Hello. How's that? Okay. If I try and untangle my scarf, I'll be in real trouble. So, good morning. I'd like to welcome everyone to our annual practice period. It's a tradition for the Shuso to begin the practice period by giving a way-seeking mind talk. And I've given several in which I've described my childhood and some of the causes that brought me to practice. I started practicing at the Berkley Zen Center in 1976 when I was 21 and a month ago I turned 51, so actually this is my 30th year of practice. I didn't spend all these years here at BCC. I left a couple of times actually.

[01:28]

I studied Tibetan Buddhism for about four or five years and then I came back and then I went off and I studied Vipassana and I studied with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield for about five years and then I came back a third time. I'm going to talk about that a little bit. but for the past 11 years I've been here quite continuously. I did know from age 20 that this Buddhist path was going to be my life. I never doubted it. I have had a lot of self-doubt and I've doubted teachers and I've doubted forms and ceremonies but I've never doubted the Dharma at least what I understood of it. To say a few words about my beginning I grew up in Philadelphia in a middle class Jewish family not a religious family reformed Jewish family and I'm the oldest of three children and I have a sister

[02:39]

Miriam who lives in Alameda with her two sons, Daniel is 12 and Jackson is 9, and I spend quite a bit of time with them, but my relationship with my sister is one of the big challenges of my life. And I have a brother, Bill, who lives with his wife and two sons in Boulder, Colorado, and I've never met those nephews. The oldest one is I think about 11 and there's a younger one who's about 6, Cole and Julian, and my brother stopped speaking to the family about 20 years ago although I do speak to him occasionally when I call and it's difficult to take the initiative to do that. He has never wanted to really explain exactly why He hasn't wanted to have contact. He has refused contact with my parents, but not with me, but he doesn't take any initiative.

[03:47]

However, every year he sends out a form letter that describes big events such as having a child. That's how I found out about my nephews being born. So I do have a couple of pictures of him, which I have up in my home. But I can't guess why he's angry. My childhood was difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, there was just a lot of fighting. My father drank very heavily and while he was not violent, there was a lot of anger and tension in the family. I lived in constant fear of an imminent explosion which there often was. It was usually my mother that was doing the exploding and he was passed out on the couch most of the time. So clearly there was a relationship between his drinking and her anger but he died about four and a half years ago and that didn't solve the anger problem.

[04:57]

So my happiest time growing up really was being away from the family and I kept a diary when I was 7, 8, and 9 years old and I was very outspoken about how much I strongly disliked my family and this went on well into adulthood even into my 30s I really, really disliked my parents and my experience of my mother was mostly being a victim of her anger and I also felt suffocated at the same time because she was very needy and guarded me very jealously. My father was actually a lot easier to get along with. but he was usually away at work. He had his own advertising agency and he traveled often to meet clients so mostly I felt his absence and he came home late at night and drank and that was that.

[06:15]

So while I did really have very little sympathy for my parents and try to get away from them as much as possible. My feelings about them did change quite a bit when I got older and I'm actually very close to my mother now and I got closer to my father when I was in my 40s, late 30s, early 40s. But the other difficulty I had when I was growing up aside from the usual adolescent difficulties was this vague feeling that I was different from other people and I was aware of this from a young age from about seven and the symptom that I was uncomfortable with was the strong feelings that I had for other women and I didn't have a name for this at the time and I didn't know what it was and it was very vague and my father was quite kind to me and I saw him as a companion so I always enjoyed the company of men and I didn't really realize that I was actually queer until I was 25 and up until that time I did have relationships with men that were well I enjoyed their company

[07:44]

So anyway, back to the earlier ... back to an earlier time. When I was 13 I was very interested in sports and from about age 5 to 12 I ice skated in all my free time. And around age 9 and for about 4 or 5 years I would get up at 5 in the morning and take figure skating lessons. and I actually won some local competitions in figure skating and pre-skating and I was very interested in sports at school and I had an enormous amount of physical energy but I also had some psychological issues and I think the problem was, you know, there's so much anger in the family and it was the most It was not easy to have softer feelings but anger was okay, it was okay to express it.

