So I guess I'm going first. And it feels kind of funny to be giving a way-seeking mind talk two and a half years after I first came to Satsang. But it just happened that practice period or subsequent practice period. So I imagine it feels different now than it would have felt then, rather than just sort of coming here and saying, this is who I am. Now it feels like I've been here a while. and almost like I've been kind of hiding out with my personal story, and now finally, here it is. I grew up in a small town in southeast Texas with about 8,000 people, about an hour from Louisiana, about an hour from the Gulf Coast, with lots of pine trees in an area called the Big Thicket. It's important because I grew up with such a sense of place and community and very deep roots, and in some ways almost the values of an earlier generation.

[01:10]

Both my parents were older, and both of my parents were born in this same town and had always known each other. My grandparents on my mother's side were alive until I was in college, and they lived just about a mile away. and they'd been there most of their lives, so lots of people knew me, knew my parents their whole lives, knew my grandparents, and I didn't really realize how rare this was and how lucky I was until I went away. I was also very lucky in that I had this small town upbringing, a southern kind of warm, soft upbringing, but My mother especially had gotten out in her earlier years before she moved back and traveled a lot. And my grandparents liked to travel. And they liked to take their grandchildren with them. I have a sister who's two years younger. And we got to travel a lot. My mother's sister died when I was four and was buried in Alabama.

[02:14]

And every summer, my grandparents and my sister and my mother and I would pile into my grandparents' Lincoln Continental and head off to Alabama to go visit her grave. And then from that we would go visit other states and do all these things and historical sites, etc. And they took us to Europe a couple of times and art museums and all that kind of thing. And my father also had grown up in a small town. It was a little difficult because my mother's family had the money. Well, it wasn't a lot of money, but more than my father's family. And he took over his father's dry cleaning business and always felt sort of shackled to that. And he would never come with us on these trips. He always felt like he had to work or he couldn't afford it. And so we would go off. And I really, he now has brain cancer and is in the process of dying. Now that I'm having to come to terms with his dying and what that means to grieve him, I'm only now really realizing how much I lost him much, much earlier, and how emotionally distant he's been in my life, and that I had never grieved that loss, and it's affected me in ways I've never understood.

[03:27]

So that's something that's very real for me right now. People ask when I started meditating. If I start going back, I think, I think since I was a very young child I was always meditating, because I was very quiet and very shy, and would spend a lot of time alone, and really loved nature, and would go for walks. And it was a great frustration in my childhood that I was a girl, and my mother was afraid to let me go out in the woods by myself, because I wanted to just walk and be outside. But I would go out and sit under trees, just by myself. I mean, I had friends, and I did feel very nurtured in the community and family, but I think I was really afraid of other children. And, you know, when I would be outside playing in the yard or something, and neighborhood kids would come by, I would run inside and hide until they went by, and then I would go back out. Let's see. And I read a lot.

[04:31]

You know, I would go to school and I would finish work really early, but my teachers were very... tolerant and supportive, and they would let me bring a book, so I would just sit and read. And, I don't know, I may have been really sensitive too. My mother says that when I was really young and went to see 101 Dalmatians, I was so traumatized by the violence and cruelty in that, that I hid under a table for two hours, and she couldn't find me, and was absolutely in a panic. And I even have some memory of that, of just hiding there in the dark. And when I was nine, I remember reading Ishi, The Last of His Tribe. I don't know if anybody's read that. It's about a Californian Indian who was found later, I think, in the 20th century and really was the last living member of his tribe. And I remember reading this and the descriptions of his religious beliefs and rituals and all of this. And so I would go out in this vacant lot across the street and try to recreate these nature rituals that I found in this book.

[05:35]

Let's see. Oh, and my mother has been a very important figure for me, and continues to be, in that she left this town, Silsbury, and traveled a lot, and went to college, also ended up going to Tokyo for two years in the late 50s to teach army children, and then from there traveled through India and Nepal, all these places when nobody was going there. You know, it was really before anyone really thought of traveling there popularly. So she had done the most things kind of in this town. You know, she would go talk to all the school children and everything. But then she gave it up to raise children and marry a hometown boy and be close to her parents. So that's had a really strong influence on, you know, who I'm supposed to be or what I'm supposed to do and the importance of family and all of that. I'm also still trying to understand how that's influenced me. So, anyway, I grew up, and when I was in late junior high, I started dating someone named John, who... We were really young, but we became really quite close, and he was a Southern Baptist, and I grew up in the Methodist church.

