Good afternoon. So, let's see, we're just ending the third week, the spring practice period, right in the middle. And the surgeon told me that usually Friday afternoon is a way-seeking mind talk. But since I already gave a way-seeking mind talk Three weeks ago on the opening Monday, he suggested that I do an abbreviated form of that and talk about practicing the world. So that's the plan. Some of you may be new to Berkeley Zen Center. Welcome. My name is Susan Marvin and I'm practicing as a head student or so during this practice period.

[01:01]

I live here in Berkeley with my husband and Victor and our 17-year-old daughter, Lee Hong, and she goes to Berkeley High School. I grew up, I was born and raised in Vermont. My parents were born and raised in Vermont. My dad was a fifth generation Vermonter who grew up on the family farm. My mother was a first generation Vermonter born to Italian immigrants. My parents married rather late for their times, they were in their 30s. So I was born a year later and my brother about three and a half years after that. And because they were older, they were really happy to have a family and basically wanted to stay home with their kids.

[02:12]

So I really have very few memories of ever having a babysitter or anything like that. We did almost everything together as a family. In fact, my dad played in the Vermont Symphony for many years as a younger man, and I think when my brother and I were quite young, he left the symphony because he just wanted to be home. He was tired of traveling and didn't want to be away from home. So I have kind of strong memories of the family and the extended family. We had lots of cousins. Scottish English, so we had a lot of cousins up in Quebec where a lot of Scottish English people settled and we used to take a lot of trips up there. Let's see. One thing that, I don't have many memories of school when I was growing up. I don't think that was quite my thing or where I

[03:14]

thrived, but I have strong memories of being outside a lot. My parents both loved the outdoors, so we spent a lot of time in kind of what I would call semi-wild places. I grew up on a lake and close to the mountains, and I didn't grow up in the countryside, but almost anywhere you go in Vermont, you can practically walk to the countryside, so it was very accessible to be out in those kind of places. And I really thrived on that. I loved being outside. I was a very physical kid. But inside, our home, we had a lot of music, mostly through my dad, and played the piano all through school, and did a lot of singing. I always liked making things, so I was kind of interested in every craft there was. And I did a lot of painting as a young person.

[04:19]

I did go on to college in New England, and I studied art and education. I can't say that, I mean, I went because I didn't know what else to do, but I didn't really thrive in the beginning in college. I left after two years and traveled abroad, and that kind of woke me up. I really enjoyed that. I came back and finished school, I studied textiles the last two years. I would say after I graduated, maybe the next ten years, gravitated towards any work or whether it was paid or not, any work I could do related to textiles. I learned to weave on very large looms and later when I came here to the Bay Area, I wove large-scale tapestries in San Francisco and restored Oriental rugs and learned basket making and taught that for a number of years and just really enjoyed all that work with my hands.

[05:29]

Those years were kind of really different than today. Rent was cheap and it was easy to find little jobs to fill in. At least in my crowd, people didn't seem to be worried about the economy or money the way that young people have to be today. Let's see, after the tapestry workshop kind of fell apart, I guess by then I had met Victor and we kind of started maybe almost a decade of doing a lot of traveling and kind of piecing together work to do some of the things that we wanted to do. We wanted to do a lot of long-distance backpacking. We did that. We did a lot of farming and odd jobs in between. took us kind of far and wide, I guess.

[06:32]

At some point, Victor decided to go back to school, and we ended up up in Davis. And I continued to farm, and Victor went back to school. I don't know, somehow the timing, we were having some troubles. Suddenly I started sitting at home and I found myself coming down to Berkeley and I found Berkeley Zen Center and began to practice here. I was 39 at the time when I came to practice here and it was quite a wonderful time. A lot of things came together for me. I think I must have exhausted my wanderlust because I went back to school, entered a graduate program and studied education with a concentration in teaching English as a second language. And I was teaching on the Mills College campus and it was probably the best schooling experience I ever had.

