Hi, my name is Clay Taylor, and I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And Lori Sanaki asked me to give this Dharma Talk to post on the website. And I thank her for giving me that opportunity. I moved here about 14 years ago with my family, because we wanted to find a good place to raise kids and get away from some of the intensity of the Bay Area. I had been practicing at Berkley Zen Center for 14 years before that. And a few years ago, I received a green rakusu or lay entrustment from Mel because I lead some study groups on Dogen and Suzuki Roshi here in Colorado Springs. I've been practicing with a Sanbo Kyodan group called Springs Mountain Sangha, which is led by our resident Roshi, Sarah Bender, and her teacher was Joan Sutherland.

[01:05]

And Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant founded the Pacific Zen Institute back in the 90s when they split off from the Diamond Sangha. The Sanbo Kyodan lineage focuses on koan study. So I've been studying koans and the koan curriculum for 14 years. And slowly but steadily, I am making my way through it. It has been an exciting and very interesting way to practice Zen. It's all the same koans that you all are familiar with, with the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Barrier in the Book of Serenity, plus a bunch of others that may not be so well known. I've served as the retreat coordinator here for eight years, and we do not have a Zen center proper, but we practice at the local Colorado College Church three days a week, and we do a couple of long retreats each year, a five-day and a seven-day retreat, plus shorter retreats on weekends.

[02:13]

Sometimes I wonder what kind of Buddhist I am. I spent 14 years doing Soto practice of Shikantaza, and now 14 years of Koan study in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage. And I think the best way for me to describe it is that I'm a blended kind of hybrid Zen student. That would be a good way of looking at it for me. Many of you will know that I have a major medical condition of chronic pain, which is basically a degenerating spine in my low back and my neck, plus fibromyalgia, it appears. I've been diagnosed with fibromyalgia by several doctors. And the fibromyalgia component, I think, comes in because my pain just never stops. It doesn't go away. I don't get any breaks.

[03:18]

I have to say most of the time it's discomfort. I try to stay in the discomfort to mild to moderate pain range each day and stay away from the severe pain. And a simple way to envision me, because my condition is complicated and In some ways, I'm very disabled in that I cannot sit still for more than 10 or 15 minutes on a good day. Standing still is very difficult for me. I meditate lying down most of the time with some shorter periods of sitting up. When I go to a retreat, for example, I only spend about a third of the time in the meditation hall. The rest of the time I am doing walking meditation outside or resting in my room typically. So we get through the day by doing lots of exercise, sitting in reclining chairs and resting my back by laying down.

[04:29]

The exercise amounts to about two to three hours typically, and that's spread out through over probably three, sometimes four different periods of exercise. I have to treat this like a major disability, which is what it is, and I've had to make these huge adjustments to my life in order to accommodate it. I don't appear disabled at all. I'm six feet five and weigh 190 pounds, and I'm very physically fit. Three days a week, I swim with the master swim team. I also do a lot of biking and hiking, and it's all for pain management. And I also enjoy a lot of it. I depend heavily on prescription medication as well. For me, I look at myself as though I'm like a diabetic. If a diabetic doesn't take their insulin, they would go into diabetic shock rather quickly.

[05:39]

And if I don't take my pain medications three times a day, I go into pain shock within about 12 hours. I am 55 years old and my condition has gradually worsened with age. However, I find that my ability to find joy and satisfaction in my life has actually increased despite the worsening of my condition. I recently was rereading a book by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I can't recall the name of the book right now and I was listening to it as an audio recording. And he was telling a story about two farmers, the skillful farmer and the unskillful farmer. So the skillful farmer keeps his leftovers and the weeds that are in his garden and some of the trash.

[06:39]

And he composts those and pays attention to them and turns them over. And eventually it becomes cured compost, which he can put on his fields. which is nutritious and it turns into crops that he can eat and produce for his family to live on. However, the unskillful farmer does not keep his excess material or his trash or his unwanted parts of his garden in this case. And when it comes time to plant the next year, he goes and actually has to purchase compost from somebody else. So that's the unskillful farmer. And his metaphor is indicating that if we want to be skillful practitioners, that we don't just cast off the difficult things in our lives. And for me, the thing that comes up are the difficult emotions that I have, such as anxiety, anger or resentment, shame and humiliation, all these things that I wanna push away at first, what I consider to be negative types of feeling states.

[07:58]

I think with practice that we begin to identify this type of reaction. And meditation is so great at allowing us patience and the time and the space to feel these feelings and experience them and let them flow through us and change so that it's a bit like composting ourselves, that they can cure and become into something that is nutritious for us and emotionally healthy. This is a big challenge for me in terms of the emotional department, because when I was growing up, I had a pretty rough time of it in my family. I had a father who was from Alabama, and so sparing the rod meant spoiling the child. So when I would get upset, I often got spanked on my bare bottom, sometimes with a belt.

