Why does it... Welcome, everyone.

[10:16]

Oh, a little earlier there on my bells. everyone to the Saturday morning Dharma talk from City Center. It's wonderful to see everyone here this morning or this afternoon or evening, depending on where you're zooming in from. I'm delighted to introduce our two speakers today, my dear Dharma friends, Laura O'Loughlin and her husband, Kosin Greg Snyder.

[11:20]

They are joining us today from Ancestral Heart Zen Temple. in upstate New York, which they co-founded. Ancestral Heart is the monastic training temple of the Brooklyn Zen Center, which they also co-founded in 2005. Before co-founding Brooklyn Zen Center, Laura trained and lived in various Buddhist communities, including Tassajara, Zen Mountain Center, San Francisco here at the city center, and Austin Zen Center. She is a clinical social worker in private practice, and also the director of Ancestral Heart. She received lay dharma entrustment from Tia Strozer in 2017. Kosin is the senior priest at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple and the senior director and assistant professor of Buddhist studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he directs and teaches... in the Masters of Divinity program, which is focused on Buddhism and inter-religious engagement.

[12:24]

Kosin received priest ordination and Dharma transmission from Tia Strozer, the Brooklyn Zen Center's honorary founding teacher and is a lineage holder in the Suzuki Roshi lineage of Soto Zen. So thank you Kosin and Laura for taking the time to be with us today. It's wonderful to see you. Thank you, Heather. We may have little bits of delay, so please forgive our internet service. Can you hear me at this moment? Okay, great. So we are beyond delighted to be here today. Thank you so much. There's David. David for inviting us and Nancy Petron for extending the invitation and Heather for introducing us. Just to say, Heather is a Dharma sister in so many ways. I just want to note that, as Heather mentioned, David, Heather, Kosen, and I are all blessed to have Tia Strozer as our Dharma teacher, who I believe is here today as well.

[13:31]

And I wanted to note that, you know, Heather is a Dharma sister in another way. Both of us come from Italian-Irish working class families. And I want to acknowledge that just by allowing herself to be who she was and is in Dharma communities, as we say, when you are fully you, Zen is Zen. By doing that, Heather has really come a long way in helping me to accept and embrace the emotional, expressive, opinionated, and sometimes very fiery ethnic inheritance that we share. and recognize how it can be actually of use and service in the Dharma. So thank you, Heather. I actually had a dream about you last night helping me up a flight of stairs, and here you are. Anytime you need a help up the flight of stairs, Laura, just let me know. Last time I spoke at the Buddha Hall at City Center.

[14:36]

I'm thinking about the Buddha Hall as we're speaking today, and I know some folks are in the dining room. David let us know, was almost 25 years ago when I was a young student about to give a Wayseeking Mind talk. And all I remember from that experience of 25 years ago is the profound terror I felt before I gave the talk and the liberation and love of Sangha I felt afterwards. So I don't quite have so much terror and resting in the... enormity of what my heart's feeling, looking at teachers and friends and residents of my beloved first Dharma home. So I wanted to just note that I actually asked Kosin if he would speak first. He and I have never in all our years of doing this together, given a joint Dharma talk. So we didn't quite know how to do this.

[15:36]

And I actually would prefer if he spoke first and then we'll hopefully we both have always a lot to say. So we're going to try to take care of each other and go back and forth. Thank you all. It's funny that I hadn't thought about this. It's funny that Laura mentioned her sharing her heritage with Heather because David Zimmerman and I share Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, which is quite rare, actually. So I'm very happy to be with all of you today. And like Laura said, we're not sure what's going to unfold here, but But when we were thinking about what to talk about, the thing that came up for us is just relationship, what it is to be in just relationship. And it's a difficult time right now.

[16:39]

All of us, I think, are feeling it. There's... There's a lot of holding to views. There's a lot of holding to views that are moving into what almost feels like warlike divisive stances in the world. In some cases, very much warlike divisive stances. And taking us to places that lead us to anxiety, fear, so on. And for some of us, the implications... what's happened recently the implications for some of us are much is much more dire than than for others and more immediate and um and more frightening and tragic to feel in in our hearts what the pain of not including everyone in the way we make decisions and in our

[17:40]

political life. And by political life, I don't just mean the way politics have been turned into a divisive mechanism in the current situation. I mean the fact that we all are taking part in a polis. We're all taking part in a community. We're all part of a shared environment that where all of our voices, we hope at least, that all of our voices are included and we're not seeing that. And it's leading to situations that are dire. So what is it to be in just relationship to one another? And I'm going to start, and if you'll please forgive me, I am going to start with... I can't actually see here. I always try to do this without glasses, and then I fail. So... I am going to start with something that might sound a tad bit academic. So please forgive me. I am leading. I am going somewhere that is less so. But I want to talk a little bit about the idea of Dharma or the meaning of Dharma.

[18:49]

And I want to talk about it in relationship to the idea of justice in, you could say, Western thought. And it's very much, these two things are deeply related. Sometimes there can be a conversation that the idea of justice is something outside of the Dharma. Dharma is functioning in some way that is almost transcendent or doesn't get quite involved in the ideas of what we call justice. And... Part of this, I think, is the way that the notion of justice has become so deeply polarized and so is difficult for a kind of non-dual sense of what it is to engage in the world, a compassionate way of engaging in the world, of being a part of that. But these words are actually, in some ways, the same, although they have different, they end up with different lineages.

