Koshin Paley Ellison on Becoming Wholehearted

to behavior science. For example, Barb started working with me at a time when she knew she needed some additional support in her life. Primarily it was the need for additional sort of support, and scaffolding is a word that I use, particularly during the pandemic when my normal resources were less available and everything felt harder, compounded by my mother passing away right before the pandemic as well. It was a time when I needed extra support and support

was available due to our physical distancing and socializlation. All that even I'm just a big believer and turning to expertise and I needed some help and I thought that Eric could provide it. Barb's focus was on bringing mindfulness and a daily meditation practice back into her life, and we were also working on helping her address a pattern of emotional eating. Yeah, the experience was positive, and the incremental approach to reintroducing mindfulness and to behavior change in

general was almost surprisingly effective and rewarding. It was like something makes sense, but then to really do it, you're like, oh, this actually worked. Like let's start with I think it was like three minutes, and I was like, Okay, I can do that. That feels good. Okay, let's go to five minutes, you know. And so this very incremental baby steps approach really paid off and I was like, oh my god, this this is great and it was nice to have some wins. So when I say positive, that's

what I mean. It was a sense of like building on wins and building a sense of maybe confidence through seeing results, sort of like cheerleading confidence, but like, oh if I did this for three minutes and I can do it for five, I've been doing it. Now I'm doing it for ten minutes a right not, you know, And so sort of building on crement gains was very positive for me. With the right support and the right approach, your life can radically transform for the better. That's where

I can help as a behavior coach. To book a free no pressure thirty minute call with me to see if the program is right for you. Go to Eric Zimmer dot coach slash application. As a bonus if we decide that we're a good fit to work together. If you sign up before January thirty one, I will include two additional coaching sessions at no additional cost to you.

The new year is a busy time in my coaching spots fill up fast, so if you're interested, don't wait to look into the program to see if it's right for you. That's Eric Zimmer dot coach slash application and I hope to talk with you soon. Our fear of what's weird about us or what's incongruent in us, we all have those aspects, and the more we can bring them to light and get to the end of the book and be like, yeah, I have a monstrous part.

I have feelings that are monstrous. Everyone does because they're just human. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sensi Cotion. Paley Allison, a Zen teacher and co founder with his partner Robert Chodo Campbell of the New York Zen Center

for Contemplative Care. Today, Coach and Paley and Eric discuss his new book Wholehearted, Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up. Hi Cotion, Welcome to the show. Delightful to see you, Eric. Yes, we are recording this again after you and I had a wonderful conversation. I don't know a couple of months ago that due to sound quality issues, we're having to redo. So I am happy to get to spend another hour with you, but I am sorry that we lost that conversation.

But let's start like we always do with the pair double. There's a grandfather talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather.

He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I feel that it's about learning how to drop down into the softness of my experience so that I can actually wonder about what am I doing, and in order to do that, to drop down into what I call it

my horror, which is from our traditions. Then, and it's really about really getting curious about the feelings that are rising and the thoughts that are connecting to those particular feelings, and then how the words and then the actions, and then that turns into habit and character. And so to me, it's about really learning how to not feed the wolf

of greed and resentment and ignorance. Is to really just keep coming back to the softness, coming back to the tenderness, coming back to curiosity and of equanimity, and so that I can be really curious about, like, wow, when I leap out and start feeding what is unskillful, what is harmful, what is divisive? I can come back and say, oh, oh, I did that, and I can take responsibility for that

and beginning. Yeah, that's really a beautiful idea. And I think it's that dropping into the softness that can be challenging, right, It is being able to descend a couple of layers deeper into our experience. So do you think that's just a matter of practice? Learning to do that more skillfully and more readily, and even remembering to do it is often the hardest part. Remembering is everything you know and

in many ways, yeah, it's difficult. But you know, for forty thousand years, Homo sapiens and embonking people over the head because there were different in different ways. And so the against the stream teachings of the Buddha or are this amazing capacity that? Yes, going against the stream takes lots of effort, and to not do the habitual thing and react. It takes lots of effort and that it

