This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So my name is Susan. And first of all, I want to thank head of practice, Tanto Greg Fain, for inviting me to give this talk. Thank you so much. It's quite wonderful to be asked to speak and then to try to understand what you might know. I also want to acknowledge all the students who are here, who are giving their bodies and minds and hearts to this practice and to all the guests. Thank you so much. You are Zen Center. And to the guests who've come on private retreats, just to unplug and get away and sleep and walk and eat.

[01:00]

And then to the Sangha Week team that's here who I am greatly privileged to get to spend time with and I'm really enjoying that process with you all. And finally to the Women Veterans Retreat that's here. I didn't check to see who was going to be down here when I started to look at my talk and figure out what I was going to maybe say. And I am so moved by being able to be part of offering this respite, this place of healing to the women veterans. from the beginning I knew this was something that SEND Center should do and I did my best to support the beginnings. And this talk I'm going to give in a minute has a name and the name of the talk is What Happened to the War.

[02:14]

And so when I realized that the women veterans were down here I went immediately to and I said, I, I, I don't know what to do. You know, there's no way that I should even, I have the right to even use that word. And yet, and yet, the part of the talk that, for which that, from what the title comes from, is an experience I just had recently with my brother, who's a veteran of the Vietnam War. So I'm hoping that the presence of the women vets here is going to help me steer a clear and steady course towards offering something that I really want to offer, which is a chance for us to have ways of healing and

[03:17]

repairing relationships. So please help me. So we're smack dab in the middle of spring. You all saw the wildflowers coming down. They're doing their best to renew, to do what spring does, to remind us to come out of the darkness kind of inward-lookingness of winter, and to come into the light and to be supported by the sun and the rain and the beauty. So I want to talk about this renewal, this possibility for renewal, about beginning again. And I think that... To begin again, one good way is to ask the question, how do I want to live this one precious life?

[04:23]

And in asking that question, to take a look at, well, where am I in relationship to that question? Where am I? Sometimes when we look at that question, we find that really we're kind of stuck. and discouraged, maybe, and confused. We've forgotten the answer. We've gotten out of touch with how we want to live our life. So when we see that, when we see the confusion and we can't quite touch that place, I think it's helpful to look at what might be holding us back or down or away or up from touching that place. And in my life, when things are off kilter, when I am not as lined up with the life I want to live, it's usually because I have fallen off the wagon of my commitment to lead an upright life.

[05:37]

And this is often manifested in relationships that are painful or lost, full of resentment or fear, relationships that have been sundered, ripped, hurt. So how do I think about renewing this sense of off-kilter that's manifesting in my relationships? Well, you can be happy to know there are a couple of different methods for doing this that come from the teachings. And one of them is called confession, repentance, and forgiveness. And the other I'm just going to call tonight beginner's mind. So confession, repentance, and forgiveness.

[06:40]

This method takes us deeper and deeper into the wound. Last week, actually it's two weeks ago now, I had a conversation with a friend because I had made a mistake. And I had asked for time to see if I could repair that mistake. And this friend agreed. which was fantastic. It doesn't always happen that way. So I wanted to try to re-pair, which in a friendship is an interesting word, re-pair, to become a pair again, to become connected and related. So in this process where I'm suggesting confession, repentance, and forgiveness, confession comes first. It's somewhat scary to be the first person to speak in a situation with a friend where there's been hurt.

[07:50]

To begin by apologizing for my own mistakes. Because it's really tempting to revert to the defense of innocent intention. I didn't mean to hurt you, therefore you probably weren't that hurt because I didn't mean to hurt you. Instead of acknowledging that my words actually had been felt as disrespect. So to confess, to offer my apology is to be vulnerable without knowing if the apology will be accepted. or if the other person's hurt will come towards you as anger. No guarantees. So in this case, this step that I was able to take was a first step in opening my heart to myself, forgiving myself by confessing that I made a mistake, I'm human.