[09:06]

And, you know, expressions of sadness or emotion or upset or despair was just, he just got scared to go there because I knew that punishment was going to be swift and harsh. And then I'm also the third of three brothers. My older brothers are two and three years older than me. And they picked on me a lot. They humiliated me, called me names, all that stuff. And they punched me a lot, such that I had a lot of bruises on my arms. I can remember that growing up. But we were practicing the man code. The man code says, you know, You're not supposed to cry. You're supposed to be tough. You're not supposed to be a wussy. And so you end up just burying these feelings.

[10:10]

And I didn't have any kind of outlet for them or any kind of empathy that was expressed for me, except somewhat by my mother. But even she was something of a stoic Swede. When I came to practice in my 20s and 30s, in the early years, I was definitely looking for a path that would ease my suffering. And I think I also just wanted to be able to feel deeper and to feel more whole, as if there was something that wasn't whole about me. And I think that something was a lack of being able to feel and stick with the difficult emotions that had been really repressed in me since I was little. And over the decades, through lots of help, lots of sitting and lots of good teachers that have helped me out, I think I've become more emotionally healthy as a human being, more empathetic and more able to respond to my own needs and also to the needs of others.

[11:25]

I wouldn't say that's always my first response. Sometimes when the uncomfortable feelings come up, I think I want to go run and hide. But I give them a little bit of time and start to understand them and realize that I'm familiar with that territory. I can handle that stuff. That's where I think the emotional health comes, just in terms of being able to go through hard experiences, difficult feelings over and over again. And my life has given me lots of opportunities to do that because I've had a really difficult life with lots of suffering in it. And what are we to do as Zen practitioners? It's to take the raw material that we're given to work with and not push it away.

[12:28]

Let it evolve and let it help us grow. And that's what I've tried to do. I remember the chapter from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, called Mind Weeds. And in that chapter, Suzuki Roshi says, you should rather be grateful for the weeds because eventually they will enrich your practice. If you have some experience of how the weeds in your mind change into mental nourishment, your practice will make remarkable progress. You will feel the progress. You will feel how they change into self-nourishment. Of course, it is not so difficult to give some philosophical or psychological interpretation of our practice, but that is not enough. We must have the actual experience of how our weeds change into nourishment. And earlier in that chapter, he says, when the alarm rings early in the morning and you get up, I think you do not feel so good.

[13:33]

It is not easy to go and sit. And even after you arrive at the zendo and begin zazen, you have to encourage yourself to sit well. That last part just struck home for me. because when my alarm goes off in the morning and it's time to get up, I don't feel so good about it. A lot of the time, every morning I have some level of pain or discomfort and with pain, discomfort can come a lot of bad messages from my mind messages like, Oh my God, what am I going to do? I'm just going to have to cancel everything today because I'm not going to be able to get out of the house. Um, and there's fear there. And underneath the fear I think is a sense of failure that my body has failed me and that I am worthless in some way.

[14:45]

There's some faith going on here though, because for me, I know that it's always better to get out of bed. And once I get out of bed and get moving, I feel better. Probably 98 times out of 100, I would say that is true. And after I brush my teeth, I start my physical therapy exercises. They take about 10 minutes. And then I walk the dog around the block, which takes 20 minutes. And usually that's making me feel somewhat better. I have breakfast with my family and I see them off to work and school. And then I will do something more vigorous, like go to the gym or go swimming or go biking. It's there where I look to produce endorphins that have the physiological effect of reducing pain.

[15:51]

When there's less pain, many of those thoughts of fear and worthlessness are no longer there. In the last eight or 10 years, I have been able to start working part time again. And my wife and I have purchased some rental units in Colorado Springs, which I manage and do the leasing and maintenance on. So that has been a rewarding part-time job. It gives me a sense of productivity, a sense of making an income and a connection to others. There's also a small foundation in my family and I am a board member of that foundation. I volunteer with the National Alliance on Mental Illness and do public speaking with them because my family has been severely affected by mental illness. Um, and those are some of the things I do during the daytime at five o'clock.

[17:05]

My goal is to be at home where I can do more physical therapy exercises for about a half an hour. And then I meditate in the late afternoon before dinner. I can't meditate in the morning very well because again, I'm not moving in meditation. I'm usually lying down and that doesn't work well for me in the morning when I need to get up and get moving and get out of the house. So that's the way my life is running now, which is pretty good. Um, in terms of, if I look over my 20 year history of chronic pain, but about three years ago, I, I fell into a deep crisis, a deep health crisis. There were a few different factors leading to my crisis, but I think the main one was that I had purchased a

[18:06]

large Victorian building that used to be a bed and breakfast. And my goal was to convert it into affordable housing. I was working with an architect pretty intensively on the floor plans and the renovations that needed to get made. And we were moving along pretty well. We had engineers that were working on the mechanical and the electrical systems. We were interviewing contractors for the job and we were about to submit plans to the building department. I was really excited about this project because It's complex and demanding, both intellectually and aesthetically, and just working together to try to coordinate all the moving parts is quite a challenge. Also, the product was going to be something that the community needed, and that is an affordable housing.

