Let's see. It's okay. I think I can get it. How is the volume? I don't hear myself. It doesn't sound like, I don't hear it. Okay. A little closer. Okay. Oh, I hear it now. Is this good? Still good? Okay. Just let me know if we lose it. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you all for being here, for coming. And thank you for inviting me. Thank you to Linda Gallion for suggesting, I think, that I'd be invited and for whoever else weighed in favorably. Pleasure to be here for this half-day women's sitting, which I've come to learn is something of a tradition.

[01:05]

Because I didn't have any knowledge of it before being invited to be here in this way, I decided to listen to several of the talks that were offered in the past on this occasion. And it was really a pleasure. I drive quite a bit, and so I had the opportunity to listen to a number of talks, beginning with the talk offered by Zenke Blanche Hartman in 1992. When I first started my residential practice at City Center, actually as a guest student, Blanche was the abbot there. And so I have very warm and fond memories. I also listened to a talk offered by Pema Chodron in 1982, which I think was not part of this women sitting because I heard some male voices in the room.

[02:11]

And then I also listened to talks offered by Laurie Sanaki, Susan Moon, Grace Sherison, and Megan Collins. And they were all together and each an encouragement to me to attempt to just be myself here this morning, just this person, which is sometimes the hardest thing to do, particularly in this seat. In March of 2020, just before we went into, I think we called it lockdown, Susan Moon began her talk by saying these words. These are really challenging times we're in. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been feeling an extra amount of anxiety about the state of the world, with our political situation and election coming, with news about the rapid effects of climate change, and now the coronavirus."

[03:18]

That was before we started calling it COVID-19. And I thought, hmm. so resonant today, you know, I could just take out coronavirus, which still has its effects to this day, and exchange that for any number of current disasters, calamities. Iran, Epstein files, Venezuela, Minnesota, I mean, and these are not in order of significance, more so relative chronology. And Susan went on to say, the Congress still hasn't been able to pass the Equal Rights Amendment that was proposed 30 years ago or something. For those of you, perhaps a few...

[04:27]

younger faces who may not have been born yet in the early 70s. It was actually passed in the early 1970s, and it was basically designed to guarantee equal rights to all citizens, regardless of their sex. But there weren't enough states that ratified it in the first, I think, seven years for it to be officially adopted and included in the Constitution. So to this day, it still has remained questionable that we are, as women, entitled to equal rights before the law. It's quite a moment in our country to be up here in this seat saying something about how it is or what it means to be a woman or even just this one woman, this person. in Zen or more broadly in the world, in any walk of life.

[05:34]

So much has changed, we might say, in the last hundred years for women in this country. And I'm reminded as I say it of some of what Megan Collins shared. And I'll say more about how her words touched me a little later in this talk. But also it seems now that so much has remained the same. Many of the underlying currents, powerful, persistent currents of discrimination and oppression, continue through the centuries. And in Buddhism we often speak of this in very kind of distilled terms, like greed, hate, and delusion. And it seems that when these forces, they meet an equal opposite force, like a boulder or a dam or a political or public uprising, they have a way of turning and flowing deeper in order to find a workaround before lashing back up to the surface.

[06:51]

I was thinking about this in terms of the relentlessness of what we call, you know, the wheel of samsara, this coursing, this continuous turning of delusion, throughout delusion. And then my mind went to the yin-yang symbol. And I thought, nature abhors an imbalance. Some of us might say, well, this seems extremely imbalanced right now. And yes, and I don't know that the majority of citizens of the world are actually for, you know, that there's a majority of people who are behind a lot of the violence and the exploitation and these large-scale developments. You know, then Jung came to my mind.

[07:55]

I think it was Jung who said, the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. And a lot of our attention goes to the shadow and to the extent that we end up thinking that it's most of what there is. And I wondered if this is... anything to do with what Suzuki Roshi meant when he said, the problems you have now, you will have for the rest of your life. What I appreciated most about the talks that I listened to, I was given enough notice about coming to join you here that I had ample time to listen and to reflect. I just appreciated their personal intimate feeling and the naturalness and groundedness and the lack of contrivance. And also, I was looking for a word for this, I thought, historicity or her-storicity?

