The Great Zendo Experiment...

This week, I received an email from YUZ (Young Urban Zen) titled: The Great Zendo Experiment.
In it, one of the leaders explained that YUZ was going to try meeting in the zendo for its next meeting. It included details of timing and asked for some volunteers to help set up the zendo and take it down that night. The reason we were trying to meet in the zendo was because we were getting a bit too big for our current space and wanted to see if the zendo might be a place where we could meet instead.
I was excited when I got the email. I liked the idea of us meeting in the zendo. As someone who was so intimidated by the zendo that I sat in the gaitan for three months, I wanted others to see how warm the zendo was, to see beyond it rules and forms, to understand that it was a welcoming place and that, in all honesty, it was just the basement of a building. It was sacred, but it was sacred because of the people in it and the way we set it up; it wasn't there to exclude you, it was there to support you.
Other people in YUZ weren't so keen on the idea. They felt like the zendo was the one place at the zen center where they were quiet, and they thought it might feel weird to be in there, talking. Others felt that it was a sacred place and shouldn't be used for something which didn't feel exactly...sacred. And others worried about our impact on the residents of the building. If we were too loud after our meeting when we were next door to the zen center, what kind of ruckus would we cause if we were actually in the building?
But on Monday night, we all showed up anyway, to be part of this experiment.

I got there a little late and was surprised to see people still outside the building, on the corner, talking. But talking is kind of what we do a lot of at YUZ, so I gave hugs all around and walked in the Laguna street entrance of the building, in to the gaitan. Shortly after I walked in, a good friend of mine walked in, and as she was hugging her friend, they started laughing and talking animatedly.
I immediately "shooshed" her, focused on the fact that we were standing right next to the men's dorm and afraid that we were making noise that would keep others awake.
"Sorry," I said. "It's just that we're, basically, standing outside someone's bedroom door, talking."
"It's okay," she said, and got quiet.
And then I heard talking from the zendo and I realized it was 7:30 and probably no one was actually sleeping. And then I thought about who I had just shooshed and how we had been talking just that past weekend about how even though the zen center sometimes feels like a quiet place, even though it sometimes feels like you're supposed to quiet your emotions, it's actually a place where you're supposed to feel your emotions, where you're not supposed to repress them. And I thought, "Oh my gosh, and I just shooshed her, for hugging and laughing with a friend!"
I went back over to her and apologized to her for shooshing her and then I hugged her hello and we walked in to the zendo together.

The zendo looked great. The leaders had moved it around just enough that it felt like a different space, but not so much that it felt like we weren't in the zendo. I went over to a corner spot on an upper tan and bowed to my cushion. But then I noticed it was a flat cushion, so I grabbed the nice firm one from the next zabutan over, and swapped them. Shortly afterward, someone came to sit in the spot next to me, where I had just placed the flat cushion. He immediately remarked on how excited he was that he got that seat, because he knew it was a good cushion because he had just sat on it during afternoon zazen.
"Oh," I said. "I just swapped them. That one is really flat. I should put it back."
"That's okay," he said. "I have a support cushion," and he sat down.
We talked about how it felt to be in the zendo and he remarked on how many people were there that night. I thought for sure that there were fewer people there that night and started to count. It was weird, we were actually big, definitely more than 40, but it didn't feel big like it had in our old space. I smiled as I looked around the zendo and saw people sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall of the tans. I felt a little bit like we were in high school, sitting on the quad at lunch. It was actually really sweet to see people seem so relaxed in the zendo. One of the leaders rang the bell and we began to sit. It was kind of weird to sit in the zendo facing out, but at the same time it was normal because we always sit facing out at YUZ. After our sit, we introduced ourselves and everyone echoed everyone's name back like we always do.