[06:50]

But he was really into religion, and being Baptist, and all of this, Because I was really into him, I started getting really into religion, and really looking at it, and getting involved in my church, and going on retreats, and all these things. And I really wanted to believe, just so deeply, I really wanted to believe. But it was that very difficult time, we were together from junior high into high school, and about that time, we started discovering sex. We never actually slept together, but it was just extremely confusing, because we were trying to live the certain ideals of what it meant to be a good Christian and a good person, and really be exemplars of that, yet sort of behind closed doors we were doing all these things that we thought were really mortal sins. And it was too much of a conflict for him, and he completely broke away from me and wouldn't speak to me for a year. And around that time I also just realized, as much as I wanted to believe Christianity, or at least Christianity the way I understood it then,

[07:55]

One day I just realized I just couldn't believe it. You know, I just couldn't literally believe it in the way I thought I had to. And so I stopped going to church at that point. And then after my sophomore year, I took a summer and went to Knoll on Knolls, which is sort of like Outward Bound in Wyoming. And that was really important to go out and find that I was strong and I could do things. Again, nature was very important. And I remember, you know, camping up above a tree line as a storm was coming in, and just feeling like that was God. And the last three days of the trip, it was a month out, there was optional fasting, and I fasted. And I felt like I could do that. I could, you know, maybe I couldn't carry the heaviest pack, but I could fast. And that was good. It gave me a lot of confidence. And I was always good in school. You know, it's funny, I'm not friends with any of these people now.

[08:57]

I've totally lost touch with almost all of them, but I went through school with the same people from kindergarten up through high school, you know, and from kindergarten up through high school I was always the first in the class, which actually was a funny place to be, I think, growing up, and also to be shy on top of that. And I think at some point I got a reputation of being stuck up, and there may have been some truth to that, but I also just remember being really afraid of people, and sort of having a shell because of that. But in my junior year, towards the end, I started dating someone who was much older than I was, and kind of wild, and would speak out at night, and lie to my mother, and do all these things, and that was kind of the first inkling of the sort of darker side of me. And my... I thought about going to college early, but instead I ended up going to boarding school in Connecticut, and I never seen it before, we just sent away for catalogs and other names and off I went.

[09:57]

And that was also quite eye-opening and it was really beautiful. It was called Hotchkiss in northwestern Connecticut, a good school. And a couple of the teachers really became mentors to me and gave me a lot of confidence. Socially, I felt like I had the choice of either becoming a preppy or a hippie, so I became a hippie. and started dating someone there who was really quite wonderful, but also a little bit wild, and got into a little bit some drugs with him, that kind of thing. But overall it was a very good experience. And I remember reading, for a course I read a book called Annie Dillard's Pokemon at Tinkertree Creek. I didn't even know it. And it has a lot of Zen in it, and I've read it several times since then, but that helped a lot in terms of awareness and looking. Also Wordsworth. I really loved Wordsworth during that time. Then I'd had enough of the East Coast, and I didn't really feel comfortable there after growing up in Texas. So when I went to apply to colleges, I ended up going to Stanford, and I'd never been to California before.

[11:04]

But my mother lived in California, and there were mountains there and ocean there, and it sort of was the promised land. So it took me a little while to adjust, but I ended up living in a really wonderful co-op called Synergy, which had chickens and the garden and we baked our moon bread and it was vegetarian and it was great, it was really good. I majored in English because I really enjoyed it in high school and I found I was taking all English classes. I also spent a couple of years doing a lot of feminist studies and that was very helpful to break through some things and understand things. And looking back, I definitely was searching, kind of looking. I took a class in calculus, which I'm not sure why, I just thought it would be good for me to take, but the TA of that class did Tai Chi and also taught meditation, and so he would offer it to his students in the evening if they wanted to take meditation.

[12:08]

And so I would go, and it was sort of a guided meditation, and then we'd have discussion afterwards. And I remember we were talking about, somehow nuclear war came up, and I said something about the tremendous fear of nuclear annihilation, and he said, oh, fear? You're afraid? It was the first time the idea dawned on me that maybe you didn't have to be afraid, even if something, the worst thing you could possibly imagine, it was possible not to be afraid. And then, you know, looking into women's spirituality, and I organized this group of women, and we in the hills of Stanford, which are really beautiful, one full moon night, and did this sort of women's, which kind of circle that was fun, but that didn't really quite go anywhere. And, let's see, and I got very much into, I was still in my hippie phase, you know, with long flowing skirts and earrings and all of that, and dancing wildly to the Grateful Dead, and some use of psychedelics, although I remember even at the time thinking, this is the window, this isn't the door, you know, and I want to go through the door.

[13:13]

And then my junior year I went to England for a time and that kind of got me out of that phase. My freshman year I started dating someone named Mark, he was just graduating, about to go to graduate school at Berkeley, and we dated all through college and I would commute back and forth. And this will come up later as an important relationship. It was extremely important, but always somewhat difficult. So I graduated and wanted to basically stay in the Bay Area, but decided to go to the Radcliffe publishing course in Cambridge, which was a six-week course. So I went off to Boston, did that, fully intending to come back to San Francisco. but Mark, my boyfriend, couldn't quite say that he wanted me to come back. So I stayed in New York, where all the jobs were anyway, and got a job working for a literary agent for a one-woman show.

[14:17]

And I really liked her, although I'm really terrible at selling things, and I'm much more into editorial kind of things, so it wasn't really the right job for me in some ways. But I stayed there for about a year, and I A couple of interesting things happened. One was, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day and was sitting at the bar there and started talking to this man named Paul, who eventually, through him, I was invited into a secret society of Gurdjieff Ospensky, you know, the kind of place where he I was sort of invited half by accident, but anyway, they let me come along. And so he said, okay, we're going to go. And so I just sort of went with him in faith, you know, through the subways, etc., to Chinatown, to this sort of unmarked door. And I thought, what am I getting myself into? But I went, you know, and went up the stairs and there was this big room and, you know, all these people who came every week. And the deal was you couldn't tell anyone what you were doing, any of your family or friends or anything.

