June 4, 2021 • 49 mins
Grace Schireson is president of Shogaku Zen and received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. She founded two practice centers and a retreat center under the Central Valley Zen Foundation.
In this episode, Eric and Grace discuss her book, Naked in the Zendo: Stories of Uptight Zen, Wild-Ass Zen, and Enlightenment Wherever You Are
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In This Interview, Grace Schireson and I Discuss Practical Zen and …
- Her book, Naked in the Zendo: Stories of Uptight Zen, Wild-Ass Zen, and Enlightenment Wherever You Are
- How we need to recognize our ego
- The importance of seeing our existence within the large space of awareness
- “WITBOW” (Wishing It To Be Otherwise) is a formula for suffering
- The essential koan “When nothing will do, what will you do?
- Awareness is recognizing your true self and your connection to the entire universe
- Mindlessness is just pure awareness and no ownership
- The 4 stages of developing awareness
- The important lesson of making mistakes often and publicly
Grace Schireson Links:
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Grace Schireson on Practical Zen, you might also enjoy these other episodes:
Paths of Spiritual Awakening with Henry Shukman
Spiritual Growth with Normal Fischer
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How we look for that space around situations. The possibility
that it could be different is a very important way
of turning away from whatever we're hung up with into
the possibility of change. Welcome to the one you feed
(00:23):
Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
you are what you think ring true, and yet for
many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
(00:45):
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
(01:21):
episode is Grace Shearson, president of the show, gaku Zen
Institute and a clinical psychologist. Grace received her doctorate in
clinical psychology at the Right Institute in Berkeley, California, and
founded to practice centers and a retreat center under the
Central Valley End Foundation. Today, Grace and Eric discussed her
book Naked in the Zendo Stories of uptight Zen, Wild
(01:44):
ass Zen and Enlightenment Wherever you are. Hi, Grace, welcome
to the show. Well, thank you, thank you for having me.
It is a real pleasure to have you on. We're
going to be discussing your book, which is called Naked
in the Zendo Stories of uptight Zen, Wild ass Zen,
and Enlightenment Wherever you Are. But before we do that,
(02:05):
we're going to start, like we always do, with a parable.
In the parable, there's a grandmother who's talking with her
granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
(02:26):
granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second.
She looks up at her grandmother and she said, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. I think the most important
part of that parable is feeling or seeing or being
(02:48):
in touch with what actually is going on in your mind.
My teacher in Japan used to say, what's the most
important thing. It's watching your mind or and or the
emotions in your body. So, for example, anger can be
very exciting in your body, and if you don't recognize
(03:09):
that wolf for one that needs to calm down a bit,
then it's impossible not to feed it because you need
to know it when it arises. So for me, the
most important step in knowing which wolf to feed is
knowing yourself and being honest with yourself and watching your
own mind. That's a great way to start. You've got
(03:31):
a bunch of lines in this book that I thought
were so great, But the one where I wanted to
start was you say that exposing the egos cover up
is the task of spiritual practice. Say a little bit
more about that, right, So the book Naked in the
Zendo really isn't so much about taking off your clothes,
although we do have one example of that in a
(03:52):
chapter accidental pants falling off in the zendo, which made
me think about it. But one of the things things
that we notice as we're watching these wolves. Is that
we want to get good at doing meditation. We want
to be good at practice. We want to be the
(04:13):
best one in this endo. Actually, and if that's a wolf,
we need to watch because it has its disguises and
it could look like sitting in a perfect posture or
learning the chance perfectly correcting other people. But really it's
about the ego, and we need to be able to
(04:35):
use practice to see even how the ego gets in
there to steal our spiritual practice. Yeah, it is astounding
the way it shows up everywhere, isn't it. And and
you talk a lot about that in the book, and
I really appreciated that, about how much we are trying
to do it right. You make a nice job of
showing this because I think that trying to do it
(04:56):
right comes from two motivations, right, there is a genuine
motivation sation of like, my spiritual practice matters, the world matters.
I want to show up and I want to contribute
the best I can. And then there's the ego side
of it. I want to be seen as being good.
I want to be seen as doing it right right. Yes,
(05:18):
there are those two sides to most everything we do,
Like the two wolves you speak of. And when people
ask me, for example, when they're getting ready to give
us one of their first spiritual talks in this and
a away seeking mind talk, they asked me, you know
what they should say or how should it be? And
I say, be helpful, don't be good at it. Do
(05:40):
something that's helpful to other people. Give them something that
will help them. But if you try to be good
at it, that's what's going to show up your selfishness.
That's really good advice. There's another line that you use
where you're also talking about spiritual practice. You say, spiritual practice, however,
it develops vides ways to see ourselves in a larger context. Right. So,
(06:06):
one of the things I realized, because I'm tall and
because I have a lot to say, is that I
can be rather dominant in a situation. And at some
point when I was practicing, I realized, wait a minute,
I am just a vegetable in this soup that's offering
some flavoring. I don't want to overwhelm it. How can
(06:29):
I keep practicing to be that vegetable in the soup
and be aware of being in the soup of all
these people and be useful and not stand out as outstanding. Right,
This idea of seeing ourselves in a larger context is
really so important. It's this ability to take some perspective
(06:51):
that is bigger than our own. I've got a program
I teach called spiritual habits, and we talk about that
in this we talk about you know, perspective, and the
idea is that the bigger our perspective is generally the better. Yes,
Because in that perspective, if we can only see ourselves
(07:13):
and not the surrounding environment that we're in, we are
stuck with ourselves in a particular way. There's no room
to turn, so to speak. So for example, if we
say pride is arising, there's a context around which this emotion,
this negative feature is arising. But if we say I
(07:37):
am proud, that takes up the whole context, and we
don't see the movement that we are within awareness and
something is arising within that awareness, but it isn't me.
I am the awareness, I am the context. And these
things arrise and they fall away. But if we keep
(08:00):
a sizing I am proud or I am smart, rather
than my pride is arising, there's no room for it
to move. We're only reinforcing these feelings of pride. Yeah.
I like the way of thinking of that as that
bigger perspective gives us room to move, to turn around,
(08:20):
to look to see it from different angles. You've got
a balloon that's filling up the entire box. You can't.
I don't know why it chose a balloon in a box,
but well, it's not you. Whatever it is, it's not you.
It's a balloon in a box and it's filling it up.
And that's what we need to see. So it's really
(08:42):
important to see our existence within this large space of awareness.
And this is something that Joco Beck emphasized in her
teaching a bigger container. Otherwise our ego just keeps growing
to fill that space like the balloon. Yeah, you mentioned
that teaching from her, and you also mentioned one of
(09:05):
my favorite sort of spiritual analogies ever, which is this
idea of you know, if we take a tablespoon of
salt and we drop it in this little eight ounce
glass of water I have, it's gonna taste pretty bad.
But if we dropped that same tablespoon of salt in
a gallon of water, well, okay, it's not gonna be great,
but okay, if I dump it in a gallon drum,
(09:28):
I'm not going to taste it, you know. And it's
that idea of the same amount of pain, the same
amount of salt, the same amount of problem. If it's
in a bigger container, doesn't feel the same way, doesn't
taste the same way. Right. You know. There's a toy
that I used to get in Chinatown, and you would
(09:49):
put your finger in a woven tube, one finger in
each end, and if you pulled it, it would become
tighter and tighter. And it's like that that as we
pull ole and struggle with whatever is on our minds,
it becomes tighter, and if we relax, it's easy to
(10:09):
remove it from the fingers, you know, it becomes looser,
and we want that spaciousness, that looseness so we can
actually see we don't have to do this right right.
That always reminds me of the story of I've never
verified if this is true, but sooner or later somebody
like that is not true. But the way that they
(10:30):
used to capture monkeys, they would put sweets inside a
coconut and the monkey would put his hand in and
then he would grab the sweets and once he made
that fist. He couldn't get his fist back out, you know.
And if the monkey just let go, the hand comes out.
You know, the same thing with those Chinese finger traps. Yes, yes,
both of those are lessons in how we make ourselves
(10:53):
miserable by grabbing onto something and insisting that has to
be this way. How we look for that space around situations.