[08:54]

So when I went to school I had this bad habit of picking on weaker people and my parents had to be called in a number of times and I was physically violent. and like getting into fights things like that and I got a lot of negative feedback for a number of years from teachers and classmates and all that and I actually wanted people to like me I didn't understand why this was so terrible at the time but eventually it did sink in. So when I was about 13 or 14 I was I was tired of the way I was, so I made a very conscious decision to become an intellectual. And then overnight, well, it seemed that way. I just decided I was going to read books instead of get into fights.

[10:00]

But my personality really changed. I became very quiet and somewhat withdrawn and people started to experience me as being aloof and I think that went on through a lot of my life. I became very concerned with acquiring knowledge and I got very interested in Buddhism in high school. and I actually tried to meditate but it was just not possible for me. I had so many negative thoughts and I didn't have a teacher or anything like that so I thought that if you practice Buddhism you could sit down on a cushion and just be peaceful and that didn't happen so I kind of gave up on that but anyway after high school I went to college for two years at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and after two years I dropped out because I wanted to travel around the world.

[11:13]

And so I spent a couple of years, I didn't make it all the way around the world, but I did some interesting things. I worked on a dairy farm in Norway for a number of months and I lived with some Berber tribes in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco for a while and I was really searching for something and I thought I was going to find what I wanted by seeing as much as possible but actually I discovered sometime during that trip that what I was looking for was more internal And so I came back with the intention of studying Zen, and this was when I was 21, and I would never be able to explain really why I knew that was what I was going to do, so I'd rather not try. But anyway, I moved to Berkeley in 1976 in October, and it was supposed to be a visit, but I never left.

[12:32]

And the first place I wanted to visit was the Berkeley Zen Center, which a friend of mine had told me about who lived in Berkeley. And at that time, the Zen Do was on White Way in an attic. So he used to come in the afternoons. I got Zazen instruction. Now, I didn't speak to anybody. I found it rather intimidating, actually. And I still... I found Zazen extremely difficult, mostly because of the mental pain, I suppose, negative thoughts, all that sort of thing. and but I did learn how to sit in the proper posture and I learned to turn clockwise after bowing to the cushion and bowing out in the room and at some point I did speak to Mel about this problem I had.

[13:39]

We didn't call him Sojan Man because this was the 70s and before before Dharma transmission but anyway I told him that I spent all my time in Zazen criticizing myself and I just couldn't stand it and he told me just to keep sitting but you know that just didn't work for me at the time I just couldn't do it and so I tried but I didn't succeed So I gave up after a while. And I stopped sitting. I was unhappy that I stopped sitting, but I just felt like I couldn't do it. And in 1978, I met this guy named Howie Horowitz. And he lived in Berkeley, and he had these wild parties. And people would bring all these musical instruments.

[14:44]

and play and he had a fairly big house and there'd be people playing music in all these different corners of the house and it was really a lot of fun and I remember wandering through the house and there was all this crazy stuff going on everywhere but then I found this little room in the back, it was this tiny room and there was a zafu and a zabutan in there and virtually nothing else. and I was very struck between what seemed like a contrast between the chaotic and the expressive in a large part of the house and then this calm and stillness in this corner. So I ran into him a couple days later in downtown Berkeley and I asked him if he was a Buddhist and he said yes and that he I sort of explained to him that I couldn't sit, wish I could, so he suggested that I read Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa.

[15:46]

So he was a member of Dharmadhatu so he encouraged me to try going there, so I did that and that was the first time I was really able to sit. I felt like Trungpa really understood how the Western mind works and he often used the word neurotic to refer to our ordinary minds and at the time the word neurotic really spoke to me and I thought that he was saying things that weren't said at the Berkeley Zen Center which later of course I knew wasn't true. But I finally was really able to sit because he emphasized that there was nothing wrong with our ordinary neurotic minds and my belief that there was was what kept me from practicing. So, because I was in search of some state of mind that I would like better than the one that I usually abided in.

