Psychology + Zen = Philosophy and methods to relieve suffering and reveal happiness.
Psychology: We project onto others what we reject in ourselves. Some call it a Shadow. Healing comes from making the unconscious conscious, taking responsibility for our projections, integrating what is split off as our own thing.
Zen: There is no separate self. When we can be at one with every aspect, then we belong everywhere and we reject no one.
We heal the world by becoming intimate with our whole selves.
Back in June I gave this talk on my experience of working with my traumatized body and how we might apply what I learned to heal the trauma of racism. Now seems a good time to post it, though late, because soon I'll be co-leading an ongoing support group for White people to uncover and transform racism, White Work on Racism (WWOR).
August 2020
My mother died on February 17th.
In recent years I called her Mum as a repair for the awkwardness in my youth that arose from obeying my father’s insistence that we call her Mother. This stilted salutation, I believe, was to repair the fall from aristocracy that our family suffered by leaving Russia. The proper word really would have been Mama but it didn’t stick, maybe because we were repairing our Russianness too. So much brokenness, never spoken but always implied.
Who was my mother? Who are any of us under all those repairs?
While I was mourning her loss, my Zen teacher, Roshi Joshin, asked if there was an image of her that came to mind, a way that I could sense her presence now. I thought of a butterfly, then changed my mind because butterflies land on things, and my impression of her was that she never really landed. "Perhaps a hummingbird," said my daughter. Perhaps. All I know is that I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t touch her. Or I couldn’t get her to reach me. I’m not sure what the difference is.
Later I realized that she saw me as a butterfly. And when I saw one several days later, seeming to call for my attention at the window, I realized that she was present in the way I see myself. In fact, my first memory is of a blue butterfly crushed by my brother. Maybe I expressed it to my mother. Or maybe I constructed it from things she said. Anyway she wrote a poem called "Blue Butterfly" for my 50th birthday. It memorializes the time when a photographer asked to use my picture in an ad, then saw that my legs were in casts and I could not walk. Here’s an excerpt:
Here was a spotlight on the indifference around, the dismay of a mother,
the trust of a child, and her innocent faith that she would be well,
made so by the grown-ups who loved her. With a turn of the prism,
our powerlessness was bared in the glare. A slight twist cast a softer
yet lucid light on the sweetness of innocence that, much too soon,
would be lost.
Yet another refraction made blaze the pain that awaited
in the tomorrows, no matter our will or resolve. In the midst of this spin,
there she sat, my blue butterfly, tranquil still in the moment.
Time enough later to learn of the future and change.
Refractions upon refractions. Reading her poem now, I understand that my illness (JRA) destroyed her idea of innocence and beauty, and there she was, spinning, while I sat, tranquil still. Of course I had no choice; I couldn’t get up and walk, could I? And this, in a nutshell, produced my lifelong struggle. She was moving so fast I couldn’t sense her center. I felt like I needed to move faster but I couldn’t. The frustration was immense. When I expressed it, they called it rage. And then it became rage. Such is the tragedy of interconnection, healed somewhat by poetry belated.
The 9th Zen precept is classically translated as "not being angry." I remembered that the Zen Peacemaker version was something like 'transform suffering into wisdom,' but when I went to look it up, it had changed! Now it is "bearing witness to emotions that arise."
Oh, if only someone had been able to bear witness then! How different our lives could have been if she had been able to bear witness to her dismay and grief instead of trying to escape it; how different had I realized that brokenness is part of the nature of things, to be included, not rejected. What if the photographer had chosen to feature the disabled girl? How different the perceptions of all those consumers of culture, how different our understandings of each other!
Thankfully the world is trying to change. Thankfully I have access to this wisdom now as I heal and accept my body as it is. I just listened to an On Being podcast with Resmaa Menakem on healing racial trauma through awareness of the body and an understanding of the context of trauma. And our own Village Zendo featured a talk by Tokuyu Hoshi on brokenness. And yesterday I watched a conversation on Disability Justice sponsored by Dance NYC on Facebook. We are bearing witness. We are acting. We are healing.
was me not you
I thought
I knew
butterfly adieu
now who?
