It's good to see you all. Good to be together. And it's a beautiful day. Also, good evening to those of you who are on the other side of the world. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, the day that we remember people. who've been murdered because of their self-expression. 2021 has been a record year in that regard, so remembering them. At the end of the day, we know that we have so much more to do to make our justice system equitable. And locating ourselves even further, we are a week past the end of our aspects of practice, the practice period where we studied the Gakudo Yojinshu.

[01:15]

And we are about two weeks away from Rohatsu. And looking right into next week, our week of celebrating gratitude and Thanksgiving. And knowing that that's embedded in the season, the season of harvest. And it comes to us with a pretty complex historical narrative that we are still understanding and understanding from many different frames. And lastly, I guess I would say it's sort of locating ourselves is that we, our Sangha is deep in the middle of a conversation about reopening, which is both very exciting and a little fraught maybe.

[02:20]

So at the beginning, what I want to talk about is something that I came across at the beginning of the aspects in a little bit of research that I did about the Gakudo Yoshida, the Dogen's pointers for practicing the way. And I found an interview or a conversation between a very highly respected Soto Zen Pan, Noiri Roshi, In a conversation between him and five people, four of them or three of them were Suzuki Roshi students, two couples, Jane and Peter Schneider and Carl B. Fumiko. And Huizu, who was Suzuki's son, and then the abbot at Rinzouan, the family temple.

[03:32]

It wasn't transcribed. It wasn't audiotaped. It was remembered. So it's second and third and fourth hand, if you will. But it had a big effect on me, and I would like to read the two descriptions. What it is is Noiri being about Suzuki and who he was and how he wasn't, and Noiri's memory of him when Suzuki was still in Japan. So here's, and so it's because it's not a transcription, it's in the third person. Wibi Roshi witnessed a lay ordination ceremony led by Suzuki and said that what struck him about Suzuki Roshi was the perfection with which he carried himself. the way he moved, the way he handled his zagu, which is cloth for bowing on, the way he bowed.

[04:42]

These kinds of things were so perfect and the temple just right for the situation that he felt that this kind of perfection could not have been achieved in one lifetime. Another time, though, Iwi Roshi felt the feeling of this stillness in Suzuki Roshi. When once at the Yaizu station, they happened to pass each other. Yaizu is the town that Rinzo Inn is located in Japan. And Suzuki Roshi gave just a quick greeting, hi, and went by him. Suzuki Roshi felt that deep, profound stillness in Suzuki, even though he had just said hi and went by. The impression that Noiwi Roshi had was that Suzuki Roshi was, in that simple way, encouraging his own practice. Noiwi Roshi was very busy, and in contrast to Suzuki was dashing past.

[05:43]

He had just finished publishing a book on Dogen's Eihei Kuroku. And in Suzuki Roshi's greeting, he felt a kind of Gokura-sama, a thank you. the work that he had done. He didn't say you did a good job. He just said hi. And Nairi Roshi felt that Suzuki Roshi recognized the effort that he had made and was not congratulating him, but encouraging him. As he walked, he was left with this image of Suzuki Roshi, which he can still recall today. So... The deep effect that it had on me, I think, was that it, well, the obvious one is it raises the bar of practice for me considerably to imagine what it would be like to carry that stillness into daily life in whatever situation one is in.

[06:55]

And it only, when I was working on this, it only recently, like in the last day or two, occurred to me that it also may be significant because of my second Dharma name, which is Jesu, which is alternately translated as stable center. And I've often thought of this stillness as like the still point in a gyroscope. One of the reasons that I came to BCC was that the teacher there had been a student of Suzuki's, and I don't remember why or what I knew about Suzuki, but I knew that I wanted something of that effect of Suzuki's. And I subsequently got immersed in the practice and didn't really think about it much after that, in that way.

[08:09]

But several years after Sojin's death, or prior to his death, Ed Herslack, our in-house videographer, did a series, I think four, of interviews videotaped of Sojin. For a total, I think of about eight hours or more. And each interview had a theme. The first one, I think, family of origin experiences and childhood. And I think the second one was his early days with Suzuki. And I think it was the second one that I attended. And there were only four of us in the Zendo. Ed and Sojin and myself and Maria, I think. And... Toward the end of the first hour, Sojin started talking about something which struck me as being really important, and I tried to remember what he said, and I couldn't.

