Alan Lessik's Blog, page 2

Not-knowing is Most-intimate

There is a Chinese Zen kōan, a teaching story about a pilgrimage that I won’t share with you today. If Zen teachers were lawyers, Zen practitioners would be required to sign a release which states that whenever a teacher says they will not do something, it means the opposite, especially if they use words that start with not-. With that disclosure out of the way, I am not going to tell you about the story because I still get easily confused by Zen kōans. And even though I spoke last time about turning off your ears and listening through your entire body, the more words there are, the more my mind wants to take over.

But I do want to talk about pilgrimages, whether they are to far-flung locations, or down your street or even in your mind. A pilgrimage is an intentional exploration or journey. Buddhism often calls this the Way or the Path.

Over 67 years ago, I started on a pilgrimage that began with my birth.  It was a path full of unknowns and the early years of intentionality were biological, as I had no sense of my mind or the world itself. We will come back to my later youth soon. Now, I want to jump to about seven years ago, when I participated in a Zen pilgrimage to the sites of Shakyamuni’s birth, death, enlightenment and teaching.

Bodhgaya, not far from Vulture Peak

At each place, we would read aloud the relevant sutras describing those events. At Vulture Peak, Shakyamuni would meet with his sangha. One of his dharma talks featured no words and interestingly never happened. I think you all have heard this one. In one of his early gatherings, Shakyamuni silently held up a flower.  Only one of his disciples, Mahākāśyapa, reacts by smiling. A story of few words, right to the point. Just a flower and a smile. Simplicity and beauty. Nothing more needs to be said. Dharma transmission without words. The essence of Buddhist teaching. No dharma talk, no planning, no speech. Enlightenment.

Despite its simplicity, much has been written and spoken about this story, proving that the mind cannot be turned off nor should be turned off. What is not as often discussed is that this wonderous story was written in about the 11th century AD in China, some 1500 years after Buddha’s paranirvana or death. And non-coincidently, it appeared as part of a Chan text, Chan becoming Zen in Japan, two hundred years later. So this story that is so dearly beloved today, would have been unlikely been known to Shakyamuni, Mahākāśyapa or any Buddhist followers in the early centuries of Buddhism. Our pilgrimage went to a real place to re-experience a story that never happened. Yet without this story of words, Zen and modern Buddhism would not exist as we know it.

So is this story true or not? Historically it is unlikely. Yet, even after I found out its origin and disclosed to you, it does not seem any less important or timeless to me. Does that information change anything for you?

On our Pilgrimage–Lumbini, the site of Shakyamuni’s birth A descendent of the tree where Shakyamuni was supposedly born

That said, I don’t believe all Buddhist sutras. According to one of the ancient sutras, Buddha was born in Lumbini, emerging from his mother’s armpit, while she braced herself against a tree. He then took seven steps and announced, “I am the world-honored one.” We read this sutra aloud on the steps of a temple in Lumbini. I was so astounded by this story that I had not heard previously that I broke the reverential silence with, “This is ridiculous! How can we even read this aloud with a straight face? The Buddha I know is no fake supernatural god.” This created some heated discussion within our group, focusing on scientific verification, belief in sutras and trust in stories which honestly left me thinking ill of one of our leaders and some of the other practitioners.

We have a brain and it should not be ignored. While science and logic have their limitations, I think we are in agreement about how human birth works and the abilities of newly born infants. The Buddhism I practice doesn’t need a miracle story. Practice itself is the miracle that we share.

Just to keep score, so far in this talk, we have one story that is not true, yet I embrace it for my perception of its truth. And another which I reject because of its contravening of scientific truth.

Let’s go back to my life pilgrimage. Each of us has our own pathway and origin story, and if we had a few days, I could potentially tell you mine. I have come to accept that my story of my version of my experiences may not be as truthful as I thought. Recent brain science shows that the further I am from any particular experience, means that what I think I remember is more likely to have morphed into a quite different story over time. In the milliseconds from an experience to the recognition of the signals travelling the nerve pathways to the brain, the experience is gone and the brain classifies it as something else. Over time other experiences and stories are added until the kernel of experience becomes layered by all sorts of other emotions, feelings and events. This scientific explanation mirrors Zen teachings of the mind.

Despite knowing this, I often want to believe my story as I tell it, just like I want to believe the flower story. Through practice and over time, I have become less committed to holding fast to my own tale of life. In what ways is the history of my story or the made-up history of my story important for me or anyone else?

The answer is in the Chinese kōan about pilgrimage I started this talk with. Although the kōan is short, I only want to share the last five words. These words secretly made their way into my body the first time I heard them, probably in one talk or another that Ryushin Paul Haller gave at the San Francisco Zen Center. He often incorporates the phrase into his talks. The context of the talk has been long lost (another forgotten story,) but a seed was planted somewhere in this physical body into which I was born. Over the years, each time those words were spoken in talks, they continued to reverberate within me. I wish I could say I was aware of their power but despite my intentions, I am more often oblivious of the machinations of my body and mind. All I can say, each time they were spoken, I instantly and briefly fell into them.

Last month, a fellow practitioner wrote me an email with these words in it. For the first time, I recognized how their beauty and deepness had sprouted within me. And again, with little forethought, their natural progression from deep within my body and soul has bloomed into a dharma talk today.

So here they are:

Not knowing is most intimate.

Not knowing is most intimate.

Not knowing is most intimate.

This are the words that have been haunting my body for these years.  Today for the first time with you, I speak them out loud: Not knowing is most intimate.

Repeat them to yourself. How do they feel to you? What is their shape and where do they seem to land in your body? Do they make you curious? What else comes up?

Zoketsu Norman Fischer points out, “we practice with phrases like (this)…and bring it into our sitting. We breathe with it in meditation practice…We repeat the phrase to ourselves during the day, and begin to notice it coming up spontaneously from time to time…It begins to influence us, bringing ordinary occurrences to a deeper and more mysterious level…The point is to keep chewing on it…until suddenly or gradually it reveals itself to us.”

Zen and Buddhist practice eschews making comparisons—comparing one thing to another is a form of clinging, desire and non-truth-telling. Who has not sometime declared that they just ate the best meal of their life and then looked forward to a better meal? If you did manage to have the best meal ever and tried to cling to that, disappointment can only follow with each new meal you ate that does not measure up.  As humans we seem addicted to wanting better and better experience. We even want better practice, instead of just practice.

For a one day, try an experiment of giving up comparisons and simply speak plainly of what you are experiencing at the moment. When I tried to do this, I became aware of how much unfulfilled desire and clinging enters into my speech and thoughts in every moment.

Yet this simple five-word phrase appears to have two comparisons: not knowing and most intimate. If we read or speak the sentence with only four words, we can get to its point.  Most-intimate is a noun itself, as is not-knowing.

Most-intimate is an intimacy without any measurement or bounds. It is an experience of immersion and suchness with an awareness filled with everything in our bodies. All of our experience, wandering, searching and being is the most-intimate, not partially intimate, not sort of intimate but most-intimate. Most-intimate is full of deep emotion and feeling of the moment which range from happiness or grief, fulfillment or emptiness, beauty or revulsion. Most-intimate wraps its arms around and hugs your body with its knowledge.

Not-knowing might be considered the prequel to most-intimate. Not-knowing is the beginning of experience, before experience happens. Not-knowing is the emptiness of the void awaiting its fulfillment. Not-knowing is anticipation without anticipation. It is the space between our breathes, the space between experiencing our senses. Not-knowing is the lack of expectations while embracing expectations.

In me, these four words arouse an exquisite calm and clarity. They silence me into a realm of personal wonderment and universal connection. Not-knowing and most-intimate are an equation signaling equality; they are a declaration of practice: Most-intimate equals not-knowing; Not-knowing equals most-intimate. Most-intimate exists within not-knowing just as not-knowing exists within most-intimate. Not-knowing expands the universe infinitely, while most-intimate simultaneously draws the universe into your body.

As a queer man, these simple words seem to profoundly address my life journey from youth to the man I am now. The open spaces of the not-knowingness of my queer lives are most-intimate, generating feelings and experiences private to me alone. As I grew older, my experiences of understanding of my body, my own sexual identities, my ways of projecting myself in my body, were but some of the ways that not-knowing is most-intimate. For a long time the pilgrimage of my queerness appeared to be my own lonely journey, with rare but important waystations of community and connection. From my earliest memories (accepting this is a mere story of what my memories are), I felt outside the norm, outside the conventional, outside the expected, beyond what I was told and trained to be and understand.

Not-knowing was indeed the most-intimate part of my journey. Helpless like I was as a baby, I could not share my queerness with anyone, since I did not know the words to explain, the words to align my body, emotions and desires. The intimacy of confusion, my own confusion, the not-knowingness of who I was. These feelings were deep within me, yet I did not know yet how to recognize them.

This is how not-knowing, not being sure, not having the feelings others expect we have, not having clarity, not knowing who or what to trust, not having security, not having the words, not having the expectations in us is most-intimate. Whether we are in joy or despair, not-knowing is most-intimate is our path and pilgrimage.