[15:22]

And if you saw each other, people in the group on the street, you couldn't acknowledge each other or anything like that. And it was kind of an odd group. I mean, there was a, okay, there was something going on there that was positive. You know, definitely kind of a therapy. I never quite got too into the philosophy of it. And the first month was free. And then... But to their credit though, like when, you know, when it came to how much it was per month, you know, and I just literally said, you're not spicing on food for a month, they said, oh, you really shouldn't, you're not ready for this, you really shouldn't do this. They weren't, you know, oh, you can afford it kind of thing. They're like, oh, if that's too much for you, you know, maybe this isn't the right time for you to be here. And I remember crying at that point, because I felt really strange about it all along, and I wasn't sure I wanted to continue.

[16:23]

But when they said I couldn't continue, I started crying. I thought, what is this? And something had been woken up in me, and it was the idea that it was going to get cut off again. But it didn't seem like the right group for me. But it did reawaken an interest in Aikido that had started kind of slowly earlier. Back when I was 16, I did NOLS. One of my instructors had been an Aikido instructor. And then at Stanford, I had done a little bit. And so I resolved to start doing Aikido again. And so I found a dojo, a little dojo, and started doing that. And that was really, became really important to me for at least a short period of time, where I did it for longer, and was going, you know, five times a week, a couple of hours each time, and was just feeling really, so again, something was being woken up. And about this time, it was getting toward the summer, and Mark, my boyfriend back in San Francisco, decided to come, he was going to come live with me in San Francisco, but I mean in New York for the summer.

[17:33]

But I guess too much damage had been done already, and for whatever reason, as soon as he got there, I basically started an affair with someone from the Aikido dojo in Taun. And it was really awful, you know, it was really awful to be just so blatantly hurting someone I loved so much and be living in the same place with them. And just watching myself destroying systematically this relationship that was so important to me. And eventually I moved out. And he went back to Berkeley, and I'd had enough of New York. I never really felt comfortable there, and in some ways I really loved it, I loved the energy, I loved the excitement and the challenge of it, but I also didn't like who I had to be to live there, you know, the street armor I had to put on, and what I had to put up with. We had sublet an apartment in the Lower East Side.

[18:36]

It wasn't a bad neighborhood, it was near St. Mark's Place and all that, if you know New York. But this particular block had a lot of problems, and the particular building had a lot of problems. A door that wouldn't quite close to the street, and a lot of prostitutes on that block, and a couple of empty apartments in the building, you know. So there was this one woman, I remember, you know, I would pass her on the stairs, and she just looked like death, you know, and you'd find used condoms, cocaine vials and things on the stairs, and just to live with that on a daily basis, even though I felt fairly safe. So I went back to Berkeley, and everything pretty much was falling apart at that point, you know, I had gone through college, gone through high school, gone through college, everything was rosy, and then suddenly kind of coming out, nothing was working anymore. Am I doing on time here? I couldn't find a job, did a lot of freelance editing kind of things, and wanted to get the relationship back with Mark and could not.

[19:48]

It had just been hurt too deeply. And it was really the first time I felt that actions have consequences, and I just knew I couldn't fix it, and my parents couldn't fix it, and he couldn't fix it, nothing could fix it. And I started breaking out in hives all over my back. I started seeing a therapist for a short time. But then I knew I needed a church, basically. And I very consciously went church shopping. And went to some Unitarian churches, went to a Korean Zen Center, went to Quakers, and then ended up at the Boku Zen Center. And as soon as I walked in, it just felt like the right place. You know, whether it had been the Japan connection, people felt right. And when we started doing, when we had service, and we started doing bowing practice, and it was all very foreign, but when I first did my first full prostration, you know, touched my head to the floor, something, there was just this great sense of relief in doing the bows. And there really, you know, a lot of people say I had this feeling of coming home, and that really was my feeling there.

[20:50]

So I was there for a few months. I dug someone's mouth once, I think. But by that time, I decided to go ahead and go to Japan. So, partially just because I needed a change and I wanted to go to Asia for a while. So I went to Japan. And Tom, who's from back in New York, was going to Japan too. So we were there together for a little while. That was very unhappy. I lived in Tokyo, which was, I think, a mistake. It was very stressful. But I taught English for a while, then I worked in a publishing company. Did some Aikido, a little bit of Jitzen, but not seriously. and things didn't work out with Tom, you know, there were other men, but, and I really felt like, even at the time I knew I was doing violence to myself and having casual relationships, but I couldn't quite get a grasp on it, and I think I'm only now really understanding how much damage I did to myself through that and what that means. Then, let's see, after being there about a year, I saved some money and I went traveling through Asia for four months,

[22:01]

and trek through Nepal, did all of that, and then finally ended up in Thailand. And toward the end of my stay in Asia, I was in Northern Thailand, and I was thinking of either going to Thai cooking school or Thai massage school, or maybe doing some meditation, and asked some people around the guest house where I was staying if they knew where I was doing meditation, and they said, oh yeah, we just came from someplace, by the way. So why don't you go check it out?" So I got a little, you know, minicab, hired a little minicab, and they took me off. And it was about 15 minutes outside of the city. And I went in and I said I wanted to come just for a week, because I wanted to go further and do some more traveling. And they said, well, it's actually a 26-day course for foreigners. I said, well, I can't do that. And they really discouraged me, but finally they said, OK, if you want to come for a week, come. So I came. So I went. After a week, I really knew I needed to stay the whole 26 days, but my plane ticket, we had three plane tickets all set up, and they were before the end of the time, and I just said, you know, I have three plane tickets, two of them international, there's no way to change them.