Then the leader passed around the reading for that night which was 'Not Always So,' by Suzuki Roshi. I laughed inside at this- how fitting for us to be in the zendo, to be in this 'sacred' place in a whole new way: 'not always so' indeed. In it, the reading talked about how water is not always water; to fish it is a home, to someone dying of thirst, it is life (or something to that effect) and I felt even more grateful that he had chosen this for our reading.
Before we broke in to small groups, the leader explained the importance of the cushions that we were sitting on. He explained that many of the cushions fit the people who sit on them in a particular way and that they need them to support their zazen. He asked that we be aware of and careful with the cushions- that we try to keep them in the same place that we found them.
I turned to the guy next to me, "Can I put back the cushion?"
"I think we'll have time at the end," he suggested.
"No," I said. "I need to put it back now. I need to be sure that it isn't disturbed."
He handed me the floppy one, I handed him the firm one.
"Karma cleared," he said, and smiled.

Then we broke in to small groups. The leader explained about not walking in front of the altar and I walked all the way around to my group's area, near the doshi door. Once there, I saw a bunch of brown cushions on the floor and thought, "Uh oh, those are, like, doshi cushions or something. They shouldn't be on the floor..." but then I thought, "Not always so. The leaders set it up this way, they'd move them if there was a problem with it."
As we sat down to talk, I cringed as I saw someone's bare feet rest on the meal board. But then I reminded myself, "Not always so...Right now, maybe that meal board is just a piece of wood, and that person is just sitting. I know for sure that they have no idea that what they are doing is considered disrespectful or inconsiderate. Let it go."
We talked in our group about the reading, about our lives, about our questions. We shared ideas and answers and experiences, and then the bell rang and we came back to the larger group.

We were a little pressed for time at that point and there were two more things that the leaders had planned for us to do that evening. So, instead of us sharing out in the large group all the things that had come up in the small groups, he asked if there were any big epiphanies that anyone felt that they really needed to share. Of course, someone did.
Then one of the members of the group (who was going to be moving away and whose last night it was) shared their experience with YUZ, and their gratitude.
Then the leaders asked for feedback from the group on the space. All in all, the response was positive. Many people shared how intimate it felt, even though the space was large, and a few people said that they had their misgivings about meeting in the zendo but were pleasantly surprised. One person suggested that we do some sort of a "zendo" training for new people, so that they would know about the meal boards.
The leader explained that there seemed to be enough people in the group who were familiar with the forms that we might not need to have a formal "traning" each time. He explained that there is a place in this practice for relaying the forms to others as they come up.
"Oh," I thought. "I totally could have explained to that guy about the meal boards and his feet. It wouldn't have been me being all fixed on things being one way, it would have been me sharing my practice with him."

The leaders also mentioned how we were able to meet in the zendo the way it was; that modifications had been made to the dividers so that they could easily be moved and that the leaders at City Center had encouraged us trying out the zendo as a meeting space.
I was touched by this. "They wanted us to meet in here? I thought we were just the loud group that used 300 Page street for free."
And then I remembered how the abbess had come up to where a bunch of us were hanging out after the dharma talk on Saturday, and remarked on what a nice energy she felt the group had.
"Maybe we're okay," I thought. "Maybe they like us."
I wasn't watching my clock but it must have been getting later and later because the leaders seemed to be both wanting to hear our feedback but needing to close the meeting. I couldn't help it, I had to raise my hand.
"Can we maybe walk that extra 100 yards across the street to Samovar to do our talking after the meeting is over? That way we could keep talking and we wouldn't bother the residents and, well, no one could really get mad at us because, well, it's a public place."

Shortly after that, the leaders closed the meeting and asked for volunteers to help return the zendo to its original state. They had asked for this help in an earlier email and I had chosen not to do it. I knew it would mean getting home late and I knew I had to get up for zazen in the morning. But when they asked for volunteers then, my hand shot up. I wanted to do everything in my power to make this work. I wanted the zendo to be totally untouched. I wanted it to be like we had come and gone and no one had even noticed that we were there. Mostly though, I wanted everyone's zazen in the morning to be undisturbed. I wanted them to be able to come to their place and sit, without any extra thoughts about cushions or space.

