I think we're rolling. Jake, if you'll signal me at 10 and 5 till, that would be really helpful. Thank you. Well, welcome everyone to spring practice period for those of you who weren't able to be here on Saturday. So traditionally, the first talk the Shuso gives is a way-seeking mind talk. I think of it as a way to make myself very seen by you all. I feel like practice period is a time for us to reveal ourselves to ourselves and each other and help each other along through that process. So I'm going to do my best to reveal myself in ways that maybe I haven't in a way-seeking mind talk here before, at least a little bit.

[01:01]

An Away Seeking Mind talk traditionally is a talk about how you came to practice. So it seems particularly appropriate to me that I'm giving this talk the day after the eighth anniversary of Meili Scott's death. So Meili Scott was my first teacher, one of Sojin's Dharma heirs. And she's really the reason I came to Berkeley Zen Center. I had been practicing with her for a few years through the Buddhist Peace Fellowship based program, a kind of practice period in the world for people who are involved in social engagement and Dharma practice. I was a Theravadan practitioner. And at some point she told me she thought it would be a good idea for me to receive the precepts. And after some discussion we decided to do it here. And so I came here in the fall of 1999 and was ordained the following spring. like her, and I think she and Sojin chose my dharma name. So, the last few months I've been thinking about my practice, the last several months I've been thinking about my practice, is something I call threading the eye of the needle.

[02:14]

I think it's kind of like Wu Tzu's case 38 in the Mu Man Khan about the buffalo that passes through the window, everything passes through the window except the tail. And the needle, in my little analogy, is something like that characteristic with which we lead our lives. At least I've been feeling that a lot about my life these days. And the threads are all the different kinds of karmic experiences that really shape how I'm able to sew with it. And I like the analogy because I used to sew all my own clothes. And in high school, for those of you who might remember me in high school and in college, they were the most outrageous patterns and fabrics that you could imagine. It was my way of being a renegade. And now I just darn my socks and patch my clothes.

[03:16]

That seems kind of fitting. I don't think in these talks I often hear people say a lot about the very early part of their lives, but that's a lot of what I want to talk about because it has shaped so much of what I work with. The basic deep root issues that come up for me have their foundation, you know, with what I came into the world with, but also the early workings with it. And as I have been looking at these stories again, As you'll find in my koan, it's really been part of the work to do that. I feel like they're rather like old home movies, you know, the black and white ones without any sound. They just show up on the screen, the images just pass by, and I'm not them. And the people in them are my parents, but they're not.

[04:18]

I have an enormous amount of tenderness and compassion. An interest that feels quite separate from the ways in which I used to relate to these stories. I even worked them over when I was in therapy in my 20s and 30s. The things that... A foundational part about who I am really happened in the months before I was born and a few months after. I was conceived in Columbus, Ohio, and I was born in Denver, Colorado. And in between that time, my birth mother struggled enormously with the decision about whether to keep her, as it turned out, only child. And she did something that was extremely unusual in that time period. She didn't sign over the adoption papers right away. There was enormous pressure to do that.

[05:19]

I don't know all of her story, but I do know that she had enormous ambivalence and a great deal of suffering that went into her decision-making. My adopted parents, Jack and Helen, had their own difficulties early in their married life. They lost three pregnancies, the third one at six months of stillbirth, and my mother was sterilized at that point. told that she should have topped only one child because her blood pressure was so bad she never lived to see that child's 15th birthday. So you can imagine the amount of, at least I imagine, the amount of sadness and loss that they carried into their early married lives together. My parents, if I forget to say this as the talk goes on, my parents were both wonderful people. They're both deeply good and honest, hard-working, moral people who had a difficult child to parent and not a lot of parenting skills with which to do it.

[06:30]

Their most important value was that I would be raised to be independent. My mom was the youngest of four kids. She was the only girl and as soon as she could get her way out of Brooklyn, Manhattan, she skedaddled down to Texas, leaving her brothers the duties of taking care of their aging parents and dying parents. She didn't even go home to attend them for their deaths. My father was the oldest. He was one of two who finished high school. He's the only one who went to college, although he didn't complete it. And he, too, wanted to get away from the controlling, what he felt was the controlling kind of parochial nature of the Dallas-Fort Worth area and took his new bride to Denver where he had a job with American Express and became quite a successful salesman. He was a wonderful salesman and businessman. He wound up in Chicago running the branch of American Express there until he lost his job when I was 10.

