Diversity - Unknown Date, Serial 00069, Side B

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we're very happy to have markedly on that day
margarita was born in the dominican republic and has been here for twenty nine years with a physician and she worked she's the director of visit
i work with health care for the whole if you were san francisco for them
and she is a practitioner at spirit rock and on the diversity committee there and in the teacher training program there
and so with is wonderful to have her today as part of our follow up from a the workshops we had ear
to help us keep this point issue ally
thank you can
and it's an honor to be asked to come and speak about the subject today
i'm just
turn this went on to oh
and every time i'm asked to speak about this this morning i had that seem incredible shaking as
it's because when i think about and i look around in the world or inability to get along and how
the resulting pain of that
often i feel like i'm not really up to the task of addressing this issue and yet i continue to do as i call my friend ellen
we fear this morning as a new i'm scared coming home by hand from a distance
so what i'd like to try to do this morning is to talk about the relationship of diversity work and buddhist practice and i would
i would like to spend a little bit of time on
talking about my own personal experience and kind of looking back at events in my life that point to a certain dry were certain interests
to cross some gap and now recognizing that that's the thread that i've been following because i never thought i would be involved in diversity work is just let something that i were saw when yet here i am but maybe before i started i wanted to read a poem of pablo
a ruler who i'm sure most of you know who he is but when he don't he's probably one of the most famous poets of south america and he was alive at the time of via again the regime in chile where there was a terrific amount of hope and the subsequent assassination of him
and this poem which does the english translation
it's called now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still for once on the face of the earth let's not speak in any language let's stop for one second and then move arm so much
it would be an exotic moment without rush without engines we would all be together in a sudden strangeness
fishermen in the cold see would net harm wales and the man gathering salt would look at his her hands
those who prepare green wars wars with gas wars with fire victories with no survivors would put on clean clothes and walk about with her brothers in the shade doing nothing
what i want she be confused with totaling activity life is what it is about i want no truck with death
if we were not so single minded about keeping our lives moving and for ones could do nothing perhaps a huge silence might interrupt the sadness of never understanding ourselves and our threatening ourselves with death
perhaps the earth can teachers as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive
now i will count to twelve and you keep quiet and i will go

so i was saying
didn't think i'd be involved in this and currently some of the areas and i find myself involved in diversity working include a national project with fetzer institute where and program has been developed cold healing the heart of diversity and it's
really looking at a different approach to diversity work on
that a tells you really look at the layer be below blame and guilt and the separation that results from that but to really feel that place where we are all really hurting from the separation and really looking at this work as a way of healing
ing ourselves and at social healing and sees me i'm also part of the young
an
diversity committee at spirit rock and recently was asked to begin a diversity task force at my job which is a whole other dimension and down marlene scoot over a chance kuhn over and i have been running a meditation group for women of color in marine city that just the
fast in the january had a years anniversary
oh
when i think ah
back to when was the first time that i remember consciously wanting to walk across a lot a very big gap and i think it was the time when i was very very young maybe about seven and the field behind the house that i lived in was sugarcane field
and dominican still want to cut cane and dominican government and arrangement with the haitian government for the haitians to come and cut the king and the relationships between the two countries i've always been quite adversarial with the dominicans hating the haitians because at some points haiti
dominated dominican republic and there's a lot of animosity we speak different languages a speaker french dialect and dominican republic we speak spanish
so there was a lot of fear and all kinds of stories about the haitians and they had to carry a burlap bag with machetes and other belongings and people will say you know they carry little kids in there and the eat people and they've be
stories like this all based an incredible amount of fear in alienation and i found that as a kid when i watched the people mostly the men cutting the cane and i was very curious and after a while i figured out i would had a little ten and i will go over to the bar
wire fence and stand there with my tin and we couldn't really speak with each other because we didn't speak the same language but the was one particular guy kind of figure out what i wanted and he would cut a cane and bring it over and over the fence would squeeze that on both sides and little trickle of changes will come and i'd have my ten and we had this
little routine that we would do throughout the whole harvest and no one in my family that it knew i was doing this i was secretly doing this but it was my way of connecting and feeling
supported by that connection
later when i was about fourteen i started volunteering in a rural hospital
and things were very bad and continue to be be very bad
