I just want to take a look around and just bring a little bit of the spirit of East Bay Meditation Center, which is located in downtown Oakland, near the 19th Street BART here, by asking you as well to take a look around. We are each other's spiritual community for the evening. There's a lot of diversity in this room. Some we can see, some we cannot. So... Let's just take a look around and appreciate the specialness of being together really unrepeatably in this evening, in this place, on this occasion. Because as I always say, even if the exact same group of people came at another time, we would all be different, right? We wouldn't be the exact same people. we'd have the same names maybe in a Buddhist community. You don't even know that. But it wouldn't be the same. So every time the Sangha gathers, it's a special thing.

[01:04]

So thank you very much for inviting me. And this evening I'm going to be giving a talk that's titled What's the Difference? Showing up and practicing across lines of of difference. So what's the difference showing up and practicing across lines of difference? I do work as a diversity and inclusion consultant and have done quite a bit of work with various Buddhist communities in the United States as well as I'm now branching out and doing some work in the corporate sector and with other nonprofits. And as we undoubtedly know, just living here in California, we are living amidst the most amazing racial and cultural diversity. We're one of the most diverse states in the United States. And we're not alone in that.

[02:06]

This is definitely the way that the United States is going. So we can say that that we're leaders and really take advantage of being where we are to be able to find out what it means to show up, and I'll be talking about this more, and practice at the lines of difference which do appear. Sometimes they're invisible and they'll suddenly appear. Sometimes they're quite apparent when people of different of different genders, of different sexual orientations, of different generations, of different cultures, of different abilities, are living fairly closely together under the challenges of the times that we live in, which are considerable on every front. So I would like to now, I like to use visual aids, and I brought one tonight, so I'm going to pass it around.

[03:13]

So a little, over a year ago, I was in, I was flown to the big island of Hawaii where my cousin, the Reverend Jiko Nakade, who is the priest at Daifukuji Sotozen Mission Temple in the Kono area, she's one of my big practice role models, had her Her group, the women's group at Daifukuji, it's called the Fujinkai, had invited me to be the keynote speaker for the 44th annual conference of the women's groups of the Soto Zen temples on all of the Hawaiian islands. And they get together every year. So this was the 44th year of this conference. And it was just, it was quite a wonderful event. And I wore this to... to show you. It's getting a little tangled up in the recorder.

[04:15]

But this, they had made these, and they gave one to everyone who came to the conference. There are about 300 people. And purple is Daifukuji's color. And they had made this lei from Kona coffee to make it look like Buddhist feeds. So these were handmade. Each one took about an hour. And whenever I look at this, I just feel so much love and happiness of the hands of the Buddhist women who made this, the love and also the local pride. because there were people from other islands who came over and they wanted to show off that this was Kona coffee. So I'm wearing Kona coffee around my neck. And then they were so thoughtful, they said, oh, you know, it's made with a little bit of super glue, so don't roast them and make yourself a cup of coffee. They are very concerned for the health.

[05:18]

So I want to pass this around. group photograph that was taken by a nice man who came and stood up on a, he climbed a ladder. I was so afraid he was going to fall off. He climbed a ladder and he took this group photograph of all of the conference participants. And I would submit that this is probably a fairly typical Soto Zen community here in the United States. I'm going to pass it around and just take your time and look at it. And look at it and see if you just kind of notice any thoughts or feelings that come up if I say this is a fairly typical Sothozen American Buddhist community. because this was of course for the women's group but being Japanese American mostly of course everyone was invited and there were little kids and the ministers came with their kids and their families and there were programs it was really quite wonderful they had a big fancy hotel in downtown Kona so I got to stay with an ocean view alright

[06:35]

So I first came to Green Gulch in January of 1985. And I was on this pilgrimage with my first Zen teacher, Zen Master Samu Sinem, who's a Korean Zen monk. And we were on this, I don't know, I guess we were about halfway through this totally insane pilgrimage, which started in... Mexico and where we'd gone down for a session and then Sennem flew to Los Angeles and left it to one of the senior students Sujata and myself to drive this unheeded Volkswagen which had been loaned to us up through Texas and across Texas and to Los Angeles where we rendezvoused with Sinem and then began visiting every Buddhist group and meditation center that we could find.