[09:12]

I went looking for notes about it. I didn't write anything down. So I asked Ed, and he graciously went through the videotape and found the moment. So now I want to just say what Sojin said. that affected me. He said, what hooked me, as difficult as it was, I've never been challenged before. I remember Suzuki Roshi saying, the only thing I can give you is my Zen spirit. To me, I always felt he was driving us to go beyond ourselves, to do something more than we thought we could do. So that was really for me. I remember early on feeling freed from myself. I just wanted to run back and bow to him for driving me to that extreme. I was so grateful to the practice. That's why I gave myself over to it.

[10:14]

I felt liberated. I didn't feel like I needed anything. There was nothing I had to have or had to do. I felt totally free. I guess you could call it a kensho. I just felt freed. So I've been thinking recently, remembering that settled feeling that Sojin conveyed. And I think there is a way in which I identified a settled feeling with something of how he transmits or what he learned from Suzuki that's handed down to us. I mean, we all remember how he bowed, how he arranged the altar during service.

[11:16]

Zazen. I have particularly been remembering how he did kinhen walking, meditation. Watching him, I had this feeling, of stillness between each step. And there was stillness. And he would step. And then there was stillness. It wasn't a constant moving. Like I was doing it. I remember trying to emulate that. How to find that stillness within movement. Hozon recently suggested that that quality of Sojans was of no gaining idea. And that has, I think that maybe the no gaining idea is actually the stillness.

[12:25]

It's that settledness. And they're pointing to the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe it's a way of visualizing how to carry something to daily life. But I found that it's not possible to spend much time contemplating settledness without immediately coming upon us. And recently I went to the Humboldt Redwoods as a way, really, of finding a settlement. I found a place to stay that had no Wi-Fi, completely unplugged. And I recommend this place to all of you. It is, I mean, if you walk in the Redwoods here in Oakland, they're wonderful, but they are juveniles.

[13:31]

compared to those fellows up there. And they're steeped in settledness. The air is saturated with it. You can't help but breathe it in, actually. But coming home was another matter. I came home. I had a day of back-to-back meetings, which I fought. I did not. I was fighting my own schedule. I was extremely unsettled, and I was unsettled that I was unsettled. Not liking it. I was finding fault with being unsettled. Not like a failure of composure in some way. And eventually, during the day, I was cooking dinner, and I put my hands chopping vegetables.

[14:42]

And because I was noticing my unsettledness, and I did a moment of just trying to arrive back in the moment, and that's the only moment. from that entire day. And it has a kind of vividness in my mind. So then I went to looking for what Suzuki Roshi had to say on the subject of unsettledness and not only so a chapter called true concentration. And the word is actually contemplating several things that he said. He's saying to us, if you know I am making a mistake, but even so, I cannot help continuing with my practice, then there is no need to worry.

[15:51]

If you open your true eyes and accept that you, that the you, in a wrong idea of practice, that is real practice. Let me read that again. I think it's interesting to try to get. If you accept the you that is involved in the idea of wrong idea of practice, that is real practice. Which was very encouraging to me, I have to say. He goes on, you accept your thinking because it's already there. You cannot do anything about it. There's no need to try to get rid of it. This is not a matter of right or wrong, but of how to, frankly, with an openness of mind, what you are doing. That is the most important point. So this seems to me like a very complete kind of acceptance.

[16:54]

Practice is how we obtain calmness and clarity of mind. But we cannot do this by physically forcing something on ourselves or by creating some special state of mind. So there goes my idea that I'm going to search for subtleness and find it and just be there, right? But if you practice zazen in order to attain that kind of mirror-like mind, that is not the practice we mean. When you practice Azen, you will accept the you who is thinking about something without trying to be free of the images you have. And then he has this in quotes. Oh, here they come. In that way, your practice includes everything, one thing after the other, and you do not lose your calmness of mind. There's a lot in there.

