It's my great pleasure today to introduce our speaker. It's my great pleasure today to introduce today's speaker, Judy Fleischman. Her dharma name is Secho Hoju, Essence Harmony Dharma Jewel. Before talking about her experience in Zen, I wanted to introduce... as someone who received an undergraduate degree and master degree in physics from MIT and an astronomy degree from Columbia University. She likes to think of herself as a former rocket scientist. And she began to practice Zen, first in Portland, Oregon, and continued for a decade Manhattan in New York City at Village Zendo where she received priest ordination from Enkio O'Hara in 2005.

[01:07]

She then served as Shouseau at the Village Zendo also in 2011. Judy arrived at BCC in 2013 and after relocating to the Bay Area Judy has held various practice positions at BCC including COSA and online programs manager, along with co-facilitating JISO ceremonies and our annual MLK program. Judy also is a practice leader with Everyday Zen, whose guiding teacher is Norman Fisher. She serves on the board of the nonprofit organization. After working in various healthcare settings as a board-certified chaplain, Judy co-developed tele-chaplaincy programs and specialized in palliative care. She currently serves as mindfulness educator and stealth chaplain at a private high school in San Francisco.

[02:10]

So the many faceted and fascinating Judy. Unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect armor is where we met with even in a hundred thousand million countless having it listened to, to remember and accept I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning everyone.

[03:12]

Good morning. Here in the Zendo and everywhere we gather, those joining online. Can everyone hear me okay? How about those cherry blossoms? Just amazing. And the birds. It's good to remember to notice those things, those connections. And for now, particularly, because it's been a really hard week.

[04:17]

And I'm going to tell you more about it in a minute. What it comes down to is what's so hard about it is a kind of moving through raw grief and really facing question how do I act from a place of compassion it isn't just about me how do we practice with that and as I say that it can sound so contradictory

[05:28]

Because we learned that the definition of compassion is that it's actually about connection. Usually with someone in pain and hopefully always including our own experience. And what I have come to realize is that the actual disconnect comes more specific. How do I, how do you, how do we respond to a situation that, I'll keep it on the eye for the moment. to a situation that I view as harmful.

[06:33]

And watch it go down and not react, but instead respond. An appropriate response that takes in the whole situation. And that can be agonizingly hard, depending on what's going on. It's so hard that there's actually a term for this. It's called moral distress. Have you heard of it? Anyone heard of that? Well, what that comes down to, moral distress, is when my sense of what's appropriate is somehow not aligned with my sense of agency, my ability to act.

[07:59]

This term became quite popular during the pandemic because on health care, we're facing this for a whole variety of reasons. But the phenomenon of moral distress goes way back and to before there was a term for it. When those two line up, it's said that we can act with moral agency. But how do we know? How do we know for sure? That is exactly what I had to face head-on this week. So I've been working since last August at a private so-called independent school in San Francisco.

[09:13]

About 400 students, about 100, a combination of staff, faculty, workers, take care of the buildings and grounds, the food services. I like to think of it kind of riffing off the way Thich Nhat Hanh, Long Village tradition, they call it the Fourfold Sangha. The school is the Fourfold Sangha of all these folks. And I probably don't have to tell you but to share from now my own personal experience of these months. It's really hard in schools right now. To have to be with some of the harsh realities that we're living with now.

[10:24]

Probably things like needing to train for the possibility of shooting, a bomb threat, things. I can't normalize that in a way that you can move through it. Part of the school's mission statement says to offer a mindful approach to learning in life. And I was hired as the first such role at that school, the earlier role, that was shape-shifted with the guests by coming back revision 10 years later because of the pandemic and the role as that mindful educator, mindfulness educator, whatever that is.

[11:46]

And as they put it, pastoral care for the staff and faculty. Right off the bat, one can ask, And how does one not provide that for all of the fourfold sangha with the fourfold sangha? So already how to be with frameworks and systems and not knowing what is this practice and how to practice it in that fourfold sangha at such a time. On Monday morning, actually on, yeah, I think it was early Monday morning, I... hard to remember. And then sent to all the staff and faculty, and then at the school assembly, the principal announced

[13:02]

that a student had unexpectedly died. And two days later, with the family's permission, the next assembly on Wednesday morning shared the heart-wrenching piece that this student died by suicide. And I just noticed that I can keenly hear the birds singing. What do you do when you don't have the power to change the thing?

