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. I have never had one of these on my head. I have a feeling I need to restrain my smiling feeling. lest I pop it off. Can you hear me okay? Hello. I will also try to restrain a movement toward nostalgia. This room is a physical place, obviously, but it's also... has a lot of meaning for me.

[01:01]

I likely first made my way into this room in 1996 when I was younger, turns out. In my mid-twenties. And in a lot of pain, actually. And seeking. The smell of this room actually is really evocative for me. The smell of the tatami mats and it's probably like the funk in the walls and stuff as well. And I really, I treasure this place, city center. And I can see some people in this room who were here at that time. Lovely to see you. See, look, there it goes.

[02:09]

I came to the San Francisco Zen Center for the meditation. That's it. Or that's what I thought. Is that going to fall off? I think I can tighten it. Okay. My face is just too... Mobile. I don't know about any of you. Is anyone here for the first time today? Welcome. I don't know, truthfully, what brought me here. I mean, I can name a few conditions. I had somebody, a boyfriend had given me Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in college. So I was aware of Suzuki Roshi. I had read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. But I was coming, at least what I thought I was coming for was the meditation. And I didn't even really know why.

[03:11]

I just knew I wanted to do it. And when I tried to do it at home, I would sit for a few minutes and then I would start shaking and sweating. But if I did it here with other people, something different happened. And I also, I don't know if anyone's... in their newer time around the city center, but I would come in the door over here for the zendo, go in the zendo and sit and get out as soon as I could afterward. It took me many months to feel brave enough to walk up the stairs with everybody else and come to service, come into this room and see what that was about. And then I was hearing words like, you know, life and death is a great matter. beings are numberless, I vow to save them. And the absurdity, actually, of that, being in a room full of people who, you know, at the time I didn't know people were doing it by rote. I was just imagining everyone really meant that every time they said it.

[04:14]

And we do, even if we think we're doing it by rote. And I thought, I want to be among people that think that great matter is birth and death and that beings are numberless and that we're going to save them And I'm going to save them. Yeah, so I stayed for a long time, not here so much. I actually came here so often that when there were... I didn't live here because I had a dog I was responsible to. But when there were residence meetings, other residents would be like, there's a residence meeting now. And I'm like, oh, I don't live here. I just loiter here all the time. And then I lived for a number of years at Tassahara and a few years at Green Gulch. Um... And like I said, I won't go down nostalgia lane, but there's a lot to say about all that, and maybe most importantly is just to express my gratitude for San Francisco Zen Center and the people who have been here for 50 years and the people who are new today.

[05:16]

This is a living, breathing thing, and it depends on all of us. A few weeks ago, I was here, actually, by the cover of night. I came and stayed with Mary and Erin, my Dharma sisters. Actually, I should pause and thank Mary as a Tonto, and also David as a former Tonto, Abbot David Z., for asking me to come and talk. I've never given a talk at City Center, which is a great joy for me, because this is the root place for me. So I was here just sleeping on their futon because I had an early flight in the morning from San Francisco's airport. And when I drove down to the airport in the morning, I went by a billboard, I think I was on 101, and it says something like, robots cannot, robots can't steal your job if you're already retired.

[06:23]

And I think it was a billboard sponsored by Prudential or something. Somebody who wants you to retire and work with them to manage your money. I don't know, maybe because it was early. It really struck me. I was in that state, you know, where I was noticing in a different level. And I was like, wow, there's a lot in that sentence. Like superficially, it's funny and clever. And then even in the level below that we're all aware of where advertisers want to prey on our fears, it's clever. It's preying on people's fears about how will I take care of myself in this changing world. It's subversive. They've got some psychologically insightful people at Prudential. And then I feel like it has about a million layers under that that speak to the dominant culture in the United States. I mean, effectively, there's a message in there.

