This is really a privilege to be here. I'm really happy to have received the invitation from Greg. Thank you so much. Okay. Probably many of you have had this experience. I've been a traveler, a Dharma traveler, and so my earliest experience really with practice and developing a relationship to practice was through Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. I stumbled across it in Tower Bookstore in New York City. And I had no idea what it said, but I got it.

[01:01]

I didn't know why or understand it. And then I sort of cobbled together my own practice and then finally went to, had the chance to go to, I was on a cross-country voter registration drive. And we, oh, it was before the cross-country voter registration drive. I went to visit someone and we, came to San Francisco and I was like, oh my god, you're home. And so I got my first Zafu that I still have, San Francisco Zen Center. And so I feel, as we often do, I feel an affinity to the lineage in a way that's hard to describe. It was just the nature of, I think, in many ways, West Coast, East Coast. I lived on the East Coast and The lineage that was there and prominent and kind of in your face was Maezumi Roshi's lineage at the time, particularly Bernie Glassman and the Zen Peacemaker Order.

[02:10]

Bernie at that time, people are familiar with Bernie Glassman? Enough. And at that time, it was sort of right in the transition when Maezumi Roshi died. I'd seen him... and he visited the Zen Mountain Monastery there, and he passed shortly afterwards, and then a little bit of time passed, and then Bernie, who was the, you know, his heir, stepped away from the White Plum lineage as the head of it. And he did this because he really wanted to focus his attention on social action. and had already been building and was continuing to build a social action venture in Yonkers, New York, and he wanted to continue that. And from where I sat, this was the only form of Zen practice that I could make sense of.

[03:21]

I would look at the practices and sort of step into them. Shambhala was also very prominent in New York. You know, different places you do this sort of dating, dating practice places, you know, don't get married. So I did a lot of little dating here and dating there. And even though I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and Bernie was way up in Yonkers, which was, you know, like another country as far as we're concerned. I would travel to this other country because of this connection to social action. And the reason is because it was the only way that I could see Zen practice reflecting my life experience. That my life experience was not separate from the notion of action and being able to serve the community. in which you lived, in which you came from, in which you found yourself just struck by the depths of suffering there.

[04:34]

And with no disrespect at all to any of the other practices or places that I saw, I couldn't see that in the places that I had been dating. And it felt for me like to not have a means of expressing in a concrete way the teachings of suffering and the response to suffering. That I would be split, always. That I would always feel this tension. And that I would be in, as I had been for a little while, I would have this competition between my practice and my life. Because my life was action. Not in the sense that I was like a raging activist.

[05:40]

It was action in the natural way that I think that we come to understand is the nature of this practice. It's an action that arises out of what you see. in front of you, not a pre-described, like, this is how it ought to be, and so this is what you should go and do. But rather, this is what's sitting right in front of me. Like someone is bleeding. Right there. They're bleeding. And you don't say, oh, well, I'm going to go to the movies. I think that's what I should do. And in that same way... For me, I couldn't say, oh, well, what I'll go do is now just go do some vows. I'll go sit on a cushion and face the wall and turn away from what I was seeing, what I was experiencing. And I didn't come from some terribly tragic conditions that just moved me to pieces. It was just ordinary things.

[06:43]

Just ordinary things. It was ordinary for the time. Particularly at that time, many young men of color were expressing a particular off-trackness. It was clear that society had failed them and that their response to that failure was to armor. and to push away and to form the kind of bodies and relationships that could protect them, that they could feel like they were home, in the same way that we come to Sanghas, because we recognize that we're suddenly something a little bit different about us, that we're after something, we're after some kind of a connection, and it isn't being met by the larger society. And whether you come slow and sort of tentative, checking it out, going, I don't know if I'm going to be a part of this strange crowd.

[07:54]

Or if some of us are like lightning and just saw it and knew that that was our love and we jump right into practice. We come and we form these communities around us, these relationships of... continuity and reflection of the life that we have and what we're feeling inside of us. And so the young people were doing that at the time, but what they were feeling inside of them was anguish and not being met, restrictions, messages, social messages that communicated that they were less than, that they were somehow, you know, had two paths, either Michael Jordan or a grave. So either they were going to be an athletic superstar or something like that, Oprah or Bill Cosby, something far out where they were headed towards the grave.

