So good morning. This is a very intimate group. We had a bunch of no-shows, so we're going to make it a little bit more intimate. A little lower still. It's always wonderful to hear women chanting by themselves. It's a whole different thing. So when Mary and I were talking about this, we really are wanting this to be a day where we can have Dharma dialogue among ourselves. And we can explore cross currents that impact our practice as women in the 21st century, and I would say 21st century, in this particular practice environment. So I'll share something about my own experience as a woman and a feminist over 25 years I've been practicing. And more recently as a priest and some concepts or issues that I've been working with.

[01:04]

I'm not really. And the dialogue that follows doesn't have to confine itself to any issues that I raise. So it really should be open to anything that comes up for anybody else, either as a result of what they hear or just because they've been stewing on it and wanted a place that was safe where they could actually air some concerns or feelings that are particular to women's practice. So in the announcement, we posed two questions to begin to consider. The first one was, how do we as women find and express our true selves, standing tall and solid within a tradition that has been male-dominant, while at the same time appreciate the gifts of this tradition? And the second question was, how do gender dynamics impact our relationships with our male teachers?

[02:06]

So those were kind of provocative questions. And again, we will have some opportunity, especially in the afternoon, to go after those in smaller dyads or triads, whatever works. But keep those in the back of your mind when you're listening. So when I first started thinking about this, it was interesting. I started thinking about Grace Shearson. And that's interesting to me because Grace Shearson hasn't always been somebody I was considering a model for my practice. Grace was tough, really tough, had a very different personality. Well, I'm pretty tough too sometimes, but a different kind of personality than I did. Sometimes she could be kind of abrupt and yet she was so sincere and so, you know, so strong in her practice.

[03:14]

so dedicated and, you know, clearly her whole life was dedicated to establishing a solid practice and to help to share that practice and particularly among other women. So I went Back to Grace's two books, I mean two things that Grace wrote to kind of look at what was her thinking. Her thinking was in the 20th century rather than the 21st century. I think it's a big, it's interesting this tremendous shift which has been going on in the last 15 or 20 years, just in general in terms of people accepting differences. in different ways. So to me, it's very interesting. And so I went through her first book, Zen Women. I remember when I came here, I don't know if some of you did, there were no women's books on the shelves. Now we have two shelves of women's books.

[04:18]

And Grace's was one of the first books that we all read, called Zen Women Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters. That's kind of interesting. The macho master thing. That was kind of Grace's edge. And the other book was followed not so long after that. And it's a book called Receiving the Marrow, Teachings on Dogon by Soto Zen Women Priests. It followed discussions that really Grace had started with a lot of those Soto Zen women priests and discussions that took place at various sodos and meetings where primarily there were men, but the women began to decide to talk to each other separately. And one of the things they found when they started talking to each other separately was they had a lot to say. They had done a lot of studying.

[05:19]

Many of them had very interesting things to say about the teaching, but they hadn't ever expressed themselves very much except within maybe their own small sanghas. None of them had written, had started writing. And so what happened after that was we have a whole, you know, we can't keep up with the number of women's books actually in the library anymore. So there's been a whole kind of revolution in what things were like when Grace started. So I just thought that was very interesting just to think about that because, and I'm going to say a lot more about that, but one of the things that I was particularly interested in was the idea of a writing that Grace did in the Receiving the Marrow in her analysis of Dogen's fascicle, which I had really

[06:33]

maybe heard before, but never really got. You know, it kind of went by me maybe. You probably spent a lot of time studying. But it just kind of went by me. It's called Rai Hai To Kuzui. And what that means is receiving the marrow. And I was particularly interested in what Dogen had to say about the place of women in Zen practice, because we had not spent a lot of time talking about it, except we've talked about Women Ancestors, but we hadn't talked about Dogen's teaching. So I was really quite interesting. Grace and Grace, Grace, basically in her introduction to her book talked a lot about the contradictions between the basic teachings of non-duality and the essential Buddha nature in all beings as taught by the Buddha.