[07:27]

There's a billboard. It's the size of a billboard. If people feel like it's legitimate to say, if you're okay, who cares what happens? You know? To me, that's part of what it was saying. And it struck me as very disturbing and also accurate. I'm aware that the United States has many cultures, you know, There is no such thing as like the culture in the United States. There's no such thing. We're a multifarious conglomeration of cultures. But I think it is fair for us, and I think people who study this on a different level than I do, we can talk about a dominant culture in the United States. And there are features to it that are nameable. And I think it behooves us to articulate what they are. Dominant culture, and by that I mean people who are overly represented in power and images and people overly represented in the media and even in the way we think in our education and everywhere.

[08:41]

The over-representation represented in that billboard. So it's white for lack of a more subtle term. Our dominant culture is dominated by white thinking, white people. Or people white identified and white acculturated. So that, right, so there are people in power. Of course there are exceptions to this, so I don't want to get into all that nitpicking. But most people in power are the dominant representation in power. People who are white, people who are male or patriarchal. So with those two things, implicit, written into the whiteness is racism and white supremacy. Written into the patriarchal and the male is misogyny, devaluation of the feminine and female people. And I'll just name a few more and I won't name them all. It's heteronormative. I imagine everyone lives in the Bay Area or thereabouts, or we're here anyway right now.

[09:51]

But think about the images you saw as a child. The images children are still seeing today. It's still... Other representations of sexuality are marginalized utterly. Our dominant culture is super gender binary. There's not a lot of tolerance for non-binary gender expressions, for transgender expressions. So in that is transphobia. Non-binary phobia. Able body oriented. I wonder if there is a better term for that. But, you know, the discrimination that comes with thinking that everybody moves around on two feet. That's overly represented in our culture. It's like we're youth, the dominant culture. And I say we because I am saturated in this culture. Youth and health centered. So we're death denying. We're illness-denying. We're illness-phobic.

[10:53]

We're aging-phobic. I really feel like that one has got to go. If we have lived long enough to be old, we're lucky. I'm about to turn 48. I'm pretty happy about it. It means I didn't die when I was 47. I really, I aspire. Someone was telling me about their mom's 85th birthday. I look forward. I aspire to have a 95th birthday, actually. So at every, and I'm not naming all of them, but I think it's enough to talk about what the dominant culture is. And at every single one of those levels, our culture is based in, our culture, dominant culture is based in delusion. It's overly reductive. It's overly reductive. And it depends on a dualism, male versus female, white versus people of color, young versus old, all that stuff.

[12:02]

Any dualism is overly reductive of a human experience. And each one of us, we could identify anywhere along these spectrums, and the fullness of our expression is always more than any identification we could ever even name for ourselves, let alone for other people. So in that I would say our culture is overly reductive. Dominant culture is overly reductive. It fails to recognize the complexity of human experience. And maybe the thing that most distilled to me as I was looking at that billboard was the delusion of individualism. The narrative of individualism that dominates the culture in the United States. that fails to recognize the complexity of what it means to be a human being. Like, no wonder we're in so much trouble. Our culture is founded on really, not just like subtle illusions, like hardcore misrepresentations of humanity.

[13:05]

It's problematic. And that's an understatement. It's robbing us of the fullness of our lives, actually. It's diminishing our lives. So this idea that human beings exist as individuals is, like I'll speak for myself, is something that's strongly held in the education on every level that I received as a young person. I come from New England. We're like more individualistic there. The good fences make good neighbors thing. That's like a real thing. I also come from a background of class migration, I would say. My parents were class migrants. And so the story of individualism, I'm sure some of you have that similar background, is very strong. If you work hard, if you do well, you will be successful.

[14:10]

And success is measured individually by wealth and ignorant things that don't take in the fullness of our human experience. But even without getting into, I don't know, sociopolitical dynamics, I'm looking around the room. Nobody appears to be an infant. Everyone appears to be at least over 18, I'm going to guess. Just the fact that we're here is an expression of interdependence on other things. There's this beautiful expression by a psychologist I really love, D.W. Winnicott. There's no such thing as an infant. There isn't such a thing as an infant. There's no such thing as an isolated baby. A baby only exists in relation to caregivers. And I would say also in relation to a human female womb. That's only how that baby's ever happened.

