This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So my name is Lee Klinger-Lesser, and I teach a practice called sensory awareness. And it's how I know Zen practice. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to share with you and what I want to talk about. I have lots of notes. Oops, Greg told me not to have this rub against it. Sorry. And then as I was walking up here, I saw the lanterns outside and the light on the trees. And it was so beautiful, and it just made me cry, just walking into the zendo, feeling the beauty of Tassahara and of this practice and of this place that's held people for such a long time.

[01:15]

So I don't know what stories I'm actually going to tell you, which of my notes I'm going to use. I was a student here at from 1980 to 1983, and I lived at Zen Center for six years, Green Gulch and here. I became a mother here in this valley, and I buried my mother here in this valley. Tassajara is a place that helps me come home in the deepest way and helps me know my own intention and how to live it. I wanted to bring this talking stick into the zendo. Because about five weeks ago, I was here helping to lead a meditation sensory awareness retreat for veterans, women veterans.

[02:20]

We were here with 14 women veterans. And this talking stick was held by each of them and holds many stories. It's living on the altar in the Kaisando right now for the rest of the summer. But I wanted to bring it in here to share and have their presence here with all of us. And also last weekend, I was on a four-day whitewater river rafting trip teaching sensory awareness and meditation with a group of veterans. So I also bring them here into this room. I came to Zen Center to study with my teacher of sensory awareness, Charlotte Silver.

[03:29]

Charlotte died about eight years ago at the age of 102 years old. And she was still teaching. She was very good friends with Suzuki Roshi. I think that they had a wonderful time with each other. They were both fierce practitioners doing their best to wake people up for this life, for the moments of our lives, helping us show up for what each moment asks of us. Charlotte and her husband Charles were the first people to ever lead workshops here at Tassajara, and the only retreats for many, many years. And they were the ones who donated the yurt to Tassajara to make it possible for more retreats to happen here. Charlotte used to say over and over again, every moment is a moment. So simple, right?

[04:33]

Every moment is a moment. But how do we live that? To know the possibility of each moment. And she said, every moment makes a certain request on us. The question is how we answer it. Suzuki Roshi talked about beginner's mind. Coming fresh into each moment. I was 19 years old. when I took my first workshop with Charlotte. That was 41 years ago. So I've been at this for a little while. And I had no idea what sensory awareness was, what meditation was. I never paid any attention to breathing. I was 19, and I was trying to figure out who I was and how to separate from my mother. And one day my mother came to me and handed me a brochure. And she said, You should meet this woman.

[05:34]

She can change your life. And then my mother turned around and walked out the door, which was very skillful. If she had tried to convince me to study with Charlotte, I would never have gone to a workshop. But she sparked my curiosity, which is really appropriate because the work is all about curiosity. You know, Zazen is also, in a way, about curiosity. How are we sitting and... allowing the curiosity to feel what breathing does, what happens in the simple finding our way into sitting. So I did go to take a workshop with Charlotte, and I had experiences that opened doors for me that I live with still, and is what the basis of what I teach. One of the experiences was, so I'm there and I know nothing about this, and... The form is that you do what we call experiments. We lead very simple activities. And in those very simple activities, how we live in the world is revealed.

[06:39]

And our own possibilities are also opened. But Charlotte asked us to hold the foot of a partner. I had no desire to hold the foot of some stranger. It seems ridiculous to me. Why would I want to hold somebody's foot? But I looked around, and everybody was holding somebody's foot. So I thought, all right. I'm here. I'm going to do it. But then the way I lived in the world was, well, if I'm going to do it, I'm not just going to do it. I'm going to do a great job of it. So I'm going on with a story in my mind. OK, all right, here I am, and I've got your foot. Don't worry. I've got your foot. I'm really here. I'm really holding your foot. And Charlotte said, are you doing anything extra? And when she said that, I could feel that my shoulder was almost touching my ear. And when I felt that, my shoulder went down. I didn't put it down.

