Shuso Way-Seeking Mind Talk

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i feel very lucky to have this opportunity to practice with you and to said he was so dry and and i'm quite aware that there are many many people who can and should be sitting in the sea and there is something in my mind any
yea a little bit arbitrary about there being one person in one year and go marching on in that way so
everybody is a senior student in some way or another
town
so i i'm going to start and of give you the bottom line first and then give kind of backfill and the the thing that i had wanted to talk about on friday or before is that what has been on my mind a lot
which is the work that i've done
all my working career
because i'm in the process very much in the thick of retiring and on
in fact i i decided a fully almost a year ago to retire
i told clients in january that i would be ending in march i ended in march and
pretty much focused on saying goodbye in that month and
then an april was to dismantle my office of thirty years and that was a big project and then my and may was going to be the start of my retirement
so my plans from it may have changed a home fist and but not in a way that feels have actually very kangra with stepping into this new chapter of my life and said gonna be
discernment process about that
so coming back to the kind of bottom line about what brings me to practice
ah
the question that i have can us what i would call my burning question that dogan question is
how do we know what we know how do you know when you know what is it that knows

it's been a very good and informative question and just on the other side of it is i think the hindrance that i deal with which is down
ah
yeah in the asking the question how do you know that how do you know how can you say that how can you how can you be so sure and kind of together with that as a bit of an envy with people who have great faith
of how i do question it like don't you have any questions
when the way it's manifested his for example when i when i was an undergraduate i thought i wanted to be an architect and i was in architecture class and we will be given these design problems and final day would be you would come in with all your drawings and put them up on a board everybody would all around
the room and then each person individually when defend their design and people would say things kind of hyperbolic like and you will go through the space and then it'll arch and involved and people will be into and now you know wax about how people would feel about being in the space and i would think
have you know that there's no data there's no receive at the time they actually there's a whole field now about on how people use space but at the time there was no data about that and so is that what that was my
that was my kind of burning question then
the way it manifested a little bit later was when i began to study psychology and took this site when i and as many of us have and you you read about these experiments that
usually the professors do on hapless freshmen in their cycle know when classes and this particular one really caught my attention put in the end the experiment is that there is nine there are nine people in a room and an experimenter and there is actually only one of them that is the
the subject the other eight are complicit with the experimenter and kind of in on what the game is but the subject doesn't know that the subject thinks that everybody is
operating in the same dark place that they are to operating and psychologists call the people who are complicit confederates i don't like fit
oh
so the experimenter does something like hold up to cards and say to the whole which one is longer
and they start with the confederates and they go all the way through the confederates and the confederates all pick this one
and then they get to the hapless ninth person and see what the that person does which which that person picks and then they count the number of people who go with this and or who go with that
and the result of the experiment is that seventy five per cent of the subjects go with a group and less than a quarter of the people go with their own
what their own perception tells them
and what i said i described this to the affair of my first therapist been in therapy pretty much on my life of one kind or another
and i said my problem is as i'm defining it is that i would i would go with the group i wouldn't i and and because of the dilemma that i inherited from my family i might even doubt my own perception i might even question whether i was seeing it right by
but even if i was convinced that i was seeing it right i would wanna i would not want to step outside so that dilemma is the other side of how do you know what you know and and it it's about how you listen to what your own experiences internally and what the day
it is externally and how you figure out what is true for you for me on and it is it is a life project that i have been working on since then actually how to listen to how to understand what my intuit
ocean is how to
believe it
trust it ah went a questioning how to let it be refined by new data and and what other people are telling me is going on on
and
i think it's not
an accident probably that
the person that i'm married to as a philosopher whose work is epistemology which is this study of knowledge how do we know what we know i mean it so ah
that and that buddhism would be you know the place where i would land where the head guy says here i'm telling you this but don't trust me go out and find out for yourself may make this your experience which is which i have always found to be such a relief such a
ah spacious ness and openness for
finding one's way
so i this is what i came to this is my sunday revelation and and i was talking to livy about this and he said on
yes the source of knowing his experience but it is also tutored experience
experience informed by tutoring and tutoring and formed by experience
going on forever
ah
so that's what i'm called my bottom hi
that that one knows from one's experience yeah that's right but also that experience
ah
i don't want to say exactly shaved but is informed
by being in relationship by being in in a trusting relationship in which there is another mind working with your mind about what is happening and figuring it out together and mirroring and software that we don't
do it alone
oh
so
sort of now stepping back to
my work on
i was
hired by alameda county superior court in nineteen eighty two
i wasn't a job that i wanted and i wasn't actually looking for a full time drivers looking for something else i wanted to start a private practice and so forth
and i went to the interviews because i wanted practice with interviews so i marched my way through these interviews and then i got offered the job on i i had to really figure out
whether i would take it and the thing that got me to take it is that it was an opportunity that rarely comes around even once in a lifetime which is
it has started apartment and higher from the ground up every single person in the department to do a new service to respond to a new code section and the code section was that people who were separating and divorcing and have children and disagreed about their children had to go to mediation first before they got