[15:11]

And babies only persist because somebody cares for them. And sure, some people are cared for by their biological parents and some people have a much more complicated story. Doesn't matter. Somebody cared for us. Someone was skillful enough to get us through that vulnerable time until we could care for ourselves. And in that, our life is a full expression of interdependence. So Zen practice is, to me, more and more, Zen practice is the practice and support to live in our connectedness and in non-duality. That's what it teaches us, and it's what it supports us to be in. And non-duality, you know, the way... Lots of people like to say emptiness. There's that kind of cold academic term that Buddhists use that I think it's just a... I don't know. I think the word empty in English just sounds a little hollow, and so it doesn't quite do the trick for me.

[16:16]

I think the same rendering could be connectedness or interconnectedness or Thich Nhat Hanh's interbeing. This like unbelievably complex myriadness of connections that make anything what it is. We could say emptiness, but then we get all cerebral and forget about the warm human body we're living in. Or at least I did for many years. So I prefer to say connected or Interdependent, but we're talking about, it's the same thing. And it's not graspable. So our regular human mind that wants to apprehend our understandings of things will be confounded when we try to get that mind around emptiness. And at the same time, we can use this clever human mind to pull up different ideas that point to it. Like, there's no such thing as an infant. And, oh, that's me.

[17:18]

Whatever I think I am. I am literally configured of so many conditions. I can't even name them. But there's some I can know. There's known and unknown. So I can look at the known ones and remind myself when I think, oh, I did this. I can remind myself, oh, way to end. Somebody fed me. And my DNA comes from somewhere. And I'm breathing this air. So if we, I don't know how prominent it is anymore. I feel like when I first came around in the world of American Zen, there were lots of people who would say things like, well, I like Zen because it's a philosophy. You know, it's nice and clean. It's not a religion. I'm like, it's a religion. I'm a pretty religious Zen person. So that's my bias. I'll admit it. Zen is not clean and tidy.

[18:21]

It's the support for us to live in inconceivable complexity. So it's messy. And it's myriad, and it's ungraspable, and it's confounding, and it's frustrating if we stay in the mind that wants to grasp things. So maybe, like me, you came for the meditation. It's like, oh, I'm going to go take myself over there and I'm going to sit some Zalzen. Zalzen, the tradition of Soto Zen is that meditation practice is the ceremony, I would say. It's like the ritual enactment of the non-duality of each one of us and Buddha. Sorry, if that's not what you're coming for. Sorry. you're coming for individual meditation, that's all right, you can do that. But you're also participating in the ceremony of the non-duality of Buddhiness and individual human beings.

[19:22]

Yeah, and even if this is our first day here, we're participating in the non-duality of Buddha and living beings and wisdom and delusion. So when we say empty, we're empty, actually, of isolation. We're empty of being separate from one another. We're empty of individualism. No, we're maybe not empty of individualism. We could keep conjuring that if we want to, but we're empty of being an individual in the way that we imagine, cut off from other people, cut off from other circumstances and myriad conditions. And our practice supports us to live with that, not necessarily an understanding, but with an opening to all that's not seen in every situation. In the Genja Kwan Dogen says, when Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it's already sufficient.

[20:35]

When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. So understanding that something is missing is like the support of Zen to stay in being open to the 50 billion things you cannot see that make that next decision that you're making that you think is yours possible. And so this is relevant, actually. I know it's a little abstract still, what I'm talking about. this comes down to our next breath right now and our next thought. You know, I think even when we get in a mindset of I'm alone right now, you know, I'm in a room somewhere and no other human beings are around and I'm having my private thoughts. And that can feel, and maybe we feel lonely or not, but we could feel isolated in that

[21:40]

We're just there by ourselves. No one will ever know what we're thinking or anything like that. The thoughts in our heads are made up of words and brain structures and mental formations that have been handed down through billions of people. Everything we do, even the most private things we do, are an expression of our connectedness to all things. There's a great article in the current Buddha Dharma written by Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams, which I recommend, called Your Liberation is on the Line. And she says, you don't get to have your own mind. You've only ever had a collective mind. There's no such thing as your own mind. So we can get that idea about being an individual out in front of us. This, I would say, is our obligation to do, actually, as moral or even just living beings.