[07:40]

Now this being in the spirit of Koreans and of course we hadn't planned it out or notified anybody. We would just go and we'd look in the That was before the Internet. We'd look in the yellow pages and we would just start calling places and say, could we come over and visit? And usually Buddhist temples are famous for their hospitality. And, you know, we were with a monk and a Zen teacher. And so they'd always, if we could get anyone the phone, they'd say, sure, come on. And so we'd go and then they'd refer us to someone else. And sometimes we had food and sometimes we didn't. And it being in California at that time, the unheated Volkswagen wasn't too much of a problem. But it did later when we were crossing the Rockies. And we came to San Francisco Zen Center and we showed up at City Center. And everyone was so nice to us. And then they said, ah, you know, Lama Govinda has just died, and his funeral is being held out at Green Gulch, and we'd like to invite you to come and visit Green Gulch.

[08:50]

So we said, sure. And we came out for that ceremony, which I remember very clearly was in the Zendo. And we visited Vietnamese temples, Jodo Shinshu, centers, Thai temples. Well, as you probably know, the Los Angeles area and the Bay Area are, but surprisingly other places as well. We stopped at Naropa in Boulder as we went across the country. You can find every Buddhist tradition in the world here in the United States. Many of them in the Los Angeles area is concentrated. in the Bay Area, around Chicago, certainly around New York. So our opportunities for learning, and this is just diversity of the Dharma, not to mention everything else, were so great.

[09:51]

And I was so privileged to be able to accompany a teacher who comes from a tradition. The Korean Zen tradition, as I understand it, has a custom that at some point you're really invited if you can to just travel around, travel around Korea, visit a lot of different centers, ask the teachers questions and have your practice tested by them because they're not afraid to test your practice either. So you know the Dharma combat is very alive and well there and it's really scary. So this pilgrimage idea is just, it's a fantastic way first of all to really increase your appreciation for the way that our practice can be, can manifest in terms of taking care of people. That when we meet our guests there was so much kindness, there was careful observation, there was generosity.

[10:58]

There was genuine interest in who we were. And in turn, we would show interest in the places we went. And so there's a kind of a protocol. And you go and you, you know, you ask about the facility and when they got it and how it was funded and admire the little hand, you know, furniture or whatever is around and really appreciate. The love, the effort, you know how much effort you put into your practice. So even if that practice looks different than the one that we do, that is a practice of pilgrimage is to go with that fresh beginner's mind of learning and to say, You know, this diversity of the way the Dharma is manifesting is a wonderful thing, that when we meet that line of difference to say, you know, I'm on an adventure, I'm on a learning adventure, and I'm going to see how much I can learn.

[11:59]

In the summer of 2008, Tricycle Magazine did a... a feature where they contacted a number of long-time Dharma practitioners, I think all in the United States, and asked them all to answer a question. And this particular question was, I think, in Buddhism, what have you changed your mind about and why? Which I thought was a pretty good question. So I was invited to submit. And here is what I wrote. It's a brief thing. We had a little word limit, which was good. Since I began to actually practice Buddhism, I've changed my mind about almost everything that I thought was Buddhism. When I was contacted and invited to submit by Andy Cooper, who was one of the editors then, he said, well, here's a question.

[13:03]

What have you changed your mind about? I said, that's a no-brainer, Andy, because I've changed my mind about everything. Okay, so I've changed my mind about almost everything. My original Zen teacher used to talk about a monk who would sit and call out his own name. So for me, I'd say, you know, be sitting in meditation and say, Mushum. And when he answered himself, he'd say, don't be fooled by anyone. I remember in 1985 sitting in a Thai temple outside of Denver, being stared at lewdly by a chain-smoking bhikkhu who had obviously never heard of women's liberation and who was so senior that no one dared say anything. And standing in a South Korean nun's temple in 1988, watching in horror as a Korean nun vigorously sprayed a spider, then grinned and said in her best school book English, kill.

[14:11]

I remember with my teacher climbing rickety stairs to a top floor temple in San Francisco's Chinatown where a golden animal, a lamb or a ram, was enshrined on a golden altar along with bowls of oranges. Intrigued, I pulled out a camera and several Chinese women pounced on me, ready to knock the offending instrument from my hand. During these travels, I never knew what was going on. and no one ever explained anything. I realize that in Buddhism, if we believe completely what we read, hear, or think, it's just another way of allowing ourselves to be fooled or sidetracked. The big Buddhist world is filled with real people with real struggles and real dirt, noise, confusion, and great beauty. All of this was the best preparation I could have had to give birth to and raise a real Buddhist son.

[15:17]

So that was fun answering that question. And I could have gone on with some of my other experiences because it just, every time I thought I sort of had a grip on Buddhism, We'd go to another temple and I'd just have to jettison that. So it was an incredible learning adventure and we met so many people who exemplified the Brahma Vaharas. That loving kindness, that equanimity, that compassion manifested in so many different ways. What's called these days often diversity and inclusion or D&I work in corporations and large organizations involves what we, I think, might call showing up and practicing across lines of difference. And we can ask practicing what?