[07:40]

It went down. And as my shoulder went down, I could feel like I had all this tightness in my arm. And then I got to the foot, and I realized I was squeezing this person's foot. And when I gave up the squeezing, for the very first time, I felt the person. I felt the pulsation in their foot. I felt the temperature in their foot. I felt an alive contact with another human being. So that was absolutely stunning to me, and I was hooked. I still didn't understand what this work was, but there was an experience there of how I lived in the world doing so much extra. Somebody in the workshop right now said to me, You know, this is the hardest workshop I've ever been in. I'm working so hard not to work. You know, what do we do to ourselves?

[08:42]

How much of our life are we spending with extra effort? So that's been a koan for me that I've lived with for 41 years. I still find myself doing extra effort, but I notice and I can let it go more quickly. Another experience I had was sitting... on a fence outside of class. This was in Mexico, a little village in Mexico. And I was sitting in a fence looking out at the ocean. And I was just sitting there. And all of a sudden, I felt the movement of breath in my armpit. And I was startled. I'd never paid any attention to breath. I'd never felt breath. And it moved in me. And I didn't have to do it. And I saw the ocean and I realized I was natural too. I didn't have to deserve to be natural. I didn't have to earn it. I didn't have to achieve it. I was part of nature.

[09:44]

So that intimacy with breath was also just stunning to me. One of my favorite poems is a poem called Lost. I don't know if people know this poem. But I'm only going to read you a few lines. And I'm skipping, so I'm reading you. What I'm doing is I'm picking out my favorite lines. I like the whole poem, but I'm saving time. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are, is called here. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. But how this poem lives in me is breathing.

[10:53]

Breathing knows where you are. Breathing knows where I am, no matter what's happening Breathing can find me. I'm never lost. You know, this is what we're teaching veterans and the tools, some of the tools we're sharing with veterans is that no matter what's happened, no matter what's going on, no matter what you've lived, breathing always finds us and can help us land right where we are right now and not be lost. One of my favorite poems, another favorite poem is just a line from Rumi. You know, there's a field far beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. I'll meet you there. What's this field? Where do we come to meet each other? The other experience that I had in that workshop 41 years ago was

[11:59]

A woman was talking about what her experience was, and she said, I feel all just all clogged up in my throat. I just feel like I'm just stuck here. So Charlotte asked somebody to get a pitcher of water in a glass, and she brought it to the woman, and she asked the woman to pour the water into the glass. And when it started to get near the top, the woman stopped, and Charlotte said, keep pouring. So she kept pouring and the water spilled all over. And as the water started spilling, she started weeping. And just weeping and weeping. And Charlotte said to her, can you bow to it? If this wasn't here for you to experience, then you wouldn't have to worry about it. But the fact that you're feeling what's here,

[13:01]

Can you bow to that? Because from here, something new can open. I'd never seen or heard of bowing. But to somehow honor what was happening and something painful and not try to turn away from it, that was also revolutionary to me. And part of how I've been living, helping to open a new door for me in these 41 years, and now a door that I can help to hold for other people. how do we really start just where we are? You know, Pema Chodron's wonderful book, Start Where You Are, that we read with women veterans who left here. We started a reading group and began with Start Where You Are. When I was here at Tassajara and I was pregnant, I decided I wasn't going to stay because I felt like I didn't want to follow a schedule getting up at 3.30 in the morning and doing things that felt like it wasn't going to be good for my body being pregnant.

[14:21]

So I went to Richard Baker, who was the abbot at the time, and I said, I'm not going to stay. And he looked at me and he said, you don't trust practice enough. Stay here and do what's needed. That was wonderful. I could stay here and do what's needed. And I did. And another woman was living here at the time who had cancer. Her name was Carol Rankin. So she also wasn't following the same schedule. So we used to walk up the Tassajara Road together every day. Walked for about an hour up the road. And After we left Tassajara, you know, my son was born. He had spent the first six months of his life here. Carol went to the East Coast. She became ordained as a priest. She went in and out of remission, had chemotherapy, radiation.

[15:23]

Four and a half years later, I was pregnant again, waiting any day to give birth. And Carol was waiting any day to die. And she called me up on the telephone. I used to be the Tassajara granola maker, and I used to send Carol granola every few months. She called me up, and she said, you know, I'm waiting to die. And here we were, at two ends of the circle, completely touching each other, in this place of waiting. for Mother Nature to act, that neither one of us could do anything about. And there we were waiting and sharing a very similar experience, but from very different perspectives. And we were laughing with each other on the telephone about what we were experiencing.

