He started practicing at the Berkley Zen Center in 1990, and he took the precepts in 1995. He received lay entrustment in 2014. He moved to Colorado Springs with his young family in 2004, and has been practicing with the Springs Mountain Sangha in the Zen Koan tradition since then. And he has led classes and study groups on Dogon and Koans there in Colorado. We are recording this talk, Clay. Okay, thank you so much for being with us, and it's good to have you back, at least on Zoom. And thank you for speaking. Clay. Well, Karen, thank you for asking me to speak. It's really been wonderful for me to reconnect

[01:01]

with the Berkley Zen Center community and realize that I'm a part of this family, even though I moved away 17 years ago. And I realize a number of you I have never met before, so I thought I'd use part of the talk today. Just to tell you a little about my life in Colorado Springs, there's a couple people on the Zoom screen from Colorado Springs, which is great. Hi, Linda and Karen. And about my practice here. And then really, as I was thinking about the talk and thinking about my days in Berkley, I wanted to share some memories about those days, and especially about when I became disabled with very debilitating back and neck pain, and how I managed to come back to practice and back to the Zen Center, and who helped me do that.

[02:03]

So I grew up in Colorado Springs, about a mile from where I live right now. And my family did a lot of outdoor things. So I spent my time camping and climbing mountains and skiing and backpacking. And that's kind of my element. Cities, I'm not that comfortable in. So it explains a little bit about why we moved. My wife, Anne, and I had two kids who were kind of going into an elementary school when we decided to move, and we decided we wanted to raise them out here instead. And those kids have gotten a little bigger. Our oldest, Ellie, is 24.

[03:05]

She's been teaching English the last two and a half years at an elementary school in Madrid. So she's seen the COVID epidemic from that perspective. Our middle child, Hannah, is 21, and she is a senior at Grinnell College in Iowa. She's going back for her final semester just in a couple of days. And our son, Xander, who we adopted after we moved to Colorado, is much more, has been a teacher for her entire career. And a couple of years ago, she decided that she would. I think you're breaking up a bit.

[04:26]

I've missed a couple of your sentences. Might turn off your video. Is there something I can do about that? Close on said, turn your video off. Give that a try. If we all turn off our video, it might make his less bogged. Oh, so other people should turn off their videos? That's a suggestion, so we can still see your face. Yes, let's give that a try. If everyone would please cut your video. And then, Clay, why don't you start? I think we lost it a little bit after you were introducing Xander. Okay. So he's 14, can you hear me better now? I believe so, yeah, let's keep rolling. Okay, so he's in his first year of high school and he loves swimming.

[05:28]

Oh yeah, so Anne has been a teacher for her whole career and she is now looking for a job in student affairs at our local university or at Colorado College. I work part-time as a landlord and property manager. It's a job that keeps me moving around, which is good, because I don't sit low very well. And we own 15 rental properties and I take care of those. There's a foundation in my family and so I do a lot of nonprofit work through the foundation with grant making. And that's a real privilege and very engaging thing to do. In terms of practice, there's been a practice community for about 25 years. It was started by Sarah Bender and it is in the Sanbo-Kyodan lineage.

[06:32]

So the Sanbo-Kyodan is a hybrid lineage between Soto and Rinzai Zen. Our main study is Koan study though. So I've been doing Koan study out here for about 15 years. And you do that a lot one-on-one with the teacher, but we also do it in groups and we do it openly for open discussion. And the project of this lineage in the United States is to innovate and open up the process of Koan work and Koan understanding and bring it into everyday life in America. We're part of what's called the Pacific Zen Institute, which was founded by John Tarrant and Joan Sutherland. Pacific Zen is kind of pretty strong in California.