[07:35]

And the way that formal Buddhist practice in India, in China, in Japan, in Korea basically ignored the teachings in creating the hierarchies. So there was this basic teaching by the Buddha Buddha had women followers. He believed that they were all valuable, whether they were men or women clergy, or men or women lay people. He addressed them separately. He gave teachings to them. He also was open to people who had different sexual orientations. He had people of those people in his saga. And yet, when the hierarchy started, they went back to the cultural, basically the cultural norms in the societies wherever they happened to exist. And in India, it was the Hindu sect. And so they ended up, in order to fit in, and this happened with a lot of religions, you know, they kind of morph depending upon what culture they find themselves in. So you find it's like Catholicism looks very African in Africa, it looks very Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

[08:44]

They basically, in order to fit in, to not start a war, to not have their religion basically suppressed, they adopted the cultural norms. of the society. And so in most of those countries, whether it was Shintoism, whether it was Confucianism, whatever the norm was when they got there with their Buddhist teaching, regardless of what the Buddha said, they basically developed these hierarchies. So I thought that was really interesting to me to think about it that way. to think about where did it start, you know, and then how does one respond to it? Because the basic teachings speak to non-duality and equality and women being able to be whatever they wanted within these religious communities, and yet that's not how it turned out.

[09:47]

Grace started off in her looking at this at first by being quite contentious. She was always having fights with the males in the hierarchy. And so she starts her book talking about an interaction she had with a male colleague. in which the male colleague had come back from a Soto Zen meeting, and Grace asked, how many women were there? And the man said, we were all women. This wasn't something to say to Grace. So, So she says, you know, she was stopped at that point. She was kind of stopped. She didn't quite know what to say in that particular instance.

[10:53]

She said it took 20 of my more than 40 years of practice, uh, of Zen practice to go beyond being intimidated by the oneness thing. Um, and then she talked about grappling with how do you deal with that? How do you deal with this? Here are these guys who think that they are, very open and accepting, and yet that's not how it feels. It did not feel that way to her when she tried to enter practice. So I thought what she said, I'm gonna read what she said about how she worked with it. She said, so she said, to understand that all is one is not enough. The One reveals itself through myriad unique formations, even men and women. Why was it so difficult to talk about women in their place in Zen? My own questioning arose as a request for more information, not

[11:57]

This is hard to believe, actually. Not a complaint about unfairness. But no matter how carefully I posed the question about women and Zen's history, my questions still somehow challenged my teachers' personal authority and the teachings of Buddhism. If there were mistakes such as gender discrimination in the formation of the Buddhist institution, or if there were flaws in the Buddhism our teachers had received from their teachers, What then was the basis of their teaching authority? Understanding how volatile the questioning was becoming, I felt I had to change the course of inquiry if I wanted to stay in the Zen community. I also felt that in order to pursue this topic, I needed to make sure that I was not caught by my own self-clinging as a female Zen person. It was essential that I move beyond my personal wound, my sorrow and anger about a long history of neglect, and even worse, a purposeful elimination of women from Zen's history.

[13:00]

My purpose shifted. I stopped questioning what had gone wrong with Buddhism and why women Zen teachers had been excluded from the historical record. Instead, I began to see my function in this current generation of Zen teachers to be creating a conduit for these women's past practices to honor them and bring them forward. I wanted to collect the teachings from our Zen grandmothers and carry them to our Zen granddaughters. The women who were still on their way to entering Zen practice I still wanted to find my own practice in the 20th century Western woman, and I wanted to help contemporary Zen practice find its way to a more balanced perspective. So the other thing I wanted to read a little bit of, so that was Grace's finding her way, and actually that turned out to be very productive. So from the Grace who was angry and reactive came the Grace who made lists of women ancestors for us to chant during service and really inspired another whole group of women to actually look and see that in fact there were Zen teachers, Zen women teachers, many.

[14:16]

And some of them had important places in history and it was worth looking at them. So the other thing that Grace did that I thought was interesting was her review or her commentary on Dogen's fascicle, Raihaito Kuzui. She dissects the fascicle of Dogen's teaching into seven arguments for the equality of women, which basically state that when women become thusness, and accept that, so when women become thusness and accept the Dharma in their teaching. And when they teach wisdom, when they're seen to teach wisdom, the wisdom of the ancestors, when the effectiveness of their teaching is demonstrated by their male students, I thought that was interesting, when the examples set by women teachers throughout history become known,

[15:25]

And also that the equality of awakening and awareness of women is the same as the awareness and awakening of men. And also he talked about how previous teachings by men had distorted women's roles as a result of cultural stereotypes. So I just thought I'd just read a few of excerpts from that fascicle. Why are men special? Emptiness is emptiness. Four great elements are four great elements. Five skandhas are five skandhas. Women are just like that. Both men and women attain the way. You should honor attainment of the way. Do not discriminate between men and women. This is the most wondrous principle of the Buddha way. This is another quote from that fascicle. There was a foolish monk who made the vow never to look at a woman, birth after birth, world after world.

