Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome Geri Oliva, our speaker today, on this cool morning. Geri has been practicing at Berkeley Zen Center since the last millennium, about 20 years ago. She is a semi-retired physician at UC in San Francisco. She has studied the body for many years in her medical practice. And she also has a very strong appetite for the mind. So she does a lot of study on her own. She studies with many different teachers and has done numerous practice periods at Tassajara, as well as Green Gulch. She is in the process of sewing a okesa and will be ordained as a priest by Sochin Roshi at a date still to be determined in this millennium. mother of two and domestic partner of one. Lastly, she is the president of Berkeley Zen Center, so she heads up the administration of our temple, and she has a gentle hand, yet firm constitution in directing the myriad policy questions that come up at our monthly board meetings.

[01:17]

So please give a warm welcome to our speaker today, Geri Oliva. I think you have a role as a publicist. Managed to make people sound really kind of daunting. OK. I'm going to give an unusual I think an unusual talk today because what I want to talk about, Darlene Cohen, Darlene Cohen is a, and you'll learn about Darlene Cohen as I speak. So I'd like to dedicate the talk to Darlene Cohen. Darlene was and is an influential Zen priest who died a little over a year ago on January 12, 2011 at the age of 68 from metastatic ovarian cancer.

[02:21]

This talk came forth spontaneously because I was, when I got the email notice from... Could you move your microphone up just a little? I think it's a little soft in that. It is. It's on, it's just kind of soft. Okay? Better? Some people back there seem to think it's okay, right? Good. I was at Tassajara for the fall practice period, as many of you know, and Greg Fain, the practice leader, came up to me one day and said, I just got this email from Berkley Zen Center, and Karen Sondheim wants to know if you can do a talk on February 11th. And it came at the same time that some other women who were staying in the dorm with me had organized a memorial service for Darlene Cohen's birthday, which is on Halloween. was her favorite, that says so much about Darlene, that she had a birthday on Halloween and it was her favorite holiday.

[03:31]

And the other thing that happened was that Darlene's book, one of Darlene's books, called The One Who Is Not Busy, was going out of print. And Steve Stuckey, who was the abbot at Tassajara at that time, had just gotten a call from a publisher that the publisher said, I have several hundred of these books And I don't want to throw them away. And so they shipped some of the books down to Tassajara. So Darlene was on my mind when I got this request. And somehow, all I could think about when I thought about talking was Darlene. I tried really hard not to think about Darlene and think about all these other subjects that I should talk about. So I began to ask myself the question, what is it about Darlene and what is this teaching that I'm supposed to get from talking about Darlene? So hopefully I'll be able to share that with you because it became quite a study for me, studying Darlene over the last few months.

[04:40]

So I first met Darlene in 2010, about a year before she died. at the beginning of a three-year training program that I had enrolled in at a place called the Shigako Zen Institute. Darlene was one of the Zen, four Zen priests who got together and decided that both lay teachers of Zen and ordained priests needed to have a different sort of training than just studying Dharma. They needed to, they needed to study more psychology, more management, ethics, things that were related to working in a lay Zen community and being able to be successful at teaching and being with a lay community that was very different from the kind of training that happens in a monastic setting or residential setting. So I had never met Darlene before that. I had heard about Darlene for years. She's kind of a feminist icon of the Zen group. And I walked into the training, and Darlene, who had severe arthritis, was sitting in front of the room on an odd-shaped bench.

[05:55]

It was a bench about hip height, a very odd bench, and she was wearing a bright-colored skirt. a flowered skirt and a t-shirt and earrings. I won these earrings for Darlene. And she also had a very bright colored scarf. And so immediately I said, this is a priest of a different color. And, you know, I just, so I kind of, it caught me, whoa, ho, what is this? She had these mischievous eyes when she looked at anyone. They sparkled, these wonderful sparkly eyes and a wonderful laugh and a smile. And she did a lot of laughing and smiling. And when she smiled, she radiated that smile. That smile filled the room with her love and compassion. She just was the opposite of what I thought of as a Zen priest.