[07:38]

Their group is quite large and has a lot of teachers out there. And one of them I've worked with for a long time who's David Weinstein, some of you might know because he lives in Oakland. And I've worked with him over the phone mostly for 15 years, but he also came to Colorado Springs and he used to do retreats with us and that's how I got to know him. I would be happy to talk with anyone about Koan work and Koan study and that kind of practice. It could be a long discussion, but for today, let me just say that it's very lively and responsive and expressive as you try to express your understanding and it really helps you get close to the vastness and emptiness. Going back many years, I took the precepts in 1995. We had a large class, but Stan Dewey was in that class

[08:39]

and so was Sue Osher and Susan Marvin. And it's great to see you guys still. We're still practicing after 25 years together. That's pretty cool. That was in 1995. I started practicing in 1990. In 1997, my life changed very dramatically. Not all of a sudden, but slowly and dramatically. So I was working as a researcher for UC Berkeley in natural resource management. I'd just gotten a master's degree and I was sort of doing my, working with some professors. And I was doing a lot of driving around the Central Valley and my back started hurting. So I then started working for East Bay MUD as a natural resource management specialist and my back continued hurting

[09:39]

and I had to start working halftime because I couldn't just sit up and look at a computer and do stuff. I just started to make all these adjustments. In the meantime, I was getting a lot of medical treatment, doing a lot of physical therapy, seeing a lot of doctors, although none of that really seemed to be helping and my condition seemed to be getting worse. And after about 16 months, I was on total disability and I was not able to work at all. So I thought I would just be able to heal up, no stress of working, get better and things would be good again. In fact, we were, my wife and I, we decided to have a second kid. That's good for the family plan, but it was not good for working. That actually caused a lot more stress and caused my pain levels to go up. I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease in my back.

[10:45]

I had all kinds of, and in the first five years, I probably saw about 20 different kinds of specialists and doctors and alternative therapists. And at that point, they told me that there was nothing else we could do for you. You just needed to get on with your life and do the best you could. And one doctor said, your job now is to take care of your back. That was kind of liberating and also kind of depressing. But at least I wasn't like holding out this great hope that I was going to get a lot better with medical science. A few years after that, when I was in Colorado Springs, one of my doctors said to me, you're pretty active. You do a lot of stuff. And that's not that common for people with mechanical back pain, with bulging discs and that sort of thing. So it looks to me like you are more of a fibromyalgia patient than a mechanical back pain patient. So fibromyalgia is a neurological disease

[11:52]

that takes kind of small pain signals coming from your body and turns them into much more significant pain. And in my case, very disabling pain. There seems to be lots of different levels of fibromyalgia in terms of how bad you have it. I would seem to have a pretty bad case. That was probably 10 years into my disability before anyone mentioned that as a possibility for me. And in my own looking around in research, fibromyalgia has a strong correlation with personal trauma. And at that time in my life, when I developed this condition, I went through a tremendous amount of personal trauma. And it had to do with mental illness in my family. Severe mental illness in my sister, who was four years younger than me, and my brother, who was two years older than me. So they both developed severe mental illness

[12:56]

and one in their 20s and one in their 30s. And have both since passed away from the effects of bipolar disease and schizophrenia. And right in the middle of that happening, my mother had a brain aneurysm and died suddenly. And three months after that happened, I started, after my mom died, I started to have that pain. So there isn't like medical science or substantiate this in terms of what's causing my condition. But I don't really have that great of an explanation in terms of the physics of what's happening in my body. So the neurological explanation and the fibromyalgia makes a little more sense to me. It's kind of the best explanation I have at this point. Also, the medicines that I take, the one that's most important and most effective

[13:57]

is a medicine for my fibromyalgia. It's called a neuropathic pain reliever. And just to describe for you sort of what I live with, when I move around, I feel better. And when I'm stationary, I feel worse. And my sort of tolerances are about a minute for standing still, about 10 minutes for sitting still, and about 20 minutes for lying down still before kind of more, my condition flares up and I start to have more pain. That's on a good day. So those are good tolerances on a good day. I wanna say too, there's a difference between acute pain and discomfort and chronic pain. And usually I'm kind of more in the discomfort zone than in the pain zone.