[16:32]

What was this vow based on? The worldly method? Buddha Dharma? The outsider's method for the celestial demons method? What is the fault of women? What is the virtue of men? There are unwholesome men and there are unwholesome women. Hoping to hear Dharma and leave household does not depend on being female or male. If you vow for a long time not to look at women, do you leave out women when you vow to save numberless sentient beings? If you do so, you are not a Bodhisattva. How can you call it the Buddha's compassion? This is merely nonsense spoken by a soaking drunk Shravaka. There is one ridiculous custom in Japan. This is called, and only one. This is called secluded area or a Mahayana practice place where women are not allowed to enter.

[17:36]

This crooked custom has been going on for a long time and people do not think about it. In the assembly of the Buddha since his lifetime, there are four types of disciples. Monks, nuns, laywomen, and laymen do not look for a secluded area that is purer than the Buddha assemblies that existed while the Buddha was alive. So basically, what Grace did was kind of take the cover off of the issue. You know, and look at Dogen, our founder, what did he say about it? And yet, even though he said this stuff, the cultural stereotypes of Japan were so strong, and still are, really, that the politics kind of took over. So,

[18:38]

So how do we deal with that? We have our own society, which is a Judeo-Christian society, which is also hierarchical. We have a lot of changes going on, and they've gone on in the last 25 years, tremendous changes in the Zen hierarchy, many, many more women in in the clergy, many more women abbesses of Zen centers. A lot of changes have happened since Grace did her writing, really, that we've all lived through, some of us. Those of us who came in 25 years ago or 30 years ago saw very few women in leadership positions, and particularly The women that we did see, a lot of them were not like us.

[19:44]

The people that you saw at Tassajara, many of them were single. They were childless. They had given up their whole life. Just like the women ancestors, many of them had to do. They had to give up everything to prove that they were worthy. You know, it somehow was okay for men to be married. Even in the early days here, but it wasn't okay for, it didn't seem okay. I mean, maybe they did, or if they did, there were marriages to other priests and they still lived out of the world. So the kind of models we saw, there were some women, but then over the last very short time, really very short time, right? It's all relative. I mean, in history, very short time, really, since I first came here. You know, the role of women and the position of women and the women who hold positions of so-called authority, that's really changed tremendously.

[20:53]

And yet, we still have our cultural stereotypes. And we still have to deal with them. Yeah. Can you just say for context when Grace wrote and when she started? Well, let me see. Grace's book came out in 2009. But her thinking, her writing of the book took quite a few years. So some of the stuff in her writing really spoke to things that happened before. But even in the last, you know, I started practicing, I guess, in 1989 at Green Gulch. And what I saw were primarily, you know, men priests were in all of the positions of authority.

[22:01]

And there were not a lot of women role models, if you will. Things were different here, more different here, but not very much in other practice centers. So it's like watching the gay marriage thing. It just sort of, one day it's changed. And you didn't even, expect it necessarily, but all of a sudden it was different. But we grew up with a certain mindset and sometimes that mindset, this is what I kind of wanted to talk about, one of the other things that for me, what's really made a big difference was when I decided I didn't know if I wanted to be a priest. And so I started this Chicago priest training program, which Grace and Darlene Cohen, who is another woman Zen priest, and two men started.

[23:09]

And for me, that kind of made a very huge difference. Both of these women were married, had children, had lay careers. Grace was a psychologist. I'm not sure if Darlene ever had. She did body work. They were people who were out in the world. They had spent time in monasteries, but they actually wore earrings. That's why I wore earrings today. They actually wore earrings. In fact, I'm not staying at home now where I would have had a scarf on in honor of Darlene. She always had a colorful scarf and she would actually have colorful robes made for her. She had a red one and a blue one. And Grace came to the trainings with short little jumpers and tights and whatever.

[24:11]

And so they defied the stereotypes of what I, my picture of those women who actually made it to be Zen priests. They were like these really dour people. I hate to say this, at San Francisco Zen Center, to me has always been a very because I didn't know the people there. I knew people there. They were very dour. They didn't make eye contact or smile. She gave a talk yesterday about making eye contact and smiling and how that's a Zen problem. You know, when do we do that? When are we being unholy? Are we being unholy when we act too friendly? That kind of thing. So it was very interesting. So one of the tools that Grace gave us In spot training, this is really interesting, you know, for those of you who know me, I'm not, I was very iffy about grace over the years. So it's kind of interesting how grace has taken over my psyche somehow.

