter in my book, which is about racial injustice. And there's a chapter about, you know, I also was very influenced by the late Bernie Glassman, Dayo Sho, and his plunges. And I went plunges means that you go to some place that is so startling that it takes you out of your concepts. You just can't hold on to what you're thinking about or what your ideas are or what you think the solution is. Your mind is kind of blown and you enter into what he called don't know mind. And so I went with him when I knew that I needed to investigate my Jewish heritage, because now I was a Buddhist. I never talked about being Jewish. I let it go as if it was inconsequential that I was raised Jewish.

[29:56]

It's not inconsequential. There was a lot of internal vibrations because of that. So I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau with... Bernie in the Peacemakers Order. And that, so I did that. And then maybe four years later, I went with the Jesus for Peace pilgrimage, which was going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the, what was it, the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing. I went there with Chosen Bays and what's their name? Great Vow Monastery. I'm a little nervous, so I have to think about the words. So I tried to explore this issue in my life very physically and very embodied.

[31:07]

It was very, very beneficial for me. And it was in Hiroshima that I kind of got this idea that there was no centralized self. Because in Hiroshima, I was a Jewish American woman dressed like a Japanese man. On a mission with Jizo, which the Japanese culture thinks that's just for kids, you know, like a cartoon character. It was so mixed up. And I didn't know who I was. At the very end, I didn't know who I was. And that was very disconcerting. And I realized at that point that I was a reflection, that I was a reflection of the conditions that preceded me.

[32:16]

It was very profound. Profound. Let me stop at that for a second. And it was in... It was in Auschwitz-Birkenau that I saw or felt the conditions that made my father. And my dad, my dad was very, very angry man. Makes me sad to say that. He felt he had a lot to prove. He was in World War II, and his whole life was proving that he wasn't an animal, that he could get status, fame, money.

[33:18]

He could rise to the top, and he did. My parents succeeded at being very powerful people in the Jewish community, and it was very difficult for their children and difficult for me. to have those as the primary values. So I had a lot of resentment, to say the least, against my parents. And I separated from them. I became a Buddhist. I married a goyim, as we would say in Yiddish. I was running away with my hair on fire. And I guess I'm going to read this as kind of, you know, I'm improvising what I say, although I have a kind of a chart of what I'm supposed to say. So I got right into it. I hope it's a little heavy. I hope it's okay.

[34:20]

But I'm going to read you the moment where I forgave my dad. And... Well, I want to talk about forgiveness, but I usually talk about it at the end of the talk, but here I am at the beginning. But let me just say something about forgiveness. Forgiveness is, for me now, one of the highest spiritual qualities. Joan Sutherland has a wonderful quote, and just the gist of it is, can we forgive the world? For being the world. Or can we forgive samsara. For being samsara. Can we forgive. That the world is made of dukkha. So that we can be free. May I be free. Because I forgive. So.

[35:25]

And I'd also like to say. You can't start out with forgiveness. I think a lot of people try to force that. There's a beautiful Vipassana meditation, probably some of you know it, about forgiving other people, forgiving yourself. And it's a three-part, forgiving other people, forgiving yourself, and forgiving the acts that you've done to other people. It's a beautiful meditation, and I've worked quite a bit with it. But I noticed in my healing that I never got to forgiveness until I was more than three quarters into digesting the pain. You can't forgive until you digest the pain of the action or the insult. And that really goes to something else I wanted to talk about, which is this book is a lot about consequences, the consequences of World War II, the consequences of slavery, the consequences of sexual abuse, because we don't talk about them.

[36:46]

We don't want to feel the pain, so we don't talk about them. to move through, to move on, to understand what might be a loving action, we have to feel, we have to go to the bottom of the pain. I used to say when I gave a lot of lectures, you go to the bottom of the pain and there's a door and Avalokiteshvara is there in the door. And can come forward and give you kindness and forgiveness. But the digestion process is very slow. And maybe I could say this. You move at the speed of your own trust. You digest and metabolize trauma at the speed of how much you can trust. So it's a long process.