[18:01]

Let me see if I can try to unpack some of it. But certainly it starts with acceptance, with complete acceptance, even with the unsettledness, accepting the unsettledness. Then the 10th pointer of the Dogen's guidelines for practicing the way is called by Okamara's translation, settling down right here. And Okamura is, this is a translation of Dogen, this is Dogen. Everyone has a body and mind. Bury between the strong and weak and the high and low spirited. In movement or in stillness, you should realize Buddha directly through nothing other than your body and mind. Do not try to change your body or mind. Just follow the realization. Sure. This is called being here or settling down.

[19:04]

So ours is a body-mind practice, realizing Buddha directly through nothing other than your body and mind. I've been reading a book called My Grandmother's Hands with a Reading Group, one of the reading groups, which is part of our Addressing Racism project, our work. And this book is by Resmaa Menachem. And it is one of the best descriptions of how trauma and how one works with trauma to heal and establish resilience. It happens to be focused on the trauma associated with racism, but he extends that to how it affects us, how it affects the black body and the white body and the police body.

[20:23]

He says, This is Menachem. Trauma always happens in the body. It is not a flaw or weakness. It is the body's protective response in a series of events that it perceives as dangerous. And it is always embedded in a body response. It's visceral. And our practice is a body practice as well. We focus on our breath, for example. Zen is described as equivalent to a yoga posture. Ron, in one of the classes, recently asked the question, which was also, he described asking the teacher the question early on in his practice, why do we focus on the breath, which was my question early on, too, because it seemed arbitrary. But the breath is a very easy, easily accessed indication of how the body is doing, what's happening, whether there's stress or not stress.

[21:40]

So it is a way of locating oneself in one's body. A lot of our Buddhism focuses on both our perceptual capabilities and our limitations perceptually. affects the limit of what we can know and understand, that there's a mystery beyond what we can perceive. In movement or in stillness, you do directly through nothing other than your body and mind. So it's the body and mind, which is settled or unsettled. And this is not something that just happens in one by themselves, isolated or uninfluenced, even though we've been quarantined and it's been difficult for us to be influenced by, you know, being together personally, by being on Zoom.

[22:52]

And we found intimacy even so. Nevertheless, being in the Zendo is not about just being in a building. It's about being connected. with other bodies, being with other people and influence of that, the effect of that. Here's what Menachem says about that. He says, when one settled body encounters another, this can create a feeling of both bodies. But when one unsettled body encounters another, the unsettledness tends to compound in both bodies. We know this, right? It's... sort of the background of our lives. I mean, I know it driving down 580. I can feel when someone has an intention of moving into my lane before they signal. You can feel the energy of the people around you, even though we're separated by these skins of metal and glass. I had the

[24:02]

opportunity to be with my great nephews when they were babies in the NICU. This is years ago now. They were born at 25 weeks. It was very early, and so they spent about six weeks. And I happened to be there by chance in the last year, the last year, the last week of there being And so I went and learned from the nurses how to hold them and what they and what the language is that they. And the nurses understand that babies who are newborn can communicate. And one of the things they like, like, for example, this. Means I really don't like what's happening right now. Make it stop. So I got to know these twins, these guys, Skye and Max.

[25:06]

And then on the one of the fifth day I was there, they were brought home and I was at their house waiting for them, mom and dad, to bring them into the house and baby. And one of them put Skye into my arms. And this little fellow who had been just, you know, like this, this is how he was. went like this. He just melted. His hands just went out to his side. He could, in his body, feel the difference between being in the NICU and being home. Even though he had never been home, he was picking up how we communicate, you know, in our, we read. It's so dramatic. And as we contemplate being back together, we know what we've been missing, that settledness that happens when we are all settled together.

[26:15]

It is also true that this is the longest period of time that we have gone without a referral to the HEAR Committee in the history of the HEAR Committee. the HEAR Committee, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is the Harmony, Ethics, and Reconciliation Committee. So the side of being settled is that we have not had moments of unsettledness bumping into other unsettledness. We settle one another and we unsettle one another, depending. That's who we are. So in that interview, by the way, that interview of Noiri Roshi was in 1973, which is just about two years after Suzuki had died. Huizu speculates that there was a relationship between the stillness that Noiri Roshi felt in terms of precepts in Zen practice.

