March 2024

*|MC:SUBJECT|*

BULLETIN

March 2024




“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” —Ram Dass

 

Dear Sangha,

I stole the above Ram Dass quote from the wonderful conversation between Ryusho and Tendo on the joys and hardships of parenting (see below for the whole interview—it’s a really good one). One of the things that stuck with me from their intimate discussion—besides the great truth that family is a relentless place of practice—is how valuable Sangha is in letting us know that we are not alone. As Tendo so eloquently puts it, “The idea, ‘There’s something wrong with me,’ shifted to, ‘Well, this is what people experience.’”

Me, I’ve always been a bit of a loner. Even today, despite (and perhaps directly related to) the demanding relationship of spouse and kid, I imagine an escape to the mountains of Tibet—some solo hermitage, a cozy cave perhaps, where I could have the space and time and solitude to finally figure it all out, become enlightened, and live happily ever after. Of course, the whole point of the Ram Dass quote is exactly how insubstantial that kind of enlightenment is—who cares if you’re one with the universe when you’re on some distant mountain? (Especially if when you come down from the mountains and rejoin your family, you immediately turn back into an asshole.) The enlightened way has to be practiced in the everyday—in relationship—or it probably doesn’t mean much.

And so, Sangha. Thank God for Sangha! In some senses, Sangha is the best of both worlds. Not alone, not not-alone, to practice with the VZ community is to sit in solitude among other seeking, suffering souls who are also sitting in solitude. (This is of course the truth of it—even amongst others, we sit by ourselves: no one in our mind but us.) And yet to know, when with Sangha, that everyone else is undergoing much the same experience as you—the same longing, the same effort, the same madness—there’s such support in this! Somehow, remarkably, impossibly, I am not the only one who struggles. I am not the only one that feels they’re a crappy person. I’m not the only one who wants to escape to a cave.

And yes, Sangha is family (and no doubt at times just as infuriating), but to spend time among the treasure of this strange and wonderful community (as we are offered the chance to do in our upcoming Urban Sesshin, detailed below) does not just test our sense of enlightenment—it grounds us in a sense of sanity. Or, to put it another way, among Sangha, we can simply be ourselves, secure in the knowledge we are not the only ones who are insane.

With deep gratitude,

Taylor Plimpton
Editor

 


FEBRUARY CALENDAR


Sunday, March 3                      Online: Practice and Inquiry Circle

                                                                with Joshin Roshi, 9:30 am

                                                   
In-Person: Body, Breath and Mind

                                                                 an Intro to Zen, 9:30 am

Thursday, March 7:                    Zazen and Dharma Talk by Kenko

Sunday, March 10, 9:30 am:     Zazen and Dharma Talk by Jiryu

                                                   Music Improv, 4 pm

Thursday, March 14:                 Zazen and Dharma Talk by Soten

                                                  Newcomers’ Meeting, 6:40 pm
 
Sunday, March 17:                    Zazen and Dharma Talk by Fusho Hoshi

                                                  Book Discussion—The Intuitionist, 5 pm    


 
Wednesday to Friday, March 20 to 22: URBAN SESSHIN


Saturday, March 23:                 Zazenkai

Sunday, March 24:                    Shusho Hossen

Thursday, March 28:                Zazen and Dharma Talk by Bokushu Sensei


Sunday, March 31:                   Zazen and Dharma Talk by Daishi Hoshi

                                                  Path of Expression, 1:30 pm



———————

Ongoing Groups: 
 

The Bolivian Sitting Group meets online Saturdays: 7 am;

                                (At 8 am starting March 16)

        Bolivia Zoom Meeting ID: 297 525 8394; Password: 1234

The People of Color Sitting Group meets online Saturdays: 10:30 am

How to Meditate meets Monday evenings online: 6:30 pm

Sorting Out Your Stuff meets online Tuesdays: 10 am

Liturgy Training: In-Person,

               1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month: 6 pm

Grace and Grit meets online, first Thursday of each month at 2 pm


 

March 20-22 (Mostly Online)
 


URBAN SESSHIN 2024:

BEING TIME IN A TIK TOK WORLD



 

Urban Sesshin culminates our Winter Ango intensive practice period and study of Dogen’s text Uji. Led by our practice leader, Shuso Jyåkuen Posey, it is an opportunity to engage Dogen’s view of being time in a whole-hearted, experiential way via a series of workshops that will help us fine-tune our understanding of this elusive teaching.