[07:38]

So they wanted me to be independent. They didn't want me to fall, to have the difficulties they did. And they did it with abandon. And they did it so completely that having much in the way of physical contact with them or emotional support from them was something they were afraid to give. That's the one side of how they parented. Now the other side of how they parented was They told their adopted child that I was so special that they could never have had a child as special as I was. And you could imagine that was meant as complete encouragement. And it had the paradoxical effect of having me feel like I was not a part of them, but separate in some way. And also that I had to always be very good. very good, very perfect, in order to continue to maintain the standard that was expected so I would have, so I'd get to stay, so I'd have their love and support.

[08:51]

You know, the paradox of that is that they both love me enormously and it took me a really, really long time to get that from them. Just as we were sitting this morning, I was thinking my dad's two favorite poems were both about Ulysses. And one of them is Tennyson's that ends with the line. I realized I forgot something I wanted to say here. One of them begins with the line, or ends with the line, to seek to strive and not to yield. And the other one is Cough's Cavafy's Ithaca, which if you know that poem, I don't know it by heart. It's the one that was read at Jackie O. Nash's Kennedy's funeral. It's this wonderful story about how the process of life is what's important. And that has been, that's been an enormous tension in me my whole life because my life has been about doing, striving, seeking.

[09:55]

The piece I forgot to put up front here was this. relates to this. It's the needle, if you will. It's the quality of life that I think stands out most about this particular person sitting up here. Sojin described me as strong on Saturday. Now, Dogen says in his fascicle on light, Komyo, he says that Komyo is not about light being red or yellow or blue or white. It's about the brightness that's in each of us. It's our own manifestation of Buddha nature. But we all have our particular way of being that is that brightness. And that one for me is a certain passion and intensity and drive and exuberance It's the kind of quality that led me to run 62 1⁄4 miles in 24 hours, to make it through medical school, to take a risk to be a human rights accompanier in Guatemala.

[11:10]

It got me through a profound childhood depression and somehow survived. And it's a double-edged sword. This quality. There was, not serendipitously, the Kentucky Derby was a week ago, and I was reminded in its running last year. I don't know if you remember about the Philly 8 Bells who had to be put down at the end of that race. I was very moved by that and the day after that, There was a wonderful essay that James Smiley, if you know that author, wrote in the New York Times sports section that I read. And when I read it, I sobbed. I'm going to do that here now, too. I cried every time I read it for several times.

[12:13]

And I hadn't looked at it for quite some time. I knew I was going to read it for this talk. And it had the same effect on me. So this is her eulogy, if you will, or her comments about eight bells. I have a friend who trained a jumper who is a relative of eight bells, the son of her grandshire, unbridled. When my friend got the horse, a woman he knows, a steward at Santa Ana, told him to watch out because unbridleds tend to be both unsound and fearless. And my friend has found this to be the case. Where most horses have at least some caution, my friend's horse will try anything. His mental toughness and competitiveness always takes over, no matter what the circumstances. This is what we saw in Eight Bells. She was more resolute and competitive than was good for her. And it literally, in her case, went up her to death.

[13:16]

Fortunately, it ran me to the zen of it. So when I was 10, my dad lost his job, and for the next 20 years, from month to month, we weren't sure how the mortgage would be paid, and there was enormous strain in our home life. My mom worked a night job. My dad worked incredibly hard. It's a long story, but basically, he was out of the house for 16 hours a day, and there was no overlap in my parents' presence. Our house succumbed to silence, and it was a very lonely, alone existence. Not long thereafter, I stopped speaking to my dad over some things that seem so harsh to say in front of you all who are listening so attentively, but over some things that might, by today's standards, be considered abusive.