Not-knowing is most-intimate is a strength and secret power of queerness and any other version of otherness. It opens a dharma-gate to explore realms closed to others; it allows us to create our Way in the world, to seek out others to love and share our truth. I finally began to understand the most-intimate side of the equation when I joined the sangha of queerness and otherness. During the darkest days of fear, legalized homophobia, the AIDS epidemic, the murders of queer and trans people, our not-knowing is most-intimate continually gives us a community vision to create the safety and nourishment that we need and to create the world that we want to live in. This sangha itself is a result of and a vehicle for the pilgrimage of not-knowing is most-intimate.

In the last years of his life, my partner René, struggled in his version of not-knowing, a version that tore his soul apart, irreparably. Every night, in the months before he took his life, we would sit at the dinner table looking at each other, searching for the magic words that would sooth his pain and mine. Staring into each other’s eyes was not-knowing is most-intimate. As he shared the tortures of his mind and how they wracked his body, his sharing was not-knowing is most-intimate. When we would play scrabble, game after game, the only thing that would put his mind at ease, our placement of letters on the board was not-knowing is most-intimate. When he asked me to help him die, his request was not-knowing is most-intimate. When I refused, my tears were not-knowing is most-intimate. And when the day came that I would find him lifeless, my scream was not-knowing is heartbreakingly most-intimate.

Looking back, I realize that I accompanied René on his pilgrimage . I can now say that my Zen practice during that time and since then has been an exploration of not-knowing is most-intimate. It was through the writing of this talk that I now understand that, so thank you for that gift. While I was still working at a non-profit where virtually all of our students had experienced the murder of a friend or family member, after René’s death, I became the one who could easily talk about the life and death, with not-knowing by my side, listening with most-intimate intention to their pain and stories, as we explored their path. And four years ago, when my friend asked me to accompany him on the journey of his last weeks of life, not-knowing is most-intimate, guided me in discovering what that might mean for me and him and the others around him.

I am a novelist and all of my fiction emerges from not-knowing is most-intimate. Many writers that I know do not outline and only have an idea of what they want to explore. When I sit down at the computer, even as I write this dharma talk, not-knowing is most-intimate guides my fingers on the keyboard in a direct connection to my words swirling in my brain and body. At the end of a writing session, I can look back to see what happened, which seeds my mind for the next session. Other creatives that I know have told me that they approach their art forms and work in a similar manner.

In the fourth-grade, my teacher Mrs. Price took me out of my constrained working-class suburban town and opened my eyes to the world, as she brought in slides and stories of her travels around the world. Her experiences planted a seed to explore the world and live in a different way than I could imagine at the time. My journeys since have taken me to live in Uganda and Honduras and to visit almost one hundred more countries. When I first started traveling, I used to read up and plan my visits to try to make sure I did not miss the important sites.  My traveling was based on accumulation and clinging, making Sure I could tell people later that I saw the things they had heard or knew about. Even then, I often remember not the classical churches or the ruins as places, but as feelings or interactions or evocations of their essence.  With not-knowing is most-intimate, I now approach traveling with a perspective based on curiosity, of what happens next, of settling into the daily rhythms of a locale, finding connections and trying on new eyes, ears, noses and tongues as I sense my way around. 

Not-knowing opens my heart and allows me to let go of preconceived notions. Most-intimate arouses the connections around me waiting to be recognized. Not-knowing pushes me to explore the physical realms of our world as well as the mental constraints that seemingly define me. Most-intimate accompanies me as I sit and allows me to accept my own awakening, despite my not-knowing that as well.  Not-knowing permits me to drop this body and accept the body of the sangha and all beings. And that is the most-intimate pilgrimage.

Thank you.

This talk was given at the San Francisco LGBTQ Sangha on 1 March 2021 and can be heard here.

A Solstice Kōan

Imagine that you were on the Tropic of Capricorn where it passes through Kruger National Park in South Africa at 12:02 PM South Africa time (2:02 AM PST) on 21 December 2020.  Besides the amazing animals, you would see the sun reach its southernmost point and for a brief second it stops directly overhead and seemingly turns back northward. You would have witnessed the solstice. What we call the winter solstice and they would call the summer solstice. Scientifically, the solstice is the moment of that change.

(Getty images)

Commonly we claim the whole day as the solstice. In the northern hemisphere, some celebrate it as the longest period of darkness and others as the return of the light.

Therein lies the paradox. An event happens and two different observers in two different points, claim it and call it their own. Add in eight billion people in eight billion other observation points, and now eight billion people claim the experience.

And what are they claiming…the longest or the shortest day. Or for some folks on the equator, the same length of day as always. But as a scientifically verifiable event, there must be someone who is right.

Can anyone here tell us that that they have seen or experienced the shortest or longest day happen? The sun is not doing anything by itself that it does not do all of the time. Yet we believe that the sun really stops its movement in the sky. Are we making this all up?

As Dōgen, the person who brought Zen to Japan in the 1200s, wrote in his greatest work the Genjō Kōan:

“If one riding in a boat watches the coast, one mistakenly perceives the coast as moving. If one watches the boat [in relation to the surface of the water], then one notices that the boat is moving.”

This is our kōan of the solstice. Where are we looking? What do we bring to the act of observing and interpreting? What is it that we think we are observing and experiencing?

The most general understanding of the word kōan is an enigmatic Zen teaching story. Shohaku Okamura Roshi, whose translation of the Genjō Kōan I just quoted is one of the foremost living Zen scholars of Dōgen.. He translates the word kōan as “absolute truth that embraces relative truth” or “a question that true reality asks of us.” For Dōgen and Okumura, absolute truth is our interconnectedness and relative truth is our individuality.

This deeper dive into the word kōan helps us better understand their purpose, particularly in Rinzai Zen. Kōans are a specific tool to understand the connection between the inter-being and our individual sense of awareness.

Last week, Steven Tierney talked about the paradoxes in Zen using the text from the Sandokai, the Harmony of Difference and Equality.

Looking at the solstice as a teaching kōan, can we hold our notion of the solstice, our relative individual truth at the same time we hold the absolute or universal truth that we have nothing to hold or that we can hold?

Okumura points out that Dōgen in particular loved these sorts of paradoxes for their effect on the mind. Buddhist teachers often refer to the mind rather than our or my mind, to signify that the mind is not entirely owned by each of us. Our mind is the biggest block against accepting and experiencing the absolute reality of interconnectedness. This mind wants us to believe that the individual is the most important and nothing else exists. Our practice is to realize that the absolute and relative exist within each other. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about understanding this and Dōgen exceled in using one method for obliterating the mind’s hold over us.

In his teachings, Okumura suggests that Dōgen uses paradoxes to try to force our mind to give up its attempts to reconcile the unreconcilable. If we let the ideas clash, if we breathe and sit, we experience what it means to have the absolute and relative co-exist as a unified, interconnected whole. When he talked about this in a recent retreat I attended of his, a light went on for me. Stop trying to understand and instead feel.

Of all of Dōgen’s writing, the Genjō Kōan is considered the text from which everything flows in Soto Zen. Written in 1233, and translated into English, the Genjō Kōan is only thirteen paragraphs long. Okumura translates the title Genjō Kōan as such:

“to answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity.”

Here true reality is the absolute inter-connectedness of all beings and phenomena and everyday activity is the relative way we live our lives.

As we ponder the solstice and try to wrap our minds around it, I want to share some words from paragraph nine of the Genjō Kōan. I consider this particular section as some of the most beautiful poetry that Dōgen wrote.

Before, I read this short section, let’s prepare our bodies and mind to take in the words as Okumura suggests we should. Please take a few deep breaths in and out, and settle into your body. As you focus on the breath, imagine it is not your breath by the shared breath of all beings. As I read the words of the poem, I would suggest to you to imagine hearing and feeling the words in your body…in your chest and belly, in your arms and legs, in your shoulders and throat, through the floor, walls and ceiling.

As Dōgen says in Buddha Sutra,

“receive and emit the sutras through our nostrils and receive and emit them through the tips of our toes.”

Hear the words with your eyes, feel them with your lips and tongue and smell them with your ears. Let your brain take a deserved vacation.

“When a person attains realization, it is like the moon’s reflection in water. The moon never becomes wet; the water is never disturbed. Although the moon is a vast and great light, it is reflected in a drop of water. The whole moon and even the whole sky are reflected in a dop of dew on a blade of grass. Realization does not destroy the person, as the moon and even the whole sky does not make a hole in the water. The person does not obstruct realization, as a drop of dew does not obstruct the moon in the sky. The depth is the same as the height.”

When I first read these words several years ago, my breath became deep, my mind quieted as I was transfixed. I might have stayed on this paragraph for minutes or hours, I don’t really know. I could not find any reason to move on and to read another word. My entire body was enveloped in the moonlight and dewdrop and inclusiveness of the universe.

In this paragraph, Dōgen does a wonderful thing. He takes a paradox that we can understand and visualize, the moon and its reflection in water. Through experience, we intuitively understand the difference between the moon as an entity and its reflection, the water as an entity and it its ability to reflect, the grass as an entity and its ability to hold a drop of water reflecting the moon. The objects are relative truth, things we can sense with our sense organ. And in this case, the reflection is the absolute truth of the inter-being or interconnectedness between all of the objects and beings. Both of the realms exist within each other.

