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, everybody. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Good morning. It is really a great joy to be with you. And with that beautiful introduction, I want to just offer my thanks to the San Francisco Zen Center community, to your teachers, my friends, those who have invited me and prepared me to visit with you with such care and graciousness. I want to invite a conscious...

[01:00]

First of all, if anybody has trouble hearing me at any time, please just give me a kind of a signal here. They're having a little trouble. Is the mic? Maybe pull it up a little bit this way. Oh, okay. Is it all right right here? Better? Okay. Can you guys hear it? Is it better now? Better over there. Okay. Again, thank you so much. And if at any time we need adjustment, please just give me a signal. I'll try to be mindful of that. So, as I just consciously really sought your welcome by looking around and offering good morning, I want to invite, if you will, if you're willing, it's maybe a little bit out of the norm for you here in this setting, but if you could offer the same kind of welcome to the people around you, sitting next to you, I'm noticing, if you're willing, the faces, the beings who in their presence are supporting you in this moment, by their being here, supporting you in this moment, with a sense of welcome.

[02:15]

Thank you, thank you. A sense of a concept that I'll use a bit later, Ubuntu, right, recognizing This is a concept that we've inherited, many of us, been offered from cultures in Africa who use the term Ubuntu to describe this way of being with each other that recognizes the interconnectedness of each of our spirits and beings. Technically, to translate Ubuntu, as it was translated to me, it means I am because you are. And because you are, I am. I am because you are. And because you are, I am. So invite a sense of that spirit, if you will, as we spend the next 30 or so minutes together in reflection on the topic of the day. So as you know, the topic that I'm choosing to help

[03:23]

ground these reflections. And then, by the way, I'll also be offering a workshop later in the afternoon for those who are interested in maybe some even more juicy engagement with these ideas. The topic really is looking at mindfulness as a support for equity and social justice in the world. When we look around, on this day. Actually, many days in the last year or so for many of us have felt like days of distress, days of disruption, days we didn't know we would see ever, really, things happening that surprise us. How many of you There's something about what I'm talking about, like, this is feeling of some sort of general unsettledness in the world.

[04:27]

And we may, if we are not really deeply practiced, it may occur to us sometimes to wonder, you know, is this really what I should be doing in these times? How many of you, first of all, for how many of you is this your first time here at the San Francisco Center? Raise your hands. Okay, so look around. There are a few people who are here for the first time. Welcome, welcome. How many of you have never done any kind of mindfulness or meditation before? So, even those who are new have at least had some meditation. I know that in the circles that I travel in, it is not uncommon for people to be relatively, you know, let's say lightly practiced in mindfulness. They haven't had the benefit of a deeply supportive community. And so, as a person whose main job is to teach law students, and as a secondary service or role in the world, I have been supported by teachers like Norman Fisher,

[05:46]

formerly abbot of this center, teachers like Roshi Joan Halifax, who founded the Yuhaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and carries forward the peacemaker, bearing witness tradition, whose founding father is Bernie Glassman. So I've been fortunate to, by virtue of my association with these and other teachers, Jon Kabat-Zinn in the more secular realm, good friend and close teacher of mine, to have been exposed to teachings that, for me, have supported practices which enable me to feel at least some sense of groundedness during difficult times like this. And yet, there are days when it's really, really hard, you know, to simply faithfully return to the cushion amidst everything that's going on.

[06:57]

We meet on this day in the wake of a recent declaration of a national security emergency at the border. A national security state of emergency. at our southern border. Just to say that arouses something in me, I don't know if it does in you, right, to reflect on that. So, just to notice the way in which terms and concepts like that, things being placed in the air, placed in our consciousness, impacts us. There's distress that comes from having the leader of this nation who has such a powerful pulpit, microphone, and influence in the broader world, such a profound impact to have this person in regular ways, not only last week, and not only with the declaration of national security emergency, be speaking in ways that impact us.

[08:17]

and that don't impact us necessarily in positive ways. So there's a way in which we're all being always influenced by the environments that we're in, by the tone of voice and the tone of spirit and disposition of the leaders whose ideas and ways of being are having such an impact on all of us. We're all in this together. You all know this, right? You know we're all in it together. And so when we think about just this question of what's happening at the border, knowing, as many of us do in law, as a

[09:17]

In my role, I've taught immigration law. I regularly teach classes that deal with tort law, which is more about personal injury and the care we owe one another is how I tend to think of it. I also teach classes dealing with race in law. And there is some intersection between those classes that look at how race has shown up in our political community, our imagined community called America. imagined community of generations, by the way. Some of you know this is the 400th anniversary of a certain starting point in our imagined community. How many of you know what I'm talking about? 400th anniversary of the landing in Virginia, of the first ship carrying people who would become very soon lifetime enslaved people.

