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. We are beyond delighted to be here today. Thank you so much. There's David. David for inviting us and Nancy Petrin for extending the invitation and Heather for introducing us. Just to say, Heather is a Dharma sister in so many ways. I just want to note that, as Heather mentioned, David, Heather, Kosen, and I are all blessed to have Tia Strozer as our Dharma teacher, who I believe is here today as well. And I wanted to note that, you know, Heather is a Dharma sister in another way. Both of us come from... Italian, Irish, working class families. And I want to acknowledge that just by allowing herself to be who she was and is in Dharma communities, as we say, when you are fully you, Zen is Zen.

[01:14]

By doing that, Heather has really come a long way in helping me to accept and embrace the emotional, expressive, opinionated, and sometimes very fiery ethnic inheritance that we share and recognize how it can be actually of use and service in the Dharma. So thank you, Heather. I actually had a dream about you last night, helping me up a flight of stairs and here you are. Anytime you need a help up the flight of stairs, Laura, just let me know. Last time I spoke at the Buddha Hall at City Center, I'm thinking about the Buddha Hall as we're speaking today, and I know some folks are in the dining room, David let us know, was almost 25 years ago when I was a young student about to give a way-seeking mind talk. And all I remember from that experience of 25 years ago is the profound terror I felt before I gave the talk.

[02:15]

And the liberation and love of Sangha I felt afterwards. So I don't quite have so much terror and resting in the enormity of what my heart's feeling, looking at teachers and friends and residents of my beloved first Dharma home. So I wanted to just note that I... actually asked Kosen if he would speak first. He and I have never, in all our years of doing this together, given a joint Dharma talk, so we didn't quite know how to do this. And I actually would prefer if he spoke first. And then, well, hopefully, we both have always a lot to say, so we're going to try to take care of each other and go back and forth. Thank you all. It's funny that I hadn't thought about this.

[03:16]

It's funny that Laura mentioned her sharing her heritage with Heather because David Zimmerman and I share Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, which is quite rare, actually. So I'm very happy to be with all of you today. And like Laura said, we're not sure what's going to unfold here, but But when we were thinking about what to talk about, the thing that came up for us is just relationship. What it is to be in just relationship. And it's a difficult time right now. All of us, I think, are feeling it. There's... there's a lot of holding to views there's a lot of holding to views that uh that that are moving into what almost feels like warlike divisive stances in the world in some cases very much warlike divisive stances and um taking us to places that lead us to anxiety fear so on and for some of us the implications

[04:29]

what's happened recently the implications for some of us are much is much more dire than than for others and more immediate and um and more frightening and tragic to feel in in our hearts what the pain of not including everyone in the way we make decisions and in our political life and by political life i don't just mean the way politics have been turned into a divisive mechanism in the current situation i mean the fact that we all are taking part in a polis we're all taking part in a community we're all part of a shared environment that um where all of our voices we hope at least that all of our voices are included and and we're not seeing that and it's leading to to situations that are dire so so what is it to be in just relationship to one another and i'm going to start and and if you'll please forgive me i am going to start with um i can't actually see here i always try to do this without glasses and then i fail so um

[05:43]

I am going to start with something that might sound a tad bit academic. So please forgive me. I am leaving. I am going somewhere that is less so. But I want to talk a little bit about the idea of Dharma or the meaning of Dharma. And I want to talk about it in relationship to the idea of justice and you could say Western thought. And it's very much, these two things are deeply related. Sometimes there can be a conversation that the idea of justice is something outside of the Dharma. The Dharma is functioning in some way that is almost transcendent or doesn't get quite involved in the ideas of what we call justice. And... Part of this, I think, is the way that the notion of justice has become so deeply polarized, and so it's difficult for a kind of non-dual sense of what it is to engage in the world, a compassionate way of engaging in the world, of being a part of that.

[07:00]

But these words are actually, in some ways, the same, although they have different, they end up with different lineages. So dharma, the root dirh, This is an Indo-European cognate. It's a direct link to the word dike in Greek, which means in Greek and is used all through the New Testament as justice, is translated as justice. Yoga, the root for yoga in Sanskrit is you, and that's directly related to use in Latin, which is justicia, which is justice. And the way they're connected in early times, in ancient life, is that there is a kind of sense in the uses in Latin, Greek, and Buddhist culture, I mean, and Vedic culture, Indian culture, that there is this way that we need to come into alignment with. So, it is a sense that our behavior, or the way that we have a path, that the path leads us to being...