[14:58]

And for people who have chronic pain sensation. So I went through this when I was, this happened to me when I was 34, started. And I just wanna say a few things about practicing at BCC. I was stuck at home for a while in these first few years. My kids were going to daycare. I couldn't take care of them. I was in a great deal of despair. And I didn't know what my life was gonna be like. Lost my job and my career. And I hadn't been going to the Zen Center a whole lot because I was in graduate school before that and having kids. But somehow Mailey Scott heard that I was not doing well.

[16:02]

And I knew her pretty well at that time. She started to come by my house and visit me once a week. And we practiced together and sat together and had tea and conversation and meditated. So Mailey died in 2002 from cancer. Actually, just shortly after this time that I'm talking about. She had a way of helping me to really see my situation for what it was. And Maya, she was a very no-nonsense, clear-eyed person. And she had these big penetrating eyes that were either, I can't remember if they were blue or brown, and she had these glasses. And one day she looked at me. She was leaving our house, my house, and she said, you know, Clay, I think it might be good if you came to the Zen Center and gave a Monday morning talk about your life.

[17:04]

And I just thought to myself, you are nuts, lady. But she was right, you know? I mean, the thing is, is I was just stuck in my own despair. She saw this as a way for me to break out, I think. She was a very hard person to deny, in my experience. And to determine, so, and I talked about my life. I dragged this big pad I was using then that had this ugly brown sheet on it, and I laid down and I talked to the Sangha for a while. Had some questions, and Mel commented on my embarrassment, which was accurate. But the thing that that helped me do it started to help me see that I could reconnect with the world in a new way, working with chronic pain.

[18:11]

And that was a lot better than staying at home all the time. And it still was a lot better than staying at home all the time. And she asked me basically to like show up and share my suffering. And that helped me a lot. And apparently it helps others when we do that too. So, I started coming back to the Zen Center. And it was tough, I had to take up three spaces when I would lay down, because that's what I would do for most of the period. And when I started going to Sessions, I couldn't walk during Kinhin, I had to walk around the block because walking slowly just flared up my pain. And during retreats, which were a bigger challenge, I would take whole periods and just walk because walking and exercise helps me feel better. Sometime during this time, Alan said to me,

[19:15]

Clay, just tell us what you need, and we can work with you. But if you don't tell us what you need, we don't know. And this has been a really important lesson for me in my life. Working with pain and working with all kinds of situations that if I don't, other people won't know, and other people don't know what I need. I say, Alan, this has been the other lesson that you've taught me has been to just be direct, and go to the source of the problem or the issue and just talk directly to people. And that's been a huge help for me. I wanted to say a couple of words about Sojin. Earlier in other conversations, I've shared about how we walked in the hills together,

[20:19]

because I couldn't do interviews in the Dokusan Hut, there wasn't enough room for me to lay down. So Mel at one point said, why don't we go for a walk? You like to walk, right? And he liked to walk then because he was trying to lose weight. So we walked in the hills with Doug Greiner a lot in those days, and I just felt so privileged because these were like two of my mentors who had studied with Suzuki Roshi, and they were inviting me to go for a walk with them. That was just wonderful. But you know, Mel, he was demonstrating to me how to be flexible and how to be innovative and how to like, take your life for what it is, and then if you have to change the circumstances to work with that. He just said, you know, he taught me that my desire to practice was the most important thing, and I could figure out a way to do that, you know?

[21:19]

Didn't have to sit upright in the Zendo if I couldn't do that. We'd work out other ways to go. The thing I wanna say mainly about Mel since he's passed away, I just had this question, and that is that he used to see me in a whiff or I think. He saw my light and, he saw my humanity and my love of practice and my dharma, and the question that I've just had is, you know, he's not here anymore, so can I see that in my life and my practice? Can I see my light, and can I see my gifts? Even though, you know, I had all these problems,

[22:30]

he just wasn't that concerned with a lot of the things that seemed to worry me. Like, making a good impression on, being successful, having a career. He just seemed to trust me for who I was, and he was okay with that, and that's kind of my question is, can I trust myself just for who I am? That was enough for him, you know? And that was what I cherished about him. So I think I will stop there, and I try to leave some time for questions or comments,