[16:20]

What does this mean here? Again, using the language that we might be familiar with, I'd say that it involves practicing what we might call emptying the self. And that means dropping our own agenda. Going in to a new situation and dropping our own agenda temporarily. It's not that it's wrong to have goals or intentions for ourselves. Of course we all do. And it can be a very useful skill to learn to drop our own agenda temporarily in order to do a couple of things. The first thing is deep listening. So in deep listening, what this means is that it's selfless listening or listening to what is important to the person who is speaking, not to me.

[17:22]

And this is something that we have the opportunity to practice in a lot of the group work. that's being done around the Bay Area. Because in the way certainly that I was trained to be in conversation with people, and I think for many of us, it's a totally well-intentioned habit. I think it's a totally well-intentioned habit conversationally to show empathy for the other person and also because human beings often bond about what we have in common. Is that not so? We search for that common ground. And that is fine. And then there can be additional skills of also being able to be with one another and to acknowledge that there's so much we might not know about that other person and to be able to slowly develop the relationship

[18:27]

to find out. In other words, so that the assumption of commonality does not block out the genuine differences between us. So in deep listening, we're listening to what's important to what the speaker says. And that means that when someone shares something from us, which is a form of dana, or the paramita of generosity, of giving, someone shares something with us from their life, from their thoughts, from their experiences, that with deep listening, we listen and we really focus our attention on what that person is saying, how they're saying it, and even some of the things that they might not be saying. Because in many cultures, the silences and the pauses are just as important as the words.

[19:31]

And then we don't add on at the end of it, you know, I completely understand you because I experienced something exactly like that. And then go on to tell your own story. And that's not that that's always wrong or bad, but with deep listening, we just completely receive the other person. And this includes... I would say from my own experience of volunteering in Oakland Public Schools, which is one of the most multicultural milieus you will ever find, that this involves showing up at parents meetings and school meetings where sometimes I never actually really understood what other people were saying at all. It wasn't necessarily a language barrier. It was a culture barrier. I remember one time sitting in this one meeting and listening to one other parent who was this amazing genius jazz saxophonist.

[20:32]

And he just, I don't know what the heck he was talking about. We were supposed to be talking about curriculum, I think. And he said something like, Like in the ancient times, you know, people would get together and would chant for days without ceasing. And I said, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like none. And I didn't to this day. I still don't know what the point was. But he knew what his point was. And over time, because we continued to show up and to work together for this little school, this little public school in Oakland, which has since gone defunct. And for the sake of our children, we kept showing up. So sometimes that's what it takes is this deep listening without even expecting to understand. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. Also to do active listening. And this is a skill set which many of us have been able to practice.

[21:39]

And all of these are skills that really we can practice. and we can get better at them. So in active listening, we listen deeply first, and then we might repeat back, if it seems appropriate, that what I heard you say was, and try to repeat and mirror back to the person. It's really a mirroring process. The most important points that we heard them say and ask, did I understand you correctly? And if the other person says, well, Yeah, kind of, but that's not what I meant there. I used a different word. Then we really learn from that, and we accept it, and we say gracefully, thank you, and maybe we got it completely wrong, and then they correct us. So we can become better and better at that mirroring process, which is so important to the way we are as human beings.

[22:40]

All this modern neuroscience that's coming out, which so many people, myself included, are looking at with great fascination, is showing the importance of that human interaction. In some cases, it's between an adult and a child or a parent and a child. But really, I think it doesn't matter how old we are, in which two people or more people are really face-to-face And they're speaking and sharing their experiences. And then to have that validated and brought back to you to say, I really heard you. Without judgment, without analysis, without our own opinion. And this is a great practice. The greater the difference between that other person who's speaking and myself, the greater the practice is to be able to repeat back what I heard them say that was important to them, because it actually might be something to which I have incredible disagreement, which is almost completely foreign or

[23:58]

not understandable or could be even repugnant to me. It doesn't matter. If when I'm doing active listening, my job is actually to mirror back. I don't actually even have to feel I have to agree with it, but I am trying to understand it. So that's part of the skill set, I feel, that's needed to show up and practice across lines of difference. So these are pragmatic and spiritual skills, I feel, that we can just get better and better at, just like practicing spiritually, practicing an instrument musically, practicing cooking. It's a practice. And just ask any priest or minister who spends much of their time listening to people's stories. The joys, the sorrows, the traumas, the problems that people in their congregation, their sangha, their community bring to them and really want to have a safe place where they can bring their story.

