Good morning. So I decided to approach this first encounter with all of you as Shuso, kind of cold, without any script, and I have no idea what I'll be saying today. And trusting that all you bodhisattvas and the others will be around here to support me, Ross assures me that they will take care of me during this time. I thought, rather than launch into some factual account of my life, I would talk to you about how I approached this talk. Everything in my life, and especially my practice life, seems to be associated with threes, and there were three people that had an influence on probably my thinking. I went to Mel.

[01:04]

Mel and I talked, I guess, at the end of February, and I thought, I have all this time. But I found that I was feeling some unease about it. I've given many way-seeking mind talks, and it's gotten so that, well, I just kind of talk about where I'm at in my practice. But this one seemed different. a little bit more, I don't know, I was giving it more importance or more weight or something than the fact that I practice here all the time and this is just another practice opportunity. So when I talked to Mel at first, I said, well, you know, if I really honestly talked about my practice, what kind of talk would I give? And my first thought was I would be silent because a lot of my practice recently has been about recognizing the delusion in my stories and so that as soon as I begin to tell a story I am aware or thinking, is this really some creation?

[02:29]

Is this some new story I'm making up? And silence And formlessness kind of attracted me. And in fact, at one point Mel called me a sashim junkie because I was never happier than when I could be in a long retreat being silent. and being in formlessness and not having to deal with stuff, not wanting to, and getting kind of attached to Zazen and attached to that feeling of formlessness, floating in formlessness. Wonderful. But I didn't think my sitting here being quiet would be terribly beneficial to all beings right now. And then I thought, well, what other kind of What else is real for me? Another thing that's been very real for me is to be trying to look at what happens with direct perception rather than having a lot of automatic stuff put on.

[03:48]

In Buddhism, there's a, you know, in Buddhist psychology, It's taught that in this part of the brain or this psyche called alaya, you store all of your conditioned responses. And so when you come to an experience, there's this danger of not really coming to that experience fresh and new with beginner's mind, but in fact, with all of this old conditioned responses. if you see anything, even in a perception of color or sound or a person, you have a whole story that immediately gets lumped on that, and you miss the whole actual reality of the moment. And I tried, so I talked to Mel about that a little, and I said, but, he said, well, people really do want to know something about you. Something real, you know, they can get their hands around.

[04:51]

And I said, but you know, I'm in my 60s and there are so many stories. What story do I tell? You know, I could tell the happy 50s, 60s, Pollyanna, Hayride, Slayroid, Kumbaya type story. I can tell the political activist story. I could tell the story of the traumas in my life and suffering. I could tell, I could tell the story of my search for meaning. I could tell lots of stories, and none of them would be true. All of them would, but none of them would be not true. But they'd be another story that I would tell, and we would all, you know, have some relationship to that story. So I talked to Mel about that, and Mel's terse one-word answer was, integrate. So that left me kind of where I was. And then John Mogey stopped me in the hall, in the courtyard one day and said, I just can't wait to hear you talk.

[05:55]

I've really seen your practice over the last years and I really wanted to, I really want to hear what's been going on with you. And I'm really not interested in all that old stuff. I'm really not interested in your biography. Tell me what's really up for you. So, The other person who will be surprised to hear that she had an influence in this morning was Linda Hess. Because when I tried to give a story one Friday afternoon or give a talk, a non-story, using direct perception and trying to not color what I said with all kinds of adjectives and adverbs and just kind of tell how it was, Linda said. Linda raised her hand after the talk and said, I didn't like it. She said it had no poetry. It didn't have any life to it.

[06:57]

It just, it didn't feel okay to her. She really didn't like it. Luckily, Elena Maroth was here and she said, I disagree with Linda. So my ego wasn't completely smashed. Whatever ego I had invested in this attempt at doing a talk on direct perception. So with all of that input, integrate, keep it current, and put a little poetry in it. You can't just talk about direct perception. It just wouldn't be interesting. OK. So I just sat there with all of that. An image arose for me, just out of nowhere, really, out of the subconscious, and it was the Winchester Mystery House. I don't know how many of you have ever been to the Winchester Mystery House. Anybody been to the... You see the signs endlessly, right? For 35 years, I've seen the signs and I never went.