[23:11]

They said, well, just try, and so they let me call, and I was able to change all three without any extra cost. It was one of those moments when you just have a pure heart and pure intention, and the world opens up for you, you know. That was a very important experience for me. You know, it was like 12 hours of sitting and walking meditation a day on your own, basically. And in the last three days of no sleep, just straight meditation. And a lot came out of my body. You know, a lot that had been stored very deep came out. And so I feel extremely grateful that I was able to do that. Came back home. I started graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin, in English. I discovered I really loved to teach, but something had been niggling at me, continued to niggle at me, and I knew I had to do more Buddhism. Because I had been at Berkeley, I knew about Green Gulch, and I was able to barely arrange the minimum two-week stay.

[24:17]

In the meantime, started seeing a really dear old friend, sort of repressed romantic feeling to come up and we were really quite involved in thinking about getting married and he was supposed to come out to live with me for the summer. And anyway, so I went to Green Gulch for two weeks and the world changed. I mean, something just clicked. I met Rev and that was a very powerful connection and I just suddenly realized I needed to make this a priority and I said, can I come to Tassajara? And, you know, just like in Thailand, I just put forth energy and then let it go and it somehow miraculously opened up and I was allowed to do it. So I basically dropped, you know, went back, lived with my friend for the summer, but then dropped, got left, took a leave of absence from school. did everything and came here for a year. And it never felt like the wrong thing. It always felt like the right thing to do. But then I realized I needed to go back and finish up what I'd started, at least my master's degree.

[25:22]

So, even though in some ways I didn't want to go, I went back last year to finish that. And I also feel extremely grateful that I was able to make my way back here. So, that's mostly it. I mean, I feel grateful to Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and all of you. I also feel very grateful to Jeremy for keeping me honest. And that's all. Thank you. Well, it's kind of a surprise to be doing it with Aung and San this evening. We sit next to each other in the zendo, and then everywhere I go, I fear, in the bath, at the laundry, at Dōkasan. So we seem to be on the same schedule. It's also interesting because

[26:27]

When you tell your story, you tell such a story of a wonderful family. I don't have that story to tell. But anyway, when I first got to Totsahara, I heard a great story, which was that I was 56 years old and I'd had two facelifts. And I thought, well, this is really interesting. I don't know how to take it. So I thought I would really cover the true story, which is that I'm 26 years old, but I've lived the life of a saint, following in the footsteps of Mother Teresa. So it's been such an ascetic life. I look like I'm 56 and have had two faces. But I was actually born 50 years ago in Los Angeles. And one of the things that Suzuki Roshi said back in the late 60s that I heard him say, was that we chose our parents, and it's really been a good question for me. My parents were both very undeveloped, and I can't quite figure out why I chose them.

[27:35]

But I puzzle over it a lot. And anyway, I thought about how much did I want to talk about this, and not very much at all. And I agree with Brother David, you know, in a sense that talking about a childhood or focusing on it, it's time to move on. And yes, I have moved on because I married and had my own family. And yet, when I thought about talking about it, I felt ashamed. So I said, well, I guess I need to talk about it a little bit and release some more. And there was a fair bit of physical abuse. And there was a woman at Berkley Gen Center, Susan Green, she died recently, and she talked about physical abuse, you know, having her fingernails pulled out. It wasn't that kind of physical abuse. It was that kind of physical abuse of belts and wooden hangers.

[28:37]

My brother tells me, I have a brother who's 14 months younger and a sister who's two and a half years older, and my brother tells me that my father, a few times, strangled him until he lost consciousness. And I know I was there in the room when it happened, but I just can't remember it. So it's been very emotional for both of us. This has only been the last few years that we've talked about it. And my brother and I are very close. The last time, well, I guess there's another, there's several reasons I wanted to talk about the abuse a little bit. I'm a psychologist now, and so is my sister, actually. And I guess my sister and my mother were my first patients. But my, one of the things that I'm aware of with kids who are in really difficult situations is that you have to make a choice.

[29:44]

to survive it. And the choice, uh, it's too much for a child to, to, uh, consider that they're in an unsafe situation and they're not getting the love they need. So they have the choice to act out, you know, and become wild in some way, or to act in and, or to, um, just go crazy. And so I see these various, kids in my practice from time to time. And for the early part of my life, it wasn't the safest route, as far as I was concerned, was to act in. And I was pretty sick. And I think that most of you may have noticed, I'm oftentimes the last one to finish at Oreoke and notice that I can eat certain things and I can't eat other things. So I think some of it may have to do with this really oppressive environment and making a choice to shut down, to survive.