[25:12]

What they say could actually be quite different from what that priest is. has experienced, and really it's the priest or minister's job to listen deeply and receive that person with deep spiritual acceptance and love. In the pilgrimage that I just spoke about with Samu Sinem and his senior student Sujata in the unheated Volkswagen, so that was an experience of being forced across lines of difference that really quickly with a very steep learning curve. And in fact, I had never, I'm not much, I don't really like to drive anyway. But I had always, I'd learned to drive on an automatic. And this Volkswagen was Gearshift. And I actually learned how to drive it in San Francisco.

[26:19]

It was a very near-death experience. So it was a steep learning curve in every way you could think possible. And from morning till night, we visited so many different groups. Literally, I never knew what culture or where we'd be. I mean, we would just go from one group to another. to another. It was the most dazzling Buddhist education I could ever have received. We went to groups that had more money, that had less money, that had lived in little houses to giant temples. It was just an amazing journey. And that trip and another shorter pilgrimage to Chicago with my teacher, those really are still the deepest foundations of my practice.

[27:25]

Because we were so welcomed wherever we went, and it was through that experience that I was allowed to enter worlds that normally would not have been exactly closed to me. but would probably not have been so accessible. I just have to say I'm a lazy person, so I wouldn't have taken on myself to go driving around and calling people up and saying, can we go and visit? And so this was an experience of very quickly crossing immense lines of difference and learning from them. So... The learning, the main learning that came to me, besides a lot of exposure to different forms of the Dharma, which I'm still very interested in, I do a lot of reading, and I don't know, it's just kind of one of my hobbies to learn about North American Buddhism.

[28:27]

The main thing that was, it got to be pretty funny to me, was that I was kind of the, you know, the junior... student grunt in that situation. And it was my job to, I had this notebook and I can write really fast because I've been a secretary. I don't do shorthand but I write really fast. So it's my job to take notes on everything that we did. And so we'd go into these situations, and Sinem would see something that he wanted to be able to remember, and he'd say, write that down. So when we went to City Center, which was so well developed, there were all those, you know, nifty, like... I don't know, gata, mindfulness verses in the bathrooms, and there was like a lot of interesting signage around. So Sinem kept saying, write that down, write that down. And I remember someone at City Center kind of sidled up to me and say, do you write everything down? And I said, no, just what I'm asked to, but that's pretty much everything.

[29:32]

I always had these ink-stained fingers, and I would be just frantically scribbling all of this stuff so that we could take it home with us and adapt it. for our own center. That's one of the ways that the Dharma spreads is as we go around and we visit these different places. But the funny thing was that even though some of these visits were quite brief, some were overnight, it usually didn't take that long, anywhere between even five minutes to a few hours before someone from the group would usually sidle up to me. and say in sort of a low voice, you know, we have the real practice here. Our teacher is the best teacher. Those other groups, like, yeah, it's all right, but we have the best teacher. And they, of course, be very proud of all the work they put into their place. They say, you know, yeah, we have the true Dharma here.

[30:35]

So everywhere I went, it was so amazing because they were all different, but they all had the true Dharma, and they all had the best teachers, and they all had the real practice. And this was a great learning for me that, of course, we're proud of our places of practice because we work so darn hard to build them up, to maintain them, and it's good to keep in mind that everyone has the best places of practice. Everyone has the best teachers. Everyone has the best lineages and traditions for them. So it really helps for me guard against falling into that and remembering that actually saying things like that to people who are not from the community can be very, not only offensive, but frightening. Because if you think about it, that's exactly what people in cults always say. that they have, you know, the real truth.

[31:38]

And that can be really the way it comes across, which is certainly counter to our purpose of being able to take what we learn and how we grow through the Dharma and be able to share it freely with others so that we learn from them and hopefully they benefit from whatever we've been able to realize as well. So keeping that very broad view that, yes, we have something that's very good and special, and so does everyone else. So as a lay person then, that's when I was traveling. I was in a monastic period of training. And then I had my kid in 1989, and I've been practicing as a lay person. practitioner and as a mother in Oakland, California, for the last 20 years. So I became interested, since Oakland is one of the most diverse cities in the United States, I think that it was J. Wilson Riles, is that his name?

[32:52]

Who is on the board of San Francisco San Center? Yeah. I've heard him say that actually there was a study done that said that Oakland was one of the most diverse culturally cities in the United States because there are other cities, say urban areas such as Los Angeles, which are incredibly culturally, racially diverse, but are much more segregated. The communities tend to live in separate areas. And he said that the study that they did in Oakland, they actually measured the distance between people's homes and showed that through this study that not only was diversity present in Oakland, but that it was integrated diversity. It was an urban area where we could truly see the problems and the potential of being in an area where people are raising their families, where there are common spaces, where there are schools, churches.