[16:24]

And if anybody told me I was going to laugh with my friend about her death, I would have said, they're crazy. I wouldn't do such a thing. And yet, this was one of the most intimate moments of my life. that we could laugh with each other out of the truth of the moment just as it was. And Carol died ten days after our conversation. And my daughter was born seven days after Carol died. And my daughter's name is Carol. How do we meet in whatever's real and what's happening? How do we allow that meeting that brings us into contact? Because that's what's happening. When I was 21 years old, I had cancer. I had thyroid cancer, and I had to have my thyroid gland removed. My parents were terrified. And they sat in my hospital room, and their terror was pouring off of them.

[17:27]

But they didn't want to talk about my having cancer. So it wasn't very comforting to me. I was feeling their fear, but there was no meeting place. In contrast, a friend of mine who was a camp counselor came, and he just walked around the hall with me. I had an IV in one arm and a stuffed animal from my preschool boyfriend, and he had his hand in my other arm. And we just walked around the hall. And his companionship meant so much. We didn't have to talk. But he was just there. And a few years later, I asked my mother to come visit me. And I said, you have to talk to me about my having cancer. So my mother came. And I said, I need you to talk to me about my having cancer. And right away, she started to try and say, you know, everything's OK, and you're going to be fine.

[18:29]

And I got very angry. And I said, I just want you to feel with me. At which point my mother began to cry. And I began to cry. And she held me. And it couldn't have been more beautiful. So what is it that creates... How are we showing up to be present with what is, whatever it is that we're carrying? How can we open for it? Charlotte's teacher's name was Elsa Gindler. She was born and lived in Germany. And all during World War II, she hid Jews under her studio. And she taught this work. She called this the work of the human being. And all through the war, she taught

[19:29]

People would come to the studio to study. And one woman who studied with her said that Gindler asked everybody to make a fist. So could you all make a fist? And make a fist as tight as you can make it. Make it really tight. Hold it tight. And let your eyes close for a moment and just feel what it does to you. How does it affect you, this fist, anywhere through you? And gradually let go of the fist and feel what's happening. This woman who lived through World War II, My hand's still not open yet.

[20:30]

It takes a while. She said this helped save her life because she lived in terror during the war. But in this practice of making a fist, she felt what it did to her to live in tightness and in constriction. And she realized that she could live in fear without living in so much tightness, that there was another way to meet it. And she felt how it impacted her. So as we're working with veterans who have lived through horrendous experiences, who live with so much isolation, who come home and miss the company of the people who have had their backs, whose lives they've been working to save, who they trust so deeply, and then all of a sudden you're on your own and you have these experiences that you can't touch yourself, that you don't know how to touch and you can't share. What do you do with all that tightness? You know, there are more veterans dying from suicide than soldiers in combat.

[21:37]

Four years ago, my Adharma sister, Chris Fortin, who is a Buddhist priest and a psychotherapist, And I both felt like we wanted to do something to reach out to veterans. And what I can do is share the practice that I know, which is sensory awareness and meditation. And I trust and trusted that this could be useful if veterans were interested. And I had no experience of the military. I had stereotypes. I had bias. I was incompetent, culturally incompetent. about knowledge about the military. But I felt like I wanted to contribute something. And actually, Linda Gallin and I walked up the Tassajara Road during the No Race, and I told her about this. And Linda said, well, Zen Center, we can help. So Zen Center's become the fiscal sponsor of this project called Honoring the Path of the Warrior, tools for returning veterans on the journey home.

[22:50]

You know, our first retreat we did at Green Gulch, one veteran came. And he's still working with us. And he's now helped us to lead other retreats. The second retreat we did, I was at the conference center in City Center. And we were in the small back room and there were about eight or nine veterans in there. And Chris and I were looking around at each other thinking, what the heck are we doing here? And what are we supposed to say? And we didn't know. And I could tell the veterans were sitting there and their legs are bouncing up and down and looking around at these people and thinking, what are we doing in here? What is this? But, you know, little by little, they helped us learn. You know, that day there was a man, a young man, 21 years old. He'd been in combat in Fallujah, terrible combat. One of his jobs was to go around and pick up body parts. He diffused IEDs.