[25:12]

But that's part of what I want to talk about a little bit. So Grace gave us a kind of a framework. Grace, you never would accuse Grace of not standing tall in the practice, nor would you accuse Darlene of not standing tall in the practice. They were women, we are women, watch us roar. They were that way, that was their model. So it wasn't like we have to be kind of, reticent to express ourselves. They were the models of people. And even the women here certainly wouldn't say that Rebecca was, before she became ill, was reticent. Or May Lee was shy about expressing her opinions. So we had these women models, and yet there was this background of not speaking, not asserting yourself. And it was almost as if when people did, there was something wrong with them.

[26:15]

there was actually, people actually felt like they were too aggressive. And so some people, some other women didn't like it. Possibly even me. At different times. So one of the models that Grace taught in the SPOT training was the model of a psychological model which talked about the personal, the realm of the personal, or the intrapersonal, the realm of the interpersonal, and the realm of the transpersonal. So, the personal equates to our habitual patterns, personal patterns based on our own experience, our gender identity, our sexual preferences, or race, or culture. In short, the role of the untransformed consciousnesses, in other words, of our ego consciousness and our storehouse consciousness that we are kind of come in with,

[27:32]

the kind of conditioned realm that we come in with, how we see ourselves as individuals, what our personal experience has been that's colored how we look at the world. So that's the first realm. So it's how we perceive reality or how we've been conditioned to perceive reality. So where we come from, where some of our automatic responses come from, from our previous conditioning. And they're very hard to change, especially if you've grown up in a certain kind of world with women having a certain position. Now there's a revolution. You still have that old conditioning that's operating. The other was the realm of the interpersonal. which it really represents our challenges in interacting with the world based on and especially when we continue to see others as separate from ourselves.

[28:39]

The interpersonal world where we see others as separate and disconnected and then the assumptions that we have from our personal realm are projected onto these other people in our interpersonal work. And then the transpersonal refers to the realm of the spiritual or in Buddhism the absolute non-dual realm where we experience the equality and interconnectedness of everything else. And so the question is how can we stay open to the realm of not knowing when we perceive or we think we perceive gender bias. So I wanted to share a couple of personal experiences. One was related to last, I guess it was last year's Women's Session where Megan was the

[29:49]

teacher. And there were a lot of women at the sitting. A couple, you know, two years ago, two years ago, actually, there was a women's sitting. And there were a lot of women there. I think you were there, actually, who expressed a lot of pain about how women were treated. They gave examples, they felt they weren't treated fairly, they weren't seen. You mean at BZC? At BZC, yeah. And then last year, it was interesting, because someone asked Megan Collins, who was sitting in this seat, how she perceived things had changed in BZC over the years. And she actually had a different take in what she had seen over the years was increasing acceptance of women at BCC and increasing roles for women at BCC all throughout the hierarchy at BCC.

[31:03]

She was talking about the change over time. Some women had perceived what they felt was gender bias. at BZC that they had been very hurt from. And then some of the younger people, who included some of the young people here, expressed that they were really surprised because they hadn't seen, they hadn't in their experience, they hadn't felt that. So there was this interesting thing for me about our different experiences. Depending upon our age and depending upon our own personal experience, all these people were part of this community. So there were some people expressing hurt. and feeling that women were not seen or given responsibility. There was a question about whether women of color were seen and were well represented here, that things might be different from them.

[32:13]

And then there was an expression by some young people that they hadn't really seen that at all, that their experience They felt fully welcome, fully accepted. They didn't see differences in roles by that time. In the last few years, we've had, sometimes we've had equal numbers of men and women priests. We've had equal, more women who were Shusos. So there had been a lot of change going on over the years, and people's experiences reflected, in a way, what they were holding as their experiences of BZC. said some, and some were, you know, some women last time also mentioned racial differences, that we were not, what they were concerned was with not gender differences, that now there were maybe racial differences that were keeping us a lily white sangha, and that those things were more important than, and that even within women, women being insensitive to those differences was an issue at BCC.