[27:23]

So... Perhaps this is another element of navigating settledness and unsettledness. It's what we do. What do we do? What is our guide to knowing what to do? We are unsettled. I recently ran across this sentence. The trick is to metabolize pain as energy. Metabolize pain as energy. I take this as the work of digesting unsettledness or pain or distress. And by positing the idea that that work happens by returning to the present. like the moment such as the one that I can remember from my very unsettled day, chopping the vegetables.

[28:29]

Uchiyama says, and this is a commentary of the Genja Koan, when we intimately and return right here, it is clear that all things have no fixed self, which is the gift of impermanence. And see, when you return to your unsettled self, you can, well, I can reassure myself, this is impermanent. He also says, we are not fixed as deluded living beings. Nor are we fixed as enlightened Buddhas. Actually, to awaken to the reality of life before the separation between enlightenment and enlightenment. is Buddha. So, including both, including settled and unsettled. He calls this living vividly in the present moment.

[29:37]

Carol Paul has told this story several times in several venues, so I think it's okay if I say it here, that Sojin said to her when her husband Al died, he told her to enjoy her life. I'm assuming that this instruction is not spiritual bypass, that it's not an instruction about avoiding pain, but it is fully feeling the pain and knowing that it is a flow of energy and to realize the no sin and grief. and enjoyment. Deeply realizing no fixed self. I mean, the way I visualize this is that we are energy. We are a flow of energy. We are actually maybe a flow of many layers of synchronous energy, energetic processes.

[30:45]

which is to say we're not products, we're not end products. So it's impossible to get somewhere, like finally being enlightened. It's not a goal. It is the effort on the way that is the true pleasure of life. So I want to come back to Suzuki. I'm going to give him the last word. This is from Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in a chapter called Calmness. In our everyday life, we are usually trying to do something, trying to change something into something else. We're trying to attain something.

[31:50]

Just this trying is already in itself an expression of our true nature. The meaning lies in the effort itself. We should find out the meaning of our effort before we attain something. Goes on to quote Dogen, we should attain enlightenment before we attain. in that typical book. Here's Suzuki again. It is not after attaining enlightenment that we find its true meaning, but trying to do so, something in itself is enlightenment. In difficulty or distress, there we have enlightenment. When we are in defilement, there we should have composure. Usually we find it very difficult to live in the effervescence of life, but it's only within the effervescence that we can find the joy of eternal life.

[33:01]

So I'm imagining that this is the freedom that Sojourn was talking about. So with that, I'm very interested to hear... thoughts are and comments and questions. And while I want to hear from everyone, I particularly want to encourage those of you who don't usually say something or shy to step forward. Echo, I think that means I turned things over, yeah? Yes, thank you, Mary, for your wonderful talk. We're all, I'm sure, spellbound and waiting for our questions to arrive. We have a question from Lori.

[34:26]

Lori, please go ahead. Is there a difference between physical pain and emotional pain? Or what is the difference between physical pain and emotional pain? My mind is going in two different directions about that. I mean, that's a good question. And it does reflect the Western separation of body and mind, which I think is a frame, but not necessarily the only frame that one can think or use. I mean, there's some neurological ideas about where pain is experienced, but pretty much it's neurological, and there is pain inside the skull, and then there's this second brain that is in all the nerves surrounding the chest and the gut.

[35:51]

Pretty much a feeling is a body feeling. Access that one can name it and, you know, cognize it, but one can also feel it without naming it. Is that sort of in the territory you're thinking? Yeah, I mean, I guess I just think that a person can have unbearable pain. that is not the same as unbearable physical pain. And what is that? I mean, it's a question for me. It's a koan, you know. They seem to be in the same place, but they seem to be happening in the same place, except they're still somehow. Well, I think when there's, yes, exactly. I mean, I think that there's pain that one can cause by how one thinks about something. Yeah. Right. That's what you're thinking.

[36:52]

Kind of. Or just getting your heart broken is unbearable. But as like when my knee is in unbearable pain or maybe it is the same, just in a different part of the body. It's a question for me. I don't know. But what you're talking about is also the pain that you cause yourself by beating yourself up or something. That's also a pain. Right. And some of my understanding, and I'm not, you know, very extremely well versed in this, is that is that dealing with chronic pain is a physical pain is a cognitive that one the kinds of exercises that one does in order to manage chronic body pain. one can address through conceptual exercises. Oh, that's interesting.