[23:54]

And there we are in this room, you know. And he said, you know, they told me we were going on a hike. And so Chris and I looked at each other and we said, a hike? Great idea. We're going on a hike. And we have three cars and we went on a hike. And that's how we learned, you know, there's no way we're sitting around in a room all day. So we combine physical activity with meditation and mindfulness tools. But at first, you know, we called it stress reduction and relaxation. And we thought, you know, what would veterans come to? But little by little, it was the veterans themselves who said, you know, this is Zen Center. We want to learn meditation. And, you know, now we're very explicit about what we're doing. We're sharing meditation and mindfulness tools. We're teaching sensory awareness. There was a veteran who came to a rock climbing event. So we did rock climbing at Planet Granite and then went back to Zen Center and did meditation and mindfulness and sensory awareness, working with breath.

[24:58]

And then we did a river trip last summer. And he came to the river trip. And everybody was introducing themselves. And he was the very last person and he was sitting next to me. And he said, I loved that rock climbing. That was great. He said, you know, but when they started doing that breathing stuff, he said, I thought that was really corny. In fact, I thought it was fucking retarded. Which is, you know, I thought, that sounds right. He's got a very tough demeanor. But then he said, but it works. And I could have fallen off the bench. And he said, I have to drive hundreds of miles every week. And I hate it. And when I get in the car, I just want to be there already. And he said, so a few days after the rock climbing, I thought, what the heck, I can try that breathing stuff. And he said, so I did.

[26:00]

And then I could say to myself, you know, I'm going to get there when I get there. And then I could look around and I started to see what was around me. And there was some pretty stuff. And he was on the river trip again last weekend. And he said, I do the breathing more than ever now. When we were here at Tassajara, the women veterans, it was wonderful to see Tassajara with their eyes, coming into this valley and feeling this place and feeling so welcomed and cared for. And I want to thank everybody here who helped to make that possible. And one woman said, she was walking down, you know, the Tassajara path, and somebody bowed to her. And she said, you know, somebody bowed to me. And she said, you know, I didn't know whether, I wanted to salute. I didn't know whether to salute or to bow or what to do. And so we talked about bowing.

[27:00]

And we talked about what bowing is. That bowing is this practice of recognizing each other beyond any story, beyond any wrongdoing or rightdoing. how are we arriving in contact in this moment and seeing the deepest capacity in every person. I have never been in a group where bowing was so alive and so needed and so filled with love. Last week on the river, we were on the Tuolumne River, which is a regular Class 4 and Class 5 river running now at about 8 to 10 times its normal capacity of water. So it was an intense river. We had 18 vets, 17 men and one woman. All 17 men were combat vets.

[28:04]

Ten of them had been on trips with us before. We wrote them a letter before the trip started. And part of this letter said... Carl Jung, a famous therapist, said, the only way out is through. That is certainly true on the river. The river is a powerful teacher. Each year we get to learn a lot about ourselves as we meet the river. In Zen, there are stories or questions called koans. These stories bring up questions that do not have logical answers. We have to move beyond our regular thinking mind and somehow live the answers. One koan is called Yun-men's appropriate response. A monk asked Yun-men, what are the teachings of a whole lifetime? Yun-men said, an appropriate response.

[29:08]

We thought this would be a koan to explore on our trip on the river. One moment after another, the river is teaching us about appropriate responses. So does each situation in our life. In addition to being on the river and finding our way through the rapids, we will also learn meditation and mindfulness tools. Each morning and evening, we will practice together. Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher who has written many books, writes, We have to take responsibility when our own hearts and minds harden and close. We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That's true spiritual warriorship. And we did that on the river.