[37:50]

It's a lifelong process. That's the other thing about consequences like with sexual abuse. Like I wrote this chapter before the Me Too movement. And I was so happy, of course, that women were starting to come out and speak the truth. But I felt like the Me Too movement went maybe 10%. Just these acts happen. But not they, but the culture, our culture, didn't talk about the 90% of what you have to do to get over the 10% of someone misusing sexuality. So... I wrote a chapter about the 90%, what I had to do to recover from childhood molestation and rape when I think I was 32, and what I had to do, what my husband had to do in order to find a wholesomeness there.

[39:05]

And I laugh now because I say I only... I'm fine with 80% healed. Yay, 80% healed. I'm not expecting 100% healed. And I translate that also to enlightenment. 80% enlightenment, great, great. What more could I ask for? And I think when I used to try to do 100%, that was kind of a perfectionism. And I think perfectionism is a near enemy or even a arch enemy of liberation. So 80% is good enough. So a lot of the book is exploring in myself the consequences of war, abuse of different kinds and slavery.

[40:09]

So with that, I had done a lot of work on healing with my dad. I think he might have died by the time I went to Hiroshima. I'm not sure. I can't remember. But anyway, I'll read you a paragraph about the moment that I forgave my dad. And it's emotional for me. Standing in the middle of the Birkenau concentration camp, I realized the causes and conditions that had made my father my so-called enemy. And he became a human being in my eyes. I saw beyond my limited and preconceived intellectual understanding of who my father was and the conditions.

[41:18]

that had shaped his psyche. My heart opened to the causes of my father's rage. It struck me like lightning in a moment of insight and release as I was moving in a long stream of retreat participants towards the front gates for a lunch of bread and soup. All of a sudden, with no warning or intention, I found myself dropping to my knees, my head bent over and my hands on my heart. People were streaming past me on both sides as if I were a rock in a stream, the water rushing past. In this moment out of time, huddled forward over my knees. I forgave my father and asked him to forgive me.

[42:24]

Crying and howling with grief for my ancestors, for my parents, and for me, I saw the many repercussions of the violence and dehumanization that had happened at Birkenau and in my people's lives. and their connection with my own life. So in many cases now, in the different little stories, personal stories of my life, my historic life, I have actually come to a place of forgiveness. And maybe I would feel more comfortable with people calling me Roshi now. And I've come to the place where it's okay to be human.

[43:36]

I don't have to be more than human to be A Zen, a mature Zen person. I really, I'm just me now. Me that's completely connected, interconnected with Indra's net. And now I meditate a lot on Indra's net. That I influence others and others influence me. And history, what's in the newspaper influences me. And what I choose to do with my life influences the world. And that has given me a lot of relief and stability. And I don't have to fix things. It's not fixable, as the Buddha so elegantly told us. But how we hold the pain, how we perceive the

[44:41]

That is changeable. That is evolution. I just got that word. Someone said, it's possible to evolve, to really change. And I feel like writing this book and now talking about the book has helped me look at it. metabolize it, and then release it, it being my history, how I constructed my psyche. And it's a lot of freedom now. I'm so happy to report. I hope, I hope this gives hope. Maybe that would be a wonderful outcome. of having written a very exposing, intimate book, that I give people hope that you can evolve.

[45:49]

You can heal 80%. You can heal. And you can move into choice, having choice about your life. So in a way... Let's just, I'm going to take a breath, if you don't mind. So, in a way, the whole book is trying to digest the fox koan. Are you guys... I'm sure some of you are familiar with the Foxconn. It's Book of Serenity 8. And I'm not going to go into the whole Foxconn, but I'm going to read the two parts that are the, what do they call it?

[46:59]

The very edge that you're teetering on an edge or a tightrope walker's rope. It's a very thin edge. And this is the thin edge that is in the Fox coan. And I'll change the pronoun to she for fun. She does not fall into cause and effect. And she is not blind or she doesn't ignore cause and effect. So for me, this has to do with spirituality that is both transcendent and descendant. So I would say that Buddhism, and particularly because we're a patriarchal lineage, that Buddhism falls into the transcendent mode, the ascending mode.