[37:53]

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Ross, I think you're next. Good morning, Mary. Good morning. You're recalling Carol's story about when her husband died and so just teaching to her reminded me of when I went through my divorce. And he said, well, now you have an opportunity to practice alone, which doesn't sound so helpful or encouraging, but ultimately it was the answer that worked for me that I needed to hear coming from my Zen teacher in that it's up to me to figure it out. And he could be a mirror to reflect this pain and difficulty I was going through. and say, well, now what are you going to do? What are you going to do? And it's, I guess, counterintuitive maybe is the word.

[38:57]

When I speak with my friends or a therapist, they have a different kind of take on the remedy, so to speak, of that. But for here at BCC, it was the right medicine. And we all share our difficulties with one another. as a sort of spiritual and pastoral kind of care and concern, third treasure. So thanks for bringing these questions up for us. Sure. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Ross. Jeff, please go ahead with your question. Great talk, Mary. You've called me forth in any number of ways and reminded me of things that I value really deeply. When you talk about Sojan and witnessing how he moved in space and how he moved with other people in space, it was some of the deepest and when I came into the Zendo.

[40:00]

And, you know, I've said this before, but he talked about, you know, hearing with your eyes and seeing with your ears and mimicking what he did and finding that space inside of my body that reflected practice in that. The feeling of the world becoming crisp and new after chanting. I mean, all of the things that kind of led me into an aware and settled place. That settling for me is often a return, right? It's a return from unsettling. I was chatting with an old friend yesterday who's also a therapist. Talking about her inner critical voice. And I got to work with this voice and all of her attention was on that voice. And I said, for me, it's different. What are you returning to? How do you return to your voice of compassion and your voice of self-love and your voice of all of the things that you value, not worrying about where you've been, but I mean, I'll say it this way, but I think about life as a series of moments that

[41:09]

that are connected by the awareness that we cultivate in sitting. Where is my attention? Where is my awareness? What am I working with? What's in my body? Where is my breath? I mean, breathing and returning the breath made so much sense to me because it's so universal. Anyway, it was just a wonderful talk because you raised for me the essential question of how am I in this moment? And for my practice, it is working with a question that calls me forth most effectively. And so I'm really grateful. Thank you so much. Try that on mute again. Hi, sorry about that.

[42:11]

Thank you for a great talk. So I have a personal and also a question regarding that. So Sojin always said, start from enlightenment, move towards practice, which is been very, very sort of, it gives the idea of I want to reach enlightenment, gaining my, it's wonderful. But we also need to remember or don't forget the dark side of meditation, especially folks that had physical, mental trauma, what have you. And when you have the white wall in front of you, it's you, your mind, your body, your breath, and everything that has been sort of stamped on that psyche and that

[43:12]

physical. So when you get off, especially after two, three days of sitting, when you leave the cushion, you're sort of on your own with everything that sort of like got unearthed and got opened up. And that should be a very vulnerable and very, almost very dangerous place to be your own, especially when you come home and I have the fortune of having a good support in the home. But for somebody that particularly doesn't have that structure, when they come home with all of that, you can call it dark energy, you can call it whatever, and you can also feel it in your body. But what do you do with that? That's a deep question. you're really talking about trauma, right?

[44:13]

And the vulnerability of trying to metabolize trauma is tricky, I think. I mean, I think, well, first of all, I would recommend Menachem's book to you. He really does talk about this as a body practice and about settling in the body as a it's almost like instead of the openness of Zazen, it's more like the processes where one is is imagining and visualizing oneself through several sequences of things. And I think, you know, who comes to mind is Thich Nhat Hanh.