[30:57]

There was also a fair bit, you know, the usual torment at meals, which was whatever, it's not unlike karaoke, whatever's put out, you have to eat. Oh, but you really have to, you really had to eat it or mother might go off. And, um, but there were other things that were a little bit strange. And, um, my father died when I was six. And one of, um, the things that I remember was shortly before he died, he, um, he caught a tuna, a very large tuna and it was in the freezer. And sometime after he died, we had to eat it. And, um, it was a real mismatch in sensitivity between my mother and the children. So my brother and I remember it really well, having to eat the tuna. And then we also had pet ducks, which we also had to eat. So, uh, there were, you know, a few traumas around eating. So anyway, I'm working on it now. And, um, trying to undo some of the damage that went on.

[32:03]

So I think my father, I think my father dying when I was six made a very big impression on me. I really couldn't understand what all the grief was about because people say, well, he's died and he's gone to heaven. And so I think I was already by that time really split in my head and my body. It took me many years. Of course, children aren't really, you know, from my understanding now, aren't really capable of mourning. And I didn't really understand what it meant anyway that he was going to be gone forever. I mean, it took a few years for that to penetrate. But it was a very powerful experience to wonder where he was. And another experience about that time was that my uncle, who was a jazz musician, had gone to Israel to do some music. And when he came back, he gave my sister an Old Testament.

[33:13]

And she wasn't really interested in it. But I remember taking it out of the drawer and holding it in my hands. And I hadn't had much religious training, maybe a little bit of Sunday school. My family is Jewish. And I just held it in my hands, and I heard a heavenly choir. And as I held the book, I knew there was something very powerful. I couldn't read yet. From the time I was very little, probably up until the time I was a teenager, I had my conversations with God, and so my spiritual beliefs were very strong and very silent. I also... did fairly well in school, although I was never at the top of my class.

[34:17]

I don't think I could behave well enough. But, um, my sister and I had a very close relationship, and we both, um, read a lot and, um, and felt like, we both felt like we were pretty crazy, because we couldn't quite make sense out of what was going on around us. And, um, When she was 18, and I was 15, she made a very strong suicide attempt. And she took maybe over 200 feet of barbital. And, you know, I think maybe, you know, less than 50 killed Marilyn Monroe, so we're not quite sure why she made it. It was also something that had a very powerful effect on me. Because she did it, and You know, she was beginning her first sexual relationships and she was very unstable and had had some disappointments.

[35:22]

But she came home from a date and did this and then she got into the twin bed in the same room with me. And I knew that she was drinking and using drugs and so my primary concern was hiding what was going on from my mother. And I listened to her all night, struggling for breath. And thought about it, checked her. And in the morning, alerted my mother that I thought something was wrong. And I found the empty bottle of pills. And I hid that. until it was clear that my mother and I weren't going to wake her up. And then I produced the box. Oh, look what I found. And my mother at that point knew what to do and called an ambulance. So for 10 days, she was in a coma.

[36:23]

And I'm not quite sure. I'm sure that I wouldn't, I don't know where I would be now if she had died. My mother did try to blame it on me, that this was my fault. I knew I could have done more, but I didn't feel that it was my fault. Fortunately, I went on and she did live. She had a wonderful, one of those dreams, you know, that I've been interested in, the near-death experience. She had one of those dreams that she met my father and he sent her back. She met her father and he sent her back. So there was a kind of turning point. I remember we called in a neurosurgeon or something. So there was this period of time when I was in high school, when she was kind of hanging there by a thread, that I was really sort of stepped out of my consciousness and out of my usual world, and I think that had a big effect as well.

[37:33]

When I finished high school, I had a California State Scholarship to go to any four-year university when my tuition paid in the state of California, so I chose Berkeley. I guess that wasn't a good economical decision, but anyway, it seemed like the right place to be, and I ended up in Berkeley in 1964 when the pre-speech movement was starting. And I had spent all my energy containing myself to stay alive in my family, and I was released to Berkeley in 1964. Need I say more? So it was pretty interesting. And I did manage to stay in school for four years. That was pretty good. And I guess I had my share of wild times. I don't know whether to be grateful or not. It's kind of interesting. It was pretty interesting that I was 17 when I was up there.

[38:40]

It was already my second semester of college. But by the time I was 18, I was living with a man who was 34. And that was kind of a stabilizing relationship in my life. And it wasn't long after that, or maybe even during that time. And that was about the same age my father was when he died. So it was kind of a coincidence. I did not have, like, a lot of violence or, you know, real overt kind of trauma or whatever, but there was a real quality of emotional absence. Sort of, they just sort of weren't there. They really had a hard time with painful emotions of their own, and so they have an especially hard time with painful emotions in other people, although my mother was actually a social worker for much of her career. and very good at it, I understand. So I mostly remember being really lonely and isolated when I was growing up.