can be hard. And I love the image and zen of the you know, going against the stream is like that them and swimming up dream swimming against the current of our minds and our habits and are lineage of forty thousand years and you know, leaping up as the image comes from China the Yellow River and getting to the dragon gate and flinging your whole body up through the dragon gate and transforming into a dragon. I love

the dragon image. Let's bring back the wolf image for a second, because there's a wonderful story in your latest book, which is called Wholehearted, Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up, which is a great book and it's going to inform a lot of what we talked about here. But you tell a great story about you being on a bus at the age of eighteen, and it involves wolves. So I thought, hey, it's a great story and be it's

got wolves in it, can't leave it alone. Yeah. So I was a seeker and really love Buddhism, and I was really I did about the path and was traveling around and as a young person excited about being on different retreats and learning and engaged. And I was on a bus and this woman, this cool woman, sits next to me and she's asking me like, oh, are you a Buddhist? And I was so excited that she was like and I said, yes, I'm a Buddhist because I

felt excited I was recognized as a Buddhist. I thought that was cool and like, I think I had some Malla beads on and you know, so like and she said, oh, so, who is your teacher? And I was like, oh, I don't have a teacher. I studied with Jack Cornfield and Joseph Goldstein and Gaelic Rimpochet and John Dido Loori and all these different people. As she said, well, where is your song? Where is your community? And I said no, I don't have one. She's like, oh, so you're a

lone wolf and I said yeah. I thought that was so cool because she saw that I'm like this lone wolf and that's such a great image for many people in our culture, being the lone wolf. And she said, well, the interesting thing about wolves, lone wolves are is that they're sick. And I remember thinking, oh my god, I had no idea. It's kind of like being in like a lash in the face of cold water, just like,

my goodness, what am I doing? What am I doing? Yeah, as she so rightly pointed out, if you see a wolf by itself, there's something wrong with it, something has gone wrong. It's not supposed to be alone. I love that story because, like you, at that younger age, I would have been proud to be identified as first by all. They notice I'm a Buddhist, or they notice I'm this, or they notice I'm a punk rocker or whatever. It

was so much identity at that age. I think I would have taken the lone wolf moniker is a good thing for a long time out of years. I would have been like, yeah, that's me, lone wolf baby. And now seeing like, oh yeah, that's not really such a great idea. How long did it take you to find

your way into community? And soenga. Not long after that, I felt pierced by that comment, and in a way that it's kind of feels liberating in a way like really hurt, and it was really true, and and I realized that I had been running in many ways and was sick like that I really did want to connect.

I really did one community I really did want to immerse myself in the teachings and go deep, you know, not just kind of stay on the horizontal, but really learn how to dive deeper and to really get curious. And so it was shortly after that that I just went back to John Didalori and started really practicing with him, and it was really you know, so I was around eighteen when I started sitting in the monastery, which is

so amazing. Around that time they had their first city place, which was in the building now where our center is. It was a bit different floor, and so I just started practicing here and really starting to steep into the practice. And I would say it took still a long time for me to move away from my real habits of preferences,

like I didn't like certain things. I was always going in and saying like, well, the community could be better if feel in the play right, you know, or if we tried this, or what don't we you know, and send might be more palatable if I had like a lot of those kinds of things right, which is perfectly normal. We all have them right. And yet you know, as the wonderful zen palm begins, you know, the great way it's not difficult for those who don't claim to preferences.

It's one of my favorite lines. I love that one also, and that at the same time, we certainly don't want to cling to our preferences, but we have them, and we also have opinions which we don't want to cling to, and yet we have them. And there is a certain field or way of working in the world in which those opinions are important. And so talk me through your process of working with that, because I think it's very

easy to go preferences. I just shouldn't have any. I start trying that, and I'm immediately like I have one every second. And some of them seem like, yeah, that would be a really good improvement for the Zen Center, Like maybe if they did do that, that's not necessarily a bad idea. It might actually make things better. And yet those preferences also really lock us and they keep us from connection with ourselves with others with deeper reality.

