This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. really wonderful to be here this evening with all of you. Thank you all for being here, all the students, all the work period people. All together we make Tassahara, so thank you. So as Greg mentioned a couple of days ago, it's traditional to give a talk right after Dharma transmission, so hence I'm here. And I think very much in line with what Greg said, the first thing on my mind is gratitude.

[01:08]

First of all, to my teacher, Sojin Mel Weitzman, whose kindness and patience and trust and wisdom... has been such a constant that it took me a long time to see. But now it's so brilliantly apparent, the gratitude just overflows. And to some of my other teachers that have been very significant, Agent Linda Ruth Cutts, who is my Chusot teacher, Leslie James, always, and Gil Fransdahl. and the many, many people who helped to make the ceremony possible. It was a seven-day ceremony. Alan Sinaki, Mary Moseen, Jean Selkirk, who helped with a lot of the sewing, Sogmai Zagu, Connie Ayers, who sewed one of my rakasus, Graham, Curtis, the bell ringers, those who helped with the jindo.

[02:26]

Thank you all. And special thanks to my Dharma sisters, Judith and Mako. Great support for all the sewing throughout the past year in so many ways. And my husband, Greg, with whom I did Dharma Transmission. It's kind of a rare thing to get to do Dharma Transmission with your husband. And very, very sweet. So after the ceremony, I asked Sojin, do you have any thoughts what I should talk about? And he said, you should talk about how you came to practice and how you feel about this. I said, okay, sounds good. So we often call those talks about how we came to practice way-seeking mind talks, the mind that seeks the way.

[03:28]

And I've given a number of them over the years. I think probably about eight formal talks in one way or another, and probably several more in less formal settings, like a small group or something. And each one has been different. Because at each time, it's at a different vantage point in my life. So I'm seeing my life differently. but what I was noticing about getting ready for this talk was that there were a few things that had never come up before, and that whereas in the past, what had really been in the forefront was the suffering that brought me to practice, and this time it was more about that mysterious mind that kept pulling me toward practice. I was reflecting that... our way-seeking mind often seems like kind of a troublemaker.

[04:30]

It pulls us into places and situations and has us doing things that may go against the grain, go against the stream, even look a little crazy sometimes, especially if we can't find a place to be, to manifest what we're feeling drawn toward. if our circumstances aren't matching that in some way. And that was certainly true for me. I just didn't know what to do with that mind. And one of the things that came up that I'd never really thought about before was a book that was very significant to me throughout my 20s. It's called Daniel Martin. And it's by John Fowles, who also wrote The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman. And I'd read all of his books, but this one really touched me so deeply.

[05:35]

And I couldn't say why. I kept trying to get other people to be interested in it. No one ever was. I don't exactly suggest that you go look this up. No one else but me has ever been interested in it particularly. It's a semi-autobiographical novel. It's kind of a middle-aged love story that in flashbacks goes back to his childhood and college years. It's a British novel. But I realized this is a whole way-seeking mind story. It's his story of trying to find a right way to be in the world. The opening sentence of the book is whole sight of or all the rest is desolation. So it's his search, not explicitly, but searching somehow for that whole site and the various side paths that he takes.

[06:36]

And I think I've read it cover to cover a dozen or two times, and passages of it probably up to a hundred times. It's the only book I've ever really read that much. So interesting to me. But it came back kind of full force today. So when I was growing up, I often had a sense of feeling like I was in a box. And other people were in a box too. And I really wanted to get out of the boxes. And I had no idea how. I didn't know what the boxes were made of. I didn't know what out would look like. But the sense of constriction of being kind of not at ease in the world or in my own body or with other people was really strong. So I had this sense of there was something other than this and also this overwhelming feeling of this is not it.

[07:41]

And didn't have much of a sense of what to do about that. I felt very pulled to be a priest when I was about 11, which I've always thought was interesting because we were Lutheran and we had pastors. And I couldn't find a connection for that in the Christian church particularly. I was very drawn to ritual, and there's very little in the Lutheran church. I thought, if I'm going to be religious, I'll be like Catholic or Jewish or something, something with more ritual. So this is a good fit, definitely. But I always had this question of like, who am I? Where do I belong? Because I didn't feel like I belonged where I was growing up. There was nothing wrong with it. There was some missing sink, some missing piece there. Now I feel very at home with where I grew up and with the people there. So clearly it wasn't outward. It was quite inward.

