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. Well, good evening everybody and welcome. Can you all hear me okay? Great. I want to welcome all of you who are present and those who are present in person and online. I really appreciate you all showing up. Really grateful to be here and on this seat, as discombobulating as it is. Is anybody here for the first time at City Center? Oh, welcome. Welcome. So my name is Patti Mitchell, and my dharma name is Doshin Mayowan.

[01:04]

And I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm a Zen priest, and I did not train at the temple here. I trained at a Zendo in San Francisco. And I am really grateful to be here. And I have... This isn't an award ceremony, but I have a lot of thank yous. And I want to start with the spiritual leadership of City Center for offering me the support and the opportunity to receive Dharma Transmission at City Center. It's a great honor. And I'm deeply grateful. I also want to thank the staff and the community who in the last nine weeks have supported my practice and my limited engagement due to sciatica pain that I was dealing with. I want to thank you for your hard work and for your practice, which has really supported my practice.

[02:14]

For me, I can't do it alone. I can't do recovery. which I've been in since December 28, 1989, and Zen practice since 2004. So it's great to have the support of everyone. And most importantly, I want to extend my deep gratitude to Christina Lenhair, who has been my root teacher for the last 20 years. Her kindness, her compassion, her patience, and her support has kept me going through a whole variety of life situations and challenges. And for that, I am deeply grateful. Thank you, Christina. She also invited me to receive Dharma transmission a little over a year ago. And I'm deeply grateful for that.

[03:18]

I lead a small, I co-lead a small sitting group in Tulsa. I was invited by a teacher who's in the San Bolinage. He was transmitted a couple of years ago. And after two years, we have about eight or nine regular people. And it's a very sweet group to practice in person. I had been in Tulsa for three years and practicing online with a couple of online groups. Peter Van De Steers' group, who I was shiseau for, and Barry Maggett, who is a psychoanalyst and Zen teacher in Joko Beck's lineage out of New York City. And I did a couple of in-person sessions with them. So I'm very grateful to them. And last, and most importantly, I want to thank Shogaku Shinru Suzuki for his practice and founding this temple.

[04:19]

I read his book in 1971. I didn't understand it, but it excited me, and I started searching. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about my personal life. I've been a woman who's lived alone and raised two sons on my own, had them on my own. I have a very interesting checkered past with a lot of suffering, a lot of confusion, despair, depression, and angst. And that continued even through my spiritual practice. It's been a slow process of healing, becoming whole, of coming to understand what practice is and how I can embody it. In 1975, I met a Dzogchen teacher through a friend of mine, and I ended up practicing in the Dzogchen Tibetan Nyingma tradition for about 20 plus years.

[05:41]

And when I went back to New York after being away from the teacher, I discovered that there had been multiple abuses that had gone in in the group. I was devastated, and it put into context the abuse, the emotional abuse that I had suffered at his hands. And I was bereft. Dharma was the love of my life, and I didn't know what to do. I started sitting vipassana in sight retreats, one, three, five, ten, three weeks. and talking to each teacher, because you can study, interview with a variety of teachers, and just searching for how to go on. And finally, a woman teacher suggested that I try to forgive him and for myself for giving away my power. And, you know, one thing that's become clear in my practice is that I, all of my life, have looked outside of myself for the love and support and appreciation that I didn't feel as a child.

[06:58]

And I was constantly disappointed, first by men, primarily, but friends, you know, family. And, you know, even Christina, I would be disappointed because I had what Lorenzo talked about in one of his talks, expectations. And I certainly had a lot of expectations when I lived at City Center, first time in 2005 for five months, and then the second time in around 2012-13 when Christina was the abbess. I expected... transmitted teachers, priests, Zen practitioners to be a certain way. They weren't, in my view. And I had a lot of self-righteous judgment, criticism, which was kind of the nature of my personality. And it, you know, caused me a lot of suffering.