Related: Who Was She? Part One
June 18, 2020
How are you?
Can you answer as you did before the plague, before the knee to the neck, or before you knew about the knee to the neck?
Nowadays you might share how you are coping with it, or your opinion about it, or your feelings about it. For the first time in a long while, we are experiencing the same subject, no need to dither on about the weather, our usual common ground. We’re in it together, in this worldwide connected suffering that bitterly divides us. And we’re in it alone, suffering in our own way, fed by our own history, nourished by what we attend to in our present, and sustained by the story we tell about it.
My story features a hospital ICU, a ventilator, a deep tongue kiss with death, and maybe a recovery. People wish me recovery, and so do I, but the truth is I can’t have back what I had.
How about you? Has it all been taken away? your routine, your people, your purpose? or maybe those things are there but changed so much they are unrecognizable. Mostly when we find ourselves in virgin territory, we reach back for what we know. We want to ‘open the country,’ resume operations, resume shopping and consuming. But many now see this moment as a potential turning point, a moment to start over, to really open the country, open our eyes to the injustice we didn’t want to see, to learn about ourselves, to join together to create meaningful change.
The first tenet of Buddhist practice, classically translated as Cease from Evil, is understood by the Zen Peacemakers as Not Knowing. It’s different from what we experience as uncertainty, which I contend is more like rehearsing scary outcomes. Not knowing means we see the world as it is instead of what we think it is, fresh at every instant, instead of an idea. What is this world as it is? It is impossible to answer; it is only possible to become aware of our ideas, gently let them go, and let the other show itself.
Dropping ideas and starting fresh is not so easy. Ideas and habits re-assert themselves like weeds in the suburban lawn. The Zen koans use weeds as metaphor for our entanglements. We can never really get rid of them, even in a monastery or a mountaintop, but with practice— either meditation, good psychotherapy, a creative process, or all three—the weeds can stop choking our little buds of wisdom.
If I think about what gave me pleasure before—singing and dancing, and I compare that experience with my current condition of labored breath, choking voice and unsteady body, I feel anguish, grief, frustration, and even rage. Those feelings arise from ideas like “I need to get better,” “What happened to my strength?” or “Maybe I’m going to die.” The only action that can follow from those thoughts and feelings is war with my body as it is. Tension then accumulates and makes it even more difficult to breathe or vocalize; if someone speaks to me I snap, or croak. I’m sure they don’t understand. I suffer.
But with practice, I can dive into the experience itself, I can breathe the breeze as it moves through me, chew my food, swallow, flow with the rhythm of my body and the world that I sense. I enter the bitter comparison and I am free of it. I enter the grief and see that nothing is lost. I enter the rage and warm myself by the fire as I do good for others. Such is the enticing paradox.
On Sunday at the Village Zendo, Roshi Joshin invited the community to speak to each other about their experiences. People have been protesting, marching, calling on elected officials, risking their lives to transform the world. And now, in this space we were encouraged to turn inward to notice our responses and share them with each other. When at the end she asked us for one word to describe what we were feeling after the practice, many said ‘opening.’ We opened the borders and were nourished by what we received. And now, back to work.
June 2020
Dharma Talk June 30On Super Gay Pride Day, June 30th, the weekend of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, I gave a talk on limits. I've decided to post the whole transcript as well as the link to the talk, just in case you want to hear my personal story and the story of several female Buddhist ancestors, two of them disabled.
I'm posting the transcript, in its talky format, to save myself time editing. Why? Time limits.
For those of you who don't want to read, I begin by asking, What is a limit? and talk about what we are not able or not allowed to do, how that starts a process of adaptation that can be mutual. We can adapt to the culture and the culture can adapt to us. I use examples to show the complexity of navigation. How do we know whether to sit through pain or change positions? And I conclude with a sweeping generalization: Limit is the answer to limit. We limit our reactions to release us from limited thinking. Our practice of sitting zazen, subtle and mysterious, is a radical act, especially now in the face of weaponized distraction and scapegoating.
