"Listening is a very deep practice. You have to empty yourself. You have to leave space in order to listen. Especially to people we think are our enemies - the ones we believe are making our situation worse. When we have shown our capacity for listening and understanding, the other person will begin to listen to you, and you have a chance to tell him or her of your pain, and it's your turn to be healed. This is the practice of peace." ~Thich Nhat Hanh
It feels a bit crazy to be writing about the past when the present moment with all its suffering is weighing so heavily on my heart, but it all relates, so please read on.
Salish Sea Bodhisattva, 2004, Digital painting
As mentioned in my previous post about Plum Village, when Bob and I returned to LA in late summer 1990, we learned that Thây was offering his next US retreat to Vietnam Veterans and peace activists at a camp in Malibu, California the coming spring. Maxine Hong Kingston was facilitating a writing intensive with the Vets. We signed up immediately. This was the retreat that brought me to tears, and secured the practice of sitting with a sangha in my heart until this day.
First you need to imagine what it was like for Vietnam Vets with significant PTSD to have the courage to attend a retreat run by Vietnamese monks and nuns. Some of them had seen their buddies killed by Vietcong wearing monks’ robes with weapons underneath. So they had to move that fear-based bias to the side in order to be brave enough to attend….when I learned what they were carrying, I was deeply struck by their bravery.
While we peace activists meditated in silence for several days (there were over 400 of us), about a dozen Vets worked with Maxine to develop their stories about the impact that the war years had on their lives. When they shared them a few days later with the entire community, there were few of us with dry eyes. The vulnerability, shame, and pain they expressed touched us all. Many of them had not told anyone, not even a therapist, about the heart-wrenching experiences that closed them off to others; some of them had spent 30 years in isolation or strung out on drugs trying to forget the pain that they had been trained and commanded to inflict on others, and that trauma became an internal wound that increased in size upon their return to the States. Many never received adequate emotional support to heal. One of the Vets had not celebrated his birthday since the war ended, and everyone sang “happy birthday” to him. Thây shared something that struck many of the peace activists deeply; how do we have compassion for the perpetrators of violence? How can we begin to see ourselves as culpable and responsible for the circumstances that forced many men to serve in Vietnam? Many of us found this challenging to contemplate, but the paradox is at the heart of our work as peacemakers.
Thây read this poem:
Please Call Me by My True Names – Thich Nhat Hanh
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.
Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of the poem:
After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.
There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.
She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.
When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.
After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”
Present Moment Bodhisattva from the Pandemic Healing Deity Series, 2021, digital painting created in Procreate on the iPad
Being able to see myself inside the experience and skin of another, even someone who rains brutality on others, was a revelation to me. It was not a comfortable place to sit, but it was useful to recognize, as Thây would explain, how when certain seeds in our store consciousness are watered via harm, they, in turn, create more harm. Having deep compassion for our enemies was something I’d heard of before, but I dismissed this idea as foolishly idealistic. Now with more mindfulness practice in my tool kit, I began to discover that this was essential medicine, not just for dealing with difficult people, but for the difficult parts of myself. Of course, the trick with this teaching is that one wishes that the damaged people who have been given or have taken the tools to cause broad scale harm in the world would find their own pathway to healing so that they don’t continue to traumatize humans and the more than human. Think Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, etc. If only…
On the last day of the Malibu retreat, participants organized ourselves into regional groups and exchanged contact information so that we could form sitting groups (sanghas) that could continue our practice of sitting together. Our group was located in Venice, California where we then lived, and those sangha mates became dear friends who helped us move through some difficult times due to my environmental illness and the decision to leave my tenured position.
In the fall of 1993, we attended our last retreat with Thây in the LA area before my illness provoked us to leave LA and move back to the East Coast. It was at that retreat in October 1993, held at a kids’ camp in Malibu, that we both took the Five Mindfulness Precepts (now called the Five Mindfulness Trainings), received the Three Jewels, and were given Dharma names (my name is Steady Nurturing of the Heart and Bob’s was Steady Transformation of the Heart). The trainings have been modified multiple times due to the thoughtful influence of the international sangha. They have become more inclusive and responsive to cultural and social changes that needed to be addressed in the trainings. One of the responsibilities of those who take the trainings is to recite them regularly with the sangha. I’ve failed at that over and over again, but plan to reignite that practice with my current sangha.