when people were in the hospital you had to bring your own sheets you had to buy your own medicines i mean basically was just like a place to be and so i would go and home at first i worked in labor and delivery in mostly saw dead babies being born because people wouldn't come into the hospital unless something was terribly wrong
and that i walked over to pediatrics and there was this little kid in particular that i remember movie was about ten who was dying of now what i recognize as hepatitis just by the way he looked
and i can get so sick that he couldn't speak and i would just come and visit him and sit with him and i would bring him pictures that i cut out of magazines and paste them when card were just to bring something at watch his faith light up and we will just sit and hang out and i remember he he eventually
died and
all the while that he was in the hospital was lying on newspaper because his family didn't have enough money to and half sheet
but town
i remember that even though it was an extremely painful experience being with that that it was there was a comfort in the wanting to be there
later being in the states when i began medical training which is kind of later much later in my life
i spend the majority of the time at san francisco general and there was a refugee clinic and back then the refugees were
the big laotian and cambodian wave and
i realized that going to the refugee clinic was probably the most one of my favorite things to do i loved being there and yet what was going on was first of all again trans am
we were speaking through translators many other people were from hill tribes among and me in on
and some of the story is that the depth of pain was something that was beyond anything i had even ever heard of and sometimes it will it would be the story
the details of how much how many members of their family had been killed what it took for them to get out of cambodian to thailand what happened then i mean was just and then other times it was just getting almost the physical experience of people who have suffered so much that there's a level of desolation that is boundless
oh
and despite that i found that i loved being there and for the past
eight years or so i've been working with health care for the homeless in san francisco enough and people as we will honey isn't it harder and why would you want to work there and i
sometimes felt it was difficult to ends right now i realize and this is why i'm telling you all these little stories that what i felt when i have found is that by walking across a big golf by being willing to be
with pain by being willing to witness the experience of other people if i'm trying to really have a meaningful relationship with another human being that's very different from me
i have to in order to do that i have to drop all the culture class specific ways of being i really have to appeal at something else in myself that is universal and in so doing i am finding an amazing degree of freedom freedom from my own limit
it a point of view and so paradoxically i'm telling you this story because i think that the opportunity of walking across a big difference is that we grow tremendously as human beings and that is the opportunity that exists there is for us to see and to begin to have
a sense that were real wholeness and our capacity to hold so much more than we thought was possible
and then has a very healing effect and when healing is happening is that you know as a physician and think about healing all the time what does it take and when what's possible and what's necessary in order to heal and when healing is happening it's not a unidirectional it's not like the practitioners healing the person but healing is happening and we are all
being healed in the process i am being healed in the process of administering of serving other people
so on
thinking back now to are buddhist practice at the core of the buddhist of the buddha's teaching his first of all our intention when we undertake the practice to acknowledge that life as we experience it involves and terrific amount of suffering and i think for many of us
just acknowledging that coming to grips with that accepting that it's a big hurdle
and once we see that then is that our hope practice or whole endeavor is about trying to see how that suffering can be alleviated and finding a way out of that suffering
and when i think about own healthcare and down
where we're sort of attempting to do something similar in a different way and i fight you know what what how does human suffering happen aside from you know the traditional scriptures and what we will be talking down the line in terms of a buddhist practice i realized that the me
majority of human suffering happens in the context of relationship without there being with other human beings if you really think about it most of our suffering is related to what we do to each other don't do our interactions with each other so if our practice is the realization that life as we know
it involves so much suffering and that this practice is about finding a way out of suffering then how we relating to each other is at the core of our practice because that's what most of our suffering is happening
so no i mean i can think of anything more important and more central to her practice then our relationships with each other
so
one of the things that i realized as well
and psychology has helped us with that it's to really understand how vulnerable we are as human beings
that we get a sense of who we are but how we are reflected on as we grew up from the time were very little
we get a sense of or sense of worth
but hello the world reflects back on us and for some of us that reflection is extremely painful
for many of us when we walk out the door if we if we look very different from the mainstream from the minute you walk out the door there's some kind of weird reflection
you know there's a feeling of alienation your own experiences net
