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. And welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Tova Green. I'm a resident here and also an I became the director of City Center. So I want to welcome all of you, especially those who are here for the first time. Anyone, could you, do you mind raising your hand if it's your first time here today? Special welcome to you, but also welcome everyone who's been here many times and you keep coming back. So I also want to say happy Pride weekend.

[01:00]

And I think this applies to all of us. And my talk today, I'll try to make clear some of the reasons why I'm saying that. But I want to first invite you to take a moment to reflect on what brought you here to Zen Center this morning. Perhaps if it is your first time... You're curious about Zen practice, or a friend invited you to come, or perhaps you're looking for a place where you can learn more about yourself. If you come every week, are you interested in the teachings, in feeling part of a community of people who meditate, or in receiving some inspiration that might help you throughout the week? Whatever the reason that brought you here or brings you here, I hope that you're able to take away something that will be of use to you.

[02:02]

And I want to say that for myself, it's both an honor and a privilege to be sitting in the seat this morning. And I want to thank Jordan Thorne, our head of practice, for inviting me to speak, and also my teacher, Linda Cutts, without who's... well, whose guidance has been extremely helpful and supportive and inspiring over many years. And I also this morning would like to dedicate my talk to two people who are no longer with us in physical form. One is my former partner, Fran Peavy, who died in October, and the other is one of my teachers and mentors, Maylee Scott, who died 10 years ago in May. Also just want to mention that this morning one of our beloved teachers, Victoria Austin, learned that her mother died just this morning.

[03:07]

So for those of you who know Vicki, you might want to send her a card or acknowledge that loss in some other way. So getting back to Pride weekend. Last night I visited my synagogue, which is not very far from here, Congregation Jarzahav, which was founded over 30 years ago by gay and lesbian Jews. And the service leader at the very beginning announced that he had heard that New York State had, the Senate had just voted to legalized gay marriage in New York State. There was a lot of cheering and celebration in the congregation. And I think those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender and are friends and allies celebrate such victories because we've had experience personally in our communities of being marginalized, of being told by

[04:17]

our families, our schools, places of worship or employment, that there's something wrong with us. And this morning, my Dharma brother, Bernd Bender, reminded the residents at a residence meeting that we're indeed extremely fortunate to be living in San Francisco and that in some parts of our country, but certainly in many countries around the world to be openly gay is to risk your life or certainly to risk attack. And not that that doesn't happen in San Francisco, but not to the degree that it happens in many other places. And he also mentioned that teenagers who are gay, I think it happens more for for young men than women, but probably for women too, are ten times more likely than other teenagers to commit suicide. So I think there's still a lot of homophobia in our society, and I think that has an impact on the inner lives of all of us, not only those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

[05:36]

So you might wonder why we celebrate Pride at Zen Center. Why do we hang that big rainbow flag outside our door this weekend? And why are we marching? We are marching in the parade tomorrow. I think it's the fourth year in a row that we'll be marching down Market Street with all the other contingents. And what does this have to do with Zen practice. So I would like to focus this morning on that connection, how Zen practice is relevant to moving towards a place of self-acceptance, not only for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, but for all of us. And what we can learn through practice about love and loving ourselves as well as others.

[06:44]

So I'll share a little bit of my own story and talk about meditation and how meditation and Zen practice have supported my ability to trust in myself, how some of the teachings have been very beneficial to me, and hopefully how this has also enabled me to be more available for other people. So I'd like just to share a poem. It's called Love After Love by Derek Wolcott. When I reread this poem, it just jumped out at me as one that was appropriate for this theme. Love After Love.

[07:48]

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. So, you know, I think everyone has had some experience in life that has been really difficult, challenging, some messages that lead to self-doubt or self-hatred, whether they come from family members, from schoolmates, from teachers, often inadvertent, sometimes not so inadvertent.

[09:03]

But we all have those. places in ourselves where we may feel some self, some of those get internalized. So some self-criticism, sometimes it comes in that form. So I thought I would start by talking about an experience that I had. This was much Earlier in my life, and some of you have probably heard this before, but it's an experience I had that came from the mental health establishment that was painful at the time, but I think over the course of my life has been something I've really looked at quite a bit. I think it's one of the reasons why I now feel that it's important for me to be open about who I am, especially in the role of director.

[10:16]

To be openly a lesbian feels like in some way we've come a long way. I don't know that I'm the first one in this position, but it does feel like something to celebrate. when I was in college, my last year of college, which was 1963, I took part in a voter registration project in Greensboro, North Carolina. And on that project, I met a woman around my age from Ohio, and something happened during the three weeks we were there, and we fell in love. And at the end of the She went back to Ohio, and I was a student at UC Berkeley at the time, so I came back to California to finish my last year of school. And then we met at the end of the year and spent the summer studying French in Monterey, the Monterey Language School.