[14:14]

So I want you to stop for a moment and just bring to mind the meaning of Avalokiteshvara, Kuan Yin Kanzeon, alternately male-bodied, female-bodied. In our age, we could say the pronoun is they. He hears the cries of the world in response. What are they hearing? How are they here? At that second assembly, I was in the room, but I was under the understanding that after the principal shared the news, and how he brought his heart to it, that I would be inviting everyone into

[15:40]

a moment of mindfulness, which is a form. It's how that assembly evolves. But that didn't happen because there was a change in plan and in that moment I wasn't aware of it. So I watched as he shared and then Two school counselors shared some things, suicide prevention. And then it was followed by a little musical video of ocean waves, just some music, several on big screens, hundreds, assembled. And then silence for, I don't know, about three minutes. Now the thing is, we talked about it here a bunch, there's something called trauma-sensitive mindfulness.

[16:48]

And what's really important about that is that there are times when just sitting silently can actually activate a trauma response, particularly, most commonly, to go into a freeze. And I know this from... so what happens is you think you're sitting quietly you think but actually you're checking out you're dissociating and that's harmful especially prolonged especially in that kind of a moment that's shared and who can say for sure But in that moment, when I didn't know what was going on, it was viscerally, searingly painful. To sit there and to be very aware that I had a plan for what I was going to offer to help with how this peace landed.

[18:06]

So many people in the room. and also to bring in the particular kind of connection language that, like here, creates a container to hold that kind of problematic, complicated, sudden grief. And I couldn't do it. Now when I say I couldn't do it, I mean, I could have disrupted it. And I want to ask you to consider right now if you've ever had that kind of a choice. Do I go with? Do I disrupt? Do I leave? What do I do? It's really hard. Combined with grief. So I want to come back to

[19:07]

What does Avalokiteshvara hear? What was I hearing in that moment? I was hearing outrage, I was hearing disbelief, and most of all this searing carpentry pain. That was my human hearing. I couldn't hear Avalokiteshvara as Avalokiteshvara in that moment until because of practice. Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva when practicing deep prajna clearly I came back to the body, what was going on in the body.

[20:17]

And by turning towards that pain, as we said, it was really hard pain to turn towards. The stakes feel really high. But I had no choice. Practice is like that, right? There's no escape. And when I came back to my body, what happened was really... I felt the sangha body. And I had a moment of not knowing, being so sure. And what came through the body as wisdom was something interesting.

[21:23]

I put a hand on my heart and I put it on my belly. You can try that now if you want to. What it does is it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And when you have big feelings, When you have looping thought patterns carrying you away, you can do this. And I just did that. And I took care of that pain. And I could feel that holding in the room. And I held my seat. while expressing, perhaps, something healing. I was in the front of the room.

[22:28]

People know the goal. Maybe some saw. Maybe it helped. Who knows? But holding the seat in that moment was the appropriate response. And the reason I trusted is it came through the body. It's not what I thought and wanted and felt this incredible urgency to do. And what that allowed was that throughout the day, as the impact was real for many frees, checked in with teachers and others throughout the day, and what they had to deal with in the classroom right after that meeting and throughout the day. How do you meet that kind of silence? And speak to it, engage it, move it.

[23:35]

And they did and we did. And by the afternoon, a lot of things were in the works, but in the afternoon, that's students, his grades, class, a hundred or so students, together with a bunch of staff, faculty, other staff. We walked out to a beach. We had a ritual. offering flowers, a shelf to the water, saying what needed to be said. Kind of like when we make offerings here during a memorial service. We sat, actually, a long time on the beach, and the quality of that sitting was very different.

[24:36]

Now remember, this is a school that does practice mindfulness, whatever that is. I mean, there's a lot to what is mindfulness in the comments these days. I could feel it, again, the Sangha body and now the Sangha body together with the waves, the light, sound. In some ways it's very mysterious and yet really direct and immediate. And this is our practice. I don't know how many of us are in our Sangha, I think about two years ago, one of our beloved elders

[25:41]

Bodhisattva also died by suicide. The thing is very close. And so is Avalokiteshvara. There's a that the energy of that kind of wisdom, compassion, heart of understanding, is present just in the moment of invoking... Think about that. It opens your heart if you really... And a lot of times when we're chanting, if I'm hunched... And sometimes it takes, a lot of times it takes... hearing the kokyo, hearing all our voices.

[26:45]

A lot of times our voice is struggling. It comes out. We are always doing this together. So to come back to, if you will, this moral dilemma that I was facing, It's with us in so many realms. How do I act from a place of compassion that isn't just about me, my ideas, my strong feelings? I have a lot of compassion for the Saturday directors past, present, and future. And when I was one of those, I should go Saturday after the dean.

