rules of warmth and consideration

I struggled last night to write a post that articulated the relationship between the rigidity or coldness of rules and the compassion that can come from enforcing them and following them. Then I gave up and wrote about my current experience with rules at the zen center. Here's what popped out:

When I come in to the zendo now

I bow in gratitude.

I press my palms together

and bend at the waist

in the same way

that I wrap my arms

around a dear friend's frame.

I fluff my cushion

the same as I fold the top sheet

over the quilt

preparing the bed for my out of town guest.

When I am done

I bow to my cushion

like doing the dishes

for someone who has made me dinner.

Dokusan with a little one

I don't actually know what "dokusan" means. As far as I can tell, it's a meeting between a teacher and a student and I think it's meant to benefit the student. I actually had dokusan once. I'm sure I'll discuss it in detail later but for now let's just say that for me, dokusan means meeting with your teacher to see how you're doing.
Today I had dokusan with a young friend of mine. I knew I couldn't be with him for his actual birthday, so I had promised him we'd do something special for his birthday during the time that I was in town. He chose to go hiking. I chose to be present with him the entire time. It was really nice. We just walked and talked. There are some things that I have, in the past, tried to change about him. There are some things that he does that frustrate me. While we were on the hike, I just listened to him. He likes facts. He likes to know things. He thinks he knows more than I do (and maybe he does...) AND he likes to use his facts to protect me (hadn't seen that part of him before). I let him tell me things that I knew weren't true. I let him lead me up rocks and across streams and follow paths that he felt were "easy enough"  for me to cross. I even let him keep hiking way beyond the time that we were supposed to turn back. (Though it was really interesting to me how much less present I was for him on our way back when I realized how late we were- apparently tardiness is a trigger point for me and I need to pay attention to that- breathe deeper when I feel it and come back to the moment).
A few things came up for me during our "dokusan" but one stood out for me:
I wanted our time together to be meaningful, I wanted to learn something about him or somehow improve my relationship with him and I didn't. At one point he looked at the scenery and said "This is my safe haven!" I thought, "Wow, this is great, I'm learning what makes him feel safe, what brings him peace." I wanted to know more so I asked him, "Why is this your safe haven?"  He just said, "I mean, it's just this natural resource just everywhere!" He's 9. He probably doesn't understand the term safe haven and might not be able to explain it if he did.
But I don't think that dokusan is really FOR something. I think that it's just me being there, with him, and that's all. I know, that sounds so totally zen and "if a tree falls in the forest..." but this is what I'm discovering: You know how things just happen in life and they're just life happening? And then later, some thing that happened a long time ago ends up connecting to something now? I think that's what this whole "do it without having a goal" thing is about. I'm working on trying to accept that I can't control things and I think that's what this is about: you really don't know, so just see it for what it is, not for what it can be. It doesn't always happen that something comes up later but it's kind of cool when it does; and it only connects later if you experience what happened earlier, and now, fully. And honestly, when he and I got into a conflict later that afternoon, he genuinely listened to me (which made me be so much more honest and sensitive when I explained what I needed him to do). Now, was he like that because we had "dokusan"? I don't know, maybe, but the point is that dokusan, or anything like that, when you're "being" with someone just is, it just is.
So, of course, since I'm still a teacher even in the summer, I thought about doing dokusan with my students (I SO hope that I'm not bastardizing this term...). At the beginning of the hike, I thought about having lunch with each of my students so that they would feel connected to me, so that they could open up to me, so that we'd have a relationship. I imagined a series of questions I would make sure to ask, topics to cover, etc. But by the end of the hike I realized that I'm just going to have lunch with my students. That's all, and as long as I'm present, that's enough.

z3: Hitting on monks

I have to admit that the first time I went to the zen center it was an attempt to meet cute guys. A cute guy worked at the zen-center-stall at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market. I tried everything I could to extend our interaction beyond the brief “That'll be three-fifty,” but it didn't work. So, I decided to go to the source. If this guy was clever, engaging, and sweet, wouldn't all the guys at the zen center be like that? I went to the Saturday intro to meditation thing and there were cute guys there but there wasn't any opportunity to talk to them. I went to the dharma talk after the instruction and all the guys there were with their girlfriends. There might have been cute guys at the zen center but there was no way to meet them (and, it felt a little wrong to use a temple as a place to pick up guys...)

The second time I went to the zen center was when I first returned to teaching after a two- year hiatus. It seemed like a cool thing to do and I felt like it fit me: I was pretty even keeled and happy and mellow in general. But that year's teaching was really difficult for me. The second graders in my class experienced stress in their lives and they took it out on each other and on me. I started the year calmly responding to them and maintaining a classroom of respect and safety. But by December, I had changed. I started reacting to them instead of responding to them. I yelled at them, used my power to control them, and grasped at anything I could to contain their emotional outbursts. In my desperation to control the situation, I just spent more time at school and less time taking care of myself. So, I stopped going to the zen center.

The third time I went to the zen center it was to find community. I didn't know that at the time, but it was what I really wanted. I went, because I was trying to follow my best friend's advice. Guess what her advice was: go to church. Ugh...I totally wanted to do what she said but I had way too much history with church to set foot in one (see z2 if you want to know more).