[09:09]

And I had the experience that the other person's heart was opening as well. This was a lucky break. It worked. It was really wholesome. It was a wholesome experience for both of us. But we can't count on that. And can we admit we're human anyway? Can we confess with no guarantees? In... Reb Anderson's book on the precepts called Being Upright he says practicing confession alone or with another reawakens the heart of compassion and the appreciation of the other's virtues so tempting to make the other person wrong and maybe they are a little wrong but that doesn't open the heart and confession does Reb also says in this book, he says, the realization of the full liberating function of formal confession must entail elements, these are hard words, of regret and remorse.

[10:26]

In our group today, in the Sangha Week group, we were working with some words from a book by David White and one person took the word regret and and ended up writing a beautiful poem about it. I told him later, it kind of melted my heart to hear this poem. So, it's a little ironic that in order to be ready for the light, the light of spring and summer to shine on us and through us, and to renew our upright stance, we need to go down into the cave of regret. We don't like to see ourselves as or be seen as less than virtuous. But making room for the pain of regret is necessary for us to be reminded of and renew how we want to live our life. This is how we know how we want to live our life when we don't live it that way.

[11:36]

So it's the spotlight. Regret is the spotlight. Rep continues to say in this book, by regret or remorse, I mean that you feel you have made a mistake, wish that you had not committed the action, and sincerely intend to refrain from doing it again. So it isn't just the pain. It isn't just that cave of pain. It's also, okay, I don't want to do it again. There's some agency there. There's some agency there. And he goes on to say, but I'm going to paraphrase this because it was longer. He says, remorse is tasting the bitterness of your non-virtue. Bitter is one of the six tastes. It's an important taste, bitter.

[12:39]

This does not mean, however, it does not mean disgust. That's too much. Because disgust is actually rejection or loathing. And remorse is, as he says, revisiting the scene of the crime and deepening one's own sense of responsibility. We are human. And the more we resist acknowledging that, acknowledging our human habits of mind, the less compassion and appreciation we can feel for ourselves or for others. We humans are driven by thoughts that we take to be real. And when we confess, we admit that we are driven by these thoughts, that we are ordinary human beings. when we feel remorse and we repent or realign we renew our vow not to harm ourselves or others.

[13:58]

So that leaves forgiveness of that little triumvirate. Confess, repent, forgive. In this book by David White that I referred to a minute ago called Consolations, he says, forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound but actually draws us closer to its source. It's not a running away. Forgive, however, does not mean to forget. Sometimes people ask that question. If I'm meant to be so forgiving, well, you know, how can I protect myself from that happening? Don't forget. Don't forget what didn't work in that situation. Your actions, the other person's actions. Be safe. Don't forget. But forgive.

[15:08]

I'm going to use David Wagner one more time. He goes on to say about forgiveness, it is that wounded, branded, unforgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt. To mature. Whoops. I'll talk loud. To mature... Let me find the quote again. And to bring to fruition an identity that can put its arms not only around the afflicted one within, but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and extend our understanding to the one who first delivered it. So... There's something that needs to happen that's getting bigger than the hurt.

[16:17]

Instead of avoiding the hurt, widening, maturing, getting bigger than the hurt. You're staring at me. I think it's batteries. You think it's batteries. That's fine. I forgive you. Yes. And I won't forget this. But we got a good laugh out of it. So there you go. Let's see. Hello. [...] Hello again. And it worked. It did. We're going to leave it after just in case. Okay. So this brings me to the to the story that the title came from.

[17:18]

My brother and I are only 11 and a half months apart. They call that Irish twins. And he was drafted into the army in the Vietnam War, for the Vietnam War. He started mentioning to me recently that he had a deep wanting to go back. And something in me said, I want to go. I want to witness this. I want to be there for him. And in retrospect, I think that when the Vietnam War happened, being a woman, I had no access to what it felt like to be in the midst of that draft situation. and not knowing what was going to happen with your life, and then being called to war. And I knew it at the time that there was a generation of men that I wouldn't have this big thing in common with.