[34:17]

shopping areas and so forth where we can actually see this integrated, diverse and inclusive society in action. So I became, as an Oaklander and resident, very interested in what it means to show up or not show up at a line of difference. What it means to be able to enter other worlds, enter other cultures and What does that take, actually? So to give you a concrete example of a line of difference, I volunteered in the Oakland Public Schools for 10 years. I would have volunteered for 12. My kid went through K through 12. So maybe it was 11 years. But the middle school, which he went to for two years, didn't want parents in the classrooms. It was kind of a lockdown middle school. So I did not go and volunteer because they didn't want parents there.

[35:20]

Otherwise, I was there. I tutored in literature, reading and writing. I taught literature in high school for four years. That would have been eight groups. And I'm still in touch with some of my students by Facebook. as they're going on. So this was really an incredible experience. And in all of that time, with so many parents' meetings, I was on many committees. I was very, very involved. We had meetings in so many people's homes. And in all that time, I never went to a meeting that was held in an African-American family's home. It just did not happen. And gradually, as I saw this, I mean, to this day, I'm not really sure why because the parent representation on so many committees was truly diverse and reflective of the student population.

[36:28]

And I just kind of noticed that that was a line of difference. And that makes sense in a certain way. that home is a place of refuge. It's a place where we go to relax and to be able to hopefully build an environment that is free of the stresses and the difficulties that we may encounter in the society, on our workplaces, whenever we go outside our Now, this was just something that I noticed. Several years ago, Paul Kivel was invited to City Center to do a diversity training or a session, and folks from outside the Sangha were invited. So my friend Sheridan Adams and I, and I think her husband, Jeff Kitsis,

[37:33]

who is a Zen master at Empty Gate Zen Center in Berkeley, and one of their friends all carpooled in. And Paul said, most of us know what we stand for. And by that he meant our values. Most of us in the room, we're pretty certain what we stand for. And we need to look around and see who we stand with. We know what we stand for, but we need to look around and see who we stand with. And this is really important. We can ask ourselves that question with kindness and with compassion and also with some honesty because we can do it privately and say we're living in one of the most diverse in one of the most diverse areas in our entire country.

[38:35]

And when we look around and see the people with whom we're living and working and with whom we have the most contact, just to take a little informal poll and ask ourselves, what are the lines of difference that might be showing up or not within the group of people with whom I stand? on a regular basis. That's really something to look into. So here I'm going to give you my learning from 20 years of living in community activism in Oakland, California. To be able to cross a major line of difference, we first need to have, of course, an intention to cross a line of difference. So everything starts with intention. If we don't have that intention, we're going to come across lines of difference just inevitably, but we might want to also avoid the ones, if we can, that are most uncomfortable or most stressful for us.

[39:43]

And to some extent, that will be probably the case for everyone. We do have to manage our stress. But if we have, if we set an intention to say, I want to really have that experience, I want to do this practice, usually it's because we make a commitment. And since we all have this practice, we know what it means and the kind of strength and determination it takes to make a commitment to learning more about the world. Because really, When we say difference or we say diversity, that's just another way of saying we want to learn more about the world. In fact, I have a very clear memory when I was on the unheated Volkswagen pilgrimage in San Francisco, we ended up going into, it was like this really dank,

[40:45]

Second floor, or maybe third floor, I don't know. We had to go up all these dark stairs into this very dark, just dank, that's all I can say, room, big room in San Francisco Chinatown. And there was a monk there, an elderly Chinese monk. who didn't speak much English, but he was quite delighted to see us, of course, because hospitality is so important in the Dharma, and gave us tea, and we tried to talk a little bit. And he said, he had been a monk for many years, and he said, I became a monk because I wanted to learn about the world. So I thought that was rather lovely, and I've always remembered that. moment with such gratitude for such a deep teaching. He wasn't someone who ever became known as a famous teacher, but he had really realized something for himself.

[41:48]

He had that beautiful mind. He wanted to learn about the world. So to be able to cross this line of difference, we need to first have the intention and commitment to learn. Second, to cross a major line of difference, we need to do the inner work to be relaxed and confident about who we are and what we stand for. So relaxed and so confident that we're not at all threatened by people with values very different from our own. because we know who we are and what we stand for. So we don't really need to defend or try and push our own ideas on anyone else, and we can be much more receptive to learning from them. And this means understanding to our very core that in order to learn from someone, we don't have to agree with them.

