I began to speak and listen to, to the night where I miss felt. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know what I'm saying. First, thank you to Urban Temple Dharma teacher and the practice period leader, Ryushin, for inviting me in the role of Shuso and to the central abbot, David Zimmerman, for the invitation to share the Dharma seat.

[02:07]

Thank you. And thank you to everybody here who has welcomed and paved the way in these last couple of weeks. I feel thoroughly at home. And that's a really wonderful feeling. Thank you. I was somehow hoping in anticipation of speaking here tonight that prior to coming, I would somehow crack the secret of not getting nervous before public speaking. And I'm afraid to say I'm not quite there yet. Still working on that. And then when Ryu Shin came in the other day and... and named the three things as he crossed the threshold into the Saturday Dharma talk, being reverence, trust, and a little bit of anxiety.

[03:18]

And then I thought, I'm cooked. There's no way. There's no way I'll get there before Wednesday. But what a lovely invitation to talk about way-seeking mind. I was actually only introduced to the idea of way-seeking mind talks since I came to the US a few years ago. And I'll say a bit more about that in a minute. But when I first heard this idea of giving a talk or reflecting for yourself, really, primarily what has been the thread of in your life, of your heart's desire. The idea of this mind, this heart, this being that has been seeking something, moving in a particular direction in ways that my brain, my me, daft old me,

[04:40]

could not comprehend or couldn't understand. And the many ways in which this has probably manifested over this lifetime. So starting with, well, I don't know, is a very good place to start. You know, I really don't know. And then to go back and to find little... little moments, like little turning points, little pivots, you know, things that seem today relevant. And a few years ago, when I joined the sangha that I practiced with in Mountain View, Kanando, just a few miles from here down the bay, and I was invited to give a way-seeking mind talk then, and... I thought, oh, let me dig up my notes from then and see if there's anything that I can reuse.

[05:44]

And it was so, it felt so different. You know, it felt so different. Something that, you know, a story that you put together at one point in your life and then at another point, how different it feels. So kind of weaving that all together and being aware that this is how it looks today and maybe tomorrow it'll be a little different. So I'll share a little bit tonight as per the invitation of the way-seeking mind talk about the things that have touched me and moved me and moved this mind of practice. I like to have this image of the way a plant moves towards the light, or salmon swimming upstream. these sort of mysterious movements. Being really small, very, very small, like very, very early, maybe one of the first memories of something kind of stirring, maybe four, five, six years old, I don't know.

[07:05]

But beginning to develop some sense in getting to know the world and getting to kind of name things and understand the relationships between things, there was this moment of looking up into the night sky. And up until then, I think having believed that it was just sort of like a dome that existed across the earth and then having some understanding of this vastness and this space that just stretched And the sense of scale, you know, and the sense of what being meant in relation to all of that. And so much awe in the face of that. And a very, very strong, formative moment, I would say.

[08:11]

may be one in many ways that I've been going back to again and again in the following decades. And in that sort of blissful innocence of early childhood, you know, I don't remember there even being much in the way of questioning. You know, there was curiosity. but not much in the way of questioning. And at one point, there was a death in the family. Somebody died. I didn't know this person, but I could see that the adults were sort of moved by something, and that there was this thing, you know, somebody had died, and I didn't really understand what it meant. So I was chewing this over, and I remember... asking my father, and I said, well, so she's died, and then what's going to happen?

[09:21]

And he said, well, he said, if you're very good, you go to heaven, and if you're bad, you go to hell, and you spend eternity cutting down trees with little stones. My dad's vision of hell. I don't know where that came from. I don't know why he told me that. But it really stuck with me and I was absolutely terrified. I don't think my dad believes that, obviously. I think he just thought that's what you tell children when they ask you. I don't know. So with all these things sort of ruminating, I think the added sort of... Other important thing from early childhood was, I think probably with all of that stirring, you know, there was some idea of like, well, what do you do with this? You know, where do you put this? You know, these kind of big feelings, like, how do we talk about them?