[33:21]

So I just thought those were kind of interesting to me because they came up basically at the women's machine and how things are or aren't here. and how we see ourselves as evolving and how people who've been here for this many years see one thing. Some people who've been coming for a very long time have experiences that are different, some of which were hurtful to them. And then new people who come and say, seems okay to me. You know, so it's interesting about the kind of the lens that you look at what's going on in terms of the reality of what's going on here. And that was, I saw something, I guess, during this election cycle that was also really shocking to me.

[34:26]

And again, kind of depending upon your generation. So look, there are differences in our cultural backgrounds, our politics, all of our background, our sexual orientation. We all are coming with all of this stuff. And I think at first, there was kind of a women versus men. You know, what I see happening and that we bring as part of what we bring from our personal experiences is a great deal of difference. So it makes this whole women's issue quite different than it might have been 10 years ago or 15 years ago. It's quite different. It has a lot of granularity. Women are not just women. Women have gender identity, they have ethnic and racial identity, they have age differences. So, and that, the age difference thing really hit me because of the thing that went on just recently with Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem.

[35:27]

I actually saw that Bill Maher show where Gloria Steinem was on and I had to gag, you know. It was all of a sudden, Gloria Steinem was dissing young women for supporting Bernie Sanders. And she actually implied that the reason young women were in favor of Bernie Sanders was because the young men were. And that somehow there was a gain that they would have from being with the other young men. Basically, they were betraying women. So I thought that was really interesting. because of just the years I've been practicing and the kind of change that I've seen, and how do we internalize that or not? In other words, from our internal experience of things, when we look at ourselves and our responses, how much of that comes from what's history that's no longer reality?

[36:34]

How do we take that generational thing, that big change that's happened over the last 20 years, and how do we adjust or not? How do we see when we have these responses? How do we see what's from my life experience, which has lots of pain and lots of my own stuff in it, versus younger people who have a very different experience? in their lives. And how do we not get into a thing like they did with basically disrespecting young people, disregarding young people for not getting how hard it was to be a woman and how much prejudice there was about women. That to me is a really kind of big issue. And I started reflecting about, I started reflecting, where are we by time? Well, it's 11.18, and I think we're supposed to stop at 12 minutes, but it's up to you guys if you want to adjust that.

[37:44]

Okay, well, we'll try. Because we're going to have a lot of time in the afternoon to talk about this stuff. So, you know, for my own life, it's been interesting for me to to look at my attitudes and my experiences from my advanced stage of life now, and how different it is, how really different it is, and how I have to keep on checking myself in terms of what's real now compared to what I kind of grew up with as a feminist, responses that I had as a feminist, my knee-jerk kinds of reactions, And I realized that I had over the years, if I look back, had kind of reactions to other women, younger women.

[38:49]

And the thing with Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright really shook me up because it really said, oh, wait a minute, you gotta look at this stuff. This is really deep stuff that can get in the way of women coming together when things that they need to come together on. And I realized that recently, I'd been to the hospital. For example, when I started medical school, there would be one woman out of a hundred in a medical school class. And when you got on the wards, You were made fun of. I remember being on a surgical ward, and they would pick one person to illustrate an exam, and somebody made me do the genital exam on a man in front of all these other men standing around. There was humiliation. You had nobody to talk to, really. That was a really different thing, and I contrasted that with going to the hospital with my husband recently at PMC,

[39:51]

And there was a male nurse, a female medical student, a female first-year resident, a female third-year resident, and a female fellow, right? And they were not dressed the way we would have dressed. You know, they had short skirts on, high heels, makeup. You know, it was this whole other revolution that's been happening in this country so that so that my ideas, you know, and I've been seeing this, it's not like that was the, that was the thing that really impressed me recently, but I've been seeing this kind of thing because I've worked with medical students for, you know, the last 20 years. So I see the medical students coming in differently, every, which shape and form, you know, and I was thinking just last week I had to go in to teach some medical students physical exam and

[40:55]

you know, there were, each of us had a number of people. I had, you know, there were two men. One was an African-American man. One was a white man. There was a woman who was dressed in a very masculine way, very short hair and, you know, male pants. She was, you know, and then there was the other woman who had a short mini skirt on and high heels and so forth. And I think, well, this is very different from, 20 years ago when they were mostly white men, and all of a sudden there's been this revolution. So the thing about it for me is that there's just been this revolution and change here too, although maybe not as apparent here as it is in some other places. that it's really important for us when we start talking about gender issues that we think about age issues, we think about sexual orientation issues, we think about racial and ethnic issues.