The possibility that it could be different, that there's something
else is a very important way of turning away from
whatever we're hung up with into the possibility of change. Yeah,
(11:16):
you have a phrase that you use in the book
that is really good and that you say is really
the root cause of suffering or a you know, one
of the big root causes of suffering, which is wishing
it to be otherwise or wit bow. We could probably
spend the rest of the episode on with Bow and
dealing with it, but share a little bit more about
(11:37):
what that is, and then let's maybe talk about some
strategies for working with it. Right. So, when something happens,
we wanted to come out the way we wanted to
come out, and unfortunately the universe doesn't work that way.
Sometimes it comes out the way we wanted to, and
sometimes it doesn't. But if we set our mind when
(11:57):
something happens on this I didn't know I wanted the
other thing. I wanted it to be this way. If
we set our mind on that, it is a formula
for suffering. Because I often would say to my students, now,
let's examine this situation. Is your wish true or is
(12:17):
reality true? And reality always trumps whatever it is you want,
So we have to go with reality and not wish
it to be another way. First, what way is it?
And let's try to take that in. That doesn't mean
we are going to try to change it, but we
need to start there. Yeah, this, I think is such
(12:38):
a profound teaching. We can all recognize this fairly intellectually
that like, okay, well, yeah, it's me resisting the way
things are that causes me to suffer. Right, it's sort
of a rephrasing of the second Noble Truth in some ways.
And yet boy, it's so wired into us, and it's
(13:00):
really easy to say, well, okay, I get it intellectually
until I'm not getting what I really want, even in
some cases what I think I need, And so it
isn't fair. Yeah, yeah, it's not right. It's not fair.
It's not. Yeah. So again this is like the two Wolves,
(13:22):
and it's a survival tool, right, I mean it has
to be part of the equipment we have is how
do we survive. We need to get the food and
then it turns out to be it's food that I
find delicious, and then the ego puts it all the
way up. There has to be a special you know,
gluten free da da da da da kind of food
before it's good or vegan food is good. And as
(13:44):
we keep saying this is what I need, there's something
true in it, there's some survival in it, and yet
when the ego gets its hands on it, it becomes
a kind of fixation and I want it the way
I want it, like Burger King will make it your way.
So it's this wishing UH to have it my way,
(14:10):
which comes from initially a need to survive. We have
to get some of what we need, but as we
turn what we need into status, it becomes a kind
of obsessive trait where only certain things will do. So
I'm not saying that being a Vegian is obsessive or
(14:31):
needing to be gluten free. I'm just saying, as we
take survival drives and work with them, and we can
manufacture higher and higher standards for me. I need this
to be the way I wanted to be, and yet
it's the most natural thing in the world. Yes, it
is natural, just like not wanting to be killed walking
(14:53):
across the street. It's natural. You want to survive. And
so how do you recognize the difference between a need
and a want. Let's say we recognize it and we
go Okay, here I am insisting that the world be
the way I want it to be, and it's not,
and I'm suffering because of it, and yet I can't
(15:15):
seem to let go. Well, the first thing to do
is to feel the suffering wherever you are. Feel that first,
so that takes you back to their suffering arising within
this space, rather than I'm grasping for this thing, because
(15:35):
when it's me grasping, that takes up the whole space.
But when we say, oh, they're suffering arising, now we
can feel that there's a part of us that can
recognize suffering, and there's a part of us that is suffering.
But we need to turn to what actually is first
of all, even if we don't like it. And that's
(15:57):
where we encounter our suffering and our grasp being and
are wishing it to be otherwise. Well, I would say
also that that's kind of the first step if we
want to make change in the world. The first step
is recognizing how we're suffering with it. And so what
is a genuine need for justice, for example, and what
(16:19):
is just are having a tantrum about things the way
they are right? And I think this gets more complicated.
It's easier to see through when we go, oh, that's
just me wanting another set of golf clubs. I don't
play golf. I don't know where these analogies are coming from.
It's just me one in another set of golf clubs,
versus saying something like, oh, I want to see justice done.
(16:42):
You know, you and I were talking about the trial
that was happening just before we came on right now, Yes,
the verdict. A lot of us have this deep desire
for justice to be done, you know. So it's easier
to It's easier for me to go, Okay, that's just
me being selfish when it's just me wanting the other
thing I want. But this gets harder when we see
(17:04):
something out in the world and yet the principle is
still true, right that me insisting that the world be
the way I think it should be as a cause
of suffering. It's true that the insisting is and that's
where we have to see that our suffering is arising
based on this situation. Just before COVID, my suffering was
(17:26):
for these children who were in these border facilities, and
there was only so much I could do before COVID.
During COVID, I couldn't go there, but I could go there.
I could go there. I could bring my body there
to make a statement, which I did four or five times,
to go to these different facilities and to experience it
(17:48):
and to be making a statement. But I couldn't make
it stop. And so I had to recognize that as
part of the suffering, there was something for me to do,
and unless I wanted to sack faced my life for
this cause, I could not find a way to do more.
It really came to me in terms of social justice
(18:09):
when I was in Spain, and when I was in
Spain was about the time that Trump was elected, and
I was talking to some of the old timers there
about their experience during Franco. It's like, how do you
get through this injustice, and the Spanish man said to me,
you need to survive it. So that took on a
(18:32):
kind of meaning to me that wherever I saw injustice,
I had to make it consistent with my ability to survive.
I couldn't just throw myself at it. I couldn't just
wish it away. But it's like, how do I live
my life and continue to live my life so I
can stand up for this injustice? Hm? Hm hm. This
(19:18):
reminds me of another part of your book that I loved.
And you're quoting a Japanese philosopher and Buddhist scholar whose
name I'm not going to be able to pronounce. He's Amatsu, alright,
I did, who said there is one essential coon in
human life. When nothing will do, what will you do? Right? So,
(19:41):
we spent a lot of time in the philosophy and
the history of Buddhism, but I think this statement encapsulates
the life struggle we have, which is, when we can
make a decision and when we can affect things, that's
not so hard. Let's just move on and let's not
(20:03):
feed the wrong wolf. However, when we don't know what
to do, then we're stuck, and that's when we have
to spend some time allowing our awareness to grow in
a way until it guides us into the direction we
need to be in. Yeah, I just love that phrase
that you know, when nothing will do, what will you do?
(20:24):
That really is a great it's a great coon. Yeah,
it is. It is he as he said, the essential coon.
It's like all coons come from this experience of I
don't know what to do, I don't know how to
answer this, and I just have to go to a
deep place. And that was very interesting experience in Japan
(20:47):
when I did co on practice in Japan, because you
had to fail, and of course that wasn't very good.
I'm used to being a good student, a good sense
to and in order to do can work, you have
to go in and face the teacher and not know
and fail over and over again. Now, some of the
(21:09):
time I was there was see the teacher five or
more times a day with what I had, and I
remember one time going to him and I was really tired.
I mean, your retreat schedule is something like three in
the morning till ten at night, and you're doing your
meditation and your co on there, so you're tired and
you're cold, and you're hungry and you don't have any
(21:30):
of your comforts, and so how do you keep working
on the nothing nothing will do? What do I do now?
So I I sat waiting to go see the teacher
and have my interview, and I had nothing. And I
came in and I thought to myself, you know, I
am a bad sotos And student. And that was my thought.
(21:54):
It's like Rin's eyes where you do the cod So
I thought to myself, I am a bad soto Zen student.
And I went into him and I just bowed. And
he looked at me as if there was a bad
smell in the room, and he said, is that your answer?
And he and I said yes. He said no good?
(22:18):
And I was right, No good at this? Good moving
right along and being able to sustain oneself and not
the self of I'm good at this, but be able
to continue to go into the depth of when nothing
will do? What will I do? To continue with that?
It takes something. And I think that was the essential
(22:41):
of the training that I had in Japan, was no,
you don't just bow, you don't give up. You come
up with an answer, even though it might not be
the right one. Do it. So that was very powerful
for me. My teacher is slightly more diplomatic. His usual
thing is I'll say I think you need to sit
(23:02):
with that some more, which is a nice way of
saying Nope, that's not it. You did not get it right.
But there are many ways to say no, that's not it.