So talk to me about working with those skillfully. Yeah, you know, the key part is not clinging to the preference. So it's like when I think I'm right, you know, we see this in the political climate that we're in, you know, that all over the world, not just in this country, you know, all over the world, this kind of rising of surreness, and when we at least in myself, really noticing my attitude towards the unknown, and you know, for myself, I'm thinking about my own development with this

experience of working with preferences. You know, when I was a kid and I felt unsafe a lot of the time and really didn't know how to not just run until I was about a leven, you know, and I felt very afraid for actually very real reasons. There was all kinds of abusive things happening in my home and and some of the communities I lived in a plot of violence, and so the feeling of unsafety was real,

but I carried it around with me everywhere. It started to become an identity that, you know, I was in the supermarket and would feel unsafe, when actually the unsafe experiences were in very specific So they started to become very general experiences, which is very common with trauma, you know, with any different kinds of trauma. We start to radiate out that experience. It's almost like an aura of experience, like oh my god, I'm a victim or around that

time these two movies came out. And this is like, you know, shows that I'm an older person because the first Star Wars movie came out, the first Karate movie came and those two movies had such a deep impression on me because I really saw that, wow, you could have a teacher. And I was so captivated by how whiney Luke Skywalker was. He was always like right right, you know, like I don't want to do that. It's hard,

you know. He was always complaining and actually related to him, you know, and just felt like that myself too, like he felt kind of put upon, and the same with the Karate kid, you know, like he was just you know, whacked around. And yet these people both found these teachers who was not someone from a school, but someone who

was like in their life and that they encountered. And so I decided to find myself a teacher, and you know, as a young gay kid, and I got bullied and in the of course, the way it worked out was the school bully was actually at my bus stops. So every morning it was like running the gauntlet, you know, like oh god, you know, like having to wait for the bus, you know, with me and the school bully, but I started going to the local strip malls. Grew up in the suburbs, and so like what you have

are a lot of strip malls. And in the back of one of the strip malls was this the wash and Roue Karate School. And the teacher there was named sense A White, and he was like very tough and

very serious, and it was really dingy. It was like an a basement, kind of swampy like and down there and smell really rank, and had this kind of like fake wood floor and we would sit on the wood floor and say so, which is when you have your legs underneath you, and so you're just kind of sitting there, which for people grew up in you know, places like where I've trained in Japan, like that's very comfortable, but for most of us who grew up here, it's like

not so comfortable. And it was so painful on this wood floor. And we would sit like that for twenty minutes.

And what I didn't understand at the time, as he was teaching us as ozen, which is you know, seated zen meditation, and so he said, you have to sit and be still with your pain or you'll never be free, and that teaching was so important to me and remains so important to me because it was the first time when I, you know, they of preferences that I began to see and then just amazed, like who knows how

you can understand these things? Like even at eleven years old, I was starting to untangle the beginning of seeing my preferences, particularly around the identity of being a victim, that I felt like that's who I was. And suddenly after going there, would go there six seven days a week and just like always showing up and it was not really like a kid karate school, so I was like this little and uh of all these adults who are like pretty rough, you know, and I just loved it. It felt scary

and stinky and important. Somehow it felt important. It felt like I was learning how to be a superhero, you know, or like a Jedi night you know, like that you were just going through this training and it became this real place of refuge for me and where I started to distinguish my preferences about freedom and actually learning how

to practice freedom. And again I don't think I could have explained it in that way as a kid, of course, but now looking back on it, I'm really seeing that how that experience forever changed me and maybe saved me from a very difficult life. That's a powerful story of a really important teaching at a really early age, and it's amazing, like, who can understand how that happened? Right? But it did, you know? And that's the amazing thing to me, the mystery of it all could be open

to their unfolding mystery. I was much more the Han Solo identifier. About the time that all started coming out. I was already always in trouble, you know. I was a kleptomaniacs. Was like he's a smuggler, you know, and just that disdain for anything meaningful, like yeah, whatever, kid, And I think I carried that for a long time, although I think underneath it there was always something deeper moving. In the book, you talk a lot about being open.

