Shuso Talk

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good morning
so traditionally the first shoe so talk is away seeking mine talk and i'd like to tell you about my life and how i came to practice
but first i'd like to express some gratitude first of all to hold your son
lenders my teacher for encouraging me to practice and keep on practicing and continue to practice and to be myself
i'd also like to express my appreciation for all of you here today all of us practicing together in this valley
and dogan says in regulations for the auxiliary cloud hall where he talks about students being like milk and water it is rare to meet one another and to practice what is rare to practice the support to you and your practice given by this assembly of practitioners
surpasses that which was given by your father and mother
so we're very important to one another and m
i really cherish all the support and friendship by received from many of you and look forward to getting to know with those of you i don't yet know ah during this practice period
and finally i'd like to
i express my gratitude for this beautiful valley in which we practice the creek the mountains which support our practice so deeply
i'd like to dedicate this talk to my father who died this year and february fourth and of course without him i wouldn't be today
and finally i thought i'd like to have a title for my talk and and when i thought about it the best when i found is a line from a poem by jane hirsch field the poem is called tree
and the line is softly calmly immensity taps at your life
advocacy
but the way i came to practices it's hard to
fathom in this sense there's not a straight line there's not a single moment
many causes and conditions so softly calmly immensity taps at your life
so oh with my life i was born in brooklyn new york in nineteen forty
ah my grandparents all immigrated to the united states my mother's parents came from russia and my my grandmother on my mother's side was one of thirteen children so had many ah
people in the extended family and the family was so large they formed a family society called the children of david ah based i think on the seventh generation ancestor david vid on landscape
and i got to know many of my grand effect all of my grandmother's brothers and sisters and when i was growing up occasionally the whole family would i get together at a kosher restaurant and the lower east side and i'd take up a whole room and sometimes we would go on outings with
the park and oh my father always lead the singing on the bus he had a great singing voice
and my my mother's parents when they came to the united states settled on the lower east side of manhattan and they had a stall in a market called the essex street market ah they spoke yiddish and they didn't have much education ah
but they had three children and they really
ah encouraged my mother and her brothers to study so much so that my mother became the valedictorian of her class in high school
a my father's parents came from poland and austria hungary and also came to the lower east side and then soon moved to brooklyn and they were hat makers milliners
one of my favorite memories as a child was when we lived in the bronx from the time i was too and we would get on the subway on a sunday morning and take the train i think we had to take three trains to get to my grandparents' house in brooklyn and when we got there the snow
l of chicken soup just filled the house my grandfather made wonderful chicken soup with parsnips and dill
so my father was born in brooklyn and on
loved
brooklyn and new york he was very athletic as a young man i've seen pictures of him
at the bottom of a tower of young men that would climb on his shoulders and they'd be three high and he was a great swimmer he loved the ocean and swimming and he was a scout and could light a fire without a match things like that
my mother was a grew up in the bronx and my parents met when they were working neither of them were able to go to college they grew up in the time of the depression and although my mother really wanted to go to college and think she went to part of one year they had to work and so they met in my uncle sam
a garment factory was the fabric factory and fell in love got married and they got a canoe they lived in the bronx they they tell these stories of
canoeing on the hudson river with their pup tent and their dog named spike and catching rides on barges and camping along the banks of the hudson river and then when i was born they sold their canoe
it never got to ride in it
so i was the first child and my name was actually alice jane schwartz
i changed my name later
i was named after in jewish families typical to name your children after relatives who have died so i'm alice was i was named after my father's brother arthur who had died at a young age and the jane was after an aunt shana
and i was always sorry they didn't name me shana good chin as a nice name
and then when i was eighteen months old my sister helen was born
and the my family moved to park chester in the bronx a park chester is a com housing apartment complex that was built by the metropolitan life insurance company and there were thousands of families living there and we lived on the eighth floor of an apartment building as
and with a four room apartment and sometimes my mother's mother my grandmother lived with us it was crowded and purchase to was at that time a place where families were either jewish like my family or irish or ital
yeah catholic and all the irish and italian catholic children went to parochial schools so the public school that i went to was almost entirely jewish and it closed on russia china the jewish new year and a yom kippur the day of atonement most of the teachers were jewish as well
the neighborhood has changed quite a bit since i grew up there so i i had the sense of being jewish that was very cultural but my parents never went to synagogue and although we went to relative's house in brooklyn for a passover which is my favorite jewish holiday