[19:51]

So dharma, the root dhir, This is an Indo-European cognate. It's a direct link to the word dike in Greek, which means in Greek and is used all through the New Testament as justice, is translated as justice. Yoga, the root for yoga in Sanskrit is you, and that's directly related to use in Latin, which is justicia, which is justice. And the way they're connected in early times, in ancient life, is that there is a kind of sense in the uses in Latin, Greek, and Buddhist culture, I mean, and Vedic culture, Indian culture, that there is this way that we need to come into alignment with. So, it is a sense that our behavior, or the way that we have a path, that the path leads us to being... in alignment, we could say, with the cosmos or with the order of things or with, in our case, the interconnected or intercausal, non-separate relationality of life.

[21:01]

And that has changed over time, that meaning in the Western time, but that initial feeling of, that initial sense of being, of harmonizing with all things. And I won't go into the ways that this can be used negatively, but that sense. And in this way, I think when the Buddha is talking about harmony instead of harm, he's pointing to this larger kind of harmony. Now, to do that, we have to look at, as we know, we have to look at karma. We have to look at our own mind, our own volition, the way our will interacts with life, how we plant the seeds in our own consciousness. that lead to other behaviors, that create the kind of neural grooves for other behaviors. And they begin to replicate themselves based on our intentions and how we plant them and how they come into being in our actions. And zazen is so deeply important in that because it's in zazen that we can watch the impulse arise and let it fall away so that we don't recede those inclinations.

[22:12]

But this word karma, is related, you may or may not know, I don't know, is related to a very common word, same kind of cognate, very common word in English, which is crime. Crime in Latin is directly related. But they're two very, very different orientations. What they have in common is that we act and that act has an effect in the future. Our actions are related to something that happens in the future. But over time, what has changed is that this kind of way we feel about crime is that something on the outside of us decides what that response is going to be. It could be the state, it could be a community, it could be any number of things. And I bring this up, not just because it's interesting, but because... We have to look in this time at the way that we have internalized this kind of a view.

[23:21]

This kind of a view that if there is something painful, if there is a mistake, if there is a disruption, if there is something that makes us increasingly uncomfortable, if there is something that even threatens our lives, that our instinct is to... often move into this kind of crime frame which is to find the perpetrator and oftentimes to exile the perpetrator or to at least for the community for our community to be involved in in such a way that is as violent that isn't about coming together and having a conversation about the way we have all been So there is a real danger, I think, in these times in our own communities of almost a notion of purity. And that if something difficult unfolds, that we...

[24:32]

We find the problem, we remove it, and then we can return to the norm, what was comfortable and good. I actually don't think this is what, in any way, what the Buddha is talking about is harmony. At the same time, I don't think the Buddha is pointing to a harmony that is about ignoring the ongoing difficulty and pain within a community. We've all inherited unjust ways of being. We've inherited... structures of institutional structures ways of behavior ways of interacting that put forward people who are considered white as the dominant group and their culture as the dominant group whatever it means to have that culture it's very complex but also men and um and almost and an understanding that White folks and men, especially white men, have almost a God-given right to be in control of things.

[25:37]

And whole institutions, folks know this, whole institutions organize around that unconscious understanding. And to simply ignore that, I think, is also not the kind of deep harmony we're talking about. but actually to sit together in the way that we have all karmically been conditioned to buy into this, to buy into this in our own minds and hearts, to buy into this in our institutions, to buy into this in the country, and to notice that when we begin to move in another direction, there's a very strong push back in this direction because we could say that it is... It's not karmic in the strict sense that it has to do with one mind passing something on, but it's to itself, its own consciousness. But it is karmic in the sense that we're not independent, and all of our consciousnesses do interact and are influenced by each other, and these things are held in our minds, and they're also held in institutions.

[26:49]

And so this moves forward and moves forward. So, in some ways, this... way of having a bodily sense of wanting to exile the problem and return to a norm. This is a tricky situation because in some ways, this is the way the current way of being stays in place. We have something that's operational. It comes to a head, we see the problem, we kind of chop the head off, and then we go back to norm. But the norm is the deeper structural problem. And so, as a community, as a Sangha, to deepen into that is painful and takes an incredibly long time and means that we have to... not fall prey to a kind of exiling consciousness because we can't heal if everyone no one's safe if everyone has the sense that a mistake leads to exile and and at the same time we need to be able to have the difficult conversations that we're having that we don't turn away from and begin to

[28:17]

We don't treat pain. We don't treat suffering. We don't treat the difficult issues that arise when we look at all of these different histories coming together. We don't treat them as a problem that needs to be handled, dealt with, removed, but that they are the mud of the lotus. We would all like, I think it's an impulse in all of us, we'd love to... the lotus out of the mud and have some kind of transcending transcendent floating lotus but um it dies it withers it dies and everything associated with that kind of transcendent lotus will die around it because our our tradition asks us to honor what comes to us, but re-enliven it. One of the things I love about Zen and ancestry is that we inherit a tradition that then asks us to re-enliven it in our time, which means to be in struggle in some ways with the tradition.