[07:00]

So here was this other role model. who was wearing, you know, who was like, I mean, I don't, sometimes I think she wore makeup. God forbid, right? So I quickly learned that all of this was really part of Darlene. Darlene was funny. She was irreverent. But she, she's always very intimate. And I was fortunate to get to know her in the last year of her life at the same time that she was dealing with the news that the chemotherapy for her ovarian cancer wasn't working anymore. And that there was nothing the doctors could do. So at the same time I got to meet this person, I got to meet this person dying. As I got to know her better, she was very bold in her expression of who she was. She had what we call a New York chutzpah. She would say what she thought, and she wasn't, she liked, she kind of liked shocking people.

[08:02]

I remember one time she actually said something about lacy underwear, and I thought... What? This is a Zen teacher training? Anyway, so she would just, that was Darlene. Darlene would talk openly about her medical condition. She was very honest about not wanting to die. She still felt that she was very much alive and had planned for something different. But at the same time, as we watched her facing death, she just did it very directly and honestly. Each time she'd give us an update, what was happening with her medically. But her, as you can tell, her presence, her very presence, you know, was very liberating for me. And many others in the group. We felt kind of empowered to be ourselves.

[09:04]

We weren't Darlene, although I do like earrings. We weren't Darlene, but she was living, she was transmitting being authentic in every moment. That's what she was giving us by just being herself. whenever we saw her. So as this kind of talk unfolded for me, I wondered, you know, was it just going to be like anecdotes about Darlene? Or, you know, what was it about Darlene? And so what really came forth for me was partly what I was just talking about, this dynamic process of living and practicing authentically was what Darlene transmitted to us in everything that she did. And the other, in each moment, and also this idea of penetrating suffering and death.

[10:10]

Darlene did that. That was what her practice was about. And that was what her teaching was about. And that made sense to me because these are two areas that I had been kind of focusing on in my own development. How do I truly learn how to be authentic? And how do I face these difficulties? How do I penetrate these difficulties as opposed to trying to run away from them, trying to do something else with them, trying to make them go away, whatever? How do I do that? And watching somebody going through a dying process was a way of really being with that. So Darlene, just very quickly, I will say just a few things about Darlene in her life, and then I will try to channel Darlene in a talk that she gave for us about what she thought was her, during this last year of her life, of what she believed was her core teaching.

[11:11]

What was her legacy? What was her core teaching? So Darlene began practicing at San Francisco Zen Center in 1970 and was ordained as a priest in 1999. But when she was 36 years old, while she was living at Green Gulch, she developed a tremendously debilitating and disabling rheumatoid arthritis. And this occurred at the same time she had a young child as well. And rather than medicate herself, she just didn't want to use medication. She didn't want to use any sensation numbing pain medication because that wasn't her practice. Her practice was to be with whatever was. So she began to do a combination of physical exercises and mindfulness practice. And she perfected these and these became a lot of what she, a lot of her teaching and she taught a lot of groups of people with chronic pain and people with disabilities

[12:14]

Because of her severe arthritis, she could no longer and never again sit in half lotus or full lotus, or even in Sesa. So she had to truly penetrate the heart of Zazen, the heart of posture, in order to carry out her own practice. She had to find a way to practice Zazen when she couldn't follow any of the Zazen practice instructions that we ordinarily rely on. So she basically developed an incredible body of teaching for people living with chronic pain. And also, she taught the positive effects of meditation or mindfulness in pain. Darlene's story reminded me of a chapter in Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, called The Marrow of Zen. He started the chapter with a story from an old Zen sutra that used the metaphor of four types of horses.

[13:18]

Excellent horses, good horses, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of a whip. The second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin. The third one will run when it feels pain on its body, and the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. Suzuki Roshi says that when you are determined to practice zazen with the great mind of Buddha, you will find that the worst horse is the most valuable one. Those who can sit perfectly physically usually take more time to obtain the true way of zen, the actual feeling of zen. I hope that helps some of you who don't, who have a lot of pain. You're the worst horse and you're going to do great. Certainly, Darlene's difficulties and her great effort to practice with them resulted in an extraordinary personal practice and the ability to work with others for whom practice was such a great challenge.

