Stand on Your Own Two Feet
Photo by Nathan McBride
The weighty, sticky, hungry self—how do we let go of it?
Zuisei looks into how our sense of self gets in the way of our lives—the narrow view of perfectionism, for example; the fulfilling of habitual roles—and offers a glimpse of what remains once we let go. This talk draws on the poetry of Ellen Bass, Zen Master Dogen’s koans, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and more.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
This is a poem by Ellen Bass, entitled “The Thing Is.”
Part of me just wants to stop there, not muddy what she has so beautifully said. At times life does feel like too much. Doesn't it—a bit too much, a lot too much, more than we can countenance? Sometimes I imagine our ancestors sitting around a campfire, no cell phones to keep their mind off things, no Netflix to distract them. I imagine them sitting under that vast, open sky, studded with stars, and feeling for that first time the awe of it, the great reverence, but also the fear, the terror that is the fragility of a human life.
When we're in the midst of it, [life] seems so solid, so certain. It's probably a good thing that our brains are built this way because without the right container with which to hold that fragility, we would just be undone all the time.
Yet I think many of us, at a certain point, penetrate the matrix. Right? We see a little number shifting, and we realize—oh, it's always changing. Sometimes [life] changes in really big, very obvious ways and sometimes in almost imperceptible ways. It really is like walking on water or like those tectonic plates moving slower than the eye can see but they're moving whole continents. Have any of you read José Saramago? He wrote Blindness. He has one book about the Iberian Peninsula slowly drifting away from the rest of the continent—the separating and then what happens after that. I think that is what happens in our lives. We are born maybe cellularly knowing that we're part of this vast body, and then slowly, slowly, without even noticing, we drift away. Before we know it, we're off on the other side of the ocean. We think we are. It seems that way. These [tectonic] plates, they're moving so slowly, it's almost imperceptible, but they're carrying a whole continent with them.
One of my teachers said, "Just as matter cannot move at the speed of light, the self cannot move at the speed of impermanence." If we think of the self as weighty—the stronger we believe in it, the more weight it has—then of course, it would be hard for it to move at the speed of the way of things, constant change. So, that belief [in the self]—it is not the self itself since there is no such thing—that belief is what weights us down. We can see this, or maybe we don't unless we stop and reflect. Just think of your own patterns, learned and honed over the years. [...]
Perfectionism, for example, is the place where I lived for a long time. We knock it, right? We knock perfectionism. We know that a perfectionist is uptight. They're not that easy to be around, but secretly every perfectionist is proud of being so. For instance, if you go to a job interview and they ask: "What's your weakness?" "I'm really a perfectionist. I work too hard." [Zuisei laughs] As if you really think that perfectionism is a weakness. Secretly, we like being that way. I certainly did. We get things done, and we do them well by our own standards. I didn't want to let go of this trait. I didn't want to be half-assed. I didn't want to say that it's just good enough. Because good enough is not good enough for perfectionists. Of course, there's not much subtlety in perfectionism. There's only perfect or wrong. So you miss a lot of life in the in-between areas. The acceptable view of yourself, of others, of the world is a very, very narrow band.
On Saturday, during the class on The Four Immeasurables, I was saying that perfectionism is really a kind of arrogance. A very strong kind of arrogance. It's the assumption that me, other people, things, and situations should fit me, my world, my preferences, my opinions, and my beliefs. When that's not the case, I'm dissatisfied. I judge. I criticize. If everyone was like me, then things would just be great. I wouldn't have to go around constantly fixing things, cleaning up things, arranging, complaining, which is really so exhausting. So if everyone would just get on board then life would be great.
I still, on occasion, expect life to fit into my own agenda, like the weather. I really was annoyed on my last trip to New York. At a certain point, I was done with the cold. [Zuisei laughs] I was only there for 10 days. I remember noticing the annoyance coming up. It's not the cold. That's not what I am talking about. It's an underlying assumption that this shouldn't be this way because I'm uncomfortable. How many of us move through life and how much of our time we spend arranging things, so we won't have to feel that annoyance?