[18:27]

I wouldn't know it. I wouldn't know it. And I didn't do anything about it at the time, but it was really clear to me that there was something big that I didn't have the experience of. So part of me wanted to go and be there for him. That was the closest I could come. And I asked him, I said, well, why do you want to go? And he very simply said, I want to make sure that people are okay. So... We put a tour together, and we went. He had never been in any city. He had only been in the jungle, so we couldn't exactly go to where he was, but we went all over and had wonderful young guides. And the whole time, my brother was engaging with them, engaging with them.

[19:28]

And what I discovered that he had done is over the past almost 50 years, he had studied... the causes and conditions of that situation. He reads a lot, he studies, and he had come to somehow a way of totally forgiving the government that sent him there. By saying This was what they knew how to do. This was a manifestation of their understanding of the world. Nobody wants to do bad things or put people in harm's way. This was what they thought was best. And he had somehow, in his heart, opened his heart enough to say that.

[20:31]

I don't know how he did it, but he did it. And in talking to the young guides, they were exchanging information and informing each other. He was telling them things about Vietnam they didn't know and about the war, and they were telling him things, and it was alive. It was present-time understanding. So some friends of mine go back to Vietnam quite a bit, and they know... They've made it a point to collect Vietnamese artists. It's their way of interacting with the people and helping in some way. And many of these artists had been in the Viet Cong. So my friends arranged for us to have lunch with the colonel. And we went over to his home, and he and his wife were both artists, and she speaks English, he didn't. But they put on this beautiful lunch for us.

[21:36]

And during the lunch, by talking to the wife, we discovered that my brother and the colonel had been in the same area at the same time. They'd been trying to kill each other, right? And I kept, you know, looking around and the colonel's eyes looked a little sad and my brother's eyes looked a little sad, but they were there. with each other and so then we went into the living room we were watching this video and I turned and to my right was the colonel and he pulled out his sketch pad and he opened it up and my brother was over here and he looked at my brother and he started looking at him the way you look at somebody that you're drawing you know and I thought he's capturing him you know in this way He's capturing him.

[22:37]

And then I had the thought, as I sat between the two of them, where did the war go? Because it wasn't there right then. Some process, some mysterious set of causes and conditions and my brother's intention and the way he studied and the way the colonel led his life allowed for the dissipation of the war in that room at that moment. Confession, repentance, forgiveness. I don't know how my brother worked with those things, but I know he cared about how the people were doing. What a privilege it was to be part of that process, to be a witness.

[23:45]

We can help by witnessing. I have another whole part of the talk where I'm going to tell you great things, but I don't know if I have enough time. Let me just mention that another way to renew a relationship that's broken is to let go of your idea that it's broken. This is beginner's mind. This is the radical practice. It's not any harder or any easier than confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Both of them are radical practices. But when we notice that we're feeding an idea of a negative situation, we're feeding it and feeding it and feeding it, you can notice

[25:00]

that if you stop feeding it and use that energy instead to just be present for some new idea to come, that negative relationship can start to transform. So, last little short story. And I could say much more about this, and please, this is not even the tip of the iceberg of how to work with having having an understanding of the delusion of these ideas, the lack of actual substance to them. So they're very, very permeable and renewable. Everything is totally renewable. That's the good news. The bad news is it's hard work. So I did not have a very close relationship with my mother. And... It was difficult for us. When I turned 40, I did a workshop on mothers, and we were encouraged to bring in a photo of our mother at our age, and so I found one of her at 40 and talked to her a little bit more about her life.