Joanna Macy: Ever Widening CirclesYou know how when the jackhammer stops you realize how much your body was participating? It stops, I relax, relieved, now I can write. But then it starts back up again and, oh the pain, can I write through it, with it? It doesn't do any good to try to feel what I felt when it stopped; it just adds a layer of frustration. It doesn't do any good to pretend I don't hear it; that adds a layer of tension and dishonesty. When I'm pretending I'm not noticing, and then there is no flow. Writing about it, on the other hand releases me to make connections, thus:
Some of us want to leave the country. It's just too much. The oligarchs seem to have all the resources, the patriarchy is entrenched, the good don't win, the earth is wailing as we gang rape her. New Zealand looks so much better from here. But recently I listened to a podcast with the very old and very wise Joanna Macy in which she drew inspiration from Rilke as she faced difficulty. Some words from a sonnet to Orpheus:
Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.
As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What's it like, this intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses
Macy talked about what we do if a dear child or our mother is dying. If we love we stay, we try to stay, we don't avoid the pain, and neither should we love the earth less because we fear it to be unhealthy, or even our democracy. Even that. Or our poisonous culture.
I love to say I don't watch TV, don't have a TV, but that requires that I mildly pretend to myself that I am immune from formula, from a hunger for suspense, for romance, for good guys triumphing over the bad, and it is nearly always guys. Looking for a new show to binge, my friend recommended Rectify, and so I watched the whole 20-plus hours, watched the wronged white guy get supported by his family, his black friends who held no resentment for his comparative freedom, and countless lovely women who were smitten by his awesome depth and fascinating awkwardness. Yeah, because I fell for guys like that, wasted a lot of time projecting my own qualities onto them and then trying to obtain them by getting them to love me. It doesn't do any good to try not to do that. I can only ring the bell of pain. And as I do that I hear my voice, and there, I'm free because I already have what I want.
Now I'm working on understanding Game of Thrones. So far the best part is that instead of checking phones, they have to wait for ravens to deliver news from other realms. What seems problematic are the gorgeous happy naked whores being trained by men to pleasure men (someone tell me they fix this in the next 20 hours!), the equation of honor with blood lineage, the constant butchery and treachery in the name of revenge and justice, and of course the damnable disproportionate screentime for men. If we don't see it, we can't interact with it at all. There are virtually no non-pretty powerful women anywhere in film or TV. Behold the first two lines of the cast page:
70% male
The whole page has 19 women, all beautiful, and 31 men, many old or fat or strange looking. Actually I'm remembering that there is an old woman who played a maid, but she is not included in this cast page. Anyway, seeing this line-up activates the not-enough software installed by the symbiotic glamour industry. I feel mad, gloomy, anxious, want to get highlights, want to disappear. Move back and forth into the change. I am still here, existing as I am, as are the beautiful women around me who don't look like the Hollywood ideal. If I keep showing my face as it is that isn't nothing. It is an intervention. I turn myself to wine. And maybe get some highlights?
Joanna Macy and others have noted that even as our country is being devoured by the forces of greed there are many communities growing out of a different model, one that acknowledges interconnection and strives for justice and the true equality of appreciating difference. We can ground our attention there while we partake in the poisons. We can notice our breath as we feel jerked around by the unceasing demands to look, to buy, to one-up the other customers. I am a customer, yes, but I am also the mystery at the crossroads of my senses. Thank you, Ms. Macy and Mr. Rilke.
April 2019
Last Sunday I gave a dharma talk* at the Village Zendo on the matter of becoming yourself. Like many Zen practices, it's an absurd and paradoxical goal. You already are who you really are, and yet things get complicated by the mind.
The previous weekend we had a panel discussion with two Black Zen teachers who talked about how it is to be the only Black person in a community, how it is to deal with racist projections and expectations. James Lynch spoke of the importance of caring for yourself, not defining yourself by how others see you. And Malik Hokyu talked about confronting the objectifications that arise, how hard it is to locate their source.