and there was always a large gathering there but i didn't really know anything about the jewish religion
my father from about the time i was five got a job in the post office which was a very secure job and he worked at nights in the post office around thirty fourth street to main post office and he worked there for over well for forty years until he retired working at night
and then he got a second job in the mornings at macy's department store as a stock clerk
and he told us he was working hard so that he could send us to college
and it was a tradeoff for me because i hardly ever saw him i really saw him only on sundays and i think i would rather have had more contact with my father but i was also grateful that i did go go to college
so i was the oldest and i was told lots of things like set a good example for your sister and be good and i was pretty good
i loved school and i'm a
i've worked hard in school and done
my parents i think was mostly my mother set up a kind of dichotomy in my family which i think was very helpful in the long run i was considered the smart child and my sister was the pretty child and
i was chubby and i wore glasses and i didn't think of myself as very attractive and
i i my parents really you know praise me when i did well in school so that was a lot of in encouragement to study but i also really loved learning my father told a story i don't know if it's true or not that he taught me the alphabet on one of those are some of those
long subway rides to brooklyn by pointing out letters in the subway ads but i was before i started school and i i did love to read and i remember story hours at the library and take out library books pretty frequently
and then a wonderful thing happened for me when i was ten years old my fourth grade teacher heard about a scholarship for children from non-musical families i don't know how you could tell that a family wasn't
but anyway i went to the henry street settlement on the lower east side of manhattan and had an aptitude test and they decided i had musical aptitude and so i want is a scholarship to study the cello for three years and that was a big was
a wonderful thing for me my cello teacher's name was sydney sandstrom shows scandinavian from sweden and i just recently found out she was a student of pablo casals if any viewed and know about jealous he a great spanish cellist and
i went to to the henry street settlement once a week at first for a cello lessons somehow my mother even though she was working took me because it was a long way on the subway until i was old enough to go by myself every week and then i started taking theory lessons
it's and was in a a junior ensemble and junior chorus and
i started going twice a week and then i applied to go to the high school of music and art which is a public high school in new york but you had to audition either in music or art
then i i did go to music and one thing about the new york school system at that time was that you could skip a grade and junior high school so i did seventh eighth and ninth grade's and two years and so i started music and art at a tenth grade and i was thirteen so as little young
and i remember the first day of school just feeling seeing all these people who looked older than me
the greeting each other with great warmth after the summer and filling very ah shy and i was pretty shy
at first in high school
but music and art was a wonderful school and i my only regret was that i couldn't go for four years because it was on a school where there is so so much life and love of learning and viewed walk down the corridor and here a clarinet or a string quartet and their be students with their
the art portfolios under their arms and
it did have some friends
i had my close friend who i'm still close to her name is linda fisher was her name then and we joined a chorus that was started by one of the teachers at music canada was a renaissance chorus we saying renaissance music and it met on saturdays in the village greenwich
village so we would linda lived in parkchester to so we'd take the train down town and we'd spend the whole day going to chorus and wandering around the village and
we became fans of a music group called the new york pro musica which was one of the early music one of the first early music groups playing renaissance music before bot
and we would find out whenever one of the people in new york pro musica was giving a free concert and we'd go and
linda's as linda became a music teacher and a voice teacher and
we it's it's nice to have a friend still who i've known for so long
so a couple of other things about music and art
i was very
interested in lots of subjects i had a math teacher named mr starr who was the first person who told me to stand up straight which people have been telling me all my life and are still working on it
but he really inspired me to love algebra so much so that i started i got some other students together we started an advanced algebra class
i also loved science and i loved writing there was a i wrote for the high school newspaper which was called overtone and i took a creative writing class which was a wonderful class we'd read essays and then we'd have to write
our response to the essays and so we read emerson and thoreau and
as those writers really inspired me and
also had a an english teacher who encouraged us to memorize poetry and there a couple of poems i remember still that i learned then one of them i just want to say few words of it
was it's part of a sonnet by wordsworth and it's the world is too much with us late and soon getting and spending we lay waste our powers little we see in nature that is ours
and that palm just appeal to me so much i think maybe because i saw how hard my father was working and he in the summers we we went to the to the catskills and rented a bungalow and my mother and sister and i would be there all summer and my father would come
i'm on weekends and also on his two week vacation and he loved being outdoors he taught me to swim and we'd go berry picking and things like that
