Way-Seeking Mind Talks

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SF-03089C
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really
well i was born in not concord massachusetts
across the street from walden pond and down i feel like that's part of my identity for concern for henry david thoreau did his hermitage and
my parents were a big influence on my interest in spirituality my mom some of you met the summer she was here for paul and brother david's retrieve cheats i consider her a contemplative christian she was raised catholic and does regularly does like silent retreats for know like three days on retreats that benedictine monasteries from time
the time and we can really connect about thousand practice and she likes thomas merton none
we get along great she i can tell her about machine and she can turn it with me and we kind of he's really rich conversations
on and my dad was even maybe a bigger influence on my path of interest in spirituality he was a priest to a catholic priest before having me
my mom let me just go back to my mom for and she was they knew each other as kids in new york city and long island and they are
my mom married a classmate of my dad's name bob and they headed for kids togethers my mom's first marriage they've for kids together my older brothers and sisters and
let you know later about twelve or thirteen years into that marriage my mom divorced bob he was an abusive alcoholic person and on that marriage was ending and then meanwhile my dad i want to say you know he grew up and had suffered some really tragic losses as a yeah
young person he was twelve when his older sister who is seventeen died in a car accident
and his family didn't deal well with death and loss they shut the doors and windows and shut out the world and didn't talk about death and didn't talk about grief and his dad then proceeded to drink himself to death so within a few years my dad lost his sister and his dad and really you know at the age of twelve or fifteen so i think this propelled him to become a priest and start
looking for answers and quickly notice these slave questions and posts about suffering
the type or priest he became as called the maryknoll a priest or merano fathers and order that does a lot of social justice activism in the world or he went to bolivia and nineteen sixties nineteen sixty four and was there throughout the sixties and for those of you who know latin american history bolivia was a well i don't know if it's still is but was a fascist government military gov
vermont
at that time and there was a movement south america called liberation theology and the idea here was
there's a huge class distinction down down there and day on poorest nation in that it was one of the poorest nations in the world
still is and so the military government is in
support of the and in the control of the the uppermost class and and you have a vast amount of extremely poor individuals and then on the church the high church is kind of a corrupt institution as well so my dad's rolled down there as a missionary i think less of the sort of convert and can conversion kind of missionary he did a lot of activism and community development
where can i want to tell you about a couple of things
al jazeera and he's really a giant in my life so in south america he was the regional director of adult education and trained twenty three a curriculum and for volunteer teachers and twenty three local communities so he administered and budgeted literacy program to train to teach thirteen hundred non-readers he coordinated
volunteers government agencies and resource personnel to bring water to two thousand and isolated families in cochabamba bolivia administered to child nutrition prenatal care clinics and on supervised personal and the distribution of emergency relief supplies for catholic relief services and about a quarter million dollars in relief he's really highly educated had to three mm
masters degrees one in education one in divinity and one in counseling and on then he in this activism role in south america when you do things like teach the poor how to read to empower them you're not favoured by this fascist government so he was put in the young prison a number of times and in cochabamba bolivia
he saw immense suffering i know he did funeral services for countless babies dying of dysentery and missed a michelle what am i say on
council are serve to leper communities and things like this and just a bear bear witness to the suffering and poverty of a third world nation like that at that time eventually this imprisonment of activists like this became more serious and they were actually executing activists like this and he left bolivia for his life and eighteen sixty nine came to america po
world war two america meanwhile had built supermarkets and highways and he came back and saw the opulence of our world our nation and just wept saw supermarket and just cried you know and we had to put the broken pieces of his life back together and then he left the church by the way that the church was totally corrupt institution by this point but the spirituality
of jesus's life and model i think was still important to him so zen buddhism help make sense of that suffering that was in him and on and so i saw evidence of this is a really young child and so on
i can remember at the age of nine seeing a painting of on she take this is an eccentric a companion of han sean and my dad say see matty that that's a zen master he's holding a broom and he's just like loving and enjoy full in the simplest of activity sweep sweeping look at any as this year to your smile you know and on
as a gap
amen
you know here with my dad was really influenced by alan watts and others at that time and martin buber and carl young and joseph campbell and we would go fishing and main every summer in the wilderness of their and dumb he would convey them we would have these conversations about dreams and the mind and down was like a tutelage sort of in a way and he was a real pacifist and then i had to step down
who is really violent so i grew up bouncing back and forth between my mom and dad's house so i see a lot of violence around my brother's there's
