Tag Archives: Joko Beck

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joyful openness of the heart

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I’m torn between continuing with Katagiri’s books and using this week to bring forward the words of women zen teachers.  It’s one of those conundrums (not a koan, just a conundrum) one encounters, I suppose, in trying to find tasty nuggets of teachings that are immediate in their impact, emotionally and culturally.  In the end, it was an academic exercise because, I was somewhat chagrined to discover, I don’t have many Zen Women on my shelves!  Joko Beck, Joan Halifax, Maurine Stuart, Diane Eshin Rizzetto and Grace Schireson.  That’s it.  This calls for more mindful consumption at my local bookstores for Zen Women writers, not because I think there are better teachings to be had but because I wonder if some challenges in practice would benefit from teachers who are intimate with the conditioned female self.


In reading Katagiri’s book You Have to Say Something, I fell into the chapter titled Opening your heart which lead to certain considerations.

For anyone living a spiritual life, the most important practice is openheartedness.  But dealing with life with compassion and kindness is not easy.  We tend live in terms of “me.”  But if you’re interested in the spiritual life, you will have to consider more than just yourself.

This is a challenge not just because of the self-protectiveness we train to deal with a lifetime of disappointments but because opening to others includes a willingness to be vulnerable to the consequences of their actions.  There’s another part to this that is the cultural baggage of being female: I’m constantly told I have to consider more than just myself.  It might be related to my generation but the roll call of all the women I work with says, perhaps not.  It feels like a conundrum: realizing a spiritual life means not only risking hurt but also could continue to foster a gender myth of willing self-sacrifice.  At the same time, if there’s an element of truth in the myth (as there often is), sacrifice should come easy.  It doesn’t and I think it goes back to the willingness to experience the vulnerability of opening the heart.

At the beginning of a retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax commented that she had heard that evening so many stories of hurt, of “being dropped from arms that should have caught (us).”  Joko Beck writes in Nothing Special,

…I am struck that the first layer we encounter in sitting practice is our feeling of being a victim – our feeling that we have been sacrificed to others.  We have been sacrificed to others’ greed, anger, and ignorance, to their lack of knowledge of who they are.

In practice we become aware of having been sacrificed, and we are upset about this fact.  We feel that we have been hurt, that we have been misused, that somebody has not treated us the way we should have been treated – and this is true.  Though inevitable, it’s still true, and it hurts, or seems to.

Though inevitable. It’s taken me a long time to understand it is inevitable; careening off each other will bring an unavoidable hurt as much as it will an ineffable joy.  Beck goes on to write of practice as acknowledging that we have been sacrificed and cultivating our awareness of the need to retaliate, to react.  And then, to see how we too sacrifice others on the altar of our desires.  This is where the openness is crucial: seeing our own willingness to sacrifice others and yet, and yet, to not do so because that is the only means of ending the cycle.  The willingness to make a sacrifice whose intent is the end of suffering is not perpetuating victimhood but ending it.  In fact, it strengthens the heart so it can stand up to and speak out against abuse in all its forms of rejection, unrealistic demands, and neglect.

The first dharma name given to me was Joyful Openness of the Heart. I was not wrong to see the conundrum-not-koan in it.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

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what is the subtle sound of the female hand?

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My dharma friend at Ox Herding has announced a new book on women ancestors in the Zen tradition titled Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters.  I ordered it as soon as I got the Wisdom Publications notice – yes, I only use Facebook for its dharmic content -and they kindly informed me that it should be arriving this week.  I’m thrilled; it’s like waiting for a visit from a good friend.  So, yesterday, I cleaned up the shelves to make room for it and that lead to interesting finds.

matriarch's bloodline

matriarch's bloodline

The bloodline of female teachers in Buddhism is not often discussed and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I actually never thought about it.  In fact (and this is really embarassing), it’s taken me a few years to see the many disconnected dots on my bookshelves.  Maurine Stuart is there.  As is Sallie Tisdale‘s penetrating stories beginning with Maha Maya.  There is Ayya Khema.  And the Therigatha, the poems of the women elders.  Of course, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein, Pema Chodron, and Joko Beck.  Evidence of my face-to-face teachings with my Dear Hearts is tucked into the spaces above and between the books: Myozen, Roshi Joan, and Sister Annabelle (Chan Duc) Laity.  Why then, did I not question who was the face of these women before they were?

Add that preparing a matriarch’s lineage is part of taking the precepts (jukai) and I have to wonder if I should surrender a piece of my X-chromosomes.

This is particularly perplexing because I’m no fainting flower of femininity.  Nor am I a feminist.  I have done things that many would say are outside the box of conventional female pursuits.  Perhaps.  I tend not to experience things that way yet I also have felt in my body and heart/mind the yin and yang of every practice center that has held me.

In university, there were several of us who broke the barriers of being women in the physical sciences.  My mentor was not-so-affectionately called the “Tasmanian Devil” for her whirlwind way of decimating anyone she perceived as only using their minimum of two neurons.  For the longest while, our role in our careers was to educate our bosses (who were usually always and seemed evermore to be men) that we were not hired to wash the glassware, sweep the floors or bake cookies for Friday socials.  Although we founded organizations like W.I.S.E. (Women in Science and Engineering) and did our best to encourage the next generation of women to see science and all careers as equally available to them, I eventually walked away from all that because it felt too much like religious fervour.

Several years later, while writing my dissertation, I got bored and went for a drive.  There in a store window was a call for volunteer firefighters.  It wasn’t and never had been an issue of challenging male bastions.  It just interested me to push my own boundaries of physical and mental tolerance.  Zen as now.  And in this now, my day job takes me to interesting places and things.  It’s only in retrospect that I am likely to notice I’m in the company of only one or two other women colleagues.

So I wonder.  This essential part of my spiritual history.   Call it female and it’s wrong.  Call it not and it’s wrong too.  What is it?

What a question!  What a great day for it to appear!

The true life of our Zen practice comes from sitting quietly, doing nothing, and then getting up quietly and acting dynamically and directly in our everyday lives.

from Our own light, in Subtle Sound: the Zen teachings of Maurine Stuart, ed. Roko Sherry Chayat

The way of being human is beyond all shapes.  It has no form.  When we use words like “Buddha” or “Tathagata” there is some danger that we think of this as something apart from us.  Searching for the mystery outside oneself leads us astray.  The mystery is right here.

from Who is the real you?, in Subtle Sound: the Zen teachings of Maurine Stuart, ed. Roko Sherry Chayat

Thank you for practicing,

Genju