[14:28]

Darlene worked with a number of groups throughout the Bay Area. and especially focused on groups of people to find delight in pain. She talked about suffering and delight. That was a lot of what she was teaching toward the end of her life. Not only do we learn how to tolerate and live with pain, but we actually get through to the delight of practice despite the suffering. I want to move now to what Darlene called her core teaching. Darlene, the first element of her teaching was body-to-body practice. She told us that this teaching was inspired by Suzuki Roshi, and I know Sojin has talked about the fact that, and others have talked about the fact that Suzuki Roshi didn't do a lot of

[15:32]

But what he did was spend a lot of time with his students, especially at Tassajara. He was part of the community. They were with him. They were absorbing his practice. So they got to observe him in various settings, and somehow transmission happened. So what Darlene would do, she was quite unusual, I think, in this way. When she had a zendo, called the Russian River Zendo in Guerneville, and when she had students that were, she felt were serious about practice, were devoted to practice, she would invite them to be with her and just spend time with her. And so they could come and spend time with her and they could help her clean, they could help her garden, They could go swimming, because she loved swimming in the Russian River. And she liked kayaking, so she would do kayaking sessions, invite people to kayak and swim, and just be with her.

[16:38]

And I got a chance to see a little of what she was talking about at one of the SPOT trainings. It was really, really hot. We were in the empty Nesendo in the Sierra foothills in the summer. It was like 98 degrees. So everybody decided that it would be good to have our dinner by the pool. And I thought, oh my goodness, a Zen pool party. Just one more mind-blowing thing. Anyway, so I got there and Darlene was in the pool with all of her students. It was clearly Darlene Sasongo was there. And they were splashing and dunking each other and they had all kinds of water guns, big pistols, you know, the kind of big rifle type thing, water guns. And I must have looked, I must have looked like, you know, the kid who came to the playground, you know, and didn't fit in. Because I stood at the side of the pool thinking, how do you, how do you do this?

[17:39]

What is this? And Darlene kind of sneaked up and shot me with a water gun. And I, you know, and then I just jumped in the water and, you know, started slashing and shooting people with a water gun. And, you know, I think it was interesting what I felt there. You know, there was something going on with Darlene and her students. They were all part of this big blob of humanity, feeling joy, loving each other. You know, there was just a lot of this wonderful feeling of just being together. And it didn't really matter what way you're together. It was just that it was fun. And in this case, fun was good. Fun was a good relief from being sitting in a classroom all day. And so this was this body-to-body contact that she believed just hanging out with you. And she kind of illustrated that. I mean, when you watched her during the time I knew her in that year, watching her, that's what happened.

[18:41]

You kind of absorbed this practice, this practice of totally being in your body and totally being present. So very, very close to one of the other very important elements of her teaching, she said, was the art of focus. Through learning to live with the almost constant pain that she had to live with, she focused on kind of synchronization of mind and body through attention to the minutia of things. When she talked about mindfulness, she really broke it down. One of her favorite scriptures was the Satipatthana Sutta, which is the early Pali Sutta on the four foundations of mindfulness.

[19:43]

So she really concentrated on mindfulness of body, and mindfulness of feeling, and mindfulness of mental objects, and so forth. this incredible amount of detail. And so some of you ever read this, they do talk about being a mind, looking at the sinews and looking at the blood and looking at the whatever, but Darlene really practiced this and she felt like she, for her own practice, for her own living with her body, this attention to this minutia, this focus, really helped her to be in her body, not to run away from her body, not to run away from the fears and the challenges of her life, which was a very challenging life. She said that she worked with students very intimately to notice very subtle changes, so she would work with them and coach them in their sitting and in their mindfulness to notice every little upcropping of energy and the complexity of everything that was going on.

[20:53]

rather than falling back on a story about what was going on or falling back on some easy way of looking at what was going on. She often used guided meditation. And as part of spa training, where I got to see this, she would be the person assigned to the evening zazen periods, as we all know, some of us who do this, these are the most challenging. you're tired, it's the end of the day, your muscles are tight. And she would be with us. Again, it was kind of a body-to-body experience with her. She would be with us and she would both talk to us about very subtle things in our body, but also come to each of us and very gently touch us and call our attention to various subtle things. It was quite powerful actually.