He then makes a jump to ourselves as humans. When he says realization or to use another word enlightenment does destroy the person, he is telling us that enlightenment or absolute truth contains the relative nature of the reality we perceive. He goes on to further say the person living their individual lives with their habits, thoughts and decisions reacting to and in a particular environment, time and place does not prevent one from experiencing realization, enlightenment or oneness.

This the core of Dōgen’s teaching. Much of the rest of vast collection of writings is about the practice of living with this teaching in our lives.

In the future when you come across a confusing and paradoxical Buddhist text or kōan, try to do so in this fashion. Explore the words with your body and breath. Linger and luxuriate in image, smell, sound and sight. This is how we are meant to experience the dharma.

Our Shelter-in-Place offers us unlimited opportunities to explore Dōgen’s verse. On a daily basis, spend some time in this special dharma space, seeing the world in a blossom, listening to the song of the wind, smelling the aromas of faraway places in your cup of tea, letting the story of the cold in the night coming from the polar reaches chill your bones, feeling the rumblings of the earth whether it is music blasting from a car squealing down the street or the shifting of tectonic plates. We are never separated from this absolute reality.

For the past thirteen years, a group of us has met in the AIDS Memorial Grove to remember our beloved friend Debra Kent who died on the solstice. Today, this gathering happened on Zoom just before our sangha meeting. Our time together was deepened by the recent death of Pat Dunn, a member of our circle and likely a friend to others of us in our sangha. Thus the solstice has been transformed for me as a time of remembrance of an AIDS warrior, who left us too soon but made sure that her daughter (my god-daughter) Sofie was in good hands before she died.

Many a gathering around the boulder in the Grove, emblazed with her name and the words “Generous, Compassionate Tenacious, Full of Life Mother, You are in our hearts forever” were marked by tears and laughter in the late afternoon, as the sun set and the damp coolness of the Grove descended around us. For a few moments, she was with us in our memories, in our stories, amazed that we were still there, amazed that we continue to honor her. The leaves on the trees, yellow and brown would fall silently as our witnesses to the cycle of life and death, of love and loss, of dark and light. What started in the last rays of the day, ended in the darkness of the evening, which shrouded the trees and rocks and path that were so clear when we arrived.  A chill would settle in, and despite our down coats and hats, our noses would get cold and we would all begin to rock back and forth to keep ourselves warm. Our time with our memories would pass, yet the surroundings held us. Even in the dark, our hearts beat stronger, warmed by the love of life within the existence of suffering and death..

The next day we knew would be longer and somehow brighter. It was the end and the beginning. The Genjō Kōan of our existence answering the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity.

This talk was given at the San Francisco LGBT Sangha on 21 December 2020. and can be heard there. The title image is from Getty Images.

Fear & Loathing, Elections and Zazen

The title of this essay uses a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson, the self pro-claimed gonzo journalist from the 1960’s and 70’s who wrote about the 1972 Nixon campaign in his book entitled Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.  On the day before election day 2020, we have our own version of fear and loathing to deal with. If you are anything like me the last weeks (maybe months and years) have not been so calm, not so rested. Some of the feelings I have experienced were jumpiness, skittishness, worry, anticipation, wanting tomorrow but not wanting tomorrow, doubting, sarcasm, hurt, physical pain, anger. Did I miss anything that you have felt?

Yet as much as we have had these feelings, I know that very few of them are what I would call firsthand feelings—feelings and reactions that arise from a specific event right now. If my computer were to fall off the desk and onto my toe, the pain would be firsthand. And likely the same event would create secondhand feelings as I berate myself for stupidly not paying attention to where the computer was perilously situated. Firsthand is the immediate reaction, secondhand are the stories that our mind make up about how and why we are feeling what we are feeling. Blame and shame are always secondhand feelings. Our mind loves to latch on to stories. The neural pathways that sense experience are different from the ones that process information. As they are processed, they become stories; the immediacy of the present disappears and they become timeless. For that reason, these secondhand versions of what we think are feelings are embellished over time and stick around longer.

Present experience and story-making are often simultaneous. To become aware of my experiences, my teacher once asked me to log good and bad feelings as they arose, and take notes on them, including what stories were attached to the feelings. On the fourth day, after I was accustomed to doing this, I fell during my figure skating. With my practice of noting my feelings, I was able to watch myself as I fell. Physically, I tripped on my toe-pick and fell pretty hard twisting my leg. But the amazing part was in the few seconds it took from me from being upright to being splattered on the ice, I was able to watch my mind make up a story. The story that I made up was that I fell and twisted my ankle, could not skate for months and then gained twenty pounds during the time I was off-ice and I was never able to skate as well again. I imagined this in full color and details in the few seconds before I hit the ice. Down on the ice, I started laughing about the absurdity of my thoughts (and my friends were worried that I had a concussion since I was laughing so hard.)  I got up, took a short break and in minutes was back on the ice and my leg was fine. If I was in a zen koan, that would have been my moment of enlightenment.

But beyond firsthand and secondhand feelings, there is a third even deeper layer—trauma. Trauma is the painful, uncompleted story that we hold onto and keep stored away in our body. Trauma is created by events we cannot fathom and from which we have not healed. Trauma comes from situations beyond our control, whether they be random unusual events—a tree limb falling on us, or events that we are powerless to control—abuse, poverty, racism, homophobia, disease, violence, loss and grief, war—horrors that were foisted on us.

Our powerlessness is key to understanding why trauma exists in each of us.  Even though the particular causes and conditions are usually different, our inability to control those circumstances and prevent harm from happening to us, cause our body to try to wall off what happened. Despite the lasting and negative nature of that trauma, I believe it is a bodily reaction that allows us the space to physically heal, to hide or forget the pain, and to attempt to move on with our lives.

Trauma freezes the story and also freezes our mind into believing that the exact same past is about to repeat itself. While the story yearns to be released, our body and mind keep it caged in, with another story that the trauma is too painful to experience and look at. Yet the body keeps sending the signals that the story is still there through disconnected feelings, exaggerated reactions to different types of events and more often through retriggering by unrelated events.

Going back to the election for a second, the polls say Biden is ahead and according to fivethiryteight.com this lead has been maintained for months now in key states. Despite the factual statement that I just made, I bet already many of you have just thought, “the polls looked good the last time.” For many of us, this story of the polls, the disappointment of the last presidential election is now tucked away deep in our bodies and our minds. No matter that the causes and conditions of today, are not the causes and conditions of 2016. Many of us are stuck in 2016 unable to see what is present today. Stuckness is symptom of trauma. If we can recognize the stuckness, or the blocks in our energy, we can affirm we are dealing with a traumatic reaction.

Even if the story trapped in our bodies is not about the last election, enough has happened in our country in the last four years, to initiate other traumas. Racism, anti-LGBTQ policies, maltreatment of immigrants, fires, hurricanes, and other adverse climate events, white nationalism, gun violence, unemployment, disregard for human life and the pandemic—all have the potential of scarring us. Add in the more personal traumas—deaths of people we love, relationships that withered away, lost jobs, difficult workplaces, health issues and injuries and it is a wonder that we are still standing upright.

In addition to stuckness, another outward symptom of trauma is the way it affects how we view or express our world. Many of us seem perfectly fine, but when we talk about the last four years, sarcasm, defeatism, powerlessness, and Hunter Thompson’s word—loathing, reign supreme. For half of my life, my go-to habit energy of dealing with the difficult, the unponderables and trauma was sarcasm. I tried to pretend that nothing could harm me because I had already anticipated the bad things before they happened or that I was too hardened to be affected by them. Sarcasm was an attempt to prevent myself from feeling the hurt and pain when I did not have enough emotional experience to more directly face the hurts and challenges. My healing and loss of sarcasm started after I came out. As I started to feel and express real feelings, I was also able to examine the trauma that many queer people carry with them, trauma that comes from having innermost desires and experiences crushed and denied by families, friends and society.

Our minds deal with these body blows in many different ways. We can try to ignore them; we can try to insulate ourselves from them; we can collapse into them; we can give up. None of these reactions are healthy.

We know that Zazen and meditation can help us get into our bodies. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the two aspects of meditation—vipashyana and shamatha. Vipashyana is going deeper for insight.  I think we are all familiar with that. The second aspect is shamatha or stopping. Hanh calls shamatha fundamental—if we can’t stop, we cannot have insight.

We need to stop our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness. Through mindfulness, we are able to stop the forward-leaning motion and pay attention to the now, to become calm. Our question is then, how do we stop and become calm? Calm can’t be willed. Also true calmness can’t be created when trauma and fear is active. Calm cannot necessarily be gained through metta and positive thinking. I understand that this last statement might be very controversial. Let me go a little deeper in to Thich Nhat Hanh’s discourse to explain.

