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. Hello, everybody. And is my voice okay? You can hear me? Good. I'm in Minnesota in the basement. And I'm very, very happy to be here. It's kind of an auspicious occasion for me. I never dreamed that I would be talking at San Francisco Zen Center. You have been in my psyche since the 70s. And I just thought I would start that out because it's the first paragraph of my book. I guess the reason I'm here is I'm talking about my book called Untangling Karma, Intimate Zen Stories on Healing Trauma.

[01:11]

So Tia, who has been a good friend of mine, recommended that I talk here. And I'm, oh, I feel so honored, really, to talk at what we jokingly call the mothership. in Minnesota. So, I don't know, are any of you old enough to remember this? And my husband very nicely enlarged it. This was on the back cover of the first Tassajara cookbook. And this is what I would, Katagiri Roshi used to say, You have an original bodhicitta. You have an original reason for your spiritual life. And this photo was my original reason for my spiritual life. I wanted to be like that in the kitchen. And the person has a kind of smirky, funny smile on his face or her face.

[02:26]

connection, a deep connection I have with your lineage. So I'd like to start with gratitude. I wrote a book about healing. And mostly I wrote it because I needed a lot of healing in my life. And I What happens in Zen and in Buddhism in general when you come into the practice with a very disturbed emotional body? And I kind of think, excuse me for saying this, but I kind of think that Zen is a little underdeveloped. in dealing with people who have had a lot of trauma in their life or who are very emotionally distraught.

[03:32]

We have a lot of incredible, incredible gifts to give to the world, the Zen practice. But I wrote this book because I had to find other ways as well as Zen to help me navigate my emotional life. So I'd like to express gratitude about my healing. I had the time and the money to do Zen practice. I had the time and the money to do a lot of psychotherapy. I had the time and the money to... study nonviolent communication. I had the time, but you don't need money to do 12-step recovery. And in a way, I could call this a deep, deep gratitude, and I do.

[04:40]

But in another way, I could say this also came from my privilege in my location in society. that I had the time and the money to do all these different modalities. And I'm so grateful for that, really. And I think it's kind of odd that, not odd, actually, it's very telling that the 12-step recovery program, which is free and is highly accessible, is a little bit dismissed in our culture. So I'd just like to honor that. I used a lot of different modalities to heal with, I would say, Zen as my base. And I was very, very fortunate that my karma led me to weave all these modalities together because I needed them.

[05:45]

I needed them. I did a podcast with Shoren that's up now on SparkZen. And the first question she asked me was, why did you write such a frank, vulnerable, exposing book? And it is terribly exposing if you read it. Now, unfortunately, now I have to talk about it. I didn't have to only write it, but now I have to talk about it. And when I was, I've been an artist my whole life, and when I was a teenager, I got this principle about art, that if you go really deep, if you scour the bottom of what you're dealing with, that that will make what you're doing artistically available to, kind of it'll make it universal or more open to humanity.

[06:56]

Lots of people will be able to relate to it because you went as deep as you could. And whether that, I don't even know if that's the right philosophy or not, but I've had that philosophy about art since I was in high school. And that's what I did when I wrote this book. And also, what I found, now that it's written and finished, is that it was also a modality for my healing. Although everything I wrote in the book, I had talked about before. I had talked about it in psychotherapy. I had done... Step four, which is writing all your defects of character, your stories about your life. I had done all of that. But I still felt kind of anxious inside. So what was that, I thought?