[09:03]

What do you mean? It's like the acknowledgement of situatedness, the acknowledgement of time and place in these talks, as opposed to being ahistorical. and some more explicitly than others. And I think I appreciated this so much in part because it's been my view that, and my direct experience, that collectively in the world of converts and Buddhism, we have a deep and perhaps bad habit, an ahistorical, homogenizing, universalizing, habit in the way that we talk about the Dharma in many contexts, beginning it with our use of the word we and our, which I just did because it's almost impossible to avoid.

[10:08]

But how consciously do we use these very, very limited and in some cases problematic terms? Because the truth is that we're actually each navigating with distinctly different bodies of practice through very diverse terrain, intrapsychic, interpersonal, collective, visible and invisible, material and immaterial terrain. Which brings to mind something Dogen said, which is whole worlds are there. You know, whole worlds are here and we see each of us only as far as our own eye of practice and situated experience can reach, at least with our physical eye. And often what we see is what he called a very small circle of water.

[11:15]

We're sitting here today in this women's half-day machine with the assumption that there is some significant shared understanding, shared terrain, shared experience of navigating this gender, our identification as women, and not only our internal identification, but the impact of others' identification of us. projections upon us, expectations of us. And this is not outside of the world of our Zen practice or many of our practice communities at large. It occurs to me to say that for me, I feel what we're doing here today, sitting Zazen to be sure,

[12:17]

together. Also, as we sit here today in this room during the talk, we're bearing witness. We're communing. Some more language of the teaching comes to meet this in a more specific way. We're communing with the source. We're together embracing this territory. of being women and talking about how we travel these pathways. And perhaps we're discovering something new together, something fresh. I hope that fundamentally we're showing up for ourselves and for each other as we truly are in this moment. knowing that it will all be different in the next moment when we walk out of this room.

[13:21]

As we know, Zen was a very patriarchal and male-dominated tradition for centuries in Asia. And many would say that it still is, and that it has also been the case here in America. According to some published data, I don't know how accurate or reliable it is, but I went looking for it out of curiosity. The current ratio of male to female practitioners of Zen Buddhism in the U.S. is actually about one to one. However, Many women who I've been in conversation with over the years continue to report the experience of Zen practice in traditional temple or training center settings to be either male-dominated, patriarchal, or very masculine in its tone or posture and expectations.

[14:40]

Of course, this varies quite a lot from center to center and it fluctuates depending on the number of women in positions of power, the number of women who are practicing at the temple. And this is the first time that in my years of practice that I've been invited to speak about or from my gendered experience as a woman. within the context of Zen. And finding language for this experience has been really revealing to me. And this being a woman, this particular woman, is an intersectional experience, as it is for everyone, which means that I can't separate my experience as a woman for my experience of being Black and Latina.

[15:44]

I can't separate it from my class, my socioeconomic family, the socioeconomics of my family of origin, my formal education, my sexuality, sexual orientation, my able-bodiedness, my health, my age. how I fit in an aggregate demographically in this country. And I can't separate any of that from being a Zen practitioner or being a Zen priest. All of these markers, these categories of conditions, which are conditioning, are not only intersecting, I think they're totally interfused. And together, They make just this singular person, moment after moment. This is the 10,000 things coming forth to realize a self.

[16:50]

Independent of these 10,000 things, which in Buddhism, for anyone who's new, means innumerable. Independent of this, there's no person here conveying herself. toward myriad experiences. So in Buddhism we study the tendency towards this inverted view to think that there is a person prior to all of these causes and conditions, that it's making her way in the world. So I'm at once totally unique and at the same time I'm able to articulate experience that fit patterns that many of you in this endo might easily see yourself in. recognized that we share as women. And yet, I wonder, is there some more accurate way to talk about this that accounts adequately for our relative differences, your relative differences, from me, even while you may find yourself deeply resonating with what I'm saying, implying some sameness?