[08:00]

Luckily, I started interviewing with Christina. She was the tanto at the time. That was very helpful. The reason I moved to City Center was City Center had the first meditation and recovery meeting in the country, I believe. And I was so excited when I lived on the East Coast. So once my dad died, my oldest son said, why don't you move to California? And I said, okay, I'm going to move into Zen Center and get a job. You know, not knowing what that entailed, but I had all sorts of ideas what it would be. And I encountered myself, which had a lot of hindrances. And I got to start experiencing the Dharma gates of everyday life in community. And when I was invited to come back, I really felt like I was...

[09:05]

revisiting my Zen family of origin. And I wanted in my behavior and my attitudes to make a living amends for the surliness, the judgments, the energy that I displayed when I lived here. And so I'm really happy that worked out. Recovery and Zen Zazen are the twining practices that support my life. I couldn't really practice or be in sobriety to the depth that I am without both of them. They support each other and they are very synchronistic in a lot of the values and principles. In recovery, we don't do it alone. We try to stay sober off of substances. by ourselves and, you know, failed over and over. I had a hard time sitting in Zazen by myself at home.

[10:09]

You know, my mind was just too confused and fraught, and I really needed the calming presence of other people sitting in silence that allowed me gradually to deepen my own practice and be able to sit alone at home. So, I went, I was invited by, I was doing Vipassa and I was invited by a friend to go to Salt Lake City and sit Sushin with Genpo Denzel, Dennis Merzel. And I had no idea what that was, but I said, oh yeah, that'd be great adventure. So I sat down and I felt at home finally in a spiritual practice. And, you know, I, I thought about staying there, but they were drinking sake next door to celebrate the sasheen being over. And I go, oh, that's not going to work. You know, I'm in recovery.

[11:10]

So I went to the Zen Mountain Monastery for an introductory weekend about Zen. And then my dad was dying. And I moved to Tulsa and was with him for a year and a half. I'm a retired hospice nurse. And then my son invited me to come to San Francisco. In 2007, after studying the precepts and sewing my rakasua, I received Jukai from Christina. And for me, When I was introduced to Tibetan Buddhism, the way I was introduced was the teacher came to Iowa and he gave a lecture on the ten Bodhisattva precepts and I had a recognition that I was not living that kind of life. Buddhism though did not keep me sober.

[12:14]

I hit a bottom about 12 years after becoming a Buddhist and I had to step back from my practice and really devote myself to 90 meetings in 90 days and, you know, working with a sponsor and working the steps. And in working the steps, you come to terms with your past, all of the suffering that you've caused yourself and others, and you've get rigorously honest with yourself. You stop lying to yourself about and making excuses. You also make amends where it's appropriate. And so, you know, I feel that the precepts and Zen and morality is really important because if we're lying and stealing or lying to ourselves or, you know, doing addictive things,

[13:15]

behavior or substances that damage us, we can't really settle. So Zazen, you know, allows us and mindfulness practice to settle into calmness so that we can really turn the light within and start the study of ourselves. So I went to Tassajara the first time in 2014 for Inango, and I loved Tongari, sitting in silence. I've always been more comfortable being quiet, not talking. I felt socially challenged, and now that I have extreme hearing, it's even worse. But now I can be with people, and I have excuse to be quiet. But I love intimacy and connection. That has changed over the years due to practice and recovery and being in community. To really appreciate others' views and perspectives and what people share of themselves, it's essential for me.

[14:28]

So my primary intention when I came to this practice period was to recognize my reactivity if and when it arose. And I was sure it was going to arose because, you know, practice doesn't fix one. It just allows awareness to keep deepening in so many ways, subtle ways. So my intention was I wanted to recognize my reactivity, especially in relationship to other people or leadership, and to not take things personally, but to really pause and and to examine what was going on in my body because usually when I'm triggered, it's a physical reaction that alerts me. Then if I pause, I don't go into a story about it or blame the other person. I can just take myself where I need to be because sometimes it's an old wound from childhood and it's like a knife going in and I just, it's a tsunami of emotion.