And in Japan that kind of slap no good or
just ringing the bell is like putting the wall there
and you have to throw yourself against it. So it
(23:23):
requires a different kind of energy. And I tried doing
con practice with some of my students here in the West,
and they became very anxious. And I realized that the
kind of environment that I had been in in Japan
was so intense I really didn't have any energy left
(23:46):
over to think or be anxious, and that I just
had to use everything I had to survive and come
up with an answer. So it's a lot harder to
translate the coon practice to our Western style aisle for
the teachers. But um, your teacher was trained most likely
in the West. Definitely was trained in the West. I
(24:07):
think he may have spent a little time in Japan.
But yet I've worked with another Zen teacher who is
a little more perfunctory give the answer, and he just
he just rings the bell, like Nope, that's not it.
So since I didn't have that experience, it was a
little hard for me to translate it for my own students.
And I also recognized in the West, the kind of
(24:30):
environment I was providing at my Zen center was comforting,
even though it was spare, and that left a lot
of room for people to think and to become anxious.
So it was a different environment, and so I actually
stopped teaching cons. My my teacher in Japan wanted me
(24:53):
to teach the cons that I had practiced with him,
but I didn't find a way to do it. So
let's talk a little bit about awareness. You talk a
lot about awareness throughout the book, and I want to
start by having you to share a little bit about
(25:15):
two aspects of awareness, or maybe let me back up
from that and allow you to sort of just say
a little bit about when you're using the word awareness,
what do you mean. Actually? For me, awareness is the
true self, and so I don't remember what aspects I
(25:35):
described of it, other than you know, there's an aspect
of light, there's an aspect of penetration. But for example,
I was just talking to some women in a zen
group I teach now, and I said, you can see
yourself as the entire universe. And one woman said, up,
(25:57):
I don't see that. I don't get there. And I said,
but you can with your mind reach out to see
the entire limits as far as your mind will go
of the universe. And if you recognize that's your breath
is coming from there, the furthest reaches of the universe,
(26:20):
and you are made up of this breath, then you
are the entire universe. And your awareness of it is
what really helps you to see that. So the awareness
is your connection to the entire universe. Yeah, the two
aspects that you're talking about, you say that there is
(26:41):
the essence of the mind and the contents of the mind.
And I love this basic idea because usually when we're
talking about mindfulness, we're talking about being present, and the
place that we usually start is with what is around
right like present of what present to a sound, oh,
(27:02):
present to a site. We see the contents of our minds,
and I love the way you describe that that this
essence is when we shift from the contents of the
mind is into what it is that seeing the contents.
Would that be a way of saying it? Yeah, absolutely,
what I said. What I said, So, yeah, much of
(27:25):
mindfulness is this kind of awareness moment to moment. Now
I'm taking a bite of food. This is the way
they eat in a mindful root treat. Right, I'm taking
a bite now, I'm chewing it this many times. But
what is it that's aware? What is it that is
aware not only of what's in your mouth and you're chewing,
(27:45):
but of some other connections to the universe. What is
it that is aware? And I really experience awareness as
something that's not just part of the brain. It is,
as I was describing, part of the entire universe. So
awareness exists. That's the essence of awareness exists both inside
(28:11):
and outside, and in a certain way, the mind is
an antenna for this awareness, and then the antenna translates
this information and we see it as content. But something
is watching, and that's something. It's very interesting. People to
(28:31):
usually discover that something the first time they're meditating. All
of a sudden, it's not just that they're having thoughts,
it's that they're aware of having thoughts. So you don't
have two brains, so you have only one mind, and
the mind has this quality of observing itself. The essence
(28:53):
of mind can see and the contents are what's what
it's seeing. So all fentimes, I think when describing mindfulness,
we don't go far enough into the other aspect, which
is mindlessness, an essence of awareness without content mindlessness. Say
(29:13):
more about that last part mindlessness, Well, mindlessness is I
think one of the aspects of a Sobodhia experience or
an enlightenment experience, where there's no ownership, there's just pure
awareness and we've lost that identification with the content of
who we are, which we're usually watching and it can
(29:36):
be rather brief, but it's what happens if we're very
lucky with a meditation experience. All of a sudden, we're
just aware and we're not stuck with this particular vision
of who we are or what we're experiencing. You talked
(30:24):
about four stages in developing awareness, discovery, amplification, circulating awareness,
and then finally awareness arising spontaneously. So maybe we could
walk through each of those four stages. So the first
one is what I described for sitting down to meditate.
(30:48):
We never knew that there was a quality of the
mind that wasn't thinking. We thought thinking was our entire mind,
And all of a sudden we sit down to meditate
and we're watching the thoughts arising. It's like, whoa, there's
something that is aware of the content of the thoughts.
(31:08):
And then the amplification is how we practice, whether it
be yoga, taigi or zazen, how do we practice the
exercise of relating to awareness, you know, focusing on the
breath for example. And then um in the next stage
(31:28):
in circulation is about how do we bring it into
our activities. So it's not just I'm sitting here and
I'm aware of being aware, but as I'm moving through
my life, my awareness is actually active. I remember when
(31:50):
I used to cook at Berkeley's and Center. I was
a head cooked for a while, and all of a sudden,
my body would turn around and I would see somebody
about to put it's soy sauce in the cole slaw.
It's like, no, you don't put soy sauce in the
cole slaw. But something in my awareness warned me because
that was my job. Now we turn around and we
(32:11):
look and see, oh, what is he doing over there?
He's pretty soy sauce in the coal slice. Thought it
was a good idea, so it wasn't in the recipe anyway.
That is how we notice. Sometimes I would talk to
my students about when you're walking outside, take the position
of the gravel that your foot is on, so that
(32:33):
you're not just hearing the sound of your foot on
the gravel, but the gravel itself is part of your awareness.
And so that's a way of kind of changing position
and circulating that awareness. What you just said there reminds
me of Coen practice so much. Taking that different position, yes,
(32:55):
letting go of thinking it through. So then, obviously or
maybe not so obvious. Obvious to me anyway, is that
when awareness is spontaneously arising in a certain way. When
I was trying to use awareness in my work of cooking,
it's spontaneously arose to save the coal slaw from the
soy sauce. It just came up and my body turned,
(33:20):
you know, I remember it very vividly. And then I
was standing in the opposite direction, and all of a sudden,
my body turned and I saw this horrible possibility. You're
very opposed to soy sauce in the cole slaw. I
have my opinions, yes, but people loved my cole slaw.
So one of the things about cole slaws it has
(33:41):
to be fresh. It has to have a fresh flavor.
So it's garlic, mayonnaise and mustard and whatever. So you
need to bounce it, that's all. And then all those flavors,
especially during seschine, are just very vibrant. That soy sauce
not so much. This gentleman was was wishing it to
be otherwise. Well he was. He was a cook helper
(34:06):
who generally, I guess you soy sauce and his food
and thought it was a good addition. But anyway, I
was famous for my cole slaw, so I must say
I have a big ego attachment there as well. So
I guess we've sort of stumbled into stories about cooks.
And the title of the book, Naked in the Zendo,
(34:27):
comes from a story that occurred to a cook. I
don't know if it was a cook at the Berkeley's
and Center. I think it was right, Yeah, you want
to share that story, Well, yes, then this was a
great way to circulate awareness. You might think you were
the best cook in the world, and your coal slaw
was the best coal slaw. But then what happened when
you tried to serve the food when you had the
(34:48):
position of being a server in this endo, and you
had to be present for each person, So each job
required a different kind of awareness. And in that particular case,
I was a server assigned to take the bowls that
had come from the kitchen and offer them and scoop
(35:08):
or use tongs to serve the food. And as I
was standing there in the back of the zendo, the
room where we were all meditating, and there must have
been at least fifty people in there, the cook came in.
And in Berkeley, the cook would make bows before the
food was served, so the food would be delivered, and
then the cook would step in make his bows, as
(35:31):
this is my offering to the community. And this cook,
when he made his third bow, his pants fell off,
and for too much to his credit, he was wearing underwear,
because some things can go by the bye during a
long retreat, but he hadn't managed to get underwear on
that day, and so his pants fell off. And I
(35:53):
was standing very close to him, watching, and so I
said to myself, I didn't see that that didn't happen
wishing it to be otherwise because I had to serve
the food and I didn't want to destroy the meal ceremony. However,
when I looked up at my teacher, so John mel Wieman,
(36:14):
he was laughing hysterically. So then I couldn't hold it
back because so Joan was across the room from the
man whose George, whose pants fell off, so he couldn't help.