[29:26]

It's not a simple, I take it the way it is, but I'm in conversation with that tradition. I'm in dialogue with it. I'm trying to understand the way it's... going to be awake in the mud of this moment. And so if we're, as a community, going to value awakening and value clarity, and by community, I mean the larger Dharmic community of the country, as well as our temple-based communities, we kind of have to resist this temptation to isolate and exile, and we have to find a way, and it's hard. We may, I mean, we try to do this in our community. We're always making mistakes, and We're always returning. It's not everyone, but we try. And it's painful, and I don't like it, and nobody likes to do it. And yet it is something that I feel is necessary for the dark.

[30:27]

I deeply feel... that it's necessary for the Dharma to survive in this country. It's necessary for the Dharma to be relevant in this country, that we don't fall in... And I'll say one last thing, and then Laura has wonderful things to say about this, but that we don't fall into... I think we're in a moment that can fall into two different orthodoxies that are somewhat dangerous. One orthodoxy is that spirituality is... somehow transcendent above this and we can use tricky things to do this we can use emptiness and no self and and constant states of awareness and all of these things to to kind of pull away from being in the karmic mud of our lives that's one piece that i would say kind of a transcendent danger and then another danger is and in some ways a similar problem in a different direction is is that orthodoxies around justice that doesn't that that where we become so hardened around what is unjust that we are no longer in just relationship with the person right in front of us where so there's so much pain and and i want to affirm the pain there's a tremendous amount of pain but practice allows us to be with that pain in such a way that we can remain in just relationship with the people that we're with

[31:56]

It doesn't mean we don't need to take breaks. It doesn't mean we don't need to rest, step back, find different communities that nourish us so we can return to ones that are difficult for us. All of that sounds all very simple, but it's very complex. And we come back into those communities and ask the question, whether it be a spiritual question, a dharmic question, or whether it be a question of justice, What is it to be in just relationship with the person I'm with right now? And just is a fabulous word because it both has this history of justice. And it also means simply right here, right now, just this, just relationship. So I'll stop there. And Laura. Can you just put the screen back? So I know, I think we go to 11. Is that right? And then take some questions. I want to see everybody. Oh, there's so much to say.

[33:01]

So what I wanted to do as a way of supporting or unpacking what Cosine was talking about a little bit is to just say a little bit about some of the work that we're doing in our community, just as a way of making a little bit more concrete some of the theoretical stuff that Greg was talking about. And, you know, we have just finished, just about to finish a 10-month program called the Buddhist Path of Liberation, which was 50 of our Sangha members who identify as white went through this process. And four of us spent a couple of years developing it, and it came out of about seven or eight years of undoing work of different varieties and moving through some of those paradigm shifts that Greg was talking about and recognizing how even our work was infused with this idea of punitiveness or being good or getting it right or cleaning up the conflict or avoiding the conflict altogether by creating a kind of perfect response.

[34:12]

And so one of the many, many takeaways that we've come to this training was infused with the paramitas. We followed each paramita. We grounded it very much in the gifts of our tradition, which had to do with ancestral practice, meditation practices, sangha building, and working through conflict and moving through a group process. And we come, as we spoke last month about wisdom, realizing how can we speak about wisdom when it comes to such groundless, seemingly endless delusion around specifically racial harm. And we recognize that we've come to trust wisdom as a process of learning, as an attitude, as a willingness to take, as you know, we use this quote all the time.

[35:13]

you know, we are completely responsible in the relative and we're completely forgiven in the absolute and holding both of those together. Because if we're just taking complete responsibility, we can often really unconsciously move into defensive strategies of shame, rage, guilt, righteousness, you know, all this stuff that comes up when we are beginning to look in the eye of this dragon of intergenerational trauma. And Greg mentioned, you know, white men, and I think it's been really helpful for us to be very specific about what we're unpacking and where we're living, but we're complex beings. And we can't separate, as I mentioned with Heather, class, you know, gender, gender, you know, ethnicity, how recent, you know, our ancestors have come over there, come over here.

[36:15]

So it's a kind of an attitude and a way of being, working with this. And as Greg, you know, pointed to Kosen, excuse me, is it's a messy process. And I think one of the major things that I come up with and we come up with collectively is how conflict avoidant we are. I mean, just profound conflict avoidance, most of us. I think because of this threat of exile, because we have also done a lot of internal suppression and oppression, dividing ourselves up, and this part is okay, this part belongs in a spiritual community, this part can't be seen, even as I move from messy student to messy teacher. You know, this is not what a Zen teacher looks like or sounds like or acts like. And having to keep on doing that and having moving from humility to from humiliation to humility to just really opening all that up and holding it with with a with a love, you know, with a with a with a refusal to exile any parts within us as well.

[37:34]

So if we go with this proposition that these histories of violence, and their violence not just of race and gender and class, of the earth itself, violence towards the earth, and an extrication from our sense of coming from a deep lineage, inheriting all that's beautiful and all that's unhealed from our ancestors, and then creating the conditions and knowing that we are responsible for future generations. From that perspective, we have been working with this vow or devotion to being able to do it differently, to really kind of just center love as experience, but love not in the sense of that move we can make, but to a sense of we're going to really look at this. And because these histories live in our bodies, this disconnection, people know a lot now more about epigenetics than how this is passed on and lives in us.