[27:46]

I turn up at bat, if you will. And, you know, there's a lot going on this Saturday morning. And there were a whole bunch of people in their various roles, and I just felt like I was fielding one thing after another, and it seemed like some of them were just highly anxious. You know, that's catchy, it's very contagious. So I went to Sojin Roshi's office. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to take care of all these people. They all have different needs. I don't know how to take care of them all. And he just smiled. He said, Don't take care of the people, take care of the situation. And of course, a different person, a different day, he might have said, listen, take care of the people, forget about the situation.

[29:00]

So it's a medicine for the moment, but that also has come back to me this week. What is the wholeness of the situation? How do we harmonize with that? Because, you know, as humans, we can only see our eye of practice. And so how can we actually see a whole situation? That image of Avalokiteshvara often is with a thousand arms, right? And in each one, there's a hand. Each arm is a hand. And there's an eye. What is that eye? And some say that's the Prajna eye, the wisdom eye, the eye that sees through duality, sees the interconnectedness, emptiness, sometimes translated as boundlessness.

[30:14]

What is that? I like intimacy. sees through being close. And in that moment at the school, my challenge was to be genuinely intimate with pain as a gateway. to relationship, being in relationship, and remembering through connection, in community, harmonizing. What else is the most important thing in this moment? room sees a little differently, responds a little differently.

[31:44]

So through practice we keep attuning all sangha eyes and we need to practice so that those eyes seeing clearly enough so connects to the eightfold view and responding appropriately you know the Diamond Sutra talks about and there isn't time to go into all of it but One thing about those five eyes, I'll just name them. There's the physical eye, the eye that sees through conditioning, the eye of karma.

[32:46]

The second is the heavenly eye, the world conceptually, which is important. From science to economics to all kinds of things, it's important to have those concepts. It's also important to recognize what kind of eye that is. The third is prajna eye. which I was mentioning, which sees non-separation. And the fourth, which I think is particularly important in this conversation, is the Dharma eye, which through really touching that image, that seeing through, then can engage compassion and skillful means, all those hands responding to relieve suffering. And what is the fundamental suffering? For you, right now?

[33:54]

That Dharma is the Eye of the Bodhisattva. And maybe that crow is telling us something about that. I don't know. The fifth is the Buddha Eye, which is also called non-dual awareness, which interestingly contains the other four. Thich Nhat Hanh, says that the coming Buddha, Maitreya Buddha said, I say says, just like all our ancestors are speaking right now. Thich Nhat Hanh says, the future Buddha is the Sangha. So we need all those eyes and hands to see, to act. And Dogen reveals that this I practice, because practice and awakening are not two.

[35:16]

We're coming into the homestretch for our first go at the Many Communities One Sangha practice. A program of quite some number of months. And this coming Monday morning, at 8 a.m. We're going to have an opportunity to hear from those who have participated in that program reflections, learnings, surprises. Why are we doing that? Because the eyes and hands Having participated in that program, my experience was that that practice, which is continuing, is to see through privilege, to hear the cries of racism and other exclusionary isms, particularly ones that

[37:04]

I'm blind to, without the interaction, without the process, without the... And I have to keep turning towards pain, which often, in my case, could be a freeze, and having ways to work with that. see something that's very hard to really take in and turn it together which is remarkably healing and ripples it helped me in the school the program helped me to really have a new understanding of what coming from and harmonizing really means, which is, you know, how do you harmonize with dissonance?

[38:14]

How do you include everything? Our saunas are messy, have you noticed? Our families, the various communities, workplaces, Art. Driving in traffic, which I do a lot of these days during rush hour. Stop and go, I often... ...time that we're sitting here, even though we're sitting, I experience it a slow canyon, and it really helps. Because things take time and they take process in Sangha. And what can really be challenging, at least has been for me in Sangha life, is when I have a tremendous sense of urgency and righteousness about what needs to happen, and by golly it needs to happen now, and it's already too late.

[39:34]

hard to remember that that's just one hand and eye. It reflects the whole universe. So what happens? when you lose touch, when I lose touch with such prostitutes wherever we are. Or become impatient with those, with the people more immediately who develop them, whether they're here now or, you know, been gone for a while. So I want to invite us into just a minute in the body, and then we'll have a little bit of time for some dialogue.

[40:57]

I just want to invite you to come back to your Zazen posture if you're not there. And if you can, keep in mind the situation. where you felt challenged by its apparent urgency. It could be recent, could be this week, could be today. Immediate, also, as wanting to move in your seat, having zazen, and maybe a sense of discomfort or pain. It could be something or someone you encountered recently. Maybe what appeared as an urgent request, urgent need. Maybe something happening in the world.