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Hanh discusses the five stages of calming in his book—The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching:

Recognition. What is this powerful emotion I am experiencing? Can I name it while it is occurring? If so, that is recognition. Even though I might react out of anger, most of the time, I do not know I am angry until I hear something come out of my mouth that is inappropriate or hurtful. We can do a body scan to find what part of our body seems to attract energy or more block energy. However, when trauma causes the blockage, it is often hard to feel emotions. Trauma is surrounded by a dense fog of confusion and pent up energy. Since it repels casual inquiry in a protective mechanism to prevent us from re-feeling the fear and deep emotions, we often come away saying we can’t feel anything. Honestly, I spent years in that state.Acceptance. The second stage can be accessed through mindfulness training. We accept what is present. Oh, I am tired, angry, sad; we learn to accept what is there at the moment. However, it is harder to accept trauma or the energy around trauma, since we are loath to want to touch or visit it. Again by its nature trauma is unacceptable and hidden away.  Part of its story is we cannot accept the trauma because what happened in its nature is unacceptable.Embracing. Thich Nhat Hanh suggests we embrace powerful negative emotions, such as anger, as an adult would embrace a crying child. I love this beautiful metaphor. With mindfulness, we can feel and be fully aware of the feelings. In a baby, these feelings are expressed not only in its cries but in the contortions of the face and entire body. Despite the intensity, we know that by embracing the baby, the child’s feelings can loosen up and dissipate Yet, can we embrace the fullness of hard emotions?  To resolved traumatic emotions, we need to do the same. I ask you to try to imagine surrounding your arms around the trauma, letting it be what it is without trying to change it.Looking deeply. As we embrace the emotion with mindfulness and calm, we can look at what are the causes and conditions of this emotion. With our screaming baby, we may realize that they are hungry or have a full diaper. At this stage with trauma, in our guided meditation, I invited you to attempt to go deeper into the trauma to find the story that was there. The story that you might find is not necessarily what originally happened and is whatever the story is now. The original event causing trauma has by now morphed into something completely different. By looking deeply, you can see what that might be now.Insight. The final step is react to the what you found and determine what can you do differently. Can you mitigate the anger or hate? What conditions do you need to do that? We can change the diaper or feed the baby or just rock the child and give comfort to them. With trauma, insight allows us to change the story we have within us, to create the new story of how we overcame the trauma and how we healed ourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh instructs us that the final aspect of shamatha is rest. Meditation is rest. Calm purposefulness is rest. Time allows us to rest. If you have a pet, you might have noticed that when they are injured, their reaction is to lie down and rest. They may forego eating for sometime period as their body heals. We need to allow ourselves the time to heal whether it is minutes or when we are visiting our traumas, it may be years.

Stopping, calming and resting are preconditions for healing, he tells us.

How do we do this in practice? A month ago, Daigan Gathier shared his techniques for going into the body as Zazen. Today, I would like to walk you through a somatic technique that my teacher Christina Lehnherr taught me. This guided meditation allows us to approach those areas of our body that we have noticed are hurting or blocking energy with the third, fourth and fifth steps of embracing and looking deeply, hopefully leading to insight.

I will share a story from my own recent experience. I recognized that I was feeling overwhelmed by negative emotions and sadness. There was nothing specific that seem to cause the emotions. In my morning sitting, I did a body scan and very quickly found a spot in the center of my chest that prevented me from breathing deeply and easily. (I say I quickly found this place, because it often is the place that comes up first for me, although over the years, its immediacy has lessened.)

I recognized I had some emotions, specifically sadness, and located it in my body. In order to embrace it and look at it deeply, I had to prepare myself. For me this means making sure I am safe. One method that we can use is to identify something in our immediate environment that is beautiful or brings out feeling of happiness or love.

Another that works for me is tying an imaginary belay rope around my waist. This is what mountain climbers or rock climbers use to assure that if they slip, they are safely held up. So when I go into parts of my body, where I am afraid of what I may find, I tie a mental belay around me so if I am overwhelmed, I know I can be lifted to safety. Maybe there are other ways that you can imagine to protect yourself.

[image error] Photo by Yente Van Eynde on Unsplash

I imagined myself being lowered into this part of my body where I felt the blockage. As I landed, I was standing outside a thick fog bank. Sometimes, all I can do is to stand and watch the mists shifting. I imagine my arms are stretching around this fog bank. I don’t try to anything else but embrace it; to let it fill the circle that my arms create. I try to feel the emotions that are shifting around. If there is fear or anger, I try to hold them as well as I can. If I start to feel overcome by the intensity of emotion, I go back and remember the place of beauty or serenity that I looked at before I began the meditation. If needed, I will open my eyes briefly to look at it to remind me of the safety and beauty within me.

[image error] Photo by Enache Georgiana on Unsplash

On this particular occasion, as I embraced the pain and sadness that were emerging, I felt secure enough to walk into the mists around me. A wise person once told me that curiosity is the opposite of fear, so even as I felt fear, I tried to think of it as curious. What was this thing that was causing such deep emotions in me? As I walked in the mists, I recognized my pediatrician’s office, the fish tank, the stack of Highlights magazines, the cat clock on the wall whose tail swished back and forth with each tick. As a young child, I used to see this doctor every two weeks for allergy shots for asthma until I was fifteen.

As I walked around the office, I saw the photograph above the receptionist’s desk. It was a small forlorn puppy with a thick hemp rope loosely tied around its neck. I remembered how I was attracted to this photo as a child. As an adult, I realized that my child Alan saw himself as that sad puppy tied down unable to be himself, unable to run free. Memories of feelings not being who I really was rose up in me. As a child I never felt I fit in and experienced the world differently than other people. I felt alone. Years later when I came out, I would finally realize that this feeling of difference was about my sexual orientation. While I pondered the sad puppy, I was struck that my pediatrician would have such an unusual picture in her office. As a lesbian practicing medicine in the 1950s and 60’s, was she weighed down by how she had to act and her denials of who she was? As a child, I only knew she was unmarried. Years later, I figured out the rest. But in this moment staring at the puppy, I wondered did she feel the same? And, curious that I was carrying around this remnant of memory in my body.

Curiosity allowed me to experience this scene without trying to make sense of it. I noticed that the heaviness that I had felt earlier had lifted. I somehow understood that I didn’t need to hold onto this story any longer. While I remember it enough to tell you, the story has little energy in it. But the sadness that I felt that day, conjured up this memory and visiting it through mindfulness and somatic feeling, freed it up. The knot is my chest diminished and I felt able to breath more easily again.

Sometimes we want to keep attached to our traumatic stories. When we do, it tells me that insight has not fully bloomed. Other times, like this one, as in a dream, we experience our bodies and just let it go. I honestly didn’t need to process this anymore than I did. I was surprised by what I saw and perhaps the feeling of surprise is a feeling of energy being released and the story disappearing. As I said earlier, this particular part of my chest is most often where I feel blockage and shortness of breath. Did it come from my asthma or were there causes and conditions in my family that brought this on? Whatever the reasons, over time by paying attention, this blockage seems to appear less and less. I took this last visit as another loosening up and letting go. If I had not been looking for an example to talk about today, I likely would have forgotten about it already. By using the type of mindful inquiry and body scan I have described, we are not trying to resolve things psychologically this way (although that may happen); we are trying to heal ourselves somatically and energetically.

Going back to today, the day before election day, I am suggesting that each of us visit what we are carrying with us right now. Is what we perceive as fear and loathing, about the state of the country or about conditions in our own body. While I do believe that our individual and collective mental state defines what is happening right now, I also believe that by looking into our traumas, we can begin to create a path to feel more authentically right now.

By recognizing our traumas, we can begin to separate those feelings from events taking place now. When I cannot do that, and my original traumas are retriggered, I will tend to turn to loathing, passivity, and anger in dealing with current problems because of the deepness of those traumas. However, when I can recognize that new emotions arise all the time from new events, those offer different opportunities for movement and change. My fear of how LGBTQ rights may be eroded under this current administration, can be channeled into action, rather than dwelling in traumatic unchangablity and defeat.

With your next breath feel what is in this moment. Feel your humanity, your power and your energy. Then take another breath and another. We are practicing the way of stopping, insight and healing. There is nothing else we need to do.

This essay is based on a dharma talk I gave on 2 November 2020 to the San Francisco LGBTQ Sangha.

Six Questions to Ask Before Having Sex in the Time of Corona

This piece was published in the Bay Area Reporter on 3 September 2020 under the title of Six Questions to Ask Before Having Sex Again.

If you were locked down over the last months with your partner or partners, intimacy has likely been a key part of quarantine survival. But for those of us that are single or in non-monogamous relationships, our ability to attend to our emotional and sexual health needs was severely diminished. Abstinence or pleasuring ourselves with video, chats, sex toys, porn and our own imaginations kept us safe and alive. Now many of us are wondering how to reconnect in real time.

Desire and intimacy have always carried risks. During the previous pandemic, most of us had “the conversation” before sex, disclosing our HIV status. With Prep and U=U, these conversations have become less important. Recently, the New York City Health Department guidelines on sex and the Corona virus suggested that “If you do have sex with others outside of your household, have as few partners as possible and pick partners you trust.”

In these lockdown months, maybe you met someone on online or reconnected with a previous sex partner. Or perhaps, you have chatted with folks about starting a pod for more safely managing sexual contact. After months of texting or video-chats, you are itching to meet in-person. While you may have already figured out all of the things you want to do, before you can safely hook-up, you need have at least one more conversation. The following six questions will guide you and your potential partner(s) as you talk about consent and risk-taking. There are no right or wrong answers. And as I was to find out, the honesty and openness of the conversation deepened the real intimacy I was seeking.

