1998.10.14-serial.00040

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SF-00040
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voice teri bauer gonna you can really hear
okay
so good evening again
i feel
a little embarrassed to be sitting here talking the same thing and i'm very grateful to tear for letting me do it ah and in fact some of the subject of my talk ah is a part of why i feel embarrassed sitting here talking this evening and that is that spent a long time since i've been
here on a wednesday night and down that is a part of why this is my way seeking mind and reverse talk or and how i came to zen center stayed lived here and i'm now going to live someplace
cells or five dogs don't fit on page street
or how i love san center and i'm going to leave it for a while
ha
fifteen years ago
i came to send center for
thousand instruction was ah
my my intention was to adore the place
and my belief was that i would find salvation here and my visceral reaction was that i didn't like it at all
ah but the cover story was stronger than the visceral reaction at that time and so on
at while it took another couple months to start coming regularly ah
i did start coming regularly and i dove in without a backward glance
a couple of months later
ah
i did come with some questions that now i wouldn't ask questions like what is the meaning of life and how can i find happiness and will i ever find the answer to the life problem
ah now i suppose my questions are more like a what is the most important thing or what am i doing here or what is made motivating me to move
or is the motivation honest or have i run out of steam
or is what i've done here all these years
ben as rich as i think it has
i'm
when i came i truly did tank that if i just sat quietly
which was in and of itself a near impossibility
right if i just did that
for a little while
wrong maybe all that hurt and suffering and crying and misery and someone would go away
ah i remember my first one day sitting the very idea of it that i would spend an entire day silent i had a
i'd made up a couple of workshops that i wanted to offer a year or so before when i was doing now movement awareness workshops and other kinds of things like that
but i never actually sold the thing and it was going to be one in which people were to be silent the whole day and i thought it was quite an amazing event so here i was at zen center and i was going to sit silently all day
i was absolutely certain that should i go through that twelve hours or whatever it was i think it was a short session so it was
the nine to five one so it wasn't even twelve hours that
pretty much i'd haven't i haven't down
wow
i heard a lot
and i wiggled a lot you know in some ways i've never stopped wiggling
my mind went
i didn't know about caffeine headaches and in those days no caffeine tea or coffee was put out on the brake table
i heard from head to toe
and somehow was i made sarcastic permanent sure somehow i kept doing this thing
ah but i i didn't i didn't get enlightened that first day
i'm
pretty soon
ah gemini were living down here
the basement of the guesthouse
and sweeping out the upstairs occasionally and paying wonderfully low band and coming over here i'm doing all the things we were to do my very first volunteering was in the kitchen and the kitchen has remained
big love forevermore
and then i saw an ad on the bulletin board the tanzer was looking for a phuket ten and it was kind of a shortage of people right at that time here and so i know person who around
had some experience working i guess was considered possible for such a job
oh
and she was foolish enough to think she could do it
so i started working presents center full time in the kitchen
it's that sessions
a soda rock to
i didn't like the forms
i didn't like the rules
i didn't understand how you could be free with all this restriction i didn't like the fact that people looked sort of like prunes a good deal of the time when they walked around i didn't like the fact that you weren't allowed to look at people during a session that you were restrained from being friendly after
ah
i didn't like the six month rule all even though it had nothing to do with me i didn't like that you shouldn't wear shorts in the zendo i didn't like any of that none of it
when i was about to be ordained so you know i've been get i've been in this for awhile now i almost didn't get ordained because we had a sashimi are kind of a teaching session the week before my group was ordained and
it was stated that the reason that one would become a priest was because they wanted to uphold the forms
and now wasn't why i was becoming a priest i didn't think
and then there was a discussion about the value of celibacy at which point i almost left entirely but i think it was like those weddings that people go through with ah
are committed this far you might as well do it and so this and so i did they think i'm saying all this because
for those of you who are having new newness problems and who ah sometimes find it very difficult to follow all this and yet still keep coming back you're not the first
now through all of this resistance
and rage i kept coming back
i went to toss a higher
for for one practice period and then by this time we were living in greenville auction them my bank gringotts
i was ordained
ah want to ta sahara and was away from a partner for the longest period of my entire life all in the same
they or so
i hated tongariro
i hated the cold i was absolutely convinced that when the ino opened the doors to air the place out she was doing it precisely because she wanted to get me
there was nothing that wasn't personal and all this just humphrey
i was sir
endlessly self involved
and yet i kept doing it
i kept doing it
so what was that all about some place in me knew
without a doubt the getting very very very still
that being hurt in a bamboo tube
yeah having someone make up a set of rules that weren't the ones i made up
that facing they rage that could come up and me around such silly little things i remember an early lecture of less place mostly james's where she was talking about how it tassajara she can remember getting so angry because someone asked her to be a server
today instead of tomorrow
and this kind of simplicity you know you have to begin to notice you have to notice the children may act as strongly to something so silly as you are reacting to things that you thought were important in the real world
so i kept looking and looking and looking and resisting and resisting and resisting and doing it and doing it and doing it and in some way with all the resistance doing it with a great deal of wholeheartedness it was such a funny max i was madly
in love with it and madly and hate with it
and
after a couple more years when we weren't sure talk to her and stayed for far over five years
and somehow in the process of those those years
the dust and just got
sanded off a little bit the resistance dropped out ninety percent so if you think i'm resistant now or
ah and i actually came to the place after a while to begin to have the luxury to question the part of me not the part of me that was resistant but the part of me that wanted to be a good girl so here i was trying to be a good girl in the midst of all that resistance it was a little bit of you know
ah poem
little bit of difficulty
on
so
i sat my son and i sat what i said
and i find myself right now wanting to pay homage to worm
a slow of people and it's always scary to do that because you're sure to forget somebody that you should have remembered but i'm going to try to do it chronologically i want to pay homage to
vicki austin who is the first person who i took a class with and who said that to then this was it was introductions as then and she made sure we all understood that this was zen buddhism not just a friend that was
one of my first shocks
to steve weintraub who was my first practice later and gave me my first name french your car
to i blanch hartman
whoa
well to layla bond course to became my next practice later
to blanche who came right after that it a pinkish
two
rob anderson who ordained me it was my teacher for many years
two ts trouser who was they
director at was suppressed you that penza
when i was guessing but then she was the director
but actually one of the first used for things that tear ever said to me was when she wasn't anything she was on her way back from africa and came breezing through
here and down at that point and david chadwick was the ten so and i was the fuck ten and
it was quite an interesting kitchen
and she stopped and told us that we had to have more protein and more greens
broccoli you can have broccoli and grains
and then she came out to green gulch
when i was there and
it was in the midst of a a lot of brouhaha that was involved with
and i was
waiting my political flag and getting terribly intense and she said to me i'm just go so your row and sit zazen that's your job right now
it isn't your job to take care of what's happening with ram
and i was a little ticked
but something about it rang true
and i took it to heart also
ah
to paul into michael
who are here to begin with and were here when i got back
how i had the joy of working under in two different occasions and
was thoroughly thrilled by i've quoted many ways that you helped me to you like the door again
i i appreciate when we sat across the desk from one another
and michael
your
your support your warmth
for being there
hmm
there's blanchett game as my teacher
when there's my friend mary
he's been there for a while
and then there's a chimney
that's why i'm afraid i've probably forgotten somebody totally important and there's my husband who knew how to resist even harder than i did
yeah
ways demands a certain aspect of the practice from me that to and nobody else does
and so you say you know so what's so what's the story or telling me well
as they as i began to look at the way that time
i was being here being here in the city at city center the last couple of years
it didn't feel like i was quite focused on community i was very focused on zen center in my job and i still found it extremely important to or said
and i'm absolutely and thoroughly dedicated to knowing
dependent core arising
to ah examining this mind does it's thing but
i noticed that i was no longer not only no longer wholeheartedly but no longer even coming regularly talks that's my embarrassment for sitting up here
ah
and then in many ways i was not participating as a member of the community there's a lot of you here who probably barely know me and that certainly not the way i was in the community before the last couple of years
and then i noticed that ah
i kept dreaming about cottages
and
it occurred to me that perhaps i had reached the point when it was time to stop living in community and see what it was like out there again
and it's very subtle because
i don't really believe it's all that different and yet i know that it's
completely different and yet i know it's really not all that different and yet i know that it's completely different at any rate it seemed to be time to look at it from a new vantage point i haven't the far i haven't the smallest notion that i'm going to find something out there that's better
special your ah more satisfactory
i had this wonderful thought of number of months ago that there was at least one or two more adventures in me so part of this all may be connected to
having turned sixty this year having tended in my life on
major dates to
do something special i went crazy and forty and fifty i want to tassajara sahara so at sixty i'm going to belay how