[19:14]

And along the way, we were going to employ a lot of local plumbers and carpenters and carpet people and fire sprinkler installation. It's the whole enchilada. A few months into this project, however, I noticed that I had muscle weakness in my right arm. And I went to my doctor and got an MRI and I had herniated a disc in my neck. It turns out the muscle weakness went away after a couple of months, but the pain continued to get worse. And as the pain got worse, my function went down such that I was less and less able to attend meetings. And I was having to rely on other people to do stuff. A deadline was coming up to submit plans to the building department and the architect and I were working hard on that. Um, but it got to the point where I was unable to attend meetings at all because I was in so much pain.

[20:21]

I was just doing it by phone and I had to sort of size up the situation and realize that things were not going to get any easier once that the plans were approved and construction started. So I decided that I needed to call off the project and I had to call the architect. and the contractors. And rather than say I just needed a couple of weeks off, I actually realized that I was not going to be able to be free of this stress unless I completely threw in the towel. So that's what I did. And I called the real estate agent who sold me the building and I said, we need to put the building back up for sale. Physically, I wasn't going out of the house much. And emotionally, I was in deep grief. This was another huge loss, and a long line of losses for me.

[21:23]

But I think this one especially hurt because it meant I wasn't able to do the kind of work that I really wanted to do, that I found really interesting and challenging. And I would meditate at home while laying down and The waves of grief and despair would just flow through me and wash through me. The tears would run down my cheeks and collect in my ears so that when I sat up they would spill out onto my shirt. I couldn't believe it. I had to laugh about that. But that kind of grief is a little bit scary because I've never had it quite so strong before. But there was a part of me that welcomed it and realized that it was appropriate.

[22:25]

It was going to be healing in some way because what I was losing was really big. And when you have that kind of loss, you go through some powerful states of grief. All those negative thoughts of failure, worthlessness, hopelessness, I just let them all come. And somehow I was washed and cleaned And it was self-nourishment, like Suzuki Roshi said. These tears were really strong for a couple of months. And then what was interesting after that was I found myself crying every day, not so much about my own state as about other things, like news reports that were sad or

[23:34]

Beautiful trees and flowers, just things that really touched my heart. I find myself several years down the road now, and I feel as though that experience changed me somehow inside in an emotional way. I find myself crying several days a week. inexplicably. Sometimes I say that inexplicably because I think you have to have good reason to cry when tears are actually coming from your heart and they don't necessarily have to be explained away. But I welcome them now. Um, it's the kind of tears that I used to be ashamed of, never really got heard when I was a child and um, and now seem to have a place in my life that where they never used to. I've returned to a lot better health today.

[24:39]

I'm not as healthy as I was five years ago, but I'm certainly much better than I was three years ago when this crisis developed. Medically, I tried a lot of things to try to avoid surgery. including stem cell injections in my discs, in my neck, and lots of epidural steroid injections and physical therapy. And in my medication, I had to max out one of the medications as well as adding a couple of new medications. And the pain was just unrelenting. So I finally just said to my surgeon, we need to go ahead and do this. a cervical fusion in my neck, so it took about a year before I got to that point, and then I had two-level fusion in my neck, and I felt better almost immediately.

[25:42]

I left the hospital on less pain medicine than when I went into the hospital, and over the next six months to a year, I started getting better and stronger. People often ask me these days how I'm doing. They know I've been through a hard time, and I tell them that physically I'm a little worse off, that my condition has declined, but that I have many, many good things in my life. And I look at my glass as being mostly full rather than mostly empty, looking at all the things that I can do and all the things that I do have. Just for example, I am working part-time again. I have a rather rigorous physical therapy routine every day that keeps me above water and out of bed.

[26:45]

I actually belong to two wonderful Zen sanghas, Berklee Zen Center and Springs Mountain Sangha. I have three kids who are thriving. I've been married to a pretty wonderful woman for 26 years. That's kind of hard to believe. It sure has helped me, and it sure has been a foundation in my life to help me through everything. Knowing that she's coming home at the end of the day, and the kids are too. Here are those tears again. I have a lot of friends and people who care about me. And I think that's been true for a lot of my life, but I didn't always realize that it was true.

[27:58]

And now I really value that. I think I've taken a lot of this difficulty and suffering, and it seems to have composted itself into gratitude and joy for me. I didn't know that that was coming, but along the way I tried to trust the process. That's what our practice teaches us, and I think the practice has just helped in so many ways, something to turn to all the time. Thank you very much.

[28:48]

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