But see in anyway, that's his job is to watch
all of us. So then I started laughing as I'm
carrying the bulls, and I laughed so hard everything is
(36:36):
running down my face, my nose, my eyes. But at
some point during this I noticed that George had left
the zendo. I mean, it's kind of embarrassing, so he
didn't stay for the meal. He went outside. And so
when it was time for me to take the bulls
back after I finished my job of serving, I saw
(36:57):
George sitting on a bench and I said, George, how
was that for you? And what happened? And he said, well,
my pants were loose, so I took a big breath
so that my belly filled out my pants and they
were on snugly. But when I bowed the last time,
I exhaled, so that left room from my pants to
(37:21):
fall off. But I said, well, how did it feel?
He said, well, I really wanted to go up to
our teacher and say, master, I have been enlightened. And
I realized, yes, of course you're in line. You just
did one of the most embarrassing things you could do
in a group of people, and you lived through it.
And that's when I began to understand the notion of
(37:46):
how much we try to look good in doing this practice,
and how important it is to make mistakes in front
of everyone. So then this became a teaching that I
had for my own students, which is make your mistakes
often and publicly, and don't let your need to be
(38:07):
good at this constrain your freedom. Your freedom to make
mistakes and understand you just continue. Your life continues, and
your ego isn't growing because you just got it slapped
a little bit. So I think it's a very important
(38:28):
practice for those of us doing a spiritual practice in
a community, is we automatically compete to be good at
it and to get it right. And so there's a
point where that crosses over into ego versus just I
really want to learn how to practice as a way
of amplifying my awareness. Yeah, yeah, that's a funny story.
(38:50):
Yeah it is. As I was reading the story, I
was waiting to hear about how mortified George was and
what a lovely man. He was. A lovely man in fact,
be for I included this story in the book. He
had deceased, and I contacted his widow to make sure
it was okay with her to include this story in
(39:11):
the book. Because he was such a sweet person and
a quiet person, so this wisdom was not something we
all were exposed to be by his blathering about it.
He just sat there quietly understanding that his ego had
just been exposed and he had dropped it with his pants.
(39:31):
So this was a form of enligenment. Let's have you
tell another story for us here, and I'm going to
let you pick the story. But you wrote a book
that really was to expose we're talking about exposing, to
expose the stories of Zen women and Buddhism, for all
its wonderful things, is a very patriarchal culture and Zen
(39:55):
is no different, better, worse, I don't know, than other
aspects of Buddhism. But wrote a book that was really
about bringing out some of the wonderful stories of some
of the women throughout Zen who have played an important
role in the tradition. And so I was wondering if
you would tell us one of their stories. Yes, I will,
because there was one woman in particular who's a favorite
(40:16):
among Zen students now that we've gotten her story out.
And her name was Mean Song, that was her practice name,
and she was practicing at a temple called ching Shan.
And Ching Shan actually is in the ancestral lineage of Tofukuji,
where I ended up practicing. So this when I uncovered
(40:38):
her story through one of the Buddhist scholars, I didn't
know I was going to be affected by her behavior
at Ching Shan. So she was one of the senior
students of a teacher named Dohue, and at that time
it was common for women to be excluded from monasteries,
(40:58):
and so the headmonk was very very upset with dot Way,
his teacher, for allowing this woman to be in the
monastery with the monks. And there's all kinds of reasons.
He wasn't out of the question because the teacher who
was dot Way's teacher actually had relationships with some of
(41:20):
his women's students. So this was quite some time ago. Anyway,
the monk who was upset one noon, he was upset
by having a woman in the monastery, so to Way said,
why don't you go talk to her rather than complain
to me, go complain to her. So this senior monk
went to her, and she was in her quarters, her
(41:43):
little retreat room and chang shan, and she asked him
if it was to be a dharma interview or a
personal interview. So was this going to be about Buddhist
practice or was it going to be um something between
the two of them, And he said it was going
to be an interview about Buddhism, a darm interview. So
(42:04):
she said, well, because it's a darm interview, I'm going
to send my attendance away my helpers, and you send
yours away, and we'll just face each other one to one.
And so when he entered her room, he found ments
On naked and spread eagle on her bed, and he said,
what kind of a place is this probably pointing to
(42:27):
her genitals with great composure, and mounts On replied, this
is the place where all Buddhas and ancestors enter the world.
Possibly contemplating his own sexual advances. One on asked, and
may I enter it or not? And she said, very calmly,
horses cross, asses do not. This is a very famous
(42:51):
phrase from another earlier teacher, which she turned around and
used on her own. This was Joe Sho's response when
someone came to him and said, I've heard about this
great bridge of Joshua, but all I see is an
old long bridge, and josh said, horses cross and asses crossed.
So she used Joshu's famous zen expression for her own purpose.
(43:14):
And then when she said horses crossed, but asses do not,
she closed her legs and turned her backside to him
and said this interview is over. And he left and
he went to the teacher to tell the teacher what
had happened, and the teacher said, you can't say that
she lacks wisdom. So it was a very awakened teacher.
(43:41):
But what really struck me, as I had studied this
story for years before I practiced in Japan, was that
actually my teacher was a descendant of Dohua. So the
temple I was in was part of that lineage Tofukuji
in Japan. In fact, it was built on the plans
(44:03):
of ching Shan in China. And when Maya Song stayed
at ching Shan in China, she stayed in the abbots quarters,
some section of the temple that was a little restricted,
so the monks didn't come and go all the time,
so she had some privacy. And when I stayed at Tofukuji,
(44:26):
I stayed in the abbots quarters, so I could see
the direct connection to her insisting that she had a
place there to my being able to practice in a
male monastery in Japan because of what she had done historically.
And this was a very profound experience for me to
(44:51):
recognize that what I was doing by being in Japan
would possibly open doors for other women. And this was
very important. That what we do for each other to
conserve the practice and make it available for others is
very important. And we do that with our own courage,
(45:12):
in our own heart, and our own intent practice. That's
a great story. So speaking of what we do for
others and carrying this practice forward, tell me a little
bit about the Shugaku zen Institute that you have founded.
Suzuki Roshi's name was Shogaku shun Reuse Suzuki, so Shogaku
(45:32):
is auspicious peak. I think I can't remember suming was
something about the dragon. So what bothered me and why
I started at Shogakuzen Institute was that Zen students might
spend twenty or thirty or more years practicing in a
Zen monastery, and sometimes on Americans in temple would say, okay,
(45:54):
well now it's time for you to go, and they
had no skills. I know one story of a young
man who later went back to school and was one
of our graduates of Shogakuzan Institute, who start out by
refinishing floors. And while certainly using awareness to do tasks
is an important part of Zen, all those hours of
(46:16):
meditation which could be used to listen to with a
full heart, to listen to other people and to counsel
them and to be a chaplain for example, that's the
kind of work that would also be beneficial. So in
Shogakuzen Institute, we offer with as little cost as possible
(46:37):
because we do things online and don't have a brick
and mortar institute to support, and we pay the teachers
according to how many students come into the class. We
are offering classes foreign Masters of Divinity, so it's a
graduate degree and with that and with other training, zen
students can become chaplains or spiritual advisors, something that makes
(47:02):
a direct use of the awareness and attention that they've
developed during their practice of exam. So you're basically trying
to give them some sort of credit for all the
work they've done on meditating. Yes, so what we can
do for a certain number of units is most universities
(47:22):
can is say, tell us what classes you've had, what
practice periods you've gone to. Let the teacher, who we
know is an authorized in teachers sign off on that class,
and we can give you some credit for that, some
credit for your hours of meditation. And you need to
take the classes you know in Buddhist history and philosophy
(47:43):
and so on. But we're also trying to make the classes,
for example, of Buddhist history, like the history of races
in Buddhism. How has Buddhist practice been discriminatory? Right now,
we're offering a course in psychological for stay, which we
think people are going to need to use. We've all
(48:04):
been traumatized by this pandemic, So how can we help people?