[10:18]

in America. So this is 1619. 1619. 1619. 400 years ago this year. That movement happened. But before that, right, we've already had the 400th anniversary of, and longer, of colonial exploits, right? So all of that energy of empire building, clearing land to make that necessary. I mean, to support the building of what we now call this community of America. To call forth those kinds of histories is painful. And for many of us in this, in the practices of

[11:21]

the teachings of the Buddha, might hesitate and wonder, why? Why do we need to call forth those histories? We want to be here, we want to be right here in the moment. That was 400 years ago. But was it only 400 years? Just bear with me now. Is it all just in that long ago past? Is it all just way back there? Or might there be some way in which Well, you know, we have secular wise people too. William Faulkner, 20th century writer of note, is often remembered as having offered this bit of wisdom about the relationship between past and present, right? Just simply that the past is not dead. Indeed, to paraphrase him a little bit, it's not even past. It's not even past.

[12:23]

What did he mean by that? Right? What did he mean by that? Are there ways in which, I like to use the phrase the long now, maybe the long, broad, deep now, to get us thinking about some of the ways that these things we call history show up, show up. show up are here too. So we'll reflect on that as we think about this moment, national security at the border. It's not the first time. Tropes, ideas of invasion, especially by so-called others, especially by racialized others. Those tropes are part of our history. can unpack them a little bit more. But there was once a thing, a yellow peril, fomented in large part by things that happened right here in California and San Francisco that led to another era of exclusion, exclusionary acts, Asiatic barred zone, couldn't have immigrants from Asia for many years in our past.

[13:47]

So, Is the past dead? Or have we in some ways been formed by what we like to think of as past? For me, the teachings of the Buddha are beautifully available to us should we choose to create space for those kinds of inquiries. Not easy. But the teachings and the practices are profound supports for us. should we choose to open up to questions like that? And I guess I want to offer in these moments that we have this idea that as we take up the path, this against the stream path of following, taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, seeking to become a little more sane with the support of the practices that have been introduced as the pathway to alleviate suffering.

[15:01]

As we take up the practices of the Buddha, there's a for me, a great invitation to see those practices not only as very personal, right, but they are very personal. They are about sitting, dedicating ourselves, studying, the allied disciplines of study, reading, listening to teachers, being in Sangha, being with spiritual friends, good friends, who can help us along the way. while especially in the West we tend to think of that work as fairly focused on the individual, I think as we do engage in these practices, we inevitably begin to see the way in which they break down the sense of ourselves as separate, isolated individuals.

[16:10]

We see, we feel the way we are interconnected. And so the work of thinking about what I am calling here mindfulness, which of course is a term that means many different things. Obviously, right mindfulness, really important aspect of the Eightfold Path. But in the kind of contemporary secular world, again, we're living in a moment where this idea of mindfulness has been given a life that's a little broader than perhaps the more traditional teachings. For me, the way I use it in those more secular settings is really in deference to teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn to be looking at ways of paying attention with intentionality, paying attention on purpose and with a kind of an attitude or willingness to accept for the moment what we seek.

[17:18]

So practices of a wide variety that support that kind of awareness, engagement, relating with reality, if you will. And the way of being with reality that arises from regularly engaging in such practices, yeah? So practices and then a way of being that can resolve. How can those practices, how can that way support us in the challenges that arise around the inequities that we see, the inequalities that we see, the unfairness that we see in the world, the suffering, the oppressions that we see in the world. Well, one way is to really just think about how that kind of suffering, the suffering that we refer to sometimes when we use the term social injustice. I recognize that that's a term that itself could be defined in many ways. You could spend a whole seminar or longer thinking about what we mean by social injustice and social justice.

[18:25]

I'm using it here really to refer to efforts to hold us accountable for some of the promises we've made as part of this imagined political community around equality, around respect for all human beings, partaking of the international concepts of human rights, which at their core have this idea of really universal human dignity. This idea that human dignity and respect equal concern for every person is something that we're all entitled to as humans. And social injustice then being the will, the courage. the practices of social justice are about having the will and the courage to attend to when we've missed the mark around providing for dignified treatment, for fairness, for justice for all. And in particular in our contemporary conversation, social injustice is often asking us to look at who has traditionally been marginalized in our society?