being mirrored anywhere you look at tv and there's no way that looks like human tv if there is somebody that looks like you and tv it's some kind of criminal or is really being portrayed in some negative light
so for many people of color in this country
there's a huge debt of invalidation of just not being seen of having their experienced and being reflected by anything in this society that has held up in a way that has value so there's this feeling of invalidation and then on top of that there's the oppression
not only is our experience now being validated but we are being oppressed because of the difference so
if we are on the side where we have a great deal of privilege when we walk out the door we're getting the car were going to the store and we don't have to worry about somebody following of thinking that we're going to steal something then when we come to the table our tasks are very different
our lessons are very different depending on where we are in this continuum of privilege to oppression and there's gradation of this in between but we don't all have the same job and we didn't weekend and ask each other to sort of do the same thing that we ourselves would do because he can be
it's really coming to grips with the diversity now
requires that we understand that the other person's experience may be completely different from ours but to be able to hold the fact that that experiences just as valid as ours and to allow them to co-exists so that when we're going to communicate their needs to view their to be a willingness
to acknowledge the validity and also the fact that they are very different experiences so
if we have a life of ease ease of movement and freedom to move about and by what we want and moving to whatever neighborhood then in looking at the people who suffer a lot of oppression than our job is to be willing to first of all open and hear what that experiences
is to be able to validate yes i see you and it makes sense to me that you would feel rage that you will feel whatever given what you are telling me
and on the other side and i can say that that point of validation and a lot of times in political work we get stuck in that place of feeling on less until we are really validated is very difficult to move from our position
you know it's like this debt that you're carrying and until somebody sees you and says i see you and it makes sense to me it's very difficult to they move on and there's been a lot of talk in the buddhist community about you know you need to have itself before you can kill up the self and so but and there is some truth to that he may not be a simplistic as
that but as human beings we are vulnerable and there certain almost mental steps that we need to go through in order to find freedom and so a lot of times in the discussion around this people have said you know they are in using right speech and because i'm not using a speech you know it just so i can listen to
that and we can use that as a weapon and as an excuse me to open up
so on and to remember that when if we're going to do that for another to validate and others experience that it's not that we're just doing that for them in the process of doing that we are doing our own healing
it is not separate
so if we are on the side of oppression and we have all this stuff that we're carrying and there's all the anger and all the first and all the desire to condemn which is you know comes with them with suffering
is to be able to see the person of privilege to see the vulnerability of that person still and to see that person's need for acceptance from us
and that's always are often very challenging
for people who are
in that place of oppression to see that the person we see as the oppressor
has their own vulnerability and their own name
so on
hopefully what we attempt to do is to get be below that layer where we just sort of throwing blame around and feeling guilty and paralyzed by guilt and because we will it just both things paralyzes and we don't get very far and the fact of the matter is that we are all hurting it
if we look deeply and some of us don't have to look if we don't want to
and then there are other of us were there is no choice every day when we walk out the door we're facing this issue but whether we have the choice to look at it or not we are hurting from the separation and if we're willing to look deeply we can find that place and recognize
it
so
thinking along the line silver healing
pima children's and latest book is a wonderful book i would recommend it to anyone and she was quoting him
this little part about widening our our circle of compassion she was quoting rashi burner glassman from new york when sure most of you know about he works with the homeless and
he was saying
he doesn't really do this work to help others he does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society they had that he had rejected it's the same as working with the parts of himself that he has he had rejected
and then she goes on to say it's even did difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves and what we reject in ourselves it's what we're going to reject out there but that in a nutshell is how it works if we find ourselves on work
workable
and give up on ourselves then we will find others unworkable and give up on them
and i have being involved with the fencer group there are three three groups and were about twenty four h and m were very mixed group an ethnically primarily and class there's a little bit less variation but there some and it's been an amazing
xperience for me to have gone through a whole year retreats and now we're entering a second phase we're going deeper
and i had one experience said town
but i wanted to tell you about just to give you an inkling of what's possible
at the end of the first year we had like a little ceremony were going to do with redressed part of of being able to be with difference is also really get to know what our own background is and so we were to dress in