[22:48]

Get all those stories out in front where we can see them and apply a mind that's open to the possibility that there's a whole bunch of stuff I can't see and also bring in a little skepticism. If we are white-identified in this culture, as I am, right, I'm Northern European descended. My grandparents were Canadian. It doesn't exempt me from anything. And... If we're white and we're aligned with the dominant culture in a way that, generally speaking, made us a little snoozy for the first chunk of our life, where we walked around and were just thinking, oh, everyone's like me. We have, I would say, more urgent and more work to do to wake up to get this stuff out in front of us because we have been, or I have been,

[24:03]

and I imagine some of you similarly. You can tell me if I'm wrong. I have been acculturated as a white person to not only not illuminate stuff around dominance and race, but to literally obscure it. I can remember moments from being a child where I would ask something about race or racial issues. You can feel the racial tension when you're a kid. It doesn't matter if you're white or not white. I mean, if you're not white, of course you do. Eventually... I mean, there are studies that show this. It takes longer for little white kids to be like, hey, something's funny. And then you'd ask an adult about it and they'd be like, oh, don't notice. If you're white, here's what most of us heard. Don't notice race, that's racist. I mean, I don't know what they said in their words. I don't think they said those words. But that was the message. If you're noticing that, you're racist. We don't notice that. Does this sound familiar to anyone else who's white out there? I forget at City Center, everyone goes really like... Did anyone else have this experience of asking as a child and having people be like, oh, no, no, we don't notice that.

[25:12]

If we're white, I'm saying. So we were taught obscuration. We were taught mental confusion, I would say. I was talking with my brother about this, who's my biological brother, so he's all white. We're like delayed, I would say. White people are delayed in our mental formations and our language and our capacity to speak about race because somewhere around, like somewhere between four and seven, when we start asking questions, people just shut us down for the most part. That may be different for some children now. I'm hoping, I'm hoping, I'm hoping. I have several children. One of them is Samoan. He's not white. And I spend a lot of my time thinking about the messages he's getting. And it's pretty... difficult to feel like I'm doing right by him and protecting him and also nurturing his resilience in the midst of racism that is deeply implicit in the messages he's getting around him.

[26:21]

And I care about my white kids too, actually, that they're getting these messages. I care about myself. I care about us. The disconnection that white supremacy brings, the devaluation of people is, I mean, I know we all know this, but I want to say it again because I'm not just talking about the big gross ways, but all the tiny, tiny ways is unbelievable levels of delusion. We are like conjuring hell realms every time we participate. And if we're white and we're not doing that work of bringing it out in front of us over and over again, we are participating. Even when we are, actually. The undoing we have to do goes way back into our early programming and brain structures and all sorts of stuff.

[27:24]

I was recently... My kids... They're a number of years apart. I have a number of kids. I have several kids. My two living kids, because I have one in the middle who's not living. My oldest has just turned 16, for those of you who know Kaya. She's 16 years old. And my son is seven, so my kids are far apart. And my older daughter is biological. And my husband, Charlie, is also a white European-descended guy. So Kaya turned out white. And I remember reading through the Little House on the Prairie books with her. And I remember doing a whole bunch of live editing, for those of you who have recently re-encountered those books. They're just incredibly offensive. But I also remember wanting to kind of... She was not really somebody who was inclined to like a lot of hard work.