[07:42]

I was really excited to be teaching and studying at the same time because I could kind of test everything out. what made sense did and what didn't I could throw away. So it was a great time and I wanted to do that so that I could teach at the community college level. So once I finished school, I worked in a number of different community colleges, Laney College and Merritt College for a long time. I've been now for 10 years at Contra Costa College in San Pablo. City College in San Francisco. And I quite like the work a lot. Students come from all over the world and it's quite a wonderful environment putting all those people in the same classroom. So I was thinking about how our Zen practice is, in my eyes, a kind of training and how

[08:43]

how easy it is to apply that training to the classroom. I certainly didn't start Zen practice thinking that that training would come in handy anywhere else, but it's been a good way to think about how to teach and what works in the classroom in terms of training students to be their best as students. So some things that I think about and that I appreciate from our training here that I brought into the classroom is kind of what I want to turn to now. A lot of students, actually it's not so much different than it is here, a lot of students want to become fluent, they want to learn a new language, but they don't realize how much effort it takes and they want to kind of instantly be good at it.

[09:48]

And so the job of the teacher is really to encourage and inspire them to find their own way and to develop good habits so that they can so that they can become fluent. English, they notice, we have a lot of immigrants in our classes, some international students, but mostly immigrants, and they know that English is the language of upward mobility, and so they want to become fluent so that they can better their lives and bring more income to their families, and many of them send money home to their countries. So they want to And you want to do it quickly. And so I talk about a lot of the principles that we talk about right here. I talk to them about looking at their schedules and figuring out what they can do, what they can manage, and setting their intention, and then following their intention.

[10:53]

And I actually use those words. I don't talk about Zen, but I use those words to encourage them. I also talk about pacing, how to pace themselves so that they can be in it for the long haul. Here we talk about that, but here we talk about the long haul as our whole life. We take up practice not to dabble in it, but to have it be a guiding light for our lives. In the classroom, I talk about pacing ourselves for the semester. for the year so that they can set goals they can realistically work towards during their busy lives. Let's see. I also talk with them about mistakes.

[11:54]

I kind of feel like Berkeley Zen Center is a place where it's been really safe for me to make mistakes. I know that's kind of a controversial topic at times here. But from my own experience, I found that making mistakes here is just fine. And the correction I receive, I feel, is really helping me to learn to express Buddha's way. And so I welcome the the correction. And so as a teacher in the classroom, I do a lot of correcting, and I find that the students really want that. A lot of students come to me and complain that other teachers don't do that. And I realize, oh yeah, there's that fear of correcting students because then we'll either feel that we're their they will feel that we're putting them down, or we will feel that we're being too harsh, or some teachers feel that the students won't like them if they correct them.

[13:03]

But I don't really worry about any of that. I talk to the students about it, and I encourage them to make mistakes in the classroom. And we actually, I like to laugh a lot, so we joke about it. and we make it comfortable so that they'll slowly come to realize that it's just part of the process and that mistakes are kind of the basis of or the other side of our successes, so they go kind of hand in hand. I also talk to them about breath and posture, and that might sound kind of weird, but especially in listening and speaking classes where students are having to get up in front of a class or small groups and talk about a variety of subjects, depending on the level, they can get quite nervous.

[14:13]

Some of them know, for example, the grammar really well, but to speak is just almost too much for them. They're so afraid of failing. So I find that focusing on the breath and posture, giving them that to think about really helps to support their practice of speaking in front of other people. And they come to laugh about it when we remind each other, oh, where's your breath? Is it up here? Is it down there? It helps them walk. One of the instructions that I've received from Sojin over the years, and I'm sure many of you have, is do what's right in front of you and just keep doing that. And I've always found that to be really, really helpful, not just in school, but in many parts of my life, especially when my parents were old and at the end of their lives. And everything seemed daunting, but if I could just focus on what was right in front of me, it helped a lot.

[15:18]

So I try to teach the students that. I actually say those words to them. And it helps us all not to get too far ahead or look too much to the past. And I remind them to do that many times. Flexibility is another thing that's really important in learning a language. Many of our students come from places all over the world where classes are so different than they are here. They're not used to our activity-oriented classrooms. They're not used to so much interaction. The classes they've come from are huge. Nobody speaks except the teacher.