clothing then said something about where we came from and i had some dread had address and michelle from a grandmother or something and i was walking up to in front of the group to talk about you know the dressing
as i stood there all of a sudden he started sobbing and i had no idea why i was crying and all of a sudden i realized that what i was crying about was the grief that i was caring about all the indigenous people of the island and i came from that had been annihilated
and as a kid i sort of knew about it and wanted to hang out with people in the country i mean that there's no one left there who has it was a full blooded indigenous person i mean they're features in people's faces that you can tell they have some indigenous globe but the culture is basically gone but somehow i had been carrying this girl
eve and i think that because i was in it makes community where people talked about experiences from so many different places that grief who was then able to be known
and i could not have known that in some other homogeneous community or even
where i normally hang around in
so when i thought to myself and there were some indigenous people in our group the potential for healing of a mixed community is amazing it's like we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what may be possible here
and then i this same person has an indigenous men from minnesota at one point just recently we were
having one of our sessions and at the end kind of wider the side of his mouth almost when you ask for something that you know of course it's never going to happen and no one will be able to give it to you he sort of slips out of the side of his mouth
oh i was hoping that maybe you guys could help us get our land back
and everybody in the room kind of charcoal and it's this discomfort oh yeah we thought you say that and they're kind of killing him i just stood there
with the enormity of that wish and i thought and i found myself immediate thinking it's impossible it's hopeless all the over the why not reasons coming up and i so what would it take for my heart to really open to that which even if it is seems
possible even if i'm feeling competent even if it brings up all this despair and hopelessness can i open my heart to that wish
and wandering you know why are all the different ways in which we close and cannot hear each other because we feel inadequate because of always
negations that come up
so when we look at the practice
and try and see what what what do we have in the practice that helps us address the
this dilemma
when very important pieces the via
piece about inclusivity we really we sit so that we can develop the capacity to be with a hold of our experience from the most ecstatic wonderful high experience to the most awful embarrassing ugly disgusting
the experience we may have and and can we develop
the substance to be with that whole range and that's what one of the major pieces of the practices to develop their capacity of inclusivity to really include all of life so that we're not leaving pieces of our experience and therefore pieces of ourselves by the wayside
and down
the other part of our practice that is important is the opportunity of insight and you know we have inside all the time you know we put this in this together and oh yeah because of this and therefore that but it's not that kind of ruins that is the insight where we really get it were
the the understanding is so profound that it's willing married to change or transformation and through that insight one of the things that we become aware of is that the experience kind of goes on along of
in some ways to to two lines that i see on the one hand is the particular our individual conditioning the individual filter that develops from how where we grew up and what our family was like and what the conditions were like
and the other one is more kind of the generic predicament of being a human being with a human mind and the whole experience of self and the separation that comes up just by the mere fact that we solidify a sense of self the minute that is present
inherent in that experience of self is separation because in their self and everything else that isn't self and in the particular with a conditioning you know our our own personality you know it's always trying to sort who show itself up and protect itself and anything that contradicts that feels threatening you
we mix and mix it makes sense so we're walking around editing experience all the time so i'm in looking at the particular and i can speak for myself just watching you know when somebody makes a comment that seems bizarre to me i can't relate to it seems weird that if i really pick apart the pieces so
that the movement of mind first there's i don't like this then pretty soon as it's wrong and then it extends to with that person's you know some judgment about the person it's that person is weird and pretty soon if i really don't want to deal with it then it's sort of like that not only were there just you know
kind of useless and eight you know write him off and i think that if you really i mean i don't know if you've had that experience but
that movement from i don't like this to giving up and writing the person off is done in a millisecond sometimes and we walk around doing this to each other all the time and we feel it mean the other person feels it
who's the director of the federal program and i were talking in and said you shouldn't say you know frequent deceiving stop at the at that level of i don't like this and just be able to tolerate that and just stay there without giving up on the person will be leagues ahead
on
and then i had a call from them one of the men in in my group and he said you know what i'm going to talk to you some more about something you said and
i had talked about this piece of on judgment but then the other thing i had said was you know is a possible couldn't we perceive beyond our personal histories is it possible that we could actually see beyond our story