[09:08]

And all of what we had developed at the time and have continued to develop pushed that in front of them. prisons were being built closer and closer to the neighborhoods and homes of people of color that were already poor and already being just compressed by society at every turn. So my sense was that there was no way that I could carry on with a practice and sort of going and doing these interesting vows and learning this cool Japanese language and stuff like that because I would leave and I would go back home.

[10:15]

You know, I was on the trains, and I was on the streets, and I was where we are in life, where everything is right there in front of us. So the Zen Peace Maker Order is where I ended up being. And I was never particularly tentative once I got there. It was sort of like, okay, this is the relationship I'm having. And so I was really full in. But it wasn't an easy path. It was not the most welcoming home coming. I knew both that the Zen practice was my home, but that the house that was built to contain it was not welcoming. And that's not to say that anybody ever said, oh, you shouldn't be here in some kind of crude way.

[11:21]

Does anybody know the difference between being invited and being welcomed? Because we have the experience of like, oh, you've been invited, but you don't feel welcome. So this was my experience for, let's go to say, most of all of my life. life in practice. I think as we all do, you go through different phases in your practice and so one of them is anger. If you have any kind of feeling sense to you at all, anything that you've been keeping down or or suppressed or off to the side, you can use Zazen, you can use the form to suppress it for a little while, but eventually just, you know, bubbling back up and shoots out.

[12:28]

You know, we all look good with our elbows poked out to the side and our elbows sweeping behind us. But the emotions, the things that have... yet been intended to eventually surface, that's the nature of the practice. It's what's so powerful about it, and it's also one of the most challenging places. It's sort of like where the rubber meets the road, where we decide whether we're going to have a practice that's about the form and what it looks like if we're going to simply maintain a an image of Zen, whatever that means when we get it in our head, or if we're gonna let this practice land deeply right in the core of our being and wake us up to ourselves. There's a choice that we all have to make at some point.

[13:29]

We really have to make it. Whatever our demons are, whatever our challenges are, whatever the thing is, that's inhibiting us because we all have something. If we're lucky, it's one. Or two. Three. That's keeping us from being awake to ourselves. That's keeping us from being honest about what our experience is, about what our suffering is, about the places in which we are just wallowing in pain, but we can't quite acknowledge it, we can't even quite handle it, so we wall it off, just like those young boys. The practice gives us an opportunity to make that decision somewhere, and invariably, many times, right?

[14:34]

What's great about it is you can kind of make the You can go down one road and go, oh yeah, this is still not working for me. I'm still going to posture though. And then, you know, it comes up and it meets you again. The it is, of course, you. And then you can decide, no, no, I'm not ready to see me. I'm just going down this other road and I'm just going to wear my rakasu and hold my form. learn all the things that I'm supposed to do. But I'm not going to meet this me. But I trust. I trust implicitly and deeply that eventually it runs out. That running away, that hiding, that

[15:35]

avoiding whatever it is that we're moving around and away from and over. We'll have to come face to face with it. And we'll make the decision that it's time. So I want you to imagine that is its own thread. We're all experiencing that that unfolding path in front of us. But on top of it, you're kind of negotiating always a sense of whether you are really allowed here or not. All right, so on the one level, just the journey of our own spiritual practice, of our own deepening, of our own discovery is, let's just say, unsettling enough. It can be quite the affair, the tumultuous affair of ups and downs and in and out and questions.

[16:45]

Who am I? What is this? What am I doing? Is this the right thing? It's the most vulnerable possible place one could imagine, unlike... pretty much any other place in any other thing, any other notion in your life. Your spirituality underpins everything. Your love, your work, relationships with everyone. Your lovers, your fathers, your mothers, your children, your boss, the way you relate to money, the way you relate to your sense of worth. Everything is underpinned by spirituality. There's nothing that touches every facet of our lives in the same way. So to say that it is important that we be held in a space of support, in a space of recognition of the tenderness of that journey is an understatement.