[19:34]

What individuals and groups of individuals have traditionally been marginalized? given our particular location in history and political community and the prior commitments and practices of our culture and time? Who are those who have benefited and who have suffered traditionally, historically, as part of our cultural commitments? And what are the legacies of that today? All right, so that long now, past is not the past, still here. If you think about the Four Noble Truths, there is suffering. There's a cause to that suffering. There's relief from suffering and the relief comes from the path. I think when we think about social injustice, there are definite links to all of those aspects of the Four Noble Truths or Four Ennobling Truths. Certainly the Buddha was talking about a different kind of suffering.

[20:37]

not necessarily this socially mediated suffering that I've been mentioning here. It's talking about more existential suffering, the kind we all may feel because of the way our minds operate around attaching aversion, confusion, delusion. Common to all. The suffering of social justice, as teachers like Erslen Zinju Manuel and others will say, The suffering associated with social injustice. This is sort of the unnecessary, socially disparate or uneven, the suffering that's distributed amongst us in uneven ways as a result of the policies and practices of our culture. So racism, so sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, classism, ableism. What am I leaving out? There's more. Ageism. Again, I mentioned xenophobia, but all of the things that show up around status, immigration status, right now in particular.

[21:48]

The whole set of dynamics around LGBTQI plus experience of historically, culturally not being accepted. When we look at social justice, we're looking at suffering that's distributed across our societies in different ways based on those historical cultural patterns of inclusion and exclusion. So it's thinking about their suffering, yes, existential greed, hatred, and delusion, the way we grasp, the way we clean, the way we're confused. And on top of that, there's extra pain that comes from the cultural commitments, the policies, the practices of our time. Does that make some sense? To think about as maybe, maybe being something that we might bring our practice more directly to bear, to at least grapple with in some ways.

[22:56]

Yes, there is suffering. There is this social suffering on top of the existential suffering that we all feel. And so how can our practices assist us when we can turn towards so many aspects of that? I pointed to all that we're pointing to when we just say what's happening at the border and that. But there's so much more, right? Domestically, some of you may know how many of us, what percentage of us in this country are... struggling to make ends meet. What percentage of us, perhaps in this room, are struggling to make ends meet? Across the country, it's at least 40, 43%. Probably etched up a little bit since those statistics came out in 2016. In California, it's 49%.

[23:59]

These are people who, again, among this room as well, who struggle to cover Basics, rent, food, medical care. 49% of people in the state of California on any given day. And a percentage of people in this room. Yeah? This is real. So when we talk about social injustice, we want to recognize that in some way all of us are touched by this. In some way, all of us are suffering. This isn't about an oppression or suffering Olympics, like who's suffering the most at all, right? But it is to ask ourselves, when we're turning toward bringing that awareness, that capacity to be present with what is, that is mindfulness, we're turning toward aspects that we're

[25:06]

pointing at as social injustice. What do we see? Again, each of us will see different things based on our particular social location, our particular experiences in the world. We're going to see different things. Yeah? And so, how does our particular experience, our own lived experience, prepare us to see certain things, be blind to other things? See certain things, be looking on the lookout for certain things, concerned about certain things, be not so on the lookout, not so concerned about others. How many of us understand a little bit about that? How our own experience, you know, this is not, again, to find anything new to beat ourselves up over. We always have enough of that at the ready. Not about that. But it is about bringing this sort of self-compassionate awareness. We're going to see some things more clearly than others by virtue of the history and experience that we've lived. We're not going to see other things. We're going to be predicting certain ways of being in relationship with other people that we think might feel comfortable and good to us, we're not going to be predicting that others will be good and comfortable for us.

[26:16]

I talk about this in one of the pieces that I've written. I've got a book coming out that looks at these topics. It's called The Inner Work. This book is particularly getting us looking at how race intersects with all of these aspects of injustice, but really... My own project is committed to a broader liberation through the doorways of all sorts of experience. I do think to help us get there, it helps sometimes to just pause and say, for now we're going to talk about gender, to now we're going to talk about sex orientation, for now we're going to talk about race, for now we're going to talk about class. Do you see what I'm saying? And in the social justice work that I do, there's been a brilliant invitation for us to normalize that kind of broad... inclusive look at social justice, using this concept of, well, first centering on different topics at a time. So in the book that I've written, it's about the inner work of racial justice. Healing ourselves and transforming our communities through mindfulness.