and he was saying you know there was a man in our group who remain in the periphery throughout the whole year and it was unclear still to this day what was happening he felt himself very separate but to what degree the we continue to perpetuate that it is still unclear but so this men that had call me was saying you know when so and so
says something and he would sometimes throw things in there were quite provocative and everybody was that are reacting so that when someone says something and i really try to open to what he's saying
and really relieved my judgments of side and chance really open to it since when i feel as this kind of disorientation
and and we talked about you know how uncomfortable that this orientation is you know there's sort of the fear like i'm going to forget what's right and wrong i'm going to loose hold them you know my sense of life and how everything should be or is somehow i'm going to lose a handle on reality and
and down
so we talked about what does it take to hang out there and how necessary hanging out there is to really begin to understand and others experience and payment can and she keeps talking about our
all this machination that we go through life all that striving and so much to do with not being able to feel that ground listener the fact that at the bottom there's nothing really solid to stand on and were always grasping could try and find something solid or some sense of certain
d
so i wanted to him
read you a little bit
about that so she was saying you know but buddhism buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try and get ground under our feet and she goes on to talk about
how we're always trying to make everything right or wrong and this is solely in the service of trying to get some sort of certainty and and then she says instead of making others right or wrong or buttoning up right or wrong in ourselves there's a middle way a very powerful middle way
this middle way involves and hanging onto a version so tightly it involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong we do it utter to a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security equally though when we
make things right we're still trying to obtain some kind of ground or security
could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hit hang out in that space where we're not entirely certain about who's right and who's wrong
could we see hear feel other people as they really are
it is a powerful practice this way because we'll find ourselves continually rushing around to try and feel secure again to make ourselves or them either right or wrong
but true communication can happen only in that open space

saturday degree
that we can hang out in this ground likeness then there's an experienced with spaciousness and with that experience of spaciousness true compassion comes it just comes and joseph goldstein knows her though he said one of the head teacher said the very center at them
i'm in meditation center environments and juices and he had been away on sabbatical and when he returned people were asking him you know is there's something new that you've got during this time of the deepening of some inside and he says you know
i really understand how compassion comes out of emptiness
and that it is when the i it's ned super busy and net so present when that isn't there then there's no separation
and the heart just moves the heart is moved by somebody else's experience it's not an effort to send something that we have to try it just happens
so on
our capacity to be with others and our capacity to really be compassionate is in direct measure to r
effort to not be so identified and then so defensive about that identity and their certain traps that i want to talk about in the practice oh boy would going to run out of time here
there when are the things that happens with a meditation practice especially if you've been sitting for a long time is that and he started to have experience in some ecstasy or you start to have wonderful insight is that there can
a came the develops a very subtle form of a version where we are so preferring transcendence that we then have this ongoing low great war with our humanness
and in many ways at really walking fully into our humanness while at the same time having had the experience of emptiness can be one of the was amazing challenges
because their experience you know as we develop in the practice what's offered you know that pristine
realm of transcendence is so attractive
you know when we see it ah that's it that's where i want to be but the other side is that we are both empty and full
and when we are caught still in this delusion were caught in duality and freedom comes when we are no longer perceiving in this way
and then the other a trap sometimes this is the identification the attachment of what it means to be a spiritual person you know if i am a spiritual person i don't have those hateful feelings or i you know that rage that i see in so and so you know that's just outside of the realm of experience as
and
perhaps one of the hardest things and better
for many people is really opening to the party where it sells that is really hateful and we all have it we all habit
and for me it was amazingly hard and it was amazingly freeing to see that i had really hateful feeling sometimes then given certain conditions hate arises and it arises for the people that i love the most my daughter i can't think of anybody i love more than my daughter and given certain condition
it's you know i to hate can arise in me and if i don't admit that to myself i will act from that motivation and hurt other people
if i can admit that to myself than i have a choice whether to act or not to act
so this even though it's carry even though it's ugly even though we don't want to look at that part of ourselves really opening to that part of ourselves that is in the shadow it's one of the most freeing experiences and then we know than other people's actions and that out of the realm or