[18:04]

some relative as well as ultimate sameness right here with the differences. And this inquiry reflects for me the teaching of the Sandokai, which is the harmony of difference and equality or some translation or the harmony of sameness and difference. What is that sameness and difference right there together? I began practicing Zen at San Francisco Zen Center at a time when there were a number of women in positions of power, highest spiritual positions of power within San Francisco Zen Center. There were two women abbots, a woman-abiding senior Dharma teacher at Tassajara, two female presidents, including one who is now the current abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, who I was able to work with. closely during her time as president. There were multiple female directors and tantos, heads of practice.

[19:11]

Two of the women abbots were openly lesbian women. Most of these women were also married, and a few of them, including the abbots, had raised their children at San Francisco Zen Center. In this respect, the zeitgeist And my experience during that decade was quite different than it was for many women of San Francisco Zen Center in the early days or in other centers. I heard in one talk given some years ago during the women's sitting, and I honestly don't remember who was saying it, but she was describing her experience of, I think, the monastery at Tassajara many years ago, feeling the need to... feeling the masculine quality of the culture and saying that the only women who seemed to be able to accord were childless and unmarried.

[20:14]

And I thought a couple of things. One is this way as women, we delimit what it means, you know, to be a real woman. I myself am childless and unmarried. And Yet I also understood that this person was saying the fullness of my experience would be the ability to feel complete in that way, to feel supported, to be with child, to have relationship and be fully welcomed and able to practice in the community. All of that said, regarding the growing female leadership, it was still experienced by many women as a patriarchal environment and even by some men who formed groups called Deconstructing Patriarchy among the residents.

[21:21]

And it was my perception that many of the women in their positions positions of power in Zen center still had to accord in many ways with or were conditioned to unconsciously accord with. Many of the old strong influences in the tradition of masculine, patriarchal expressions of power, hierarchical power. I want to just pause and say, I don't mean to say that this masculine energy or yang energy is in and of itself some evil thing. I actually think we all have yin and yang energy. And I just want to make that clear. It's not always when we talk about the masculine and expression of greed, hate, and delusion.

[22:28]

Not necessarily. Any more than an unbridled yin energy is... Also, many of the young women at San Francisco Zen Center continued to chafe against bowing down to what they perceived, not only as the patriarchal power, but some of the more ancient East Asian and specifically thousand-year-old monastic Japanese cultural moors. And the relative exclusion in their experience of many contemporary Western democratic, egalitarian people values that they had been raised with as women in this modern Western world. They were young women encouraged and inspired in their upbringing by many influential, well-educated, courageous, progressive, liberal folks.

[23:35]

particularly here in the state of California and even more specifically here in the Bay Area. It was something of a clash, a culture clash. And yet and still, there is something, many things, that many women each and collectively experience as profoundly liberating and beautiful in this tradition of Zen. something that we each have equal access to within this practice, even within our complicated communities, sanghas, wherein we're all still trying to wake up and experience an unconstructed freedom. When I first discovered Zen and found myself drawn to the teachings and later to the practice, I had inclinations that are very different from the inclinations that I have now.

[24:45]

I have changed a lot, not only as a result of this practice, but as myriad life experiences and growing older. I'm a middle-aged woman now. which amazes me. And this is the first time I've ever referred to myself publicly, publicly as a middle-aged woman. And it'll be interesting to see how I feel about having said so tomorrow. What does it mean, you know? But it's true. I think it means that the number of years you've lived are possibly equal to or greater than the number of years you're likely to have left in this body. When I first began Zen, I was very stoic in many ways. I had been a successful competitive endurance athlete for many years, then a serious kind of yogi into my 20s and early 30s.