[21:55]

It was the most incredible kind of Zazen instruction I've ever had. It was very intimate, it was very personal. And I personally kind of got this way of being with any suffering in this way which is kind of part of penetrating it. You're with it in such intimate detail. You're with it completely and then taking the suffering apart. What nerve is being pressed and what muscle is being tightened and that sort of thing. So it actually gets you into the suffering in a way that is not so easy to get into, at least for me. So this kind of mindfulness practice and this very detailed focus was really very powerful for me personally. So the other thing she told us as her core of her teaching was that her own personal koan was, this present moment is the only safe place.

[23:13]

I think that's also another really powerful kind of thing about her. Basically, I think in her life, and then especially as she was dying, looking ahead and imagining what it would be was not a productive line of practicing, but being with whatever was going on at the same time. The other aspect of this being in the present moment was that she talked a lot about a concept which is not a concept unknown to us called simultaneous inclusion. That was really a lot of what she practiced and that practice of simultaneous inclusion was everything is here in this moment. Everything is here in this moment and learning how to broadened your mental focus and your consciousness to include everything, allowed you to be with whatever was there.

[24:24]

So it allowed her with the pain that she lived with constantly, and now with the fear of death, broadening your focus in the moment, not narrowing the focus to one thing, but broadening focus in that moment. was a really powerful part of her teaching as she was moving towards this end point. And I think she also talked about the importance of, as another element of her teaching, the importance of dealing with things right away in the moment rather than putting it off. That any kind of putting it off meant more suffering. So she saw this as practicing the third and fourth noble truths that there's an end to suffering and part of the end to suffering is practicing with great effort and great concentration and being in the moment with whatever is.

[25:31]

So one koan that she really liked that she used to teach with, and I was going to channel it through her, was the koan of Yunyun is sweeping grounds. So the introduction to the koan, as she quoted it in her book, and I'm using her book rather than the Book of Serenity, because I wanted to give Darlene's understanding and Darlene's way of looking at it. Having shed illusion and enlightenment, having cut off holy and ordinary, although there are not so many things, setting up host and guest and distinguishing noble and mean is a special house. It's not that there is no giving jobs on assessment of ability,

[26:36]

But how do you understand siblings with the same breath and adjoining branches? So Darlene feels that this introduction is referring to this concept of simultaneous inclusion or non-dual perception. She says, the experience we have when we just do our lives whatever is under our nose without considering whether it's timely, boring, pleasant, or unpleasant. In other words, it behooves you to be aware that you can experience your activity in two ways. You can experience the undifferentiated, non-dual, or simultaneous included flow of events on the one hand. And on the other, you can divide activities into categories so that you have a sense of doing one thing after another. So this is the case. This is case 21 in the Book of Serenity. As Yun-Yan was sweeping ground, Da Wu said, too busy.

[27:40]

Yun-Yan said, you should know there's one who isn't busy. Da Wu said, if so, then it's the second moon. Yun-Yan held up the broom and said, which moon is this? So in this story, there's some teasing going on with two monks. And one monk is challenging the other monk about, are you really mindful when you're sweeping? What's going on with you? You look busy. And the other monk is saying, there's one who isn't busy. But then that would imply that there are two people. There's some duality going on. There are two different two different things going on rather than one thing, rather than simultaneous inclusion. So then, when Dao Wu says, so if so, then there's a second moon, he's really pointing out that there might be some duality going on.

[28:49]

And Yun Yan holds up the broom and saying, this is it, the present moment is it, the present moment is everything. So he kind of does that to contradict it. So in Darlene's feeling, In Darlene's view, without special upset, there is no solution. Without struggle, there's no expression. Here, as Yun-Yang was sweeping the ground, Dao-Wu casually tested him. Yun-Yang said, you should know there's one who isn't busy. Good people, as you eat, boil tea, sow and sweep, you should recognize the one who is not busy. Then you will realize the union of the mundane reality and the enlightened reality. This is called simultaneous inclusion. Naturally, without wasting any time. We're all waiting time. Okay. So this, this really, this, this koan Darlene used, and this was really important to her in terms of her

[30:01]

working with the idea that at any moment there was suffering and death and yet at any moment there was also the universal realm and the realm of ease and the realm of mental expansiveness. And she really worked hard to guide students in this development process in a different way, I think, than a lot of other people. She did it as something that is possible for all of us to learn through guidance and training in a very focused way, rather than kind of reading a lot of things or coming to it on our own some way, sitting. She was quite directive, more than I think a lot of other people. She had an agenda. She had an agenda and she had a way. And so one of the things that she did was she actually did workshops In this case, she did workshops at Tassajara with business people.