[42:01]

It's not all one thing. And right now in this world, some of those other issues are bigger than the gender issues. So how do we as women actually come together and accept each other for who we are in our difference, in our difference. And how do we actually get, you know, okay, this was my experience. How can younger people get what older people's experiences were? And how can older people get what younger people's experiences were? And how can we learn about our own, our issues that are different? And certainly here, you know, we try and we have a lot of women in very visible positions now, and yet we still, there are still issues. And how do we look at them in this kind of environment rather than the environment that we used to look at it, which was very simple, men, men, women. Now it's no longer that. We see the richness of, and the diversity within women.

[43:03]

And that's a big issue for us in terms of our own dealing with each other and dealing with other people. We had something recently that we talked about, I think, was some younger people talking about the old biddies at Berkeley Zen Center. Some of us took some offense to that. But what is that about? What kind of work do we have to do among ourselves, looking at some of the differences that we have? So I guess that what I wanted to really talk about was, you know, we have a more complicated situation now than we did before. It was very simple, women's rights, women's laws, women's discrimination. Now it's quite complicated. How do we really accept each other as women with who we are, with the differences, rather than talking about the sameness?

[44:10]

How do we, you know, the sames and the differences? How do we have those so that we don't, you know, have something like Gloria Steinem putting down young women for being free? free enough to pick a candidate without it having to be the woman. You know, that's a freedom, right? Some of us feel like that, might feel that from our experience, that's a betrayal. So how do we stay aware of those things in our practice and in the way things run? So I think that that's really important. The other thing which we might talk about more this evening or this afternoon in our kind of small group discussion that I wanted to mention is, we talk about gender dynamics with males. So I really spent a lot of time talking about dynamics among women, because I think we have to get our own act together, right?

[45:18]

In order to think about what is women's practice now? How does it look different when we actually have positions of authority? then it becomes more complicated. What is it that we bring? What is it that we bring that's uniquely from a woman's perspective? So anyway, so I just wanted to kind of bring that up because I think that that really is a big thing for me, being aware of that, especially working with young women a fair amount. and kind of their realities are different, and they're very real, and they're not right or wrong, they're their realities, they're their experiences in life, so how do we include people whose life experience are different, whether it's an ethnic or racial thing, or a gender identification thing, or whatever, how do we actually open to that in a more complicated way?

[46:24]

It means a little work, and it means a little thinking, and it means a little dialogue, So the other thing I wanted to talk about this afternoon and I will just introduce is just the issue, because we talked about, is the issue of relationships with male teachers and the male-female dynamics that we observe and how we deal with them, which I hope we can deal with this afternoon when we have more time for dialogue. And by that I mean several things. One is that there are still situations where I think women here experience kind of not being heard by men. And that's a really big issue. And of course there were generational things too. You know, are the men we don't think care, listen to us, or understand us, are they older and therefore, you know, the generational, just as we have generational issues among ourselves, they do too.

[47:35]

You know, so we have some issues that may be generational. How do we deal with those generational issues? And also hierarchical issues, where a man is in a higher position. And how do we behave in a situation where there is a hierarchy and where we feel that our issues as women are not heard, are dismissed, are not seen? That's what I hope we can talk about a little bit in the afternoon. And the other issue, of course, is the issue of, which we may or may not get to, and may not be as important as others, but the issue of male-female interactions that are inappropriate, and how do we as women look at those in the context of Sangha life. and how do we handle those? How do we, as women, stand up about these things?

[48:39]

How do we, as women, stand up about situations where we don't feel heard about our own responses to what we feel is maybe gender bias towards ourselves or gender stereotypes? And how do we, as women, look at inappropriate relationships and how do we handle those. So I hope we can have that discussion in small group discussions later on. So I don't know if we have any. So I think we should let people have some response. A lot of issues have been raised. We can always shorten that. Shorten this out. I don't, I'm randomly jumping in.

[49:48]

Thank you for a really interesting, bringing up a lot of really interesting issues. For some reason I was flashing on how, one of the first things that happened when Baker O'Shee left city center, city center, when I was there, practice discussion with. And I don't think it was exactly that he had been repressing that particularly. He was not that terribly gender biased, but he had just been repressing so much of the change that wanted to happen. So there were like these ten things that happened within like three months after he left. And that was one of them. And so to me, you know, coming was the, one of the things that I picked up on in my early feminism was this idea of decolonizing your mind.