[38:43]

And to try to support the possibility of both individually holding the charge of all that. And I used to think that meditation was enough for that, you know, and I would, you know, meditate and I'd work individually with my karmic, what I call hyper arousal. And it wasn't enough. Somehow it just kept replicating itself in different forms. And sometimes the spiritual community itself kind of reinforced that need to kind of clean it up or purify it. You know, a lot of it was projection, but I think there's actually unconscious cultural norms. that kind of replicate that. So one of the things we always talk about is, you know, this, from a spiritual perspective, this exiling, what threatens our identity with being good.

[39:44]

You know, how do I show up? How do I, you know, and, you know, being raised as a really good girl and listening to my teachers and doing things that I'm told to do is both a gift. And it's also one of the, inheritances around patriarchy for me. And so what do I, you know, what do we do with that in our bodies? And this is where I think the somatic understandings are so powerful. We might just, you know, tighten or defend. We might feel rage or anger around these conditions which are not just ours. You know, this is not just mine. And then that comes off in terms of all forms of energetic control that those who enter community can feel from us. And also thinking or collapsing, or I have to admit, Greg and I are very guilty of this, overworking. We're all so poor and there's so much to do and so many programs to put out.

[40:51]

And then we disconnect from our bodies and we don't believe we need to rest. We're punitive with ourselves when we take space or fail our students or have to say no. And, you know, one of my beloved co-facilitators said, you know, there's a tenderness that arises in her when she remembers there's no I in this work. And so when we bring this kind of Western individual mindset that this is my work to work on here, I'm in Sangha. but it's only my responsibility and what's happening is only mine, we lose this capacity to rest in and take refuge in a collective humility and process and willingness to not know and to confess what's happening for us. So a lot of what we did, it's almost celebrating in a strange way, allowing through the work to really

[41:55]

bring up the shame, allow the shame to be heard, to give a name. We would do, we would have, we had a slide show where everybody, the 50 people in the program did their rage drawings. So everybody kind of, I almost brought mine in, I didn't bring it in, a picture of our, the energetic quality of rage that lives in all of us. And maybe we think we don't have rage. I would ask you to explore that deeper. How could we not have rage when we have been our ancestors have been traumatized themselves and the price we pay for having the privilege? You know, there's there are hearts have had to go through a lot. So and then grief. So if we start to. learn through somatic strategies, through resting in the group, through an allowing and an acknowledging of what's here and all this complexity, there is something that, you know, that started to free up in me and I felt more liberated to be who I am.

[43:03]

Strangely enough, it's kind of a paradox, you know, while as I included all these things in, I felt freer. And part of this trusting in the collective is really doing deep ancestral work for ourselves. All of the members have ancestral altars. Greg and I have a beautiful ancestral altar, and we decide to offer coffee to our ancestors instead of tea since they're European and would prefer coffee in the morning instead of tea. But really being in conversation with them, which helps me to both allow myself to be that I am of them, and I also have a possibility to go beyond what they were able to do. So as Greg mentioned, a big part of this is if we can begin to metabolize those

[44:15]

All of that energy in our body, I think it creates a condition for just relationships for us to go into community. In my case, as a white woman teacher, to sit across from a person of color, have them express what they're expressing, and watch all of those strategies kick in that makes me want to protect, defend, avoid, justify, collude, whatever. You know, whether it's, I'm so terrible, so sorry, I don't know anything. tell me everything, which is giving up our dharmacy or else of the ways that we try to isolate and minimize what this person is telling us and including all of our traumas and their trauma too. And just to say, at least in our experience, and again, we've had many, many ruptures in the psychological language. We talk about the The importance, this is a psychological analogy to the lotus in muddy water.

[45:20]

Ruptures are essential for intimacy building, for repairs. That the ruptures, the things that start to fall apart, as we know this intuitively and in our experience, but just to keep naming it, the ruptures are okay. It is how we repair them, the way we attend to them, and all the subtleties. of that rupture and how we meet that moment that creates either, you know, as Desmond Tutu talks about in his book, In the Art of Forgiving, you know, either a replication of violence and harm or a process of reconciliation. And and that even beyond that, that those ruptures, those expressions of conflict are a signal. You know, they're a signal. They're kind of part of the medicine. And how do we see it as medicine?

[46:23]

How do we see it as wisdom in there somewhere and transformative energy waiting to be met? And I think that is happening so, so much in our communities and also happening more broadly. So we are trying to create communities of responsibility and returning to keeping complex all of the histories that are come to be and how we navigate those, which does include us being very humble and willing to learn and that the wisdom is in all different sources of the collective body. And, you know, we have another psychological term called identified patient.

[47:23]

You know, the one who comes and, you know, is kind of the rabble razz or the one who's a problem. Can we see, you know, that in family therapy, that person is seen as the problem by the family. And actually, they're the ones giving us the distress signal that something else needs to be addressed. You know, how do we just keep turning? the way we're thinking about this from Eskregelsing, from crime to a collective wisdom. And I think that will help us to begin to just rely on a deeper connection that's actually always there as we speak about from the position of the absolute. that those roots of disconnection are not the deepest layer, but we have to go through that layer often in order to recognize that we're always in a deep reciprocal relationship with our ancestors, with each other, with our bodies, with the world.