[07:58]

This is after 50 years of Buddhism. And also as my students at Clouds and Water started to call me Roshi. Ooh. is this how a Roshi feels? I asked myself. So I decided again to, I feel like at that point, my personal karma, my personal history, I had somewhat digested. Oh, you know, what happened to me as a child, what happened to me during my early life. So if I've digested my personal story, what was left that was giving me this anxiety? And that's when I began to explore intergenerational trauma. And a lot of the book is about placing my trauma in a larger perspective, in the system perspective

[09:06]

And in history. And that actually gave me a lot of relief. And I would say by the writing of this book, the metabolizing of it, the releasing of it, I have actually had quite a bit of freedom coming to me now after 50 years of studying Zen. Oddly, I got the freedom by actually going into my stories. So that's a little controversial, I think, in the Buddhist community. Intimate stories is in the title. And I think, if I may say, I think it's kind of a female way of teaching that we tell stories about our life and how I actually used the principles of Zen and the principles of spirituality to untangle my stories.

[10:15]

But I couldn't only think of my stories personally. I had to think of my stories systemically. And that's when I really began to understand interdependence. You know, in some ways, I hate to say this. It's a confession. I think that a lot of my Zen life was about me becoming free. And I didn't realize, actually, that there is no me. I understood that from transcendental mental states that I got in. from sitting for long periods of time, then I felt that there was no me. But I didn't understand that in terms of my stories. The late Thich Nhat Hanh, Dayosho, he has this phrase, self is made of not-self.

[11:28]

I is made of non-I elements. And I just really began to penetrate that phrase because I started to see that I was a reflection of my parents, of history, of what was currently in fashion when I was growing up, which was hippies. All of those outside factors were how my structure, was built that I call an ego. And when I studied all of those factors, I actually could see, could see there was no centralized person, that I was a reflection of my conditioning. And that's the deepest part for me of having written a book all about stories of my life.

[12:30]

You know, We talk about, what do they call it in Buddhism? Not depersonalization. Oh, I'm not going to remember the word. But we want to depersonalize our stories. And the irony for me is that I had to go into my story, deeply into my story, before I could see it wasn't personal. It was a reflection of all the conditions, the conditions of my birth. I was born in 1951, and my parents were Jewish. And the Jewish community had barely, not even barely, digested the genocide of the previous decade. So that was highly influential.

[13:31]

in the making of my psychic structure. And until I really delved into internalized antisemitism, which is the first chapter of the book, I didn't get where this anxiety was coming from. And it was coming from being brought up in the Jewish community in the 50s. And not only that, you know, thousands of years. Jews having oppression. And the scientists are now finding that oppression actually changes your chromosomes. They elongate the telomeres on the ends of the chromosomes. So the next generation is more likely to have symptoms because of that. And I also had a deep hope that if I went into my internalized antisemitism, that that would also register with other people who were also oppressed.

[14:47]

And I've been talking to people, and it seems like it might be true that what I talk about actually relates, particularly that if you're an oppressed person, You know, I'm speaking about race. I'm speaking about religion. I'm speaking about political oppression. That you carry around self-hate, which is coming from outside. But actually, that's an external thing. And how do we heal that? Heal that so that we can have... the clarity of love and the clarity of freedom of choice and the things that come with enlightenment or liberation, that has to be dealt with, or at least in my case, it had to be freed up.

[15:50]

So the book talks about a lot of things that are, I feel that, well, you're not really supposed to talk about them. You're not supposed to talk about internalized anti-Semitism and you're not supposed, well, we're beginning to talk about race. There's one chapter in my book, which is about racial injustice. And there's a chapter about, you know, I also was very influenced by the late Bernie Glassman. and his plunges. And I went, plunges means that you go to some place that is so startling that it takes you out of your concepts. You just can't hold on to what you're thinking about or what your ideas are or what you think the solution is. Your mind is kind of blown and you enter into what he called don't know mind. And so I went with him when I knew that I needed to investigate my Jewish heritage, because now I was a Buddhist.

[17:06]

I never talked about being Jewish. I let it go as if it was inconsequential that I was raised Jewish. It's not inconsequential. There was a lot of internal vibrations because of that. Bernie in the peacemaker's order. And so I did that. And then maybe four years later, I went with the Jesus for Peace pilgrimage, which was going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the, what was it, the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing. I went there with Chosen Bays and what's their name? Great Vow Monastery.