[50:52]

And it may have been internalized oppression, there may have been another word for it, but it was about how you, and that was the thing to me that corresponded the most with Dharma practice, when I came to Dharma practice, was how you can get your mind out of the, you know, how can you, And so to me it just always felt like there were always a lot of women and we were always doing that outside of Zen Center and inside of Zen Center. And when I came here, you know, Meili was the main disciple. And yeah, Mel has some really retrograde ideas, but he has darn transmitted. So it's always been full of contradictions and people and a lot of women working. So I mean, for myself, fortunately, I mean, that sounds terrible, Jerry, to be the only doctor. And you know, like I never had There's always been a lot of people around me trying to do the same thing I'm trying to do.

[51:58]

So that just really, yeah. And we're not that different in age, so that was generational and situational. No, but you are. You are. Because I had the experience that there's a tenure. It happened very quickly. And what you chose to do, I mean, it might have been if I had gone to high school, if I had chosen to go to medical school, it might have been so different. No, but the women who came through 10 years later had a completely different experience than we did in college. I had that experience in architecture school. Yeah, we had three women who wanted to be doctors, three out of a class of like 350 at a women's college, and only one, me, went on to medical school. And they were counseled not to. They were counseled that it would interfere with their families and that they should be chemists instead if they liked science and that sort of thing. So it was a dramatic change. And, you know... I mean, we've just been in a midst of a long, dramatic... Unbelievable change.

[53:06]

That's still happening. That's still happening. Yeah. Well, we reflect what's going on outside. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I think she's really a great example of that. I think when you said, it's interesting because you say we all have, you know, we all have those types of glasses, right?

[54:11]

And you said, and you were there, and I'm like, yeah, I was there. You said several women spoke up about that. I was like, you have several? You know, it's amazing. But I do, and I started thinking about that. Oh yeah, but it started with one person and it was a very painful experience that she talked about. And it just, it kind of like, you know, you see this domino effect when somebody expresses something and it gets mirrored. Right. So yeah, I don't know if I would use several as my word, but I guess definitely a few people spoke up about that. Yeah, just that it pinged other things. Well, and then there's the issue of discerning, right?

[55:17]

Because it's your lens that you're looking through. Is this because I'm a woman? Is this coming at me because I'm a woman? or is this coming at me because of a hierarchical or somebody's personality, you know, or, or whatever, you know, which, which we, which, which for a while, you know, people were just knee jerking, it must be because I'm a woman. And I think we're at the point now where we're saying some people are, you know, unskillful in their communication. Some people are hierarchical in the way they look at the world. Is it really, Is this a woman's issue or not? To discern that rather than just automatically, if a man says something stupid, assuming it's because there's a gender bias, because it may be. And I think now we kind of reflect internally a little bit, at least I do, as to whether or not, is this really just somebody who's unskillful?

[56:18]

in communication, or is this somebody who really is unaware that they actually have a power or a gender bias going on? And if so, how do I deal with it? And that's kind of where we're, I think that's the skill that we have to, that we require now. Because not every, you know, we can't assume. There was a time when we assumed that any time a man said something as unskillful and stupid, we would just put it as sexist, yeah. I noticed the age divide and the technological divide. It creates an invisibility. I think there's an energy that I had and I connected with others that I don't have now. It doesn't upset me so much. I'm just not going to fight about it. that something comes up that's unskillful, or being married to a man who's 87 years old, you know, talk about old white guys, inappropriate comments, just like, you know, you've got to let it go, and I don't know if that's useful to

[57:40]

Yeah, I mean, I think for me it's more complicated than it was in the beginning because there was clearly both legislative laws and customs and, you know, there were real biases that were institutionalized biases. Now we're dealing with more subtle issues a lot rather than those institutionalized. to have that role model. It's very different than me. But just to watch her kick butt. Yeah. She was our alter ego. She was. She was like our alter ego, right? Let Grace take care of Sojin. We'll wait here for you. Did you want to say something? Yeah. So I was at both last year and the year before women's sittings, and I actually, two years ago, I felt like I had expressed some kind of, of my own experience of discrimination and pain, and I felt actually kind of written off by older people in the group that day, saying that, oh, you know nothing of, like, the struggle that we've had to go through to, you know, give you all your ability for this kind

[59:14]

Oh, really? That's interesting. I kind of was like, yeah, I guess I shouldn't really, you know, complain. And also see that change because I, you know, I came here and I, you know, I have seen all of these women around and it hasn't really been something here for me. But then in the background, there's also been one of the first conversations

[59:41]

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