[48:38]

That's all I want to say. You know, one thing that, because Laura just made the comment about meditation and being enough, and the thought that came to mind was there is a way that when we're working through difficult situations together as a community, that in some ways it's true, meditation is not enough, and yet it's critical. It's critical. It's critical to have a mind and heart. I want to say, you know, I think it's so important that in the Chinese tradition that we inherited, that there are three seats of knowing. There's the one we're used to, the kind of discerning mind. There's shin, which we associate with, you know, what we know from that place. And then there's hara. And... When all of these are awake together, we know in a different way.

[49:46]

We discern in a different way. We can feel separation as soon as it arises. It isn't a matter of discerning what separation is or isn't. The body feels separation. The awake body feels when we tear a relationship with another person. And to return to that after that tear occurs, the moment... been in this place where we'll say something and right away we'll feel something happened and to laura's point i think what's so important is so often that that wisdom can be drowned in shame sense of perfection humiliation things that we tell ourselves and then we don't address it because egoic things flood in behind that wisdom instead of just oh there was a tear And there was a tear between myself and another person because of my words, and now I can address that. And so zazen, I feel, is so critical to giving us the opportunity to become a fully awake body where the different ways the body knows come alive, integrate,

[51:03]

The scaffolding we've built around so many ways of knowing because of our own histories can slowly be dismantled by looking at our karma. And at some point, there is a being there that is connected. And there's nothing particularly special about that. It is the way it is. And unless we are willing to be in that kind of intimate conversation... you know, that's the mirror doesn't arise, right? We don't see these particular things that we'll do whatever we can to avoid at all costs, you know? So, you know, again, it's like it's wonderful the conflict comes up because it shows us the limits of our capacity to open. And then as... The first teaching I ever received from Tenshin Roshi and the teaching that I carry with me every day, can I be open to being closed?

[52:07]

Can I allow myself to feel the places where I'm closed? Bring acknowledgement and compassion and responsibility to those places as opposed to trying to pry them open or escape or indulge the closeness. And I think we're, I think 45 minutes is when we're supposed to quiet down, so that's soon. But I'll just say one thing, because I'm just moved by this, that Dogen wrote two, he wrote more than this, but there are two festivals that are particularly about aspiration. And they're right after each other. and in one there is an aspiration for basically an aspiration for meritorious activity without attachment to outcome right and then and then or virtuous activity or wholesome activity wholesome action without an attachment to outcome and then the other one is the aspiration for for awakening but specifically bodhisattva awakening the awakening of all beings everyone's awakening and when they're brought together

[53:22]

There is our way, right? There is the aspiration for the meritorious activity of working for the awakening of all beings without attachment to the outcome. And it feels, I mean, it's always a time for this. I don't think it's ever, but it really deeply feels like it's a time for it now. That we have to be so deeply devoted to each other's liberation. Almost, it's a funny word to say, almost ruthlessly. Like in a way that we risk love in every situation, even if it's terrifying. We risk connection. Really feeling into that connection. So maybe, do you have anything else? No. Okay. That was a little meandering. Thank you for listening. We're so happy to hear from all of you.

[54:28]

Yeah, exactly. Your thoughts. Well, thank you, Kosin and Laura, for that heartfelt, inspiring, and illuminating co-Dharma talk. I really appreciate your wisdom and your spirit. And so... If people have questions, you can raise your Zoom hand. You're also welcome to chat them directly to me if you'd like, and I could speak them into the room. So either way, I see that Tim Wicks has his hand raised. So I also think I need to unmute him. There we are. Thank you, everyone, Heather as well. Oh my gosh, this is really a wonderful, important talk. And I don't want to ask you to air your sangha's dirty linen in this public format anymore, but I need to push you a little bit more and to speak a little bit more about how difficult this conversation is.

[55:46]

Yeah, yeah. You both spoke so wonderfully about how messy it is. And we just have this deep tradition that our feet are stuck in of silence and doing those two things that you spoke about, of separating, that I heard anyway, a spiritual bypass of thinking that many things are to be... sort of drifted over in favor of emptiness and then the separation of rage. So if you could just talk a little bit more about how, because, you know, we already have experience at Zen Center of some of the difficulties and messiness of the conversation, but we also still, I feel, are very sort of... still trying to pull ourselves out of the deep conflict aversion that is both cultural as far as the United States is concerned, based in puritanism, you both refer to that in a little ways, but also a doctrinal

[57:04]

you know, being stuck in silence and not being able to have this conversation, conversation, conversation that you, Greg, mentioned several times. It's just so difficult for us. So I hope you don't feel like you already spoke enough about it. I would like you to go a little bit deeper just because it's so real, I think, for us. Thank you. Okay. You start. Thank you, Tim. And I think this is fine. It has to be talked about. We have to be honest. I mean, one of the things that I think keeps us all stuck is that we don't talk about what's real. And it's awful, this process. I'm just going to be frank. It's awful. There's nobody that wakes up in the morning and is like, I really want to deal with... misogyny and racism today in our community. I think in some ways the only thing that I can say that comes to mind is there just has to be an insistence that the conversation happens.

[58:19]

If there's any kind of sense that we're going to get to the right spot or we're going to figure it out or we're going to find a comfortable way to do this or anything like that, that has to happen. The other thing that I think is very difficult, and I don't say this to spotlight anyone here. This is a very general comment. It is very hard in every situation, every church, every temple, whatever it is. For spiritual leadership to say, I don't know what I'm doing. I have no idea what I'm doing. And I don't know how to do this. And what I have been trained in has not given me the means by which to address it. And I have to come into a situation and completely not know. Which means I have to look painfully foolish. And... and have my own dirty laundry aired, and all kinds of things have to happen. And that is a really hard process because, and to Laura's point, I think it's a hard process because of exile.