It was really interesting to put the zendo back together.  I loved seeing the different degrees of fading of the wood on the floor where the tatamis had been all these years. I loved seeing how the tatamis fit with the dividers and I really loved the latches that held them together. It reminded me again that this was just a place, it was wood and metal and, whatever tatamis are made of (I've just been informed that they're made of bamboo).
As we tried to return the the cushions back to their spots in the zendo, I started to freak out. I worried that cushions and nametags had been moved, and I had no idea how to put them back exactly as they had been. I looked at the seating chart outside the zendo but that only helped for a few spots and some of the spots on the chart didn't match our actual experience with where we had seen people sitting. I didn't know what to do. "Maybe we should take a picture next time," one of us suggested.
"Should we write a note to Valorie, letting her know that we tried our best?" I asked. "Or is that me trying to control the situation?"
The leaders smiled at me, which to me meant, "We tried our best, that's all we can do."
I went home worried, and noticed this; noticed how invested I was in this going well, how much I wanted this to work, noticed how much I wanted to "please" the "leaders" of City Center and how much I cared about the zendo.

The next morning, as I was walking in to the zendo, I saw someone walking out, and I thought it was weird. Then, as I was bowing to the zendo, I noticed them walking back in, with a cushion in their hand.
"Darnit," I thought. "We didn't put their cushion back in the right place. And now their cushion is somewhere in the zendo and they don't have the time to go and find it. They have to sit zazen on some random cushion, and that's a total bummer. Their zazen, is a bummer now."
I knew in my head that it wasn't the end of the world, that everyone in the zendo knows this practice, knows that having your cushion moved is a dharma gate, not a bummer. But still, it seemed like a crummy way to start your day.
I didn't want them to feel crummy. I didn't want them to think that someone had moved their cushion in carelessness or apathy, I didn't want them to start their day with that kind of a feeling. So I emailed them and told them what had happened and apologized.

And that was that. That was the end of the Great Zendo Epxeriment. I have no idea if we're going to meet in there ever again.

YUZ gets big

Every Monday night at 7:30, I attend Young Urban Zen (YUZ). Technically, I'm not young enough to attend YUZ; but no one has ever carded me (and honestly, the age range in the group is so vast, I figure my "seniority" gets lost in the average of us all).
YUZ has been meeting on Monday night for about a year and a half (it started in the summer of 2011). I don't really know how it started, but I know why I started coming. I read about it on the Ino's blog as a place where people could meet to talk about their practice. At the time, I was in this funny place in my practice. I knew enough to get in and out of the zendo, I had taken one class in Buddhism, and I was meditating on a regular basis; but I still had a million questions. The tricky thing was, they weren't little questions that could be answered at the zendo forms session on Saturdays but they also didn't feel like big questions that I would ask the abbot or one of the teachers. And they were personal questions, not ones that you would necessarily ask at a dharma talk Q and A. I wanted to know things like: How do I try to practice if I'm not supposed to be "trying" to practice? How do I practice kind speech while refraining from false speech? And, like, is this a religion? And what's up with the robes? I wanted to be in a place where there were people who were kind of beginners like me, but who knew more than me; and in a place where I could ask questions and not feel like I was wasting the time of people whom I perceived as experts (those are my issues, no one at the zen center has ever presented themselves as an expert or has given me any inclination that I'm wasting their time).
I was so pleased when I showed up at my first meeting of YUZ. It was exactly as I was expecting it. There were people there who knew way more than me and they answered my questions in a way that was appropriate to where I was in my practice. And there were people who knew way less than me and I found myself being able to share times when I had had the same questions as they had. And the funny thing was, this would change all the time. Sometimes the people I helped, ended up helping me, and vice versa. But the best thing was that everyone seemed to be struggling with the same things. I couldn't believe that other people made up fantasy boyfriends, that sometimes they hated meditation, and that they didn't know what to do at parties either.
Over time, we became a community. We made close friendships and started taking ownership of the group- talking about what we wanted it to look like, how it could help us and others to navigate this confusing life of being who we are and trying to put this practice in to our lives in a meaningful way.