Two things you you started off kind of saying that by you know, dropping down and really being open to what's happening. And a term that you use a lot. You use this several times, which is being receptive is essentially being open to learning from everything. And you've referenced this a little bit. We're right in the middle of it. I don't know when we'll release this, so I don't know what the world will look like then. But today we are two days after the election. We are in

very uncertain times, and there's a lot of divisiveness. As you said, now most listeners of this show, not all, but a lot of them are going to share my political leanings towards not Trump. I'm assuming that's probably your political leanings, such as they are. How do we work with this divisiveness in healthy ways? Because as much as I see who's in office, you know, okay, yeah, that's

a problem. The policy, Yeah that's a problem. More deeply, I see the deep divisiveness and what feels like this big rift and even if, as a lot of people I think wisely point out, we might even be that far apart on a lot of the issues, if we could even get there, But how do we start to heal this divisiveness because some of the things that were

divided on feel like deeply moral issues. I don't know how we do it, but I can tell you remember as a teenager, we had lots of friends of our family, like dear people who had thought of his uncle's like Jane. One of them was named Jerry and that was Michael when I was a teenager, and before they even had a name for it, they were dying of AIDS and

it was the beginning of that pandemic. And I remember so much anger towards the government and the lack of care and the lack I think it was Reagan perhaps in an office at that time. And my parents were socially engaged, and so we would go to protests and things like that at and but my dad also was a big fan of ram Das and so we used to go see Ramdas whenever he would come around. And

I remember him. It must have been around I don't know, fourteen fifteen or so, and we went to see ram Das and round us, you know, had his little table there and there was a picture of Reagan and his Guru on the table and he said, until I see them as equal, I won't be free. And it's so interesting. Someone sent me this like it's a trump Buddhist statue. Is what it really is? Yea, And that says on

the bottom, imagine m hm. And so like every day I go, I kissed him and I feel like I learned that from Ramdas And I think that there's something really important about not splitting off the darkness in ourselves into someone else. And I feel like that's what's happening in this time and actually throughout time, and it's nothing

actually special about this time. We read history like it just there's waves of fit and then it goes away, then it comes back, and when we're in trouble, and certainly ecologically and a lot of other reasons were in trouble COVID nineteen, we're in a pandemic even before this of social isolation. When there's that kind of trouble, people look and this happens every you know, at least every

seventy years. There's this big cycles of this of kind of totalitarian splitting because people are afraid, and they all want to feel good and they want to feel safe, and they want to feel secure, and they want to feel happy, and most people are looking for someone to tell them how it's going to be and whose fault it is, you know, blamed seems to be a popular thing.

And so to me, learning how to rest in ourselves and to realize that yes, I have that in me to blame, to point fingers, you know, it's your fault it's your fault. And who has not gone through a

day feeling that? And so for me, my work is to really bring that into myself and to really realize that, you know, how I'm racist, homophobic, how those things are real, misogynist, time, transphobic, like all of these things like that are really coming to light at this time, and to really reckon with that and say, yes, that's also me, that's also me.

Trump is also me throughout time, you know. And then we chant this verse of atonement where we say all evil karma are committed by me since of old, on account of my beginningless greed, resentment and delusion born of my body mouth, and thought, now I a toned for it all, like every day we say that and really learning how to mean it and just realize, yes, throughout time, since the beginning of time, like Tyrannosaurus Rex, like eating a little dinosaur, like we're responsible for that and we're

part of that. And and some people say like, oh, that's too much, and I said, I don't think so. For me, it really looks to how I can build a bridge of compassion. I feel like we're in that upswing of this kind of polarization where there's no bridge, you know. I keep looking at the map, you know there, as many people do, and as right during elections, and it's red and blue and red, and like what's be red and what's going to be blue? And a lot of feelings about that, and how do we like to