For the most part, Zen practice focuses on clearing away the delusion of a separate self, and there is no doubt that the more we sit the more we can drop our dependence on identity. But when we see each other, we see the marks of identity: skin color, gender expression, clothing or hairdo, disability if visible, body type and so on. Our minds are built to categorize and predict, so it is impossible to eliminate the expectations and judgement that shape the way we interact with each other.
When you are a person who is marked as different from others, the usual process of forming an identity gets tangled; what gets reflected may not feel true. When I was growing up, moving from army base to army base, there were no other Russian disabled kids. I felt like a misfit, and so I struggled to imitate the customs in each place. Only in the woods by myself could I feel alive and genuinely connected. By high school I figured out how to construct an identity as a quirky drama girl that allowed me to behave in odd ways and still be popular. People saw in me what I wanted them to see.
But this sort of thing initiates a split between who we feel ourselves to be and how we are perceived by others. and that split drives us to Zen, or psychotherapy, or destructive acting out. The bad news is that healing the split actually requires meeting the aspect of self that we try to cover.
For me, that is weakness. My disabilities are serious but not visible. I've figured out how I can adapt movement so that I can dance, adapted my household so that I can eat (hint: don't bring me a jar unless you will open it for me), adapted my personality so that I see myself as a hero not a victim. But underneath there is still an aspect that is the toddler who can't walk, the kid who can't keep up, the adult who gets tangled up trying to get an item out of my pocket without a wrist to bend. And that aspect feels shameful because I have learned that it is better to cover it.
Fortunately or unfortunately life always serves up what I reject. This year I've developed a quaver in my voice, something sticky in my throat or diaphragm. I believe it reads as fear, which is not ok at all, right? The more I try to control it the more prominent it gets. So the good news is that I have no choice but to embrace the fear, and fear of fear. I breathe, do what I do as I am, notice how people respond, sometimes say something about it, watch it come and go.
It doesn't seem like good news when something comes up to challenge our identity. But actually taking down who we think we are or who others think we are, over and over again, is what makes us grow, and even to become fearless. That's the paradox. Rejecting nothing, including everything, that's how you can be who you really are.
After I wrote this, I listened to an On Being podcast having to do with just this, exposing what we are taught to be ashamed about. So, for me it's whatever a vocal quaver indicates, but it could be anything. What would our culture look like if we all had the courage to out our true selves?
*The Dharma talk has a slightly different focus, on the matter of being alone.
January 2019
Photo by Jesse Jiryu DavisIn this Dharma talk, I looked into how to work with rage so that we can atone for it all, as we promise to do in our Zen Gatha of Atonement.
All evil karma ever committed by me since of old,
on account of my beginningless greed, anger, and ignorance,
born of my body, mouth, and thought,
Now I atone for it all....
It turned out that understanding how female sexuality worked provided a clue into how we can accept the unacceptable and disintegrate.
November 2018
I have to start somewhere. Next Thursday (November 8th), following the midterm elections, I'll give a talk on kabillion year-old rage, intense female sexuality, and love. Might as well start with something about anger.
Last month, following the Kavanaugh hearings, our Zen community met for council practice and someone told a story that featured million-year-old rage. That sparked a flame around the circle and so we burned, kabillion-year-old rage fueled by memories of abuse, oppression, shame, helplessness, terror. Even if we can't remember what happened 10,000 years ago, our bodies howl in response to today's injury.
A line from a koan: When the dragon howls, clouds moving over the caves grow dark.
Clouds respond. Humans respond. When I asked Roshi whether Trump is the howling dragon, she said he is the tail. How can we respond effectively to the war he is cultivating?
It is said (on bumper stickers) that if you aren't outraged you aren't paying attention. Ok, but Kavanaugh was outraged too and now all the troops are out on both sides. This country is built on the idea that adversaries will arrive at truth. How's that working? The courts are wasting time proving technicalities instead of repairing, congress is a bloody mess with fangs and ruptured jugulars, and the populace is ever-ready to bend the truth to the victor.