and somehow even though i lived in new york i really acquired on a love for nature and
during those years and i was in high school i went to girl scout camp and i was in a pioneering unit one summer and went on my first a canoe trips and overnight camping and ah
really enjoyed being out of the city
so when it was time to apply for college i i wanted to leave new york i'd never been anywhere else and
i heard about antioch college in yellow springs ohio and decided to go i was accepted to antioch and there are few things about antioch that were pretty unique the slogan was more than books they had a work study for they still do antioch is still there at a work study program
i'm so you would study for three months and then have a co-op jobs for three months in various cities all over the united states and it didn't have any fraternities or sororities there were students on the governing body of the school and
they have folk dancing as the main social activity
so i started antioch when i was sixteen and
couldn't figure out what to major in i started out thinking i would major in physics and ah
i took physics in the spring of my first year and it was so beautiful and yellow springs there was a great park to walk in and i couldn't bear stay inside to do the physics labs so my physics professor advised me to drop physics
the which i did and then i switched to philosophy of science and then just to math and then to sociology and it's very confusing
but one thing that happened after my first quarter at antioch stands out for me i took the greyhound bus back to new york to visit my family and my father met me
at the bus station and we were walking across town to the subway and we passed the office of saying which was an organization of for same nuclear policy one of the early anti nuclear organizations and i had heard about it at antioch antioch was a very liberal college and there were many activists on campus so i wanted to go in
and get some literature and my father wouldn't let me go in a kind of froze and then he said what difference can one person make any way and i i always remembered that and kind of after that
began looking to see what difference one person could make and i think he was so frightened because it was the time of the mccarthy era and
in many people got in trouble for their political views but an
that's the closest i can understand why he had such a strong reaction to it
ah
so antioch had an education abroad program and the what i didn't mention is that because i thought i was going to be a science major i started studying german literature and started studying german
and had a wonderful german professor and i really loved german so when it was time to do antioch education abroad i decided to go to vienna
our i could study german and music i was still playing the cello and also was interested in psychology and that's where sigmund freud came from so i'm going to vienna
and i loved piano or at first lived with a viennese woman who had an extra room in her house and i found a group of international students at quaker house in vienna and many of them were music students and we played music together and took walks in the vienna woods and
and went to the opera you could get a standing room tickets for four shillings which with that time was the equivalent of sixteen cents or went to the opera and then as i learned german i was able to go to the theater vienna has an incredibly rich cultural life and also it was in vienna that i
had my first relationship with a woman i met her at quaker house and i needed to place to live and stern i've got a room in her apartment she was an artist a painter from on her path english and half viennese a hernia was lisa
and we lived together for about six months and then i wanted to go to israel because i really really wanted to understand more about being jewish so she came to israel with me and to other viennese friends and we all went to a kid
votes for the summer ah and then i decided to stay and study hebrew at another kibbutz for there's an open up a israel has a wonderful i think it still does but at that time this was a nineteen sixty ah
i'm a wonderful
program where you could live on a kibbutz have a kibbutz family adopt you and study hebrew and the the kibbutz i went to was in the north of israel and had been founded by dutch jews and also there were some czech jews and coast
oak german so while i was struggling to learn hebrew the other people in the open where a young people who were immigrating from north africa and romania we had no language and common so i might kibbutz family spoke german and i became actually very fluent in german while i was living in israel stray
change better
that's what happened
and when i returned i was very drawn to kibbutz life say that was the for my first experience of living in a community and ah
was how hard people work to how to that just hard but how willing they were to do whatever needed to be done rather them what degree they had and
when there was a a birth or a death the whole community was involved in the celebration or the morning and the holidays were celebrated together remember hanukkah which comes in december as a festival of light and
every family had a menorah in the dining room people ate together and the dining room was just full of light and
so i i was tempted to stay in israel but i also thought it would be good to finish college so i left and went back to the states but i had stayed too long to graduate with my class from antioch so i went to berkeley where my sister helen was awesome
studying and i decided to stay in berkeley and eventually i i got a job and i transferred to u c berkeley and i became a german major ah
in the summer of
nineteen sixty through just before my last year at uc berkeley i joined a voter registration project in north carolina was sponsored by the american friends service committee and a group of black and white college students came together and we were housed in a black church