[15:46]

and I need to take care of myself. One of the things about practice is that I've used lots of outside means, and that has included psychotherapy in the last year, where I had a particular situation with my oldest son, and it was bringing up that tsunami of grief and despair, because I have regret about my children, you know, that... for what they went through being with me. And so I found a Buddhist psychotherapist who was recommended by a friend who had been working with him for a while, and I met with him on Zoom. And he had me trace back when I'd be triggered to the feeling, the earliest memory. And I started being able to recognize the response and take care of myself rather than be in bed for days sobbing and wanting to give up.

[16:54]

So Zazen doesn't necessarily address psychological or emotional issues for me. I've needed outside help. You know, I had a particularly difficult childhood. I was raised in an alcoholic family. It was violent, critical. I went to Catholic school, and the nuns were pretty tough and critical. So, you know, I had a lot of self-criticism, and it's taken, you know, a variety of tools to process all of that. One of the chants in Barry Maggett's group is one that Joko Beck, he slightly amended it, but it's the four practice principles, and it's caught in a self-centered dream, only suffering, waking to a dream within a dream, each moment, life as it is, the only teacher, being just this moment, compassion's way.

[18:09]

For me, Zazen practices allows me to awake into that self-centeredness, you know, to my judgments, to the stories. I remember, like, one of the sashines I did here, I spent a lot of the sashines fantasizing a romantic relationship with one of the men here. And, you know, I had all sorts of visuals, and I shared that with a teacher years later, and I said, wow, you wasted all the sashines. But, you know... I've been a slow nut to crack. And, you know, it takes what it takes. But that's one thing, you know, I encourage people that it's not about results. It's about what Christina has shared. It's the enthusiasm, the devotion, the wholeheartedness we bring to what is our current practice.

[19:18]

And that unfolds for us. The Dharma unfolds. And I've experienced life bringing me exactly what I needed. And that has included great challenges, difficult situations. And yet my trust in mind, trust in Dharma, has just deepened and deepened. And yeah. So for me, You know, the Tibetans have a teaching that is very rare to embody a human body, first of all, and then to encounter the Dharma and have and connect to it. Because many people come to our little group and Zen's not for everyone, you know. I like to encourage people to really start slow and check things out and listen to their own body and reaction to just starting to sit in a Soto Zen form.

[20:30]

I really like working with beginners both in recovery and in practice because it keeps it very green for me. It helps me remember, you know, how it was. So Zen practice always also, you know, brings us insight and wisdom. It's not all dreary and dull. And it allows those four boundless qualities of the heart, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity to dawn for us, you know. And it's not... What I love about Zen that has taught me, I thought I was, you know, going to get enlightened and I'd sit in Tibetan meditation, you know, like straining for enlightenment. I thought it was some altered state. And I really love the teachings, Dogen's teachings, about what practice is.

[21:36]

And when I first read him when I lived here and I was in study groups, I was like, oh, this is... This is too paradoxical for me. It's like koans. I can't go there just yet. But, you know, that's changed also over the years. And I'm so grateful. I read the history, you know, more historical perspective in a David Hinton book of how Buddhism came from, Bodhidharma brought it to China, and then what was going on in China, Taoism and Confucius, and then how Dogen came and what was going on in his time. And it was really helpful to have that historical perspective of, you know, what was going on. So some aspects of recovery, I didn't think I was an alcoholic.

[22:42]

I didn't drink every day. I had a full-time job. I was a single mother. But I knew a woman, and she had taken me to a couple of meetings, which I didn't connect to. I just was in the back crying because I was emotionally disturbed over a man. And I finally... You know, she called me to watch her son, and I said, I can't get out of bed. And she said, Patty, you need treatment, and you have insurance. And I said, what is treatment going to do that 39 years of self-help books, Buddhist practice hasn't done? She said, trust me, you have insurance. Give yourself the gift of recovery. And so I went in and, you know, was trying. you know, surly. They wouldn't give me my bag. You know, my personality was on full display. And when we had to do the first step and share it with our small circle of people, I was blaming everything on the outside.