you know broken glass and i'd see them arrested and bloody one another and they never really took it out amicus all my life they outweighed me by two hundred pounds their massive and on and but i still was around all the time as was hiding under tucked under tables and stuff like that and so that contrast i know that set in me a real vow at a young age
to try to find a peaceful way to be in the world and my dad's example was important wilderness stephanie became his next church and that's where we both you know dove into spirituality kind of explosion together and down he would teach me the dharma but i didn't know it was that at the time he would teach me things like if i had a headache he'd say and as he probably learned as a somatic therapists to you'd say like what color is it
how big is it how much water would hold and he would invite me into suffering physically sound familiar you know and and then the headache would either go away or change or he'd say can you let go of it know a governor and he would convey these alan want stories to me about like life is like doing dishes you know you can either look over at the statutory dishes and display
gosh shit or you can totally get off on each action you know the bubbles in the warm water and just like yeah okay and he encouraged me to live life this way and we both were really interested in the sense of flow were like kind of a search for somebody where a performance athletes experienced sort of a dropping off of self you know genius and whatnot so from for
a young age i got into things like rock climbing and sailing and skiing and stuff like though i can remember the age of nine picking a buddha dropping ashes on the buddha by master seung song koreans and master off my dad's bookshelf and it's a book of collins i didn't really get anything about it other than the cover dropping ashes on the buddha meant
if you worship the icon of the buddha you're missing the point that it's an interior direct experience in your life and dumb i understood that much anyway
at a time and on
so life went on and my dad's other equality that was really palpable and influential as his loving presence he continued he was world the he m took his skills from south america and he became a bilingual guidance counselor in a republic junior high school where for the next ten years she did among other things developed on know chairperson coordinate
or of seven hundred and sixty six special education programs and on
so he i went to visit him at school in or and people who loved him but mostly i'd see him he like going through toll booths were going to convenience stores the kind of presence he attended to giving and exchanging like change with the merchant or genuine care of how are they doing and on
loving presence so i can say is just there was very palpable and on
when i was so growing up to like teenage years now
i got in i started sitting when i was seventeen in high school i just started sitting zazen three times a day twenty minutes at a time in my dorm room in high school and i started i read the set of seeing and i noticed noticed and i start getting to gary snyder and annie dillard and nature writers
some
i just noticed how much more extroverted oddly enough i was when i said so and on days when i didn't because actually think i felt more at ease and more presence with my peers and maybe a little less self-conscious i'm so i went on to college and went to evergreen state college in olympia washington really radicalizing institution because my for
first year as there i was just hit with like here's what's going on in the world from a really liberal perspective the environment you know who just got loaded with facts on state of the environment social justice and dumb became very depressed in the face of all the information and on
felt despair really i felt like really clear about how people saw themselves human beings see ourselves seal themselves as the center of the universe and i actually felt like through wilderness time and otherwise that we weren't there were just common citizens in the world among species and that own this was such a powerful
paradigm for humanity that this could never be overcome actually and as long as it wasn't this anthro for centrism would ruin the world basically deep depression and down
and so i was really depressed i was in college and my professor crossed the room like there were three professor somebody else was teaching there's three hundred people in electro homes professors walked up to me in the middle of a car maybe i was crying and class i don't know and he said have you ever read shambala the path of the sacred path of the warrior and as a know maybe a tissue
that's so i did and or other things in the notion of taking refuge really hit me the three refuges and also own ah was the bodhisattva vow to save all beings as first i'm really heard a religion that addressed this notion of serve an antidote to that what i perceive us or this anthropy centrism
so college went along the next year i felt like because it's like what my dad and i have been doing in my notion of on the need for rites of passage and campbell and young still turning in my head i went to alaska alone whereas eighteen and i did a lot of solar wilderness travels sea kayaking and travel and denali national park of
my own and taught natural history and stuff up there was very spiritual experience to be in this alaska is a lot more wilder than the lower forty eight i just say that if rich i mean what one moment there was wales ah salmon eagles otters glaciers and i just felt like the world really is really abundant
and down
maybe that renewed my faith somewhat i came back to school and i did a traveling semester on a bus called the autobot expeditions to do it's an intentional community with twenty students living on a school bus studying a region we drove all around the northern rockies and i got to study on a number of native american reservations at that time and i am not emphasizing that in this talk with has been a big
part of my spiritual path this native americans days