[45:24]

Thich Nhat Hanh's book on anger is a particularly good one. And he talks about being so unsettled and so... that he couldn't sit, that he could not sit zazen. And so what he did was hin hin, and he just paced the floor all night long and just let himself feel the anger without doing anything about it until he finally sort of exhausted himself. So that's one thing. thing that comes to mind. Another thing that comes to mind is I think it's very, very gentle with oneself and to not bite off more than one can chew, so to speak, to go up to the

[46:32]

To go to the challenging moment, the challenging edge, not the re-traumatizing edge. I mean, that's the place where you don't want to go is to be so much in the memory that you're re-traumatizing. And so finding your one zone, you have to find that edge. We are challenging ourselves, but not hurting ourselves. Right? Very difficult to do. It's almost like brain surgery. You deal with neurons almost. That's right. They're even not visible, and they just flare up. Right. Andrea mentioned last week, when she would approach Sojin, and she would think that, oh, maybe he's thinking that, and then he would say, I don't even go there.

[47:35]

And that, I've been using that in my mind, you know, like when a thought, a trigger happens, and then it just goes, right? And so I go, okay, I don't even want to go there. And we already dealt with, you know, blah, blah, blah, and then just come back to the breath. Nice. You learn things, but helping here is the three jewels, of course, but the sangha. And their sangha is not necessarily, they're all in the BCC. There are sanghas at Safeway, at Whole Foods, wherever, everywhere. So, but again, thank you for that. Yeah, thank you. Husband and wife, they were professors in Brown. I don't know their name, but they actually did this program called The Dark Side of Meditation. And people who have really traumatic experience and they actually bring him home and they treat him and so forth. So I think support of another human being is very important. But anyways, I just want to say thank you.

[48:37]

Appreciate the answers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kabir. We have now a question from Sean. Please go ahead, Sean. Thank you, Mary, for your talk. This is very timely. And it's not so much a question, it's just on the subject of pain and trauma. I believe I read somewhere, and this isn't an exact quote, but in Beginner's Mind, Suzuki says, the fact that you recognize that you have this mental pain or physical pain means that you're alive. You're well enough. Something to that effect. So I just wanted to say that. Thank you. Yeah, so that kind of fits in with the other things that I read about how recognizing and having the effort is the practice, right?

[49:45]

Recognition, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Sean. We have a question from Jim. Jim Herb, please go ahead. Hi, Jim. Thank you, Mary, for... Pardon me. I'm on two devices so that I can both hear and see. What a choice. See what I can do here. Can you hear me okay? I can. I'm sorry if there's a little background echo. First of all, thank you very much for a very interesting talk that I absorbed a lot from. I have a question about trauma. It's kind of a general question whether you have thoughts on trauma and karma. My question comes from a sense that all of us have trauma.

[50:48]

And I think we also live in particularly now at a time when we're becoming more aware of the collective trauma, especially when we talk about. and some of the difficulties we have in society. So it's a very open question, but I would appreciate your comments. Trauma and Carmen, well, I'm inclined to say, although I don't pretend to be an expert, but I think of them as the same thing. The causes and conditions that have brought us to this moment are all included. And the interesting thing about the trauma research is that they're finding that it can be transmitted down and actually be transmitted in the DNA. I mean, that is a little bit amazing to me when I think about how memories and events can get embedded in that kind of granular way.

[51:56]

I think it's another way of talking about what's happened to us and how we have been shaped by what's happened to us and how we affect one another. I'd be interested to hear what you think. Okay. Thank you, Jim, very much. Peter, please go ahead with your question. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, Mary. Peter Overton, please. Oh, I'm sorry. Peter C. Go ahead, Peter Carpentier, since you're already on and unmuted, go ahead. Who's on? Me? Yeah. Thank you. Last question, our book group is reading America's Racial Karma by Larry Ward, which really speaks to that question.

[53:07]

It's a very short book, so if that's helpful at all. But thank you for your talk. I really appreciate you raising the question of trauma as it relates to trauma. And this has kind of already been said, but in trauma healing, we often use the phrase titration. We titrate everything, which means we take it in little tiny bits so as not to re-traumatize someone. And I discovered after many, many years of sitting for five days and going to Tassajar that I was dissociating the entire time I was doing all of that. And that as soon as those retreats were over, I was at the local junk food store just pounding down junk food to deal with all the what was just said. you know, five days of sitting looking at a wall with no one or support me or help me heal through what was coming up little by little. So my own experience tells me that for some people, me included, sitting on one day sashimi is too much.