me what I've been imagining? It's like what would purple look like? How do we come together? You know, across difference? You know, as we were talking about earlier than for forty years, we've been bonking people over the head because they were different. And whether we're like we're bonking people over the head for peace or bonking them over the head for a capitalism, it doesn't matter. We are responsible

for our actions, what we're putting into the world. And I really have no interest doesn't mean not good at it, you know, feeding that as you're talking about the wolves in the beginning, like beeing the wolf of separation, like like who needs more of that? And that's a hard and deep practice. It's everything intellectually and even experientially, and cases I totally agree with that. I get the like hate was never dispelled by hate, Like, oh I'm hating

you because I see you hating other people. Like, wow, that this doesn't make any sense. And yet in these moments when we see certain things occur, boy, is it a deep practice for me not to see myself as being fundamentally different? You know, you look at it and you go on the surface, it looks like the values are so different here, and and I think what I hear you saying is we've got to keep similar to where you started, keep dropping deeper. Yeah. I have a preference,

of course, you know. And yet if I cling to that preference, because the reality is, whatever happens, other people are listening to this conversation will know what happened, perhaps, I hope so, although I guess we never really know what happened because things just go on and on. Stories never end, They don't exactly. And but I think that what's so important is that how do you want to live? And no matter what happens, that bridge of compassion still

needs to happen. So there's still you know, one side has like seventy million votes, right, a lot of votes, and the other side is like sixty eight nine million votes. Those are like big groups of people that need to figure out some way to come together. I mean, the divide has always been there and how do we each

take that responsibility. To me, it's like the juiciest, most interesting work, and so to me in a way, I do, of course have a preference of what happens and who might be the winner, but I I still feel like the work is the same, and it's one way it appears will be year, but the work is still there to do. And I feel like that's you see this

happening across the globe. It's not an American issue, and it's not you know, some people's it's about the current President's not about that either, you know, I dinna talk about this Karmak cause and effect pattern that has been around for millennium and we have to atone for it and just realize, here it is again, and what are we going to do about it? Right? I just got done doing a virtual retreat with zen peacemakers to Auschowitz, which is normally a retreat that is done in person,

and it was done virtually this time. But it's a really powerful practice. And you start talking about these totalitarian cycles and you look at it and you're like, oh boy. You know, and I've been asking myself the question a lot lately, what was the proper response of the average German person, because I consider myself just an average person, of the average German person in nineteen say thirty eight,

what was the proper skillful response. And on one hand, you go, well, it matters and it doesn't matter, and what I mean by that is, of course it matters in that person's life and the people around them. And on the other hand, you go, well, maybe it doesn't matter in the grand outcome of what happened there. But you know, at these I'm just finding these are really deep, powerful questions right now because we look at where that hatred and totalitarianism can go. And you can't even put

it into words how horrific. I used to go on those retreats with Bernie and very powerful, you know. And one of the things that I experienced going on those retreats was that, you know, I went there. You know, my family, extended family were killed by their neighbors before the Nazis came because they felt like, oh, like we could you know, get rid of that and take all

their stuff. But literally their neighbors they're rounded up in one group, We're rounded up in a barn and set on fire, and you know, my other extended family and great grandparents. You know, we're fleeing you know, different places, and it happens everywhere, and you know, and these are four different countries. And so I think that the habit of destruction and it starts with what we do with what we're feeling. Right, we started to feel afraid and

then the fear gets attached to a thought. I mean, Dogan laid all of this out, the founder of the soto Zen School. You know, the feeling turns into a thought, and the thought becomes words, and the words become actions, and actions become habit. Habit becomes your character. So we have this incredible opportunity to, like a really pay attention, be intimate and curious and soft and be like, oh man, I can feel that wolf. Wow, you know, like that