[31:05]

So she was bringing practice out to a lay community of people who were not necessarily Buddhists, but who are busy and who were having problems, suffering with all of the duality in the world. And she would take them to this, introduce them to these kinds of teachings, kind of in a very easy way. She was very successful and her workshops were always really popular because of that. So she would do exercise specifically that would be more towards narrowing the mind's focus. You know, how do you concentrate? Concentrate on your big toe. She would have people sit for five minutes and see if they could just only think of their big toe. And then she would also do exercises that would include expansiveness. you know, how do you include your breathing, your big toe, your right arm? You know, she would kind of give them things and each time they would do it, they would kind of come with another way that they could add to the expansiveness of their thinking.

[32:13]

And pretty soon, if you've ever done that, pretty soon you lose all of the, you do it and then pretty soon you lose all of that, all of the detail. and you can get to this expansive place. Many people are lucky enough not to have to do it that way, but I think the thing that was unique about Darlene for me was that she cared so much and she really wanted to make sure that everybody got there somehow, they got some sense of it, so that that would be inspirational to them then. They could then cultivate and have the energy to continue to pursue that practice because they had some tools that they could use. Some of you, I guess, have read the Thich Nhat Hanh book on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and he also has that approach, which is using these exercises, using these ways of bringing people who are not

[33:23]

familiar with Zen practice or with Buddhist practice into this environment where they're supported in just having the space to expand their consciousness and to practice this simultaneous inclusion. Which to me, I think, was a good way especially when I was reading this at Tassajara, it was really a good way for me to deal with some of the things in my life that were kind of problematic for me. I was dealing with, for example, when you go to Tassajara, a lot of things come up for you. In fact, it's kind of like all ye who enter here abandon hope. You can't get away, so whatever comes up, you have to deal with. One of the things that was coming up for me was my mother who's old and dying and has been requiring a lot of my attention.

[34:30]

And so somehow this teaching of Darlene was actually really helpful. And there were some other things that came up for me. Some things that come up for us, our demons come, sometimes when we sit for a long time and they come in Tassajara too. So I have one particular kind of experience for me was kind of thinking about the one who isn't busy and kind of trying to imagine for myself what that would be. How would I kind of conjure that? How do I know it's there? How do I kind of bring it in consciously? Not just practice and let everything go and see what's going on, but how do I kind of call it? in in some way. I thought I would experiment since I had plenty of time. And for me, I kind of had a visual image. I called in a visual image that for me is being totally calm and a place that I have inside where nothing can disturb, nothing can disturb.

[35:48]

And then called in a demon, you know, called in what I call my crazy red-headed lady in the attic, who is kind of my very emotional out-of-control part. And by using these techniques, being able to sit simultaneously, totally at peace, and consciously bring in the most difficult things in my life, call them in and be able to be with them in a different way. and to be able to be with them and kind of look at them with some curiosity without being disturbed. And I found that, and I think that's part of what, when I talked about, well, you know, why did I want to talk about Darlene? I think that's, for me, part of why I wanted to talk about Darlene. I wanted to talk about, I wanted to learn about that. I wanted to somehow incorporate that into myself so that I could see, I could really live that teaching. I could kind of get her

[36:49]

her kind of in-the-body, body-to-body teaching and actually have that work for me in a way that I hadn't done consciously. We have these experiences, I've had these experiences where I'm very calm and zazen and some disturbing thought comes, some suffering arises, and I'm okay with it. But I hadn't actually consciously done it. with something where I had really been blocked, where I really had just hit a wall, hit a wall, especially with my mother, hit a wall with the suffering. I couldn't seem to work with it. Whatever tricks I pulled out, I could sit and sit. I could not do it. And yet somehow this training, this very strong mindfulness of looking at the object of suffering in great detail, looking at the feelings that came up with it, looking at the body sensations that came up with it and the emotions that came up with it. All of that sitting in, you know, holding, not holding on, but just being in this place of stability and safety.