But over time, YUZ grew. It was great at first, we were excited that so many people were coming because we all knew how it felt to have this place, this community of like minded people, and we wanted to share that with others. But then, it started to feel too big. A lot of people were coming, which was great, but it made our "small groups" of people talking together, a lot bigger, and, for me, that kind of decreased the intimacy of my relationships with the people in the group. I think in general, many people felt this way- it was great to have new people but we all wanted intimacy and closeness and didn't know how to create that for the "newcomers" or to maintain it with such an increase in size.
We considered a bunch of ideas to maintain the intimacy: having cohorts based on when we started coming to YUZ, having a second night for people to meet, having people 'self select' into "experienced" or  "newbies" as they came each night so that we would have two small groups instead of one large one. But every time we thought about this, everyone said, "No! We don't want to divide this group. We don't want there to be separation or categories. What we love most about this group is that we're all together, regardless of where we are in practice."
In the end, we kind of just kept going. We never really addressed the issue of size because all of our solutions involved separation, and no one wanted that. We were just big and we dealt with it.

But recently, we've actually gotten too big. Like, physically, there's kind of not enough room for us in our current space. And also, there are some people who have stopped coming because we're so big- who no longer feel the intimacy with such a large group or who feel uncomfortable talking in front of so many people.
At our most recent meeting of YUZ, we finally tried to address the issue of size. And, in true zen form, we tried to solve this problem by asking a question:
What do you want from YUZ? (I think that was the question they asked last week, it was something to the effect of 'what do you like' or 'what do you want to keep having ot YUZ' or something like that).
The most common answer (in my group at least) was a sense of community. They wanted to feel connected to others and this was a place where they felt that. Almost everyone said that they loved YUZ the way it was, it was just the space issue that was a problem.

At the end of the meeting, the leaders threw out some options to us about how to deal with the space issue:
How many of you want to have two nights so that we have smaller groups?
How many of you wouldn't mind meeting somewhere else that's bigger, but not necessarily physically connected to the zen center?
How many of you would feel okay meeting in the Buddha hall (but on another night since it's already being used by another group on Mondays)?
How many of you would feel okay meeting in the zendo?
The meeting ended and we weren't sure what was going to happen next.

Feeling death...and refusing it

I had a weird experience this past week. I had attended the dharma talk at the zen center on Wednesday night and I had brought my bike in to the coat room because someone had tried to steal my bike seat while I was in class at the zen center the night before. As I wheeled my bike out of the coat room, I looked down the hallway that leads to the zendo and had this feeling that it was the last time I was going to see it. For some reason, I felt that when I left the zendo that night, I would be leaving for good.
Part of me thought I would be hit by a car riding home, part of me didn't know what was going to happen, but I definitely had a feeling that I would never see the zendo again, and that made me sad. I didn't want to say goodbye to the zendo, I didn't want to say goodbye to this life.
The feeling also made me kind of scared. Just that weekend, I had been telling my friend about how I had 'predicted' the '89 earth quake when I was on pain killers the weekend before the quake. She had joked that I shouldn't share any premonitions with her because apparently, they might be true. And there have been times when I have felt something before it happens. For about three weeks before I broke my teapot, I kept feeling like it was going to break. I have no idea if any of this is true but I know that it felt true enough that when I felt it in the zendo, I didn't want to leave.
It was interesting to be there, to have this feeling that if you left, you were walking toward your death. And it was funny to watch myself, because I refused to move. Part of me knew I was supposed to, that my death was inevitable and not moving wasn't going to keep it from happening, it would only delay it or mess it up or something, but most of me didn't care. Most of me just dug my heels in and refused to move.
After a while I said to myself, "It's just a feeling, it's not your death, you can leave now," and so I did. I was still a little scared walking out the door and I have to admit that I've been a lot more careful on my bike at intersections ever since. I don't want to die. I'm sure there will be a point in my life when I'm all, "Okay, I will die whenever I die, there's no point in fighting it, it's out of my hands," but I am definitely not there yet.

Letting go of who you WANT to be...