If people don't have time to go into therapy, how
can we be helpful to people. So these are the
kinds of skills that we're trying to develop so people
can use the time they've spent meditating to help in
the world. Wonderful, Well, Grace, Thank you so much for
(48:26):
taking the time to come on the show. It has
been a real pleasure to chat with you, and I
really appreciate everything you've shared with this school of links
in the show notes to your website and to your
books and other ways that people can find you. Terrific.
Thank you for having me, and it's been great to
talk to you. I'm going to see someone who has
read my book and actually understood some things that I've forgotten.
(48:47):
I did read it and I loved it. Thank you
so much. Okay, bye bye. M If what you just
(49:08):
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How we look for that space around situations. The possibility
that it could be different is a very important way
of turning away from whatever we're hung up with into
the possibility of change. Welcome to the one you feed
(00:23):
Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
you are what you think ring true, and yet for
many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
(00:45):
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
(01:21):
episode is Grace Shearson, president of the show, gaku Zen
Institute and a clinical psychologist. Grace received her doctorate in
clinical psychology at the Right Institute in Berkeley, California, and
founded to practice centers and a retreat center under the
Central Valley End Foundation. Today, Grace and Eric discussed her
book Naked in the Zendo Stories of uptight Zen, Wild
(01:44):
ass Zen and Enlightenment Wherever you are. Hi, Grace, welcome
to the show. Well, thank you, thank you for having me.
It is a real pleasure to have you on. We're
going to be discussing your book, which is called Naked
in the Zendo Stories of uptight Zen, Wild ass Zen,
and Enlightenment Wherever you Are. But before we do that,
(02:05):
we're going to start, like we always do, with a parable.
In the parable, there's a grandmother who's talking with her
granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
(02:26):
granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second.
She looks up at her grandmother and she said, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. I think the most important
part of that parable is feeling or seeing or being
(02:48):
in touch with what actually is going on in your mind.
My teacher in Japan used to say, what's the most
important thing. It's watching your mind or and or the
emotions in your body. So, for example, anger can be
very exciting in your body, and if you don't recognize
(03:09):
that wolf for one that needs to calm down a bit,
then it's impossible not to feed it because you need
to know it when it arises. So for me, the
most important step in knowing which wolf to feed is
knowing yourself and being honest with yourself and watching your
own mind. That's a great way to start. You've got
(03:31):
a bunch of lines in this book that I thought
were so great, But the one where I wanted to
start was you say that exposing the egos cover up
is the task of spiritual practice. Say a little bit
more about that, right, So the book Naked in the
Zendo really isn't so much about taking off your clothes,
although we do have one example of that in a
(03:52):
chapter accidental pants falling off in the zendo, which made
me think about it. But one of the things things
that we notice as we're watching these wolves. Is that
we want to get good at doing meditation. We want
to be good at practice. We want to be the
(04:13):
best one in this endo. Actually, and if that's a wolf,
we need to watch because it has its disguises and
it could look like sitting in a perfect posture or
learning the chance perfectly correcting other people. But really it's
about the ego, and we need to be able to
(04:35):
use practice to see even how the ego gets in
there to steal our spiritual practice. Yeah, it is astounding
the way it shows up everywhere, isn't it. And and
you talk a lot about that in the book, and
I really appreciated that, about how much we are trying
to do it right. You make a nice job of
showing this because I think that trying to do it
(04:56):
right comes from two motivations, right, there is a genuine
motivation sation of like, my spiritual practice matters, the world matters.
I want to show up and I want to contribute
the best I can. And then there's the ego side
of it. I want to be seen as being good.
I want to be seen as doing it right right. Yes,
(05:18):
there are those two sides to most everything we do,
Like the two wolves you speak of. And when people
ask me, for example, when they're getting ready to give
us one of their first spiritual talks in this and
a away seeking mind talk, they asked me, you know
what they should say or how should it be? And
I say, be helpful, don't be good at it. Do
(05:40):
something that's helpful to other people. Give them something that
will help them. But if you try to be good
at it, that's what's going to show up your selfishness.
That's really good advice. There's another line that you use
where you're also talking about spiritual practice. You say, spiritual practice, however,
it develops vides ways to see ourselves in a larger context. Right. So,
(06:06):
one of the things I realized, because I'm tall and
because I have a lot to say, is that I
can be rather dominant in a situation. And at some
point when I was practicing, I realized, wait a minute,
I am just a vegetable in this soup that's offering
some flavoring. I don't want to overwhelm it. How can
(06:29):
I keep practicing to be that vegetable in the soup
and be aware of being in the soup of all
these people and be useful and not stand out as outstanding. Right,
This idea of seeing ourselves in a larger context is
really so important. It's this ability to take some perspective
(06:51):
that is bigger than our own. I've got a program
I teach called spiritual habits, and we talk about that
in this we talk about you know, perspective, and the
idea is that the bigger our perspective is generally the better. Yes,
Because in that perspective, if we can only see ourselves
(07:13):
and not the surrounding environment that we're in, we are
stuck with ourselves in a particular way. There's no room
to turn, so to speak. So for example, if we
say pride is arising, there's a context around which this emotion,
this negative feature is arising. But if we say I
(07:37):
am proud, that takes up the whole context, and we
don't see the movement that we are within awareness and
something is arising within that awareness, but it isn't me.
I am the awareness, I am the context. And these
things arrise and they fall away. But if we keep
(08:00):
a sizing I am proud or I am smart, rather
than my pride is arising, there's no room for it
to move. We're only reinforcing these feelings of pride. Yeah.
I like the way of thinking of that as that
bigger perspective gives us room to move, to turn around,
(08:20):
to look to see it from different angles. You've got
a balloon that's filling up the entire box. You can't.
I don't know why it chose a balloon in a box,
but well, it's not you. Whatever it is, it's not you.
It's a balloon in a box and it's filling it up.
And that's what we need to see. So it's really
(08:42):
important to see our existence within this large space of awareness.
And this is something that Joco Beck emphasized in her
teaching a bigger container. Otherwise our ego just keeps growing
to fill that space like the balloon. Yeah, you mentioned
that teaching from her, and you also mentioned one of
(09:05):
my favorite sort of spiritual analogies ever, which is this
idea of you know, if we take a tablespoon of
salt and we drop it in this little eight ounce
glass of water I have, it's gonna taste pretty bad.
But if we dropped that same tablespoon of salt in
a gallon of water, well, okay, it's not gonna be great,
but okay, if I dump it in a gallon drum,
(09:28):
I'm not going to taste it, you know. And it's
that idea of the same amount of pain, the same
amount of salt, the same amount of problem. If it's
in a bigger container, doesn't feel the same way, doesn't
taste the same way. Right. You know. There's a toy
that I used to get in Chinatown, and you would
(09:49):
put your finger in a woven tube, one finger in
each end, and if you pulled it, it would become
tighter and tighter. And it's like that that as we
pull ole and struggle with whatever is on our minds,
it becomes tighter, and if we relax, it's easy to
(10:09):
remove it from the fingers, you know, it becomes looser,
and we want that spaciousness, that looseness so we can
actually see we don't have to do this right right.
That always reminds me of the story of I've never
verified if this is true, but sooner or later somebody
like that is not true. But the way that they
(10:30):
used to capture monkeys, they would put sweets inside a
coconut and the monkey would put his hand in and
then he would grab the sweets and once he made
that fist. He couldn't get his fist back out, you know.
And if the monkey just let go, the hand comes out.
You know, the same thing with those Chinese finger traps. Yes, yes,
both of those are lessons in how we make ourselves
(10:53):
miserable by grabbing onto something and insisting that has to
be this way. How we look for that space around situations.
The possibility that it could be different, that there's something
else is a very important way of turning away from
whatever we're hung up with into the possibility of change. Yeah,
(11:16):
you have a phrase that you use in the book
that is really good and that you say is really
the root cause of suffering or a you know, one
of the big root causes of suffering, which is wishing
it to be otherwise or wit bow. We could probably
spend the rest of the episode on with Bow and
dealing with it, but share a little bit more about
(11:37):
what that is, and then let's maybe talk about some
strategies for working with it. Right. So, when something happens,
we wanted to come out the way we wanted to
come out, and unfortunately the universe doesn't work that way.