[26:17]

And something in me shifted, and I felt for the first time more empathy and compassion for what her life had been. And I decided that every day at Mother's Day, I was going to go to the card store, and I was going to find the card that said all the things about my mother that I didn't believe were true. You're a good cook. You listen. I love those cookies that you made, you know. All of the things that actually I had held to as not being true, I said... I'm going to send her that card. Every year I sent her a card like that. So she was, I was 40, she was 63. I did that until she died at 71. And by the time she died, that story had become true. It had actually become the story and I could more easily just drop my attempts to convert her into the mother that I wanted her to be and let her be the mother that she was.

[27:30]

and be with her the last two weeks of her life as she was done. And just be... And it's interesting. I think I was with her in the same way I was with my brother. I was witnessing her not trying to ditch... My brother can be kind of irritating. And three weeks with your brother, right? Only three slightly heated conversations in that time. Because my job was to not try to have him be someone other than who he was. to witness his process and to be there. And I think doing that with my mother was a result, was a condition brought about by me letting go. Letting those ideas fall away. That's another clue. We don't actually let go. They fall away. They fall away. So, Greg told me I had to be done by... 20 after? Okay, so we have, if you would like, I could take a couple of questions.

[28:35]

Maybe a couple of questions. Let's see if there are any. No one has a mother? Yes. I find that could have like for a relationship that's in disrepair you know that um that one cathartic moment of heartbreak like washes away like could easily i i i could just like conjure that up and any virtue that someone otherwise years and years and years if i remember that one sentence So there's a reason for that. I read about this. The painful, negative, dangerous memories get stored back here in the primitive brain, in the reptilian area.

[29:48]

The good memories get stored in another area that doesn't come forward as quickly. So, because I thought about this in terms of my mother and I kept thinking, what's my son going to remember about me? He's going to remember all the negative stuff first. You know, so I better keep storing up the positive now because I've got a lot of rebalancing. But if you realize that the negative stuff is just there because it comes up first, because we were hurt and we're protecting ourselves, that's the not forget thing that happens. We're protecting ourselves from further hurt. It will flush us with adrenaline or pain or something. But I think you notice that it goes away, right? But it comes first. Yes, Penelope. What did your mother think of the cards? She loved them. Did she think they were true?

[30:53]

I hope so. Yes? You said that fortunately, when you talked about the first method, that fortunately there was an opening of the heart rather than the person coming at you with anger. Can you talk about the not-so-fortunate situation where you do these things and the person will perceive that you're asking for? I had a situation. I owned my own business, and I had a falling out with my business partner. She got really angry with me, and I had to shut the whole company down because she wouldn't speak to me. And lawyers and all that stuff. And I kept reaching out to her, reaching up.

[31:54]

Nope, nope, nope. And finally... I realized that the only thing I could do, and this is what I promised her, I wrote her a note and I said, whenever you're ready, I'll be ready. That's my commitment. That I'm going to hold that space open pretty much forever. And if she comes back into it, I'll do my best to prepare and be ready. That's my job. I can't control the world, I can't make it be, you know, Disneyland. So that's, you know, that isn't an answer to what happens when you're hit with anger and how do you work with that and it's scary and, you know, your system goes into kind of alert and it's hard to remember to breathe in that situation, but that's what I would say, breathe, breathe and don't say anything. Breathe, be still, don't say anything, and let it wash over, and then maybe remove yourself from the situation until you want to try again.

[33:05]

Okay. One more question. Back there, yes. Well, so you only need to remember if it's something that you need to actually, if it's a lesson that you need to be sure that you know. Pretty much the forgiveness part, if it starts to melt your heart and the other person's heart, you don't need to remember anymore. That's kind of the high road. Yeah. That's great when that can happen. But sometimes it was actually a dangerous situation or something where you really need to know that when you say whatever, this person has a really hard time hearing that.

[34:18]

So you want to remember that because you don't want to make it unnecessarily difficult. That would be a good remembering. Thank you, loving family. This is my body. Someone said to me the other day, welcome home. It felt great. So I really, really appreciate having the opportunity to be here with you tonight, and thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[35:14]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_94.52