[14:25]

And my way of taking control was to shut down and remove myself. Now, I want to say, in case I forget, I love my dad enormously. And he and I sorted through our things. And by the time I was in my mid-30s, we were the best of friends. I have to say, really the best of friends. And we had a remarkably deep and intimate relationship. He really gave a lot of himself. But these were difficult times, and I withdrew into being the perfect little child, the quiet, perfect, invisible little child. There are two little stories from this time that stand out that I think are some of the examples and themes of Wayseeking Mind and What My Life Would Be. There's about 13. I called my mother into my room. My poor mother. I'm going to run out of time and stop talking so much.

[15:26]

I called her into my room and I said, Mom, Mom, I don't know why I have to marry just one person. Why can't I be in a house with all my friends? So maybe that's turned out to be true. And the other was laying awake at night looking at the stars. crying because I wanted to touch them, knowing that I was separate and really yearning more than anything to know what it meant to be connected with everything. So fast, jumping ahead a little bit here so I can get to how I got here in the next five minutes and leave a few minutes for a dialogue. I went off to medical school, not because I always wanted to be a doctor, but because I knew I had to be able to take care of myself because no one else was going to do that for me. And also because I desperately needed to do some good, have my life be of some use.

[16:29]

I didn't really understand until later how much joy and how important it is for me to be of service. I knew I really was lucky to have stumbled into being a doctor because I really, really liked it and I was good at it. When I think about being good at it, it's kind of puzzling to me that people said I was then because when I look back, I think the real reason I came to practice was not so much out of my personal suffering, which you can see was quite significant and bottled up Anger and need for perfectionism was huge. But really what got me here was the amount of suffering I was causing other people. And I could feel it most in my interactions with my patients. Not in big ways. You might not have noticed it. I sure did from time to time. The places where I missed people. The places where I didn't hear them.

[17:33]

The places where I was so focused on getting to the end point, to doing the right thing, to being good, that I didn't hear what was really important to them. And I could tell you many stories about that that stand out in my mind from 25 years ago. But that, I think, was really the fuel that something needed to change because, you know, as they say, it wasn't They weren't big, they were small, but I really felt them. So I went into therapy. I'm not sure how much it helped. At least it helped me have a little bit more balance with the stories that I had and a little bit more insight, I say in deference to all the psychologists here. But for me, in 1986, I had my first meditation instruction. Papasana by James Beres. It didn't stick. My therapist knew some meditation I learned Mecca and I took it like a thumb in a blanket to me and did it constantly as a way of comforting myself.

[18:45]

And then in 1994 my best friend from medical school was killed and that was the opening for me. I decided that I would do something that I wanted to do since I was nine years old, go to a place that had called me since then, and that was the Himalayas. I went to Nepal on a small organized trip and got to those mountains and something dramatic happened. I don't know what it was, but I came back and I started sitting in my little room for 30 or 40 minutes, twice a day for five years. I didn't miss a beat. I immediately started looking for meditation retreats. I had no idea what was involved. I signed up for the longest one I could get into. It was 10 days down in Yucca Valley a few months after I came back. And it was like an ocean swimming fish being let out of a cage into the ocean. I'd come home. I knew it. I started looking immediately for a teacher.

[19:47]

I prayed on it. I looked and looked and looked. I, by total serendipity, was invited to go to this talk that was being given. Diana Winston, who is the founder of the BASE group, happened to be there and be announcing that BASE existed. I had no idea whether I would get in or exactly what it was, but I went home the next day and wrote my resignation letter to my good paying job. I knew it was time. Don't ask me what I knew it was time for. It was just time. And two months later, after making the most difficult decision of my life, which was a different decision, I joined BASE and I met Mei Li and I thought, oh, well, this is too bad. This is the person I thought it was going to be.

[20:48]

Not my teacher, I wasn't very impressed. But she got me. And the first time I came in to this benda, I was sitting, I picked a seat probably about where John Mogey is, and I bowed to my seat, and the two people on either side bowed to their cushions, bowed to me as I bowed, and I burst into tears. I knew that I was where I was meant to be. And it's really this practice of being together with each other in this way that's taken this rough rock and begun to polish it down. I'm so grateful. There's a joy in my life. You know, it's so funny, the joy and ease, the anxiety is all but dissipated. and the joy and ease that I feel is in a certain way impersonal.