[08:07]

in alignment, we could say, with the cosmos or with the order of things or with, in our case, the interconnected or intercausal, non-separate relationality of life. And that has changed over time, meaning in the Western time, but that initial feeling of, that initial sense of being, of harmonizing with all things. And I won't go into the ways that this can be used negatively, but that sense. And in this way, I think when the Buddha's talking about harmony instead of harm, he's pointing to this larger kind of harmony. Now, to do that, we have to look at, as we know, we have to look at karma. We have to look at our own mind, our own volition, the way our will interacts with life, how we plant the seeds in our own consciousness. that lead to other behaviors, that create the kind of neural grooves for other behaviors.

[09:07]

And they begin to replicate themselves based on our intentions and how we plant them and how they come into being in our actions. And zazen is so deeply important in that because it's in zazen that we can watch the impulse arise and let it fall away so that we don't recede those inclinations. But this word karma, is related you may you may or may not know i don't know is related to a very common word same kind of cognate very common word in english which is crime crime in latin is directly related but there's two very very different orientations what they have in common is that we act and that act has an effect in the future Our actions are related to something that happens in the future. But over time, what has changed is that this kind of way we feel about crime is that something on the outside of us decides what that response is going to be.

[10:18]

It could be the state, it could be a community, it could be any number of things. And I bring this up, not just because it's interesting, but because... We have to look in this time at the way that we have internalized this kind of a view. This kind of a view that if there is something painful, if there is a mistake, if there is a disruption, if there is something that makes us increasingly uncomfortable, if there is something that even threatens our lives, that our instinct is to... often move into this kind of crime frame, which is to find the perpetrator and oftentimes to exile the perpetrator or to at least for our community to be involved in such a way that is violent, that isn't about coming together and having a conversation about the way we have all been.

[11:23]

So there is a real danger, I think, in these times in our own communities of almost a notion of purity. And that if something difficult unfolds, that we... We find the problem, we remove it, and then we can return to the norm, what was comfortable and good. I actually don't think this is what, in any way, what the Buddha is talking about is harmony. At the same time, I don't think the Buddha is pointing to a harmony that is about ignoring the ongoing difficulty and pain within a community. We've all inherited unjust ways of being. We've inherited... structures of institutional structures ways of behavior ways of interacting that put forward people who are considered white as the dominant group and their culture as the dominant group whatever it means to have that culture it's very complex but also men and um and almost and an understanding that

[12:45]

White folks and men, especially white men, have almost a God-given right to be in control of things. And whole institutions, folks know this, whole institutions organize around that unconscious understanding. And to simply ignore that, I think, is also not the kind of deep harmony we're talking about. but actually to sit together in the way that we have all karmically been conditioned to buy into this, to buy into this in our own minds and hearts, to buy into this in our institutions, to buy into this in the country, and to notice that when we begin to move in another direction, there's a very strong push back in this direction because we could say that it is... It's not karmic in the strict sense that it has to do with one mind passing something on, but it's into itself, in its own consciousness.

[13:55]

But it is karmic in the sense that we're not independent, and all of our consciousnesses do interact and are influenced by each other, and these things are held in our minds, and they're also held in institutions. And so this moves forward and moves forward. way of having a bodily sense of wanting to exile the problem and return to a norm this is a tricky this is a tricky situation because in some ways this is the way the current the current way of being stays in place we have something that's operational it comes to it comes to a head we see the problem we kind of chop the head off And then we go back to norm. But the norm is the deeper structural problem. And so, as a community, as a sangha, to deepen into that is painful and takes an incredibly long time and means that we have to...

[15:02]

not fall prey to a kind of exiling consciousness because we can't heal if everyone no one's safe if everyone has the sense that a mistake leads to exile and um and at the same time we need to be able to have the difficult conversations that we're having um that we don't turn away from and begin to We don't treat pain. We don't treat suffering. We don't treat the difficult issues that arise when we look at all of these different histories coming together. We don't treat them as a problem that needs to be handled, dealt with, removed, but that they are the mud of the lotus. We would all like, I think it's an impulse in all of us, we'd love to

[16:06]

pull the lotus out of the mud and have some kind of transcendent floating lotus. But it dies, it withers, it dies. And everything associated with that kind of transcendent lotus will die around it. Because our tradition asks us to... honor what comes to us, but re-enliven it. One of the things I love about Zen and ancestry is that we inherit a tradition that then asks us to re-enliven it in our time, which means to be in struggle in some ways with the tradition. It's not a simple, I take it the way it is, but I'm in conversation with that tradition. I'm in dialogue with it. I'm trying to understand the way it's going to be awake in the mud of this moment. And so if we're, as a community, going to value awakening and value clarity, and by community I mean the larger dharmic community of the country as well as our temple-based communities, we kind of have to resist this temptation to isolate and exile, and we have to find a way, and it's hard.

