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 morning, everyone. Thank you for inviting me to be in Sangha, our third jewel. spiritual community, the community of mindful harmony, to be in community with you this morning. I want to appreciate your spiritual intention, your spiritual practice, whatever form that may take. There may be some diversity in the room this morning. And I want to appreciate your spiritual Your sorrows, your joys, your unique difficulties from the many cultures that you come from and that are represented in this room.

[01:11]

I want to appreciate that. I also want to appreciate the goodness in your heart when you woke up this morning that brought you here. The title of my talk is This morning is awakening, engaging, and embodying social justice. Awakening, engaging, and embodying social justice with the emphasis on embodying. E-M-B-O-D-Y-I-N-G, embodying. It has the word body in it. And I understand from the website that there's been an online winter 2016 practice period called Awakening and Engaging the World, Traditional Zen in Contemporary Life.

[02:12]

So I'm riffing off of that. Embodiment. Fully being in the body. Our aliveness, the raw aliveness, vitality of this organism that is breathing and renewing its cells at every moment and pumping blood and digesting and running and regulating a million processes, some of which we're aware, many of which we're not aware because they're just going on. That is so, so amazing. We stop just several times a day and appreciate it. the body, whatever our condition may be, I personally think that's a really amazing practice. I am a mother, so I always say that I've seen the life of a human being from scratch, and it's just pretty darn amazing.

[03:15]

So, before we consider whether we can embody Dharma, And in my case, being at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, where our mission is diversity and social justice based, whether we can embody social justice, that which is just, that which is fair, that which is equitable, good, and compassionate for the many. We can just ask ourselves, I think, whether we can embody our own body. And a story that I tell because it is a true story and because I like it when I teach is that once I was passing by a couch and there was a toddler, I don't know, three and a half years old, who was normally an extremely active child.

[04:23]

Some said hyperactive, but just normally really zippy, always running around, just very intensely active. And this child was sitting cross-legged on the couch, completely still. I mean completely still, just like a Buddha figure. And so, of course, I rudely interrupted and said, what are you doing? Because I was so astounded. And the child said, was just sitting there, said, I'm enjoying my body. So we can see this is something. It doesn't need to be some spiritual practice. It doesn't need to be some fancy seminar that we pay $500 for. This is our birthright. This is our birthright as human beings. To embody the body and I hope, whatever our condition may be, I'm enjoying my body, this child said.

[05:29]

So this points to the potential for enjoyment of embodiment. And for me, that's very important. I'm now going to... on that theme, invite you for a few moments of mindfulness, a very light, very open, very kind and friendly awareness of what is arising in our body, in our mood state, in our thoughts right now. And that will be different for every one of you. So I'm just going to invite you. You can close your eyes. You can keep them open. We're just checking in with ourselves. Just that really light, friendly, inward focus. The attitude is very important. It's friendly attitude. Best friend to ourselves. At the yoga studio where I study in Oakland, they say, give yourself a hug.

[06:36]

That's a yoga stretch. So we're giving ourselves that kind of mental hug, then asking ourselves if we like, how do I feel this morning? Am I well rested? Or am I fatigued? And there is no right answer and there's no good or bad answer. This is mindfulness. Just noticing, just observing, seeing how accurate we can be. How do I feel this morning? Am I well-rested or am I fatigued? Do I feel grounded? Whatever that may mean to you. And resilient. So remember, this is mindfulness. So we're not talking about what we think we should be or what we think we might be.

[07:40]

trying to go beyond the words and check in. What's arising in the body? Do I feel grounded and resilient? Or do I feel frazzled, irritable, fragile? Just checking in with ourselves and whatever else you'd like to invite yourself to check in about. How am I doing this morning? Son, I also invite you to check in. Do I feel that I basically have all that I need to sustain myself physically, emotionally, spiritually? If the answer is no, do I have a plan or some leads on how to become more sustainable? And this is where sangha can be a big help, folks.

[08:41]

If our answer is no, that's good information for ourselves. We can ask our spiritual friends and our teachers and Google stuff on the internet. It's good to have a plan on how to become sustainable. And the last question I invite you to ask yourself is, in the past week, how would I rate... my overall sense of well-being? Whatever this may mean to you. In the past week, how would I rate my overall sense of well-being? see at least one person smiling. See, I'm cheating. I'm just looking around. You're a very beautiful looking group, I will add.