With whom, if anyone, have you been sheltering-in place?  Your interactions with any household member mean being exposed to others or exposing them to you. Share information about your daily contacts with the people in your household, highlighting any of them more vulnerable due to age, health or other factors. And be aware that circumstances can change, as it did for me when a partner’s parent had emergency surgery, causing us to put a brake on meeting.Have either of you had any symptoms in the last 14 days? Those symptoms include: fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath and loss or smell or taste. My seasonal allergies have some of the same symptoms, so I made sure my partner knew about that in advance so my sniffles would not be off-putting.Have you been in direct contact and/or sex with someone diagnosed with COVID or someone who is undiagnosed but is symptomatic? While most people with COVID -19 have symptoms, asymptomatic spread is possible. Generally, if you are healthy after 14 days of any type of exposure or possible exposure (e.g., if you have been in any large protests recently), your chances are low that you carry the virus.What masking, social distancing and health protocols do each of you follow? People have wide variations in how they handle these basic protocols and you want share how you attend to them. While the guy I was talking to had similar standards, they were not exactly the same as mine. We had to make sure each of was comfortable with the other. For example, my social distanced participation in recent protests caused my friend to require that I get tested before we met up again.Have you been diagnosed with COVID-19 using a nasal swab or saliva PCR test or tested for COVID antibodies? Testing is only useful, if you can get results back quickly. I was lucky to get my PCR test results in 24 hours, but if you have to wait a week or more and you have been out and about, the results will not mean much. According to NY Public Health Department, “people who have recovered from COVID-19 at least 10 days from the day their symptoms started and who have not had fever for at least three days are likely no longer infectious.” Currently, the length and type of immunity antibodies might confer is unknown. With low reliability rates, antibody tests may be worthless. However, in the future we should know more.Given that a person could be asymptomatic and still infect others, how do you feel about that risk? This might be the toughest question, in that it addresses your risk-taking/adverseness. While attending to all of the health protocols above will significantly lower the possibility of infection, there is still some risk through asymptomatic exposure. My friend and I talked about our willingness to address this unknown exposure. Since both of us had been going shopping and cautiously participating in the outside world, we had already knew that we were taking some chances, that others did not.

After this discussion, we felt a base for honesty and compassion had been established between us. Yet, one can hear all of the “right” answers and still decide that they are not ready. On the other hand, when desire takes over, data can be thrown out in the rush. We gave ourselves more time to ponder the risks and our desires before making a decision.

When we decided to give it a shot, we went on to the bonus question:

What types of sexual practices do you enjoy and what would be off-limits at least in the beginning?

Remember, the virus can only be passed if any of the participants are currently infected. For me, we know enough to trust each other during this time. Honesty is hot. Our conversations about Covid have not stopped but now they include much more. Sex, safety and intimacy are still possible in our COVID world.  

Beings are numberless, I vow to save them: The 4 Boddhisattva Vows

  Shu-jō mu-hen sei-gan-dō

Bon-nō mu-jin sei-gan-dan

Ho-mon mu-ryō sei-gan-gaku

Butsu-do mu-jō sei-gan-jō

Beings are numberless; I vow to save them.

Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.

Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.

Buddha’s way is unsurpassable; I vow to become it.

The first time I chanted these lines 12 years ago, I was fascinated. They were the mystical embodiment of my perception of Zen at that time—undefinable, unattainable and magical.  Over these years since, my perception of Zen have changed as I delved in to the practicalities of practice itself, sitting, forms, dokusan (practice conversations) with my teachers, reading and listening.

Yet today, I am still fascinated with the Bodhisattva vows. In April 2013, I received lay ordination called Jukai where I accepted and acknowledged the Bodhisattva precepts as an ongoing path within myself. That day, I received my dharma name of Shinki Buzon, Profound Capacity Dancing Mountain. My life changed. Never before had I consciously done anything like that–in front of my teacher, other students and friends, I committed to live a life according to Buddhist principles.

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The process leading to Jukai at SFZC has many steps of study, discussion with a teacher on the precepts, practice with the precepts, more discussion, sewing the rakusu, unsewing my mistakes, sewing some more, relying on the guidance of those more experienced in all of the above and living with my own instincts. On the day of Jukai, I questioned what I was doing and why, after years of pushing away all sorts of possible involvements, was I joining this cult. I remember using that word cult in my mind and not in a positive way. As we chanted through the building, bowing at altars before we entered the Buddha Hall for the ceremony, I told myself to run now as this was my last chance. This very thought was still in my mind and vanished exactly when I stepped over the threshold of the Buddha Hall.

Each morning when I sit, I recite my intentions. For many years, one has been “My intention is to awake with all beings”, another way of saying “saving all beings.”

I want to acknowledge that parts of my talk today have been inspired by Shohaku Okumura’s Living by Vow which looks deeply at what he calls the eight essential zen chants and texts. The first vows that he examines are the four Bodhisattva vows that I chanted earlier. [image error]

I love the idea of saving all beings. I would say who doesn’t, but I realize this is my way, not everyone’s way. A good part of my life has been geared toward saving all beings…my professional career, my activism, my openness to my friends and family. Yet it took a long time maybe 40-50 years to get myself to consider saving me. Saving all beings was my co-dependency. As long as I was busy saving all beings, I didn’t have to look at myself—my problems and issues, my long-twisted karma from my family history, from my cultural history, from my being a white person in a racist society, from my being a racist in a racist society.

Often one is prodded to spiritual practice by something they find lacking in their souls. Quickly enough the ideas, the readings, the classes can engulf us and keep us satisfied. Ah, I am making progress and pat myself on the back. But by themselves these actions only activate the mind and create a new distance from our original intent. Frustrated, I  would ask, “How is this helping me? How will my personal problems be fixed?” Eventually I hit the metaphoric wall of realization (and believe me Zen has lots of these walls everywhere) that Zen is not about fixing me. Zen practice allows me a portal to look at reality and with this one jumps back to a larger view, the greater mind. Zen is not an intellectual activity, despite the strong tradition of scholarship and writing—it is a body practice. That is why we focus on sitting and observing the world with our body and feelings. As far as I have experienced, this cycle of questioning oneself and one’s actions and recommitting repeats over and over, each time coming back to the body.

One of the early and continuous lessons from Zen is, “We are already enlightened, we just don’t know it.” In David Chadwick’s book, To Shine One Corner of the World, he reports Suzuki Roshi, wryly saying it another way, “Each of you is perfect the way you are … and you can use a little improvement.”

I accept this is a truth. I accept that imperfections, mistakes, wrong paths, uncertainty, pain are just as much a part of understanding, acceptance and perfection as are peace, happiness, equanimity and the right path. “Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.” Suzuki Roshi said in Not Always so. [image error]

Throughout these twists and turns of my Zen experience, I kept returning to the four vows. I would like to share my understanding and experience of the four vows today. My caveat is that I am not an expert and approach my topic with Beginner’s mind. I can offer you only one person’s incomplete version of the reality that surrounds us.

According to Okumura, a bodhisattva is a person who lives by vow instead of karma (habits, preferences and ready-made systems of values.) Honestly, I’m not the best Zen student or Buddhist. I take shortcuts whenever possible and like to believe that those shortcuts are justifiable and good in themselves. So if I am already enlightened, by living by vow, I must be a bodhisattva or at least on the path. Since Zen is often so hierarchical, I always thought that there must be an official test for being a Bodhisattva. Maybe it is as simple as saying “Person, Man, Woman, Camera, TV”, I don’t know.

Okumura says, a Bodhisattva is defined by their commitment to the vows. Consistent repetition of the vows settles them in the body. Even if you do not know Japanese, the sounds of the words alone begin to work their way through the mind to the body where they live and flourish. Start with the vows, repeat them without expectation and let them sink in.

So let’s look at the vows.

Beings are number less, I vow to save them. As Zen teacher Marc Lesser points out, Beings are numberless—there are no beings. There really are no beings, he wasn’t kidding. If all beings are interconnected, then what we imagine as ourselves disappears. At the same time, our personal self does not disappear. Both/all exist simultaneously.

Today we are all staring at a computer and Zoom demonstrates our connectedness and individuality. When you are on gallery view, you can see the pulse beat of our humanity together. If we are all unmuted, occasionally you will notice individual boxes spontaneously light up, even when someone else is speaking. We may be listening to the speaker and at the same time, we are connecting with everyone.  The lighted boxes flip around as people move, sigh or make a remark.

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If you can flip to speaker view, you see that the speaker is commanding attention like when we are in the I or me mode. We are the center of attention. But speaker mode does not eliminate the other boxes; the speaker is not alone. Our challenge is to accept and live with the interconnected beings of the ultimate reality and the individual being that has a body that experiences conventional reality. No single being can be saved by itself, just as all beings interconnected cannot save themselves.

I can easily imagine saving friends or people in my sangha, but what about all of the other people—the difficult family members, the person at work who is abrasive and annoying, people that don’t wear masks when they should, acquaintances that post right wing memes on Facebook, people who threaten or carry-out violence, people who don’t practice Buddhism… For numberless beings, I seem to have a large and growing list of people who I believe I cannot save or maybe in my heart of hearts, don’t want to save.