[17:18]

We may, I mean, we try to do this in our community. We're always making mistakes, and We're always returning. It's not everyone, but we try. And it's painful, and I don't like it, and nobody likes to do it. And yet it is something that I feel is necessary for the dark. I deeply feel... That it's necessary for the Dharma to survive in this country. It's necessary for the Dharma to be relevant in this country. That we don't fall in... And I'll say one last thing, and then Laura has wonderful things to say about this. But that we don't fall into... I think we're in a moment that can fall into two different orthodoxies that are somewhat dangerous. One orthodoxy is that spirituality is... somehow transcendent above this and we can use tricky things to do this we can use emptiness and no self and and constant states of awareness and all of these things to to kind of pull away from being in the karmic mud of our lives that's one piece that i would say kind of a transcendent danger and then another danger is and in some ways a similar problem in a different direction is is that orthodoxies around

[18:43]

justice that where we become so hardened around what is unjust that we are no longer in just relationship with the person right in front of us. There's so much pain, and I want to affirm the pain. There's a tremendous amount of pain, but practice allows us to be with that pain in such a way that we can remain in just relationship with the people that we're with. doesn't mean we don't need to take breaks it doesn't mean we don't need to rest step back find different communities that nourish us so we can return to ones that are difficult for us all of that it sounds all very simple but it's very complex and um and we come back into those communities and ask the question whether it be a spiritual question a dharmic question or whether it be a question of justice What is it to be in just relationship with the person I'm with right now?

[19:45]

And just is a fabulous word because it both has this history of justice. And it also means simply right here, right now, just this, just relationship. So I'll stop there. And Laura. Can you just put the screen back here? So I know, I think we go to 11. Is that right? And then take some questions. I'm going to see everybody. Oh, there's so much to say. So what I wanted to do as a way of supporting or unpacking what Cosine was talking about a little bit is to just say a little bit about some of the work that we're doing in our community just as a way of making a little bit more concrete some of the theoretical stuff that Greg was talking about. And, you know, we have just finished, just about to finish a 10-month program called The Buddhist Path of Liberation, which was 50 of our Sangha members who identified as white went through this process.

[20:54]

And four of us spent a couple of years developing it, and it came out of about seven or eight years of undoing work of different varieties and moving through some of those programs. paradigm shifts that Greg was talking about and recognizing how even our work was infused with this idea of punitiveness or being good or getting it right or cleaning up the conflict or avoiding the conflict altogether by creating a kind of perfect response. And so one of the many, many takeaways that we've come to this training was infused with the paramitas. We followed each paramita. We grounded it very much in the gifts of our tradition, which had to do with ancestral practice, meditation practices, sangha building, and working through conflict and moving through a group process.

[22:00]

And we come, as we spoke last month about wisdom, and realizing how can we speak about wisdom when it comes to such groundless, seemingly endless delusion around specifically racial harm. And we recognize that we've come to trust wisdom as a process of learning, as an attitude, as a willingness to take, as you know, we use this quote all the time. you know, we're completely responsible in the relative and we're completely forgiven in the absolute and holding both of those together. Because if we're just taking complete responsibility, we can often really unconsciously move into defensive strategies, shame, rage, guilt, righteousness, you know, all this stuff that comes up when we are beginning to look in the eye of this dragon of intergenerational trauma.

[23:05]

And Greg mentioned, you know, white men, and I think it's been really helpful for us to be very specific about what we're unpacking and where we're living, but we're complex beings. And we can't separate, as I mentioned with Heather, class, you know, gender, gender, you know, ethnicity, how recent, you know, our ancestors have come over there, come over here. So it's a kind of an attitude and a way of being, working with this. And as Greg pointed to, excuse me, is it's a messy process. And I think one of the major things that I come up with and we come up with collectively is how conflict avoidant we are. I mean, just profound conflict avoidance, most of us. I think because of this threat of exile, because we have also done a lot of internal suppression and oppression, dividing ourselves up, and this part is okay, this part belongs in a spiritual community, this part can't be seen, you know, even as, you know, I move from messy student to messy teacher.