[48:02]

And we are really good at that. And I bless my ancestors for helping me figure out transcendence and perspective and seeing the world from a not centralized self. And that the world changes all the time. And that there is, I think of the third seal. You know, when I was growing up in Buddhism, the third seal was dukkha. And then maybe 15 years ago, or I don't know how long ago, both the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh changed dukkha to nirvana. And I thought, what are they doing? That's not the traditional teaching. And I thought about this a lot. Why did our two leading Buddhist, contemporary Buddhists, change it from samsara to nirvana?

[49:05]

And where I ended up was with evolution, that they were trying to tell us, where they were teaching us that it's possible to evolve, that it's possible to go from dukkha to nirvana in how we practice. Where I'm at now is, this is where I'm at. I'm not compartmentalizing things as much as I used to. Enlightenment and ordinary and transcendent and descendant and Zen and Vipassana. I don't know what category. I used to live a lot by categories and judgments about categories. And what has freed up in me is seeing the mutuality, seeing that the opposites spin around each other.

[50:16]

That's the wholeness, that ascendant and descendant modalities of spirituality spin around each other. They're mutually necessary. And I'm talking about Descendant, like the book I would call Descending, because it's about my stories, it's about history, it's about human relationships, very down on the ground. But this book, although it's Descendant, is totally based on my Zen practice, which was Ascendant. And I realized that the freedom that I'm feeling now, I don't know how to express my gratitude for the freedom I'm feeling now, is based on the mutuality of transcendence and descendants.

[51:18]

And if I may say, as an elder Zen teacher now, I think we need to develop a little bit more on the descendant part in Buddhism. And I'm hoping that the 21st century will realize that. I think we already are. the rest of the world and with a lot of people in 21st century. And there need to be some changes. And I think the changes are already happening. I have hope that they're going to happen. And this is my offering to see if I can help modulate ascending and descending Buddhism.

[52:22]

I really want to have a dialogue. So I'm going to close so that we can talk to each other about what I've said. But I want to end with, I don't know how to pronounce this, so please forgive me. It's a Japanese word, kintsukurai, which is the Japanese craft of taking a broken vessel and And putting it together with gold or silver, repairing it, mending it with gold and silver. And the new vessel is very, very beautiful. The mended vessel. And in some ways, I feel a little bit like that's what I've been doing with myself. Taking a really broken person. When I first came... I just met an old person from Katagiri Roshi Sangha who looked at me and said, oh, you're the girl who was crying all the time.

[53:37]

You know, crying in the Zendo and crying. You know, I would go up to Roshi for Dokusan and I would just sit in his room and cry. The poor guy. This is a Japanese conservative Zen teacher. He didn't know what the heck to do with me. You know, I would just cry and cry. But anyway. My vessel has been put back together with gold. So I have a picture here. This is a jar that is an example of kintsukurai, which is putting together a broken vessel with gold or silver. And there's a fabulous... koan about it. You know, I'm going to read you the koan because you guys are Zenies. I kind of took out a lot of the koans when I give other talks. But I'm going to read you the full koan because it's really great.

[54:42]

Okay. I'll take a couple of minutes. All right. This is a koan. I think it's in the woman's koan book. The Hidden Lamp. I think that's where I got it. And it's called The Authentic Tea Bowl Before You Were Born. Moonheart, a Zen teacher, had prepared in great detail a tea ceremony for her teacher, Abbas Echo. She had cleaned the tea house, arranged a just-picked flower, found a teapot, boiled the water, and contemplated what sweet to offer. Moonheart decided to use a special antique tea bowl, a precious gift that the abbess herself had given her. Near the beginning of the tea ceremony, a Dharma sister of the abbess, Mushin,

[55:44]

stopped by and was invited to join them for the tea ceremony. She had a nickname, the Wild Woman, and carried a bone as her teaching staff. Right in the middle of the ceremony, Mushin smashed the tea bowl with her bone and scattered all the pieces on the floor. Everything, every thought stood still. Moonheart nearly fainted. Mushin exclaimed, now look at the authentic tea bowl that exists before birth. So that's the transcendent answer. And then this is what the Abbas said. A few moments later, Abbas Eiko calmly responded. I gave you this tea bowl, but now I would like you to give it back to me.