[38:01]

So I think that it really, for me, I think what this, this kind of study of Darlene is, is kind of watching somebody, you know, watching somebody do this, first of all, watching somebody do it moment by moment and then thinking about how consciously is this possible to do consciously? Is it really helpful for me? And I think the other thing is, is it helpful in terms of working with other people who are having difficulties and having some tools to work that are a little bit more directive than just kind of letting it happen or not happen. So the last element of Darlene's training that she talked to us about was that you really couldn't just do this practice.

[39:03]

You couldn't just do it like, oh, I think I'll do Darlene's practice. That for her it really required vow. It really required making a real vow and a commitment to stay with it. Because it would be so easy, especially in a situation with serious suffering, it would be so easy to do something else, to do something distractive, or not to stay in each moment. And I think this She says, it takes greatest tension and effort to stay in the moment, to keep the focus and to practice simultaneous inclusion, especially in the face of sickness, pain and death. But only if we practice in this way, with this great vow to practice in this way, can we reach the marrow of Zen. But Darlene always

[40:05]

always added something else, and what she added, talking about vow and talking about zeal and vow and sticking to it, was the importance of recognizing when your energy is depleted, that if you stay in this very intense place all the time, there's a chance of burning out, and if you stay working with other people in this place and this kind of thing, there's a chance of burning out. really talked about being aware of energy depletion and that's why she liked to go swimming and play. So that's why she also incorporated the play in her practice and play was very much a part of her armamentarium. And so play then would help to re-energize when you just were sitting enough in your soup that it was good to go. And that's another thing that I tried to do in Tassajara. trying to really work with these issues that were so fundamental for me, so difficult for me.

[41:11]

But it was good to go do yoga every day or go for a walk, do some other activity, some physical activity, some fun activity that would get you more relaxed and re-energize you after really working hard. if you were working hard on something. So in December of 2010, about three weeks before Darlene died, we had a spot training. And up until the last minute, Darlene was planning on coming. She really wanted to come, but by that time her sickness was taking on a more rapid form. aggressive path and she was not able to travel. So she sent one of her students with a laptop computer and we set up a chair in front of the room with a scarf like this, a bright colored scarf for Darlene.

[42:20]

And she joined us through Skype. And when her small group went to talk about their, you know, we would break up for some of our activities in small groups. They took her, they took Darlene with them. And then she said that she wanted to say goodbye to each one of us, that she was going to die and she was getting ready to say goodbye. So, so we put Darlene's, the computer with Darlene sitting there in front of the room and each person went up to the computer and bowed and, you know, smiled and bowed at Darlene and Darlene bowed to us. It was amazing, the power of that. I can still kind of feel it. She was connecting with us. I mean, she could see us, we could see her.

[43:22]

And we met, and she made eye contact with us. And she, you know, she said, you know, it's like, I'm dying goodbye. You know, it's one of those profound experiences, I think, that none of us will ever actually forget. So, I think, up until the end, I mean, she was, up until the end, she was, and I think she even had a scarf on. But up until the end, she expressed herself fully. She was this multifaceted feminine personality that lived with such great enthusiasm and is a wonderful role model, certainly, I think, for men and women, but certainly for women. Somebody that really is a treasure for those of us in Zen practice. Certainly, I carry her inside, and I feel like she's living, she's alive now for many of us as she was then, just because she never really, she was still there, you know, I mean, it was quite

[44:28]

quite something. So I don't know if any of you, if you don't, maybe you get a feeling for her through me. She has lots of books, little books that she wrote on arthritis and living with pain, and people can get those if they're interested in reading those. And I don't know if there are any DVDs of Darlene. That would be something, huh? I don't know if there are. She's just a wonderful person that I think we have as part of our tradition, that has given us something that a lot of other people have not, and something that many of us who are practicing now, and teaching especially, can learn. Okay, so we're done I guess.

[45:15]

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