[11:24]

And then I moved to Boston and started working as a research assistant in an outpatient clinic in a mental health... It was a teaching hospital that was part of Harvard. And my friend Nora moved to Boston, and we were living together. And as part of my research, I was looking through the book of psychiatric diagnoses and found one that said... character disorder, homosexual. And this was extremely upsetting to me. I didn't feel there was anything wrong with my loving Nora. But at the time, this was 1964, I really didn't know anyone else who was lesbian or gay or anyone I could talk to about it. So when Nora had to go back to Ohio to...

[12:26]

where she was studying, I ended the relationship and felt very depressed for a while. But I didn't really know, I didn't trust myself at the time to just go with my basic feeling about that relationship. which was that it was loving and caring, and there was nothing wrong with it. But later, I went to social work school, and when I graduated, I had a male therapist who said to me that I would be cured when I was in a stable relationship with a man. So I got a very strong message that loving women, there was definitely something wrong with me. And it wasn't until the early 70s when I was an intern studying gestalt therapy in a center near Boston where I asked for a session with one of the therapists on the staff.

[13:37]

And as I was expressing my feelings of attraction to a woman that I knew, she said, oh, I've had feelings like that myself. And that was very... healing for me, just to hear someone I respected say that. But the times had also changed by the early 70s. And that was the time in Boston and here in San Francisco as well. They were the beginnings of the gay pride movement. And at that time, it was called gay. And now we've expanded it to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and questioning. So lots of letters now. But the basic feeling is the same. And so things started shifting for me at that point. And that was also at the time when I began to explore Buddhist meditation.

[14:40]

At the center where I was an intern, there was someone on the staff, Jack Cornfield, who had recently come back from Asia and was just beginning to get together with the people who started the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie. And so he took the group of interns that I was part of one morning to introduce us to sitting meditation, which was followed by walking meditation to the local ice cream store and then eating meditation. So it was all very delightful. And that experience with Jack had an impact on me. And later on, I started going to retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie, 10-day retreats mostly because I was working and trying to sit in between.

[15:42]

And I met some really wonderful teachers there, including Thich Nhat Hanh. And then, so that was the beginning of learning that... I want to mention another teacher I met at the Insight Meditation Society is Sharon Salzberg. And I'm mentioning her because she's written two books that I've found very helpful. One is called Loving Kindness, and it's about... one of the four abodes of the Buddha, or Brahma Bihara, as they're called, Loving Kindness Metta. And we're going to do, I'd like to share with you later, a metta meditation that was written by May Lee Scott. But Sharon also wrote a book about faith, which I recently reread, the suggestion of one of my friends. And in that book, she talks about faith as not blind faith or faith...

[16:49]

in someone or something outside yourself but faith in your own ability to see the truth to investigate the truth and to find out what really works in your own life what teachings or teachers are relevant but what teachings resonate with your own experience which is what the Buddha taught and I think that's the connection for me between meditation and practice and exploring what arises as we sit with developing an ability to speak to ourselves, to those hurt places in ourselves with kindness and compassion and also with an understanding that everything changes, including ourselves.

[17:54]

I mean, impermanence is one of the basic teachings of the Buddha. And as we sit, as we see the stream of experience, awareness of a physical sensation, awareness of coming back to the breath, and then a thought arising, sometimes a strong emotion. But it all comes and goes if we pay attention to what's arising moment by moment. And so I think that's... that can also help us to understand that we too are, you know, we are constantly changing and our views of ourselves can also change. And then our views of ourselves can really soften, especially concerning some of the messages that we've internalized. Like, there's something wrong with me because... I love women.

[18:56]

That message doesn't have much power anymore. And it's not just because of sitting. It's also because things in our society have changed. And I've had many, many positive experiences. But seeing that any fixed view we have about ourselves is there's no substance to it. I hope I'm making myself clear that we and everything are changing all the time. And sometimes we like the changes that happen, sometimes we don't. But I think also with sitting we learn to have some equanimity in the face of things that whether they're pleasant or unpleasant. And I think that's another piece of being able to really love and care for oneself.