[25:52]

And then later I channeled that inclination towards arduous activities and to my intellectual, academic, and spiritual life. And even there was a period of what I would call a kind of asceticism. And that stoicism has an origin story dating back to my childhood, as it often does. I would say that the antidote to that has been a lot of emotional and psychological work, including on this cushion. Transformational work. But if I could say it in just a word, I would say that the single most potent ingredient in the transformation for me has been intimacy, the cultivation of the capacity for intimacy with what is, to look directly at, consciously, and experience the truth of my vulnerability without immediately attempting to counter it with some defensive strategy.

[27:19]

And this is something we cultivate in our practice here, this non-reactivity, this ability to remain open, even if not always equanimous in the face of difficulty. And to also discover at times that there is an ability to be equanimous, in the face of difficulty. It's very difficult not to engage in some subtle forms of defensive protective strategies, especially when speaking publicly from the Dharma seat, to be honest, where I feel able and kind of expected to mobilize this intellectual kind of verbal command, this facility with language. You know, even though all of us, many of you here, long-time practitioners, know that Zen is not an intellectual exercise.

[28:27]

It is the cultivation of an appropriate response. And often from this seed, it feels as though the appropriate response is to say something. To say something in a compelling and clear way. I don't know if that's the true assignment or if it's just something that we've built in here in the West. I think we are here to encourage each other's practice, particularly from this seat. In Zen we talk a lot about the three marks of existence. This is our most, I think, fundamental universal teaching, which is the teaching of suffering impermanence and no self or no discrete own being.

[29:33]

What we usually don't hear as often, given equal significance in the context of Zen, is the marks of the 10,000 things. We're actually marked. by innumerable things. No, we don't positively emphasize these things in Zen because they're all impermanent and essentially ungraspable and ever-changing phenomena that we tend to suffer because we try and get a hold of them, trying to control them. However, I do think we're called upon to understand and to be able to speak to the fact of how we're all marked. from birth to death by our relative circumstances, many of which are fundamentally created by the ways we think.

[30:36]

One of the questions that I have for us is, how can we not fall into the delusion of attempting to reduce the many to the one? which lends itself to a kind of erasure. We lose track of the teaching of the two truths so easily, the relative and the ultimate, their inseparability. So how can we not misuse our transcendent abilities and in doing so diminish the significance of the differentiations and the details of our relative suffering world. You know, when people say, like, it's all one, you know, it's all one, man. It's like saying, you're perfect just the way you are. Everything is perfect just the way it is. And leaving out the final clause, which as we know, quoting Suzuki Roshi is, and you could use some improvement.

[31:44]

which I think is an incredibly gentle way of saying that there is work to be done. I was thinking like the Tenzo in Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun, the old man drying mushrooms in the heat of the day. He said, no one else is me. No one else can do my work for me. And that encounter was really profound for Dogen, we gather. from the way he wrote about it, who lived such a privileged aristocratic life. He basically revealed, he was wondering, why aren't you, you know, you're such a mature, wise practitioner. Why are you out here drying mushrooms when you should be in your study contemplating and discussing the Dharma? As Bai Zhang said a hundred years before Dogen, a day without work is a day without food, which I tend to understand as an expression of the inseparability of what we call our practice and the efforts that we must make to attend to the details of our everyday lives, which is work in so many ways.

[33:08]

including the work of addressing gender discrimination, as well as the hate and bigotry and social and economic oppression of so many kinds. It's work to sit up here and know I'm getting myself in some trouble. You know, it's a certain kind of work. I'm really not here to teach anything today. I look out and I see so much, so many years of practice that exceed my own. Thank you all for listening so kindly and patiently. For a minute in preparing this talk, I thought I might be responsible for saying something inspiring this Women's History Month. And then I thought, I think it's enough, if I can, to be encouraging in some way, to offer myself simply in this grounded way, in this heartfelt way, as just this one sincere practitioner, full of holes and limitations.

[34:35]

When I say that, I want you to know I'm not saying it to diminish myself. I think it's the truth and a natural truth. And I give a lot of thought to the risks of becoming or entertaining the fantasy of becoming a charismatic leader. I was listening to a panel of people recently in a discussion that I think was titled The Architecture of Silence in Spiritual Culture. Has someone heard that? Yes, very good. And I loved, V was part of the panel, formerly known as Eve Ensler. And she said, I think Tina Turner said it best.