i have a couple of quotes
one is from martha graham great modern dancer
there is a vitality a life force and energy and quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you and all time this expression is unique
and if you block it it will never exist through any other medium
and be lost
the world will not have it

so one of the
great values of being in zen center is learning something about what an expression of myself might be
i learned that it wasn't as
a young student debt i did during a real hot soup when rob was exhorting us to express ourselves to go back into the zendo with a hat and said facing our when just what she did go the courage to try it
was probably about expressing herself
seems to be that expressing ourselves is
very subtle matter
and sometimes in order to to try to do it we're have to do big things in stumble around
but finally it seems as though expressing ourselves is just to do whatever it is we do and not be too worried about what everybody thinks they're we may care a great deal that
what we do does or doesn't hurt
suzuki roshi says in the sand okay one of the sand okay lectures
today we may be very happy and tomorrow we do not know what will happen to us right to seems to be basic to our teaching today we may be very happy tomorrow we do not know what will happen to us
so
come and you can go he can make this plan and that plan whatever the plan is we won't happen the way you planned it
thirteenth century japanese a memoir
ceaselessly the river flows and yet the water is never the same
while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone
never staying for a moment even so is the human being and human habitation
and finally from coben chino
a student asked him what does got a got a paragon t etc mean it doesn't mean anything actually says everything is falling apart fall apart fall apart altogether fall apart we can't do anything about it that's what got they got a means really
there is nothing to hang onto
so maybe it can go home a little early tonight
thank you
intention equally