This past fall, around the anniversary of my mother's death, I was being urged by good friends and my therapist to have a ceremony to help me "let go" of my mother. I didn't want to "let go" of her. I felt like I had just met her, and I thought that if I "let go" of her, she would leave my life completely.
I wrote a series of blogposts about this, about how much I didn't want to let go of my mom. Shortly after posting them, I received an email from Shundo (the former Ino at the zen center). In it, he thanked me for the blogposts and said "A phrase came up for me while I was at Green Gulch that may be helpful: letting go of something doesn't mean that you are getting rid of it; you are putting it down, and if you pick it up again, you will have a different relationship with it."
This helped. It echoed what my therapist had been saying about how it was only by letting go of my imaginary mom that I would begin to see my real mom. It also loosened up my grip on her: imagining that I was only putting her down for a while, instead of leaving her completely, gave me the security to begin to unfurl my fingers because I felt like she would still be there even if I did let go of her.
I've shared this teaching with a couple of people who were going through transitions in relationships and they've found it helpful too. Recently, however, I found it helpful in a totally unexpected way.

I had been studying myself as a teacher- trying to notice what triggered me, what upset me, what I was afraid of. One of the most common things that came up for me was test scores. I don't know why, (I wish I did) but I never seem to be able to increase children's test scores in a significant way. There may be a little increase here or there but often, their scores either stay the same or decrease- and I hate that. I hate the idea that a kid would know less after spending a year with me than when they walked in the door. Also, I have found, that the kids' whose scores do increase, tend to be kids who were doing pretty well anyway. For some reason, they seem to improve while the kids who were really far behind, the kids with whom I spend the most time, put in the most effort, either stay the same or decrease. This frustrates me to no end because a big reason why I became a teacher was to help those kids, to be "that teacher" who somehow "saved" those kids. It's how I evaluate myself as teacher. I only consider myself a good teacher if I increase the test scores of the kids who struggle.

At the beginning of the school year this year, I got a letter from a former student of mine. My impact on this particular student had always baffled me. She did well in school- she wasn't a 'straight A' kind of kid, she was more of a sincere, interested, hard working kid- and I thought that our year together had gone fine. As she progressed to fourth and fifth grade at our school, she would often visit my classroom to say hi or to talk about how things were going.
One afternoon, she came to my room in tears. Things had been really difficult for her and she needed a grownup to talk to and she had come to my room as a safe place. She simply ran across the room to me, put her arms around me, and cried. I let her cry, until she was done. We didn't talk much but she expressed to me what was upsetting her. I told her the grownups would take it from here and brought her back to her mom (who was wondering where she had gone). That year, she visited a couple of other times when she was upset, but her mom also shared with me that my name had come up in her assignment about people who had had an impact on them.
I was still confused by this. I hadn't improved her test scores, she hadn't become a better student, her home life was fine; in my mind, I hadn't made any impact on her yet she seemed to think I had done something significant.

And then this year she had her little sister deliver a letter to me (she's in junior high now so she's at a different school). I won't divulge the contents of the letter because what she said in the letter was simply that she wanted a place to share her private thoughts and that I was the place where she felt safe sharing them. She didn't want feedback, and definitely didn't want anyone else to read them. But the letter closed with the words, "I trust you to do this for me," and that hit me. I was the place where she felt safe, I was the one who she could trust.
I got this letter the same week that my new kids were sharing in class meeting that what they liked most in school was 'the teacher,' and this time, I actually believed them. I believed that they liked me because of the way I was treating them: I was seeing them for who they were, encouraging them, accepting whatever they had to offer as their selves.
And these two events made me start to think that maybe this is who I am as a teacher. Maybe I'm not "that" teacher who "saves" those kids by improving their test scores. Maybe that's just not what I do. But I was afraid to "let go" of this idea of myself. I wasn't comfortable just "giving up" on improving their test scores because I was so bad at it. I worried that by "letting go" of this idea of myself that it would just go away and I'd never increase their test scores, and that seemed like a bad idea all around.

But then I thought about what Shundo had said, that 'letting go' didn't have to mean 'throwing away,' it just meant 'putting it down' for a while and that sometimes, in putting it down, we can develop a new relationship with it. And I thought that maybe I would have a new relationship with myself and test scores if I would just put them down for a while.
I also noticed that in focusing so much on trying to be that teacher who I wanted to be, that one who "saved" kids by improving their test scores, I had been blind to the things that I was as a teacher. I hadn't seen the impact that I had on this little girl, hadn't recognized the importance of whatever it is I do that makes kids feel safe.