yeah and we went out every day to register people to vote and greensboro was quite segregated at that time it was shocking to me i had never been in the south and it was around that time when the woolworth's soda fountain counter was integrated and at the end of
the time we were there we all got on a bus and we were given police escort out of greensborough because we black and white students together and we went to the march on washington and nineteen the famous one where martin luther king gave his talk and joan baez was singing and they were it
some incredible experience bus loads of black children from freedom schools where they are singing and
people from the labor movement and it was the very inspiring event
one other thing happened for me during that time in greensborough one of the participants was a woman named nora and somehow we got lost one day and ah she kissed me that began a very important relationship
so i went back to berkeley and she was going to antioch but when i graduated the next summer she came to drove out to california and we spent the summer in san city right near monterey we rented a little cabin and we studied french at the monterey language school
cause i had majored in german i was thinking about going to graduate school in german literature and been accepted at a few schools and i was gonna go to harvard
so i was learning french and
somehow going to graduate school didn't really in german literature didn't feel right and
at the time i thought it was that i couldn't imagine living them are spending the rest of my life in a university but i also think that it was such a big stretch i was the first person in my family to finish college and i didn't know any college professors except for the ones that i had at uc berkeley who were all men and
and i didn't have really a mentor and so i
spent the summer learning french and then
i thought maybe i would go to france and continue learning french i didn't really have a plan a solid plan but i got a ticket to france and nora and i drove back east and stopped to visit her family in ohio and somehow i got poisoned or a poison ivy
we were walking in the woods and i arrived and the east coast with really bad case of poison ivy i was posted to leave and about a week and i went to visit cousins in boston who am i got to know
this was a family that was very important to me everywhere i don't think i'll take the time to talk about the now but it my cousins sylvia who
i respected greatly just asked me what i was doing going to france giving up graduate school she thought i was wasting my life i was only twenty three but she thought it was wasting my life and i got cold feet and it didn't go to france and i didn't go to graduate school and i moved to boston
and looked for a job and nora move there also we shared an apartment and
i got a job as a research assistant at a mental hospital working for to psychiatrists they were doing a study of outpatient
clinic patients and part of my job and included interviewing many many patients using a questionnaire that we developed
while i was working there i looked in a
now we call it dear sam that said
a book that had all the psychiatric diagnoses in it and there was one that said character disorder homosexual
when i saw that i got really scared what was wrong was there's something wrong with me i didn't know anyone else who is gay or lesbian i am
it didn't know anyone i could talk to about it and i talked to nora about it and when she went back to antioch at the end of december she had she was only there for three months i decided to end the relationship and i got really depressed
i got dermatitis actually and went to it
dermatologist who said he thought it was depressed and
i
decided that i would just that tried to go out with men after that and
i went well and the other thing that happened and in that year was i decided to go to social work school so i was working in this mental hospital where they were psychiatrists psychologists and social workers and i found i really enjoyed talking to the patients that i interviewed and i wanted to know me
more what why were some of them
one of the questions i had to ask for example was ah how many times have you moved in your life and found some people had never moved and other people were always moving and the always moving ones there were other things that other problems that were ah kind of
i'm going on in their lives and i i wanted to understand more so
but i didn't want to go to graduate school for four more years or seven years to be a psychiatrist or i decided to go to social work school and i went to smith college school for social work in northampton massachusetts school cygwin as some of you know cygwin she's going there now
ah and
smith is a a wonderful school it was at that time very psycho analytically oriented and you go to school in the summers and do all your coursework and then there are two ten month field work placements where you work in an agency
so you really get a chance to do social work and on
i graduated from smith and nineteen sixty seven and
got my first job at a university hospital in boston as a psychiatric social worker working with outpatient clinics and mute outpatient ask is me outpatient adults
university hospital is in a part of boston that is called the south end and at that time there were people of many different ethnic groups living in the south end and
i was able to do some home visits to visit families and individuals in their homes and oh
was a wonderful experience to work with people in their own homes as well as to see people who came to the clinic and
during that time on two things happened once a
i was interested in doing some therapy for myself and started therapy with us a psychiatrist i told him about my relationships with men and he said that he thought i would be cured when i was in a state of my tell them about my relationships with women and he said he thought i would be cured when i was in a
long term stable relationship with a man
i never got cured