Sometimes it comes out the way we wanted to, and
sometimes it doesn't. But if we set our mind when
(11:57):
something happens on this I didn't know I wanted the
other thing. I wanted it to be this way. If
we set our mind on that, it is a formula
for suffering. Because I often would say to my students, now,
let's examine this situation. Is your wish true or is
(12:17):
reality true? And reality always trumps whatever it is you want,
So we have to go with reality and not wish
it to be another way. First, what way is it?
And let's try to take that in. That doesn't mean
we are going to try to change it, but we
need to start there. Yeah, this, I think is such
(12:38):
a profound teaching. We can all recognize this fairly intellectually
that like, okay, well, yeah, it's me resisting the way
things are that causes me to suffer. Right, it's sort
of a rephrasing of the second Noble Truth in some ways.
And yet boy, it's so wired into us, and it's
(13:00):
really easy to say, well, okay, I get it intellectually
until I'm not getting what I really want, even in
some cases what I think I need, And so it
isn't fair. Yeah, yeah, it's not right. It's not fair.
It's not. Yeah. So again this is like the two Wolves,
(13:22):
and it's a survival tool, right, I mean it has
to be part of the equipment we have is how
do we survive. We need to get the food and
then it turns out to be it's food that I
find delicious, and then the ego puts it all the
way up. There has to be a special you know,
gluten free da da da da da kind of food
before it's good or vegan food is good. And as
(13:44):
we keep saying this is what I need, there's something
true in it, there's some survival in it, and yet
when the ego gets its hands on it, it becomes
a kind of fixation and I want it the way
I want it, like Burger King will make it your way.
So it's this wishing UH to have it my way,
(14:10):
which comes from initially a need to survive. We have
to get some of what we need, but as we
turn what we need into status, it becomes a kind
of obsessive trait where only certain things will do. So
I'm not saying that being a Vegian is obsessive or
(14:31):
needing to be gluten free. I'm just saying, as we
take survival drives and work with them, and we can
manufacture higher and higher standards for me. I need this
to be the way I wanted to be, and yet
it's the most natural thing in the world. Yes, it
is natural, just like not wanting to be killed walking
(14:53):
across the street. It's natural. You want to survive. And
so how do you recognize the difference between a need
and a want. Let's say we recognize it and we
go Okay, here I am insisting that the world be
the way I want it to be, and it's not,
and I'm suffering because of it, and yet I can't
(15:15):
seem to let go. Well, the first thing to do
is to feel the suffering wherever you are. Feel that first,
so that takes you back to their suffering arising within
this space, rather than I'm grasping for this thing, because
(15:35):
when it's me grasping, that takes up the whole space.
But when we say, oh, they're suffering arising, now we
can feel that there's a part of us that can
recognize suffering, and there's a part of us that is suffering.
But we need to turn to what actually is first
of all, even if we don't like it. And that's
(15:57):
where we encounter our suffering and our grasp being and
are wishing it to be otherwise. Well, I would say
also that that's kind of the first step if we
want to make change in the world. The first step
is recognizing how we're suffering with it. And so what
is a genuine need for justice, for example, and what
(16:19):
is just are having a tantrum about things the way
they are right? And I think this gets more complicated.
It's easier to see through when we go, oh, that's
just me wanting another set of golf clubs. I don't
play golf. I don't know where these analogies are coming from.
It's just me one in another set of golf clubs,
versus saying something like, oh, I want to see justice done.
(16:42):
You know, you and I were talking about the trial
that was happening just before we came on right now, Yes,
the verdict. A lot of us have this deep desire
for justice to be done, you know. So it's easier
to It's easier for me to go, Okay, that's just
me being selfish when it's just me wanting the other
thing I want. But this gets harder when we see
(17:04):
something out in the world and yet the principle is
still true, right that me insisting that the world be
the way I think it should be as a cause
of suffering. It's true that the insisting is and that's
where we have to see that our suffering is arising
based on this situation. Just before COVID, my suffering was
(17:26):
for these children who were in these border facilities, and
there was only so much I could do before COVID.
During COVID, I couldn't go there, but I could go there.
I could go there. I could bring my body there
to make a statement, which I did four or five times,
to go to these different facilities and to experience it
(17:48):
and to be making a statement. But I couldn't make
it stop. And so I had to recognize that as
part of the suffering, there was something for me to do,
and unless I wanted to sack faced my life for
this cause, I could not find a way to do more.
It really came to me in terms of social justice
(18:09):
when I was in Spain, and when I was in
Spain was about the time that Trump was elected, and
I was talking to some of the old timers there
about their experience during Franco. It's like, how do you
get through this injustice, and the Spanish man said to me,
you need to survive it. So that took on a
(18:32):
kind of meaning to me that wherever I saw injustice,
I had to make it consistent with my ability to survive.
I couldn't just throw myself at it. I couldn't just
wish it away. But it's like, how do I live
my life and continue to live my life so I
can stand up for this injustice? Hm? Hm hm. This
(19:18):
reminds me of another part of your book that I loved.
And you're quoting a Japanese philosopher and Buddhist scholar whose
name I'm not going to be able to pronounce. He's Amatsu, alright,
I did, who said there is one essential coon in
human life. When nothing will do, what will you do? Right? So,
(19:41):
we spent a lot of time in the philosophy and
the history of Buddhism, but I think this statement encapsulates
the life struggle we have, which is, when we can
make a decision and when we can affect things, that's
not so hard. Let's just move on and let's not
(20:03):
feed the wrong wolf. However, when we don't know what
to do, then we're stuck, and that's when we have
to spend some time allowing our awareness to grow in
a way until it guides us into the direction we
need to be in. Yeah, I just love that phrase
that you know, when nothing will do, what will you do?
(20:24):
That really is a great it's a great coon. Yeah,
it is. It is he as he said, the essential coon.
It's like all coons come from this experience of I
don't know what to do, I don't know how to
answer this, and I just have to go to a
deep place. And that was very interesting experience in Japan
(20:47):
when I did co on practice in Japan, because you
had to fail, and of course that wasn't very good.
I'm used to being a good student, a good sense
to and in order to do can work, you have
to go in and face the teacher and not know
and fail over and over again. Now, some of the
(21:09):
time I was there was see the teacher five or
more times a day with what I had, and I
remember one time going to him and I was really tired.
I mean, your retreat schedule is something like three in
the morning till ten at night, and you're doing your
meditation and your co on there, so you're tired and
you're cold, and you're hungry and you don't have any
(21:30):
of your comforts, and so how do you keep working
on the nothing nothing will do? What do I do now?
So I I sat waiting to go see the teacher
and have my interview, and I had nothing. And I
came in and I thought to myself, you know, I
am a bad sotos And student. And that was my thought.
(21:54):
It's like Rin's eyes where you do the cod So
I thought to myself, I am a bad soto Zen student.
And I went into him and I just bowed. And
he looked at me as if there was a bad
smell in the room, and he said, is that your answer?
And he and I said yes. He said no good?
(22:18):
And I was right, No good at this? Good moving
right along and being able to sustain oneself and not
the self of I'm good at this, but be able
to continue to go into the depth of when nothing
will do? What will I do? To continue with that?
It takes something. And I think that was the essential
(22:41):
of the training that I had in Japan, was no,
you don't just bow, you don't give up. You come
up with an answer, even though it might not be
the right one. Do it. So that was very powerful
for me. My teacher is slightly more diplomatic. His usual
thing is I'll say I think you need to sit
(23:02):
with that some more, which is a nice way of
saying Nope, that's not it. You did not get it right.
But there are many ways to say no, that's not it.
And in Japan that kind of slap no good or
just ringing the bell is like putting the wall there
and you have to throw yourself against it. So it
(23:23):
requires a different kind of energy. And I tried doing
con practice with some of my students here in the West,
and they became very anxious. And I realized that the
kind of environment that I had been in in Japan
was so intense I really didn't have any energy left
(23:46):
over to think or be anxious, and that I just
had to use everything I had to survive and come
up with an answer. So it's a lot harder to
translate the coon practice to our Western style aisle for
the teachers. But um, your teacher was trained most likely
in the West. Definitely was trained in the West. I
(24:07):
think he may have spent a little time in Japan.
But yet I've worked with another Zen teacher who is
a little more perfunctory give the answer, and he just
he just rings the bell, like Nope, that's not it.