[20:14]

So... Getting back to Sharon's teaching about faith, she says faith comes from the Pali word sadha, which literally means to place the heart upon something, to offer one's heart. And it's a verb rather than a noun. So faith is an action. And in her book on faith, she says, the Buddha said, faith is the beginning. of all good things. And no matter what we encounter in life, and these are Sharon's words, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, and to love again. It is often faith that brings us to practice. It might be a glimmer that things could be better in our lives, or a sense that there's a way to relieve our suffering. And that glimmer of faith can

[21:19]

grow and develop as you sit. And it really is faith in the teachings, but also faith in learning to become our own teacher, in a way. So I had a surprise recently. I went to a one-day women's retreat at Green Gulch It was led by Chris Fortin and Lane Olson. And the theme of it was coming back to Earth. And that theme came from the image of the Buddha during the long night that the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and was visited by many troubling spirits. Sometimes they're called Mara. Temptations and doubts and fear arose. But the Buddha sat steadfastly through all of that and then at some point he put his hand down to the earth and touched the earth and woke up in a way.

[22:32]

He had an insight into the cause of suffering and the way to relieve suffering. So that image of touching the earth was the image that guided the women's retreat that I went to and During the retreat, we had a silent walk to the garden in Green Gulch. If you've been there, it's a very beautiful garden. Part of it is well-cultivated, and there's a central area called the Herb Circle that has a beautiful tree in the middle, which was flowering that day, and then hedges around it and four arbors with roses twining on them. And the gardens at Green Gulch right now are in full bloom and extremely beautiful. So we did a silent walk to the garden, and later I went back there at lunchtime, and I was looking at the tree in the middle, and the question arose in me, will you be my life partner? And it surprised me.

[23:36]

I knew there were many weddings that happened in that garden, but I realized I was asking that of myself. Would I be my life partner and would I be able to hang in there through everything that occurs in my life? Sickness and health, old age, which is not far away, good times and bad times, whatever. Could I really be there for myself as my life partner? And a feeling that, yes, I can do that. Yes, I want to do that. And that as I am able to really meet myself fully, I'm also much more available to meet others fully and to be open to other people's needs.

[24:38]

ups and downs and difficulties and accomplishments. And we have something in our residence meeting we call celebrations and mornings. It's a wonderful opportunity for people to talk about things that have happened in the last month that they want to celebrate or they want to mourn. And we can share both the celebrations and the mornings. So... I feel that is one of the, again, one of the fruits of practice is being able to be there for ourselves and others with openness to both the celebrations and the mornings. So maybe this would be a good time to chant May Lee Scott's metta prayer.

[25:40]

I like this very much because we do chant a version of the Metta Sutta, the loving-kindness meditation here at Zen Center. But Melis is a little different, and part of it includes a little bit of Zazen instruction, and it extends from sending loving-kindness toward ourselves to sending it out to the whole world. So if you've got a copy, perhaps you could share it with your neighbors. I don't think they were enough for everybody. So let's say this together. Metta prayer. May I be well, loving, and peaceful. May I be at ease in my body, feeling the ground beneath my seat and feet letting my back be long and straight, enjoying breath as it rises and falls and rises.

[26:47]

May I know and be intimate with body, mind, whatever is feeling or mood, calm or agitated, tired or energetic, irritated or friendly, breathing in or out, in and out, aware, moment by moment. of the risings and passings may i be attentive and gentle towards my own discomfort and suffering may i be attentive and grateful for my own joy and well-being may i move towards others freely and with openness may i receive others with sympathy and understanding May I move towards the suffering of others with peaceful and attentive confidence. May I recall the bodhisattva of compassion, her one thousand hands, her instant readiness for action, each hand with an eye in it, the instinct of knowing what to do.

[27:57]

May I continually cultivate the ground of peace for myself and others, persist, mindful and dedicated to this work, independent of results. May I know that my peace and the world's peace are not separate, that our peace in the world is a result of our work for justice. May all beings be well, happy and peaceful. Thank you. for sharing that. I'd like to say a few words about May Lee Scott because my guess is many of you don't know who she was. She started out as a social worker in the East Bay and became interested in meditation as she was raising her three children. She was married to a university professor at UC Berkeley and eventually they separated. And May Lee got interested in meditation and started sitting at the Berkeley Zen Center and later ordained as a priest with Sojin Mel Weitzman.

[29:05]

And I met her when I was on the board of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and May Lee joined the board. And she had a saying which was, devotedly do. So she, every morning, would read the Chronicle and the New York Times and make at least two phone calls or write two letters after reading the newspaper every day because she would see things that she had thoughts or feelings about and wanted to contribute to changing some of the things that she thought or at least commenting on some of the things that she thought were unjust or comment on things that people had done that she thought were useful for the benefit of all beings. And she received Dharma Transmission, which is full authorization to teach, and then moved to Arcata to lead the Sangha there.