[10:27]

How do we express them? You know, what's appropriate? And my family weren't particularly, weren't at all religious, actually. But at school, I had access to a Christian education and Bible stories, and that was something that I really loved. And I insisted on my parents buying me a book of kids' Bible stories, and I would pore over them. And I was so entranced by these stories that took place in these far-off places, these deserts and these names like Jericho and Bethlehem and Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee. When I actually found out those were real places, it was kind of hard to bring the two together. So it felt very exotic. It wasn't something that really happened at home.

[11:27]

And at the same time, it could be very scary as well. I was sort of entering into these stories, but not really... fully understanding them. And so I'd keep myself awake at night, you know, mulling over stories like Abraham and Isaac in the Bible, you know, when I thought, you know, if God said to Abraham that he should kill his son, maybe he'll ask me to kill somebody as well, you know, and what do you do then? He's God, like, you can't say no. You know, these were the kinds of things that would really... looking back on it now caused me large amounts of anxiety, which I think got addressed in different ways later on. But I think the biggest takeaway from that early engagement with the Christian stories and the tradition was this sense that there was a goodness in it, that there was a goodness, that there was just such a thing as being good.

[12:33]

Somehow, you know, Jesus was good. And so I could try and be good. And there was an essay assignment at school. I was probably around my daughter's age now. And you had to write about what you want to be when you grow up. And I said, I would like to be Mother... In all humility, I'd like to be Mother Teresa. And... And my family just thought this was hilarious. And I didn't understand why they thought it was so funny because I was quite sincere in my aspirations. So what to do with these big feelings? You know, what to do, how to hold this? I think another important thing an informative discovery a little later on in my life, again, still at school, was a connection with the arts.

[13:44]

I want to say arts sort of generally. I was so lucky when I was about 15 years old that I had an amazing English teacher who was so good at was so bent on sort of waking us up. I went to an all-girls school and, you know, at 15, we were all kind of full of attitude and nobody really wanted to work hard or, you know, being really surprised by anything. And this teacher, Mr. Crosby was his name, he would work so hard to try and sort of infect us with the same enthusiasm that he had for books and poetry and, and particularly Shakespeare. And with me, he managed, at least. Like, this was really kind of a sort of a breakthrough for me when I realised that there could be so much richness in expression, in reading, you know, in writing creatively.

[14:50]

And then, in the case of Shakespeare, we'd also turn it into theatre and be acting it and embodying it as well. you know, and coming out and speaking these lines and this poetry. And this really moved me. You know, I could tell that this is something that really kind of drew me in. I really enjoyed acting, as maybe some of you who were present for the ceremony this morning might have picked up. And then a little later on, I discovered painting. So I started doing art classes at school. And again, another wonderful teacher. I think it takes wonderful teachers to really show you where the magic can lie. And this teacher sensed that I was interested, but I was a little hesitant because my schedule was very busy.

[15:52]

And he would say to me, just come to the art studio whenever you can. Just come on in and I'll set you up. And, you know, here are some oil paints and here's a board and you can try painting and, you know, see how it goes. And then I just ended up going there whenever I could in my spare time. And having this experience with painting, probably around like 17 or 18 years, where time would just completely disappear for a period. So I'd be kind of working on a picture using oils, using oil paints, which was important because the oil paints you can kind of work in and change and sort of work the colours and stuff. And it could be very small and detailed and very absorbing, very absorbing. And what I realised was it was my first...

[16:53]

experience of doing something so instinctively and not thinking about it. You know, it was really like embodying a practice where this sort of aesthetic and expression was coming out in and of itself. And I somehow wasn't, I didn't feel like I was controlling it, you know, or thinking about it or trying to direct it. It was just this sort of like immediate expression of something. So it was a beautiful point of reference. I didn't continue painting because then what happened was I went to art school. And in the 1990s in art school in London, everything was really about conceptual art and like modern art and nobody really painted anymore. And so when I got there and I said, I want to paint, all the teachers just sort of, you know, thought I was a bit old fashioned. And so I started doing other things. making art with my head which kind of killed it for me.

[17:56]

And then after a while I stopped doing that. The very first contact that I had with Zen practice at all was walking down the street one day and encountering a person who was selling some secondhand books on a piece of tarpaulin on the floor. And one of those books was Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And I think he wanted about 50 cents for it, maybe even less.