[30:13]

We had a circle every morning for about an hour and every evening. We had quotes that we read and talked about. People talked about the intention they brought with them on the river. During one of the rapids, a young man fell out on one day, and he fell out again the next day. He had been deployed four times in four years to combat zones. He thought he was going to die under the water. On the second day when he fell out, he wasn't ready to get back in the boat. And we were spending time being with him. It took us about 30 to 45 minutes talking. And people were in other boats. The other vets were in other boats waiting. And afterwards, I heard about conversations. Two men in one of the boats were kind of making fun of him, joking and making wisecracks.

[31:21]

And a young man, much younger than they, just quietly looked at them and said, you don't know what he's lived through. You don't know his story. And I heard about this from one of the men he said that to, because that man said, I don't want to do that anymore. I had said I wasn't going to do that. And he helped me see that. And then he later went up to the man, the vet who had fallen out, and told him how important it was for him and how sorry he was that he was doing that and what he's learning about himself. Another man said, he should just suck it up and get on, which is a very typical training in the military. You do your job, you suck it up no matter what. Well, there was a man in that boat who was a medic in Iraq who became so angry he couldn't speak. Because when he was in Iraq, there was a young man who kept saying, I can't, I can't keep doing this.

[32:30]

I need help. I can't keep doing this. And his sergeant said to him, suck it up, do your job. And he shot himself in the heart. And they brought him, his body, to this medic to see if they could save him. And he brought him onto the river. He lives with him all the time. And later he wrote a letter to that man who had said that, sharing his story. We did a ritual on the river where people found a stone to throw into the water of what they wanted to leave on the river. What is it they wanted to let go of in their life? You know, one man wanted to let go of feeling like a piece of shit. Somebody else wanted to let go of guilt for being alive. Somebody else wanted to let go of this silence. Because as a vet in the Persian Gulf, he had lived through things as an 18-year-old.

[33:34]

That he was trying to be a good soldier. But what he lived, he hated. And he lost a part of his own soul. And when he came back, he was being debriefed. And they said, did anything happen you need to talk about? And he said, yes. And he showed photographs that he had taken and talked about what had happened. And he was told, that never happened, and don't ever talk about it. And for 20 years, he didn't. And on the river, he began to talk about it. So people shared what they were throwing in around a campfire. And the love and presence in that circle is so strong. I lead and facilitate groups, many groups all around the country. And usually I'm a very good judge of how much time things take. But we also ask people to find a stone to represent their intention of what they wanted to take with them into their life that they experienced on the river.

[34:39]

And this was our closing for the trip. And I figured it would take us about an hour and a half. After two hours, we had gone through eight veterans. Because what we asked was for people to share their intention and then pass the stone for somebody to witness them. Each person was going to hold their stone and share something they really appreciated. people knew how much they needed to be seen. And I've never been in a group that was more loving and more expressive and more eloquent and more attentive and more present than this group of veterans. So after two hours, we had to get off the river, but we had ten more people to go. So we did get off the river, and they gave us a deck. And it took us three more hours.

[35:42]

So this closing circle took five hours. Oops. Okay. I want to just read you what two veterans wrote to us after the trip. You've done something very special here. You've created something from the ground up that is having a profound impact. Oops, that's not the one I wanted to start with. This is from one of the vets from the Persian Gulf. I just want to take the time to say thank you from my complete and whole heart for what you have given me this weekend. I'm speechless because the gift you both gave me was hope. And I really can't remember the last time I truly had it. The act of pulling a trigger from a man-made weapon on another human being has shattered my person. You both have given me the hope and energy I need to somehow find a way to try to put my shattered soul back together, piece by piece.

[36:50]

I'm not going to read you the other quote because I just want to end with a poem from Thich Nhat Hanh. how do we each find the appropriate response? How do we find how we show up for ourselves, for the people in our lives, for the veterans and other people? And this is one of my favorite poems called Please Call Me by My True Names. Don't say that I will depart tomorrow. Even today I am still arriving. Look deeply. Every second I am arriving to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird with still fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

[38:05]

I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones. My legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the Politburo with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his debt of blood to my people, dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

[39:15]

My joy is like spring. so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open. the door of compassion. So thank you all very much. And sorry I didn't leave time for questions, but if anybody has them, stop me on the path. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information,

[40:16]

Visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[40:19]

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