[18:07]

I'm a little nervous, so I have to think about the words. So I tried to explore this issue in my life very physically and very embodied. It was very, very beneficial for me. And it was in Hiroshima that I kind of got this idea that there was no centralized self. Because in Hiroshima, I was a Jewish American woman dressed like a Japanese man. on a mission with Jizo, which the Japanese culture thinks that's just for kids, you know, like a cartoon character. It was so mixed up.

[19:10]

And I didn't know who I was. At the very end, I didn't know who I was. And that was very disconcerting. And I realized at that point that I was a reflection, that I was a reflection of the conditions that preceded me. It was very profound. Profound. Let me stop at that for a second. And it was in... It was in Auschwitz-Birkenau that I saw or felt the conditions that made my father. And my dad was a very, very angry man. It makes me sad to say that.

[20:15]

He felt he had a lot to prove. He was in World War II, and his whole life was proving that he wasn't an animal, that he could get status, fame, money. He could rise to the top, and he did. My parents succeeded at being very powerful people in the Jewish community, and it was very difficult for their children and difficult for me. to have those as the primary values. So I had a lot of resentment, to say the least, against my parents. And I separated from them. I became a Buddhist. I married a Goy, a Goyim, as we would say in Yiddish. I was running away with my hair on fire.

[21:18]

And I guess I'm going to read this as kind of... You know, I'm improvising what I say, although I have kind of a chart of what I'm supposed to say. So I got right into it. I hope it's a little heavy. I hope it's okay. But I'm going to read you the moment where I forgave my dad. And... Well, I want to talk about forgiveness, but I usually talk about it at the end of the talk, but here I am at the beginning. But let me just say something about forgiveness. Forgiveness is, for me now, one of the highest spiritual qualities. Joan Sutherland has a wonderful quote, and just the gist of it is, can we forgive the world?

[22:21]

For being the world. Or can we forgive samsara. For being samsara. Can we forgive. That the world is made of dukkha. So that we can be free. May I be free. Because I forgive. So. And I'd also like to say. You can't start out with forgiveness. I think a lot of people try to force that. There's a beautiful Vipassana meditation, probably some of you know it, about forgiving other people, forgiving yourself. And it's a three-part, forgiving other people, forgiving yourself, and forgiving the acts that you've done to other people. It's a beautiful meditation, and I've worked quite a bit with it. But I noticed in my healing that I never got to forgiveness until I was more than three quarters into digesting the pain.

[23:32]

You can't forgive until you digest the pain of the action or the insult. And that really goes to something else I wanted to talk about. which is this book is a lot about consequences, the consequences of World War II, the consequences of slavery, the consequences of sexual abuse, because we don't talk about them. We don't want to feel the pain, so we don't talk about them. And in order for us... to move through, to move on, to understand what might be a loving action, we have to feel, we have to go to the bottom of the pain. I used to say when I gave a lot of lectures, you go to the bottom of the pain and there's a door and Avalokiteshvara is there in the door and can come forward.

[24:42]

and give you kindness and forgiveness. But the digestion process is very slow. And maybe I could say this. You move at the speed of your own trust. You digest and metabolize trauma at the speed of how much you can trust. So it's a long process. It's a lifelong process. That's the other thing about consequences like with sexual abuse. Like I wrote this chapter before the Me Too movement. And I was so happy, of course, that women were starting to come out and speak the truth. These acts happen, but not they, but the culture, our culture, didn't talk about the 90% of what you have to do to get over the 10% of someone misusing sexuality.