[19:01]

It was the 90s. So I got it for really cheap. And I remember I took it straight to a park. I just went and sat in a park, and I tried to read it, and I found it. You know, I was coming completely new. I had no idea really about Buddhism or Zen or, you know, what any of that was. But it was just this book just kind of fell into my hands and that was that. And that was during a period where I was maybe in my very early 20s and I was kind of conducting a very radical, experiment in my life which I would characterize now something like I was trying to like relax the muscle that had been working so hard my whole life to keep the existential dread at bay and all the ways in which I had endeavored to do that through

[20:18]

trying to go to church with some church-going friends of mine, to traveling all over the place, looking for things coming in and out of strange relationships and all sorts of acting up, all sorts of erratic behavior. I'd been very close to... My grandfather, I was very close to my grandparents growing up. And just when I was 18, so that sort of, in that like tip into adulthood, my grandfather was killed suddenly. He was hit by a car one day. And it was really, it was really shocking. You know, it was really, it was sad and there was so much grief, but there was an element of shock that really took me a long time to process.

[21:21]

And the shock was the nothingness, you know, the gone-ness. They're like, where is he? I didn't think he was chopping down trees with little stones. I hoped he wasn't. But it's... There was an emptiness that... that felt very dark, you know, a kind of real difficulty in finding a reason to do anything, really to do anything. I didn't understand how people lived with optimism. You know, I didn't, I would stand sometimes in public places and watch people go, about their business. And I wanted so badly to understand how you could just live day-to-day life in the face of what seemed like such a deep existential crisis.

[22:36]

And I had this very simplistic either-or in my mind, which was either there is a God And if there is, then why don't we spend every minute of every day in remembrance of that and living that and sort of worshipping that in a way because it would be so important. And then if there isn't, why do we have all these rules and, you know... and these things that we tie ourselves to, you know, in the absence of it, it kind of felt, well, then there should be moral anarchy. And that was all I could see. You know, it was just those two options. And so carrying that mindset around was really heavy. And it made doing anything very, very difficult.

[23:40]

And so in the midst of that, I found the Zen mind beginner's mind. And like so many things that I picked up, I thought, oh, maybe this will help. Maybe this lovely looking man on the book, he looks so wise and gentle and enlightened. Maybe he's got something to say in here. And of course he does. There's so much in this book, but I couldn't decipher it at the time. I had absolutely no point of reference at all. And actually around that time, And on these travels that I was embarking on, on the Great Search, I ended up in India and I went to a Vipassana retreat, like a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat. And that was the first time I'd ever sat meditation. So that was a dive into the deep end. And... So, and that didn't help either because what that, I didn't know, you know, what happened was I went and then so I didn't, I went in expecting that I would be calmed and that I would be very chill and that I would come out and be floating a couple of inches off the ground.

[24:58]

And instead what happened was things that I had been suppressing, you in retrospect, that things that I'd been suppressing and pushing down just wanted to come up. And it was really scary. And I didn't know how to talk to a teacher about it. I didn't know how to process this with somebody. I kept it all inside. And so it kind of, it made matters a little worse before they started to get better. And so about a year after that, a friend of mine in London, where I was living, said to me, oh, I've just met this group of Zen monks and they're really nice. And they're having this weekend retreat. I think it's called like a session or something. And you should come.

[26:00]

So the first time I ever sat Zen was a session. just went straight into that as well. And... And I fell in love. Like, I really... I can't, that sounds so cheesy, but I really can't do the experience justice with different words. I was so taken by every... aspect of what I experienced um in those few days of the session from from the way that from the rhythm you know from the the the way it looked even you know the black I don't know the the teacher and the teachings and this kind of sense of poetry and a sort of a directness that was a little indirect as well.

[27:08]

And then there was this humour about it. There was just so much there. So much there. I remember the teacher who was leading it was an American monk called Philippe Coupe who was living in Paris and he was a student of Taizen Deshimaru. And during one of the he started to talk about the Heart Sutra, and he quoted, and we were actually sitting in Zazen, and he started to say, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. And that's all I remember. Like, I remember that, and I remember thinking, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that. And I... want to spend a long time working with that, you know.