[39:42]

They called my bedroom the Planet Shaman. And I spent a lot of time there alone reading and I was... kind of nerdy and bookish and very, uh, very low self-esteem. So, uh, I didn't have a lot of friends and I mostly remember being really pretty lonely. Um, and I went to, uh, uh, I sort of was raised in a mainline Protestant church that kind of bored me after a while. It seemed like a lot of little old ladies with blue hair and furs and not a lot of spirit so I stopped going in probably fifth grade and I remember around junior high or so I was really kind of you know asking a lot of questions the way that junior high kids at that age do and somehow I ended up in this church that had been

[40:44]

that had grown out of like gatherings in people's living rooms or something. Now I know, at the time I didn't understand this, but now I know that it was a, it was a fundamentalist, Pentecostal, evangelical, charismatic, you know, holy roller church. But what impressed me so much the first time that I went was this, the pastor got up and talked about how God loved us absolutely unconditionally. and that just got me right here you know because I certainly didn't feel that way about myself and I was just hooked right in and so I started going to this church and I got really immersed in it and I was going several nights a week and so forth and I was this little evangelical born-again Christian My mother says I was a real pain in the ass. But they were very good about taking me to church and letting me do my own thing and at the time my father was bringing home Zafus and books on Buddhism and my mother was writing a master's thesis on Zen and public administration.

[41:53]

And I was exhorting them at the dinner table about how they had to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior or they'd go to hell. So, anyway, I'm very grateful for them because their policy was just to let me do it until I got over it. But what happened was that I've, they always kind of, I think my mother is actually this very sort of vibrant sort of energetic person in some ways, and my father's really kind of a control freak. And so my mother sort of encouraged me to sort of, sort of subtly to kind of be as uppity as I was. And so I was asking questions and challenging my teachers and so forth. I had a sixth grade teacher. My mother called, he called my mother into a conference one time and said, well, Mississippi, we need to learn to deal with Shannon despite her problem.

[42:59]

My mother said, oh, what is that? And he said, well, she's an independent thinker. So he tried to get me thrown out of school for reading too many books. But anyway, so I ran afoul of the authority in this fundamentalist church because a lot of the doctrine didn't make sense to me and I was always asking these questions and being adolescent and not very skillful, as it got more sort of authoritarian and more rigid and more dogmatic and I started kind of asking more questions and getting more resistant it degenerated into a kind of a personal battle between me and one of the leaders of the youth group that I was in and one day the pastor came to the youth group while I wasn't there and told them that I was not a Christian and that I was sowing seeds of discord and so the next time I came to church nobody would look at me or talk to me And this had been my whole social life.

[44:03]

All my friends, I had sort of surrogate mothers who had taken me in and, you know, everything. And suddenly I was out. And I was devastated. And I was very, very, very angry for a really long time. And just, I was crushed. So then in high school I got involved with this other this non-denominational youth group called Young Life, some of you may know about. And there was a woman there, she was this short, blonde cheerleader, named Maureen, and she was the first person I ever really felt really loved me. And she was a really good friend, and I was very, I was pretty needy and pretty clingy, and she was very patient actually. And then she went off to college and I was heartbroken, but I was involved in this group and so forth and I was sort of studying the apologetics, the sort of explanations that fundamentalist Christians come up with to explain why their particular belief system is absolutely true.

[45:19]

you know, reading all the books and everything, I was studying to be a camp counselor, going through this indoctrination process. And somewhere in there I borrowed a copy of my father's Tao Te Ching and I read this book and I actually copied it by hand into a notebook. And it really, something about it really got to me. Buddhism didn't make much sense to me. I'd read a little bit about it but I couldn't get, I didn't understand why anybody would want to get nothing. So I wasn't so interested. But Taoism really said, something about it really spoke to me. Instead of seeing this sort of opposition of dark and light and good and evil and so forth, you know, they arose together. and they depended on each other and it was like as if I had spent my whole life looking at the world from this perspective and then all of a sudden I was standing over here looking at it this way and it was like, wow, you know, it was so interesting to me and I remember telling one of the leaders of my church group or of my youth group that I had read this thing and it was so interesting to me and the next day I was out of the camp counselor program.

[46:26]

So that was enough of religion for me for a while and I got involved in politics instead. So I was involved in student politics in high school and then in college I went to go, during a summer internship in college I worked for Tom Hayden in the state capitol and was so appalled and discouraged by what I saw that I decided that what I really wanted to do was journalism. I thought if I could give people information about the bullshit that their politicians were pulling, maybe I could do something to bring about some constructive change. So I transferred from UC Davis to Berkeley, and I went to work for the student paper, and it was the height of Reaganism at that time, and in 1984, the Democratic National Convention was held in San Francisco and the week before the moral majority came to San Francisco and had its conference.