So since I didn't have that experience, it was a
little hard for me to translate it for my own students.
And I also recognized in the West, the kind of
(24:30):
environment I was providing at my Zen center was comforting,
even though it was spare, and that left a lot
of room for people to think and to become anxious.
So it was a different environment, and so I actually
stopped teaching cons. My my teacher in Japan wanted me
(24:53):
to teach the cons that I had practiced with him,
but I didn't find a way to do it. So
let's talk a little bit about awareness. You talk a
lot about awareness throughout the book, and I want to
start by having you to share a little bit about
(25:15):
two aspects of awareness, or maybe let me back up
from that and allow you to sort of just say
a little bit about when you're using the word awareness,
what do you mean. Actually? For me, awareness is the
true self, and so I don't remember what aspects I
(25:35):
described of it, other than you know, there's an aspect
of light, there's an aspect of penetration. But for example,
I was just talking to some women in a zen
group I teach now, and I said, you can see
yourself as the entire universe. And one woman said, up,
(25:57):
I don't see that. I don't get there. And I said,
but you can with your mind reach out to see
the entire limits as far as your mind will go
of the universe. And if you recognize that's your breath
is coming from there, the furthest reaches of the universe,
(26:20):
and you are made up of this breath, then you
are the entire universe. And your awareness of it is
what really helps you to see that. So the awareness
is your connection to the entire universe. Yeah, the two
aspects that you're talking about, you say that there is
(26:41):
the essence of the mind and the contents of the mind.
And I love this basic idea because usually when we're
talking about mindfulness, we're talking about being present, and the
place that we usually start is with what is around
right like present of what present to a sound, oh,
(27:02):
present to a site. We see the contents of our minds,
and I love the way you describe that that this
essence is when we shift from the contents of the
mind is into what it is that seeing the contents.
Would that be a way of saying it? Yeah, absolutely,
what I said. What I said, So, yeah, much of
(27:25):
mindfulness is this kind of awareness moment to moment. Now
I'm taking a bite of food. This is the way
they eat in a mindful root treat. Right, I'm taking
a bite now, I'm chewing it this many times. But
what is it that's aware? What is it that is
aware not only of what's in your mouth and you're chewing,
(27:45):
but of some other connections to the universe. What is
it that is aware? And I really experience awareness as
something that's not just part of the brain. It is,
as I was describing, part of the entire universe. So
awareness exists. That's the essence of awareness exists both inside
(28:11):
and outside, and in a certain way, the mind is
an antenna for this awareness, and then the antenna translates
this information and we see it as content. But something
is watching, and that's something. It's very interesting. People to
(28:31):
usually discover that something the first time they're meditating. All
of a sudden, it's not just that they're having thoughts,
it's that they're aware of having thoughts. So you don't
have two brains, so you have only one mind, and
the mind has this quality of observing itself. The essence
(28:53):
of mind can see and the contents are what's what
it's seeing. So all fentimes, I think when describing mindfulness,
we don't go far enough into the other aspect, which
is mindlessness, an essence of awareness without content mindlessness. Say
(29:13):
more about that last part mindlessness, Well, mindlessness is I
think one of the aspects of a Sobodhia experience or
an enlightenment experience, where there's no ownership, there's just pure
awareness and we've lost that identification with the content of
who we are, which we're usually watching and it can
(29:36):
be rather brief, but it's what happens if we're very
lucky with a meditation experience. All of a sudden, we're
just aware and we're not stuck with this particular vision
of who we are or what we're experiencing. You talked
(30:24):
about four stages in developing awareness, discovery, amplification, circulating awareness,
and then finally awareness arising spontaneously. So maybe we could
walk through each of those four stages. So the first
one is what I described for sitting down to meditate.
(30:48):
We never knew that there was a quality of the
mind that wasn't thinking. We thought thinking was our entire mind,
And all of a sudden we sit down to meditate
and we're watching the thoughts arising. It's like, whoa, there's
something that is aware of the content of the thoughts.
(31:08):
And then the amplification is how we practice, whether it
be yoga, taigi or zazen, how do we practice the
exercise of relating to awareness, you know, focusing on the
breath for example. And then um in the next stage
(31:28):
in circulation is about how do we bring it into
our activities. So it's not just I'm sitting here and
I'm aware of being aware, but as I'm moving through
my life, my awareness is actually active. I remember when
(31:50):
I used to cook at Berkeley's and Center. I was
a head cooked for a while, and all of a sudden,
my body would turn around and I would see somebody
about to put it's soy sauce in the cole slaw.
It's like, no, you don't put soy sauce in the
cole slaw. But something in my awareness warned me because
that was my job. Now we turn around and we
(32:11):
look and see, oh, what is he doing over there?
He's pretty soy sauce in the coal slice. Thought it
was a good idea, so it wasn't in the recipe anyway.
That is how we notice. Sometimes I would talk to
my students about when you're walking outside, take the position
of the gravel that your foot is on, so that
(32:33):
you're not just hearing the sound of your foot on
the gravel, but the gravel itself is part of your awareness.
And so that's a way of kind of changing position
and circulating that awareness. What you just said there reminds
me of Coen practice so much. Taking that different position, yes,
(32:55):
letting go of thinking it through. So then, obviously or
maybe not so obvious. Obvious to me anyway, is that
when awareness is spontaneously arising in a certain way. When
I was trying to use awareness in my work of cooking,
it's spontaneously arose to save the coal slaw from the
soy sauce. It just came up and my body turned,
(33:20):
you know, I remember it very vividly. And then I
was standing in the opposite direction, and all of a sudden,
my body turned and I saw this horrible possibility. You're
very opposed to soy sauce in the cole slaw. I
have my opinions, yes, but people loved my cole slaw.
So one of the things about cole slaws it has
(33:41):
to be fresh. It has to have a fresh flavor.
So it's garlic, mayonnaise and mustard and whatever. So you
need to bounce it, that's all. And then all those flavors,
especially during seschine, are just very vibrant. That soy sauce
not so much. This gentleman was was wishing it to
be otherwise. Well he was. He was a cook helper
(34:06):
who generally, I guess you soy sauce and his food
and thought it was a good addition. But anyway, I
was famous for my cole slaw, so I must say
I have a big ego attachment there as well. So
I guess we've sort of stumbled into stories about cooks.
And the title of the book, Naked in the Zendo,
(34:27):
comes from a story that occurred to a cook. I
don't know if it was a cook at the Berkeley's
and Center. I think it was right, Yeah, you want
to share that story, Well, yes, then this was a
great way to circulate awareness. You might think you were
the best cook in the world, and your coal slaw
was the best coal slaw. But then what happened when
you tried to serve the food when you had the
(34:48):
position of being a server in this endo, and you
had to be present for each person, So each job
required a different kind of awareness. And in that particular case,
I was a server assigned to take the bowls that
had come from the kitchen and offer them and scoop
(35:08):
or use tongs to serve the food. And as I
was standing there in the back of the zendo, the
room where we were all meditating, and there must have
been at least fifty people in there, the cook came in.
And in Berkeley, the cook would make bows before the
food was served, so the food would be delivered, and
then the cook would step in make his bows, as
(35:31):
this is my offering to the community. And this cook,
when he made his third bow, his pants fell off,
and for too much to his credit, he was wearing underwear,
because some things can go by the bye during a
long retreat, but he hadn't managed to get underwear on
that day, and so his pants fell off. And I
(35:53):
was standing very close to him, watching, and so I
said to myself, I didn't see that that didn't happen
wishing it to be otherwise because I had to serve
the food and I didn't want to destroy the meal ceremony. However,
when I looked up at my teacher, so John mel Wieman,
(36:14):
he was laughing hysterically. So then I couldn't hold it
back because so Joan was across the room from the
man whose George, whose pants fell off, so he couldn't help.
But see in anyway, that's his job is to watch
all of us. So then I started laughing as I'm
carrying the bulls, and I laughed so hard everything is
(36:36):
running down my face, my nose, my eyes. But at
some point during this I noticed that George had left
the zendo. I mean, it's kind of embarrassing, so he
didn't stay for the meal. He went outside. And so
when it was time for me to take the bulls
back after I finished my job of serving, I saw
(36:57):
George sitting on a bench and I said, George, how
was that for you? And what happened? And he said, well,
my pants were loose, so I took a big breath
so that my belly filled out my pants and they
were on snugly. But when I bowed the last time,
I exhaled, so that left room from my pants to
(37:21):
fall off. But I said, well, how did it feel?