[09:45]

So if you like, open the eyes if they've been closed. Thank you for that practice. And the reason that I'm suggesting and requesting that you might do this little investigation now and really maybe several times every day as a practice is because I do think it's important. From where I sit, from where I'm positioned at this point in my life, I do think it's extremely important. And I'm not alone in thinking that it means something important in this society we live in of multiple stressors. including stressors that I'm 62. I'm a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese-American.

[10:46]

So my parents, who are both deceased, were Nisei. And my mom grew up in Hawaii during the war. My dad grew up on a farm in Indiana and was drafted into the U.S. Army during the war, which was... an awkward position to say the least, although he actually liked the army a lot. And so I'm growing up still and I'm living with stressors that my parents never even thought about, never even probably imagined. So it means something today. In March 2016, here in San Francisco, in the United States, here on planet Earth, how well-rested and resilient and equanimous, I didn't even know that was a word until several years ago, how much equanimity we have, that one of the four limitless abodes in the immeasurables, the Brahma-Vaharas,

[12:01]

equanimity. It means something, how well-rested and resilient and equanimous and cheerful and nourished and being in our bodies with well-being to the extent that is possible. It means something, all of these things, to the extent that we feel them overall on a day-to-day basis. Because in this path of Buddhism, of the Buddha Dharma, of the Dharma, if we want to awaken, if we want to engage with the world, once again referring to the theme of the practice period as I've seen it on your website, I saw the brief online video that Yushin Paul Haller did.

[13:06]

I watched that last night. So if we want to awaken, if we want to engage with the world, and we've got to, really. I mean, even if a hermit's in a cave or on top of some remote mountain, they're engaging with their world. It's just... It's totally unavoidable, so we might as well do it. And I'd add, if we want to help to transform this world in alignment with our Bodhisattva vows, so those of us who've taken Bodhisattva vows, I received the precepts and the vows in, I think, 1983 in Toronto, the Zen Buddhist temple in Toronto, Canada. It was a Korean Zen temple, and that's when I received my name, Mushim, which is a Korean Buddhist name, equivalent of Mushin in Japanese.

[14:09]

So if we want to help to transform this world in alignment with our bodhisattva vows, to create situations where there is less suffering, more happiness, more peace, And for those of us so inclined, more justice, more equity, more capacity for everyone. In the Metta Sutta, it says omitting none. So omitting none, everyone to express what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called basic goodness. Basic goodness. If this is what we're envisioning, if what we might call a dharmic or dharmic society is what we're trying to embody through what the very veteran social justice activist Grace Lee Boggs

[15:16]

who died recently, I think she was over 100. She was based in Detroit, and there's a great documentary and a book, I think called American Revolutionary, out about Grace Lee Boggs. So if we're trying to contribute towards a Dharmic or Dharmic society, and trying to embody it in ourselves through what Grace Lee Boggs called a powerful... of the imagination. So as human beings, we have this amazing ability to imagine. And what I believe that Grace Lee Boggs was referring to is not imagination in the sense of kind of idle daydreaming or fantasy or just kind of letting the mind wander around necessarily, though it's good to relax the mind. but a powerful act of the imagination in terms of we know, each of us probably, what we want to protest against in activism.

[16:28]

There's often a lot of metaphorical war language. We're going to go to war. We're going to fight. We're going to fight it. We're going to conquer it. And... And maybe there's less attention, although this is changing. This is changing on not only imagining and visioning, but to the extent that we can, creating the communities in which we want to live. And it begins with that powerful act of the imagination. what we're trying to create in microcosm in our spiritual communities through what some activists are now calling prefigurative direct action. Pre-figurative direct action.

[17:30]

To my understanding, what this means is that we recognize we're limited and that we're up against very huge problems and now globalized, structural violence, racism, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, all of these forms of structural violence and oppression. So we recognize that. We recognize we don't have a magic wand. We can't just wave it and everything's better on the planet. And so what we might do as an experiment, and I do think this is pretty, something good that we can try is to think, well, could I do something on a much smaller scale, a scale where I have some leverage, a scale that I can get together with some friends and put this together to, even if it's an action that lasts maybe two hours,

[18:39]

that it will in some way embody where we want to go, where we want to go. And I think maybe it was last year or something like that, I was invited to be part of a prefigurative action with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, which many of you know, and I've been a member for many years. And we met... before dawn, and then we went out to the Gill Tract Farm in the East Bay, which is an educational piece of farmland that's now, I believe, been sold. So it was in the process of being sold by UC Berkeley to become a shopping mall, and a group of activists paying homage to Occupy went out and occupied the Gill Tract Farm. and had tents there, and I think they were having a little farmer's market some days.