[47:34]

And I wanted to cover this because having had some personal experience of what it was like to be a fundamentalist Christian I thought that I could maybe cover it with a little bit more balanced perspective than some of my colleagues who were just hated the moral majority. So I covered it and It was the most amazing collection of sort of military force or police force I had ever seen before or since. There were police on horseback, on foot, on motorcycles, in cars, SWAT team, a bomb squad, hotel security guards, Secret Service. I mean the place was just swarming. with police and barricaded behind all of this weaponry was a lot of wealthy white people who were going on and on about how they were right and everybody else was wrong and they had the truth and everybody else was wrong and talking in very frightening terms actually about that it was okay to kind of

[48:43]

oppressed people because they were wrong and there was one pamphlet in particular I remember of a little blonde head on the cover of it was this picture of a little blonde girl with these long ponytails and shorts huddled in a corner screaming and hovering over her head was a big hairy arm with an axe and the title of the pamphlet was murder violence and homosexuality And it was about how gay people are unstable and dangerous and a threat to society and need to be neutralized because they're dangerous. And I had been taught homophobia, not by my family so much, but certainly by my church. But I was beginning to get to know some gay people and I was horrified by this thing. And I was just horrified by the rhetoric I heard, but outside the demonstrators were equally, they were screaming, go to hell, fall well, go to hell, fall well. And if he had walked out the door, they would have torn him limb from limb.

[49:44]

They were equally convinced they were right. And the moral majority was wrong and, uh, and were quite violent in their opposition. And, um, the police were busting people's heads open. and it was just, it was just a war and I was overwhelmed and I ended up sobbing in the hotel bathroom because I just, I couldn't take sighs, I just, it was overwhelming to me. And I had actually some months before had wandered into the Berkeley Buddhist Church which is a Jodo Shinshu church which is run by this Italian guy from Philly who plays the saxophone and he gave me this book on Buddhism and reading it somehow at that point in my life it just made sense to me, it was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. So I also went church shopping around Berkeley and also had the experience of walking into Berkeley Zen Center and I went, oh, this is home. So I had started sitting there and

[50:46]

I went after this conference, I went to a one-day sitting, and Kadagiri Roshi was leading it, and I went in and talked to him about this violence. I think somebody hit me with a kiosk when I burst into tears. And I went in and talked to him and said, I don't understand about this violence. And he said, if we want peace, we have to be it. You can't scream and yell for peace, we have to actually be it. And something about that really touched me and I thought, I really have to find out about that. So I ended up going to Green Gulch, took a semester off and went to Green Gulch. And shortly before I went, the woman with whom I had covered the Moral Mood Ready Conference ended up spending the night. And I had this whole other bunch of questions to deal with as well. And so I spent my time at Green Gulch also totally freaking out about the fact that I was coming out So let's see, I'm going to fast forward here. I worked mostly as a journalist.

[51:48]

I covered politics and I covered Asian American politics in Chinatown. And I covered law, which was really depressing. And I went to work for Wells Fargo Bank. And I got involved in founding the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. And at the time, there was a lot of talk about domestic, a lot of energy around domestic partner benefits and I was working in, at that time I was working in the personnel division at Wells Fargo and I started raising questions about domestic partner benefits and this so alarmed my boss that he forged my signature on falsified personnel records and it was this awful thing and anyway I ended up, he ended up getting fired And I ended up getting nine months to go around the world, you know, to take time off, and I went around the world by myself. It was really kind of nice. It worked out pretty well. And Wells Fargo changed its benefit policy. That was pretty good. But I realized, actually, now that I've jumped ahead too far, and I wanted to talk about, in 1989,

[52:53]

Well, around the time I did Jukai in 1988, I got involved with this woman and it was actually a really destructive, very destructive relationship that lasted off and on for about seven years. And the first major sort of blow up in it happened at the end of 1988 and I moved to San Francisco's Inn Center in 1989. I was pretty much running. And at that time I had been going to, I had started growing hair on my face when I was about 20 and I thought there was something wrong with me. And so I went to various doctors and I finally found a doctor who was an endocrinologist, the faculty at UCSF, and she, She confirmed that there was something wrong with me, that my body is deficient in a hormone that regulates your metabolism, your blood pressure, and your ability to handle stress. And in the effort to produce enough of it to keep me functioning, I overproduced some other things, other chemicals and so forth.

[54:00]

Anyway, consequently, I have hair on my face. And so she told me that the cure was to take a small dose of cortisone every day for the rest of my life. This is a standard treatment for women who have so-called excess facial hair. And so I was taking this medicine and what happened was it completely shut off my adrenal gland and completely stopped my body's production of this hormone. And I was living at City Center and trying to do the schedule and working 50 hours a week as a daily news reporter and collapsing in the hallways at Zen Center and not being able to do the schedule and didn't really understand what was going on. And so I was told that I had to leave Zen Center because I wasn't fulfilling my commitment. And I left and moved out and I was heartbroken. and I got sicker and sicker and sicker and what happened was at one point I got a cold and because my body was so compromised at that point it was such an overwhelming stress that I started vomiting uncontrollably and I couldn't stop and I finally had to be rushed to the hospital and they put two liters of fluid into me before I could sit up and then it happened again three weeks later and then I found out that it had been a mistake

[55:20]

that I should never have been given this drug in the first place, that even though I may be slightly deficient in this chemical, the treatment was far worse than the cure. So it took me months and months and months to recover and I was so sick that I could hardly get out of bed, I couldn't even like walk around the block. And anytime I had stress, and I was still in this really destructive relationship, so I had a lot of stress, I was, you know, threw it up all the time, it was really awful. And though some people at Denton knew what was going on, nobody inquired or did anything actually to help. And I was very, I felt very, very hurt by that. So eventually I recovered and but I was thinking about my story about this and it's like one disaster after another. I recovered and I was, somewhat during my recovery I went and stayed with my parents-in-law and I sublet my apartment to this guy that I had known since grade school.