[23:46]

That I was a woman born in a man's world. That I was born into the wrong family. Yada, yada, yada. And they all, you know, it became clear that that I could not admit that I was powerless over people, places, and things, and that I wanted things to be my way, and that my way of dealing with frustration or despair or anger was to take something to change how I felt or suppress what I was feeling. So by the time I hit bottom, I was taking a lot of Xanax. In recovery, we started reading the big book. We had small groups and people from the outside came in and they would tell their story, how it was, what happened, how it is now. I heard these horrendous stories and people were laughing and grateful and

[24:50]

And the other part of the story was that they talked about feelings I had felt all my life, you know, feeling unique, not a part of. And they talked freely about their suffering. And I finally felt I was at home with people I could relate to because I had longed for For something other than the American culture I was a part of at the time, you know, I just never found connection or meaning in my folks who were working class. And so I just, you know, I longed for something I didn't know what. But... Recovery has principles and, you know, gratitude and acceptance are core principles.

[25:51]

And I find those also in Zen. Gratitude. Christina was talking in the last class. She ended the class. with talking about our stories and what we focus on at the end of the day. And if I'm laying in bed and going over resentments or, you know, lacks of, you know, who did this to me? Or, oh, I don't feel a part of that. It causes contraction. It causes a negativity, a sense of lack. And when I can remember to go to bed and be grateful and have a ritual that I can do at night that turns the mind towards gratitude and acceptance of my life as it is, it's a totally different experience. And Steve Stuckey had given a talk about

[26:54]

when he received his terminal cancer diagnosis about how he started his day of being grateful before he got up out of his bed, on the side of his bed. And I immediately started that practice because... many mornings I would wake up in moods or dread of what I had to do. And if I start grateful for embodiment, for the opportunity to experience life, it's a whole different day. So there's a saying in the big book, when I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation, some fact of my life unacceptable. I can find no serenity until I accept life as it is.

[27:54]

For a complainer, I needed to hear that over and over again. And there's a particular step, the 10th step, that when you're disturbed, it's a worksheet, and you actually put why you're disturbed, who did what to you, what it threatened, and what was your part in it, and then on and on. And you can share that with your sponsor or a friend. So that's been... particularly helpful. So this practice period, Buddha body, Buddha mind, has been wonderful. I had, I trained physically before I came because I wanted to be wholeheartedly present and engaged in life in the temple. However, two days before I left, I started having lower back pain and I started taking Advil and the pain continued to increase and I was taking pretty hefty doses of Advil.

[29:15]

And it became unbearable. I was in the kitchen trying to clean the stove. I wasn't bending down or doing anything. And I talked to Christina, and she gave me direction to rest, to use the hot water bottle, and to listen to the body. So I had an expectation of how I thought I was going to be here in this practice period. And so I couldn't be in the work circles, in the work crew during the day. I couldn't do full prostrations. You know, I spent a lot of time, I went for short walks, but I started attending to the body and I got a recommendation from someone here about a chiropractor. down the street on Laguna. And so I had five chiropractic treatments, and she has a deep tissue masseuse who works in her office.

[30:17]

And I had three total, one after transmission, but two before. And right before transmission, my sciatica disappeared. And Christina, I wanted to just start doing full bowels. And Christina counseled me to take it slow, you know, to be able to complete transmission. Because when I was in the midst of the sciatica pain, I had disappointment. I thought I was going to have to go home. However, that big game that was happening, what was it? The Super Bowl? Yeah. The tickets were really expensive, so I couldn't, you know, book a flight. So I thought, okay, one more week, I'll see how it goes. But I, you know, so I encountered the grief and the possibility that this wasn't going to happen.