It was definitely ironic that what emerged somatically for me at that time was an illness that made it difficult to breathe. I’ve written about this elsewhere before, but I think it’s important to share, in light of my desire to have a more committed meditation practice, how precious breath had become for me.
Many years after leaving LA, I was chatting with Joanna Macy just before she gave a talk to our former community on Vashon Island. She had been struggling with her own respiratory illness at the time, and she reminded me (and herself) that exhaling what we are taking in of the world’s despair is essential to our well being. I had received a similar message before from a healer who told me I needed to “pull my antenna in” so that my body was not getting bombarded by all the pain in the world. This message is essential for activists, healers, and emotionally sensitive folks to hear. We can’t always be on “high alert” otherwise we can’t be of service to anyone.
A nourishing thing that happened during that retreat was an unexpected connection between my cultural background and the Buddhist community. On our last evening together, everyone gathered to have a sing-a-long. Inspired by our location at a Jewish kid’s camp, many of the songs that we sang came from Yiddish or Jewish culture. That was heartwarming for me, despite not being raised in a practicing home, I had been sent to a Jewish cultural camp by my mother’s parents. Even though I often felt like an outsider there, I had some very good memories of singing around the campfire.
Over the years, I discovered that there are a significant number of folks with Jewish heritage who have found a spiritual home in some kind of Buddhist practice. Fondly known as Jew-bu’s or Bu-Jews, I first encountered a plethora of people from my cultural heritage when Bob and I attended a socially engaged Buddhist conference in Oakland in 1991. I got very curious about that confluence, found books on the topic, and am still learning about it. That conference featured an amazing menu of teachers that included Joanna Macy, Robert Aitkin, Sulak Sivaraksa, and others.
In June of 1995, with our infant son in arms, we moved to Western Massachusetts. As new (and older) parents who were not sleeping very much, it took us a while to find our sangha, but when we did, we were blessed. This group, located in Shelburne, MA on the land of an intentional community founded in the 1970s, was sitting in the Plum Village tradition, following the mindfulness precepts. It was a wonderful and welcoming group with several older and very committed activists; we gratefully sat with them for 7 years before moving to the West Coast, and during the pandemic we were able to rejoin them a few times on Zoom.
Around 2000, we took a field trip with that sangha to hear Thây speak at a university in central Vermont. Bob and I were astounded to see thousands of people in the audience. We had no idea that Thây’s teachings had grown so popular, and were a bit nervous about this increasing popularity (as mentioned in a pervious post). Our sangha had several discussions about this, and eventually we decided that it was best to see this growing enthusiasm for his teachings as a sign that the collective was beginning to heal.
For many people, it can be super uncomfortable to sit in meditation. We can get filled with self-doubt (am I doing this right?) and our inner critic can let loose all kinds of self-torture. Our minds can wander from past to present to future without pause, ruminating on worries of all kinds. “Intrusive thoughts” can make a mess of what was supposed to be a time to chill out. My advice is to do this practice with self-compassion, with no expectations, and with grace. Try to forget about right ways of breathing, and just notice what you are witnessing on a sensory level. How is gravity holding you? What is the temperature on your skin? What are you hearing? What’s happening in your body below the neck? Does the resonance of meditation bell wake up a deeper part of you to stay in the present moment? Does hearing a guided meditation help your focus? Are you able to feel the energy in the room? Are you getting distracted? What can bring you back to your breath? Sometimes repeating a gatha is one of the ways that the mind can stay present, or having a soft focus on a lit candle.
Having said all that, I must confess (not that confession is part of my spiritual tradition) that a solo meditation practice on the cushion has been a rare thing for me in recent years. It does happen, but not on the regular as I would like to cultivate. I’m truly in awe of folks who have that discipline, as I was of Bob. I’ve learned a new way of meditating over the years, which involves pausing mindfully in the midst of an activity and taking some intentional breaths. Sometimes I repeat a gatha. Bob was the dishwasher in our home until he got too sick to do that chore. He used to tell me that dish washing was one of his favorite meditation practices. So now when I wash dishes, I am able to channel that energy; I am in the present moment, I ground in my body, and feel gratitude for the running water, the mobility of my hands with only slightly arthritic thumbs, and the ability to bust through chaos by having an uncluttered sink.