[56:28]

And he moved in, changed the locks, disconnected the phone, got an unlisted number, wouldn't talk to me. I had this $300 apartment in The Hague and it was like gone. So I went to Zen Center and I said, could I stay here for two months while I go back to work and find another place to live? And the message came back, no, you're just being dependent. You have to take care of yourself. Can't come back. So again, I felt really crushed and I sort of really triggered all this stuff about, I think, my earlier experience with the fundamentalists. And I was really angry for a really long time. and I went to Berkeley and I was working there and I stayed away for a long time but, you know, I took this vow to do this practice and I had to find out how to actually do that. And I went to, you know, I'd go to Berkeley Zen Center and people would say to me, please come back, we'd like you to come back, please come back. And I tried to talk to Mel about what had happened and

[57:33]

you know, I was so critical and so angry at him that I don't think he could have heard anything I had to say. And so there was always this tension between me and him. We were always fighting because, you know, I was really pissed at him because he was involved in these decisions and I think he felt very defensive because I was so critical. And it was just this, always this tension. But I was, I really felt like somehow I had to figure out how to do this practice. And so I'd go and for a long time All I could do was I could come and take care of the altar on the weekends. And I'd come, I'd take care of the altar on the weekends when nobody was there and I'd leave. And that was how I, that was my practice. And then little by little by little with a lot of encouragement from people in the sangha, it's a wonderful sangha, I'd start to come back and I'd start to come back. And I also, after I went around the world and came back, I went to work for this management consulting company. And I was editing a book on good management practice and I injured my hands because I was spending all these hours on the computer.

[58:42]

And as soon as my doctor said I needed to take a break to take some rest, I got fired. So I was out of work for a while and that was very hard. But then I got this voice-activated computer which was really wonderful and I got this job teaching disabled people how to do voice-activated computers. which was great, and then the company went out of business. So, it's like, you know, shit! You know what! So, I came to Tassajara last January. Blanche invited me to come to Sid Tangario and be here for 10 days, and I thought, what the hell am I doing, you know? And what am I going to do next? So I sat down and I got really quiet. And I thought, you know, what am I going to do and what do I want to do? I realized I'd kind of been going from thing to thing, from job to job, whatever had sort of shown up in my life whenever, when I needed a job.

[59:47]

Without any real sense of purpose or direction, I had this kind of idea about journalism being helpful and stuff, but journalism itself is such a grind and I'm not so sure it's all that helpful and and then I did these ways I did video computers and that was helpful but that was sort of happenstance and what do I really want and I realized that actually the most helpful the most constructive thing I have encountered in my life is actually this teaching and this practice and that I want to make it much more central in my life, and that actually what I really would like to study and write about and read about is religion, and I'm actually also really interested in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. And so I decided to work more closely with Blanche, and I've applied to graduate school at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and I'm trying to just really

[60:49]

settle into my practice and it's interesting being here has also in some way really brought me... I've been working for a long time on sort of making peace with my Christian experience but some of it, it seems like things are really kind of flowering for me here. I was here about 15 days, I don't know, 15 days in the practice period that it occurred to me that the reason that Mel probably couldn't hear anything that I had to say to him about how hurt I had felt was that my motive had been anything but love, you know, I had been angry, I had been self-righteous, I had wanted to be right, and so of course, you know, confronted with that I'm sure you know, I could understand why he would sort of put it off. And I actually walked up to him while he was here and I said something about, I apologized actually for being so unloving. And he hugged me for all I was worth and kissed me.

[61:55]

And it was like the whole thing just disappeared. And I think Jesus was really right that love is the main thing. I mean, I think he was really right. And I think about that and I think that what he taught and what the Buddha taught fundamentally are not so different that what we look for out there hasn't ever really been lost. And what the magic of his teaching I think was that he was loving to people who the world said was scum, you know, tax collectors and prostitutes and the lepers and so forth and he saw people the way that people talk about Suzuki Rush is seeing people and love them and I think that's also at the heart of what Buddha taught and so I don't know somehow things are coming together and I'm kind of just settling down

[63:01]

And I don't exactly know where it's headed or, you know, where I'm headed, but I feel really like I'm on the right road. And all these ups and downs and all this kind of drama and all this stuff has kind of brought me here. And I guess the one thing that I didn't say about while I was at Green Gulch, which I've never forgotten and actually kind of informs my experience, is that at the end of my stay at Green Gulch, at the end of the last period of a one-day sitting I was sitting there and this image of this policeman came to mind and it was this cop in riot gear and he had this absolutely stony face and he had his baton out in front of him and he was going to whack me if I tried to step off the curb and I thought he was the absolute antithesis of everything in the world I thought was right and good and true and me and I realized for just an instant that without him, if it weren't for him, I would not be who I was, where I was, doing what I was doing.

[64:08]

That actually my life depended on him and depended on Jerry Falwell and that pastor and, you know, and that I was not separate from them. And I've also been sort of deepening my sense of that in all this zazen here. So I guess I've run out of things to say. That's it. Let's go.

[64:46]

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