wow an experience and true empathy is possible because we know that somewhere even if we have been acted on it we are capable of doing some very terrible things
and if we don't have to admit that to ourselves we will kind of do it under the table
so on

he'll come
trying to choose where to live
oh i'll tell you a quick story that speaks to have them
the listing view and i and i make a point of of talking about this because
in the spiritual practice if we don't really understand this we are a willing to move into this messy part of our humanness that involves dealing with each other and dealing with each other when we're very different from each other
so seeing and understanding that this is our practice this is our practice so i was some it was the opening retreat at spirit rock and oh
i think maybe the for the first day and when we sat there was then the amazingly exciting thing you know and we were sitting in the in the hall and
outside there were tons of men you know still planting little bushes it was like this big push to finish the the place on time and in the retreat get started and things weren't quite finished and so there was a lot of work being done outside and there were many of the teachers at spirit rock and there was alive
noice and some of these guys later i realized for mexican and they were talking in spanish we're talking very loud and somebody one of the teacher said whole wedding to see maybe sylvia speak spanish and she can talk to them and you know and i i started just sitting there having this very uncomfortable feeling of us and them and the sort of otherness
and also just own
i had started feeling just such a sense of gratitude for all the effort and the energy they took the bill that place all the luxury of the place itself and then feeling these men outside and so i had this that also caught in a conflict of the separation and so a one point we were doing walking meditation to
guys were outside of the walking meditation room again in talking really loudly and i went outside and i said hey guys you know this is the silent meditation and even in catholicism you know they're silent retreats and they've got it immediately and the minute they knew what was happening they started talking really softly
and then i could start a like goal of all the stuff that i was having so i went back into the meditation hall and i set and julie western was a wonderful teacher in that she provides a very soft very kind way of holding experience was doing the introduction to the to the meditation and i sat there
and soon i began to have that experience that it had had other times and real our openness you know beyond a concept just an incredible spaciousness and the i was no present myself was a busy it was just the in an open space
ace and then the guys would use the pick and he would hit a rock and i hear the sound click you know hitting the rock and in that moment of hearing the sound i knew that i was hearing and then feeling becoming and the appearance of self and then it will go to be silent again and he would dissolve
into spaciousness and then experience that then being identified a just space and the sound will come again clink and i i was president and he we just went back and forth back and forth back and forth and for the first time my life i really had no preference absolutely and i could see
when were kylo ren pushing from the tibetan tradition headless a quote that a sort of always kept in my mind we live in illusion and the appearance of things there is one reality we are that reality when we understand this we realize that
we are nothing and being nothing we are everything that is all
and a new tradition in the zen tradition in there
versus of the oh yeah
faith mine it's all about this and i just wanted to mention will re-render a piece at the redeeming in a at the end
the great way is now difficult for those who have no preference when love and hate are both absent every everything becomes clear and undisguised make the smallest distinction however and heaven and earth or said infinitely apart
there's a jumping to the end emptiness here emptiness there but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes infinitely large and infinitely small no difference for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are saying
so too with being and non-being don't waste time in doubts and are humans i have nothing to do with this one thing all things move amount among and intermingle without distinction to live in this realization is to be without anxiety about
non perfection
to live in this phase is the road to non-duality because the non dual is one with a trusting mind
any know
we can spend a whole life to reading this

yes to ah
finish i want to say that this work of diversity
we cannot do it
in in theory or by reading about it we have to be relating to each other to do it
and unlike in many parts of the world where you have homogeneous populations you know that can hate and other homogeneous population somewhere else in the bay area we have an incredible opportunity because we're such a mixed group
ethnically culturally class wise it's an amazing opportunity if we know how to use it it's kind of unprecedented in the world and when we even think about what what's happening with buddhism in this country we look at buddhism in other countries and and look at for example thailand such a day
shapely buddhist country and the nuns in thailand and that fed by the populace because her now considered worthy of enlightenment or you know just not worthy substrate
and and i keep thinking you know the incongruence of a buddhist practice and a culture or cultural attitude that pervades the practice to that degree that they can go on and so one of the questions is you know do we have an opportunity in this country