[18:03]

And so we have a challenge when we come to places, communities, Sanghas that are still struggling or maybe not even aware of how to do that. Maybe not even aware of the ways in which we are creating systems and structures of unwelcoming in the same way that society has done that for young men of color. And it's important for us to think about that, to consider how we do that. Because I think that I have my own brand of action in the world and what's important to me and each of you will have yours. But what we share is this right here. What we share is this relationship.

[19:08]

We're in an odd family where we're at once completely connected, but we know nothing about each other. We're like these weird, you know, third cousins. And you don't like my mother and you don't look like my father and I'm not even really sure that it's true that we're related at all but yet we're all at this reunion together and I've been told that every single one of you are part of my family and you know how that is you want to believe that you want to trust that that is true And that all of the, well, let's say the good associations that you have with the idea of family, you want those to be there.

[20:10]

And even those of us that are pretty pessimistic. So I think it's the nature of our human spirit to keep hoping that something in us says, maybe this time I will be welcome. Not just invited, but welcome. So we have this work to do. And we have this work to do because for every one of us, and I like to name the elephant in the room, like I'm a rare beast in the Zen world. There's not many. I'm actually mixed race, but black African-American is good enough for me. There's not many practitioners, much less teachers. I think there are three.

[21:13]

Forty, fifty, how old is it? Fifty years? Fifty years. Fifty years. Yeah. Not for trying. Not for not trying. So I'm an extreme case. I'm black, female, and queer. Hit a couple of markers of some of the ways in which our community, our sangas, and I I don't think of you all as you, I think of you as us, has work to do in terms of coming to understand what our practice is really about so that this veneer of unwelcoming that sometimes plagues our communities can be lifted off

[22:27]

For many years I used to think these thoughts and I had the idea, the actually rather unfortunate idea that, and I even wrote a book about it, so it's terrible when you have an unfortunate idea and then you actually put it in stone by like getting it published. I had the unfortunate idea that the reason that we should have more welcoming sanghas and more diverse saundas and more inclusive saundas is because it would be useful for the people that were trying to practice. That's not at all true. It is true. But more importantly is that it's useful for the people that are practicing. It's useful for the people that are here that are practicing. Because every single one of us here has some aspect of ourselves that we don't feel. be accepted. That we don't feel is really okay to let everyone else see.

[23:49]

Every single one of us has something and it doesn't matter that we fit some model of dominant paradigm that we're white, male, heterosexual, maybe tall, maybe, I don't know, Adonis-looking, strong, able-bodied, and then the rungs kind of go down after that, you still have something, you still have some part of you that wonders, is this part of me okay here? Is this thing I did in my life going to be accepted? Will I be still welcome in this family as who I am? And I feel so sure, more than ever before, of two things.

[24:59]

That by working on and being incisive about expanding and widening the circle of this sangha for everyone, it will create the welcoming for that part of you, that aspect of you, those things about yourself that are still held back. that are still uncovered, you will come to feel that they're welcome. You will know that you are welcome. Oh, I said two things, it's really three. The second thing is that we don't have to go terribly far.

[26:06]

It's the response, the ability to develop that is actually right here in the practice itself. The ability to come to real clarity about the ways in which we ourselves in our own body, in our own being, are not yet welcoming, are not yet embracing, are not yet open, open, open. Exist right. Is that, do you know? Is that enough? Oh, there. Founder. Yeah. Formally speaking. I know that because that's where I found myself. That's where I found the parts that I had discarded. That's where I found the parts that I felt like would not be accepted. That's where I found the parts that I had turned away from.

[27:09]

So I feel very clear that maybe not entirely uniquely, but certainly profoundly that the practice of zazen, that the practice that we hold here, that if we embody that practice, that we allow ourselves to truly drop into it, that if we allow ourselves to see ourselves, then we are then able to see others. And that for as long as we are not seeing others and truly seeing them for who they are, it means that we're not seeing ourselves. It has nothing to do with others, you know, this idea of not being welcoming. It has to do with ourselves. It has to do with the ways in which we're not welcoming ourselves.