[35:41]

We don't need another hero. So that's part of where I'm coming from is to not give the impression that I am somehow above these difficulties that we're all facing. I want to start winding down this talk, moving to some closure by expressing special appreciation for the talk that was given in 2018 for this women's sitting by Megan Collins, who at the time was 92 years old. Shugetsu Myozen, Autumn Moon, Wonderful Zen. Is this mic still working?

[36:46]

Okay, good. Listening to the talk, I never would have guessed that she was 92 years old, and I only happened to learn because I found her so heartwarming that I went looking for other talks that she may have given. And I found that two years earlier, she'd given a talk titled something like On the Occasion of Her 90th Birthday. And we should all be so fortunate to be such a sharp as a tack, funny, energetic, and delightful, as I found her to be. Interestingly, it was easy for me to feel able to relate to her, even though she was 40 years older when she gave that talk than I am today. She was born in pre-World War II, and she is not someone I've ever met. When later I mentioned her to my teacher, she said, you know, that's Laura Burgess's mother.

[37:51]

I didn't. She's a mother, a grandmother, a longtime lay practitioner and lay entrusted teacher, none of which I have been. If the math is correct, she's 100 years old this year. And there are a couple of things that she said that I greatly appreciated. And I'll quote how she began her talk. She said, at this point in my life, I really don't know what it's like being a woman in the current world, I'm dealing with being old. And I live mostly in the company of widows. Most of my companions and age mates still have very bright minds and a lot of joie de vivre. She said, we're mostly dealing with being old, more than the business of being women. The business of being old, that expression, brought to mind a couple of things and one being the question what is the business that any one of us that you or I are mostly dealing with now?

[39:04]

On the occasion of this sitting we have the opportunity here together for now to be dealing with the business of being women together in conversation and yet I'll share that in order to prepare this talk I had to disentangle my mind from the business that it has been so consciously caught up in. The business that I've been dealing with in recent months and in recent days. Notably, the business of being black and Latina in this country where in a violent white nationalism is steeply on the rise. Knowing that at any moment, you know, in this country, my right to be here may be called into question and someone with a government-issued uniform might pull me over and ask me to show my proof of citizenship.

[40:21]

How likely it is to happen here in the Bay Area is... at this moment, well, unknown, but I'm also dealing with the business of having just learned that the Tassajara Zendo burned to the ground three days ago. Tassajara, where I lived and practiced many times and just one year ago was Shusou and spent most of my time There in that sendo, I see the face of someone who may not have heard. Yes, very, very impactful news. So what is the particular business that any one of us is dealing with today? I have occasion to also consider in between

[41:25]

having recently moved out of my cottage because toxic mold was found there, and I had to suddenly move, about the rise, the steep rise in misogynistic discourse and the amount of violence against women that is being reported these days. But regardless of, you know, Specifically, it is that any one of us is focused on. I know that we're all inextricably bound in this net of mutuality and destiny and assistance. And this psyche enters the zendo and sits down on the cushion facing the wall, usually, and dares to be silent and still and to study the power of the mind. face the three marks and the 10,000 marks of a shared existence that we call life and death and in Zen we also call no birth and no death.

[42:35]

Not turning away and not touching. So I guess I leave you with the question of what it is that you're most dealing with now. before you entered the room, lately, as women, the business of being mothers, perhaps grandmothers, the business of being a person of color, the business of balancing finances, struggling financially, being acutely or chronically ill, staying healthy, staying connected to family and friends and community. There are multiple enterprises competing with the ability to give my attention to the business of being a woman as though separate from any of these other experiences. I think more importantly it's often competing with my ability to be awake.