[59:29]

Because there is this puritanical belief that our spiritual leaders need to be perfect, and if they're not, we're going to kick their ankles out from under them. And it's violent, you know, so the violence goes in a lot of directions. And so we have to build a culture that says, no, we are in this. We're in this and we're going to figure this out. But it means everybody has to put everything on the table. Can I give an example? Because I think... I think you wanted an example. And it's a little tricky. But I could say more generally speaking, because I'll just focus on those who identify as white in our community, that there have been moments, and I think this is why the program we developed came out of it, where I think we often don't trust ourselves.

[60:29]

We talk a lot about the distrust between people of color and white people. White people don't trust each other. And I think there has been experiences of exile or perfectionism or kind of I don't want to identify with this messy white person over here and I'm going to put myself over here or kind of taking down the white leadership. So I think one of the things that we've been trying to do is understand how White supremacy has actually created a distrust and fear between us. And how do we begin to stop the ways that we've been, you know, now that we have some languaging around social justice, kind of like, let's show how good we are by using all the right words. And I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, but I don't think it's sufficient. And in fact, you know, it's kind of like it's performative. And I think we're also performing for each other. and that were also distancing from each other.

[61:30]

And so that happened in our community. We had a lot of pain in our community amongst each other, which created tremendous harm for the folks of color in our community. And, you know, the other thing that sometimes white communities want to do, and we were told by our BIPOC SANGA members, I don't want to do this with other white people. I want to do it with folks of color. You know, they're the ones who know. What do I have to learn from you? And that isn't helpful in some ways. It's useful at certain points in certain ways. But we had to, like, go through a very messy process of pain and distress and harm that happened between us. And I think we're working our way through that and learning. And the reverberations. You know, just because you make an action or do a reconciliation doesn't mean it's over. I mean, things from three or four or five years ago are still reverberating in interpersonal interactions, in traumatic or triggered responses and harmful interpersonal actions.

[62:36]

And the other thing that we really have tried to address is how do we, because of this idea about leadership and putting so much pressure that as if all the wisdom is in the leadership, And that the leaders believe they don't have any more to learn is structurally creating more formal structures so that the charge of all of that and the clarity about who's responsible for that and doing that is shared among the whole community. And, you know, we're doing our work, you know, in BPOL. I don't come in as a teacher. I'm one of the students there. And I'm doing that with other students. which is, again, I think a kind of radical notion. But I think it's also helpful. So that's, I don't know, Tim, that helps. It's a little bit of our dirty laundry, the mud, which we see as full of nutrients. Thank you, Tim and Kosen and Laura for your response to his question.

[63:44]

There's another question in the chat. asking how long have you been focusing on social and racial justice and healing as a Sangha? And what first motivated you? Wait, hold on. My chat is scrolling here. What first motivated you as leaders to initiate this inner work? And what healing experiences keep motivating you to keep going? That's so good. I like Greg to start. So I had a very... particular moment, which I've talked about before, there was, we had a program called Awake Youth, and we were in schools in Brooklyn, and many of the students, high schools, and many of those students came to Brooklyn Center when it was at 505 Carroll in Brooklyn. And we had this strange division between the sangha where Almost all of the teens who were coming there to practice were either African-American or Afro-Caribbean.

[64:50]

And the majority, not all, but the majority of the song was white. And we became close with many of those young people. And some of them stayed into the community after they graduated from high school. But two young women Laura and I became close with and still are over a long period of time. And when they were 19, They were there was a shooting that happened outside of Detroit of a young woman. She was she had was having car problems. She went up to a little over 10 years ago. She went up to a screen door to ask for help. White man came to the door and and shot her through the screen door. The screen door was locked. But he, for whatever reason, even though she was 19 and he was 40 or something, he was threatened by her. And I remember that night.

[65:51]

And the reason it shook me is because both Loyalty and Lacchiato were 19. 19-year-old black woman, the same. And the first night I couldn't sleep because there was this just, I still feel it, this fear. that it would just happen, it could too easily happen to them. There was no reason for this to happen, right? It could too easily happen to them. And the second that I stayed up, because I had this sense that we are Buddhists, and what killed that young woman, Regina Clark, what killed that young woman was what was in that man's mind. That's what killed her. And here we are Buddhists, and that's our specialty. And we weren't in the dialogue. We weren't in the conversation at that time. And that bothered me a lot. And so in that sense, we started, I think soon after that, we invited, what was their name?

[66:54]

People's History. I mean, not People's History. People's Institute for Survival and Beyond to come to a workshop. And that kind of unleashed all of this. And I remember saying something, you know, and she was right. I remember initially talking to Tia about this, and she said, this is going to open Pandora's box. And it was a very fair and appropriate warning because it did. And it became really hard to practice. It became very difficult to practice. But I remember, you know, I remember James Cone, who's a black liberation theologian, and he has this sentence in his first book that just struck me. He said, if you are going to seriously work for the benefit of oppressed people, if you're really going to do that, then your body is going to take on the pain of oppression. You're going to start feeling it. And you start feeling... the pain and suffering of that, and it's going to be miserable.