[28:19]

And the third thing is that, therefore, Without that practice, without that practice of looking deeply into the way in which we are not seeing ourselves, beholding ourselves, loving ourselves, as is reflected by our not seeing others, beholding others, welcoming others, we are not actually attending to others. thing I like to call speech to bring. I, in my own life, have these experiences of aversion and resistance to people.

[29:21]

And I realized, oh, that's aversion and resistance to this one right here. And so I would feel chagrined. Terrible. What kind of a practitioner are you? What kind of a practitioner of the vast and unparalleled Dharma teachings of the Buddha are you? And then there would be sweetness. Because there was my work. right in front of me. I didn't have to go look for it. And they would exist together. So that we're not holding a sense of shame or guilt or, oh my God, we're terrible. But rather, look, there's the next step.

[30:21]

There's the next stone to take me across the river. and maybe all find ourselves. It's 4 o'clock. Yeah. I told you it's 4 o'clock. Yeah, well, you know, we can stop. Thank you, Celestia. Answers actually would be really well. I've got a few questions.

[31:28]

Please say your name. Sure. Once upon a time, I spent a lot of time with particularly young people in prisons that were young people incarcerated. I was a the earliest form of my idea of, like, this is social action, this is dealing with injustice. Most of my work in dealing with injustice is talking to sanghas these days.

[32:32]

Because I, after many years of turning away from the Buddhist community as a relationship. I did my practice. I led my community. I dabbled here and there. When I had to go to things, I went sheepishly and immersed myself in the world of the movements of social justice in America, particularly supporting them in coming into practice. for themselves so that their own work was more grounded and effective. And then I realized that I was inviting one part of my family to go and join with another part of my family that wasn't quite welcoming and that that was a mistake.

[33:36]

Because I have no interest in having that. I led a residential community. I'm really clear. I don't want to need one anymore. I need the house to do anything. And so given that I have no interest in nation building, but I... deeply believe in the power and the efficacy of this practice for what ails this world right now. Maybe not some other type, but for what ails this world, this society right now. Ail is an illness, something that is the source of illness. And that I'd better come back and develop my relationship with this part of my family.

[34:47]

So that the eventual surge, and there will be a surge, of people that are from very different backgrounds than we have historically seen in Zen communities, people that are different religions, historically, people that are different socioeconomic backgrounds, people that are different, entirely different cultures. I don't mean just for me. I mean just for you. I mean for me. I'm flummoxed by the amount of diversity there is and the interest there is in this practice. So we have to make sure that there's not just an invitation but a welcome moment. Two questions. What helped you to see what it was about yourself? The unwelcome-ness.

[35:48]

What helped you to see what was in you that was creating that feeling of unwelcome-ness? How was the song of it? wanting to be more welcoming and acknowledging that it is coming from each of the practitioners, but how, what venue would you recommend Sanda to kind of look on itself and see what it's being that is an invitation not welcome, I guess. You know, I think, I think for me the, it's not very complicated. The way that I saw my own sense of unwelcoming in me it was the way in which i was unwelcoming or not open to others was the way in which i was not open or not welcoming to others my aversion to others was the indication of my own unwelcoming to myself it was as simple as that i couldn't if we really believe and eventually feel into the direct experience

[36:57]

of no separation, there can't be any other reason. There can't be any other answer. So if I'm experiencing aversion to nothing other than myself, then it has to be myself. If there is nothing other than just this, then how could anything that's out there, any kind of aversion, be anything other than a reflection of what I was experiencing for myself, but I couldn't work with that. That's actually how we do things, right? It's like I couldn't acknowledge that. I'm not going to walk around saying, oh, I don't like me. And so I just didn't like you instead. It's much easier. For convenience. It's certainly less painful. You didn't ask this, but I'll add on that the response to that, the way that I uncovered the things specifically in myself was through Sazen.