[43:44]

Just stay awake. Wake up again and again and to return. There's really no box on which to tie this up with a neat bow, this talk. So I think I'll just stop talking and invite you to talk with me, to share any contemplations or questions you have, and especially anything you felt troubled by or concerned with that you heard me saying. I may or may not have meant it. Thank you for your attention. I don't know if we have a mic or... Oh, we do. Okay, great. Thank you for your beautiful talk.

[44:56]

Thank you. a great deal of resonance for me. And I've had the great fortune of sitting for the last week at city center in the end of the winter praxis period. And the theme was Buddha body, Buddha mind. And the talk was in noble silence, entire time. So your words are landing especially richly. Thank you so much. The business that I find myself dealing with at the moment has to do with being a grandparent, having the father of my newly born grandson in mortal danger in the hospital, and my daughter is the soul of support of the family there?

[45:59]

Do I leave and go across the country? Maybe I'm just blowing through here. But I've been here a long time and feel very centered here. I'm grateful to have had so many chords struck in your talk. I hope to listen to it again and again. Thank you. so much. Hi, I'm Margaret. I hesitate to make this comment, but I didn't know about Tassajara. And I remember this morning, about 3 a.m., saying, you really should sign up for one of those work periods. I'm thinking, well, will there be work periods we could go to to help clean up, perhaps?

[47:01]

There will be plenty of work now. I would think there will be plenty of work. I'm sorry that you were hearing it that way. I know that Linda spoke of it from the Dharma seat yesterday, so I was imagining that word had spread. In the back? Hello. Thank you for the talk. You're welcome. I've been thinking about – you mentioned like yin and yang and like energies of masculine and feminine. And I often find myself like deeply not relating to the characterization of like yin and femininity. And I'm just like – I've never actually asked a teacher about it. So I'm curious like in this space where it's like all women of like – Yeah, I don't find women to be very, like, passive and receptive and neutral and, like, you know, this, like... And I struggle when it gets brought up because I don't... Yeah, I'm just... That's the question, I guess.

[48:14]

Yeah. Again, I don't want to equate women with the feminine because we all have different feelings, access to... masculine and feminine energies, different expressions, chosen and unchosen, I often feel like, and I'd love to hear from other women here because I know there are multiple ways of thinking about this and as many perspectives as there are women here. As a woman, I'm aware that I grew up feeling very strongly as an intuitive feeling type. And I... developed a strategy for being taken seriously in, pardon me for saying, a man's world by presenting as highly rational, strong kind of development of intellectualization and feeling the need to diminish or hide the power of intuition.

[49:27]

and different ways of knowing, a certain immediacy of knowing that can't be explained syllogistically. There are other things I can say about that and why I think we might, certain bodies, certain psyches, have these tendencies But that's not really the point. I welcome you to say, you know, ask more, say more if that was not really satisfying. I don't know that there is a satisfying answer. So I think that's perfect. And I appreciate what you said. And I, yeah, I appreciate that. And I really resonate with the ways of knowing and what gets valued. As being like different ways of knowing and like... I think often we associate the feminine with a certain quality of nurturing, being relational.

[50:40]

And I'm comfortable with that. I don't know. What do you think? Hi, my name is Debra, and I'm just responding to your last statement, and I don't feel what you said is a gender-based attribute, personally. Thank you. My husband was an extremely nurturing person. Yeah. And had great joy and happiness. I just sense a lot of... I got confused with the amount of genderization that was kind of going on, and I didn't quite resonate with all of it, so... Thank you for telling me. Would you like to share how it is for you as different than what you heard me saying? Yeah, I think I come... I don't like to look at the duality point of view, male, female. I mean, especially today with such fluidity regarding those two, in quotes, genders. Seems out of date.

[51:43]

Yes. And as a Buddhist, I like to view things as a not-to viewpoint. So I didn't... I just, you know, sometimes it just seems such a structured... It seemed binary, the way that I was talking about it. Yeah, and then just all these attributes to the different sexes that I feel are not really true. How many intelligent women do you know that are strongly intellectual? I don't know, I just struggled a bit. I certainly didn't mean to make a universalizing statement, but just to say how it was, how it's been for me. Right. And I just wanted to say to you, I just wanted to thank you so much for being who you are and coming as a woman of color and a woman of multiple, in quotes, I'm not sure the right word there, you know, I guess in quotes, I hate to use the word because I feel it's a limiting word, but ethnic backgrounds to us. I wanted to thank you so much for that and your bravery in being who you are. Thank you.