[67:58]

And all the protective strategies against it. Yeah. And so, I mean, that was the thing that turned us as far as what maybe the second part of the question about what the thing that keeps us going. I just, there's so many things. It's hard to say because it's so intimate. It's almost as if the community is starting to... energetically embody something different. You can't name it as a thing, but you can feel it. And one thing I would say, you know, we have a tiny, tiny little temple. You know, there's less than 10 of us in this residential temple. And when we first started it, we were very conscious that we wanted it to not be a white dominated space and that people who were coming here as residents needed to, particularly if they were white, needed to have done some work or have some perspective or ability to to be with the charge of racial pain. And because of the incredible compassion, courage of working and living in a very intimate setting, it's like a family.

[69:10]

It's not like Tazahara where you can kind of hide at the other end of the monastery. intimately having conversations. And I will say personally that the students of color who came to me and with such clarity and sensitivity named something about something that I was embodying and that we were able to kind of unpack it in its complexity and also include, you know, there was one moment where someone said to me who was a particular Asian ancestry, I'm trying to be very vague about it, is he said, you know, the Irish and our people sometimes competed with each other or worked together in the same kind of domestic help situations.

[70:12]

And it was subtle, but it was powerful. It was a way of connecting histories, understanding differences, and those kinds of things, that ability to navigate that and nuance that and allow all of that in the room and hold it. And what that means in terms of our relationship gives me incredible inspiration and a re-devotion to the work. I do see relationships transforming in deeper ways. I'll say one more thing about what keeps us going. For me, to watch people move beyond identifying with the way we've been racialized, but not in some, you know, ultimate we're beyond race because we're not in dual way. No. But because we work through together the way we've all been racialized and the pain.

[71:14]

of our racialization and to come out the other side and be humans together, fully recognizing that that is freedom. That is deep liberation. And, you know, I'm always reminded of the 23rd Psalm, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You know, there is the cup runneth over is after the valley of shadow of death. It's not before it or somewhere else. You go through that and then you get to it. And that feels true. And just a quick, another example. We have, there was a Zen Students of Color retreat up at Ancestral Heart. And they were doing a whole weekend and they invited Kosen and I in for particular moments. And one of the moments they invite us in is for each of us to talk about our ancestry, our ethnic ancestors. And we drew pictures and told stories. And that was transformative for them. because it kind of fleshes out who we are as beings and the complexity of that.

[72:22]

Thank you for the question and for the response. There's another question in the chat that someone's asked me to give voice to. This person asks, how can I, as a BIPOC, Community member, be a part of the embodied conversation, healing and just action. There has to be, first of all, just start out, there has to be support for your voice. And so I don't... I want to be very careful because this can be a tendency in white dominant communities to put the onus of this on to people of color, which it just simply cannot be. That's just more violence. There has to be deep support for your voice and structures to set up where those voices. So for us, because Zen tends to put everything to the spiritual hierarchy, we had to create other places.

[73:29]

where there was true empowerment. We had a Sangha Council, which takes on the racial diversity of the Sangha, but there's the voice, they have an empowered voice there to give us feedback about people moving into particular roles in case we're missing things. There is the Zen Students of Color group. We have an Ancestral Heritage Council that's forming that are a lot of the senior Asian students in the community. to create places of power that isn't just the Zen hierarchy, because that takes so long to move through. And so how do you take part? I mean, bring your voice, as scary as it is, bring your voice into the community. But what I will say to the people who identify as white folks here, support those voices. deeply support voices of color coming into the front of the community.

[74:34]

And when there are recognitions and things that are just so painful and everything in your body wants to resist it and shut it down, don't. Just don't. Let that voice have full expression and be heard. You may agree with it or not, but It may be true or not. It may be one of the things I really hate is that really brings up ire in me is when say, oh, that's coming from trauma. Everything's coming. Of course it is. You know, things are coming from trauma and they're coming from difficult backgrounds and all of that. That doesn't mean it's not a legitimate perspective. Right. So so to really let I don't know who's asking, but I'll say this is this has to co-arise. Your voice has to co-arise with the willingness of the community to allow that voice to be heard. You can't just enter. And not dismissed. Yeah. Your voice has to be heard and not dismissed and taken seriously.

[75:36]

And there has to be places for voices of color to be heard. structurally within the institution so that those perspectives feed back into the decision-making process of the institution. If they don't, then we're just playing games. It's just games. I mean, this I feel strongly. You're just playing games. So there has to be some way. So yes, please come forward. And also on the other side, please make room. Thank you for that response. And the person who asked me to ask the question said, thank you for your response. It was very inspiring. So I see that Shirley has her hand up. So I will ask you to unmute Shirley and please unmute yourself and ask your question. Okay, great. Thank you so much for this talk.

[76:38]

It has really illuminated things for me because In a lot of ways, I haven't been wanting to really get into the conversation that is so loud in society, all the politics and stuff like that. Because I feel like everybody's talking, but the way they're fixing the problem, I don't agree with it. And I don't want to go deeper into pain knowing that there's no answer there. And I think really... What has helped me is just hearing you talk about, like, naming the concepts and the structures and how they operate and the whole exile thing. And I realized I do that in my own life. Like, I consider myself a good person. Like, sometimes I know I don't do things right, but then I realized it, like... There's somebody that did something.