Is it possible to live in peace with all this? Some would bypass it, live in some kind of dissociated equanimity, but I strive to include everything, including anger.
Buddhist advice on anger ranges from the fundamentalist--cease from anger, to the aspirational--be kind, think loving thoughts about your mother, to the psychological--hold the anger like a baby or inquire into it (see for example, Thich Nhat Hanh or Ezra Bayda).
In my work as a psychologist and in my own life, I understand feelings as being comprised of sensation, thought, and action tendency.
Anger is felt differently by people depending on what they experienced--their own anger or anger they witnessed. My own is nearly indistinguishable from fear because I grew up with disabilities that prevented me from ever winning a fight. Many women experience a mix of anger, fear, or sadness, and almost everyone experiences tension when trying not to act out. Of all the feelings, anger has the strongest action tendency that is forbidden. Well, it used to be forbidden; now it is stoked by our president.
What to do!?
When we sit in meditation, the urge to punish can fall away, leaving clarity and determination. Fear can rise and fall, informing effective protection. The flow of sadness can open our hearts, giving us inspiration and fortitude to have conversations with those who differ from us. And maybe tension can ease as we accept the variety of experience. And then we act. We respond.
Please don't check out. Take care of yourself and those you love, have some fun, eat some food, get some sleep, and then act. Donate to someone, help get out the vote, go to a march, have a good conversation with someone on the other side. Take heart in impermanence and the certainty that every breath, every thought, every glance, every word affects the outcome.
Next up, emergent strategy and intense female sexual desire, a response to Musho's talk: "Intense male sexual desire."
October 2018
"All I want is for you to be happy."
As Mother's Day looms, let's honor the truth coming out of the convict's mouth. This blessing, worthy of a Zen master, delivers deep love, an impossible prescription, and a promise of self-annihilation. Reconcile it and freedom is yours.
A monk asked Yun Men: "When it is not the present intellect and it is not the present phenomena, what is it?" Yun Men replied: "An upside down statement," or the convict's truth, which pairs nicely with his answer in the previous story: "An appropriate statement."
Mama, I think that about covers it. Thank you for doing the right thing when you could. Thank you for trying and failing so I could see what was impossible. Thank you for trying and failing so I could see what was possible. Thank you for wanting what I could never achieve so that I could abandon all hope and enter The Way.
How could I be happy as a child, a disabled burden to displaced parents? How can I be happy as an adult living in a culture that offers poison as happiness potion? When greed is cultivated as virtue, when difference is punished or expelled, when violence excites us so much we can hardly hear the birds sing, how can we be happy?
Mama is just telling it as she learned it, says Jacqueline Rose, writing in Harper Mag. Mama is allowed and expected to be a tiger on behalf of her child but she may not express her own despair. "What the pain of mothers must not expose is a viciously unjust world in a complete mess."
Locked into a fiction, Mama provides an upside down statement.
As a daughter I long for the satisfaction that eluded my mother. As a mother I wish I could give what I never got. My heart breaks for my daughter as it breaks for all of us who thought never again meant something we could count on, who thought we were progressing. All I can offer now is participation. I participate in the tragedy, participate in the blooming trees and sunshine, participate in the enormous moon rising.
Sometimes I even participate in the damn patriarchy.
And I am happy.
April 2018
You can listen to the talk on Mother's Day that followed from this post here.
June 2018
“Trust the process,” said my new romance, as everything converged.
The spectacular and ridiculous ritual known as Shuso Hossen became the focus that yanked my fragments together last month. Fear was a constant companion but the terror was wildest when I imagined Dharma Combat, the challenge to “Dragons and Elephants” in the Dharma Hall to confront me, to demand answers to potent life questions. Having watched a few of these, each time amazed at the deft handling of such deep inquiry, I was certain that I could never measure up.
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