[54:12]

I mean, Suzuki Roshi said in one of his talks, sometimes sitting every day is too much. Sit once a week. He was very much attuned to just what's enough. So I have not set a Sashim in years, but in those years, I've gotten some really high-quality skilled trauma therapy from some really high-quality skilled therapists. Zen teacher at San Francisco Zen Center, who I sat practice period with 15 years ago at Tasa Hara. So, and now... I don't know if I'll ever sit in another machine, but now I know how to listen to my body and how to know when enough is enough or is now going to be a problem rather than a solution and what the resources are that are available to me when that happens. And the last thing I'll say is I think it's really important is that my training has told me that trauma almost always happens in relationship, whether it's a parent or a parent.

[55:20]

or racial trauma, it always, so it has to be healed in relationship. Something about another empathic, warm, loving, supportive body that is co-regulating with mine, which you spoke to, that ushers me through that experience. We traumatize that, and a wall doesn't provide that. It just doesn't provide that. So I really think we have to be to a certain point of healing in our own bodies. before we can sit in front of a wall for a day or three days or seven days without, you know, getting re-traumatized if we're trauma survivors. And I just think it's a really important thing that you raise and for us to be aware of. And if anybody hasn't read John Wellwood's interview on spiritual bypass, I think it's with Tricycle. I have it. You can go to the BCC community and ask for it. I can post it, but it's a wonderful talk. Great. Thank you so much.

[56:21]

Thank you, Peter. Peter Overton? Thank you, Peter. Let's go with Peter Overton. I would actually ask Peter C. to put your email in the for people to communicate with you on what you just offered. Thank you. Peter, you muted. I just, yeah, now I'm back on. Thank you, Mary. I really appreciate the way you hold the space and the subject matter. It makes it so much so accessible. My question, I'm finding it's really important in my life at this point in practice to focus on physical and emotional stability and balance. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the concept of stability as a a way of flux of subtleness, unsettledness. It seems like stability must include those things in some way.

[57:32]

Yeah, I think you're right. I think, well, two things come to mind. Andrea, Ryushin talked about this, watching... Alexandra move across the Zendo, which was a process of continually catching herself from falling. Finding the stability in the movement and combining them. So that's one thing that comes to mind. The other thing that comes to mind is that idea of a gyroscope where there's a... a still, but there's movement all around it. Yeah. Right? So it does, I do, this has been what I've been needing to focus on for myself, which is about including unsettledness in the settled.

[58:40]

Yeah. The not settled with the settled. That it's like this. So there's a constant sort of recovery from one to the other. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry, I'm unmuted. Go ahead. Question. Thank you. So I've got a couple things I want to ask you or bring up, Mary. One of them, when Lori was talking about unbearable pain, whether it's emotional or whether it's physical, With my mother, I've gone through a couple of situations, and I had felt that certain things would be unbearable, and I would not be able to get through them. And what ended up is that I did get through them. And I think in thinking about what Lori said, there's a part of me that wonders is how much...

[59:46]

does our unbearable pain, how much of it is that it's someplace that we've decided we're going as opposed to someplace we might land if we allow ourselves to land wherever we land, where it takes us. So that's one of the things. And then the other is your talk was a lot, felt to me a lot about our own mind and body. And. how we work with them. But in the last, you know, I have felt that that we as a Berkeley Zen Center have sort of leaned a lot closer towards focusing on how we help others and how we fix others and how we keep other people from being hurt. And, you know, let's do this, but that might not do that. That might hurt people. And I'm wondering, how do we or how do you see us dealing with our own minds and our own bodies with our practice and how that can be the good starting place, or if you believe it is, for then how do we work with not necessarily individuals, but with the greater good of all and how that is done.

[61:12]

because it feels like two different paths. So if you could speak on that, I would appreciate it. Thank you. Well, it's possible that I'm not completely understanding what you're saying, but I would say that it doesn't, it doesn't, I don't experience those two things as separate paths, I guess. I'm trying to figure out why I don't see it that way. Partly because I, when I think about doing things for others, if you will, that frame, I think that's what you're referring to. I actually think that I'm doing that for myself.