[24:22]

You know, this is not what a Zen teacher looks like or sounds like or acts like. And having to keep on doing that and moving from humiliation to humility to just really opening all that up and holding it with a love, you know, with a refusal to exile any parts within us as well. So if we go with this proposition that these histories of violence, and their violence not just of race and gender and class, of the earth itself, violence towards the earth, and an extrication from our sense of coming from a deep lineage, inheriting all that's beautiful and all that's unhealed from our ancestors, and then... creating the conditions and knowing that we are responsible for future generations.

[25:26]

From that perspective, we have been working with this vow or devotion to being able to do it differently, to really kind of just center love as the experience, but love not in the sense of that move we can make, but to a sense of we're going to really look at this. And because these histories live in our bodies, this disconnection, people know a lot now more about epigenetics and how this is passed on and lives in us. And to try to support the possibility of both individually holding the charge of all that. And I used to think that meditation was enough for that. And I would meditate and I'd work individually with my karmic, what I call hyper arousal. And it wasn't enough. Somehow it just kept replicating itself in different forms.

[26:30]

And sometimes the spiritual community itself kind of reinforced that need to kind of clean it up or purify it. You know, a lot of it was projection, but I think there's actually unconscious cultural norms. that kind of replicate that. So one of the things we always talk about is, you know, this, from a spiritual perspective, this exiling, what threatens our identity with being good. You know, how do I show up? How do I, you know, and, you know, being raised as a really good girl and listening to my teachers and doing things that I'm told to do is both a gift. And it's also one of the, inheritances around patriarchy for me. And so what do I, you know, what do we do with that in our bodies? And this is where I think the somatic understandings are so powerful. We might just, you know, tighten or defend.

[27:36]

We might feel rage or anger around these conditions which are not just ours. You know, this is not just mine. And then that comes off in terms of all forms of energetic control that those who enter community can feel from us. And also thinking or collapsing. Or I have to admit, Greg and I are very guilty of this, overworking. We're all so poor and there's so much to do and so many programs to put out. And then we disconnect from our bodies and we don't believe we need to rest. We're punitive with ourselves when we take space or fail our students or have to say no. And, you know, one of my beloved co-facilitators said, you know, there's a tenderness that arises in her when she remembers there's no I in this work. And so when we bring this kind of Western individual mindset that this is my work to work on here, I'm in Sangha.

[28:42]

but it's only my responsibility and what's happening is only mine, we lose this capacity to rest in and take refuge in a collective humility and process and willingness to not know and to confess what's happening for us. So a lot of what we did, it's almost celebrating in a strange way, allowing through the work to really bring up the shame, allow the shame to be heard, to give a name. We would do, we would have, we had a slideshow where everybody, the 50 people in the program did their rage drawings. So everybody kind of, I almost brought mine in. I didn't bring it in. A picture of our, the energetic quality of rage that lives in all of us. And maybe we think we don't have rage. I would, I would ask you to explore that deeper. How could we not have rage when we have been our ancestors have been traumatized themselves and the price we pay for having the privilege?

[29:53]

You know, there's there are hearts have had to go through a lot. So and then grief. So if we start to. learn through somatic strategies, through resting in the group, through an allowing and an acknowledging of what's here and all this complexity, there is something that, you know, that started to free up in me and I felt more liberated to be who I am. Strangely enough, it's kind of a paradox, you know, while as I included all these things in, I felt freer. Um... And part of this trusting in the collective is really doing deep ancestral work for ourselves. We, all of the members have ancestral altars. We have, Greg and I have a beautiful ancestral altar and we, we offer, we decide to offer coffee to our ancestors instead of tea since they're European and would prefer tea in the morning instead of, prefer coffee in the morning instead of tea.

[31:02]

but really being in conversation with them, which helps me to both allow myself to be that I am of them, and I also have a possibility to go beyond what they were able to do. So as Greg mentioned, a big part of this is if we can begin to metabolize those All of that energy in our body, I think it creates a condition for just relationships for us to go into community. In my case, as a white woman teacher, to sit across from a person of color, have them express what they're expressing, and watch all of those strategies kick in that makes me want to protect, offend, avoid, justify, collude, whatever. You know, whether it's, I'm so terrible, so sorry, I don't know anything, tell me everything. which is giving up our dormancy or else of the ways that we try to isolate and minimize what this person is telling us.