and the other thing that happened with of i started studying a viola da gamba i'd played cello up till then all my life and i cello teacher when i lived in berkeley had a viola da gamba in her house maybe some of you don't
know what a viola da gamba is a true
it it's a six stringed instrument that's played with a bow like the cello but it comes in different sizes and it was played it's a renaissance instruments so his music was written for the viola da gamba of before the cello like before the time of bach and it's often play
lead is this called a consort of files would you have trouble which is about the size of a violin a tenor and bass and
it's very it's a softer sounding then
modern stringed instruments and they're often played with harpsichords or recorders and i found a viola da gamba teacher in new haven and i would take the train every week to study with her shoe she would had her name was martha blackman and she had played in that original new york promusicae
a so i found other people who played early music and i got so interested in it that i was actually thinking of leaving social work too
become a musician and i wasn't getting along with my supervisor at university hospital
she was
i'd say i wanted to try different things i wanted to do some work with groups i wanted to do some work with couples and she
i didn't think i i was ready to do that and
ah so it was a combination of feeling kind of stifled at my job and really loving music and then one evening i was riding my bike used to ride my bicycle i lived in cambridge and i'd ride across the mass ave bridge was a few miles to the hospital i was wrong
heading home on halloween evening and a car door open in front of me and i hit it and fell into traffic and
i woke up on the
i think i woke up and we know i think i was unconscious for a little while i woke up in great pain and an ambulance came and took him to the hospital and turned out that i had broken my pelvis and my left leg and
that was very difficult time in my life i was in the hospital for ten weeks and there's no way to mend a broken pelvis except to not move fiscally and
soon after was in the hospital they discovered i had some very deep bruises on my buttocks and so i couldn't just lie on my back so i was on a circular electric bed and every six hours it would be flipped so i'd either be on the back or i'll be on my stomach and my leg was in a cast and down
so it happened on halloween so i was there for my birthday and thanksgiving and
i couldn't do very much you know
i can move with my hands and my head and friends came and brought music to listen to and on my birthday music group i was in cayman serenaded the was just amazing to hear this music because renaissance music in the hospital and my cousins who lived in boston also came in
visited and brought me thanksgiving meal that was home cooked
and i spent time with friends in the interesting thing was a discovered that because i couldn't move i'm when friends came we had some really quality time in the hospital and i also experienced the hospital as a very caring place which i had hadn't kind of negative thoughts of
our hospitals i've never been ill but the nurses took such good care of me and
before i left the hospital i had to have surgery i had a skin graft on my ah scars all they were now scars add and
knee surgery and so i had to i learned to walk first with a walker had to re-learn how to walk and then on crutches and i left the hospital on crutches and
about a week after i left the hospital my leg began to swell up and
when fact to the doctor and i had phlebitis a blood clot in my left leg so i had to go back to the hospital for another week and all in all i was out of work for about three months
and one thing i didn't mention is that the night before the accident i'd have gone out on a date with someone and we'd slept together and so somehow i felt guilty that i mean i associated that with
my accident and
i had
just a lot of guilt about having cause somehow caused the accident and
when i left the hospital also i found that the that i had really deep scars on my buttocks and
it was very hard to accept my body at that time and
when i went back to work my supervisor told me that she wanted to fire me because she didn't think that i was ah
it somehow that i i i i guess the other pieces while i was in the hospital i had a lot of time to think and i decided i wanted to continue on in social work and didn't want to become a musician so when she's told me she wanted but she did fire me
it was ah i i will glow
and i started looking for another social work job
so i would say this was one of the hardest times in my life and and yet out of it some amazingly wonderful things came one was on in the process of looking for another job i found a job at cambridge hospital in boston ma cambridge hospital in cambridge
edge
where my
it it was a job working in child psychiatry and pediatrics and the supervisor was a psychiatrist who as a community psychiatrist who really believed in group work and working with families and couples and encouraged me to do work in some of the neighborhood clinics and cambridge and
my work kind of took off blossomed i really enjoyed that job
and
i continued to play music although i decided it wasn't going to be my career and i've found a a music group of people we we've formed a consort the greenwood concert and played a lot of concerts and
one of the people who taught early music one of our teachers
and i had a of
so there are a group of early musicians who had been our teachers who bought a place in maine that we went to visit and
while there i saw book called don't push the river a book by barry stevens about gestalt therapy and down read the book cover to cover and decided i wanted to learn about gestalt therapy and down
so
i heard about excellent at that time and i got a catalogue and a convinced of friend to go to a workshop a gestalt workshop at esalen with me
and in the at the last minute she couldn't go so i went to iceland by myself and somehow in flying from san francisco de monterrey my luggage got lost and i arrived at esalen and first thing i saw was the swimming pool and i love to swim but i didn't have my be