[62:21]

I don't think those are separate. I think it's an expression. I get so much from feeling in relationship to someone that it doesn't feel like a different path to me than having responsibility for what's going on in this general energetic neighborhood. It feels to me like those did. So I don't know if I can, I don't know if that helps at all, but they don't feel separate to me, I guess. Thank you. I think I'm probably not explaining myself very clearly, but this might be sort of an example. When we open up the Zendo again and people need to be vaccinated, I'm assuming, hoping, and need to wear masks.

[63:29]

And I heard someone say, well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. And what if someone comes not vaccinated or they don't want to wear a mask? What do we do? Because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. That too, it shouldn't be something separate. I mean, I feel like if I'm good, everybody around me has the potential of being good. And if I am not good, meaning if I am not practicing, then it makes it harder for people around me. I will make it harder for people around me. So I guess in a case like that, for me, it's not so confusing is what do we do? We don't want to hurt someone's feelings. That's the thing that I am sort of talking about, like in a situation like that, that it really can't, everything can't stop because it might hurt someone's feelings that they don't, they're either not vaccinated, don't want to get vaccinated, can't get vaccinated.

[64:40]

Because if the plan is that this is what we do, and I guess I've seen more getting caught by we don't want to hurt someone's feelings. And so a bigger plan or the good for all somehow becomes less of the equation. That's an example, I think, of what I'm talking about. So hopefully that's a little bit more clear than mud. Thank you. Thank you. Ed, did you want to have a question? Thank you. Go ahead, Ed. Yes. Hi. Thanks, Mary. You know, that interview that I did with Sojin, what struck me, really struck me, was when he said he felt like he wanted to bow down.

[65:42]

He wanted to rush up to run up to Suzuki Roshi and... and bow down at his feet. And I was so surprised because I, like what Peter was saying, is that I would go to Sashin's and I would feel like I just needed to run out of the Zendo because of all the material that was coming up for me. And the idea of bowing down in gratitude was felt, I was really, having that experience and that knowing our limits is really important and I really didn't know my limits and sort of just wanted to out and that's why I was like how could you feel that you know how could you be so

[66:46]

full of gratitude to do that. So that's it. Thank you for your interviewing and work and all the wonderful things that you've done in archiving. Thank you. Thank you, Ed, for your comments. And I'd like to say that knowing our limits, we are well over our time today. And I couldn't leave it to Mary or Hozan to make the call if we continue with this interesting dialogue. I'm fine. Why don't we take the next... Okay, I would ask questioners to please be brief and concise. Thank you. Asking me to be... Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for your talk. Asking me to be concise is like, you know, that's harder than any of the practices I've had to do so far. I guess...

[67:50]

I don't have a specific question. I wanted to talk to everything that you said in response so much for concise. But I guess the thing that came to mind, two things in particular, one was in the question of the body, mind, pain, the way physical pain. is in a place, we can locate it, whereas emotional pain is ethereal and that it doesn't exist in a place. And maybe the work of sort of objectifying pain, allowing it to be something to take care of, can work for both. So if my hand hurts, I take care of my hand. And if my heart or my emotion hurts, then I take care of that. And that came to my mind.

[68:54]

And the other thing I thought of was taking time. And I think the image of Suzuki Roshi saying hi in the middle of the bustle around the day and of the student And the image of you looking at your hands in the evening of a day of rushing, those are the same teachings. And I want to thank you for those because they remind us that it's available. It's about taking time to be in it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Last questioner will be Stephanie. Please go ahead, Stephanie. I wanted to, I'm seeing something.

[70:04]

Would you like to unmute your microphone? Can you hear me? Yes. I wanted to respond to what Dean said about making people unhappy by setting boundaries around requiring vaccines. You know, I think that setting boundaries is a good thing. Whether people are unhappy with those limits, the person who is unhappy has an opportunity to look, if they choose, at The bigger picture, it's an opportunity rather than feeling hurt and separated. I think it's important, I think that we all learn to step forward into what we're committed to and keeping our community safe is a first priority.

[71:12]

So I thought I would contribute that as a way of resetting as really very valuable and an opportunity to look at oneself. Right. Thank you so much. I think that's a great response. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[71:34]

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