[07:59]

This winter, my youngest son, Eli, and his girlfriend were visiting for the holidays, and I was trying to figure out what to do with them. And his girlfriend is a biologist raised in Ecuador in an expatriate family and interested in biology and is totally like the Dian Fossey of bats. That's what she's going to be. So I think, you know, couldn't go shopping. I realized she really wasn't interested in seeing Christmas decorations. What could I do? So I took them to the Living Dinosaur show. in San Jose. So I found myself in San Jose at the Living Dinosaur Show, us and everybody else with kids under 10. But she actually enjoyed it and criticized the narrative of the person who was telling the history of evolution of the dinosaurs, because she knew better than that. And she found it interesting.

[08:59]

And we saw the signs. And somehow, for the Mystery House, and somehow, Somehow I just needed to go to the Winchester Mystery House. And the Winchester Mystery House is a mystery because for about 30 years, I guess, a widow living there had the house in constant construction. And no one knew exactly why it was in constant construction, but she would constantly have new rooms built, or dormers put in, or doors put in. And there's one place where there's a door to nowhere. You go down this hallway, there's a door, and you open it, there's brick. And the rooms in the mystery house are hanging off at all kinds of different angles. So you walk down a couple of stairs, and there's a room between one floor and another, and the rooms are jutting out all over the place. And I thought, well, now, why is this coming up for me?

[10:03]

Winchester Mystery House, what is this? Obviously, this is a metaphor. My psyche is working on the symbolism of this. And as I thought more about it, I thought, well, it's kind of It's about, for me it's about a lot of things. It's about, it's a lot about kind of what's been going on with me recently, which is as I begin to be with things and understand things, my old house doesn't work anymore and I have to build a new room. It happens to me with individuals. I have some fixed picture of an individual and then I open to that individual in a new way, and I see that that person is no longer who they were, so in order to keep them in my house, I have to build another room for them. So I thought about it like how I construct the world and how in practice sometimes being awake and being aware, seeing things,

[11:12]

And also working on your own practice, you're kind of in this constant state of construction or transition. Mel said to me, one dogasana in the last six months, you're always in transition. And of course, and I felt, I didn't say it right away, but I would have said, but isn't that what, isn't impermanence and change, isn't that really how it is? And I thought some more about the Winchester Mystery House, and I thought, it's the self, in a way. It's almost like, in order to hold onto myself, recognizing that I am a kind of bundle of skandhas that arises and ceases, there's still this kind of need to hold on to something.

[12:21]

In my practice, it seems like I can't quite let it all go, so I have to keep on altering the vision of this definition. And so the house then starts looking very odd because it doesn't really fit. And I was thinking the other day that Building these rooms, I could either do two things. You know, the foundation is built on, you know, for just so much weight. And eventually, if I add another couple of rooms, the entire building will come crashing down. And then I will really have to face what is. And either that or I'll build out and there'll be wings and the house will float. and it'll flow up into the land of celestial Buddhas and fade into the ether. But somehow I'm still, where I am in my practice, I guess I'm still trying to accommodate and build this house.

[13:24]

So I guess I think that there really is no house, there is no life, but there is this mystery tour that I guess we're all on. But then, as we always do when we think further about things, I realized something else about the Winchester Mystery House. I remembered the story about the house somehow, and the story is that the person who owned and built the house was the guy who invented the Winchester rifle. and manufactured them. And he and his wife lived there, and they very much wanted children, but every time she became pregnant, she had a miscarriage or a stillbirth. And this was a source of great pain. And she began to think that the reason this happened

[14:28]

was because their livelihood and their life was built on the creation of a weapon that killed people. And so she then became a spiritualist and would have seances in her house. So one theory about the building of the rooms is she would have a seance in the house and then something would inspire her to make another change. And her husband died early also, very suddenly. He was a young man and he died of something like pneumonia. So there is this whole theme of karma and karma in this odd-shaped ever-changing house. And that has also That's been a major theme that I've been studying over the last five years or so.