We will get to delusions, next, but as a preview of that topic, the list of people I don’t want to save that I just recited is a really a list of delusions and not necessarily people. If there are no beings, then how can there be these beings I can’t cope with, do not want to deal with and blame for not wanting to be saved? I can only turn to myself. What parts of me in our interbeing do I not want to sit with? What parts of the me/interbeing need a little improvement in my perfection? How am I abrasive, threaten, hold fixed views, don’t want to get along with family and others, don’t want to acknowledge other ways of living except for my own and a select few others? In a paraphrase of Senju Earthlyn Manuel, in The Way of Tenderness, a Bodhisattva has to practice with the limitations of our own perceptions of the mental spiritual state of our family, society, beingness.

Right now, an important question for me is how are my fixed views as a white person skewing my interactions with our reality. What am I bringing to saving all beings from a point of whiteness? I believe (whether it is true or not) that I have pondered this from my identities of a gay, cis-male from a working-class background. And those ponderings may inform my view of whiteness. Yet, in this moment, I am coming to greater awareness of how, in my own process of awakening, my whiteness limits my worldview.

Many of us are used to either/or viewpoints and mentality. For me it is easy to get fixed on what is right and what is wrong. I believe in my versions of right and wrong and if pushed I can find people and theories to back me up. So while ethics and morals are not intrinsically bad, using them as a moral battering ram can be. Saving all beings means engaging with those we might choose not to and engaging in ways that may not be comfortable. Saving all beings means engaging with those parts of myself that I am not familiar with, don’t want to be familiar with or want to push away. As several teachers have pointed out, sometimes saving all beings is simply doing less harm. Or as another Zen teacher Valorie Beer once said, “My job is to save all beings from my own stupidity.”

Which leads us to…Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. We are certainly experiencing this statement of reality these days. Corona appears to be inexhaustible but that is not enough. Racism appears to be inexhaustible, but that is not enough. Violence in all forms and manifestations is inexhaustible and that is not enough. Unemployment and poverty appear to be inexhaustible but they are not enough. Environmental degradation is certainly inexhaustible and even that is not enough. I can add to this litany all of my own personal delusions and all of the ones I don’t know about.. Another way to state delusion as are inexhaustible is We cannot even have enough delusions to satisfy our desire for delusions. A fundamental truth recognized by Buddha: our humanness is defined by our struggle with delusions, especially the basic one of not recognizing our interbeing.

Yet, perhaps, the biggest delusion is that delusions are inexhaustible. We know from our experience that delusions can be exhaustible, they can disappear in a puff of smoke, in a moment of stillness, in a flash of awareness. Keeping them exhausted is something else. By acknowledging our ability to acknowledge our delusions big and small, we have a place to act from, a way to experience life directly without filters.

Yes, they won’t end, which is why…

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. You may have noticed the vows never use the word but. The first phrase of each vow offers a vision of reality that appears to be part of reality yet encompasses all of the reality. The second phrase does not negate the first one (the way the word but would). The second phrase gives the action for us to follow. Sure there are a million bazillion ways to enter the dharma, and we can still enter them. Is it a delusion that we need all of these entry points? With million bazillion beings aren’t all of the entry points occupied? More importantly, who needs so many dharma gates? Don’t we need just one? Will it not lead us where each part of us needs to go? Just as there is no end gate that says you have achieved it all, there is no beginning gate. Just gate among gates among gates reminding us of our vow and of our delusions.

I have a Facebook acquaintance who has world views to which I do not subscribe. This person recently posted video meme debunking the corona virus. I was furious (and this was just 15 minutes before I was going into a sangha meeting.)

I had (notice the use of had…always an indicator to ask oneself, do I really have to?) to respond and wrote, “If you can’t believe that virus is dangerous, I don’t know what to say. I am saddened to think that you feel a need to share nonsensical propaganda. Please take me off your mailing list. I hope you remain healthy.” 

Fairly quickly, the response, “Where did you get the idea that I don’t think it’s serious?  I just look at other information outside the mainstream”

My quick response, “I pay attention to public health officials. The rest is non-information. This video falls into that category. If one believes in the seriousness of this pandemic, then that person encourages their friends how to best support themselves and survive this disease.”

Despite what I thought was a measured response that did not attack this person and tried to skillfully communicate, I went into my sangha meeting furious, ready to cut the person off, drop the friendship. I was caught in my own anger and wrestled with this for the entire time I sat. I even thought at one time “How dare they break my Bodhisattva vow!” (another aside, when statements like that enter my mind, it is a good sign for me to stop and examine my great capacity for absurd thoughts.)

I decided to utilize a practice called tonglen where one breathes in negativity and breathes out positivity. I began to breathe in my negativity (which was super easy due to all of the intense thoughts that were bothering me) and then consciously breathed out equanimity, safety and good health to all.  I did that until the bell rang.

After, we finished, I went back to FB and saw their answer, “Got it!”  I was so caught up in my righteous anger and my time spent in sitting occupied with the fight, that I was somehow disappointed that they did not leave me anything else to be mad about. Tricked again by my own mind.

What can I learn from this? Hmmm, maybe I can trust my vow after all. And even if I saw a different response, maybe I still could have trusted my vow. Maybe my vow includes being angry with myself, using my sitting time to sit with my emotions and using that time to defuse or accept the emotions for what they were. 

Why did I bring up this story? Because this was a dharma gate. We do not choose dharma gates, we surrender to the dharma in whatever way it meets us. Every situation, every moment and every breath is a dharma gate; everything is an invitation to enter. Now. Fully. We have entered them with first breath and will continue entering them until our last.

And finally we get to…Buddha’s Way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.   The vow to follow the three treasures, the four noble truths, the noble eightfold path. We have the guidelines, we have the instructions, we have the wisdom. We will get it wrong and the climb back on the path or more accurately, the path includes dead ends, falling, not seeing the signposts, having it rain and hail on us, having our memories of all of these things overcome us. The path also has everything we need, every experience, every ability, every sense already. Nothing is lacking. We practice is with our entire being that is why we say become it. We are Buddha and with our vow we have continue to become it.

With gratitude, I thank you for listening to me today. 

This is a dharma talk that I gave a the SF LGBT Sangha on 3 August 2020. You can listen to the full talk although the first 5 minutes were a bit spotty due to a weak internet connection. 

Six Questions to Ask Before Having Sex in the Time of Corona

If you were locked down over the last months with your partner or partners, intimacy has likely been a key part of quarantine survival. But for those of us that are single, our ability to attend to our emotional and sexual health needs was severely diminished. Abstinence or pleasuring ourselves with video, chats, sex toys, porn and our own imaginations kept us safe and alive. Now many of us are wondering how to reconnect in real time.

Desire and intimacy have always carried risks. During the previous pandemic, most of us had “the conversation” before sex, disclosing our HIV status. With Prep and U=U, these conversations have become less important. Recently, the New York City Health Department guidelines on sex and the Corona virus suggested that “If you do have sex with others outside of your household, have as few partners as possible and pick partners you trust.”

In these lockdown months, maybe you met someone on Daddyhunt or Mister or reconnected with a previous sex partner. After months of texting or video-chats, you are itching to meet in-person. You have already figured out all of the things you want to do with this Daddy or boi, but before you can safely hook-up, you need have one more conversation.  The following six questions will guide you and your potential partner(s) in a conversation about consent and risk-taking. There are no right or wrong answers. And hopefully the honesty and openness of the conversation will deepen the real intimacy you are seeking.

With whom, if anyone, have you been sheltering-in place?  You may think you are engaging with just one person in the household, but your interactions will mean being exposed to others or exposing them to you. Share information about your daily contacts with the people in your household, highlighting any of them more vulnerable due to age, health or other factors.Have you had any symptoms in the last 14 days? Those symptoms include: fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath and loss or smell or taste. Obviously, seasonal allergies and common colds have some of the same symptoms, so be honest about your health status.Have you been in direct contact and/or sex with someone diagnosed with COVID or someone who is undiagnosed but is symptomatic? While most people with COVID -19 have symptoms, asymptomatic spread is possible. Generally, if you are healthy after 14 days of any type of exposure or possible exposure (e.g., if you have been in any large protests recently), your chances are low that you carry the virus.What are your masking, social distancing and health protocols? People have wide variations in how they handle these basic protocols and you want share how you attend to them. Notably, essential workers working directly with COVID-infected people or store employees who meet a range of people likely have very different habits and needs than the rest of us.Have you been diagnosed with COVID-19 using a nasal swab or saliva test or tested for COVID antibodies? According to NY Public Health Department, “people who have recovered from COVID-19 at least 10 days from the day their symptoms started and who have not had fever for at least three days are likely no longer infectious.” Currently, the length and type of immunity antibodies might confer is unknown. With low reliability rates, antibody tests may be worthless. However, in the future we should know more.Given that a person could be asymptomatic and still infect others, how do you feel about that risk? This might be the toughest question, in that it addresses your risk-taking level. While attending to all of the health protocols above will significantly lower the possibility of infection, there is still some risk through asymptomatic exposure. Talk about any concerns you have and your willingness to address this unknown exposure. If you have been going shopping or otherwise participating in the outside world, you probably have an understanding of what you are willing or not willing to do.

If you made it this far, you have established a base for honesty and compassion. However, we can get all of the “right” answers we want and still not be ready. When it comes to sex and intimacy, the data we have can easily be ignored when desire takes over.

You are now set up to discuss what if anything happens next and how soon. If you come to clear mutual consent, here is the bonus question to discuss:

What types of sexual practices do you enjoy and what would be off-limits at least as we start?