[08:43]

I also was very interested in psychology. And I got a degree in psychology as an undergraduate. And I left that because I thought the other people in my program were way crazier than the clients that we were seeing. And I didn't know how to deal with that. It was the 70s, and people were being very politically correct, which drove me insane. And I didn't know how to deal with that very much. I looked for it in the women's movement. Some of the things that I read when I was like 16 were really exciting to me. They really seemed to be like getting out of the box. I remember Jill Johnston said something like, a whole object complete with missing parts. And I loved that. I felt like, wow, here's this whole group of people that seems to have this vision for another way to be. And then I went to college, and I got involved in the women's movement on campus, and

[09:48]

They were, by and large, very politically correct radical lesbian Marxist feminists, which was not at all what I was looking for. And I was rebellious with them in very amusing ways, like wearing dresses to feminist meetings and things like that. I was coming from work, but still. And I got really kind of ostracized for that, you know? It was very interesting. People I'd known for years wouldn't look at me because I was wearing a dress. It was really interesting. I did a lot of different art forms. I did a lot of music. I played bass and piano. I did classical and swing and blues and rock and world beat and all kinds of things. I had a lot of fun doing it, was a professional musician for a lot of years.

[10:51]

There were some kind of fun pictures of me on Facebook somewhere when I was a musician in my 20s. But I wasn't really looking for music. I was looking for a way to be, and I was looking for it through music. So I wasn't really finding what I was looking for. The first time I really... got more of a glimpse was reading R.H. Blythe. And I found Blythe through a footnote in a Salinger novel. And Blythe was a really quirky Englishman. He was tutor to the crown prince of Japan before the war. And he was interned in Japanese concentration camps during the war. where he became Eiken Roshi's first Zen teacher, actually. Blythe was sitting Zazen before that. And he also wrote his first books in the camps on Japanese humor, of all things.

[11:56]

He did translations of haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, Zen and Zen classics. He was a very literate man. And... the way that he wrote, he spoke about, he said, it's not difficult to write about Zen. What is difficult is to write by Zen, by which he meant to be expressive of the mind of Zen in the writing and in English. And I felt that he did that the way that he would write. Like I remember one phrase was... and when there is no hand to lift, and when there is no lift to hand. And when I would read him, I would feel some sense like the top of my head was being unscrewed and taken off, and there was a sense of spaciousness and lightness and joy and no thought, which was very unusual for me.

[13:09]

to not have a lot of thoughts buzzing around. So I read a lot of Blythe, and this seemed to indicate that this had something to do with Buddhism and meditation. So I set about looking for a place to go practice. I was living in San Francisco, and I went to a lot of different practice centers, did a six-week intro to Vipassana course with Jack Kornfield. In the back of some store in Fairfax, it was like 83 or something. Dharmadhatu, Shambhala, a lot of different places. Never made it to Zen Center, interestingly enough. Never went to San Francisco Zen Center. And because I had some very kind of idealistic thought about what Zen was, it was very hard for me to make the connection between... sitting meditation and these other ways of being because my experience of sitting was actually quite painful physically and mentally and emotionally.

[14:22]

Growing up, I'd learn how to be really disconnected from my feelings as a way to make things smoother in my family and not stay, you know, keep my chin up above depression. So sitting and not thinking about things, all this stuff would come up. And it was just about overwhelming. But I stuck with it as well as I could doing a Vipassana practice for some time. And then in my, I guess I was in my mid-20s, I was probably about 25, 26, I started doing solo desert trips. I had gone camping with a boyfriend. He was the drummer. I was the bass player in the band. And he took me out to this place in the middle of Nevada. There was hot springs there and a creek to go camping. There was so much sky and so much open space and wildness and silence.

[15:33]

And I just really resonated with it a lot. So the next time the band had a vacation, I said, let's go camping. And he said, well, I can't. I'm in this other band, and we're playing. And I said, well, OK, I'm going. And I didn't know anything about camping or the desert or being alone like that or really about meditation for all that I was struggling. I didn't know how to settle my mind. He kindly loaned me his bus that we'd gone in before. He had a 68 VW bus named Crazy Horse. It didn't have any heat. And I took the comforter off my bed that I used year-round. I didn't have any boots. I just had a light jacket. And it was late January, and I was headed to the northern... Arizona and New Mexico desert.