[28:09]

Still am. So that was how I started to practice in the UK. So in the UK, the Sanghas in the UK for the most part were the ones that I was part of, are part of the European Zen Association of Zendos that were founded by Master Taizen Deshimaru. in the 60s and the 70s. So in the UK, there were no, like, resident Dharma teachers. So we would sort of facilitate our own, you know, sitting groups and stuff. But if we wanted to go on, say, Sheen or spend time with teachers, we would need to go to France. And so in the first few years of my practice, I would go on these, like, They were called summer camps in France, so they were periods of intensive practice during the summer, so July and August, and then go and live there as a worker, much like we do here, I'm sure, working the kitchens.

[29:15]

So I worked a lot in the kitchens, a lot of kitchen time. Pretty much from my first visit, actually, Guy Mercier, who then became my ordination teacher, just sent me into the kitchen and said, you should go... And I never emerged. I spent a lot of time there. And it was hard work. It was really hard work. That was one thing that I discovered. Again, you know, not what I'd been expecting, you know, not the kind of chill-out time that I thought it might be. And in this sangha, there's a lot more... you know, discipline, it's strict, they felt like a lot more strictness, you know, to me, like that's, there's often when I meet people here and I say I'm from Europe and then people will say, you know, isn't the practice very, or they'll say two things about the practice in Europe.

[30:20]

Number one, it's very strict and number two, they have bar, don't they have a bar inside the temple? Like, yes, they do. And so you sort of go from one to the other. Like, yes, there was a bar. And then in between Sashin's, there would be parties and wine and beer would be served and misbehavior would happen. And then, you know, and then we sort of go into Sashin and it was, you know, just very by the schedule. And there was Kiyosaku's and Kiyosaku men. I don't know if you know, people don't maybe know what a Kiyosaku is, but it's a, they call it like the stick of enlightenment. sometimes and it's used for it's used for usually like relaxing a muscle here like in the shoulder and you would always ask for it during zazen but sometimes you'd see the kiosaku men sort of walking around and one time I overslept probably after a party and I remember waking up in the morning and there was a kiosaku man just like kind of standing over my bed with his sort of huge but very

[31:25]

menacing smile and he just looked at me and went zazen. It's fun in Europe. So I was thinking about if there's one kind of one teaching from around that time that really stayed with me and this is one teaching of Deshimaru's that gets talked about a lot, you know, maybe in the same way that here we might talk about beginner's mind a lot as one of Suzuki's teachings. So Deshimaru will talk a lot about something called Mushotoku, Mushotoku, which is kind of simply put, and I won't go into it right now, but kind of mostly means like no goal or no attainment. So the idea that the spirit of practice would be musha toku and that we don't go into it with the idea that it's going to lead us to a particular place.

[32:35]

And so in the context of everything that had been in my mind and had sort of brought me here, this was such a radical notion to practice with. This kind of no... no gain, you know, no attainment, like, sort of nothing. Like, what do you, I was like, what? I don't, you know, we don't get enlightened after a couple of years? Like, okay, you know? Really doing this for its own sake, you know, being here for its own sake, One day around that time, it was a day off during one of these practice summers, and I was walking down the country road, and I was noticing how, like after a few weeks of this intensive practice, how different I was feeling, how much quieter my mind felt.

[33:44]

And I saw some... something very normal, like I saw a little weed kind of cracking through the asphalt. You know, you see little weeds that, and they sort of look like they're just like, like cracking through the cement, you know, this thing that's so strong and then this tiny little weed that's so breakable, you could just pull it off in a second, you know, and it's sort of managing somehow to grow in this place where, you know, it's not the most nurturing kind of moment, It's still there. And I could, in that moment, I had this, you know, very powerful experience with it where I thought, well, that's, this is, it embodies for me what mushotoku means. You know, this little weed doesn't have a goal. This little weed is dancing. You know, this little weed is just living and doing what life does.

[34:50]

And, you know, there doesn't need to be an end to what this little weed is doing. And so this, like, initially kind of felt a little, you know, in the context of this sort of existential dread that I came in with, I thought, ooh, this, you know, also feels like a little empty, but then that emptiness felt so rich, it kind of turned back into the everyday, the everything. You know, it sort of then turned my attention into just settling into everything that's in front of me, everything that I am, every part of experience. And then that became so rich. It didn't happen all at once, but it was a trajectory. So then a few years into my practice, maybe 2011, I think, about 10 years into my practice, I asked to be ordained.