bathing suit
and there were plenty of people swimming naked but i have my scars and i just didn't feel comfortable but i decided to do it anyway so i went and ah
and that was the beginning of a lot of healing that week it was only a week at esalen but it made a huge impact on my life
i had my first massage at esalen and witness message was working on my back i could feel kind of drops of water falling on me and it turned out that she was crying that she had had a broken back and working on my scars just brought up
issues for her but it was actually very healing for me
that she could touch me and not shy away from touching my scars and in the workshop the gestalt workshop i also worked on
the about my scars and ended up leaving i felt on the other thing that happened at esalen was it was the first time where i saw someone meditating someone was sitting on a rock meditating so it's about i was about thirty three at that time and
when i came back to boston i put i found out about a place right outside boston called associates for human resources that offered training and gestalt therapy and i took a leave of absence from my job and was an intern there for three months and interestingly
jack kornfield was working in the office there and he took the whole group of he taught meditation one morning and after showing us sitting meditation and walking meditation we walked to the local ice cream place and did some eating meditation
ah and
i decided to see one of the gestalt therapist there for a private session and ah
i told her about my feelings about women and she said i've had feelings like that myself which was a total shock he was someone who i respected who is a mental health professional who didn't think there was anything wrong with having feelings about women and that again was
for me and by this time it was nineteen seventy three so there was a whole different climate around being gay or lesbian it was the big there was some the beginning of the gay rights movement there was a women's bookstore in that had just opened in cambridge
age there was a woman's newspaper called sojourner
which i i wrote far with the music critic for a while i went to lots of women's music concerts and i went my first gay pride march and really came out in a whole different way with a lot of support and
it was a real
so different from the feelings i had had about being a lesbian earlier on
so
ah when it was near the end of my three month internship at associates for human resources and i was supposed to go back to my job at cambridge hospital
one of the exercises that we did i was some guy was somewhat conflicted about going back
to traditional social work and we did a guided meditation where
gestalt uses a lot of but it is this the imagination a lot i think that's one of the things that appealed to me about it so there was a guided meditation where you were going somewhere with a backpack on your back and then you would take out the contents of the backpack and have the different items
in the backpack talk so i had this
box of colored pens that wouldn't stay closed and as i became i was the box of colored pens that wouldn't stay closed and i realized i didn't want that going back to that job even though it was a great job felt like closing the box and i didn't want to go back and i didn't go back
i submitted my resignation my supervisor told me that i was wasting my wasting time i could cause theme came up and and giving up a brilliant career in social work and
so what i did instead was a number of the staff at the associates for human resources had been doing a training called rica
and it was a training put together by a chilean man named oscar chazal and i decided to do a forty day training and vermont in yreka and a record so it combined meditation something called kite psycho calisthenics that was like yoga or we ate
vegetarian food we did visualizations montrose and lots of different things and that was really my introduction to buddhism although it was in this amalgam of other practices and i lived in yreka house after that and started a
private practice in psychotherapy and in that house
i met a woman named arbor and we became very close and about was from jamaica and i
i had lived in ghana for a number of years and she was very interested in tibetan buddhism so after that year living in a dump a living in an yreka house we moved to a dharma da to house in cambridge and i went to my first retreat which was at common chilling in vermont as
and chew gum trungpa was alive in those days that i can remember they've been giving a dharma talk coming in our lake everybody waiting and that's what i remember more than the content of the talk
and during that time i was also given my first dharma name by trungpa rinpoche's with dharma lake feast and there was an initiation i checked with diana i think it was the karmapa came and and i got a initiated and red string around my wrist
an obvious said that meant that i would be a buddhist for life but i didn't really believe it and i
so anyway i
lived in the damo da to for for that year and then it didn't feel like the right practice for me so i went to my first retreat at the insight meditation society in barry and kept on going once or twice a year i'd go for a ten day retreat and try to sit in between i'm gonna try to face
fast forward a little bit
so this was in the mid seventies and
i i had a so had a private practice in cambridge and was going to retreats and then in nineteen eighty two a friend told me about joanna macy's work and i went to a workshop with joanna
i'm joanna is a buddhist ah
scholar and activist and at that time she was doing workshops called despair and personal power in the nuclear age and
this was a weekend workshop with about sixty people in it and
in that workshop i realized that
that i had a had a really deep concern about is still did about the threat of nuclear war my activism had been kind of on a back burner and
i i have felt inspired at the end of the workshop to