[16:34]

Just totally unprepared. I grew up in Southern California. To me, desert was like Joshua Tree, Palm Desert, the place you go in January, February. And I'd seen pictures of the Grand Canyon with snow on the rim, so I knew that it could snow there. So I called ahead and I said, is it snowing? And they said no. Okay, then it must be warm, right? I mean, I've never lived in snow country, you know. So I set off kind of late in the afternoon, late in January. And I got as far as probably the pretty high Sierra and was just too tired and pulled off the road to go to sleep. Took off all my clothes, got in the back of the van, realized I was really, really cold. Very quickly put on all my clothes and was like just up all night because it was... Of course, it was snowing. I mean, it wasn't snowing, but it was really snowy and it was freezing.

[17:37]

And I was out for two weeks. I later called it the Crazy Horse Winter Tour of Hell. I told people I was going on a vacation. I didn't... I knew I had to go. I thought it was pretentious to call it a vision quest. I wouldn't have called that even that to myself. I didn't know how to let go. So I was just in this very unconscious way putting myself in this situation that I had some idea would do something. Kind of like just throwing myself out in the desert and hoping for the best. And I have to say, I hung on very, very tightly for the better part of two weeks. There were little moments of kind of opening here and there. Oh, and the other thing was, I was familiar with Highway 5.

[18:42]

I-5, you know, goes from Long Beach, where I grew up, to the Bay Area. Takes about seven hours to go 425 miles. So looking across... Going east, I just kind of held my fingers out and kind of measured across, thinking I could go about that speed every day, you know, that distance every day, not realizing that a 68 VW bus goes about 35 miles an hour at 7,000 feet uphill. So things were taking like twice as long to get places, and it was cold, and I was driving all day, and I was basically nuts. I was just nuts. And just coping. You know, just didn't, like, I'm fine. I'm fine. And I would wait until I was, like, really fine to call home and tell everyone how fine I was. I saw the Grand Canyon today. It was really beautiful. It was great. But I wasn't connected at all. And this was just an incredible intensification of what my usual life was. But on the last, so I made a loop, and I came back around Southern, and

[19:47]

New Mexico and Arizona, and it was starting to thaw out. It was actually in the 50s. It was like 5 at night, and it got up to freezing during the day. The bus helpfully had a compass and it had a thermometer, so I always knew. It's really cold. But, you know, what I was starting to thaw out and feel, and the morning that I was actually headed back, I was going to stop over in L.A. before going back up, So I could let go now. I'd kind of done this event. I think this was really my first sashin, you know? Totally not knowing how, just throwing myself into this. I got in the car and turned the engine, and I had the thought, I'm not having a good time. And that was, I think, the first actual bit of reality that had intruded in two weeks. That was like the first actual connection with my experience was I'm not having a good time.

[20:52]

It was just this very simple truth. And I started to cry. And because I had so much pent up energy, I cried for about 14 hours straight driving back to LA. It was great. And you would think after that I would never do this again. But I went back like three or four times a year for years. And I always felt like... I didn't necessarily want to go. I often didn't think of it as being very much like Sashin. You go, but after a while, there got to be something. Something would really shift, usually on about day three, just like Sashin, and be like, oh, I'm here. And I always had a hard time with people. letting myself be seen, letting myself trust other people. And I felt like the desert, like I couldn't hurt the desert, and it would be patient.

[21:57]

It would just wait for me to show up in a way that I couldn't ask other people to wait for me, to wait that long for me to be present. And the desert would just be there, waiting, really indestructible. And gradually I learned how to be in touch with what I was feeling and to connect. And the last time I went to the desert like that, I kind of tuned in and I thought, you know, I was only about halfway through what I'd planned for my trip. And I said, I think I want to go home and see my friends. So I turned around and went home. And by then I was already starting to practice in a more formal way and with other people. So that need hadn't come up. It got moved to something else. Oh, and the frontispiece, the epigraph in Daniel Martin that I mentioned before, I thought I had a very apt quote.

[23:14]

It's from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. And it says, the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears. I thought, yeah. Yeah. So once the new started to be born, the morbid symptoms started. going away. I started doing Tibetan practice in the late 80s, I guess. That really helped me. The foundational practices for Tibetan practice, it's a lot of bowing. You're supposed to do 100,000 bows while you are reciting a mantra. counting your boughs and visualizing a Buddha field in 360 directions.

[24:18]

Very, very well populated. And so I was doing like 300 boughs every morning. It took about 45 minutes. Woke up a really good sweat. It was exhausting. And after that, I felt like I could sit. My mind could be calm after that. I'm really grateful for that practice. And no, I didn't do 100,000 boughs. I got up to about 38,000, though. Abs. really good abs during that time. And then I started doing Vipassana practice, and I started, I did a little, that's where I met Gil Fronstal, and I did some daily sitting, but it just happened that I started with like a 10-day retreat before I'd really done a full one-day sitting, for which I'm very grateful, because again, it was just like throwing myself out there, and I remember on the third day suddenly realizing, this is what I've been looking for. And in a way, particularly this way of being with people, of being so intimate without words.

