Zen - The Path of Healing

Alan, a native of Ireland, now living in the US, was drawn to Zen by its message of intrinsic wholeness, its Taoist roots and its simplicity. He began zazen practice at home in the 90s, and started formal Zen practice in 1999. He subsequently practiced for several years in the Tibetan Buddhist Gelug tradition under Panchen Otrul Rinpoche with whom he took refuge/jukai in 2000. He traveled to teachings by HH the Dalai Lama in India and Europe in this period. He also acted as a Buddhist representative for various Irish interfaith gatherings. He returned to formal Zen practice in 2014, connected with Tim Burkett in 2017, and was ordained as a priest by Tim in 2019.

Full Transcript

Thanks so much and wonderful to be with you all today. Thanks for having me. I've never been to Santa Barbara, although my wife's name is Barbara, so I feel a deep affinity with it. I've only heard good things about it, so I really appreciate the warm welcome of this sangha.

As we were sitting just before this, I was reflecting on connections and movements and migrations. Obviously I've moved here to the US from Ireland, moved to the Bay Area about four years ago. Thinking of Monica, here in California, Tim, my teacher, his great grandfather migrating to the US, sleeping outside on the streets in New York when he wasn't welcome indoors. Suzuki Roshi coming to the Bay Area in the 50s. And all the migrations before that and the place names that we have like Santa Barbara and San Francisco. But then of course the people who lived here before that and I'm very aware that I'm living on Ohlone territory here in Oakland. I was just sensing into that and also appreciating the countless causes and conditions that have enabled us to be here together and through the magic of Zoom. Maybe one of the silver linings of these past couple of years.

The topic that I'm reflecting on today is Zen as a path of healing. I want to be clear, this is an inquiry or an exploration. Because in some ways I see Zen practice as a whole body living inquiry into what it is to be human. One of the things I loved when I first encountered the idea of Genja Koan, this idea of life as a Koan, living as a Koan and what is it to encounter our experience through our whole body. I love, there's a book by Dan Tiger and Dan Layton called Zen Questions and I love the introduction where he makes the point that there are many Zen questions, maybe all things in Zen are questions. But also that Zen questions as a verb that somehow our practice is an inquiry into what it is to be alive.

As I was preparing for this, I came across this quote that I really like because I want to be clear, I don't believe I have any answers. I'm really just sharing my own experience and my own inquiry into what it is to practice and to be human and to be alive. There's a wonderful quote by an Irish writer called Miles Na Gopaleen, he's sort of a comic writer. There's a book called The Third Policeman, about a policeman who rides a bicycle, who starts to become part bicycle the more he rides the bicycle. But he says the first beginnings of wisdom is to ask questions but to never answer any. So I promise to give no answers today.

Sensing into this notion of our practice as a path of healing and the Four Noble Truths that we're all familiar with are often framed as a medical diagnosis. That there's suffering and that there's a cause, that there's some end to that and there's a path out of it. It's a beautiful teaching in so many ways. I'm a bit of a language geek and sometimes I like to play with words just to try to make sense of them for myself. So the way I've been working with playing with those words is, maybe rather than a reframe around it might be that there is a wound or there is a woundedness. So we might call it suffering. We might say well there's, as to be human is to experience some sense of disconnection or wound. And that there's a cause for that. And maybe one cause is our primal, or seems like our fundamental sense of disconnection, our lack of embodied knowing of being intimately connected with everything and everyone. So there could be that. And then also others woundedness, you know, as we grew up as small beings, the woundedness of others plays out. And so we take that on. That lives in us.

But of course, the Four Noble Truths don't stop there. So there's good news. The idea of the end of suffering, for me what really appeals to me about Zen is this notion that wholeness is our true state. That in some profound sense that we, perhaps what drew us to practice is some curiosity about this notion that wholeness at our root, we are whole. That's what I love about Dogen's teaching on practice enlightenment. We don't practice from a place of wholeness. And yet, as Suzuki Roshi says, you know, we could use a little improvement. So if we know wholeness is our true state, then maybe the path becomes a path of healing, a path of awakening that wholeness that's already there. Not healing in the sense of getting from here to there or wholeness as a goal. Maybe it's partly about embodying that wholeness, awakening or enlivening that innate wholeness that's already there.

With that in mind, part of my reflection then has been, well, what is that path of healing? What is that path of awakening wholeness or embodying wholeness? And then, of course, we take a bodhisattva vow, we take a vow to save all sentient beings. As part of the question comes up for me is, how do we be with that? How do we heal the heart of the world? How do we embody that for ourselves and bring that into the world?