[77:39]

Yeah, it could be classified as wrong, but then I'm exiling them and I become part of the problem. And so in describing the exile and how that's problematic and then and also presenting another way, which is, you know, the messiness and dealing with it as a community, that's actually where I can see, oh, this is this has me be able to get outside of myself. and check in and go, okay, what's actually going on here? And something that comes to mind that I saw many years ago from the Charlie Rose show, who coincidentally, I mean, he was exiled too, you know, but like there was somebody he interviewed and it was interesting because the person was a playwright that it was... he was um interviewing and that playwright said that we often talk until the point of departure but what would be helpful is to continue talking until the point of arrival and i remember at that point i i think it was back in the 90s it was i had a vcr and i i i was like this is really good and i don't understand what he's saying i must rewind it like 15 times but i've never forgotten that and um

[79:02]

So thank you so much for this talk today. It's completely shifted and given me more details and given me a way to participate in the conversation and keep myself in check and in the community all at the same time. Sort of like meditations, like check in, like I'm not just one person. I'm part of this. How can I settle back in? Thank you. I love that quote. So there's time probably for one more question before we close out. Looks like Peter has raised their hand. I'll ask you to unmute Peter.

[80:04]

Thank you so much for your talk. Talks. I found it very informative and inspiring. And I just wonder, you know, I didn't really catch, I wasn't listening, I guess, to the early part of your talk when you were talking about exile and banishment. And I think it was related to crime and karma. Let's see how I listen. And, you know, I realized that exile provides a kind of survival function for a social community. And, you know, so, having put that out there, one of the Confucian qualities or primaries is the idea of harmony, that we want to achieve and maintain a degree of harmony for the common good, for society, and that that is part of

[81:32]

the Tao, the way. And so I'm just wondering how you might couch these ideas of exile and justice in regards to harmony. And I'll listen. Thank you. I just want to name one thing that came up for me when you were talking, which is one of the reasons I think we avoid conflict is because we've seen such out of control, anger, violence, hatred, expressed in our communities, in our homes, in our relationships. And so to me, the idea of forms and container and rituals around engaging with these difficult conflicts and we've done a lot of work and gotten some wonderful wisdom from San Francisco Zen Center around working around ethics and violations and returning to harmony.

[82:36]

But I do think we have to be very formal and conscious when we engage in these conversations. And we do have to, like I said, I think we have to metabolize a lot of those things as they live in our bodies enough and stabilize them enough without shutting them down so that they can be anger-like expressed in the service of connection. And so that is, there's no formula for that. I think we know how to create containers and forms and structures. And I believe if we do that well, we can allow these energies to come in and be held in a way that's not going to replicate harm. And another thing I'd say, which I think you hear a lot, which is, you know, we can have an intention not to harm, but we have to stay through and recognize the impact. And that's, you know, we have no idea how the body we're sitting across to, what their history is and how they receive something.

[83:45]

So we have to kind of hang in the conversation through that piece. Yeah, and I think the only thing I would say to the harmony question is there are a lot of false harmonies. And there are two things. There are false harmonies, and we often confuse harmony with order. And they're very different things, right? And sometimes we want to maintain order. And we want to maintain... Or we want to false... You know, when things become... Sometimes when things become... When harmony seems like it's falling apart... Maybe it is because we're not upholding the precepts well, and we need to look at that. Maybe that is what's going on, and there are things to address. But harmony, I think harmony in our tradition has to be moral. It has to be an ethical harmony, not just an agreement in terms of behaving a certain way with each other that feels harmonious, but a deeper morality that addresses...

[84:50]

Is there a false harmony here that is, and I think we can look at this even in Confucianism, that is there a harmony here that is covering over a systemic structure that is harming a large group of people that don't have the same kind of voices? Who's deciding what harmony is? Mm-hmm. Is everybody involved in deciding what the harmony is? Or is only like six people involved in deciding? Or are only men involved in deciding what the harmony is? You know, who's deciding the harmony? And I think if we're going to arrive at harmony, it means that everybody in the community is in the circle. Together deciding what harmony looks like. And that's far less efficient, far less orderly, far more complicated. You know, but... But that's the only way I feel we're going to arrive at something that actually is all the way to the bottom harmony.

[85:53]

And it's not static. Harmony is not static. Well, thank you, Peter, for your question. And thank you, Kosin and Laura, for your insightful questions. and helpful response to what is harmony and who is deciding what harmony is. And so it looks like we're out of time. So I just want to thank the two of you again for taking time out of your, what looks like super busy schedules. And thank you everyone for being here and for all the thoughtful, thought provoking questions. So please everyone have a wonderful day. and hope that we will connect with you soon. So take good care. Thank you. Bye-bye. Good to see you both.

[86:58]

Thank you so much, Kozen and Laura. How wonderful. See you soon. Thanks to two of you. So wonderful to see you both. Thank you for your sweet connection there about our Irish-Italian working class backgrounds and also just Kosen and David having Pennsylvania Dutch background together. How unusual is that? Right. Well, I'm going to end the conversation with my power of being the Zoom host right now and hope that you all have a great day.

[88:06]

And thank you again, everyone, for joining us. So take good care. Bye-bye.

[88:11]

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