Now, it just so happened that this same summer I had gone to church. I was visiting relatives and church is where you go after breakfast on Sundays. But this time when I went, I went as an observer: what was this thing that was so important to my friend and relatives? This is what I saw: good friends hugging my cousins and asking how they were, kids playing with each other, and a priest shaking hands with everyone as they left. This is what I heard: updates on efforts to help a sister church in Central America, a call for volunteers for the local food bank, and a sermon that offered advice on balancing the conflicting needs of making enough money to support your family and actually having time to spend with your family. “Now I get it!” I thought. Of course people love church: it's a bunch of people getting together to share in each others' lives, to help their community, and to get advice about how to live through this funky thing we call life.

I came home and thought about going to church, but it felt like it didn't fit for me. I was pretty sure that I could go and meet people; people with whom I could hang out and share my ideas. But I also felt like if I didn't agree with the bigger structure, eventually, that would cause a problem.

So, I talked with another friend about going to church. She said that “church” was a lot of things: the actual church that I grew up in, the institution of church, religion, spirituality, community, etc. We talked about the zen center as a place where I could find community without feeling like I had to “buy in” to some greater belief system or religion. So, I decided to go to the Saturday intro to meditation thing.

z2: Why I didn't want to bow or meditate

Just, really briefly, I want to describe my history with religion and meditation because I think I share the same history as a bunch of people and because I think it'll help explain some of my initial reluctance to get in to the whole “zen” thing.

#1 Religion: Raised Catholic and attended church every Sunday until I was 18. Basically, I wasn't that into my church and only went because it was what we did on Sunday. Once I went to college, it was gone from my life completely. However, in college, I had some experiences that confused me. There seemed to be a duality between a belief that everyone was equal (Love your neighbor as yourself) and a hierarchy (some people go to heaven and some go to hell). It felt hypocritical and exclusive: two things that rubbed me the wrong way. I think I over-generalized that feeling to all churches and just kind of stepped away from religion in general. If you had asked me back then what my religious beliefs were, I would have had to say something between atheist and agnostic with maybe some sort of paganism in there? Nothing really fit. I believed in humanity: that there was some sort of goodness/ basic human kindness in all of us and that that was what propelled the universe.

#2 Meditation: A friend of mine from high school once gave me a tour of Green Gulch (it's kind of like the Marin version of the San Francisco Zen center, but probably really different- sorry, don't know much about it). My friend was smiling the entire time he was showing me around and I could see how happy he was with his practice there. I, on the other hand, was mortified. When he showed me the tea room and told me all about the ceremony for drinking tea I thought, “How ridiculous! Why all these rules? Can't two people just sit together and drink tea?” Then he showed me the meditation hall and I was just sad. I knew nothing about meditation but when he explained to me that everyone comes in and faces the wall and sits in silence I just thought it was a total waste. I pictured all of these beautiful happy people (like my friend) turning away from each other instead of being together and sitting in silence instead of sharing their thoughts and laughter and individual selves with each other. I had a lot of respect for my friend and figured there was something good there but was very aware that it was definitely not for me.

z1: Smiling, quiet, and pretzel legged (Intro to Buddhism and Zazen)

So, the next few posts will be about my own experiences with “zen” practice. I've organized them in mostly chronological order but anytime you see a title with z in it, you'll know it's going to be about zen.

Why is a blog about teaching talking about zen practice? Because it's a blog about being a compassionate teacher. Compassion is probably not the first word that comes to people's minds when they think of “zen,” but the more you know about zen, the more you realize it's actually the core or heart of practice. Plus, my desire to be a compassionate teacher came from the experiences I had with compassion while practicing at the zen center (see my first post: thinking).

I like the zen center. It makes me happy. It took me a while to really understand the whole zen thing (and I'm still learning). I had a bunch of misgivings and reluctance and refusals and fear at first. But with the support of friends and the residents and lay practitioners of the zen center, I stuck it out and now I'm basically giggling my way through my days (though that may be connected to the fact that it's summer).

I wanted to write about how I got to a place where I actually enjoy the zen center for two reasons:

1) I think that a lot of people have the same fears and reluctance that I had and I'm hoping that by reading about my experience, they'll say “Oh, that's all it is?” and they'll stick around long enough to see the happy part of the zen center (not that there's a sad part of the zen center, but all those black robes and silence and chanting often make for a somber mood).