[30:08]

But during the time she lived in the Bay Area, one of the gifts I received from Mei Li was to learn from her how to work in the women's jail in San Francisco. I went there with her for over a year, every week, and with another person who was a teacher here, Mary Mosin. And we taught meditation and yoga to women in the jail. And this is a practice that has continued to this day. Joan is doing that currently. And many students who have been at Zen Center go to San Quentin. as well. So anyway, that was a great gift I received from May Lee. So just to tell you a little bit about who she was. So getting close to the end of my talk, so I just wanted to say a couple more things.

[31:11]

This week I had tea with a group of new students here. And one of them asked, why do we bow so much at Zen Center? And why do we bow to the Buddha? Why do we bow to our cushions? Why do we bow to each other? And I think that for me, the bowing is a sign of respect and appreciation for the people I practice with, for the people objects that enable us to practice, like the cushions in the zendo, but also for the teachings. And in bowing to the Buddha, my feeling is I'm bowing not only to the Buddha who was an awakened one, but to that aspiration in myself to wake up. So it's when I bow to

[32:14]

my teacher, Blanche, or to one of my friends in the Sangha, I'm bowing to that quality in them as well. And really, someone else in the group who was not a new student mentioned that for him, bowing is about gratitude. And I think that's also, so gratitude for one another, gratitude for the cushions, gratitude for the Buddha and the Buddha's teaching that... encourages us to practice. So I'm going to reread the poem I started with, Love After Love, and then I have a few comments about what's happening tomorrow and one other thing before we stop. So Love After Love, and this is partly because my teacher, Linda, says that every good poem needs to be read twice, at least twice, but twice. The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat.

[33:26]

You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. So tomorrow we will be marching in the Pride Parade. We'll be led by Anne Marie, one of our staff, who will be wearing a very large papier-mâché head of the Buddha and long robes. And her friend and partner will be her attendant. We'll have students from Green Gulch coming this afternoon. They'll be spending the night and marching with a banner that they made that says, we're here, we're queer, we're Buddha.

[34:33]

And we'll have... dancers and flower scatterers and a truck. Our senior Dharma teacher will be with us, Blanche, as she has been in other years. And it's a wonderful, joyous experience to head down Market Street with people on both sides, waving, cheering, even bowing. And so I'm looking forward to a very joyous celebration. And I hope some of you will join us. You don't have to be LGBTIQQ to march. You can celebrate your own journey to fully be who you are. So I'd like to end with a song. And you have the words to that, too. It's at the bottom of the Metta Sutta. It's called Give Yourself to Love.

[35:37]

And it's by Kate Wolf, who was a California singer and songwriter. And I've asked Daniel to accompany me on the guitar. So we'll all sing the chorus. And then there are several verses. There are three verses with the chorus in between. So if you don't have the words, let me just Perhaps just let's say them once, the words to the chorus. Give yourself to love if love is what you're after. Open up your hearts to the tears and laughter and give yourself to love. Give yourself to love. Ready? So the chorus is first.

[36:42]

And why don't you listen once, we'll do it twice. Give yourself to love if love is what you're after. Open up your hearts to the tears and laughter and give yourself to love. Give yourself to love. Let's do the chorus again. Give yourself to love. If love is what you're after. Open up your hearts to the tears of laughter and give yourself to love. Give yourself to love. Kind friends gathered round There's something I would say That what brings us together here Has blessed us all today Love has made a circle That holds us all inside Where strangers are like family And loneliness can't hide You must give yourself to love

[38:07]

If love is what you're after, open up your hearts to the tears and laughter and give yourself to love. Give yourself to love. I've walked these mountains in the rain I've learned to love the wind I've been up before the sunrise To watch the day begin I always knew I'd find you Though I never did know how But like sunshine on a cloudy day You sit before me now So give yourself to love if love is what you're after. Open up your hearts to the tears and laughter and give yourself to love.

[39:08]

Give yourself to love. Love is born in fire. It's planted like a seed. love can't give you everything but it gives you what you need love comes when you are ready love comes when you're afraid it will be your greatest teacher the best friend you have made so give yourself to love if love is what you're after open up your hearts to the Tears and laughter and give yourself to love. Give yourself to love.

[40:10]

Thank you, Daniel. Thank you very much. So I want to wish all of us a very joyous, Pride weekend. I think we have a lot to celebrate. We certainly also have things to mourn, but I think this weekend perhaps the balance will be in the area of celebration. Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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