[15:31]

So I guess that's the context. That's kind of how I got here, you know. That's what was going on in my thinking, in my sitting around the anticipation of having to be here and having to talk about what's going on. So on that note, I'm going to kind of turn it a little bit. and try, and Linda, was that interesting enough with the house? Yeah, I liked it. So I just want to make sure Linda was OK. John, I don't think you're quite there yet, but it'll take probably the rest of practice period for that. But I have to do some, I have to kind of accommodate Mel's suggestion of integration. I was, and in that, again, another image came, and it was kind of like a living tapestry with different threads that were alive, you know, something that would hang in the hallway of Hogwarts Castle where, for those of you who don't know, that's in Harry Potter.

[16:43]

where you kind of walk by this tapestry and as you got closer, there was kind of chattering and as you looked at the different parts of the tapestry, you'd see acts, things happening, people talking, there'd be different action at different parts of this tapestry. So I thought, well, I can't really weave the whole tapestry, but I'll weave a few threads. and maybe at other times during practice period, if people are interested, there are more threads and we could talk about it at tea or talk about it individually, but one of the things that came up for me when I was at Tassajara about, I guess it's a year and a half ago, that I hadn't really thought about in a long time was Catholicism. I was born into an Italian Catholic immigrant family. My father was born in Italy. And in many immigrant communities, like in the Mexican community and South American communities and the Filipino community, now it's still the same.

[17:56]

The newcomers come and a lot of what life is about is connected to the church. So Catholicism was not just some label I had or something that I was kind of given. Catholicism was something you were part of that from as early as you can remember. There was always something with the church. It was kind of the fabric of your life. When you're from a big family, and my family, my mother was from a big family, I guess she had five sisters and a brother and several other siblings that died in their youth. My father's family also, he had three siblings and two step-siblings, and so it was a big family. There was always, and Italian Catholics marked everything with a religious service or a ceremony. And so it was always, it was this fabric, this core fabric of my growing up and my life was Catholicism and ceremonies.

[19:05]

It was either somebody's christening or somebody's holy communion or somebody's confirmation or somebody's baptism, somebody's death, somebody's novenas. There were fiestas in Italian churches, and so you had feast days that you went. You didn't just go every now and then. You went every Sunday, and as a kid, you went to confession every Sunday. And you also went to religious instruction every Wednesday afternoon. Every Wednesday afternoon, I was in a community of immigrant Italians and Irish. The school emptied out and we all went to religious instruction. So, and I guess what, you know, There's a lot I could say about that, but what I started getting in touch with at Tassajara was the kind of foundation of duality, of good and evil and sin and purity that were really so kind of basic to living that way and the way that people talked in my family.

[20:26]

you were a bad girl or you were a good girl and that kind of thing. And I think the reason it kind of came up for me a lot when I was in Tassajara was because I had been really dealing a lot with karma my own action and the consequences of my own action and having a lot of trouble with the kind of judging mind and feelings of not being good and so that when I kind of started to uncover karmic action of mine I couldn't just be with it and gently, I couldn't hold it gently. There was many years of confession and repentance And I kind of somehow in that kind of realization of that thread of Catholicism, being with it, there was a kind of a release, and I remember

[21:49]

One of the things that I had trouble with was when Mel, when I did Jukai and Mel gave me the name Pure Stream Nourishing Heart, I really had trouble with that name. I never could really accept it. I really, and I didn't really know why, but I remember thinking, well, maybe it's because I wanted something more, you know, warrior-like, warrior woman, struggler for good. And I thought maybe I was kind of disappointed. Pure heart, nourishing stream, okay. But actually what I got in touch with, what I really got in touch with at Tassajara was that I was ashamed. I was wondering if I would cry. I was ashamed. I was ashamed of actions. I did not feel good.