[26:01]

So I wrote a chapter about the 90%, what I had to do to recover. from childhood molestation and rape when I think I was 32, and what I had to do, what my husband had to do in order to find a wholesomeness there. And I laugh now because I say, I'm fine with 80% healed. Yay! 80% healed. I'm not expecting 100% healed. And I translate that also to enlightenment. 80% enlightenment. Great. Great. What more could I ask for? And I think when I used to try to do 100%, that was kind of a perfectionism. And I think perfectionism is a near enemy or even a

[27:06]

arch enemy of liberation. So 80% is good enough. So a lot of the book is exploring in myself the consequences of war, abuse of different kinds, and slavery. So with that, I had done a lot of work on healing with my dad. I think he might have died by the time I went to Hiroshima. I'm not sure. I can't remember. But anyway, I'll read you a paragraph about the moment that I forgave my dad. And it's emotional for me. Standing in the middle of the Birkenau concentration camp, I realized the causes and conditions that had made my father my so-called enemy, and he became a human being in my eyes.

[28:26]

I saw beyond my limited and preconceived intellectual understanding of who my father was and the conditions. that had shaped his psyche. My heart opened to the causes of my father's rage. It struck me like lightning in a moment of insight and release as I was moving in a long stream of retreat participants towards the front gates for a lunch of bread and soup. All of a sudden, with no warning or intention, I found myself dropping to my knees, my head bent over and my hands on my heart. People were streaming past me on both sides as if I were a rock in a stream, the water rushing past. In this moment out of time,

[29:32]

huddled forward over my knees. I forgave my father and asked him to forgive me. Crying and howling with grief for my ancestors, for my parents, and for me, I saw the many repercussions of the violence and dehumanization that had happened at Birkenau and in my people's lives. and their connection with my own life. So, in many cases now, in the different... little stories, personal stories of my life, my historic life, I have actually come to a place of forgiveness.

[30:39]

And maybe I would feel more comfortable with people calling me Roshi now. And I've come to the place where it's okay to be human. I don't have to be more than human to be A Zen, a mature Zen person. I really, I'm just me now. Me that's completely connected, interconnected with Indra's net. And now I meditate a lot on Indra's net. That I influence others and others influence me. And history, what's in the newspaper influences me. And what I choose to do with my life influences the world. And that has given me a lot of relief and stability.

[31:41]

And I don't have to fix things. It's not fixable, as the Buddha so elegantly told us. But how we hold the pain, how we perceive the ourselves, that is changeable. That is evolution. I just got that word. Someone said it's possible to evolve, to really change. And I feel like writing this book and now talking about the book has helped me look at it, metabolize it, and then release it, it being my history, how I constructed my psyche. And it's a lot of freedom now.

[32:45]

I'm so happy to report. I hope this gives hope. Maybe that would be a wonderful outcome. of having written a very exposing, intimate book, that I give people hope that you can evolve. You can heal 80%. You can heal. And you can move into choice, having choice about your life. So in a way, Let's just, I'm going to take a breath if you don't mind. So, in a way, the whole book is trying to digest the fox koan.

[33:54]

Are you guys... I'm sure some of you are familiar with the Foxconn. It's Book of Serenity 8. And I'm not going to go into the whole Foxconn, but I'm going to read the two parts that are the, what do they call it? The very edge that you're teetering on an edge or a tightrope walker's rope. It's a very thin edge. And this is the thin edge that is in the Foxconn. And I'll change the pronoun to she for fun. She does not fall into cause and effect. And she is not blind. Or she doesn't ignore cause and effect. So for me, this has to do with spirituality that is both transcendent and descendant.

[35:06]

So I would say that Buddhism, and particularly because we're a patriarchal lineage, that Buddhism falls into the transcendent mode, the ascending mode, and we are really good at that. And I bless my ancestors for helping me figure out transcendence and perspective and seeing the world from a not centralized self. And that the world changes all the time. And that there is, I think of the third seal. You know, when I was growing up in Buddhism, the third seal was dukkha. And then maybe 15 years ago, or I don't know how long ago, both the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh changed dukkha to nirvana. And I thought, what are they doing?