[21:53]

It doesn't feel like it's so personal to me. It feels like it's the joy and peace of all of life and I'm just in the flow of it and I feel so very fortunate. So I think I managed to get through at least some of what I wanted to say and there's a few minutes if anyone has anything that's come up for them that they'd like to talk about. Thank you very much. I look very much forward to spending this time revealing and being revealed, each of us, to the other during this practice period. May we have a lot of fun together. Mary? Was there any religious or spiritual training or component of your refrain? Yeah, thanks. It was actually my dad's mother. My only grandparent I really knew was Methodist. My grandparents were Methodist and so that's the tradition I was raised in.

[22:56]

My mom was Greek Orthodox. She high-tailed it away from the Greeks as fast as she could and spent her time in high school with the Lutherans. So she was quite willing to do whatever. And I said the Lord's Prayer every night. It's still a certain way in which that The goodness of the gospel is in my life, the goodness of my grandmother in that way very much informs my life. Thanks. Thank you, Andrea. Could you say something about the search for your birth parents? I'll say something little about it. I found them. When I was about 30, I finally found them. It was a good journey. It was really important for me to make it.

[23:56]

I needed to wait until I was ready to have whatever I got, be what I got. I was very fortunate. My birth father, although he's never really admitted that I'm his child, clearly knows that I'm his child and I have had some wonderful conversations with him. I'm very much like him. Same cloth, cut out of the same cloth. My birth mother and I have had one, two phone conversations and she's one of the one-third of all birth mothers who could have no contact. It's just too painful for her. But I've felt very complete. I think they're both alive. My dad is a has been in Ohio State for 52 years as a professor of radiology. Tamar? I was just going to

[25:02]

I was really interested in what you said about your patients and your relationships with them. And I kind of feel like I want to hear more about that part of your life and how you practice that in a way that is respectful for the privacy and confidentiality of the people you work with. So I just wanted to, if you can, sort of try to encourage you to share specifics about that because I feel like that's a part of it I don't quite know. Are you interested in the early things that happen? I think, yeah, the whole thing. I think that how those interactions and stuff, how those inform, yeah, I think just any time I think would be interesting. Either the early ones or what you experience during the day when men come here. I just Thank you. But I realize limitations in terms of wanting to respect privacy and confidentiality.

[26:10]

It's easy to do, actually. I can tell you one story that I was remembering about a long time ago. Alfred Bell. I know he's long gone. I was a resident at the Boise VA, and I made an amazing diagnosis about a condition that he had and packed him off to the Tertiary Care Hospital in Seattle where he got the care he needed. It took him a while to come back and I didn't know why until he arrived. It turned out he had a second diagnosis that I was unaware of and that was lung cancer. And it wasn't evident at the time that he was under my care, but he had symptoms and He said to me, he made a point of saying very clear to me, you didn't listen to me. You didn't listen to me. There was something else that he was trying to tell me that I didn't hear. And that really stood out because I thought I had done such a, I had, you know, one of the things about being a doctor is that I didn't say is,

[27:20]

I got to touch people, I got to care for people, I got to open my heart and love people in a way that I didn't really get to do that in my family. So the fact that I failed him in some way was really powerful for me. The other thing I would say is that the way I work is just so different now than what it used to be. You know, I'm a primary care internist. There's a lot to do and take care of for a patient in a 15 minute visit. I used to want to do everything for people and be very sure that I had taken care of things. Now, I let the person lead. You know, the 10,000 dharmas of the person's experience are what come forward to meet me and I receive them. and I hear what's going on, and my work is really to try and help support people in knowing that they can bear whatever suffering, whatever their conditions are, that they have the strength, the tools, and the support to do that.

[28:24]

So the way in which I practice is enormously different than it was 25 years ago, and even different than it was seven or eight years ago. Thank you for asking. It's very important to me. That's it. Thank you all very much. We'll get to do a lot of this.

[28:45]

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