to litigate
so this depart was the mediation this was the the these are the group of people who would provide that service provided free in the court
oh so sort of like a detour sign from the court
interestingly and kind of a side comment the person who hired me what as judge michael pollachi
and he died in february
and after a long and stellar life and so during this whole process of ending my practice which i'm not i was now and i hope private practice i've been going to memorial services several of them and meeting with people and reminiscing about on an insult of re-establishing these connections who has been
i'm quite intense and chief
on
so a chain that changed my life that that taking that job changed my life i offered them to years i stayed for twelve because i was very much taken with the
ah the challenge of translating psychological information into the legal system and and vice versa
and i i came to the job with no experience at all with law with a court i've never been in a court room
and they said that would be the easy thing to teach the they were hiring me because of my experience with families crisis and administration
oh i had been working doing crisis family therapy in east oakland where the crisis in those cases was between an an adolescent run away and their families and figuring out that issue
oh
the the model in the legal system for finding the truth is very well defined
there's there's the thing called the rules of evidence and what's admissible and what's not admissible in what the rules are for what you can take what you can count on as a fact in in in a case what the judge can or a jury can count on
the problem with families is the way families operate don't fit at all with the legal system and everything in families as hearsay and hearsay isn't admissible in court of law right
so what would happen and what did happen is that the the courts themselves were
there's no comfortable word for the this worm it's a good when it's iatrogenic and it's really used in the medical field which means
disease physician caused disease diseases or problems caused by being in the hospital or being treated like a staph infection that you get her pneumonia or whatever that's incidental to whatever it is that brought you in and there was a pretty high consciousness that there is a lot of a
yatra genetic effects of the court system on families that it encourage people to gear up and fight to not talk to each other to not find common ground to it it it posits that there are two opposing interests
and in in a family in a family where there are children first of all there's not just two opposing interests there are many interests that don't have a seat at the table the children the grandparents and so forth they're actually quite involved with the deal
emma whatever it is that the families bring bringing to the court
and even the idea that these two interests are unrelated that is that the best interest of this person isn't in it completely tied up with the best interest of this person is is is it doesn't fit with families because
ultimately what happens even when a family is separated and there are children there's still a task that brings them together they will always be parents have a child or children and they always have a common job which is in a common interest that they cannot step away from wherever they are bound together forever so
so so the idea that there were these effects on families that would cause them to have more difficulty with each other when i got home and made show nino dinner for their children that night was part of the was trying to be solved by the mediation
and it also turns out that that's really not a good way to find out what's right and true that that idea that to attorneys can come in and paint a picture over here and do that narrative and painted picture over here and and then the collision of those two narratives will somehow have the truth fall out on the floor and the middle like zhao stirs coming at a
each other
actually doesn't fit that scenario either
like i give you an example and this is a friend of mine a good friend of mine who's a family lawyer had this case in which the in this case of in our children but there was a family business and the question was how to divide the family business who would get it or whether it would be divided and how and the and the husband was an engineer and had a
invented something and they manufactured it and the and was a the creative energy and though the wife in this case was the office manager
and the story they told the narrative they told was he said she was always in my way she hindered me i would have been so much more successful if she hadn't been there and the family business as mine i created it i'm the creative force here
and she said if it weren't for me he wouldn't have a business because he is whatever us whatever narrative was he was scattered he couldn't you know make the payroll and all of that kind of stuff
and another attorney or other attorneys less wise
would just take the story of the person that they're representing and tell it as loudly and is boldly is he could and then you leave the judge to kind of scratches head and try to figure out what what the umbrella story is on his tail but there was a silent partner
it was had the opportunity and got permission to interview the site the same partner and who said look this business depends on both of them and he he didn't appreciate her
he is she didn't appreciate him and their divorce is about their lack of appreciation of each other it's not about their the one of them not being essential to this business
oh
so if you fought it out in court what you do is redefine the injury and the store the narrative of the injury rather than figure out what the with the healing umbrella was of the of the story with them with each other
bomb
that's the norm in families that there are contradictory narratives and a relationship
that's true with the research says that that's true even in relationships that are not breaking part that are so successful relationships that the narrative of one spouse does not match the narrative of the other i don't know how they determined that no know what the study was the determined it but it my imagination is that
he had ten couples and one spouse had these that you know a colleague over here and the other had the narratives over here and somebody was trying to draw the arrows between the method like the puzzle on the newspaper something like that and they been any couldn't do it you couldn't match up the narratives
oh
so that's part of the work that was part of the mediation work which is
both how to hold narratives that are not matching and not collapse in either direction toward either one and i have to say part of that as tolerating the anxiety of not knowing taught not tolerating not being able to
know what the answer is
and and to figure out what to do in any case
and i am one of the ways i think about it i i was lucky in that i
her training in
family therapy is part of it and oh dear