[16:19]

Our classes are very different. So I encourage them to try all kinds of strategies and techniques to further the development of their language. And it's really easy to see which students are flexible and which students are not so flexible. So I talk about that, about the value of trying something even if you don't believe it. And I think I learned that here also, that certainly our teacher and all of the senior students, when they give us advice, it's because it's worked before, it's kind of a tried and true piece of advice, and it's worth just trying. And I tell the students, if you try it and you don't like it, then you can throw it away. Particularly in the area of writing, I teach advanced writing and it's amazing how many students just want to start writing without having anything to say or any organization or any thought of where they're going to go in their writing.

[17:34]

And so we try to give them a variety of strategies to help them organize their writing or just get ideas they can use. The students who are willing to do that, the students who are flexible, you can see that they really make progress, but there are always students who think that they can do it without that, and so it's a continual struggle to help students realize that we can all just try whatever's offered to us, and if it doesn't work, then we can throw it away and try something else. Also, working as a teacher, I have my own challenges, and I've found that our Zen practice has really helped me find ways to work with those challenges

[18:35]

I think starting out as a new teacher, I used to be really attached to the outcome of the classes, the successes and the failures of the students. I connected more to me than I needed to do. And after practicing here and listening over and over to the guidance or the suggestion to drop the words me, my, mine, myself, I decided a number of years ago to try to take the word my out of the language that I use to talk about the classroom and the students. So, for example, instead of saying my students and my class, I stopped saying that, I would say, the classroom or the students or our classroom or our students. And it seems like a kind of, or it may seem to you like a kind of small thing, but over time something really shifted dramatically for me anyhow.

[19:44]

And that was that I started losing that attachment to the successes and the failures of the students. And I don't think I became any less responsible, but I wasn't so focused on myself. It was more balanced. I put more emphasis on the shared responsibility that we have in the classroom, the students and myself. And I found that it's really helped me feel more confident as a teacher and helped me focus less on the mistakes and the failures of the students and more on what everybody's doing well. I mentioned that I work in two districts.

[20:49]

I'm considered a part-time employee. I work the equivalent of a full-time teacher, but because I'm not in one district, I'm considered part-time in both districts. And that's quite common in the field of ESL these days. There aren't a whole lot of full-time jobs anymore, so many, many people who work as ESL and other teachers at the community college level work more than one part-time job. And so there's a lot of uncertainty connected to working that way. The uncertainty of one's schedule from semester to semester. Also, if there's low enrollment, classes can be canceled quite suddenly. So I found that Working with that uncertainty, being a Zen student has really helped me with that because, well, let's face it, uncertainty is kind of the name of the game here.

[21:53]

So just putting that uncertainty into something bigger and developing kind of faith and trust in the bigger picture has helped me a lot. There are many years where I experience a lot of anxiety from semester to semester, but over time that's kind of fallen away and I realized that really the important thing is to apply my own effort and to do the best I can and to network with people. so that there are options available if something falls through. And I've been quite fortunate that I've always had plenty of work. So it's a kind of relief to have kind of worked through that or to continue to work with how to work with the uncertainty.

[22:59]

And it's made me actually realize what many of our students live with in a more global way and their families back in their countries because many of them come from situations where the political and economic situations are full of uncertainty. So it's helped me to understand what they go through in a much bigger way. So I have 20 after, is that right? That's right. Let me stop it. So I think I'm going to stop here, and I'm sure other people have things to say about how you bring your Zen practice into the workplace. So if people have comments or questions, that would be great. I never realized the degree with which you're a gatekeeper for these people who are trying to not just learn a skill, but actually kind of break out and move up in the world, which is so fundamental to our well-being, our personal well-being, which I think we take for granted if we're born in this country.

[24:15]

And I'm wondering if you talk to your students outside of the classroom, beyond the particulars of learning language, just about or are you pretty much restricted to just the classroom and you don't really have much outside? Well, I don't have a lot of outside contact with students because of where I live and where they live. Most of the students who go to Contra Costa College live around, they live in Richmond and San Pablo. and the San Francisco City College, the students live there. But one thing that comes up a lot, actually, in their hesitancy to speak in classes, when we get to the bottom of that, they have so many experiences in public places, in stores and other places, where people are rude to them, where people tell them to go back where they come from, where people tell them, I can't understand you, speak English.