[42:59]

We don't even have to like them. We don't have to agree with someone in order to learn from them. So this is the opposite of preaching to the choir or reaching out for support, which is also very good. You know, for myself, if I feel a little vulnerable, a little fragile, a little burnt out, then of course I'm going to pick up my phone and I'm going to call a friend who I know basically has a lot of the same ideas as me, a lot of the same intentions as understands me. And I'm going to ask that person to basically be my cheering team and take out the pom-poms and say, go Mushom, because you are right. And that's good. It's good to get that kind of support. But how much do I actually learn from that person? Probably not so much.

[44:04]

So I'm going to want to kind of build up my self-confidence and my ability to be very relaxed with people who are quite different from myself and who, as I said before, it might even be that I like them, but I just don't understand them at all because they might be speaking in a very coded way or, I don't know, you just haven't gotten on the same wavelength or something. It takes a while. It takes a while. And thirdly, then, to cross a major line of difference, we have to really, I think, hone in on the patience paramita. Patience is something that's good in almost every situation, and particularly when we encounter lines of difference. I can't think of anything that is more valuable than the practice of active patience.

[45:09]

Which can also be framed as a pranahita, one of the three doors of liberation. And that's sometimes translated as wishlessness or goallessness, letting go of being goal-oriented. Really just being, I mean we say that, show up and be fully present without having our own agenda, trying to control the situation to be what we want it to be or need it to be. And very importantly, because we have taken that bodhisattva vow, we do have energy, we do have enthusiasm to fulfill this vow, understanding that Certainly from my own experience, sometimes a service that is called for when we show up at a major line of difference is to not serve until we are asked to do so.

[46:16]

In other words, not to show up with the mind that says, wow, there are all these problems and I'm going to tell you how to fix them. but instead to show up with the intention of there are many people here who've been certainly aware of issues and of the situation, have probably been working on these issues for a very long time. And as a new person here, my job is to first learn what work other people have done to appreciate and value that work. no matter what my judgment of its efficacy might be, and to really begin to deeply understand the complexities, the culture, the customs that have been built with loving care, sometimes a little bit by happenstance, but often not over many, many years.

[47:28]

So I practiced this a lot when I was in those 10 years of volunteering in the Oakland Public Schools. Because, of course, I did so because I could see the need for children to learn reading and writing and the basic skills. I knew that they would need these skills. But sometimes the schools were so chaotic And the situation was just, sometimes it was even hard to find a place where I could tutor a child, where we could even hear each other that wasn't full of distraction. And we would go from one locked room to another and then try and find someone with the key. And then it would be, my time with that child would be over. That's how dysfunctional some of the public schools are. Or there would be no corner. So sometimes I became very impatient and I thought, well, here I am.

[48:33]

I am ready to serve. I'm ready to help these kids and I can't get to it. This is really frustrating. And what I learned was that was okay. That I just, if it didn't work out one time, I would keep showing up and I would just keep showing up and I'd keep showing up and I would do my best and I would keep showing up. And gradually, over time, I began to be inside these broken systems. Even a broken system, which is still a system, works in some way. And I began to understand whom I had to talk to to get that key or how I could negotiate a system which seemed impenetrable from the outside. And I also began to develop... relationships with the children in these schools and with the other parents and with the teachers. So sometimes I would show up and I would feel that my volunteer time, frankly, was entirely wasted.

[49:36]

But it was not. It was not at all. Because over time, I got to know them. They got to know me. And this is what crossing lines of difference is. It means you just keep showing up. And after a while, at some point, people who may have first have looked at you with indifference or suspicion or neither, maybe they just didn't know you, will decide that they trust you because you obviously are not there for your own needs. If you had been, you would not keep showing up. And when that decision to trust is made, that is when people open their lives to you, their experience, their fears, their hopes.

[50:37]

And that relationship really comes alive in a way that great learning takes place. So for every child that I helped in the Oakland Public Schools in which I volunteered for those 10 years, hopefully they learned to read and write a little bit. But I know that what I got for myself was the most valuable learning of being able to enter their worlds, if only briefly, if only in that very limited way, in that setting. Still, I was able to enter their worlds. And their worlds were, for the most part, rather different from mine. I mean, first of all, there's just a huge generation gap. Then they came from cultures that were different from my culture. This was where I learned. This was where I actually began. This was my entryway into...