[52:44]

And even letting us kind of question more about what was said. So thank you again. You're very brave. I just wanted to thank you. Thank you. I would love to hear anybody who would like to help me with this. How do we talk about being women as different than men without not necessarily falling into a binary, but without acknowledging these particular differences, without falling into talking about the masculine and the feminine as dualistic rather than something that is fluid. And maybe there's more than the masculine and the feminine that we can include in the energies. Maybe that's, I'm really open and interested in hearing some people who have more kind of progressive language and a different paradigm. They're thinking about this in a different paradigm.

[53:45]

Thank you so much for your talk. So many parts of it resonated with me. On this issue, let a thousand genders bloom. There are, I don't think there are in fact two genders. There are many, many genders. And there are also many biological sexes. There's XXY, there's YYX, et cetera, et cetera. So they're there. Our problem is we're held up by the language and a lot of pressure to make a binary out of what's in fact a spectrum, a beautiful spectrum. And we all, I think part of what we're doing is we're trying to find the language. You've challenged us to join this, join together in trying to find the language. And I thank my tranny friends for, you know, trying to help us do this. I'm so thankful. And we are blessed here at the Berkeley Zen Center to have folks who are helping us with this.

[54:54]

Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciated what you just said, that there's gender is a spectrum, and there are innumerable genders. So... I feel I've been set up women's sesheen as though. it on now? Okay. I struggle with talking about being a woman as well, but sometimes I think about how it's perhaps about feeling like you don't have a voice. And that is irrespective of how you identify, right?

[56:01]

And maybe that is more something that we can all relate to. I've always worked in male-dominated fields, and I was talking to my friend about sometimes when we fear speaking up for something that we know we should speak up about something that bothers us, especially when there is a power dynamic at play. And I don't think that's about being a woman. I think it's about feeling like you don't have a voice. And I just so happen to now work for myself. And something about that is freeing because, well, if I don't wish to hire somebody to help me with somebody, help me with something, I can respectfully choose not to.

[57:02]

And so that kind of autonomy has created made me feel more like I have a voice. And so sometimes I think about it as like when we feel like we have the space to have a voice and when we sometimes struggle. But lately I've been thinking about how, like why is it that just because now my circumstances have changed. Why do I feel like I suddenly have more of a voice? And if in the past, when I worked for other people, why did I feel like I didn't have a voice? And I thought back to that. And I think that's, that is perhaps my own issue rather than, it's like both, right? And so what I've been challenging myself is seeing it less like there is something to fear and more that there is an opportunity to be heard if you have the strength to ask for it.

[58:31]

Thank you. Thank you for a very compelling talk. So I think when we talk about gender, we're collapsing a lot of different categories. So one is physical. One is psychological. So for a long time, I saw a Jungian therapist, and they talk about masculine and feminine. And I wish we had different labels. that weren't gender-related for those kinds of characteristics and ways of thinking. We also talk about experience. So... I grew up in the 50s. Girls didn't do that. You name it, girls didn't do that. So I look at these young women like Title IX. There was no Title IX. We didn't do sports. So my experience growing up as a woman is very different probably from yours just because of where and when and the circumstances. And there are probably a number of other, whether we call them continuum, I'd call them continuum rather than binaries, that we collapse into the concept of gender.

[59:43]

And also how we look at one another. So, you know, we see a young Asian woman, and then we see an older gray-haired woman. And I have to say from my perspective as an older person, I often kind of discount young people because it's like, you know, the children are running the world, right? So we're collapsing a lot of different characteristics and continua into the term gender. Yes. And? Just to return to something that I said at the beginning, there's how we relate internally to ourselves as gendered, but a big part of that is how we are seen and how we internalize how we are seen. And so then how do we talk about this experience without referring to the language that defined us as such? if that makes sense. Yeah, I was just going to, before passing on the mic, I wanted to say something on my own account, which is... So I certainly agree that sex and gender are very fuzzy concepts, and a lot of different things can be collapsed into them.