I still don't know who I am as a teacher, and maybe I'm not one thing, but the kids are telling me that what's important to them...is that I accept them no matter what. I need to listen to that, see my role in that, accept that this is part of how I manifest myself as a teacher. And in the mean time, I also need to "let go" of my 'dream' self, my idea of who I am, my ideal, my goal, my concept of what really matters as a teacher, because that image is keeping me from seeing who I actually am, and who is beneficial to the kids.

The voices inside your head...are you.

I hear vocies inside my head all the time; and they often take the shape of an actual person. I hear the parents in my class wondering what we are doing during "room time" on Friday afternoons. I hear Paul asking me why I don't come to zazen on Thursday mornings.
I've always known that these aren't actual voices, I know that these people aren't inside my head, but I recently realized that these "people" are me, these "voices" are my own, and sometimes they have something to teach me about myself.

It was a Tuesday night, and I was worried about how far behind we were in terms of what the kids needed to know for our upcoming unit test. In my head, I pictured two parents talking on the yard after school about 'room time:' what it was, why the kids did it, how much time was spent on it. Then an actual parent popped in to my head and said, "What is this room time thing all about? Why is my kid spending half an hour on 'room time' on Fridays when he could be doing math or writing?"
At first, I got worried. I tried to justify 'room time' to the parent, to explain the importance of unstructured free time in the classroom.
But then I stopped myself. I said to myself, "Don't worry, that's just the parents talking. That's just them not understanding about the importance of 'free play,' and creativity."  I decided to dismiss the comment as silly parents worrying for nothing.

But then I realized that it wasn't the parents making the comment, because the parents... were at home. They were watching Downtown Abbey. They were tucking their kids in to bed. They were not inside my head at that moment, they couldn't be.
And when I saw that they couldn't be inside my head, I saw that the only person who could be inside my head at that moment, was me. The parents were not the ones saying these things, I was.

See, before I saw that, before I saw that the only one making these comments was me, it was easy to dismiss the comment as just the parents and their misunderstanding of things. I could ignore these questions, just blame them on the parents, and use this to avoid whatever issue I was having with the situation.

But then it happened with Paul. It was Wednesday night. I was excited because I knew that I got to sleep in the next day. (During the practice period, on Thursdays, there's only a short 'interval' after the first zazen, so I can't really leave the zendo without feeling like I'm disrupting zazen). As I was imagining sleeping in 'till 6, Paul popped into my head. He was sitting across from me and we were having imaginary dokusan.
"You don't come to the zendo on Thursdays," he said.
"No, I don't," I answered. "I get 'trapped' in the zendo on Thursdays and can't leave on time to get home in time to get ready for school."
He raised an eyebrow and looked off in to the corner of the room, "But you don't come and sit in the gaitan."

"Darnit!" I thought. I'm going to have to explain this to Paul. I'm going to have to justify to him why I don't sit on Thursday mornings.
And so I did. I started to explain to him about the gaitan and how it felt to be in the zendo... and then he suggested that I sit at home.... and then I started to freak out because I didn't want to do that and then I freaked out some more because I thought Paul was going to challenge me about the fact that I didn't want to sit at home....
But then I thought, "Wait, Paul is eating dinner right now. He's probably laughing about something or talking with someone over dinner in the dining room. He's not here, he's not the one questioning the fact that you don't sit on Thursday mornings, you are. Paul probably doesn't even notice that you don't sit on Thursday mornings, but you do, And clearly, you have some issues with it."

And I saw that this was about me. That I was making up Paul. But that I was making up Paul not because of things that Paul thought, but because of things that I thought.

At first when I saw this I thought, "Okay, if you want those voices inside your head to stop (and I often do), I can just stop them, since I'm the one making them up."
But later I kind of saw that sometimes these voices inside my head are something I need to listen to, to notice, to sit with.

It's true, a lot of our stories are totally delusional and they probably often come from our experiences with others and so there are definitely times where it seems totally appropriate to ignore these voices inside my head, to see them as the delusions that they are. But it's starting to feel like they can also be litle messages, little 'hey look at me' flags from your self saying "This is coming up for you, see it. It isn't those other people, it's you."