[38:11]

Excuse me. So you found the compassion for yourself in Sazen. You found the clarity to recognize that this was in your way, this outside compassion. image of somebody trying to hurt you or repel you or whatever. You felt that compassion and thought that. Yes, I didn't think it necessarily was people trying to hurt me or something. I just didn't like them. They were different. They didn't even have to be doing anything in particular. They were just different. We categorize and we separate. So it was just separation. It's just, it wasn't like, oh, somebody's doing me harm and so I dislike them. That's kind of a reasonable, I'll take it. But rather just ordinary aversion, ordinary aversion. Just, I don't know you and you've not done anything to me, but you look different and I'm already conjuring up ideas of, rather not.

[39:16]

So that kind of thing, yeah. But I think zazen alone without a view can't necessarily uncover that. So if you don't have the view of understanding, like, oh, I'm experiencing aversion, and use that view on your cushion... have a sense of, like, oh, this is what I'm working with, then it's more amorphous. You can kind of get lost, I think. This is just my view. You can kind of get lost in, you know, just practice for practice sake, which is true, yes, and that's something you get to. It's like there's practice that's just for practice sake, and then there's, like, the aspects of practice that are applied, I would say.

[40:19]

where you're actually engaging your practice as a tool. It's actually part of how you are able to open up the arenas and the areas of your life that are as yet unaddressed, including compassion. Sorry, there was a second part of your question. I remember it. Okay. Yeah. I think that the challenge is the unwillingness to, you know, it would be sort of like us dealing with slavery as individuals in this country. If we've just been like, everybody should just change their mind and be better about their slaves, then it'll all be better. We had to make a collective action. It had to be a big, sweeping, agreed upon, and not everybody agreed, clearly, but it had to be an undertaking. It was even symbolic. 14th is when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and it didn't set everyone free right away.

[41:22]

It was just symbolic. Nobody ran off and said, oh, I'm free. But it set something forward, and sanghas can do that, where they make a statement, and they set something forward, and it's hard to go back on it once you've uttered it. Once you've said it, you emit an energy, you put a sense of motivation behind it, that even if you don't do it well, That's not the thing. Whether you do it well, it's that you do it. Thank you for your question. Could you say your name, please? I'm Joe. Earlier you said when you discovered Zen and practiced that You described transition or the realization that came to the transition from that first description that didn't feel real possible to

[42:42]

Oh, I still love the elbows poking out. I can't deny that. I still love the gazing at the wall. All of that. But it's like you say in the Oxford entails, you know, the way in which you sort of go up and you have to get a view. And it seems like everything is the same when you come back again, but it's different. And so on this side of it, I feel like, oh yeah, I love everything about the practice, all the fussiness and the robes and all of that. But I had the opportunity to go through the experience of what actually M. Scott Peck has a book called The Different Drum, and he calls it a stage of our spiritual practice, The Great Doubt. where you just have doubt about your practice.

[43:46]

And I just thought everything was like wrong and I had to wrestle with it. And I don't think we've really done it until we've wrestled with it. I don't think we've really done this practice until we've wrestled with it and questioned it. And said, well, I don't know if this is really worth it. What am I doing here? And so I went through that doubt about the... the validity of this practice as getting me to anywhere at all. And I had to really live with that, live with that period of time. Because what was really happening was the breaking down of the idea of the practice so that I could actually enter into the practice itself. You can totally ask unprofound questions.

[45:11]

What's going on there with that ruckusoo? I told Greg that this is my bling ruckusoo. This ruckusoo was made for me by my community, and it represents... the four colors of the four people. A common idea in First Nations and indigenous people, Native Americans, is that there are four people, four colors of people on the earth, and they're black, white, red, and yellow, and that they represent north, east, south, and west. And so our community has held with this notion of the four colors as an expression of the welcoming of everyone. And so, oh, some ceremony or another, it was sewn for me. And a dragon.

[46:18]

And I'm apparently not easy and so, as a teacher, so... The dragon as a symbol has been associated with the way that I am. So it has dragons. So they're dragons. Kanshin would not disagree with that a thousand percent. Do you think I'm easy, yeah? I have a question. What's your name? Oh, sorry, I'm Steph. Steph. I have a question going back to being welcoming. You can follow up on Shannon's question. So I understand two ways that we can be more welcoming. I'm not sure there's many. But one being turning towards ourselves and learning to welcome those parts that we don't. And then the other, making a move as a sangha, a statement, an effort towards being

[47:25]

more welcome. My concern is that often in these communities, people are doing the work of trying to welcome the self, hurt themselves, and welcome the other. However, we don't know the ways in which we're not welcome. How do we become more aware of what we're not aware of. Like, how do we, how do we, um, how do we become more aware of, uh, the ways in which there are not being a volcano in order to address it more? I'm going to say something that's completely, turn off the recorder. Zen doesn't make you know everything. So, very unorthodox.