There's a lovely poem that I encountered recently by a young Canadian poet called Rupi Kaur. She says, talking about a woman, but I think we could apply this to any being: "what's the greatest lesson a woman should learn? That since day one, she's already had everything she needs within herself. It's the world that convinced her she did not." So that really speaks to me. I grew up Catholic, and so I got lots of convincing that I was not whole and had lots wrong. So it really speaks to me that this idea of innate wholeness.

One other thing I was sensing into around this is, as we attune to wholeness and healing, what are the markers or the signs of healing in the world? I came across this lovely book by the author Paula Arai. I'm sure many of you are familiar with her. It's a beautiful book called Bringing Zen Home, and it's about the healing heart of Japanese women's rituals. And I love how it's about people at home in everyday life and specifically women in the home. And so there's a line in there that I loved. And she conceived of this thing, she calls it the way of healing. There's a line in there that I love, which is, "I know I am healed when I am kind." And that resonates with my experience. It feels like a beautiful aspiration. Otherwise, holiness, the Dalai Lama, makes it so accessible when he says, "my religion is kindness." So it seems to me there's something deep and profound about such a simple truth that our practice seems to emanate from that place. And yet I know I speak for myself, I can fall away from that. I can experience the absence of that in myself and in my relationships with others. So continuing, ongoing continuous practice, turtle practice, as my teacher Tim likes to say.

Reflecting on what is this path of practice of healing? What is this particular Soto Zen practice that we follow? And the phrase that I've been finding really helpful is just the notion of being with our practice as a practice of being with being with through our Zazen, through our rituals and forms, being with cleaning the toilet, being with taking out the garbage, being with our friends and families or the people in our neighborhood. Just this idea of being with and there's a phrase I love, a Mushotoku mind, which is the Japanese rendition of the Heart Sutra, Han Yashinyo, has that phrase Mushotoku, often rendered as a mind or a body mind of no gaining, of no project of I suck. I need to improve myself to be OK. I need to meet the social media standard of acceptance. Suzuki Roshi's beautiful phrase of beginner's mind, what is it to just be with, to be with our experience, to be with life without an agenda.

Some aspects of that that I find helpful and I love that our practice is a practice of the body. How is it to be with our full embodied experience? How is it to experience our life unfolding through our entire body mind? There's a lovely story. There's a Canadian, she was a Catholic nun and she somehow stumbled into Zen in Japan. I think she was there on a mission. Her name was Elaine McInnis. And she first encountered a Zen master there. I think it was Yamada Roshi. I'll have to look up the name of it. So she looked at him and they were chatting and he said to her, how do you pray? So she was telling him, you know, we do this and we do that and various different things. And he asked her, no, but what do you do with your body? And she was stumped because she was like, the body doesn't figure at all. What's the body got to do with anything? I feel like my own practice and journey over the years has been this feels like the journey of a thousand miles from here down into the rest of my experience. And so I love that about our practice.

So, how do we experience and be with life through our whole body? There are some distinctions there. Of course, we have our heads. We have this wonderful cognition and we have logic, which is a beautiful thing. And I love that Dogen doesn't throw out logic. He plays with it and gives it primacy. So it kind of subverts our expectations. I love this notion of upright backbone or solid backbone and soft front. So for me, what comes to mind is like this strong sense of ethics or commitment to do right by the world. But then having this open, open heart, this open, soft front. And then I also think of the wisdom of our gut, our knowing of our intuition seems as if there is a knowing that we have access to that doesn't come just from this part of our body. So, you know, all of those are all still logical separations. So they can be helpful and they can get in the way.

Something I find helpful is when I practice, it almost feels like I live our cosmic mood around it feels like when we're sitting in Zazen, whether we sit on a cushion or whether we sit in a chair or whether we lie down. And I'm a big fan of, you know, there's this doesn't have to look a certain way because not all bodies are built the same. It feels to me somehow like we are sitting in this beautiful furnace or bathing in this wonderful bath of the universe of emptiness of which for me emptiness really means interconnectedness or love or fullness. So it's almost as if to sit in our practice is to allow ourselves to, you know, burn completely away as Suzuki Roshi says, but not in an effort to get rid of anything just to allow that to unfold within us.