[36:09]

That's not the traditional teaching. And I thought about this a lot. Why did our two leading Buddhist, contemporary Buddhists, change it from samsara to nirvana? And where I ended up was with evolution, that they were trying to tell us, where they were teaching us, that it's possible to evolve, that it's possible to go from dukkha to nirvana in how we practice. And... Where I'm at now is, this is where I'm at. I'm not compartmentalizing things as much as I used to. Enlightenment and ordinary and transcendent and descendant and Zen and Vipassana.

[37:14]

I don't know what category. I used to live a lot by categories and judgments about categories. And what has freed up in me is seeing the mutuality, seeing that the opposites spin around each other. That's the wholeness, that ascendant and descendant modalities of spirituality spin around each other. They're mutually necessary. And I'm talking about Descendant, like the book I would call Descending, because it's about my stories, it's about history, it's about human relationships, very down on the ground. But this book, although it's Descendant, is totally based on my Zen practice, which was Ascendant.

[38:16]

And I realized that the freedom that I'm feeling now, I don't know how to express my gratitude for the freedom I'm feeling now, is based on the mutuality of transcendence and descendants. And if I may say, as an elder Zen teacher now, I think we need to develop a little bit more on the descendant part in Buddhism. And I'm hoping that the 21st century will realize that. I think we already are. the rest of the world and with a lot of people in 21st century.

[39:20]

And there need to be some changes. And I think the changes are already happening. I have hope that they're going to happen. And this is my offering to see if I can help modulate ascending and descending Buddhism. I really want to have a dialogue, so I'm going to close so that we can talk to each other about what I've said. But I want to end with, I don't know how to pronounce this, so please forgive me. It's a Japanese word, kintsukurai, which is the Japanese craft of taking a broken vessel and and putting it together with gold or silver, repairing it, mending it with gold and silver.

[40:29]

And the new vessel is very, very beautiful, the mended vessel. And in some ways, I feel a little bit like that's what I've been doing with myself. Taking a really broken person, when I first came, I just met an old person from Katagiri Roshi Sanga who looked at me and said, oh, you're the girl who was crying all the time. You know, crying in the Zendo and crying. You know, I would go up to Roshi for Dokusan and I would just sit in his room and cry. The poor guy. This is a Japanese conservative Zen teacher. He didn't know what the heck to do with me. You know, I would just cry and cry. But anyway. My vessel has been put back together with gold. So I have a picture here. This is a jar that is an example of kintsukurai, which is putting together a broken vessel with gold or silver.

[41:41]

And there's a fabulous... con about it. You know, I'm going to read you the con because you guys are Zennies. I kind of took out a lot of the cons when I give other talks. But I'm going to read you the full con because it's really great. Okay? I'll take a couple of minutes. All right. This is a con. I think it's in the woman's con book. The Hidden Lamp. I think that's where I got it. And it's called The Authentic Tea Bowl Before You Were Born. Moonheart, a Zen teacher, had prepared in great detail a tea ceremony for her teacher, Abbas Echo. She had cleaned the tea house, arranged a just-picked flower, found a teapot, boiled the water, and contemplated what sweet to offer.

[42:47]

Moonheart decided to use a special antique tea bowl, a precious gift that the abbess herself had given her. Near the beginning of the tea ceremony, a Dharma sister of the abbess, Mushin, stopped by and was invited to join them for the tea ceremony. She had a nickname, the Wild Woman, and carried a bone as her teaching staff. Right in the middle of the ceremony, Mushin smashed the tea bowl with her bone and scattered all the pieces on the floor. Everything, every thought stood still. Moonheart nearly fainted. Mushin exclaimed, now look at the authentic tea bowl that exists before birth. So that's the transcendent answer.

[43:50]

And then this is what the Abbas said. A few moments later, Abbas Eiko calmly responded. I gave you this tea ball, but now I would like you to give it back to me. Before you do, gather up all the pieces, glue them back together, and fill the cracks with gold, and name this new bowl the authentic tea ball before birth. So that's the descendant answer. And a lot of the koans are about this. But I didn't kind of get it until recently. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[44:54]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click on giving. May we fully enjoy the doyma.

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