like the monster. You know, there's a book that I loved as a kid and it's called I Think the Monster. At the end of the book, do you know that book. It's a great book and it's like a deep, dharmic truth book and it starts Grover from Sesame Street and he's like in the front page, he's like, don't turn the page. There's a monster and then to the book, don't turn the page, and he's like the whole book saying don't turn the page. He's like trying to like

bricks up the page. He tries to tie the page. He's like trying to he keeps telling you not to turn the page because there's a monster. And of course at the end of the book it's Grover is the monster, and he's like, oh, and so many times like our fear. I mean, it's quite a sophisticated book in many ways, you know, and our fear about what's weird about us or what's incongruent in us. We all have those aspects.

And the more we can bring them to light and get to the end of the book and be like, yeah, I have a monstrous part. I have feelings that are monstrous. Everyone does because they're just human, you know. The feelings of disgust and rage are universal feelings, you know, and part of like the seven universal feelings that exist in every single culture, and so how do we reckon with that?

To me, actually, the more I get in touch with those feelings and myself and the more I say yes, that's me too, I feel, the more free I am. And it kind of brings me right back to sense A White in that dingy karate school and saying that if you can be still in your pain, you can be free. But if we're running from that monster at

the end of the book, will never be free. From your perspective, is that the primary role of practice, or let me say that a different way is one of the best ways to improve that ability to be with what we feel typically cultivated through a seated meditation practice, or in addition to that, what are the other ways that you have cultivated that ability the wonderful question, Well, they took me eighteen minutes to get it out in

my case, Yeah, it's usually more than is needed. But I guess no is exactly what is needed, right And I think for me the point of practice is actually

to begin to cultivate unconditional love. You know, I'm really lately more and more clear about that, at least for myself, Like I feel like it's actually teaches you really what love is, which is to love all the things about someone, even the things about someone or something or some country, even the things that you don't understand or that scare you, but that you can be intimate and engage with it, and again it doesn't mean spiritual bypassing and just like

oh whatever is fine, doesn't mean you don't say no, and it doesn't mean that you don't work for change. But it's about how you are with that. And for me, a lot of these things are so easy to say, As my teacher often says, it's an easy thing to say, but it's it takes everything to do. And for me, part of the path is, you know, really have an amazing therapist, she's gorgeous her mind and her being in practice, you know, and having wonderful friends you know who call

you on your ship. And I feel like those parts are really important. So to have kind of a base of support where there's some inquiry and some fun. I need to have a little fun and not take ourselves

so seriously and being kind of too sacrony. And I think that the more I can in touch with even you know, I have this experience with my sense students, you know, like I feel like we get to this point where that they finally are like you just appointed me, and the boom boom boom, and they get really mad, you know, which I always find is like a thrilling moment because we do disappoint each other, you know, like there's not kind of going back to that kind of

lone wolf, and that's where a lot of people flee. They're like, oh no, this is not perfect, which of course nothing is truly perfect, imperfectly perfect, but not perfect. And I feel like that was also what was feeling me, Like I would just jump around to these different groups and like, oh yeah, I don't really like that, or it's a little weird or a little culty or whatever that is, and to find a good enough group where actually I like when people are quite different from each other.

There's not like one vibe of what a student looks like, and I find that to be exciting and enlivening. But to learn how to settle down and really learn what love is just takes time. And for some people it's they're quick learners, and some people like myself, I'm a rather dense person. It takes me a long time, and

so it goes. It's one of the reasons why you know, there's two main schools, and and one is Rinzai, which is also part of our Mazoomi Roshi lineage, and which is kind of values that kind of sudden awakening and can show experience and then that experience has approved and then you've arrived somewhere in some way. But then Soto School, that just feels like it's just about endlessly unfolding, and I feel so resonant with that. I was having a

conversation with somebody. We were using different words than Soto and rinse I, but we were using these terms of like, is it these big moments of really deep opening, is it sudden awareness? Is it just this long path? And I said, well, I think honestly the answer is it's both. At least for me, they've both been there. There have been moments of whether that can show be I think that term Ken Show meaning sort of a sudden awakening, right.