I'm very aware you want to talk about being with, that I have the privilege to have the space and time to be with in ways that lots of others don't. I have the privilege of being a white male. I have the means that I don't have to spend every waking hour working. I'm thankfully free of addiction and other things that would make that impossible for me. So I never want to lose sight of, especially given our bodies at Faveo. How do I stay open-eyed, clear-eyed to the world that we live in, a world that has gone through, we all know what the last couple of years have been like. We're aware of climate change. I have two young children, so often wonder what it is that the world that they're inheriting. I'm very aware of what's happening in Ukraine right now. And that, apparently there are 40 wars raging in the world right now. So wanting to be aware of what a privilege I have to have this space and time to be with, to heal and use that not as a, it's very easy for me to go to a place of guilt or self-criticism around that. And so really using that as an inspiration to keep my eyes and heart open and think about what is my way of inhabiting or living my call to service. And it doesn't have to be a grandiose thing. And that's an ongoing inquiry for me. But I feel it's important for me to at least name that and be open, be continually inquiring into that.

Another aspect of being with is feels like in our practice. It's sort of being with it all at once. I love the language of Dogen, although I find it infuriating sometimes. But I love that he says, Zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. And then he goes on, I feel this is a bit cruel where he says it's simply the Dharma gate of joyful ease. I know my practice is not always joyful ease. But I do take that as a helpful way of inquiring into what am I bringing to my practice? What am I bringing to life? Because when it's not joyful ease, and I want to be clear, this is not about bright side-ing and saying, hey, everything's fine. The Lego movie song, everything is awesome. But rather, how am I watering or nourishing my inspiration and my aspiration? How am I approaching my practice from a place of connection? And then, you know, sometimes I lose touch with that. So how do I continue to attend to that and water that?

So when I think of this all at once nature of our practice, this immediate or unmediated contact with our experience with life, I feel like words start to fail. So I found myself playing with words like being, withing, or wholenessing, or Zazen-ing. And I think that's a really powerful part of our practice. It's an all at once practice. It's not a step ladder practice, as I've heard Tim talk about Suzuki Roshi speaking about. So being with all at once.

The other part of being with, I'm aware of, is being with it all and how can we transcend binaries? It feels like so much of our world right now lives in a binary mode. And there's an us and a them. It seems particularly amplified by social media. I was talking to somebody recently and somebody who held a different view to myself around lots of different things, including vaccination and politics. And I'm somebody who's chosen to get vaccinated. And I was aware of this tendency in our society to want to other everybody and in myself. And so the challenge I put to myself is how can I see this human rather than just the things that we don't agree on? And that's not to say that we don't have a clear boundary. We don't have clear discernment. I love this metaphor for a practice, the two wings of a bird, wisdom and compassion, or I might use the words tenderness and knowing or tenderness and discernment. So we want to have tenderness, but we also want to have clear discernment. And so what's it like to hold both of those?

So I think of being with it all and transcending binaries. I have a bit of a philosophy geek in me and studied it for a little bit in my undergraduate years. My practice in the Tibetan tradition, there's a lot of love for Nagarjuna and the Middle Way, which I feel gets a bad rap because emptiness. I don't know. I feel like emptiness is such an unhelpful word. Because, you know, the void, I mean, it doesn't really sound like a warm, cozy place that you want to hang out. And I think that's just a language barrier.

And so I was looking up some of the verses of the Moola Majja Makarika, which is the fundamental wisdom of the Middle Way. There's a couple of beautiful verses in there. One verse is, "I prostrate to Gautama, who through compassion taught the true doctrine, which leads to the relinquishing of all views." So, again, we know this is not to get rid of discernment, but it's how can we hold lightly our notions about reality and how can we hold lightly our innate sense of being separate beings? At some level, we know it's false. So how can we hold that lightly?

There's another verse in there that I loved, which is, "The victorious ones have said that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. However," I'm adding that word, "for whomever emptiness is a view, that one will accomplish nothing." So we don't want to turn, we don't want to make any of these things into a thing that we hold as a stick. And we're like, well, you know, I have the thing and you don't, or, you know, this is better than that.

It gets funny because, you know, in Buddhist philosophy, there's lots of the Majja Mika folks and the, you know, the name is escaping me now. I can't think this morning. The folks who posit Buddha nature, Yogachara, you know, in the Tibetan tradition I trained in, it was kind of like, yeah, Yogachara is kind of OK, but that's the sort of the, that's the basic teaching. And, you know, the really advanced stuff is over here. So it's just funny to me how even in our world of practice and all of these compassionate teachers that still, this can still happen. But I seek to hold it all lightly.

So that quote, there's a lovely quote by Suzuki Roshi. I picked up this book recently. I'm sure you've heard of it. "Zen is right now." There's a companion. "Zen is right here." And there's some other anecdotes by Tim in here. But I love this couple of quotes in here I wanted to share with you. So one is this. A student said, "Unless I misunderstood what you said the other night, the motivation to improve is itself ignorance." Suzuki answered, "Ignorance means, in another word, concrete. To be caught by a concrete idea is ignorance." I just love that.