Wednesday Morning, Jyåkuen, a watchmaker, will kick off the workshops with a look at the practice of watchmaking, and follow up in the afternoon with an outdoor trip to the NYC Horological Society to study the history of watchmaking. https://hs-ny.org

Wednesday Online afternoon participants will attend a workshop facilitated by our beloved Poet-in-Residence, Filip Marinovich, writing spontaneous poems.

Here’s Filip’s description of the workshop:

UJImprovisation :
Your time being is the poem. 
Freely translating Dogen into Dragon. 
This time 
Being is the poem. 


On Thursday, Marco Seiryu Wilkinson, Asst. Professor of Creative Writing at UC San Diego and published author, will lead us in a memoir workshop:  "The self setting itself out in array sees itself" How was it then? How is it now? What does then look like now? How is now a function of remembering then? We'll engage in life-writing through the lens of memoir as a genre fundamentally concerned with how the act of remembering structures time. Just who is this time-being manifested through the act of remembering?

On Friday, Shinryu Sinclair Thomson, Roshi, a historian at NYU, will speak to the changes in our conception of time that historical documents provide.

Barbara Joshin O’Hara, Roshi, will then engage us in a reflection on the forces that contribute to our ongoing alienation from being time. Video clips from Modern Times, Koyanntsqui, and Time and Tide with Andy Goldsworthy will serve as discussion prompts to tease out the beliefs and assumptions we have about time that fragment our experience of ourselves and the world.

The workshops for Urban Sesshin are online only and available upon registration. In-person practice at the zendo will continue as usual with morning and evenings zazen available to everyone.

The full schedule and registration will be available soon   HERE  


Fees:

All fees are suggested. Your participation is important to us. Give what you can.

· Members

o $35 per day
o $90 for full Urban Sesshin (Mar 20-22) & zazenkai (Mar 23)

· Non-Members

o $40 per day
o $100 for full Urban Sesshin (Mar 20-22) & zazenkai (Mar 23)


 


March 17, 2024, 5:00 pm, ONLINE

Village Zendo Book Group


 
THE INTUITIONIST

By Colson Whitehead




For the time being, a book.
For the time being, an author.
The flowing of time and space, words and mind.
For the time being, a watchmaker.
For the time being, an elevator inspector.

“Two warring factions in the Department of Elevator Inspectors in a bustling metropolis vie for dominance: the Empiricists, who go by the book and rigorously check every structural and mechanical detail, and the Intuitionists, whose observational methods involve meditation and instinct.  Lila Mae Watson the city’s first black female inspector and a devout Intuitionist with the highest accuracy rate in the department, is at the center of the turmoil.  An elevator in a new municipal building has crashed on Lila Mae’s watch, fanning the flames of the Empiricist-Intuitionist feud and compelling Lila Mae to go underground to investigate….  A dead serious and seriously funny feat of the imagination, The Intuitionist conjures a parallel universe in which latent ironies in matters of morality, politics and race come to light, and stands as the celebrated debut of an important American writer” (publisher’s blurb).

For the time being, a book, an author.
For the time being, a reader.
For the time being an online discussion.
For the time being, a sangha….

Join the discussion in our online zendo on Sunday March 17th, 2024 at 5pm. No registration necessary.  All are welcome.  For questions, contact ChoGaku at marjoriesmccoy@gmail.com.

The Intuitionist is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.  255 pages.
 