[32:12]

And including all of our traumas and their trauma too. And just to say, at least in our experience, and again, we've had many, many ruptures in the psychological language. We talk about the... The importance, this is a psychological analogy to the lotus in muddy water. Ruptures are essential for intimacy building, for repairs. That the ruptures, the things that start to fall apart is, we know this intuitively in our experience, but just to keep naming it, the ruptures are okay. It is how we repair them, the way we attend to them, in all the subtleties. of that rupture and how we meet that moment that creates either, you know, as Desmond Tutu talks about in his book, In the Art of Forgiving, you know, either a replication of violence and harm or a process of reconciliation.

[33:17]

And that even beyond that, that those ruptures, those expressions of conflict are a signal you know they're a signal they're kind of part of the medicine and how do we see it as medicine how do we see it as wisdom in there somewhere and transformative energy waiting to be met and i think that is happening so so much in our communities and also happening more broadly So we are trying to create communities of responsibility and returning to keeping complex all of the histories that are come to be and how we navigate those, which does include us being very humble and willing to learn and that the wisdom is in all different sources of the collective body.

[34:33]

And, you know, we have another psychological term called identified patient. You know, the one who comes and, you know, is kind of the rabble razz or the one who's a problem. Can we see, you know, that in family therapy, that person is seen as the problem by the family and actually they're the ones giving us the distress signal that something else needs to be addressed. You know, how do we just keep turning things the way we're thinking about this, from Ms. Greg was saying, from crime to a collective wisdom. And I think that will help us to begin to just rely on a deeper connection that's actually always there as we speak about from the position of the absolute. that those roots of disconnection are not the deepest layer, but we have to go through that layer often in order to recognize that we're always in a deep reciprocal relationship with our ancestors, you know, with each other, with our bodies, with the world.

[35:54]

So... you know one thing that um because laura just made the um comment about meditation and being enough and the thought that came to mind was there is a way that when we're working through difficult um situations together as a community that in some ways it's true meditation is not enough and yet it's um it's critical it's critical it's critical to have a mind and heart i want to say you know i think it's so important that in the chinese tradition that we inherited that there are three there are three seats of knowing there's there's the one we're used to the kind of discerning mind there's shin which which we associate with um you know what we know from that place and then there's hara and um

[36:55]

when all of these are awake together we know in a different way we discern in a different way we can feel separation as soon as it arises it isn't a matter of discerning what separation is or not or or isn't the body feels separation the body feels when the awake body feels when we tear a relationship with another person and to return to that after that terror occurs the moment i mean we've all been in this place where we'll say something and right away we'll feel something happened and to laura's point i think what's so important is so often that that wisdom can be drowned in shame sense of perfection humiliation things that we tell ourselves and then we don't address it because egoic things flood in behind that wisdom instead of just oh there was a tear and there was a tear between myself and another person because of my words and now i can i can address that and um and so zazen i feel is so critical to giving us the opportunity to become a fully awake body where the different ways the body knows come alive integrate um

[38:20]

the scaffolding we've built around so many ways of knowing because of our own histories can slowly be dismantled by looking at our karma. And at some point, there is a being there that is connected. There's nothing particularly special about that. It is the way it is. And unless we are willing to be in that kind of intimate conversation... You know, that's the mirror doesn't arise, right? We don't see these particular things that we'll do whatever we can to avoid at all costs, you know? So, you know, again, it's like it's wonderful the conflict comes up because it shows us the limits of our capacity to open. And then as... The first teaching I ever received from Tenshin Roshi and the teaching that I carry with me every day, can I be open to being closed?

[39:24]

Can I allow myself to feel the places where I'm closed? Bring acknowledgement and compassion and responsibility to those places as opposed to trying to pry them open or escape or indulge the closeness. And I think 45 minutes is when we're supposed to quiet down, so that's soon. But I'll just say one thing, because I'm just moved by this, that Dogen wrote more than this, but there are two festivals that are particularly about aspiration. And they're right after each other. and in one there is an aspiration for basically an aspiration for meritorious activity without attachment to outcome right and then and then or virtuous activity or wholesome activity wholesome action without an attachment to outcome and the other one is the aspiration for for awakening but specifically bodhisattva awakening the awakening of all beings everyone's awakening and when they're brought together

[40:39]

There is our way, right? There is the aspiration for the meritorious activity of working for the awakening of all beings without attachment to the outcome. And it feels, I mean, it's always a time for this. I don't think it's ever, but it really deeply feels like it's a time for it now. that we have to be so deeply devoted to each other's liberation, almost, it's a funny word to say, almost ruthlessly, like in a way that we risk love in every situation, even if it's terrifying. We risk connection, really feeling into that connection. Yeah. So Mandy, do you have anything else? No. Okay. That was a little meandering. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[41:46]

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, please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:09]

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