[28:32]

So I was kind of like, look at these people. You know, they made a house in a day, you know. That's what I was peddling at the time. I'm ashamed to admit now. And literally, I was like trying to leave out whole passages wherever they... It was just so... It's so problematic. These classic books of American... that lots of kids in America read, with the delusion, and this is not the only place that this shows up, that there was this vast expanse of land where nobody was. I mean, it's funny and it's not. And we're here in California, do you know? Like, we have the legacy of the people that plowed all the way across the country with that delusion. Obscuring, obscuring, obscuring, obscuring. Native people, you know? So I started reading them again with my son recently, just because, you know, you're looking for books that a seven-year-old can take in, and chapter books are great.

[29:34]

And I was just like, honey, I can't do it anymore. He's like, let's keep reading those. I'm like, no, I just can't. Let's find some else. It's just too painful to... Right, and that's actually probably part of the story, my very personal story. I wanted to peddle the work ethic, and I ended up peddling racism. you know, with my child, despite my intentions. So, we need to look at these stories. I think that that confusion about individual, or the confusion that leads to all this obscuration depends on individualism. It depends on the delusion of separateness. If we are in touch with how we're connected to other people, dehumanizing them, is it possible? And that might sound remote if we spent most of our life in the United States.

[30:39]

Because it is. Because we've been programmed so strongly. But I really believe that there's something much deeper in our nature that sings about how we're connected that we also know. and we can foster. So, what I would recommend today, anyway, if we would like to start to unravel or continue to unravel or deepen our unraveling of the delusions we carry and the delusions that we've inherited, the first thing I would recommend is kind of simple. And it might sound overly simple, and so I'll qualify it after I say it. But the first thing I recommend, and again, especially if we're white-identified, is turn up in our bodies. Like, make room to feel our physical, embodied, living life.

[31:46]

Again, you know, I'm from New England. I often think about New England like if I could... If I was a visual artist, I would draw a picture of New England. It would be like brains walking around on feet. Or the culture I came from, anyway. I think that disembodiment, for me, is a big part of white culture. The disconnection with a lived sense of what's happening in my living being. Because when we tap into our lived, vulnerable, breathing, heart beating, squishy, often agitated, squirming, living being, we come into a more full picture of our own complex humanity. And whenever we can do that and we look across at another person, it's harder to dehumanize and to separate. If we're old enough, our training will slap back in and we will do it. Oh, there's a blah, blah, blah, you know.

[32:51]

White, male, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And we'll name things unconsciously often. Or there's Henry, you know, or whatever. We'll start naming and our naming will disconnect us. But we can have the intention to keep coming back into the body, ground ourself in our own humanity, our own vulnerability, our own complexity, and then open to the world and notice every living thing in front of me and certainly every living other human being is this vast myriad thing and is way more than I could ever name and is totally deserving of my respect and gratitude. But that really, in my experience for myself, that gesture can be as small as like I feel my feet on the ground. I feel my... I feel my breath breathing. If I'm really desperate, like I'm super cerebral, which definitely happens to me, again, where I'm from, if I put my hand on my heart, it's really, I recommend this.

[34:06]

You know, we might, not a lot of us are socialized to do that. Sometimes it looks a little sentimental. Whatever. If we put our hand on our heart, like there's some knowing, or in our bellies, there's some knowing there that I feel like I have been taught to disavow. And when I touch into it, I'm much more likely, well, first of all, actually, I'm already doing something counter-cultural. I'm going slower. I talk really fast. I think really fast. And again, I came from a culture where that was really problematically so. If we even just breathe, we're slowing down enough to show up in the body. We have a chance to have more choice in what's going to happen next.