On Work and Practice


An interview with Joel Tendo Avery

on the relationship of practice and parenting




by Iris Ryusho Höger


We continue our series of interviews with Sangha members and friends whose work intersects with their practice.


Thank you, Tendo, for joining me and the Village Zendo today in our ongoing exploration of the many ways in which our practice intersects with our work. Tendo, like me you’re a student at the Village Zendo and a parent of two teenage kids. I’d like to talk with you about practice and parenting today and about how they might inform each other. You might have heard the rather famous quote by Ram Dass: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” [laughs] For me it has definitely been true that those closest to me really know how to push my buttons. And in doing so, they offer plenty of opportunity for me to notice what I do—to actually see my deeply ingrained automatic responses to life. In this way, I feel my kids have been and continue to be my teachers. I was wondering, do you feel your kids have been teaching you something about yourself?

Oh yeah. Way before I became directly involved in Zen—and probably within the first year of being a stay home parent—I was joking with a friend, and I said, “Before I had kids, I thought I was a pretty nice guy, but now I know I'm an asshole.” [laughs] Just the ways in which being a parent really pushed on emotionally difficult places for me, triggering responses like anger. I later learned my anger was a protective layer and that I was actually feeling embarrassment and shame because what I thought I was going to be like as a parent wasn't what I was as a parent, and what I thought was supposed to happen wasn’t what was happening. It really was a jolt to be daily confronted with it. It’s not like you have a friend and things go badly and you just move away from that friend. This was a living being in the house, and I was staying at home all the time, and then all of that was being witnessed by my wife at the time. So there was no kind of pretending that it wasn’t happening. I didn’t have a lot of resources to deal with it at the time, but I definitely had the awareness. And so it was like the awareness without the insight. That was where the parenting thing really shook me at first.



Can you give an example of a situation where you could see what you were doing?

For me, at that stage, it wasn’t anything that my child had done. It was more that I was feeling really isolated with the responsibilities. It was taking everything that I had. But I had these stories that I should also be accomplishing other things with my time. And so it was this kind of myth that I could stay home and raise my child, but also stay actively engaged socially or politically or with these other kinds of responsibilities and connections that I have. And I think it did eat at me, but I didn’t even know what was going on. I didn’t even know what was upsetting me. It was the condition of my life at that point. But I was not ready to accept that that was the condition of my life. 



But you noticed the discomfort?



Very much. And then not wanting that discomfort, not really having the tools to deal with that discomfort. So what would happen is I would just snap, and I would all of a sudden feel all the frustration. And then I was also immediately ashamed of that anger. Which made it even harder for me to be curious about the anger because I didn't want anything to do with it. So I tried to shut it down and apologize and move on instead of being curious about it. So, yeah, it was pretty awful. 

I can so relate. I once had this situation with my kids where I got so angry that I hurt myself. I remember the anger, but I have no idea what it was about, because it wasn't about what it was about. [laughs] 

Exactly.

It was old stuff that was coming up. And then, in a fit of anger, I hit the doorframe with my hand really hard to a point where my hand was bruised and swollen for weeks. And my kids were laughing at the ridiculous sight of mommy first hitting the doorframe and then jumping around holding her hand in pain. Their laughter and the intense pain in my hand brought me back home and made me see what I was doing. I could suddenly step back a bit and see this overwhelmed, exhausted woman, crazy with anger, hitting herself, hurting herself. It was an intense teaching, and I was constantly reminded of it for days and weeks afterwards while my hand was slowly healing. For many days I had a chance to see and feel what I do to myself and to those around me. And, yes, as you said, there was a lot of shame too.

This is interesting because I think exactly what you said: the emotion is what you remember, but the instance is not. One insight moment, or kind of a flash of recognition for me was when I took off my glasses and I threw them in anger, and then they broke. So then I had to make an appointment and get the glasses replaced, which meant there was this ongoing daily reminder of what that outburst had been. It was a long time before the laughter and relief came for me, so I was still really mired in the shame, it was a long climb out of that. But, yeah, those kinds of things, like a bruise on your hand, that bring you back to the moment and remind you: this is not just a passing thing. There’s something older and something else that needs care here.