[60:55]

And I also agree with those who worry about universalizing language, about... about pulling together too easily too many traits and essentializing what is masculine or feminine, those are pitfalls. And yet, I guess speaking from my own experience, I am a woman who was raised as a boy. What is femininity? It's a mystery. I do not have an answer to it, but it's real. It's real and there's something there and there's something that at some point I had to change my life in order to honor properly. And so whatever it is that brings us all in here together in community as women on this morning, I don't think we can say it's simply

[62:04]

a matter of socialization or a matter of how we were raised or how we are seen by the world. Because I was not raised that way. I was not seen by the world that way. And yet somehow I'm here. And I think it's still a koan for me exactly why that is. Thank you so much. Thank you for that and deep thanks for your talk. I'm coming back to the question you asked about the many and the one and how to hold the many in its diversity. I had the good fortune to be directed to do a study of the Sandokai earlier a year ago.

[63:06]

And it was the first time that I really understood the Buddhist idea of equality. I think it was in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki says, might be, not always so, I'm not sure. Everyone is completely unique. Every being is completely unique. Every tree, every person, every ant. unique and because of being unique not comparable not being compared to and that to me was a moment of revelation because I realized how much of my own training has been and going through educational systems is ranking comparing, ranking, categorizing, making better and worse.

[64:10]

I mean, all of those ways in which we, in differentiating, evaluate or judge and bring a judgment to it. And that, in a way, I understand trying to dive into oneness to escape from that. judgmental-ness and then the underside of diving into oneness as an escape from that is not celebrating the uniqueness of everyone and how beneficial that is to us all. I recently had a chance to be on vacation by the ocean and had a chance to just stare at the waves coming in realizing that each wave is different and each wave is beautiful and trying to bring that feeling toward my eyesight with other people that every body is beautiful and every manifestation of an elm tree is beautiful and

[65:32]

in its way that, well, I don't know what else to say. Thank you. When you referred to the uniqueness, I thought of the commentary in the Zen Koan of the unique breeze at dawn. It's a verse. The unique breeze at dawn. Can you see it? Constantly, creation is weaving her loom and shuttle, or something, her loom and shuttle, weaving the ancient brocade. Thank you. And one of the things that that brings to my mind, and you're talking about watching the waves and each one being unique, is also totally in motion, like momentariness. You know, the insight into the impermanence of it all. I think, is an access point for seeing each thing as totally unique and incomparable.

[66:37]

Thank you. I see the striker getting up, so I'm feeling like, good sense to him, bad sense to him. Thank you. Which is it? Let's let this be the last. Okay. First, I just want to extend total sympathy for the setup. As someone who has given a talk at a women's session, you do feel like, yeah, making a mistake on purpose or something. I just wanted to bring up the, you know, like part of the job is to bring up the other side. And so however we are exploring the feminine and the masculine in our current time, I mean, There's a history. It reminds me of what you said about we can't be ahistorical. I mean, there has been women have been treated a certain way and told certain things. And on this planet, there are still lots of women who are still in the darkness of that.

[67:43]

I mean, the badness of that. And so I want for them, you know, something for them. I wish they were here, you know. to have this discussion about what really is feminine, what is masculine. And I just, you know, I always think, wow, birth control and divorce changed our lives, you know. And just a few little things like that matter a lot in the material world. So just bring us back to the material. And I really appreciate your talk, and it's very brave to get up. in front of a room full of women and try to say something. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Things are numberless. I vow to swaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible.

[68:44]

I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's ways unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Beings are numberless. I vow to become it. Amen. Amen. Amen.

[69:45]

Amen. Amen. to be coming

[70:22]

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