[42:01]

Whatever that is, see what it's like just to breathe that just breathing in that sense of urgency and then breathing out what happens again breathing in that sense of urgency noticing what happens as you breathe out on your next in-breath just bring to mind everyone assembled here today breathing out this noble

[43:26]

assembly of Buddhas, of Bodhisattvas. Breathing, seeing through, intimate, responding. and when you're ready if you want to put your hands and gush up and we bow

[44:27]

This is our practice. We have a little bit of time, not a lot of time. There are some questions. Thank you, Judy. I think I can speak loudly enough, if that's okay. Is that okay? In listening to you, when you first started speaking, I thought, oh yeah, how do we manage this? How do we hold these things? And what I realized partway through, there's the grief or the challenge of that. How do we hold that? But as you continued to speak, I started to say, when you started, when you talked about that you're at this assembly and you had something planned to say and you wanted to say it and you knew, I guess, that there was something important and it felt important to share that with people and it made me start thinking about a situation last year.

[45:53]

I had gone through a couple of losses and a friend of ours was in hospice and I wasn't really involved in that even though I was one of the kids there were these plans being made and I kept on wanting to but I got information I just went through this and it sounded similar to what you were talking about but what came to me was my ego that struggle is that I felt like I had something to share and it felt like in what you were talking about when you said you know we have something and I think about recently a couple of times I've thought I've got something to share I've got something that would be helpful and encouraged and I'm I didn't hear you say the word ego although I think

[46:57]

that may have been in there, but being so left-brained, I was really struggling to find that. And I know, I sit down and I read books, and we're talking about the ego, and that's what pulls me back from, what about me? I've got something to say, and it really pulls me back into, oh yeah, it's not all, you know, I just read the thing in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind about the waterfall. and oh, I'm a drop, I'm an ego. So I think if you don't mind, if you could talk about that a little more about where your ego came into it and how did you come to terms and find that freedom of your ego in that situation? Well, it's seeing through the ego

[47:58]

And also recognizing that what we call ego can also be turned and express itself. The wisdom of what's called for in the moment when it recognizes itself as the whole. Not just part of the whole, but the whole. So when I came, when I had that... Maybe you had a taste of it when we were even just processing that. I think the mic went on. Okay. We have another mic, right? I'll try. Okay. Great. I have to turn the power back on. And it goes off. It comes on. Not so different are devices.

[48:59]

you know, from ego. And I think this is a really important point that you're bringing up, Dean, because I needed to come back to what was happening in the body, and it was only then really turning towards the pain of, if you will, the ego's sense of what is together with, not alone, not isolated from, genuine grief and also a genuine sense, discernment of something that could be offered. But it's not the appropriate thing to do in this moment. And I think that that's the challenge of these kinds of situations. It's not an either-or, it's a both-and.

[50:06]

So it's aiding to and through this thing called ego and recognizing that what I was experiencing is my body suddenly put me in contact with all the bodies in the room. I mean, I felt like doing that exercise. of breathing in and bringing to mind that we're all breathing in together. Some people call that, you know, as a device, a broadening awareness practice. You know, you become aware of your body, quote-unquote, and then the cushion, and then out and out and out. But really what that means is it's recognizing that ego's essential essence is avalokitesvara, with all those hands and eyes. so how do we befriend the ego and i think the most immediate way we do that is through our body practice through the body you know like that old koan um it's like reaching how does the bodhisattva of compassion what to do with all those hands and eyes and and the responses well it's like reaching for a pillow in the middle of the night it's just that

[51:28]

So how do we breathe in that ego and breathe out intimacy? A follow-up. I kind of got lost during that. Think what I'm interpreting you're saying is we have that ego. Yeah, I'm sorry. I appreciate your response, but I mean, we're probably talking about the same thing, but what happens to me is I recognize my ego is bigger at that moment. And what happens with me is realizing that my ego is that, then I think I know what needs to happen.

[52:32]

Because that's what my ego is. Look at me, I've got this. And rolling that back when I am able to often read something that reminds me that's what's happened, then I fall back. The whole thing about realizing that I'm one with everybody, that's when that moment comes. And I'm not sure if that's what you just expressed, but maybe. I think my experience of the kind of situation that I was talking about, and it might be a little different than yours in some ways, is that there was this visceral sense of Harm is going down right now.

[53:34]

Right now. Right now. For instance, people who witnessed George Floyd being slowly and who are in the vicinity had to face this very issue. Urgent. What do you do? And we have been living with needing to grapple with the various understandings of that moment ever since. And it connects to the hospice room, and it connects to right now. So yeah, we'll continue to work with teachings around, you know, and how do we penetrate it, what is the Dharma eye and so on. But as they say, the rubber hits the road with what are you going to do now.

[54:44]

And I need to apologize because I think that I still am in the midst of complicated grieving and I think I spoke longer than I intended to because I also needed to pause and keep coming back to the body and the grief that's running through.

[55:07]

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