I've had Ken Show moments psychologically for sure, where I'm like boom, WHOA hang on a second, like everything is different now. I just see things like one light went on. And I've had them spiritually, and I've had an awful lot of just one foot in front of the other, very boring, day after day, moving along. And it's really been both. And I'm struck by our first conversation, the

one that didn't get released. Maybe we should just release the low audio quality conversation to our Patreon listeners as an extra bonus if you love Cohen that much that you're willing to listen to him on low quality sound, here it is. It was a great conversation. But one thing is we talked about a lot that you just touched on and we haven't is good enough community and songa. We hit it in the beginning about the lone wolf idea, Well, I remained a lone wolf a lot longer than you

did because I would do the exact same thing. I'd be like, oh great, this is the thing, and I'd start to wade into it. Whether it be a community, whether it be a belief system, whether it be a Sana church, you name it. I've wandered into a lot of them, and I go into a certain point and all of a sudden I hit these things that I go wait, I don't think that's true, I don't believe that, or that seems wrong or and then boom gone, over

and over and over and over. In the conversation I had with you, and listeners have heard this that you know not too long ago. You know, several years ago I made the decision that I was going to start working in Zen. I was going to pick a teacher, and it had been the tradition that I was first drawn to, the one that I keep getting pulled back to.

I was going to just pick a teacher, and I was just going in staying, and I said, you know, I gave myself an original six months, which I know is laughably short in the spiritual path, but I had to give myself a time like for the next six months, you can't evaluate this. And it's gone on far longer than that, but it's been really valuable for me to go, oh, yeah, there's things I don't agree with here, Oh that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe it will someday, maybe it won't.

I don't have to accept the whole thing, but I can just remain and learn and grow and that there's some value in being part of something, even if that something is not perfect. I used to do this in a a You had to get a sponsor in a right, and it was like, you know, in my mind, it was like I was looking for the person that I was going to become. I had to find that person so that I could then just follow them and and everybody I find, I'd be like, well, they're not perfect.

They're not like me in this way, or they're not like me in that way, or they're not And I finally went like, the only person that's going to be the mature version of me is me. Like what I'm looking for an impossibility, and in the meantime, I'm missing the experience, the relationship, the learning, the wisdom that's available there because I'm holding out for some perfect that didn't exist exactly. You know, it's just it's not even possible.

It reminds me so much. One of my favorite stories, Da Cornfield tell us about when he was studying with Agen Cha and and he said, you know, who's the who's that guy over there? Do you know this story? No, I don't. Wonderful and here and him, you know, he comes around here for a little while, and after a while this place inks, and then he goes back to Tibet and you know, and goes there for a while

and starts Tibetan Buddhism. Then after a while that that place stinks, and then he goes to Japan and tries Zen and after a while that stinks, and then he goes back home to America and tries another tradition there and then after a while that stinks, and then he comes back here again, and he's been doing this for years, and Jack said, you know, what's his deal? And he said, well, he doesn't realize that he's just carrying around his own

ship bag. And once he gets somewhere, he puts it down, and after a while he starts to smell it, and then he blames everybody else, picks up his ship bag and goes to the next place, and then puts it down, does the same thing. And it's so amazing how we do that. You know, it's like a to me, it's kind of a grittier version of that. You know what John kebots And says. You know, wherever you go, there you are. It's just I like this version better. That

is a great version. I think this is a really interesting question though, because on one hand, it's very difficult to discern when is the smell that's coming from here my own ship bag, and when is this not the right fit, the right thing for me, the right like these are really challenging questions and important questions. I've been wrestling with us a little bit as my jazen. It's just become difficult all of a sudden, like just plateau flat,

like what am I doing here? And I find myself just suddenly going Maybe what I need is I've never really fully explored Hinduism. I think I should chant more. I think I need more more musical chanting. Maybe I need more body work, Maybe I need more. And it's an interesting thing because you know, you don't want to blindly just go, well, I just keep staying here because everybody says that's what I should do. And yet I don't want to jump around. I want to trust my intuition.