[25:23]

You know, just body-to-body intimacy. You know, bowing when you pass people. Actually, we didn't bow in Vipassana, but just mindfully moving past people and finding your own rhythm in your body, walking. And I did that for a long time and really loved it. I was doing a lot of long retreats every year, but I missed community. So I started sitting at Berkeley Zen Center, and that was where I met Sochin Roshi. Just immediately fell into that. And by that time, I was also in graduate school for psychology, and I eventually got my doctorate in clinical psychology. And practiced doing that for a while. Moved into Berkeley Zen Center, became a resident. And the week after I moved in, we were sitting Rahatsu Sashin. And I think it was on the third day of things.

[26:26]

It was always really significant for me. I think it was the third day of Rahatsu Sashin. And I was the work leader. So it was the period before lunch. And I was sitting up above the zendo where I was living, making out the work assignments for after lunch. And I remember looking down in the zendo and seeing everyone sitting through the windows and thinking, this is it. This is exactly what I want to be doing. Being practicing, being part of the community, being of service. This is it. The only problem is rahatsu is going to end in like four days. I said, well, I guess I'm going to Tassajara. And I'd been here once. I'd been here for a work period. Like, gosh, maybe 96, 97, something like that. And this was like 90, this was 2000. I'd just been here once for a few days with BCC Sangha.

[27:28]

So I finished paying off my student loans and took like a year and a half to finish everything off and close up my life. And I moved here in 2002. And by then, Greg and I were together, and a few years later, I ordained, and then we got married, and I wish you so, and like that. And I just kept getting happier and happier. The more I've come into practice, I was remembering a parable in the Lotus Sutra the parable of the gem in the robe so I'd like to share that with you we are like a poor and impoverished man who went to the house of a close friend the house was a very prosperous one and he was served many kinds of delicacies

[28:37]

The friend took a precious jewel, sewed it in the lining of the poor man's robe, gave it without a word, and then went away. And the man, being asleep at the time, knew nothing of it. When the man had gotten up, he journeyed here and there to other countries, seeking food and clothing to keep himself alive, finding it very difficult to provide for his livelihood. He made do with what little he could get and never hoped for anything better, unaware that in the lining of his robe he had a precious jewel. Later, the close friend who had given him the jewel happened to meet the poor man and after sharply rebuking him, showed him the jewel sewed in the robe. And when the poor man saw the jewel, his heart was filled with great joy for he was rich, possessed of wealth and goods sufficient to satisfy the five desires.

[29:42]

We are like that man. And the jewel, of course, is an image of the Buddha nature that we all have, that we're unaware of, and that we need to find. often with the help of a teacher or a spiritual friend. So during the ceremony, I kept feeling like... I said to Sojin, I feel like you have given me my life. That you have given my life back to me. My life which... is mine and has always been mine, but I haven't been able to have it until you gave it to me. I was thinking, you know, people have said to me, how was the ceremony or how do you feel?

[30:57]

And I really had no idea what to say. really quite beyond words. I would say things like wonderful or amazing or joyful. And I still don't really know what to say. I think I can say a little more, which is intimate, peaceful, gratitude. deep, deep gratitude. A sense of interconnectedness is just so deep. So beyond ordinary and extraordinary. To be in ceremonial space for seven days

[32:02]

but not to be in silence, to be working. We were working and doing things throughout, so the ordinary and the ritual were completely intertwined, no separation, and actually our lives are always like that. But when we practice, when we make special circumstances, special containers, special ceremonies, we're able to see it. It becomes alive and awake for us. And we awaken to it over and over again, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose. But we can make ourselves more accident-prone. So thank you all. I think we have time for maybe... Just a couple of questions if anyone has any.

[33:05]

Yes? When I was growing up, I think it went away most when I was by water. I grew up In Long Beach, I grew up by the water. So when I was at the ocean or when I was sailing, that little tiny dinghy, about eight feet long. So when I was growing up, it was like that. Intermittently, the older I got, then it got to be like I would notice when I was, I called it being clicked in or clicked out when I was connected or not connected. Now it's more like jumping in and out of boxes.

[34:07]

It's just boxes, but they're places that we live, like we have clothes and we can take them on and off. I mean, you can't get out. There's nothing other than boxes, actually. There's no out of the box. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[34:55]

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