[56:48]

Before you do, gather up all the pieces, glue them back together, and fill the cracks with gold, and name this new bowl the authentic tea bowl before birth. So that's the descendant answer. And a lot of the koans are about this, but I didn't kind of get it until recently. So I'll end and maybe we can have a talk. You can just comment or if you want to ask a question, I'd be very willing to answer. Thank you, Judith. anyone should be able to raise their Zoom hand and we will have a queue. And while people are thinking of that, I will offer the closing verse so we can just end the Dharma Talk portion of the morning and then we will have comments and questions.

[58:02]

Oh, excuse me. Go ahead. I'm sorry. May our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. I just noticed in the chat that someone asked for the name of my book.

[59:09]

So would you put it in if you know it? Because I don't want to deal with the chat while I'm talking with people. Yes, of course. Thank you. Tova! Hello, Judith. Thank you so much for your talk. I really resonated with many, many things that you said, and I appreciate your women's perspective of and how open you were about your own healing process. And I wanted to ask you if you know about a poem by Hannah Block called The Joins. It's about this process of, she calls it, she uses the Japanese word kintsugi. And I wonder, is it okay if I read a bit of it? Lovely. Okay, she says, we glue the wounded edges with tentative fingers.

[60:09]

Scar tissue is visible history and the cup is precious to us because we saved it." And then she says, sometimes the joins that the potter uses with this gold powder, sometimes the joins are so exquisite they say the potter may have broken the cup just so she could mend it. So I'll send you that poem if I can find your email address. But I just appreciated the way in which you talked about healing and how it's a lifelong process. And I just appreciate the change that you have made and that you're sharing it in a book. I think it will be really helpful for many of us. So thank you. I don't really have a question. I just wanted to appreciate you and your work.

[61:12]

Tova and I roomed together on the Jesus for Peace pilgrimage. That was quite fun. Fun and not fun, both. Both, yes. Thank you. So anyone who has anything to offer can.

[62:27]

And maybe Jill is having a hard time raising their Zoom hand. So I'll ask you to unmute and you can. Hi, Judith. Excellent job. I was thinking as you were talking that so many of us have these familial roles or past history that but make rules for our family that we don't even understand generations ahead, like where we are. The rules were made in the past for survival, to keep things moving, to keep everybody alive. And now we're stuck with the rules that are part of our family. We don't even know why we do them sometimes. And I think it's really amazing that you were able to go to Auschwitz and internalize why there were rules or what your father was trying to accomplish with his life and maybe the rules of survival that he based it on.

[63:41]

And I just think that's really great that you could do that. My question is, how did you know what to choose, what stories to choose when you wrote the book? I'd like to answer your question, your first question a little bit, and then I can talk about choosing. Untangling karma. The Buddha talks about that. What did he say? Well, it's so hard to find things in my notes. Anyway, he said it's up to us to untangle our karma. I learned a lot about how to untangle my karma from the Tibetans. Pema Chodron, of course, is a great resource. She taught me Tonglen, which was very powerful for me.

[64:44]

And the Lojong slogans. One of the Lojong slogans is do anything differently. So that means you have to identify the pattern, the karmic pattern, or the karmic momentum. And then once you've identified it, you can recognize it when it arises. I got this also from Ken McLeod. He has a wonderful book on interrupting habit patterns. When you recognize it... As arising in the present moment, it's all present moment. You rely on the universe. You trust. You resonate with the larger space. And then you interrupt the pattern in the moment, however you can. And I've said it like a mustard seed of spiritual quality or practice.

[65:47]

like a three breath practice or patience or forgiveness or whatever you're working on, you do it in that moment when you see that you're in the pattern. And then what Pema Chodron has said over and over is the more you run a pattern, the stronger the pattern gets. The less you run the pattern, the weaker the pattern gets. That's how I practiced. Well, I still practice that way, but for decades, identifying what the patterns were that I wanted to change, noticing when they arise in the present moment, and doing anything differently in response. That's the way you untangle the momentum of our karmic life. So that's one answer. I taught that a lot at Clouds and Water. And I did that a lot, which I think was the tilling of the ground before I wrote the book.