I just you know, these are things that I know I wrestle with in lots of listeners wrestle with I think anybody in a spiritual tradition does. But you've managed to sort of say this place feels like home long enough. How has that played out for you? Well? I think originally, you know, I needed a strong containers and my first teachers were very strong about liturgy and form, and that was really important to me and really stays with me.

And you know, for the last almost ten years, you know, working with this teacher who really her teaching truly is about unconditional love, and she's you know, a successor of Peter Mathison, as she comes from that line of folks. But it's just also this like real focus and clarity.

So for me, it's been following. I've been always felt very connected to Dogan and very connected to my Assumi Roshi's lineage, and in particular my Assumi Roshi, you know, who was a deeply imperfect, perfect person and you know, I had, you know, lots of scandal and I met him after all those scandals, and I was so amazed by him insofar as someone could do something that was harmful and he took responsibility for it, and there's something about the way he was and he said, I would

never defend what I did. There's no excuse, and it's just I was like, wow, I had experienced so much perpetration myself, and I had never met someone who had perpetrated other people, who was non defensive and took responsibility. He's like, I'm responsible. Your responsible. That's the end of it,

you know, totally taking the responsibility. And I feel like I want to be like that when I grew up, Not that I want to do the things that he did, but to have that kind of courage to be able to fall down so badly and hurt people, and to like fully take responsibility for it. I said, if he can do that, I certainly can do that. And I

felt like wow. So that his lineage has always been very important to me because of who he was, in particular after his fault, that's when many people left him, but I found like, that's the person that was interesting to me. It was also what I was so moved by.

You know, I had this experience of you know, doing chaplaincy work with guys and sing sing, and I also felt very similar with them, like that they were like totally committed and totally serious and totally open and loving, and they had done terrible things and they were at one with that. To kind of go back to that theme that we're talking about tonight too, about atonement, like being at one with like, yes, I did that, I'm responsive. I'm not going to divide. I'm not going to divide.

You know, like many people when they do things, they don't take any responsibility for it. But for me, as someone who has experienced you know, physical and emotional and sexual violence and anti Semitic violence, to have people taking responsibility felt radical. And to live a life where you could really be responsible and also responsible for the division that lack of responsibility creates. And I think that's another thing about we're talking about this time and all the

divisiveness and all the polarity. It's like both sides are not taking responsibility for the injury of the divide. They're just blaming. There's a habit. I'm not saying everyone, but like there's a habit in the pattern in the society of blaming another instead of like, oh, it's their fault, it's the red fault, it's the blue fault. And there was this great little thing that I saw the other days. One forward to me like it was, what are your

fears about this election? And they had people on both sides of this like talking about like I would leave the country. I'm gonna move to Mexico and I moved to and like they just clipped it together the way they edit it. All the people were saying that they're going to leave the country and they were from both sides. It was so brilliant and to see that, Wow, like that's what we're like, we don't really know how to

be at one with our own pain. And going back to sense a white in the back of the drug store in the strip mall. To learn how to be with our pain is the place of freedom and how do we do that with ourselves as a society, as a culture, as a value. To me, I'm so excited by that as a potentiality. Well, that is an absolutely beautiful place to leave it. I've got a hundred more things I'm gonna say, but I'm gonna leave it there.

You and I, though, are briefly going to talk in the post show conversation where you are going to tell us a hilarious story about some of your maybe your first night as a chaplain and you and your serious zen robes and then things sort of devolved from there. So you and I are going to do that story

and some other stuff in the post show conversation. Listeners you can get access to that as well as special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a poem and all kinds of other good stuff at one you feed dot Net slash joint coach, and thank you so much for not only coming on well you are a guest a long time ago, for coming on a couple of months ago and doing the interview and then me having to toss it actually doing it yet again. Very gracious. Thank you so much. I'm enjoyed to be

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