[51:43]

being a diversity consultant, was volunteering in the Oakland Public Schools. I'll speak for just a few more minutes and then wrap it up. And I'd like to hear your insights, your observations from when you looked at the photograph or any questions you may have. To say that also over the past several years, I made a decision at some point when I looked at the demographics, because I've done interfaith work. So I Googled the demographics, religious demographics of the United States, and I thought, ah. And it said Christians, I think, were around 72% or 73%. Buddhists were under 1%. We're just totally negligible. And I mean, but it was just Christians. I thought, oh my gosh, we really live in this Christian country. And now I'm seeing the figures. And it really, I think I've got to, I've got to do something about that.

[52:47]

So I began doing a Bible study with my local Jehovah's Witnesses. And I've been doing that for several years. And I did a presentation on this experience of, and I've really learned a lot about the Bible. It's been great. And about Jehovah's Witnesses who have, I must tell you, if you don't know, one of those amazing infrastructures in the world. They are almost completely a volunteer organization, including they do not have clergy. Everything is done on a volunteer basis, from cleaning to cleaning. to the preaching, to the massive programs that they run. Volunteers, folks. Think about the organization that's needed and the energy and devotion of the people who are doing it. And since I work for East Bay Meditation Center and I'm on the board, and we are a largely volunteer organization, I thought I'm just going to take their best practices.

[53:51]

And I've learned a lot from them. But mainly for me, it was a spiritual journey to... trying to understand Christianity from the point of view of faith, which I've never been very successful at, even though I grew up in the Bible Belt in Ohio. And through this experience, I can absolutely say I really now feel I do understand it. And to the point where I was invited to give a presentation at a symposium at Radcliffe a few years back, which was sponsored by the Pluralism Project at Harvard. on women's interfaith organizations. I'm not the head of a women's interfaith organization, but a few of us who are women leaders and do interfaith work were invited to give a presentation. So my presentation was called the Interfaith Monologue. Usually we hear about interfaith dialogue, right? So this was the Interfaith Monologue.

[54:54]

It's my own strategy. So, you know, if you take it, you have to give me credit because I invented it. And my thinking about this was, so I really would like to enter into the world of the Christian point of view in which the Bible is the fundamental text is a revealed word of God because I've never had a speck of belief in that. I think the Bible is fascinating. personally never had any any feeling or faith that it was a revealed word of god because i read it pretty much all the way through when i was a i think in like fifth grade and uh because i wanted to understand it and i just thought i just do not get this at all there's a god of love but then there's a god of vengeance and you know where how does this all go together i could not make a bit of sense of it so uh How do I cross that line of difference?

[55:56]

Well, first of all, I had an intention. I had a commitment. So that worked out fine because Jehovah's Witnesses come to your house, so it's really convenient. You don't have to go anywhere. Second of all, so they show up, and then, you know, if you invite them in, they're happy. And they're all people from my neighborhood, so I run into them at my farmer's market, Trader Joe's. And then active listening and deep listening, dropping my own agenda. So that's what I did. I decided this was not going to be about mutuality because part of their belief system is that if you don't believe in their belief system that it's motivated by Satan. So I thought that's fine with me because if I'm being motivated by Satan it's as good as I can do. And I'm not here to convince them of what my beliefs are. I'm here to learn from their beliefs.

[56:57]

And so I did. I would just show up, and they have these lesson plans, and you read these things, and you answer these questions. And it was really interesting. And all the questions I asked, they could answer. I mean, these are really impressively trained folks. And if they couldn't answer it, they never fudged. They'd say, we don't know. Like, I'd say, well, what? word in Greek or Hebrew, they'd say, we don't know, but we'll get back to you. And they would write it down in their books and come back the next week and tell me. So it was through the interfaith monologue. I decided that I was just going to be there to learn in order to cross that line of difference. And you know what? After several years of this, a regular Bible study, Some of them would, you know, I have Buddha figures, I am in a Buddhist household because I'm Buddhist, would say, well, you know, what is that? Or tell me about this.

[57:58]

And then I would explain to them and they've become very interested in the Dharma and rather knowledgeable about it. And it all developed naturally because it's very natural in a human interaction that when there's trust, when there's acceptance, when there's lack of judgment, That's when the door opens. That's when the heart opens. And that's when we can truly have the gift of entering into the experience of someone whose life, whose belief, whose value is very different from our own. So I'll end there, thanking you all for your gracious, deep listening, and ask for your insights. And any questions you may have, I will certainly try to answer. Yes, I see a hand in back and then your second.