[23:39]

and thank you for your time. Clay, thank you so much for a beautiful talk and compelling questions. It's so nice to have you back. So we can use our usual digital method for raising hands through the participants box or the reactions box. We have a number of people who've already raised their hands. I will call on you. Please try to be concise, because unfortunately we don't have a lot of time. Ross, would you like to unmute yourself, please? Thank you, Karen. Hey, Clay. Thank you so much for bringing up the point of recognizing the light in ourself with Sojourn's passing. I've been thinking about that a lot myself,

[24:41]

and whenever he was around, I always felt him as a mirror, and that he's not around, I'm still seeing him, and I'm still getting validated when I remember those meetings that we had, and I really hope that you can tap into that energy and feel. My question is, you're leading Dogen groups, and I'm wondering how you got curious to study that and how that class study is going for you. Thank you. You know, it was just going back to my roots, and I'm realizing that I loved Suzuki Roshi, and I wanted to learn more about Dogen, and there were some people here who also wanted to do that. I haven't led a Dogen group specifically in a little while. Currently, I'm leading a Koan group with a few students. So that kind of, I'm thinking that I would like

[25:42]

to do another one in the future, because I get a lot out of it, and there's some here. Thank you. Good day to you. Thank you. Chris Evans, would you please unmute yourself and speak? Thank you, thank you for your talk. For your Koan, is it more like what we're familiar with under guidance from Sojin and more of a discursive, or is it more like Rinzai Zen, where it's sort of a riddle? And then if there's time for a second question, do you see any differentiation or distinction between Dogen and his teacher, Rujing, and their essential teachings, please? Thank you. You're welcome.

[26:43]

So our Koan study is sort of both a conversation and an open discussion, and it's also kind of more one-on-one intense work with a teacher, in which you try to express in the ways you can your understanding of what the Koan means for you in your life. And in terms of Rujing and Dogen, I'm afraid I don't know enough about that to answer that question. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Before I call on Sue Osher, I just wanna mention that Clay's email is in the chat box, if you would like to follow up with him after this. So Sue Osher, would you like to unmute, please? Thank you, Karen. And Clay, thank you so much for your talk. You are a part of us.

[27:48]

I feel connected to you. I'm always glad when you show up. And I was looking at your mat that was under the tan for years, and your mat was my connection to you for a lot of years after you moved to Colorado Springs. So thank you very much for your talk. Thank you, Sue. It's been great practicing with you all these time, years, and other people have told me the mat has reminded them of me as well. So I'm glad I've had a long life. And I think that as far as your light, that's what I think Sangha and friends are for, to remind us that our light is shining when we forget it. Thank you. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you.

[28:49]

And now our final question. Michael Shangaris, would you like to unmute, please, and ask a question? Gassho Clay, thank you for all your practice. And it's wonderful to be in contact with the heart, mind, space that you create. It's life in my morning in many ways. Koan practice is really a profound way to engage with the world. How has Koan study and embracing pain as a Koan played out in your life? Oh, well, you know, Mel is always, or Sojin, has always said, you know, that it's the Koan of everyday life. What is your everyday life? How do we find meaning in our everyday life, our everyday activities? And I would say that pain, for me,

[29:56]

has more fallen into that category of Koan work, like how do I just work with my life today, right now, right here, for what it is. It's played into lots of the Koans that I've worked with in the curriculum. But I think the Koan curriculum, in a sense, kind of, it takes you beyond that as well. It takes you like beyond your personal circumstances, as well as sometimes making your personal circumstances become vividly alive. So it can do both. And, yeah, sometimes I just have to forget about it, and other times I have to go into it more. Thank you for the question. That sounds like a good Koan right there. And was any Koans that popped to mind

[30:56]

that you worked with that had pain that came up related to them? I was gonna say all of them, but I'm not sure about that. If you'd like to talk some more about it, I'd be happy to do that by phone or by email.

[31:12]

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