ah find some friends three of us formed a support group and i wanted to learn how to lead to spare and impoundment workshops and i had already been working with groups and so it wasn't such a big stretch and i i went to a couple of trainings and began leading to spare and empowerment workshops i also joined a women's
civil disobedience group at that time and oh we were inspired by the women of greenham common and we protested at a place in new york state the seneca army base and climbed over the fence along with there are hundreds of women who climbed over and got arrested and
ten thousand i the first time but not the last time i did civil disobedience around anti nuclear issues and then around the war in nicaragua and the u s government's participation in that
and i continued to
do some work with joanna macy and at the end of one of her workshops i got the idea that i wanted to go to japan to lead despair and empowerment workshops and i spent about a year it networking with people in japan and
the
learning some japanese and
raising money and nineteen eighty six i went for three weeks and offered despair and empowerment workshops in tokyo and kyoto and i went to hiroshima and nagasaki
i was
extremely moving and then the next year i went to australia to lead some workshops and fell in love with australia and of
trying to condense this so i lived in australia went to australia i went back and lived there for three years and worked with a group of activists i counseled women at a women's health center and went to retreats christopher titmouse visited that part of australia was northern new south wales and there
lot of buddhists in that area and

a christopher duty or retreat every year in bodhgaya so i decided a middle of my last year it turned out to be my last year in australia to go to bodhgaya and said ah his retreat in india and
what i didn't mention is that through my work with joanna macy and there was a whole network of people who were working with her leading to spare and empowerment workshops i met friend pv who became my partner and friend
had written a book called hard politics and
the australian into help group that i was part of decided to hold a heart politics conference and invited friend to australia and proud and i fell in love and even though i'd known her since nineteen eighty two i hadn't really she'd been more a colleague and
when i first met her at an inter help gathering she was leading a workshop on terror for people who were terrified about nuclear war and you had to be you had to really be terrified to go to the workshop
had i was terrified of friends so i didn't go and over the but i'll be the years as i got to know her i could read i got to really appreciate her a big heart and her real commitment to social change work and am
ah
when i really connected with her she had found out she was hiv positive so she was also vulnerable and a way she had never been before and so in
she came to australia she invited i told her i was going to india she was working in india every year in varanasi on a project to clean the ganges so she wanted to show me her india and after christopher's retreat i went to buy an icy and ah spent about a week with friend and foreigners
city and met all the people she worked with their on the ganges project and then she went back to california and i went back to australia and we rode and called and she invited me to
i live with her in san francisco not long story short i did
to make it short and on
ah we lived in oakland and
the very first week i i i was living with friend she took me to a synagogue in san francisco she was a member of metropolitan community church and there was a synagogue up the street called congregation to as the hub which means congregation golden gate trust synagogue
with special outreach to gay and lesbian jews and a gay rabbi and the minute i went into congregation chose a how i felt very at home and became a member and a year later friend and i had a ceremony of commitment and at congregation chars a have with the minister
of metropolitan community church the rabbi and joanna macy so we had jewish buddhist and christian
the ceremony with all our friends and my parents came and i was quite wonderful and my work shifted because i when i moved to the bay area i had a social work license that was good for massachusetts but it wasn't good for california and i started studying to get a california license and in
the meantime
i was doing various social change projects and friend had promised since i loved australia so much that we would go back there every year and we she had developed a workshop on and something called strategic questioning a tool for social change and we went back to australia and lead workshops every year and saw
our old friends and i i also wrote a something about a support groups for activists because i had been in an activist support group the whole time i was in boston and then the three years in australia and i joined another group that friend had been instance nineteen eighty two and activists support group in the
bay area so
on the book the little book that i started on expanded and was published by new society publishers so i was working on that and then a friend got a teaching job in australia for three years just around the time i finally got my social work license in california so we
went to australia and we were also going to india and i gave up trying to find a job in social work and just said okay this is my work working with friend she had an organization started an organization called crabgrass working for social change and crab grass is a kind of gray
ras that has very deep roots so if you pull up one piece of it it comes up somewhere else and that was a great image for social change work could you can kind of stop it so i just want to briefly mention the most i think that one of the a couple of wonderful things that we
dead