[16:53]

So of course here I realized later that we talk about this all the time here with the ordinary mind but somehow the way a different language at the time spoke to me more. So I spent about four years there. I took a lot of classes and I did the Shambhala training which was kind of a series of weekends where they teach basic Buddhism but in completely secular language, they don't use any Buddhist terminology, it's all kind of a Western non-religious language. So I spent about four years there and I was uncomfortable about a number of things which wasn't unusual for me and it was the late 70s and kind of the end of the hippie time and you know a lot of people still you know a lot of men still had long hair and at Dharmadattu everybody cut their hair really short and they were wearing suits and ties to

[18:20]

to the meditation hall, which I thought was kind of odd, and it didn't sit well with me. And also, Trungpa really wanted Buddhism to enter mainstream culture in the West. That was really important to him, which is I think why he had all these people in suits and ties. And so, But the odd thing was that after a retreat, for example, after a weekend, everybody would get really, really drunk. And that contrast was unbelievable. I mean, it was mostly vodka, and there'd be people passed out on the floor a couple hours after the end of a retreat. Plus, There were a lot of rumors going around, you know, about, you know, orgies and, you know, trunk possibly had a lot of relationships with female students and there's a lot of drinking all the time and that kind of thing.

[19:44]

So that I was uneasy with that. However, I did meet him. once when he came to town and I had a little interview with him with just a couple of people and I was very cynical because I really didn't trust teachers and I especially didn't trust him because of the stories that I heard and even though I loved his books I had very low expectations of the person. However, I have to say I was quite amazed when I met him. He was very, very humble. and kind. He wasn't at all what I imagined, so it was quite an experience to meet him, and I'm sorry to say that I don't remember the exact details of the conversation that went on, but he really was amazing. But I also had this personal habit of aversion, and I found enough things not to like to want to

[20:51]

move on from there. And then I came back to the Berkley Zen Center in 1980, and at that time, I remember sitting a Labor Day sashim in the community room, and during work period, we were working on building this Zen Doh in the back. And so I spent a lot of time here in the 80s, and I became a Dohwan and a Kokyo, and May Lee Scott was here, who was very encouraging, And during this time, I also went back to college and finished up my degree. I went to Cal. And I had a couple of careers before I went to library school in 1988. Most of my work life was spent baking. I worked in three bakeries, mostly at Nablum, which probably most people know of, a college in Russell. I worked there for a number of years. I also had a drafting career. which I really did not enjoy.

[21:53]

I loved the baking but the drafting I really could live without. But then computers took that over so I got out of that. And also I started to do some Vipassana retreats in the mid-80s from 10 to 20 days long and You know, I used to come and have dhokkasan and I used to tell you about these vipassana retreats. I think I was trying to brag. Because they were long retreats and my problem was I had a very hard time with a daily practice. You know, I would have come every day for maybe a month and then I just couldn't do it anymore. But I did come to a lot of sushis and I did a lot of retreats. It was easier to kind of dive into the long, difficult experience and then have some eventual calm come out of that than it was to have a daily practice with all the daily aggravation of everyday life.

[23:01]

But Sogen was never impressed by my coming back from retreat and telling him I had all these experiences. He just would say it's more important to sit every day. which I realized the truth of eventually. But I was still ambivalent as I said you know I never doubted the Buddhist path but I had this problem everywhere I went with finding things wrong and it really prevented me from having a deeper practice But my second period at the Berkley Zen Center, what I found wrong was that I felt there was too much criticism going around about, particularly about the forms. I remember one time a Kokyo told me that I chanted too loud and I got really upset and other little things happened.