Remember, the virus can only be passed if any of the participants are currently infected. You may want to consider routine testing as you are seeing this new person. Honesty is hot. Sex, safety and intimacy are still possible in our COVID world.  

Endings: Storytelling at the Berkeley Moth

My first Moth Storytelling night in Berkeley on June 6. 2018 on the theme “endings.” Stepping up to speak after my name was called, all I knew was my first line. For the Moth you cannot read anything prepared. Your name is picked out of a hat and you come on stage. As I walked up, I tried to fast-forward to at least the second line. But that is not how it works for me most of the time, whether in speaking or writing. I said my first line and the the second appeared and then the third. Six minutes later, the whole story had all tumbled out.

When extemporaneously speaking, I know the story but not how I will deliver it. That night the auditorium the lights were turned low, so I could not see the audience beyond the second row. At one point, in the storytelling, I paused for a few seconds and realized that people were holding their breath waiting for my next words. That is when I knew they were listening.

Good writing regulates how the reader breathes: speeding up for exciting points, stopping or slowing during dramatic or poignant passages. The secret superpower of writers is our ability to control the readers’ breath, emotions and feelings in their bodies. This also explains why sometimes we don’t have the words for why we like a certain book or passage we are reading. An effective story bypasses the brain and goes directly for the body and breath. Check this out next time you read.

Sex in the Time of Corona

Who could imagine that radical behavioral changes required due to the coronavirus would make kissing dangerous and caressing forbidden? Sadly, health professionals have ignored sex and intimacy as they outline the dos and don’ts of our current lives. The implicit message is that we shouldn’t be talking about sex when people are dying. However, that is the wrong response to an urgent human need.

Throughout the last century, LGBT men and women were forced to assess the risks of desire. Long before AIDS, we cruised and sought out sex partners in a hostile world. A wrong move or misplaced trust could bring beatings, arrest, and/or blackmail, leading to the loss of livelihood and home. The right move brought us intimacy, pleasure, friendship and, sometimes, love.

During the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we were forced to assess new risks. With better understanding of that virus, we identified safer sex methods. These changed over time with medical advances until today we have undectectable = untransmitable and PREP as an available prevention strategy. We have adapted to each of these changes.

The New York City Health Department was the first to post guidelines for sex during the corona outbreak. While they emphasize social distancing as well as intimacy with those already in one’s home, the guidelines also recognize that people will reach out to others. More recently, the San Francisco Department of Public Health issued more specific Covid-19 Sexual Health Tips. In a time of extreme isolation, sexual connection is an important component in maintaining our mental and physical health.

Just as the history of the AIDS pandemic has shaped epidemiologists thinking about Covid-19, the previous development of HIV safer sex and harm reduction protocols give us a model now.  Shaming was used as an early tactic but studies quickly showed that it only drove unsafe behaviors deeper underground. Harm reduction strategies attempt to understand why people have certain behaviors and propose changes that they can undertake. As we see today, significant numbers of people are unable to easily alter their behaviors due to a lack of financial resources, their living situation, other health issues, the need to work, marginalization by society, and/or addiction. Yet, sex and intimacy, connection and support are desires shared by all.

In the last month, most of us have modified the range of our activities to limit exposure to corona. Some are quarantining extremely tightly with minimal exposure to outsiders, home delivery of food and needed items, and continuous sanitation procedures. Others are following guidelines which permit food and other shopping along with outdoor exercise with social distancing.

To date, the bias in public health practice favors those who are living with their sex partners, leaving out up to 50% of the population. LGBTQ people are all adept at assessing risks, even if we do not always follow them. What we need is a harm reduction approach to attend to our sexual needs based on our life and environment as well as our assessment and openness to risk.

So what is a guy or gal to do? It depends on your risk level.

No risk

Get out those toys stored in the bottom drawer of your dresser. It’s time to clean up your dildos, reeve up the vibrators, swab down the sounds, put on your ball gag and pump up your nips. On-line venders, such as Mr. S Leathers and Good Vibrations, here in San Francisco, are still delivering if you want to expand your repertoire. Use your time so you are prepared next time you get to play in person.

Make new friends internationally or local on-line. Find out what is going on where they live, swap some pictures and begin the fantasies. Most of the global LGBT community is horny right now and are ready to talk about it.

Porn is always a stand-by but video cam-ing is quite popular as we shelter-in-place. There are lots of horny folks out there and the intimacy of responding to a hot man or woman on the other side of the camera beats (so to speak) anything else.

Low risk

If 50 Shades of Gray taught us anything, we know the power dynamics of BDSM can be played out while adhering to social distancing in the same room or even in different places. Gas masks and means to filter the air may change all sex play for the next years. Get creative.

Move in with your primary play partner. Observing a 14-day quarantine with them until you both are sure you have no symptoms or exposure will allow you to go at it once the waiting period is up. Obviously, a deep and honest conversation needs to occur about expectations and needs during this period and afterward.

Low-Medium Risk

Observe the 14-day quarantine with a trusted sex partner who lives separately from you. As above, mutual honesty and trust are called for and optimally the two of you would commit to only having sex with each other during this time. Some folks have trusted circles, with several people that have committed to follow the social distancing guidelines in their life outside these interactions. This option increases in risk with the addition of each member of the circle.

As to the future, based on the HIV experience, antibody testing will change the risk equation as we gain additional information to make decisions. We will likely see distinctions being made between Covid-19 positive and negative possible sex partners, just as we have seen in the past with HIV.

At the end of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, his star-crossed lovers spend their last moments on a ship that raised the cholera flag solely to keep others away so that they could have their long-sought privacy. While this might have described the queer community in the past, we won’t hide away in this pandemic. As we take strides to prevent the virus from spreading, let’s maintain intimacy in our lives in an open, honest, sex-positive and caring manner. We can do both and live better for our decision.

This essay was published as a Guest Opinion in the Bay Area Reporter newspaper on 30 April 2020 under the title Sex in the Time of Covid-19

Welcome to Our Collective Retreat (Sesshin)

Welcome as we are in another day of our collective sesshin in Northern California. It’s a very special time because we have never tried to have a sesshin with all of the population of Northern California. But with all of us sheltering-in-place in response to the corona virus, here we are.

Sesshin is a Zen word that translates to “touching the heart-mind.” Buddha would gather his followers to study, practice and sit in meditation for several months during the rainy season when it was difficult to travel. The last part of this practice period would be an intensive time of sitting for a week or more in what today we call mindfulness. The purpose of a sesshin is collect and unify one’s normally scattered mind in order to refine and focus it.

Mingyur Rinpoche,said the following about preparing for a long retreat or sesshin:

“I’m going to do this retreat not only to benefit myself but also my friends, family, colleagues, society, and the world. If you are a Buddhist, think of rousing bodhicitta for the benefit of all sentient beings, so they may recognize their true nature and completely awaken.”

Although his words were from 2017, he is addressing us as we shelter-in-place today. Yes, we are staying in our homes for our own benefit but more importantly to benefit our friends, families, colleagues, neighbors, society and world. I cannot think about another example where humankind has sacrificed together on such a large-scale. We are saving all beings by sheltering-in-place, practicing social distancing and assisting family, friends and neighbors in safe ways. This is the essence of sesshin.

Clearly, this collective sesshin that we are engaged in is different than a traditional sesshin ending a practice period in a Zen temple. Those retreats are time restricted (usually a few days to a few weeks), are conducted in silence, have their own set of rules, and strict daily schedule and routines that all must followed. There some other norms for sesshins that I will discuss later.

The largest difference between our collective sesshin and regular sesshins (besides the size) is that our collective sesshin is an unplanned sesshin of everyday life. We are asking people to stay in as each lives their own life.  This coincides with my own interest in Zen—how do I manifest Buddha life in everything I do each day.

As Gandhi was organizing for the Salt Strike in India, a pivotal event in the Indian independence movement, he recognized that he had no resources except for the large populace everyday on the streets. In the final days when he reached the beach where salt was produced, he said to multitude of people surrounding the area, “you are already sitting around all day, come sit with me for a purpose for justice.”

Well we are the masses, all in our homes, so let’s be there with purpose. How many times, have you said, I wish I could practice more, meditate more, be more intentional, but I don’t have time? What is quite wonderful about our current situation is that your request has been answered—you have the time now. That’s what we are doing in our collective sesshin, we are in our homes, in our place and this is our chance to do it with purpose.

How do we use this special time that may never come to us again? Let’s look at how our sesshin is the same or different than traditional sesshins.

In any sesshin, including ours now, as you focus attention on your body and where you are at this moment, emotions and feelings arise. We have learned through practice that what arises does not have to control us. What arises is what arises—nothing more and nothing less. We acknowledge the arisings as they emerge and with most, that is all we need to do. The feelings pass quickly. But certain other emotions and ideas stick with us and won’t let go of our minds and body.

In this this particular time and in this particular sesshin that we are living through in Northern California, a lot of arising is happening. Over and over I am hearing about fear, anxiety, anger, and suffering taking over people’s lives. This particular constellation of emotions often emerges out of trauma. I define trauma as the unfinished story of pain that reaches deep into every part of our physical being. We all know the unrelenting power of lingering stories, stories without conclusions, stories that have a visceral urgency to be finished. That is trauma. Unexamined, feelings of hopelessness, anger, sadness, and fear arise, retriggered by current events.