I think the other frustration that immediately came up was, well, I'm already so busy and all consumed and exhausted that how am I supposed to now find time to take care of this other stuff? That was when I first got into therapy. But even that felt like a bit of a battle. And that was not what I thought getting into parenting would be like.

Me neither. Nobody tells you that. [laughs]

Not like that. You hear people complain about what children do at different times. Now that I have teenagers, people will be like, “Oh, teenagers . . .” And I’m like, actually, teenagers are awesome! I think it's so much more about what it brings up in me than it is necessarily in anything that the child is doing. There are times when my kids genuinely frustrate me, but I think much more often it’s what I’m bringing to it that makes it hard. I’m the one making parenting hard, not them.



How did your zen practice come into play?


I think really in the background. My practice has helped me to notice impulses or thoughts when they come up. And it has relieved me of some of the immediate pressure to act on them and rather just to notice them and then make a more conscious decision about where I’m going next. I think the big thing that I got early into my Zen practice was emotional awareness. And it was funny, because so many of the talks that I was hearing were very intellectual talks, but what I was experiencing on the cushion was a lot of emotional turmoil. Just having access to my own emotions in that way through meditation helped. And also the experience of having a very intense emotion come up on the cushion where I might cry or I might be really afraid or something. And noticing it and staying with it for the 30-minute sit, and then also noticing that five or ten minutes later that wave had really already dropped. If I had had that surge of emotion off the cushion, I would have felt I had to do something about this right now. But because I wasn’t going to get up, because I had to respect that everyone else was sitting for half an hour, I just stayed with it. And so I was able to see the way it came up and then also dropped. That has shifted something for me. I’m a little bit slower to respond immediately, and it makes room for curiosity. It almost feels like stretching. It affects everything, but you can’t point to a specific, “Oh, now, this has immediately changed because of that.” It's like conditioning, a gradual kind of shifting. An increase in the ability to be with what's up rather than respond immediately to it. 



Joko Beck, founding teacher of the Ordinary Mind Zen School, calls this “creating a bigger container,” meaning allowing awareness to become deeper, broader, and continuous. I remember my first practice with this: to try and notice where in my body my emotion was actually happening. Where could I sense my anger? A tightening in the chest? A tension in the shoulders? Rising heat in my throat? It was very difficult for me to even notice my bodily reactions in the beginning.

Yeah. I think learning how to know those things about myself and knowing how to take care of myself was helped by being in community—realizing that I’m not the only one who is feeling these things has really helped bring it out of a place of shame. The idea, “There’s something wrong with me,” shifted to, “Well, this is what people experience.” And having this awareness for myself has helped me when my kids are going through something. Now I can witness what they’re going through, I can care for what they’re going through, but I’m not trying to just always run in and fix it. I mean, that’s still an impulse, but I’m trying to help them build some resilience and ability to care for themselves with connection and support from me. So they’re not on their own, but supported in a way that gives them the emotional kind of training that I just never had. 

Like you, I have two children who are very different from each other, and it has been a huge lesson for me to understand: not everyone is like me. We have different tastes and preferences; I should not assume that my experience is everybody's experience. Rather than making assumptions, I could ask questions, be curious and listen. And label my preference for what it is: a preference. My oldest daughter taught me this, when she was still pretty young. I, like many people, enjoy sunshine, while my daughter prefers rain, as the brightness and the heat of a sunny day can feel too much on her sensory system. So when I habitually referred to a sunny day as “nice weather,” she got really upset, saying: “How can you say ‘this is nice weather’? Can’t you say ‘I like this weather’?”

And not assume everyone does, because this is not my experience, right?

Exactly. This lesson has really changed my view towards life. I come from a family where I perceived it as dangerous to not have the same opinion as everyone else. So that was a big thing for me to say, okay, we can love each other and we can be safe around each other, and we can still acknowledge that we’re different. 