[59:02]

Thank you for the talk. You're welcome. And what's your name? I'm Nora. I am wondering if you closed that door that you talked about at the end, which I feel like recently did where there was a lack of acceptance and trust on my heart lack of the conditions for creating that natural kind of curiosity so there was a lack of acceptance from me and I'm just wondering my reaction is to kind of attack the situation in every way possible to get it back, you know? But that feels like maybe not taking care of it. I'm wondering, how do you take care of the situation once you've, how do you heal it, you know, if you've hurt it?

[60:08]

So what I'm hearing, Nora, is that it's a situation where there was an attempt to cross a line of difference, but some injury occurred. I don't think that there can be any general response to that because each situation is specific. And I would say within my experience that once again, taking the long view may be what is needed. I mean, certainly there is present within our tradition, whether we believe it literally or not, the concept, which for me is very valuable, that we form and we conduct and we resolve the issues within relationships, not only with

[61:15]

possibly in this lifetime, but over many. And whether that is literally true or not, taking that point of view can actually give us a very deep patience to continue to try to heal that wound. Does that make sense? Thank you. what you stood for, and I don't know what I stand for. What do you stand for? What do you mean by that? That could also mean values. Do you have values? I probably do. But you don't know what they are? I don't articulate them, I don't think. Oh, that's interesting, yeah. Well, thank you for that question. My values are... And I think it's very true that sometimes we don't even know what... I'll speak for myself.

[62:23]

I don't know what my values are until I'm in a situation where my values are not being honored. So one of the things, for instance, that I discovered from having been in the... a Korean Buddhist system, and having trained in the Korean monasteries for nine months in 87, 88, is that one of my values is I am raised in the United States, I'm an American citizen, and I came back and I just said I want my vote. One of my values is the democratic process. I don't have to have my way, but I sure as heck want my vote. having been in a system where I did not have a vote. So that's how I discovered the importance of that value to me. I want my vote. I want to be included in the decision-making process around issues that will affect my life.

[63:30]

That's extremely important to me. Another value I have is education. This comes from being raised in a Japanese American family where education is the ultimate value. You know, whatever you have to do, you're going to send your kids to college. And not only that, because my mother believed in public education, that is also one of my values. Thank you. Thank you. Yes? This is a really basic and kind of silly question, but... How do you have values that are that strong and not have an agenda? What's your personal practice, as deep as you can go, to kind of not bring your agenda somewhere? I always feel like I'm defending everywhere I go, and I don't know how to think.

[64:32]

I can't imagine not doing it. Thank you. That, I think, really goes to the point of it. what I'm trying to say here. Well, I'll go back to what I just said about one of my values is I want my vote. And I also know from experience that if I insist on that in every situation that I might go into, I just won't go into certain situations. I'm going to avoid them because I'm going to say, no, I won't have a vote there, so I'm not going to go and do that. or I will get into that situation, and even if there's something that I could benefit from learning there, I'll say, to heck with this, because I don't have a vote, so I'm out of here. Goodbye, and you won't see me later. But if there's something in that situation where I really can learn, because there are hierarchical situations.

[65:37]

I mean, when I was the... assistant walking around writing everything down. I can assure you I did not have a vote there. It would not have been my vote to learn how to drive gear shift on the hills of San Francisco. That it was by going through into situations where I did drop my own agenda or was forced to drop my agenda without defending anything. It was really there that I learned that sometimes just being able to do that and to say, okay, this is temporary. I'm not going to be in this situation all the time or everywhere I go, but I'm just going to experimentally go into this situation and learn from it because there's no other way that I'm going to be able to enter. that situation with so many of my own ideas, so many of my judgments and opinions, which these folks are obviously not interested in, in the very least.

[66:41]

And that's okay. So just relaxing the mind is really what it's about, I think. Just relaxing the mind. Yeah. And it sounds like there's also a discerning process, like you're not going to waste your personal energy on If it's something I want to change. Sometimes there are situations where change is not even asked for. People are happy just as they are. I've spent hours sitting around with boys playing video games, which I had no interest in whatsoever. But since it was their passion, I would just hang out with boys playing video games, my son and his friends. And they didn't need to have anything changed. And if I said anything, boy, this is really violent, they would say, don't start on that. And I would have been ushered right out the door.

[67:44]

So I've learned a lot about video games, which are a really important part of youth culture. And certainly, you know, I can sort of do the PS3 a little bit. I have one game that I play. It's a Japanese game called Katamari. I think that's it. I have greatly, greatly been so encouraged and it's given me great joy. to be here to receive this warm welcome, to see faces of friends and also folks I don't know, folks from the East Bay. And I want to thank you deeply for the effort, the commitment, and the love that you put into your practice here.

[68:49]

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