[35:11]

I'm doing this awesome training at East Bay Meditation Center called White and Awakening in Sangha. It's a six-month program for white-identified people around race. And there was this consensus happening the last time I was there, but I missed the last month, of how most of our worst kind of racist gaffes are when we're hurrying. And I was like, oh my God, that's true. I would say actually our worst anything gaffes are when we're hurrying. when we're hurrying and we're moving quickly, we're more likely to fall into our acculturated habit, body, mind. Any amount we can slow down opens the space for more choice and literally more freedom. It's literally encouraging liberation in the situation. So I encourage us to, if we want to work with these amazingly

[36:12]

Deep and old and problematic aspects of this world we're inhabiting and this country we're inhabiting. Show up in the body. Make room for that whenever it's possible. And then secondly, I would say, value what we find there. Elevate sensation to a level of like worthy of my consciousness. I've been doing this for a couple years now. I've been really trying to pay attention to my body and like reconnect. There's like tension in my jaw. There's often pressure in my throat. There's different, all sorts of stuff happens in my belly. Tightness in different places. It's really good information. If I can pay attention to the tension in my jaw, then I'm like, oh, I'm nervous. Okay, I'm nervous. much more prone to doing something stupid and not helpful, not skillful.

[37:15]

Okay, I'm going to breathe, I'm going to feel that, and then I'm going to probably do something not so skillful, but I'm going to try. I'm going to make an effort to slow down. And then the third thing I would recommend, but I feel like these build on each other, is to come from love. And what I mean by love is like the big L. Big O, big B, big E. Forget just the big L. All four letters. Billboard size letters. What happens if we move from a place of love and by that I mean relationship, connectedness? If we move from a place of the complexity of how we depend on each other and how we are creating each other, we create one another every single moment. Also in a Reverend Angel Kilda Williams article, she says, what is wrong with us?

[38:19]

What's wrong with a culture that doesn't have love as its central value? That billboard is like, you know, to me says like greed is our central value and it's legit. It is not legitimate. Greed is not legitimate. It is not our inmost request. It's in there, I see it. I'm greedy, definitely. But our base request, our root request, is to be connected. That's what we came here for. We took human infant form so that we could express that fully. What happens when we move from that place? With our actions, with our speech, even with our thoughts, even in the privacy of our own rooms. I've been noticing lately how often in my, again, in my cultural habituation, I've been taught to connect with others by negative kvetching.

[39:27]

Do people know kvetching? Complaining and B-I-T-C-H-Y-I-N-G. can tell I have a seven-year-old, like I've just spent the last five years spelling everything. So when we notice that, again, it's a place I can go to, it's also in my family, like we're going to, we want to connect and so we're going to say something negative about something else or someone else. Does anyone else have this experience? Somebody nod with you. I know that one I'm not alone in because I deal with other people all the time. What if we notice those moments and we feel our breath and we feel our feet on the ground and we're like, oh, hang on a second. Actually, I'm going to subvert the dominant paradigm here and I'm going to come from love and not negativity and not individualism and not disconnection. I was recently rereading Zenju Earthland Manuel's book, The Way of Tenderness.

[40:35]

I highly recommend this book if you haven't read it. It's wonderful. One of the most Zen books I've ever read about how awakening happens in the body. The body is important in Zen. So for those people who are like, it's just a philosophy, I love to study it. Fine, but first have a body. She writes in the introduction to that book, I hope to arouse in my readers' hearts an urgency to attend to our disconnectedness. there is an urgency to attend to our disconnectedness. It is killing us. It's killing us in large ways, like globally, and it's killing us interpersonally. And these tiny gestures of slowing down and coming into our body and noticing what we're doing, that can seem really simple and really personal and like it's just happening in some, you know, like when you're checking out at the grocery store. But those moments...

[41:39]

Literally, you know, culture is not made in huge gestures and like legislation. Those things are important. Huge gestures and legislation matter. But culture happens in these billions and billions of tiny interactions between human beings. So it seriously matters what we do in those moments. If we want to bring liberation to this world, we, I, I need to attend to those tiny, tiny moments. Value the person in front of us completely. Value ourselves so that we can value the person in front of us completely, so that we can attend to our disconnectedness, so that we can bring liberation. Thank you. 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.

[42:43]

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.

[42:58]

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