[36:14]

And I ordained as a nun in France at the temple. And it was the same year that I also got married. And... That's quite on brand for me. Like I just, it was like everything I have to have, you know, everything all at once. Like I can't choose, I can't choose one or the other. So I got married and I got ordained in the same year. And then, you know, things, you know, the nature of practice or at least the way in which I could be part of practice, you know, began to change. And especially, and nothing more transformative than motherhood for me. And I became a little worried, like when I was talking to my ordination teacher about ordination, and one of the things that he said to me was, well, soon...

[37:23]

you know, you're going to get married and probably have children, and then you won't have time to practice anymore. And that made me quite determined to prove him wrong. That really did. You know, I thought, why on earth? I mean, from that perspective, I thought, then I didn't know what was coming, but I thought, well, why on earth would I not be able to do that? And then once my daughter was born, what I didn't expect was the physical, emotional, hormonal, chemical transformation that happened, you know, that happened for me, which I think the biggest upshot of it was that the kind of the centre of my focus in my life just... completely shifted it used to be me sorry it used to be me and then um and it didn't happen immediately it happened kind of slowly but I began to realize that I was making decisions um for my daughter and for my family and not necessarily for me and this was a this is a wonderful experience you know this was a wonderful experience especially in the context of everything that I'd explored and practiced with in Zant

[38:51]

And I kind of, what I wanted to do was just bring these two worlds together, you know, as much as I can. I've looked and looked and there is not a chapter in the Shobagenzo about parenting. If anybody knows one, maybe it's got hidden away in a little drawer somewhere, please let me know. But I joke, but like there was a little bit of that feeling of like, you know, what, how can we talk about parenting? You know, how can I talk about motherhood? which is such a wonderfully rich life experience, you know, in the context of the Zen practice. So it's definitely awakened something in me about being able to be supportive to people who do have families, you know, and to be able to practice together with children where that's possible. Yeah. Two minutes left, right?

[39:55]

Is that two minutes? Okay. Well, we're almost... It's almost full circle. A lovely thing. In 2016, my husband got a job with a tech company here in the Bay Area, and we ended up living in Mountain View, and I started going to the Zendo there. And when I did, and I met the guiding abbot there, Les Kaye, who then offered to reordain me into the Suzuki lineage as well. And so I would go to Les's house and we'd have tea there. And I realized that where Les lived was Haiku Zendo, where Suzuki Roshi gave the talks for Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. Goose pimples. I was like, full circle. construct in my mind but still like it felt there was something quite extraordinary about when I realized that that you know somehow through through that long big journey that little book that I found on the floor in the tarpaulin I'd now sort of come to come into this amazing legacy that Suzuki Roshi created and

[41:15]

and that still is going with so much energy. And so during that time, being in Mountain View, and I was, I had a great appetite for, you know, experiencing more Zen here in the area. So I started coming here to San Francisco Zen Center. And one day I heard a Dharma talk by Roshan, actually as a podcast, just as a podcast. I was driving and I heard this Dharma talk. And my heart or my way-seeking mind stirred again and just said, you should come and meet this teacher at San Francisco Zen Center. So I did. That's it, thank you. I was looking, I was reading some bits of Becoming Yourself, Suzuki Roshi's new book that's just come out.

[42:26]

And there's a chapter in there right near the beginning. And he says, I often ask my students, he said like, he was expressing, I'm paraphrasing, but he was expressing how he's sometimes a bit bemused as to why people were coming, like more and more American people were coming to the Zen center to sit and he said, and I'll ask them, he says, sometimes they just say, I don't know. And sometimes they, they give me a reason. And like, I think about that reason and I don't really, you know, I don't really believe that reason. And, and I still want to know, like, it just doesn't make sense to me. And he said, after that, I do think that I don't know does kind of feel like a better answer. So with that, um, Thank you. Thank you.

[43:42]

Well, I'm not going to take a look at what was just waiting for me. [...] I'm not going to take a look at what was just waiting for me to take a look at what was just waiting for me. That's just a big fan of this.

[44:18]

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