[27:18]

Centering race, but recognizing we all have some relationship to this thing called race. The idea that many who do social justice and who are interested in, really, liberation for all of us, recognizing that there are different types of suffering. Theorists in those practices have come up with this idea of rotating centers. So that, yes, we center on race sometimes, but then we, all right, let's clear the space, center on ableism, disability. Spend time seeing what we aren't seeing. about ways that our structures of community and connection, our environments, might make some people more comfortable than others, in terms of our physical disability and not, and ability differences. Together turn to that. Let that be the center of the conversation. Maybe then talk about how it intersects with other things. Create space. Rotate the center.

[28:19]

Gender is there. Class is there. Do you see? so that we allow ourselves to pause and go deep when we need to with some trust that we're going to turn and the center will allow for other people's reality as well. Everyone's experience matters deeply. And so we will, if we trust, we build that capacity, be able to create spaces where we can hold it all. It's important for us to realize that our practices can help us here. can help us with the personal, the interpersonal, and the systemic work of social justice. And it's important for us to remember that the blind spots that I just referred to show up in ways like this. I wrote about it in another piece that I've published in the past. It's a moment in time here in my beloved city of San Francisco, where it was right after, I'm describing a moment where I had just gotten tenure at my law school, University of San Francisco,

[29:23]

And my dean was good enough to arrange to have flowers sent to my little small home that I have in this particular neighborhood here in the city. So the scene is I'm at my house, dressed for a day in my place, kind of comfortably dressed. And I open the door. And it's an apartment in San Francisco in a neighborhood. that's considered to be one where people are fairly well-to-do, Pacific Heights. So I open the door, and there I am, this petite black woman wearing the sweats that are my typical Saturday at-home attire. The delivery man gazes at me and says, flowers for Professor McGee. And I reach toward him, preparing to take the vase, and say, I am Professor McGee. And he's somewhat taken aback and kind of And as I wrote it, somewhat taken aback, the hidden ground of his preconceptions temporarily shook.

[30:30]

He kind of pulls the vase back just a bit rather than releasing them to me and says, are you sure? And in that moment, I'm like, am I? You know, just for a moment. Yes. Unless I allow any incorrect assumptions to go... Let's go ahead and correct any that might be running in the room. The delivery person was a black or African-American man. We are all running preconceptions, right? We have all imbibed trainings about who belongs, who doesn't, who belongs where, who doesn't. Every single one of us. We can't live in cultures that are running these things without impacting all of us. And so mindfulness is in part, I think, beautifully, mindfulness, the practices of the Buddha beautifully support us in turning toward what we can do to disrupt those kinds of patterns because they impact our ability to create spaces where people feel safe enough, feel welcome enough, feel well enough met that they can join us in the work of our spiritual development,

[31:50]

of making the world a better and safer place for all, how might we more robustly use the practices, if you will? I know we like to think of the practices not really being of any use, not instrumental. We're just sitting. But are we capable? Can we? In some ways... draw on these beautiful practices, the beautiful teachings of the Buddha, the Buddhas of the millennia, to support us in bringing that spirit of Ubuntu that I mentioned. Because I am, you are. Or I am because you are. And because you are, I am. Because you are, we are. How can these practices actually help that spirit of Ubuntu be more of a lived experience? Not just an abstraction. Something we feel every day. We feel impacted when somebody's suffering. We feel impacted when people are being demonized at the border. And we're not willing to just turn away, but we're willing to, with some compassion, help alleviate the suffering that we know is there.

[32:59]

Well, the work that I do is all about asking that question again and again and again. Finding the joy, actually, that can come from being engaged in that kind of real life, like, you're here, I'm here with you, kind of question. There's joy in that for me actually. And so if you're at all interested in those kinds of questions, as I say, I've written things about these topics that you can read and more will be coming. And this afternoon we'll do a workshop if anybody happens to have extra time and hasn't signed up on these very topics. But for now, I close just by saying I thank you for your being for whatever it was that drew you into this moment, this precious, unrepeatable moment of connection around this topic. And may you be well as you go forth from this moment, reflecting on and making real in your own ways your commitments to see and to work for justice in the world.

[34:08]

Thank you. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:35]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.15