After moving to Vashon Island in 2003, we looked for a local sangha in which to find community and continue our group meditation process. There was none in the Plum Village lineage on the Island, but there was a Soto/Rinzai Zen group in the tradition of Sasaki Roshi (Bob had been his assistant and had studied with him on Mt Baldy near LA) and other teachers. Bob joined that community easily, but I found it too unforgiving of the human body and its vagaries - when I had an allergy attack one morning, I was asked not to sniffle while sitting with the group. This made me feel a kind of body shame that I had never felt with previous groups. So I decided not to return. Bob tried to explain that the Vietnamese Zen tradition was much more forgiving and open than the stricter, Japanese version of Zen. I wanted nothing more to do with it, and although we attempted to start our own home sangha, it did not take off, and only lasted a few months. There was not enough community glue to keep it going.
Akhilanda, the Goddess of Never Not Broken from the Pandemic Healing Deity Series, 2021, digital painting
Soon after we moved into Seattle in 2011, we had a friend who invited us to join POCAS (People of Color and Allies Sangha), a Vipassana meditation group that was started by a lovely group of anti-racism and social justice friends. We sat with this group for four years until we moved to Tacoma. As changes began to shift POCAS, the main facilitator, Bonny Duran, recreated the group as the Crones sangha. I would occasionally commute up to Seattle to sit with them.
During the Pandemic lock down, I sat with various groups online including the Crones, the BiPOC groups found at the East Bay Meditation Center, The Mindfulness Community of Puget Sound, and sanghas as far away as London and Massachusetts. It was an exciting experience to meet practitioners from all over the world and to learn different perspectives and ways of framing the teachings, but I was deeply missing an embodied practice with others.
When Bob received his Stage 4 Melanoma diagnosis in March of 2022, and our garage had been renovated, we decided to turn the space into a Zendo. Due to our community art project, The Tacoma Story Hive, we already had some meaningful connections with community, and thus the Bad Buddhist sangha was born. Bob coined the name, wanting people who were new to the practice to feel welcome. He was the perfect leader of our sangha, kind and compassionate, gently offering instruction, and ever-humble despite his many decades of training as a lay monk, his years as an organizer and facilitator of retreats and sesshin, and his deep relationships with some of the most significant Buddhist teachers. Throughout his cancer journey, up until the very last months, he made sure that we stayed on task, guiding our meditation practice and offering thoughtful comments about our readings.
In the spring of 2023, as Bob’s health took an unexpectedly steep decline, the sangha was there to support us. When he went into hospice at home, and soon lost his ability to speak and move, members of the sangha graciously took turns staying with him, playing music and guided meditations for him, and giving him pain-relief medications, so that I could sleep a few hours. Members of the sangha became the best sort of bodhisattvas.
Bob died peacefully on the morning April 28th (exactly one year after our first sit with the Bad Buddhists, on his half birthday). After washing and oiling his body, and clothing him in his Vietnamese meditation robe, his Tsalagi (Eastern Band Cherokee) beaded collar, and his prayer beads, the sangha arrived to sing, pray, and meditate with him, while covering his body with the magnolia petals from our tree in the backyard. While we awaited the arrival of the Earth Funeral home to take his body to be transformed into nutrient rich soil, the sangha had a mini-wake in the backyard, sharing stories, tears, and laughter. And at his life celebration in June, the sangha participated in the ceremony, planting seven columnar apple trees outside the Zendo in Bob’s healing soil, while sharing stories, food, and songs. Our garden has become an example of “interbeing” at its best.
Since that time, the sangha has met every Thursday night without fail. The medicine that the sangha provides weekly for this broken heart in incalculable. Even though I’ve not had the kind of training and immersion in Buddhist practices that Bob had, I’ve never doubted that the sangha should continue. It’s part of Bob’s legacy; his parting gift to the community. The membership has shifted a bit over the past year and a half, but some stalwart friends keep showing up. Last summer, I decided to list the Bad Buddhists in the Plum Village directory, and as a result, we’ve gotten a few people who might not have found us otherwise. These new folks who never met Bob, but can see his photo on the altar, have added fresh flavors to the mix. We are lucky to have them.
Tonight, the sangha will celebrate the Winter Solstice together. So to you, dear readers, I wish you all a Happy Solstice! May the precious and nourishing light visit you in many forms, and may the germinating dark offer you unexpected creative seeds. May you find your way to a supportive practice that grounds and guides you through the many challenges and the enormous grief we are facing as a collective. I highly recommend these two books by Thich Nhat Hanh: Fear and Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. May you always be present to everyday beauty and acts of kindness.
I loved this thanks for sharing: thoughts, practice recipes, resource links, paintings and photographs. You are amazing.