when we heard about the war and the former yugoslavia friend and was very very touched by hearing about the mass rapes in bosnia and wanted to do something to help the women who had been raped so she wrote a letter to about sixty friends and twenty friends in australia asking
people to make small bundles of things that refugees my refugee women might need practical things like so for ash shampoo lotion handkerchiefs and other response was incredible
we got thousands of packages from all over the united states and thousands in australia so we went to the former yugoslavia together and with a friend from australia and sometime is much too long a story to get into how we deliver the packages to the refugees
but was that kind of
seeing a situation and being able to respond that i really appreciated about friend and finding out of a skillful means it has something that people also can join in on
so and the other project that grew out of the work in varanasi was a gathering together women who were working on water issues in different parts of the world and we went to the beijing women's conference and nineteen ninety five and did a couple of workshops about women and water that women from
all the continents came to and we would hurt hearing about the water the terrible
shortages of clean water and difficulty in keeping water clean and mostly women were dealing with these issues carrying water for long distances and so we organized a to women and water conferences one environment see and one in katmandu nepal i learned a lot about water
and
so while this was going on on my work with friend
when i'm moved
to the bay area i also wanted to find a place to sit and i went to spirit rock cause i had a connection with jack kornfield but it didn't feel right to me
there and then i went to green gulch and green gulch
it just reminded me so much i forgot to mention when i lived in australia i lived on a biodynamic farm ah that had a meditation hall and it was about thirty years old and on there were cows and a big a organic garden everyone worked in the garden every week was called dominant or so
so green gulch reminded me of dominant a and i love the fact that there was a farm and that people had been living there together and practicing for so long and so i started going to green gulch first on sundays and then
i did guess practice couple of times and
then part of a full practice period and my very first practice discussion there was with belinda
and am
i felt an affinity with her and part of it ah so i began to work with the buddhist peace fellowship and joined the board of the buddhist peace fellowship and know that linda had been president of the board
i became president of the board of vps and
so the
there was a ah
there are many reasons why i asked linda to be my teacher and she said she would if i agreed to sit every day so that was the beginning of my sitting every day and
but i received a layered nation n
may ninety eight and the name i was given as courageous wind devotion jewel and the very next day friend and i went to yugoslavia to do s'more work
and that name really gave me heart gave me courage
ah so
i continued to practice a green gulch and also at berkeley's than center because we were living in oakland and on by kitchen
and

i did my first practice period as a non-resident at city center and
sometime during that practice period i had the thought i could really lived here i liked there's something about
the practice at city center that felt very strong to me and
so
at the same time i was as i was practicing every day going to berkeley center and and my commitment to practice was growing stronger if there was a and a lot of difficulty in my relationship with friend about my practice and also i then i stop
added to work for the buddhist peace fellowship half time so i couldn't travel with her as much and we had different takes on it i thought that having little more of separation was beneficial for the relationship but she experienced it as great loss and
so ah
finally i decided i wanted to live at city center and we thought we would do it
trial of staying together in our relationship while i was at city center and see each other twice a week and and i realized at the end of our two month trial period that i wanted to stay of city center and that the relationship wasn't just was
hunt sustainable for me so it was very sad for me and for both the bus and
it took a long time for that rift to heal now friend and i once again in communication and i think it a place of mutual respect she came to my ordination which meant a great deal to me
so after living at city center for a year and a half
i came to tassajara and talked with linda truth about it i wanted to come for one practice period so i could keep my job at buddhist peace fellowship but linda suggested coming for a year and i agreed and came for a year and here i am and it's now four years and
and
i think i might just end here
this a lot i left out buddy
i've been talking for a long time and you've probably kind of
ah need to stretch but i'd want would like to
and with jane hirsch fields palm tree and just be before that i'd just like to say
that i'm aware that this is a time and the practice period where there's kind of i think of it as a steep learning curve for everyone so many of us are in new positions not only the tongariro students learning all the different ah jobs that you learned
yeah but many new senior staff people and other people doing new positions and that is also for me a new position and i just
take up i'd i'd just take a lot of heart from the way that we're all continuing to learn and
no challenging ourselves this way
and i want to say especially to the tongariro students that i look forward to having tea with you and getting to know you during this practice period and hearing all of your way seeking mine talks
so this is the palm tree
it is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house
even in this one lifetime you will have to choose
that great com being this clutter of soup pots and books
already the first branch tips brush at the window
softly calmly immensity taps at your life
thank you very much
may i