should said i had a diagram so i'm going to have to describe the diagram that i drew oh here's
if you can see this is just a five pointed star
so this is a sort of conceptual way of thinking about how families operate if these
circles are people in a family and this is how they're seeing things this is the angle of their view you can see that depending on how you draw this the overlap of their perceptions about what's happening in the family can either be very large or very small but it is there
there somewhere it is the common reality that we all rely on that there's a certain part of their experience that is hidden to themselves or hidden to other people not recognized not seen and when people are in conflict with one another when they are threatened they retreat
two and emphasize the part that they think is not reflected or scene and therefore you get the contest over the fight of the narratives that are hidden and and not the overlap and i that's that's one of the explanations i came up with what with why that is
true but
ah it's just a kind of diagram
oh
this work is intense has been intense has been very fruitful but intense and is is another reason i came to practice because the intensity of the work needed to be balanced by the intensity of the vacation and so somewhere in here i i ended up doing a lot of wilderness traveling and a lot of whitewater rafting and as
especially would take a long vacation in the summertime like a two week or three week time away which was a complete mind wash and a real reset and i would come back
the way i would describe it i would come back the way you feel at the end of a seven-day such as machine that they would just be this sense of settled and your and my mind would be
i'm at ease i guess i would say
and i would try to hang onto that i'm going to i would make these dedications i'm gonna hang onto that and that never works actually it never worked a year several years went by and then i realized kind of in the mid nineties i have to do something when i'm in town i have to do something ongoing i didn't call him for
practice but i i recognize that i needed something that vacations don't do it
and that was the first time i i've stuck my nose here and i think i did a three day session or today sixteen or something around about ninety ninety five but i i of came and went and taught sahara and other places and
i am not i mean it's i am not somebody who i have envied the people who say i came here and i just felt at home i just knew i was home i i'm not a person actually who comes the feeling of being at home easily and one of the great
surprises when i receive my dharma name was i was very afraid of getting a dharma name because was afraid of what it would point to in terms of what my edge was so nervous about that oh i hadn't anticipated how reassuring the the first name is the
original home on
which so it was deeply moving to me
when to tell one more story and then i'm a star since mine watches ten minutes of said how much because it's five you have fun okay well let me just tell this briefly and then leave some time
ah
one of the things that i did and i did it not as a plan that was a happenstance i hello
group i've been meeting with for a number of years to talk about dharma and how it it moves in our lives and does we decided to have a day of sitting and or the location that we had had sort of fell through so the upshot was that it ended up in my office this is mid march
while i'm still seeing clients so we move the furniture you know back and ah the modified day like eighty five modesty and
the next to the last zazen period the last one your sit facing our pray i realized that i had all day been sitting facing an empty client chair
and don't
and i started to cry
oh because i real at just in that moment this sort of ghostly trail of pupils passed through that chair of people i had seen on i felt
i felt the reciprocity of the relationship i felt how much i had
come learn from them and gains from them and how much they had been my support they had been my living and how their trust in me had been my living and i felt ah quiet
grateful for that own it actually changed i think the way that i said goodbye
in the next in the next two weeks after them
oh
and i will say also briefly the on that i'm sitting with his moomin can thirty five say joe is separated from her soul and so i been it's a story about separation and reconciliation so
it i've been sitting with this separation that i've been working with people and their reconciliation and how that is between people and within oneself and cell phone
so let me hear your comments and thoughts and so far