[25:23]

So we have conversations about that and what I tell them is that you're already better than a lot of Americans because you know two languages and most Americans only know one language. And so I tell them, if they're in a tough situation in a store and someone's rude to them, to follow their breath and say to the person, excuse me, this is my second language and how many languages do you speak? But I'm really careful to tell them to say that in the quietest voice And I also tell them another complaint that they have is on the telephone. But I think we can all relate to that. Sometimes when I'm on the telephone with someone, say buying a ticket or something, if that person is rude, I just say, thank you very much, and I hang up, and I call another, you know, I try again, and I get somebody else.

[26:38]

So I tell them to do that. Thank you. You had said something about that you started, instead of using my students, my class, that you made that shift with your work. Have you also found a way to give up that sort of possession in your everyday personal life? And if so, what is it? What does it look like? One thing at a time. It took a long time to just change that one, you know, just that one word. It's kind of like in one of the teas, we were talking about the koan, good and bad. To try to stop using the words good and bad every day would be a great practice, but very hard, I think.

[27:44]

Right? We could take it on together, Dee. I'd be happy to do that. Okay. I can't see. Who's that? Oh, Ann. Just sort of with Dean's question, what was your resistance? What was the hardest part about making that shift? Tell me you like to be in control. Yes, we all do, right? Yeah. I think It's kind of like, you know, you can do something a thousand times one way, and then one day you wake up and you think, well, gee, I could do that differently. So maybe that's all it was. It's like, you know, habit energy is like that, isn't it? I want it to be less... I think it's the teachings here that, you know, it takes forever to seep in.

[28:50]

And then one day you wake up and you think, wow, I thought, oh, I'm so attached to the outcome of what the students are doing. And I think there's a different relationship to have there. I don't know, does that answer your question? Alan? Well, it's sort of in the same area. I know what's uncomfortable to me about using the word my is that it implies ownership. And sometimes when I hear people using that expression, say in relation to students or some population, there's something inside me that squirms because I don't, you know, I don't own other people. Right. That was a spur for me to do a similar thing to what you did, and I don't use that in relation to relationships, even like Sylvie and Alex.

[30:06]

I don't think of them as my kids. I feel like, well, they can own me, but I don't own them. But it's an internal, It's based on the internal perception sometimes. Right. And also, just maybe to get back to what you were saying, your question, it helped me to have a cleaner relationship with the students, to realize that my role, what I want to do is send them off on, you know, I can provide them with certain tools, but to send them off on their own. It felt like it was cleaner, freer. I don't know your name. Yes, I'm Eric. Hi Eric. Hi. In some ways our lives have been similar. I taught ESL for 30 years, including at some of the community colleges that you mentioned.

[31:13]

And there were three parts that I feel pain about It's not an issue of one-upmanship or belittling others. I didn't ever say to students, in how many languages do you speak? Rather for me, it would be more of responding from the place of compassion. I'm sorry that you're having difficulty understanding me. Is there something I can do? the word I or my, and more often use the word you and your.

[32:17]

I wonder what you think about that. Sounds good to me. Well said. Thank you. Yeah, Chris. Yeah, you said before you came to Berkeley Zen Center, I think you were at Davis, and Oh, I don't know. You know, I learned, when I was very young, I learned TM, Transcendental Meditation. It was all the go. And I did it for a while, but most of the people who I knew who were doing that wanted to learn to levitate. Do you remember those times, Jerry? And I had no interest in that at all. And, you know, I just stopped. And, you know, I don't know how to answer that.

[33:20]

I think I've heard Sojin say that sometimes we think we come to practice through pain, but really we come to practice to express ourselves. And I think I was just ready for that. I see the striker is up. It's really great to see so many people. Pardon? One more? I don't think there's any more. No, ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Anyhow, it's great to have so many people here on a Friday afternoon. It's years since I've sat in the afternoon, and one of the great joys of practicing in this position is sitting in the afternoons again. It's quite lovely. Thank you all so much.

[34:11]

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