[22:54]

I really wasn't worthy of the name. And, you know, what it started was kind of sorting through, you know, the sins and sorting through the sins, sorting through the debris of karmic action. and how I dealt with mistakes, how I dealt with sins by judging and labeling, and just kind of getting a sense of the causes and conditions of those attitudes and feeling the causes and conditions of those attitudes, there was kind of a softening of that. And sitting with that, I just sat with my name for days, trying to just be with my name.

[23:59]

An interesting synchronicity happened, which was that I lost my old Rakasu, like weeks before I went to Tassajara, or a month before I went to Tassajara. And Jean Selkirk, bless her, said, you can't go to Tassajara without a rakasu. So for the two weeks prior to going to Tassajara, she and I lived together basically for two weeks sewing another rakasu. And I left it with Mel, or she left it with Mel and bugged Mel. Mel was on vacation or something and she bugged Mel. I'm sure she was merciless. during that time I was kind of sitting with this sin and stained and these feelings and letting these feelings of shame and unworthiness and just being with those.

[25:02]

Interestingly, the theme at Tassajara was karma and so I had opportunity to study and think about that and one of the One of the things that we did during that practice period was we did a lot of public confession and repentance. One of the things that really came up for me as a big thing during that time was that I was an abortionist at one time. When I was starting off in medicine, I was very involved in the women's health movement, and I felt that I needed to kind of put myself where my mouth was and that I would learn how to do abortions because people needed them. And I had always carried with me. I did them for a while, and it was really, really hard for me.

[26:06]

It was my Catholic background that made it hard for me. I did feel I was ending life. I did feel very strongly about women's reproductive rights and their right to make the choice, and that's why I did it, but I really... There was something about it violating some internal So one day I got up in front of everybody and confessed. And it was an incredible experience for me. It was as if everything all dropped away. And I think I felt like it wasn't just confessing that. In a sense I was saying, Here's all my karma.

[27:07]

You know, here it is. This is my offering here. Here's all my negative karma." And I kind of fell, literally fell to the floor, to the ground. And there was some kind of release that happened after that. And then I was sitting and Sometime after that, we had like a nine day session in the middle. So you got a lot of chance to sit. And I was sitting and I was, somehow there was a stream and I was in the stream. And there was something about the sparkling, pure, stream of ... but also the fact that the stream was moving and wasn't permanent. So somehow I got in touch with the fact that having the name Pure Spring Nourishing Heart really didn't mean that I had to never do anything wrong, that I had to somehow ... I don't know, that I had to be something that I wasn't, that I had to always be

[28:29]

kind and nourishing, I could never be cranky and mean, that pure was pure, and you're either pure or not pure. And somehow, out of that whole mix of stuff, I really felt like I could accept my name. And a few days later, interestingly enough, my rakasu came. Mel had did this wonderful enzo on it, which of course was, which seemed so right for where I was. And I had someone, one of the priests said, at Tassajara, come with me to the Kaisando, which is the Tsukiroshi's altar in a separate building from the temple, and we did a ceremony where she gave me my rakasu, and I could accept it.

[29:42]

I could really accept it. So it was interesting to kind of kind of follow that thread of in my life and kind of looking at the causes and conditions and getting there. I guess we don't really have more time. The other thing I was going to talk about, maybe I will talk about the next time Friday, was just the threat of family and what that is in my life, but we don't have time for that now, so maybe people might want to ask a question. Mary. Thanks. When you were talking about confessing and something fell away, I was thinking of that song that gives me your troubles. You would lose them.

[30:44]

I know how to use them. Yeah. They serve that for you, it seems like. Yes. Does that resonate? Yeah. Yeah. Peter? Things are numberless.

[31:46]

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