I grew up in a very similar family where you had to be on the same page, and it expressed itself most clearly in religious language. But it was later that I started to realize that that was a view that my parents held more globally. It was also something as simple as matters of taste. Something that there’s no doctrinal comment about still feels just as charged and important. I had absorbed that and had to really learn to let go of those kinds of assumptions I was making. One way that would show up would be a classic example. In America, the Disney Princess story is something that people with my politics are not supposed to have anything to do with. So I didn’t want my kids to watch any Disney movies and have any kind of Disney stories and princesses in their life. Telling myself, “I’m not that kind of parent. That’s the wrong way to parent.” If one of my kids would start to take an interest in that, then it was also a reflection on me somehow. It would feel like a moral issue was at stake when it was not quite there. Learning to give them some more space actually also gave me a lot more space. As I started to relax a bit, I started to enjoy other parts of my life more and would not be so worried about whether or not that was acceptable to whoever I was worried about. But, yeah, that is still a big unlearning for me, that it must be one way, down to what goes on your pizza. [laughs]

For me, wanting to control other people's likes and dislikes came from a place of deep insecurity. As long as I couldn’t allow myself to be me, I couldn’t allow others to be them. If somebody had a different need, taste, or opinion, I had to make either me or them wrong. I either felt superior (“Nothing here works without me”), or inferior to everyone (“I can’t do anything right”), and one perception could change to the other in a blink of an eye as these seemingly opposite perspectives were actually two sides of the same coin. I brought this pattern to basically all of my relationships, be it my coworkers, neighbors, friends, partners, kids, even pets. It made me very lonely, angry, and exhausted, and it caused a lot of suffering also for those around me. When I finally saw what I was doing I felt deep grief. 

This definitely is a big ongoing learning for me, and I think it is intimately related to our Zen practice. No matter if I feel I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders or if I feel I’m on top of the world, in both cases my delusion creates an “I” and a “world.” And the “I” is not part of the “world.” I feel this is a basic human condition, not only something unique to me. We all do this in one way or the other.


Yes, I think the other way that Zen practice has really helped me is exactly these kinds of conversations. Not only does zazen practice give you a container in the zendo, but by having some kind of common language and some kind of common experience, it allows for conversations like this, right? It is striking to me—you’re in Germany, I’m in New York, we’ve never met, you grew up Catholic, I grew up Protestant—there are all of these differences. You’re a mother, I’m a father, and yet it’s strikingly familiar, right? And I think part of what I appreciate is that the framework allows for these conversations and allows for safety. You know, when Roshi talks about intimacy—this allows us to be more intimate with ourselves and in what we share with other people so that you can actually realize you’re not the only one dealing with this. This is a shared experience. And for me, that’s a really great antidote to the shame that I experience that it’s just me, that I’m a problem. It’s like, oh no, we all are muddling our way through this and thank God there’s a way to deal with it. So I think that’s another really big piece for me: the way it allows for those connections and understandings. 

Yes, I’m ever so touched by the Jack Kerouac quote that’s on the wall of our zendo: “Equally empty. Equally to be loved. Equally a coming buddha.”

Thank you so much for this interview, Tendo.

 

REFLECTIONS


You be Bosatsu,
I'll be the taxi-driver
Driving you home.

        —Gary Snyder


 

 
We communicate in three places online:

our email list, a Facebook page, and a Groups.io list

where we share events and information among the whole

Sangha. Explore these various ways of staying connected and

up to date here: https://villagezendo.org/connect-with-us/
 


Editor: Taylor Plimpton

Editor Emeritus: Nina Shuka Klippel

Managing Editor/ Design & Production: Howard Thoresen


In these trying times, the Village Zendo still relies on your support.

If you are able, please make a donation.
 



VILLAGE ZENDO – True Expression Temple

260 West Broadway, New York NY 10013

 










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