[19:44]

So they normally did some meditation, and we offered to do the morning shift so they could sleep in and become well-rested and resilient. So we came in, and we put down tarps, and we did some movement meditation, walking meditation, and we did some sitting meditation. as a prefigurative action of being on the land, human beings on the land. If we are indeed trying to create now the spiritual community in which we want to live, the family in which we want to live, the workplace in which we want to work, then we need a baseline of well-being, of healing, of resilience, of rest, and the quiet happiness of deep restoration. For there to be restorative justice, so a lot of you know that term, not punitive, restorative justice.

[20:51]

So there we see again, to restore, to restore to a state of goodness. There's restorative yoga, which, in my book, is wonderful. You just go and you just lie down and you're propped up by cushions and mats and you have blankies put over you and you just go into this very deep, restful state if that's possible. Some people may become more agitated. Some people fall asleep. It's all okay. The purpose is restorative. So for there to be restorative justice and healing of... that have been injured or broken. That is, we might call it sangha, spiritual community harmony. In our communities, we ourselves need to experience restoration at so many levels. The profound spiritual levels, as well as what might be called the everyday, maybe the mundane, yet extremely important,

[22:00]

And this is something that I am proposing, suggesting, that might be a fruitful investigation within the context of contemporary United Statesian or American Zen training and Zen culture, which, along with its beautiful exactitude... and truly amazing poetry. My original training academically was in poetry, and that was my direct pipeline into Zen, which I never really was conscious of because it all worked out in this quirky way until some years ago when Robert Aitken Roshi was alive. I was visiting him in Hawaii. He was a very good friend to my family. Before he got involved in Zen, my understanding is he was a teacher in a private high school, and he taught English literature, and he taught poetry.

[23:04]

So he and I used to recite some poetry together from memory. We had that bond. And we were visiting, and Aitken Roshi said, Zen is poetry. Zen is poetry. And I thought, duh, I never made that connection before. Of course. That's what led me into it. Those of us who love Zen know it's got this incredible poetry. It's got beautiful connections to the arts. And there can also be, in monasteries and in Zen communities I've been in, a certain amount of routine sleep deprivation and crankiness. What is the relationship between of spiritual awakening and social awakening to literally feeling awake and well-rested. And dare I say it, to feeling a healthy sense of self-respect and a very good kind of pride.

[24:09]

Even, and I'm fabulous as I work for peace and justice, positive attitude. Today is March 12, 2016, and here is what I'm hearing within the spiritual activist circles that I inhabit in Oakland and at the East Bay Meditation Center for your consideration and contemplation today to create some dots that you might connect as you like or not. So here's a dot for what we believe is... The first time ever, a Buddhist teacher, Larry Yang, my family member, will be one of the grand marshals in this June's San Francisco Pride Parade. He's going to be one of the community grand marshals. He's been elected. And this year's Pride Parade is on the theme of racial and economic justice.

[25:14]

We are so happy. This is just breaking news. Larry actually called me on the phone to tell me before it was announced publicly. And I had secretly thought, because we really got out the vote, I'm the communications person for East Bay Meditation Center, and we tweeted, we Facebooked, we emailed, we Instagrammed, we got out the vote. So I was secretly not that surprised because he's an amazing activist. and very beloved and very well-known. However, I pretended to be very surprised, and I screamed loudly, like, ah! And he started laughing, so then I screamed, ah! And it was a very happy moment for us. So that's one dot. How amazing is that? And I know that San Francisco Zen Center City Center has been super cool about participating in pride. and representing us as Buddhists in pride.

[26:17]

So this year's pride is going to be full of Buddhists. It's being organized. There's a kind of meta, M-E-T-A, organizing being done through Spirit Rock. And here's another dot. So how about this? Recently in Yes magazine online, there was a wonderful interview with Angela Davis and her sister, Fania Davis, titled The Radical Work of Healing, Fania and Angela Davis on a New Kind of Civil Rights Activism. And I've just been quoting this quote from Angela Davis from that book. that particular article nonstop and all the Dharma teaching I've been doing since it came out, maybe February or something like that.

[27:21]

Angela Davis, I think our notions of what counts as radical have changed over time. Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension, all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles. That wasn't the case before. More Angela. And I think that now we're thinking deeply about the connection between interior life and what happens in the world, in the social world. Even those who are fighting against state violence often incorporate impulses that are based on state violence. in their relations with other people. This is a real point of awareness for myself and I believe for all of us.