2 ) As I was learning to meditate at the zen center, I would often hear others sharing their struggles and breakthroughs and realize how similar they were to my experience. Once I knew that others were experiencing the same thing, I felt like I was actually on a path toward learning to meditate and so I was willing to keep at it. I have to agree with what I've been told that there isn't “one way” to meditate. I'm changing my way all the time and different things work for different people but for me, it was really helpful to hear what others were struggling with. So, I'm hoping that by sharing my experience, other people will see that it's doable: you too can stare at a wall all pretzel legged and quiet. And if you stick with it long enough and are open to all the stuff that goes with it, you'll probably find yourself laughing at yourself and smiling at others.

being seen

As I mentioned before, my overall goal in being a compassionate teacher is to truly SEE my students for who they are:" to see beauty in the chaos that is life." Lately, I've been seeing myself. And I realize that the parts of my self that are most beautiful ARE my fears, my mistakes, my unplanned attempts and the times when I am just present, just being me. In the lives of 7 and 8 year olds, I'm thinking that this will look like tears, anger, shouting, hiding in corners, challenging the teacher... pictures made for a friend, snacks shared at recess (with the risk of breaking the "no share" rule), an "I'll be your partner" because no one else will. All of these are attempts to be seen and to connect with each other- some just look a lot more like human connection while others look like aggression or threat.
I've been thinking about how to illicit this in my students; how to actually get to know them.. I'd definitely like to do some sort of questionnaire that gets at their fears, their desires, what makes them happy. I always do this at the end of the year in their letter to their fourth grade teachers but I'd like to do it sooner, and more seriously this year- to look at their responses as seriously as I do their reading and math assessments. But I realized that in asking THEM to do this, I need to do it first: share with them my fears, my happiness, my insecurities. I imagine this will be quite a balancing act around control and power: me showing my vulnerability while asking them to trust that I mostly do have the final say. But it feels right.
A friend of mine pointed out, when I was describing my experience at the zen center, that my teacher's expression of vulnerability around following the rules, his sharing that he broke them sometimes, made the rules all that more accessible to me, showed me that I'd get to his level of expertise someday too. So, for now, that's my plan: to share myself honestly with them if I'm going to ask them to share themselves with me and each other (which reminds me that I also need to be thinking about setting up a really safe classroom climate before I start asking them to do these things... definitely need to keep that in mind in all of this).

Practicing with little ones

I don't have kids, but I do have nieces and nephews and friends with kids. Often, I can't help myself from being a teacher around these kids. In the summer I sometimes "try out" some of my classroom management techniques on them. Last summer, I practiced saying things just once. It was great! I learned about how long it takes for kids to see that you actually mean what you say when you only say it once (it takes a long time and lots and lots of testing). I also learned that what I say has to be reasonable and fair and that often I need to explain to the kids later WHY it was reasonable and fair. They need to see that you have rules because you care about them, not because you want to control them. Again, it takes time and experience with you for them to believe it, but once they do, it makes things so much easier!
So this summer, I've been trying out some of my zen practices with the kids; specifically: seeing things just as they are. Case in point: Little guy and I are playing a game. He wants to shoot me with his car. Initially I see this through my own lens (shooting is violent and only kills people) and want to tell him to stop. Instead, I see it for just what it is: a kid shooting at me with his toy car, and I let him shoot me. After he does, he explains to me that HIS car shoots lasers. Granted, he's still shooting me but consider the alternative: if I had told him to stop and explained that shooting only kills people, I would have basically been telling him that he was a murderer when really, he's just a kid shooting me with a toy car. I'm sure we'll have conversations in other contexts about guns and shooting but in this case, it really was just a toy car and a little boy.
Second zen practice: accepting that I can't control the universe (small children included).
It's time to go. We are not in our shoes, we want our hair in braids, and it's the last day so we're supposed to get there early to give the thank you cards to our swim teacher. I know that I actually CAN control this little one: I can threaten her with removal of priveleges, I can reward her with a cookie or even verbal praise, and if all else fails, I can pick her up and put her in the car and we will get there on time.
I decide not to control her. Instead, I am honest with her (seeing things as they are): We are late. If I braid your hair now, we will be later and your hair will get all messed up in the water. If we wait until after, it will look nice. We can't get in the car until you have your shoes on. If we are late, I'm not sure how we can give the cards to your teachers because they will have already started class.
She agrees to wait to have her hair braided, she puts her shoes on enough so that she can walk to the car, and we leave for swim practice. We get to the parking lot and are late. I am tempted to rush her more but instead accept our situation. She comments on random flowers and takes the time to make sure her card is on top of her towel, which makes us even later. I suggest we give the cards to the teachers right away (trying to change things, to make up for our lateness), SHE laughs at me and says we can just do it at the end. When I make her give the cards to the teachers (STILL trying to control the situation!), the teachers say we should wait until the end.
Yep we were late, yep we couldn't give the cards, yep, yep, yep- such is life. Was it SO bad? Was it worth picking her up, threatening her, or bribing her? Guess what, it wasn't. We were late and life goes on (and we shouldn't have gotten there early to give the cards 'cause the teachers wanted them at the end anyway- who knew? No one, and that's the point, we just don't know...)
Now, am I gonna be all zen about being on time when I have yard duty and will get yelled at or in trouble for not being on the yard to supervise the other classes if I'm late? No way! At least right now it doesn't FEEL like I'm going to be all zen about it. I'll bet that the later I get, the more tempted I'll be to control them. But for now, it's summer, and late turned out to be just fine.
I hope that by the end of the summer, I'll see that late is a better alternative to threats and bribery. Not quite sure how that's going to work but I can still hope.