and on so then on this bus experience had a really open curriculum and you can study whatever you wanted and given a lot of room guess what i wanted to do with some study meditation doubt of physics was you informed me that year and i built a our bench once on my break i just started sitting outdoors we lived outdoors
as slept outside every night the winter in south dakota was really rough
and then this leads me up to like my senior in college i am became depressed again and i think i was depressed for two reasons one is my girlfriend at the time and i went through an abortion and just the the experience of that death of a life was really really struck me and i mean know went with her to the clinic and really was there
yep seems really sad as i think about it and also anxiety about what to do after college was hitting me hard so i went home that winter and december i told my parents about the abortion i told my dad about and he was like get into your breath get into your body and on we did some breathing exercises and and then
two months later i went out to olympia washington my parents are in boston mind you and down and i'm in school and down it's february sunny day in february and i'm biking home from school to my house and my girlfriend intercepts me in her car and says put your bike in the car go get back to the house we don't go to the house we go to a local city park
my mom is there she's crossed the coast she's standing in a sunny meadow and she's in a black like
cape kind of thing and she says you dad sick you know
and i knew he was gone already said it's birds guarneri
he died and on we started making our way to the east coast anda so as twenty one senior year in college
just overnight he's gone so i don't have an experience of dying when someone dies to me their you're gone overnight
so i made my way home and as we made each step with the way my monster breaking more news to me he had committed suicide and half
and then i got home and then they're like and reason he committed suicide was that in a role as a school counselor some accusations have been brought against him for sexual misconduct with a student
inappropriate and a lawsuit and surfaced and down he started to more he was despairing obviously and ah
he wrote a note and plan to suicide my mom found it the day before he tried and said richard you know what are you doing this is she is going through some of the the trump the trauma of the accusations and the media was hounding our house i didn't know about any of this and down she said you know i'm not suicidal because i feel guilty and
suicidal because i can't the shame
and the i can't stand to be tried by the media basically we we had newspapers and you know his his career is ruined if your work with children and you have even an accusation even if you're innocent your career is gone he was sixty something sixty years old so on but he succeeded the very next day he asked is fixated himself in a
car in public garage and down
and so
fortunately in the state of depression aids begun sitting with the passionate group every week before in the fall so i continued with that and continue with counseling i was already doing and i was really committed to sort of healing through diet and exercise and meditation and i graduated school i don't know how the hell i got to the spring semester
i did and then i am
really gave myself to my body i just said
mom i just started climbing and sailing a lot more and on skiing i became a ski bum in colorado and a climbing been lived or my truck for months and climbed all over the country and then
when our offshore sailing from rhode island to south america
and on at the meantime i had applied to gringotts practice period and i was in venezuela or trinidad and i got my mail forwarded or something my mom read me a letter said green gulch practice period starts in like a week or something and i'm like forty eight hours later i flew from venezuela to
boston to green gulch and sat my ass down from my first practice room and unfortunately i'm at a time but i'd like to tell you more about the next two steps
okay so my first practice period was with reb and ninety seven and it's ashame i really heard from reb the echoes of my dad's voice and it really affirmed to meet yeah my dad had been teaching me exactly what i needed to know to come to terms with his death and that i'm through sitting with physical pains that we sit in zazen
and sixteen i learned to trust and relax that and then the emotional pain that had been shelved for two years surface surface and are aggrieved really hard and really
a lot of compassion came up for my dad for the level of suffering that human through but then the the grief and suffering also came up connected to the pains of my childhood and the violence i lived among as well as that pain of the world that i was speaking of ecologically socially justice none of it was differentiated just was all there and all of it with compassion
and all of it just meeting it so on
a pretty much started practicing that and new i never leave you know kind of save my life i think and ah
then the next fall i met mimi
and we live together green gulch in oz coke practitioners for like nine months and we started dating and we moved away from green gulch and eventually moved up to where do you paya for year and then moved to seattle for the next four years so i could go to graduate school in ecology we got married at the gringo zendo and eighteen and two thousand and two with linda ruth
and in two thousand and three decicco with a new roof there to and then now mimi and i spent a year in reflection about with as with a then rinse eyes and abbott psychotherapist in seattle exploring our fears concerns and draw to starting a family and we concluded that we did want to start a family but that on
we want to go to tassajara for your first and that's what brings us here while living in seattle we lived with a group of practitioners five practitioners and has been doing our house and kept going for four years and many of biscuit all of us had san francisco zen center monastic practice as a shared experience and that was a great experiment
thanks