[28:24]

Angela Davis, even those who are fighting against state violence often incorporate impulses that are based on state violence in their relations with other people. And another dot, Patrice Cullors recently dubbed one of the nation's top civil rights leaders by the Los Angeles Times, named an NAACP history maker in 2015, and one of the three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black Lives Matter movement, as I understand it, was founded by three queer-identified black women here in the U.S., And Patrice Cullors created an organization called Dignity and Power Now, DPN, to be the principal organization for a multifaceted, trauma-informed, healing-motivated movement to end state violence and mass incarceration.

[29:33]

And in a recent article, The Spirituality of Resistance, Cullors points... directly to self-care, to the need to vigorously oppose burnout and further exhaustion in already traumatized communities and says, my being alive is actually a part of the work. Even rudimentary things like eating healthy and exercising are essentially taken from us, black folks in particular. To reclaim our bodies and our health is a form of resistance, a form of resilience. In the brief video on the San Francisco Zen Center website about your online winter practice period, which again is titled Awakening and Engaging in the World, Traditional Zen and Contemporary Life,

[30:37]

Roushian Paul Haller says very beautifully, this is the request of zazen, then meditation. This is the request of zazen. Sit still and be what is. How do we do that? End of quote. Sit still and be what is. How do we do that? What is this moment in the swirling confluence of our individual, our national, our social, our global and political and historical lives? Sit still and be all of what that is. How do we do that? Who are we in the biggest selves we can be?

[31:39]

the maha bodhisattvas the world is waiting for? That's what I want to know. I think that Zen is a pushy kind of spiritual tradition that is urgent. It shines light on huge and unanswerable questions. The great matter of birth and death and says, answer. Answer this unanswerable question immediately. I've done koan practice. Was very bad at it. But I tried. I tried. Gave it 100%. You know, and this is a natural koan. Answer. Answer immediately. Because I feel this is what we need to do as human beings. And... I believe each of you is a leader. You have the capacity in the nature to be a positive leader for positive change.

[32:50]

What I believe we need to do as human beings, and for each of us is leader, of us as leaders, to answer this question. Who are we in the biggest selves we can be? The maha bodhisattvas, that this world full of suffering, full of dukkha, full of oppression and wars, hungry children, people without drinkable water. Who are we in our biggest selves at this very moment? And the next, and the next. Answer, answer. The Sufi Muslim teacher, my friend, Baba Ibrahim Farajaje, the former provost of the Star King School of the Ministry, and the person who nominated me to receive an honorary doctor of sacred theology degree from the Star King School for the Ministry, which happened last September,

[34:06]

He died. He just recently died on February 9th, 2016. He's much on my heart. And he and I were self-declared evil twins. I've never proposed this to anyone before. After I co-taught with him and two other religious leaders at East Bay Meditation Center, we had a wonderful one-day retreat on of contemplative and meditative practices from four different spiritual traditions. And that's where I met him. He'd been recommended to us as someone who was an activist right up our alley. And I went home and I contacted him on Facebook and I said, Baba Ibrahim, would you be my evil twin? And then I thought, my gosh, I don't even know this guy. And he immediately answered and said, yes, I will be your evil twin. So we really felt close.

[35:08]

He and I were very close, and I was one of thousands around the world who felt close to him, who benefited from his love and his passionate teachings of what he called organic multireligiosity and social justice. Thus I will end by quoting him. Radically subversive religious leaders are willing... to challenge paradigms, challenge structures of oppression, to encourage people to dream into reality new worlds. So you can see this is really picking up all these threads. This is what I'm seeing so much of out there in the blogosphere and just in what's happening in the activist world. Radically subversive religious leaders put their body where their discourse is And by so doing, they tap into the energy in the communities that's already moving.

[36:11]

To continue the quote, so what I mean is those who are really willing to build communities of resilience, of sustainability, that are counter-oppressive and who engage in the work of connecting the dots constantly. What are the dots we can connect today in our mutual journey towards awakening, towards engagement with the world, towards liberation, towards profound freedom? In ending, I'll again quote my friend Baba, who was a black, mixed race, bisexual, Muslim scholar and teacher, a United States man of color, who with a massive heart attack returned to the great friend, to the beloved, as the Sufis say a few weeks ago. So quoting Baba, I'll end by saying, May all who seek find.

[37:16]

May everyone who's seeking, may you find. And may all who love be made whole. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:53]

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