Our retriggered traumas take us back in time. In the queer community, many older gay men have said for them they feel like it is 1985 when AIDS was raging through our community, taking life after life with little understanding of how and what can be done. For those that survived, this great suffering and grief has never been fully resolved. The corona virus crisis occurs and the old feelings come rushing in.

Our reactions to the current state of affairs is overlain by these past emotions that twist themselves into this new situation. I want to suggest that when you find that combination of fear, anxiety, and anger, first try to acknowledge their existence. If the emotions lesson or go away, that’s all you need to do. But if you find yourself stuck in any one of those emotions, that’s a good time to acknowledge that perhaps there is something behind it. Try to identify the source, how it felt in 1985 to watch a partner die, what it was like to fight in a war you were unprepared for, how it felt when you lost a job or ended a difficult relationship. Identifying the source is discovering a little post-it note saying this memory and feeling is from the past and I am reacting to that, not to the current situation.

From that realization, you can start differentiating from the past and the present. When we feel from stored trauma, we are remembering a feeling and emotion but not feeling the same way we felt at the time nor how we would feel a current emotion arising. In seeing the post-it note, you can gain a little distance to look at the trauma. Quite often in formal sesshins, individuals may have very powerful emotional responses arise as they give the time and patience to feel what is deep in their bodies. In our collective sesshin, the same will happen. If you can, allow your feelings to arise and respond to them. This is where our practice of mindfulness is the most useful for us.

To do so, we must practice self-compassion. We all are suffering and hold hurt within our bodies. We all had plans and dreams disrupted by this virus. We have been expected to adjust to major changes in lives, the loss of a job, distance from loved ones, and isolation. We cannot change what has happened and clinging to that past will not allow us to live on fully. Acknowledge those disruptions with gentleness, compassion and feeling.

In a traditional sesshin, we would be following a rigid schedule. You walk in the door, the schedule is posted and that is what you will be doing for the period of time. In our collective sesshin, each of us is determining our own schedule. What is your schedule, what are doing, how are participating? Are you still feeling part of the world or perhaps you are feeling a need to hide away. When do you get up, eat, exercise, do chores, sit, go to sleep? Pay attention to the order your life need right now and be aware that it will change.

In a traditional sesshin there are many periods of sitting; some exercise, with Kinhin–walking meditation or yoga; and meals to provide for the nourishment our body needs. In our sesshin, this about your schedule and how you are providing for these needs. We each need to determine how I am living my life—do I want to live my life kinda schlumpy, or do I want to live my life with purpose. All the little decisions get magnified in our sesshin—what do I wear if I am not going outside; how do I want to look for myself; what makes sense now? Whatever the answers are for you, determine them with intention and purpose.

Traditional sesshins reduce distractions as a matter of course. Now, we are forced to ask ourselves, what nourishment am I feeding my mind right now. This is challenging as we are talking about the consumption of news, social media, live streaming…all aspects of the place and time we are in right now. I would suggest examining what is coming as a source of nourishment. I recently binged watched Star Trek: Picard in two days. A noble hero struggling to be moral in a universe filled with deception.  Afterwards, I decided to binge another program which I discovered was filled with a level of violence that only fed the fear in me.

I find that reading fiction works for me in a different way.  I just finished The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a horrific book detailing the violent and degrading conditions that African-American slaves faced in this country. Yet I was able to observe his characters confronting the unconfrontable. The bravery, the determination as they struggled through life, gave me a vision of the courage and the perspective required to confront a virus wreaking havoc worldwide. A good friend in South Africa posted on Facebook as his country is just starting their shelter-in-place, “My father was under house arrest for 25 years by the apartheid regime, I think I can endure the next three days.” Let the nourishment we recieve from real life and fiction that carry us to this greater place.

In a traditional sesshin, you are admonished not to have any sexual interactions. Some of you are sheltering with your loved ones, many of us are not, so sexual feelings and desire for intimacy will inevitably arise. Acknowledge these feelings, as well as step back to identify what do you desire at the moment. Our greatest suffering comes from not getting what we have determined to be what we want or need. But this is not just our mind speaking; sexual energy is a powerful energy within our body that should not be categorically suppressed. There are alternatives for dealing with sexual energies within social distancing rules. Intimacy during difficult times helps us feel connected and comforted and allows us to gather the energy to face our suffering another day.  During our collective sesshin, please pay attention to this.

Another important aspect in a traditional sesshin is the dokusan, or practice consultation with your teacher. Who can you talk to about your life and what is coming up for you? Who do you know that may be able to give you some guidance? By being honest with your situation and eschewing glibness, you may discover any number of unexpected people will listen and offer you wisdom. I have been surprised about the openness of people sharing direct comments to me on social media, including people I barely know. Our situation can bring out the best in friends and strangers if we ourselves are open to accept support and understanding.

We need to remain connected to others, especially if you are alone. Zoom meetings, face-timeing, talking on the phone, talking over the fence to neighbors, texting, social media messaging—provide means of communication and possibly intimacy. In a traditional sesshin a powerful connection develops from sharing the same space in silence as you experience humanity without having to talk. In our case, in addition to looking inward as we sit and meditate, we have to look outwards to find that human interaction vital for our well-being.

Each day, each hour of our collective sesshin presents an opportunity to celebrate another day in our lives. Unfortunately, there will be people who die from the coronavirus and other causes that will not be around to celebrate. What will spark joy in your life today? At least once a day, give yourself up to the beauty and love that exist around us.

Sesshins offer a container for safely within the group, within the space, within the appointed time period. What do you need to feel safe right now? What arises for you that you can do in the space you are in? We are all struggling with this. While we have health guidelines for dealing with exposure to the corona virus, each of us needs to do what we sense we require for our own safety based on our physical and mental health status and experiences. Do what you need to do, what makes your comfortable without making yourself crazy. If obsessiveness and fear are overwhelming you, sit to find your way through them.

Our collective sesshin officially was planned to end on 7 April. When I am in the beginning of a traditional sesshin, the end point is often in my mind—can I make that far; oh, another day has passed; I am almost there. Eventually, I let the end point go and am able to focus more consistently on the moment. We are not trying accomplish anything in sitting or in a sesshin. We are living.

For the betterment of our lives, the end point of our collective sesshin has been extended for at least another month. Enjoy the extra time we have been granted as you continue to be focused on the now and the present and today. By embodying your experience, you will discover unimaginable changes in your life. We are all here in you and for you as we continue this practice together.

Thank you.

This piece was based on a transcription of a dharma talk, I gave to the San Francisco LGBT Sangha on 30 March 2020 via Zoom

The talk ended with the Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo, chanted in the times of disaster to relieve suffering and bring upon healing.

KAN ZE ON                       Kanzeon! Salutation and devotion to Buddha

NA MU BUTSU                 We are one with Buddha

YO BUTSU U IN                In cause and effect related to all Buddhas

YO BUTSU U EN               and to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

BU PO SO EN                    Our True Nature is

JO RAKU GA JO                Eternal, Joyous, Selfless and Pure.

CHO NEN KAN ZE ON    So let us chant every morning Kanzeon with Nen [attention]

BO NEN KAN ZE ON       Every evening Kanzeon, with Nen!

NEN NEN JU SHIN KI      Nen, Nen arises from Mind.

NEN NEN FU RI SHIN     Nen, Nen is no separate from Mind.

Corona Anxiety, Fear & Anger–How to Calm the Trauma

Recently, I have been anxious, fearful and angry. How about you? While Covid-19 brought these feelings to the forefront, I realized the cause was something else, old traumas being re-triggered, the trauma of the pandemic—HIV/AIDS—that killed virtually every person affected in its early years. The deaths and illnesses affecting family members and beloved friends. The trauma of the last three years as we watch our democracy being threatened. And now with shelter-in-place, I face the unknown once more.

Trauma is the unfinished story of pain that reaches deep into every part of our physical being. Since the current health guidelines do not address trauma, I would like to talk about what I am doing in hope it will help you.

1. I need to acknowledge the deep root of my feelings by recognizing where my own grief and fear originate. Doing so, allows me let go of Covid-19, the concerns about being trapped in my home and feel the emotions in my body as they present themselves.

2. I set aside part of my day to experience the beauty and peacefulness of this year’s early spring. I weed the garden and take the permitted walks in my neighborhood. I watch the sunrise, follow the mid-day clouds and dream.

3. I am reading novels and short stories allowing me to enter into other worlds where characters are confronting the unconfrontable in horrific situations. “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, or “Her Body and Other Parties” by Carmen Maria Machado are just two examples of storytellers that took over my body and feelings ultimately giving me perspective on the world I am dealing with.

4. As early AIDS activists did, I am finding ways to channel my anger into political change. As was then, our very lives depend on our actions.

5. I am confronting stupidity with solidarity by drinking Mexican beer and ordering out from my favorite Asian restaurants.

6. And, perhaps the most important, I am face-timing, messaging, air kissing, or elbow bumping those I love and care for. I smile and thank the workers I come in contact with at the supermarket and pharmacy. Human connection is what we need most of all.

This Perspective was broadcast by KQED on 23 March 2020 and can be heard here.