[66:58]

And the stories, you know, really, the book started out, I had a few what I considered kind of profound stories that I wanted to write down. The one, I mean... Going to these places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki on one end and Auschwitz-Burke now on the other, that seemed pretty profound to me. I went to Africa with an all-Black group, and we studied the slave castles in Ghana. And then I went to Mississippi, to Montgomery, Mississippi, to go to those museums. Oh, and I had this incredible story about Melissa, who was my childhood maid, a black woman. And I had this incredible relationship with her, and I was at her death in Greenville, Mississippi. And I just wanted so much to write about all this stuff.

[68:04]

And then I have all this 12-step, you know, getting rid of all my... addiction issues that I thought, you know, God, I didn't have asthma. Now, after, you know, at 32, I had this like miracle, what I felt like happened. I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write about the doc retreat, which was I did solo outdoor meditations on the suburban pond behind my house. And I did those for five years and they were incredible. So I wanted to write about that. And I didn't understand really what the overall book was going to be about until it was finished. And now I see that was all these different ways, transcendent and descendant ways, a lot of different modalities for healing myself. I worked with Sandy Boucher.

[69:06]

Some of you might know her. She was my editor for a long time. It was very important that I had an editor because you can't write this frank of a book without someone holding your hand. She was really there for me. And she was also very strict. She did not want this to be a journal. She did not want me to... Go overboard on all my emotional stuff. Like she took out pages and pages of all the things my dad did to me. Pages and pages she took out. And only the bare bones were left. And then when we got the three or four main chapters written, what we call all the heavy chapters. heavy, heavy, she said, you know, you need some short, light chapters. And we began to call them sherbert.

[70:07]

Do you know when you go to a gourmet restaurant, they give you sherbert to cleanse your palate? So we have these three or four short chapters, which we called the sherbert chapters, which they're still kind of heavy, but... They're lighter and shorter, and they bring you up out of trauma into, you know, just mindfulness practice and how I live my life, that kind of thing. Did that answer you? Okay. The city center dining room has their hand up. Yes, some folks are here. Oh, great. Saloma. Saloma. Okay. Hi. Can you hear me? Okay. Hello. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you very much.

[71:08]

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I feel like I heard so many beautiful things that it would take way too long and I would not be able to. But two things that I wanted you to know that I took away from this time here. One is the level of anxiety that was still lingering and the connection you made that made to the intergenerational trauma was very meaningful for me to hear. And the other was the forgiveness of your father and the freedom that you've found in that forgiveness is really, really beautiful. And I'm just so very touched by everything that you shared today. And I built the courage to tell you because I wanted to share that. So thank you for all your practice and all your work and for sharing it with us here today.

[72:11]

Thank you so much. This is my dream that people who have difficult histories and are doing Buddhist practice full-heartedly will get something from my stories because they're not told that much. You know, the shadow. In fact, I'm a quilter. This is my quilt. And this person, this guy, is on the back of the book. They took my quilts. The front of the book is one of my quilts, and he's in the back. And I wrote, I made another quilt called Holding Hands with My Shadow. I wanted that to be the name of the book. But if any of you are in the publishing business, the title of the book is the group process. And usually the author doesn't have that much to do with it.

[73:14]

But anyway, Holding Hands with the Shadow, Making Friends. With all this split off parts of myself, that is what has brought me peace, is I don't have to split them off. I can investigate them, love them up, bring them back in, and learn how to love myself with my scars. The scars aren't going to go away. They're lifelong. I can be gentle. Like that's the thing I'm most working on now is because I was from a violent family, I was very harsh, very harsh and very overachieving, like trying to prove myself through achievement, which is what my parents did. And now I feel like the opposite, that what I want to express is

[74:20]

is gentleness towards the suffering that's within us and without us and the world. Now there's so much suffering. How can I bring kindness and gentleness to that? Because bringing harsh violence back just makes everything worse. So that's my practice right now is gentleness and forgiveness. We have, right, we have until 1.30, another few minutes.