He said, well, I really wanted to go up to
our teacher and say, master, I have been enlightened. And
I realized, yes, of course you're in line. You just
did one of the most embarrassing things you could do
in a group of people, and you lived through it.
And that's when I began to understand the notion of
(37:46):
how much we try to look good in doing this practice,
and how important it is to make mistakes in front
of everyone. So then this became a teaching that I
had for my own students, which is make your mistakes
often and publicly, and don't let your need to be
(38:07):
good at this constrain your freedom. Your freedom to make
mistakes and understand you just continue. Your life continues, and
your ego isn't growing because you just got it slapped
a little bit. So I think it's a very important
(38:28):
practice for those of us doing a spiritual practice in
a community, is we automatically compete to be good at
it and to get it right. And so there's a
point where that crosses over into ego versus just I
really want to learn how to practice as a way
of amplifying my awareness. Yeah, yeah, that's a funny story.
(38:50):
Yeah it is. As I was reading the story, I
was waiting to hear about how mortified George was and
what a lovely man. He was. A lovely man in fact,
be for I included this story in the book. He
had deceased, and I contacted his widow to make sure
it was okay with her to include this story in
(39:11):
the book. Because he was such a sweet person and
a quiet person, so this wisdom was not something we
all were exposed to be by his blathering about it.
He just sat there quietly understanding that his ego had
just been exposed and he had dropped it with his pants.
(39:31):
So this was a form of enligenment. Let's have you
tell another story for us here, and I'm going to
let you pick the story. But you wrote a book
that really was to expose we're talking about exposing, to
expose the stories of Zen women and Buddhism, for all
its wonderful things, is a very patriarchal culture and Zen
(39:55):
is no different, better, worse, I don't know, than other
aspects of Buddhism. But wrote a book that was really
about bringing out some of the wonderful stories of some
of the women throughout Zen who have played an important
role in the tradition. And so I was wondering if
you would tell us one of their stories. Yes, I will,
because there was one woman in particular who's a favorite
(40:16):
among Zen students now that we've gotten her story out.
And her name was Mean Song, that was her practice name,
and she was practicing at a temple called ching Shan.
And Ching Shan actually is in the ancestral lineage of Tofukuji,
where I ended up practicing. So this when I uncovered
(40:38):
her story through one of the Buddhist scholars, I didn't
know I was going to be affected by her behavior
at Ching Shan. So she was one of the senior
students of a teacher named Dohue, and at that time
it was common for women to be excluded from monasteries,
(40:58):
and so the headmonk was very very upset with dot Way,
his teacher, for allowing this woman to be in the
monastery with the monks. And there's all kinds of reasons.
He wasn't out of the question because the teacher who
was dot Way's teacher actually had relationships with some of
(41:20):
his women's students. So this was quite some time ago. Anyway,
the monk who was upset one noon, he was upset
by having a woman in the monastery, so to Way said,
why don't you go talk to her rather than complain
to me, go complain to her. So this senior monk
went to her, and she was in her quarters, her
(41:43):
little retreat room and chang shan, and she asked him
if it was to be a dharma interview or a
personal interview. So was this going to be about Buddhist
practice or was it going to be um something between
the two of them, And he said it was going
to be an interview about Buddhism, a darm interview. So
(42:04):
she said, well, because it's a darm interview, I'm going
to send my attendance away my helpers, and you send
yours away, and we'll just face each other one to one.
And so when he entered her room, he found ments
On naked and spread eagle on her bed, and he said,
what kind of a place is this probably pointing to
(42:27):
her genitals with great composure, and mounts On replied, this
is the place where all Buddhas and ancestors enter the world.
Possibly contemplating his own sexual advances. One on asked, and
may I enter it or not? And she said, very calmly,
horses cross, asses do not. This is a very famous
(42:51):
phrase from another earlier teacher, which she turned around and
used on her own. This was Joe Sho's response when
someone came to him and said, I've heard about this
great bridge of Joshua, but all I see is an
old long bridge, and josh said, horses cross and asses crossed.
So she used Joshu's famous zen expression for her own purpose.
(43:14):
And then when she said horses crossed, but asses do not,
she closed her legs and turned her backside to him
and said this interview is over. And he left and
he went to the teacher to tell the teacher what
had happened, and the teacher said, you can't say that
she lacks wisdom. So it was a very awakened teacher.
(43:41):
But what really struck me, as I had studied this
story for years before I practiced in Japan, was that
actually my teacher was a descendant of Dohua. So the
temple I was in was part of that lineage Tofukuji
in Japan. In fact, it was built on the plans
(44:03):
of ching Shan in China. And when Maya Song stayed
at ching Shan in China, she stayed in the abbots quarters,
some section of the temple that was a little restricted,
so the monks didn't come and go all the time,
so she had some privacy. And when I stayed at Tofukuji,
(44:26):
I stayed in the abbots quarters, so I could see
the direct connection to her insisting that she had a
place there to my being able to practice in a
male monastery in Japan because of what she had done historically.
And this was a very profound experience for me to
(44:51):
recognize that what I was doing by being in Japan
would possibly open doors for other women. And this was
very important. That what we do for each other to
conserve the practice and make it available for others is
very important. And we do that with our own courage,
(45:12):
in our own heart, and our own intent practice. That's
a great story. So speaking of what we do for
others and carrying this practice forward, tell me a little
bit about the Shugaku zen Institute that you have founded.
Suzuki Roshi's name was Shogaku shun Reuse Suzuki, so Shogaku
(45:32):
is auspicious peak. I think I can't remember suming was
something about the dragon. So what bothered me and why
I started at Shogakuzen Institute was that Zen students might
spend twenty or thirty or more years practicing in a
Zen monastery, and sometimes on Americans in temple would say, okay,
(45:54):
well now it's time for you to go, and they
had no skills. I know one story of a young
man who later went back to school and was one
of our graduates of Shogakuzan Institute, who start out by
refinishing floors. And while certainly using awareness to do tasks
is an important part of Zen, all those hours of
(46:16):
meditation which could be used to listen to with a
full heart, to listen to other people and to counsel
them and to be a chaplain for example, that's the
kind of work that would also be beneficial. So in
Shogakuzen Institute, we offer with as little cost as possible
(46:37):
because we do things online and don't have a brick
and mortar institute to support, and we pay the teachers
according to how many students come into the class. We
are offering classes foreign Masters of Divinity, so it's a
graduate degree and with that and with other training, zen
students can become chaplains or spiritual advisors, something that makes
(47:02):
a direct use of the awareness and attention that they've
developed during their practice of exam. So you're basically trying
to give them some sort of credit for all the
work they've done on meditating. Yes, so what we can
do for a certain number of units is most universities
(47:22):
can is say, tell us what classes you've had, what
practice periods you've gone to. Let the teacher, who we
know is an authorized in teachers sign off on that class,
and we can give you some credit for that, some
credit for your hours of meditation. And you need to
take the classes you know in Buddhist history and philosophy
(47:43):
and so on. But we're also trying to make the classes,
for example, of Buddhist history, like the history of races
in Buddhism. How has Buddhist practice been discriminatory? Right now,
we're offering a course in psychological for stay, which we
think people are going to need to use. We've all
(48:04):
been traumatized by this pandemic, So how can we help people?
If people don't have time to go into therapy, how
can we be helpful to people. So these are the
kinds of skills that we're trying to develop so people
can use the time they've spent meditating to help in
the world. Wonderful, Well, Grace, Thank you so much for
(48:26):
taking the time to come on the show. It has
been a real pleasure to chat with you, and I
really appreciate everything you've shared with this school of links
in the show notes to your website and to your
books and other ways that people can find you. Terrific.
Thank you for having me, and it's been great to
talk to you. I'm going to see someone who has
read my book and actually understood some things that I've forgotten.
(48:47):
I did read it and I loved it. Thank you
so much. Okay, bye bye. M If what you just
(49:08):
heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly
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