people
on thirty
so many few questions okay
he was curious though she talked about
which
the
reliable
v
talking about over the capacity
i said
ah by repeatedly getting caught not doing it
yeah you know i i i mean i give you a very brief example but i i mean over and over and over again you listen to one person and you go oh that's i got it and then you go down that road and then at some point the heat you get your chain yanked because you hear the other narrative
and you go oh ray wait a minute and you to backpedal
like a very simple one is i was seeing a couple and he was he spent the first i don't know what twenty minutes of the are complaining about why or how she wouldn't go see his accountant they were don't try to decide to get married and and in it and heard not doing that was reflected
of her not willing to test her financial lot with his and humming he had he he was gone for it and i was sitting there thinking
well i can see that i get his point she is kind of this not and that and he's responding to that and her and i why went for it and she sat there quietly and when he was spent she said why we're seeing in berkeley she said wherever his name was your accountant lives in
philadelphia
and i went right
there's always a fact that kind of tells the whole thing that makes you kind of appreciate that there's another side and i can't tell you that the number of times and has happened to me
i it's it is that it is the bigger truth that that always happens and so there's really no choice about sitting with the difference
what i would i do try to do too
make it tolerable is to to i i but i have said to myself and other people is the universe is big enough to hold these in some way that i cannot see
there is some overarching way in which both of these things can be contained and held and understood and i can't and i i can't at the moment see it

the appreciate story of the couple that were evolving a business and the to find a partner gmail is giving me to think that that we all have failed partners in our relationship if we can just hear that you can speak
eliminate the to side and
you can get to the overarching him
said oh wow well the morning my phrase
these points are flipping and my wife is just like oh yeah that's what happen

and if it seems like
the for your clients are so lucky who ended it's a creative act together and people i would imagine your training lot of training in this process of the university a big place and an overarching way of looking at and no one right way
and that's a really and i'm listening to the news on the way down on
wow this is really great stuff
yeah i wouldn't know one of those people who said no this is the longer line people are not good for you know but you know that has it's consequences because i'm testing to see people really love me
i'm an actress and a lot of realization about
sometimes says
thank you
thank you for in imperfect
critically brick course
but i'm not very good particular question
you've furthered a career where you do you help people find them
a connectionless was connected reality you worked in the system which is what you said all about opposing realities cranky war crimes or that causes the benefits this one is right now is rothman how has the sense of home
ah like like like you said you
experiences of of your judgments be
you know of what's real
yeah obviously be wrong
how is your your sense i am interested in how your practice has has helped you the to deal with that sunset the difference between the narrative of realities

well actually a narrative is it is is a reality
not all narratives are not real i mean they're just not complete
there's some aspects of the narratives which are we are on
but maybe i'm not getting your question when my question is how was practice how is packed worm your exploration of that question
well i think i think there's an opportunity and certainly it's true for me the
all the practice here is not on the cushion it is also in relationship and the number of times that i've been
caught by someone else's narrative or someone else's narrative has been directed at me and is contradictory to mine have been incredibly rich and important moments not always been easy were happy but they have been
having it come up in this ah
in this arena or this
the holding environment in which we all have an intention is incredibly powerful and it has been more useful to me then working it through and therapy actually oh so you know
ha ha cohen has meant a lot to me that the story about haku in being
accused of being the father of the neighbor's child and being given the child to raise in his response was whatever you say
and then the story changes in the baby gets taken back and he says whatever you say and that
that ability to
i really worked with that in my own
the self about trying to
not only have my own reality but also to let the other person have their reality and say whatever you sputter to include that and to try to understand
how it is that they the other person is perceiving what i'm doing regardless of what my intention is my intention is one thing but the impact of my behavior is another
those and so understanding that and having own a contained place as sanga and in which to do that in which we can have those experiences with each other and then we can come back and sit and be silent and then still be there this the relationship is still there has has really been
a big practice for me