There's one other one that I feel relates really beautifully to the same idea. Suzuki told us we stuck to naturalness too much. And when we stick to it, that's not natural anymore. He said, "The only true naturalness is when you are you in its true sense in this moment." So how do we not be concrete without rejecting concrete or getting stuck on it? How do we be natural and not stick to it?

So when thinking of binaries, some things that came to mind for me are binaries. There's inner, outer. There's the personal. There's the societal. There's gender, race, ideology. Ease and joy, difficulty and challenge, being and time. Maybe this isn't so much about binary, but the planetary and the interplanetary. The question that came up for me is how do we hold a frame of what's local and what's global and the current time, the current moment and the timeless? How can we be with all of that and sense into the truth of that, that really is the reality that we experience in that binabbit?

So just a couple more things I wanted to share about being with and being with it all. And again, I just wanted to anchor on how important I'm finding it to really continue to focus on my aspiration. What is it that first brought me to practice, to nourish that beginner's mind, to really nourish the spirit of kindness or the spirit of being. Or that grandmotherly attitude, if that works for you. Some of us, maybe we didn't have grandmothers or maybe they didn't, who knows how they were. But I think we can all understand that. What is that kind elder energy or spirit that we can bring to our practice? Because I know when I lose touch with that, things seem to dry up.

So related to that, another question for me is how do we not cauterize or cut out our deeper instincts, our desires, the parts of ourselves that we may not want to reveal to the world? It feels like it's so easy to want to be good boys and girls, to look and be a certain way, even in spiritual practice. I'm very aware of the risk of spiritual bypassing, of wanting to reject those parts of ourselves, those inner beings. We have many inner beings, many parts.

So when we talk about being with universality, I never want to lose sight of particularity, the specific nature of our own experience and of our own reality and heritage. There's a lovely quote by James Joyce from the book Ulysses, where he says, "Every life is in many days, day after day, we walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old women and men, young women and men, wives, husbands, widows, brothers, sisters in love, but always meeting ourselves."

So, you know, the question for me is how do we be with those parts we don't like as well as the ones we prefer? How do we turn towards those parts and see the richness in them, especially the ones that, you know, we're like, where did that come from? I seek to be this kind person. And then this other part comes up. And Tim has a slowly phrase like, how might we sponsor our shadow? How might we work with those places in ourselves that actually are real places of treasure? And not just work with them cognitively, but work with them through our body, through our experience.

We all know the Genjakoan notion of, you know, to study the ways to study the self and to be intimate with all of these many, many pieces and parts. How can we be with the full spectrum of emotion, of instincts, of desires?

There's another quote I want to share with you, and I'm going to move to a close here. Shundo Ayama, who's a wonderful Zen nun, she's a beautiful book called "Zen Seeds." And I love this quote by her. She says, "When we perceive joy, anger, happiness and sorrow as enriching our lives, just as rocks and tree roots and water spray embellish nature, then we're able to accept whatever happens and live like flowing water without clinging to anything." So to me, really, it's an homage to all of it. It's all here and it's all welcome.

I'll close with, I'm not sure, one last poem, if I may. I think there's one of the things that's not often called out for me, at least, is the magic of our practice. Zen has a lot of, I want to say magic or even in the Tibetan tradition, the tantric practice of transforming what's here and working with things that are not quite logical. So we have our zazen, which is this mystical practice of enacting our Buddhahood, we might say. We have ritual, we have inspiration, we have images and symbols. You know, we might burn incense or offer flowers. So all of our senses, I think humor is really important. I think, you know, there's the cosmic joke of us all living on this burning flaming rock of molten whatever suspended in infinite space and time. I mean, you got to laugh. So, you know, to me, humor seems to be a really helpful part of our practice. And then how can we continue to recognize the non separateness of our experience, our intimate connection with it all.

So I'd like to just share one more poem, which is by an Irish poet called Paul Amiham. And for me, this captures a little bit of the particularity of our lived experience, a little bit of magic. It also is a nod to the robe, you know, when we saw our rakasu or we saw a robe and the different panels. So I'll read this to you. This is a short poem called "The Quilt."

It was a simple affair.

Nine squares by nine squares,

blue on green, spots, stripes, bows,

alternate with gold on red chevrons.

My grandmother's quilt I slept under,

the long and winding nights of childhood.

Above the bed, a roundy window,

my own full moon, I loved the weather's

wheeling past, the stars, the summer suns,

my auntie's deep breaths, distant thunder.

Thank you all. It's been a pleasure to be with you and wonderful to practice with you.