[48:29]

We do not become all-knowing because of our practice. Thankfully, there are things like critical analysis in education. There's enormous bodies of work for undoing racism, for becoming... an anti-racist organization and anti-now-everything-else organization. I do my own work all the time. I'm working on transgender issues and I'm trying to understand, like, what are the ways in which I'm not welcoming? What are the ways... You know, my community has in the past not been... Well, let me give you a perfect example. There is a... One of the great pleasures that I have is I get invited and welcomed to teach at sanghas that are of different, not only lineages, but different schools.

[49:32]

And so Vipassana, insight meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh's mindfulness community, which I really enjoy. And I was invited to co-lead a retreat. And there was, I've had this like sticky issue because one of the things that transgender folks sometimes wish for is to be called a different pronoun. Is everybody aware of that? And so one of the pronouns is they. And I am a stickler for the English language. And so I would just practically scream that I'm not... going to call anybody a plural unless they had multiple personality disorder. I simply refuse. I'm outing myself here. I simply refuse. I was just like, no, no. I'll call them anything they want, but I'm not going to call them they if they're not multiple people. It just seems wrong to me. I was at this retreat and

[50:38]

By my own doing, we had sort of stirred up the emotional energy at the retreat. And there was a person that is transgender there at the retreat. And the person, you were allowed to go into this circle and pick up an object and say kind of anything you want that sort of connected with the energy of that object. And the object was a stick. And the stick represented anger. The person shouted. It's a person that I like very much. I led another retreat that they were part of, and I liked them very much. And it wasn't directed at me. It was something that was actually part of the larger group. And I just got to escape because I was sitting in the teaching role and they didn't know that I held this little sniggling idea that I wasn't going to do that. And they shouted, just use the fucking pronoun. Just use they. I don't need an English lesson. That's my choice.

[51:41]

It was just done. I was like, that's right. That's right. My skin is still on my nose. I don't have to make this decision for the person. And whatever was held was something that I was holding on to. It had nothing to do with it. And so we have to do our work. We have to find the ways in which... And it's out there. We have Google. That knows everything. There is plenty of work. I would recommend not diversity training. Anti-racist organizing, which now includes things around gender and sexual orientation. There's plenty of things out there. The ways in which we are currently in this society and we don't know, it's willful ignorance of this one.

[52:47]

Do you have any specific recommendations? Yes, the People's Institute for... It's got a long name. They're in New Orleans. The People's Institute, that's it. They're... Brooklyn Zen Center, is anyone familiar with Brooklyn Zen Center? Anyone familiar with Brooklyn Zen Center? Brooklyn Zen Center will be in January or February, inviting the People's Institute to come and lead. It's a three-day training. They call it an anti-racist training. And that's where we've got to be. It's not inexpensive. Why should it be? They do a lot of work. They put a lot into it. But sanghas can come together. They can band together as groups. If they're small, they can get with other people. You can form 40 people pretty quickly. That resource and the resources that they offer.

[53:52]

And I'll take the extra time because I think this is so important to say this. I recommend them because it is the only training that I have sat through myself that I feel like was not... I'm clear that I can say this, particularly to white folks, that it's not shame and blame. That you're not going to come out feeling like, oh my God, now I should just go and flip my wrist and get in a hole or something. I'm really bad, which just turns people and shuts them down. It's not a shutdown training. It's incredibly illuminating. It ranges around economic disparity, the histories and origins of our country and how we got here. And really deeply encouraged. It's not a magic bullet like nothing is, but it's very, very powerful. And it's very inclusive. When I say inclusive, that's not code word for the other people. Inclusive is us all.

[54:54]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[55:17]

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