[31:20]

And, you know, being with what is, as it arises, is... It's helpful to have friends, spiritual friends, and a teacher in particular who has wisdom that can give us another way, another option of how we can consider a challenge. Yeah, I think that's all I want to say. When I had to give talks in Tulsa, I was invited to speak to another little Zen Sangha that meets at Interfaith Retreat Center, the Osage Forest of Peace. You know, I had a lot of anxiety about giving a talk and

[32:23]

Christina mentioned that you co-create the talk with whoever's present. And that has really helped me when I've spoken in AA, when I've told my story. And one of the things I noticed today in particular was the warmth that I felt and the connection that I felt with this community It's like suddenly you weren't individual beings, but this loving energy. And I'm so grateful to be a part of that. So thank you for your practice and for listening. And we have time for questions. I am going to... I'm extremely hearing. I have a cochlear implant, but I don't wear it with the microphone because when I have it in, I hear my own voice, and I hear sounds two different ways.

[33:29]

So, Michael, if I don't hear the question, would you repeat it for me? Okay, thanks. We have about nine minutes. What's that? We have about nine minutes left. Okay. Any comments or questions? Lori, I can count on you. Hi, Patty. Thank you so much for your talk today. Thank you. It was lovely to get to know more about you. Are you going to keep your hair short? Yes, I am. Yay. I think you look so good with it. Yeah, at least. Okay. Thank you so much for everything. You're wonderful. Yeah. Thank you for the haircut. Thank you, Patty.

[34:42]

I had a question that was coming actually before the Dharma talk. I was curious if you could say a few words about the relationship between student and teacher and how that was for you, especially as part of the Dharma transmission. Did you hear me? I couldn't hear the distinct words. Asking about the student-teacher relationship? especially with related to Dharma transmission. Well, Dogen talks about, you know, the mother hen pecking from the outside and the chick pecking from the inside. And I think that's a beautiful analogy. It's interesting. I've learned a lot being in relationship with a teacher about myself and finding my own voice.

[35:53]

In the Tibetan tradition, it was all about subservience. And in the Hindu, when I was involved in a yoga tradition, it was, you know. And in Zen, it's very different, the bowing. to the teacher. And for me, it's a relationship that is a foundation of my practice in the sense of showing up and being transparent with someone who can then make suggestions or encourage me in just the way that I need.

[36:55]

Being vulnerable first with an AA sponsor because as an alcoholic I I had a lot of defenses. And so AA taught me the benefit of being honest and transparent and being intimate. And for me, the relationship with Christina is most intimate. And she inspires me by her energy, her being, her... the way that she accepts other people and interacts with a variety of personalities and her gentleness. She has modeled for me how I want to be because I was a tornado of rage, sarcasm, anger, disrespect of others.

[38:08]

And I am so grateful that practice and recovery has cracked that nut. So thanks for the question. We have time for one more question. Hi, Patty. Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you for your share. I'm so glad you talked about Meditation, or I think the group is called 12 Step and Zen or Meditation and Recovery. I can't remember. That's how I came to this place as well back in 2007 for a couple of years. And I only came for that meeting and I kind of like tiptoed in and out, right? But I stayed in recovery. But that's how I came here. And I think... there's a couple of us around that that's true for.

[39:13]

And I think about a lot the similarities and differences between the two communities and the overlap. Yeah, it's fascinating and I appreciate both so much. Yeah, and I also was sitting here wondering, Like, I was like, oh, I came to Zen through recovery. I wonder how many people are making their way to recovery from Zen, like crossing that bridge, right? Because I think they, yeah, they go together very well. And it's really interesting to think about you as a tornado. Like, I was very surprised to hear all of this tonight. But I get that. Yeah, I get that. Because at a certain point, you are no longer, I mean, it's every moment you're a different person, but certainly like 20 or 30 years later, you're not at all the person that you were.

[40:21]

And so, yeah. Moment to moment. And you're a model like that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:57]

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