[24:12]

Because I was shy and self-conscious there were just a lot of like little, like people coming up to me saying, you didn't do this right, you didn't do that right. And I found sitting hard enough so I, I don't know, I just couldn't handle it any longer. So I left again and I just practiced Vipassana for about five years and I went to a sitting group nearby and Vipassana is very kind of loose with forms you can sit any way you want it's not particularly orderly and on but on a retreat you don't work very much and there are long periods of sitting and walking and there are very few group activities there's no Oreo eat and people eat kind of a buffet style but what you do do is you watch your mind all day long

[25:13]

and you watch the hindrances arise and pass away just all day and you observe them very closely. And I continue my effort to try to sit daily and that would work for a few months and you know I was stuck with the same pattern so I finally got frustrated with what seemed like a superficial practice and there was no real Sangha even though Spirit Rock eventually came into being there was really I didn't feel there was a real Sangha so I finally came back here in 1995 and seriously settled into a daily practice and I came here six days a week for about five years and I held a number of practice positions and I also led a group on Monday nights a sitting group for homeless people up at the chaplaincy for the homeless and I facilitated a couple of Dharma groups so there was a period where my life was really steeped in the Dharma and I was very happy with that and

[26:26]

Then at the very end of 1999 and I was the director at the time I got a job and I. have been really looking for a new job for a long time. And so most of you know about this particular job, which is the one I have now, which is running one of the branches at San Francisco Public Library. And it's an extremely consuming job. It's really 60 hours a week when you include the commute and the long hours and the late hours. And so that radically changed how I could practice here. And I just also want to mention that in 1998 I met my partner Nancy and we moved in together about three and a half years ago in Oakland and this is really the first really settled domestic relationship I've ever had. I've had other ones but not any that really felt like a commitment.

[27:29]

But anyway so I had a lot of changes in my life around the same time And so for the past six years that I've been working like this, I come to Zazen two mornings a week and that takes a lot of effort for me because I work so late and so long. And every year I come and sit for a Hatsu Sushin. And other than that, I don't do very many Sushins at all. So I really miss being here. And I'm extremely happy to have been given this opportunity to be Shuso for this practice period. And I wanted to say a few things about the practice period. I know that it's difficult for many of us to come more often than we do due to work or parenting and other obligations and commitments.

[28:42]

So I think this is a really precious opportunity and I'm inspired by everyone being here and encouraging me and I want to encourage everyone else. I have a lot of sympathy for people who had a difficult time increasing their commitment to coming more often and I want to be helpful in any way that I can. I do want to say a word or two about what I'm planning to do here. I'm going to come every morning Monday through Saturday, and I was unable to get a lot of vacation time, at least during the month of May, so I'm going to be coming in the afternoons on Mondays and Thursdays, and that depends on nobody calling in sick at the library.

[29:53]

If somebody's sick I'm going to probably have to stay, so So until Memorial Day I'm going to come on Monday and Thursday afternoons, but after that one person who's supposed to be there full-time is coming back, so I'm going to try and come every afternoon for the last couple of weeks of practice period. So barring any unforeseen circumstances I should be able to make it. The theme of the practice period of course is the Heart Sutra in everyday life and I'm not qualified to explain the Heart Sutra and Sojan's going to talk about that. What I'm going to talk about is everyday life and what I'm trying to understand is how to practice Prajnaparamita moment by moment in everyday life.

[31:00]

So I'd like to stop now and just see if there are any questions or comments or find out if there's anything. Anyone? Yes, Charlie. I know he was in that car wreck, in a lot of pain, and I guess the drinking started after the car wreck. Do you think that he was some sort of spiritual genius?

[32:07]

an ordinary practitioner with a lot of zeal? Well, unfortunately I didn't spend enough time with him to really know him personally that well. So I'm not sure, I just think he really understood how we think and I thought he could really communicate well I really don't know the answer to that. It is? I'm surprised I could talk for that long.

[32:54]

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