[75:33]

Oh, there's someone there. If nobody wants to, I would read something from the book. But we got it. We got somebody. I just want to say thank you. And so many things did resonate. One thing in particular was when you spoke about forgiveness and that reminder that, um, when we think about, we come up and meet something that needs to be forgiven. The habit for me is, um, to want to ascend, go forward. And you just like clarified some things within, within me. So. Now I realize that when it's actually worked, which I have experienced a full forgiveness, but it has been a very deep dive. So instead of this expectation of something's going to happen and I have to like make this, create something in order to relieve suffering, it's more, and that's a habit I now see so much clearly that

[76:48]

It's happened, but I didn't know how it happened. Now I see it. It's like when that presents itself in its time to take action, it really is, it requires a turning around. It's like this turn that happens and this dive. So it's like this activity of inward turning that then actually is this ground up a genuine activity. And in that activity of turning, descending, it's transformation and it becomes the blossom. It's so wonderful the way you were able to clarify that. I want to read your book. Thank you. Yeah. You know, the San Francisco Zen Center bookstore has the book, and you can order it online anywhere, really.

[77:54]

And you could give me a review on Amazon. I'd like to close with reading another story about forgiveness. So Iko Narazaki Roshi was a very famous, high, You couldn't get much higher in the Sotoshu hierarchy than Iko Narazaki Roshi Daisho. He has passed. Bless him. And he came to Hokyoji, which is the Zen monastery affiliated with Katagiri Roshi. Katagiri Roshi begged him to come because he wanted us to see the way of that he lit the incense and walked. And he was very embodied, really embodied. Like I remember Hokyoji, it was very, very primitive at that time.

[79:01]

We didn't even have electricity and it was rained a lot. And I remember watching Narazaki Roshi walk down the muddy hill And he had on those Japanese sandals with big wood ones, you know, like three or four inch sandals. And he was so elegant walking on the mud. It was like he was walking on a cloud. I really do believe. So he came. He came as a favor to Katagiri Roshi. And he taught us... But what I want to read to you is Narazaki Roshi's forgiveness. He came for a week, Sishin, at Hokyoji. On the last lecture of the week, Narazaki Roshi, the distinguished Zen master from Japan, started to cry.

[80:06]

He said that he had not wanted to come to America, the land of the enemy. He said he had a lot of hatred in his heart for America and Americans after the catastrophe in Japan of World War II. He was just barely convinced to do it as a favor to Katagiri Roshi, but he had a lot of internal resistance. Now, he said, Having sat zazen in the beauty of Hokyoji in the zendo or meditation hall with all of us for a week, he had watched his hatred dissolve. Iko Narazaki Roshi watched his mind as it changed. He began to see our humanness and hear our heartfelt stories. He saw our practices the same as his practice. As he told of his transformation, the whole Zendo began to cry.

[81:14]

I think he left the United States a changed man, which he had not expected. We had all thought that the students would be changed, but in this atmosphere of truth, in a week of sitting together, we were all mutually transformed. Thank you so much, Judith. So thank you for your time today. I'll let everyone know the link to order the book is in the chat. So please order it from there and then head over to Amazon and just leave a review. And let's see, everyone should be able to unmute themselves. And if you'd like to just say goodbye and thank you. Bye. Thank you very much.

[82:14]

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for a beautiful talk. Thank you, Judith. Thank you so much, Judith. It was very helpful. Congratulations on your book. Yes. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Good job. Thank you, Judith. It was a healing experience for me. Don't be a stranger. Really appreciate the work you've been doing, Judith. Thank you, Tova. Love you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was such an important talk for me. Judith, thank you so much. Thank you from my heart to yours. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody. Thank you, Judith. It reminded me of Thich Nhat Hanh's work in the book Love about the healing meditation and the student at Plum Village who did his forgiveness with his father.

[83:25]

So thank you so much. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.

[83:37]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.22