Of course, perfectionism is also a wonderful defense mechanism, if what you need is to keep everyone at arm's length. I've spoken about and written about my own slow-dawning realization. As long as I was focused on getting things done and not on the people who were helping me to get those things done, then I was always going to be separate from the very people I wanted to be close to. I would always be separate from the very people I wanted to love and be loved by. I wanted to be close, and I was afraid. So instead, I fell back to what I knew so well, which was performing. By that I don't mean acting or pretending. I mean, doing what had to be done to the best of my ability, fulfilling a role. I didn't know that in doing so I was constantly buoying up, shoring up my sense of me. When [my sense of self] got threatened, then I began to manipulate things. Doing things well, by itself, is great. I want to do things well. I want to give myself fully to my life and the moments of my life. But, when what I was doing was feeding that idea of me, then I was fulfilling, performing, a role.
Think of going to visit your family, the ultimate web of patterns that is so difficult to extricate ourselves from. Perhaps the relationship with your mother is such that when she asks, “Have you called Aunt Silvia?” for the third time, you flip out. It is not about the call; it's not about Aunt Silvia; and you know it's not rational to get so upset. She's just asking you a question, right? Or is she? Some part of you may know she's not just asking. There may be years, decades of disapproval behind the question, of expectation, of resentment, the push and pull of power, perhaps abandonment. Who knows what else? Right? So that question is not just a question, not for you.
If your mom asked me, "Did she call Aunt Silvia?" I’d answer, "No, she didn't." There's no skin off my nose because I don't have that history. Also, my own self is having its own problems with my own mother. [Zuisei laughs] But when your button gets pushed, you explode. We say that so easily—my buttons got pushed. What does that mean? Where is that? Where's the button? What do you need for that to actually happen? Push button, explode. What is that dynamic? Of course, you can look at this psychologically. But from a spiritual perspective, from the perspective of the fundamental nature of things, what is needed in that moment? “Have you called Aunt Silvia?” Right there. What is happening right there?
This self is not only heavy, it's not only weighty, it is sticky. It's like walking around wrapped in Velcro, and then we wonder why we're covered with burrs. It is not rational in the usual sense. I remember years ago I went to see my family. And my person is my aunt. My mother is long dead, so my aunt fills that purpose, my aunt on the other side of my family, though. My aunt really tries. I mean, she really tries to show how much she loves me. Usually, we just go like this. [Zuisei gestures] It's very painful every time it happens. Once when I went I was with my partner at the time. She said, "You know that your aunt is going to give you something, and you're not going to like it. You're going to be really annoyed, and then you're going to be really hurtful to her. So, just take a moment to think, what can you do?" I really stopped and I thought about it. I thought, Okay, she's, she's going to give me clothes because usually she does, and they usually have nothing to do with anything that I would like to wear. So, I'm going to say thank you so much. This is so kind of you. This is so thoughtful. I'm not going to say anything else
I swear to you 15 minutes later, my aunt comes, and she gives me this bright, fluorescent pink hoodie. [Zuisei laughs] I lost it. I lost it. I didn't say it was ugly or anything like that. But everything I said I was going to do, I didn’t do. I was a monk at the time. So I said something like, I'm a monk. I don't need so many things. I just went off on this rant. My partner was looking at me like, Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? It was as if some other part of me took over, that old self took over. I could see it on my aunt's face. So I tried to sort of fix things a little bit. She left and I thought, What just happened? At that point I had been practicing for 15 years. It wasn't like I knew nothing. It was immediate, me stepping into me in that dynamic with her. It is so hard to let go of the self, even when we hate it, even when it hurts, even when we're ready and thinking, I don't want to be like this anymore. It is so challenging.
It didn't help that for years people would say to me, "Oh, you're so serious." Daido Roshi, my first teacher, would come up to me, pinch my cheek, and say, “Oh, Vanessa, you're so serious. I could tell that he was amused, and he was also sad. I could see that in his face. I could hear him thinking, If you don't let go of this then you're really going to suffer. He was right. He was right. My response [Zuisei laughs] when people said I was too serious was that I felt worse about myself. I thought, Now there is something wrong with me, something I need to fix. Of course that just proved what people were saying. I did take myself, my self*, too seriously. It doesn't really work to say, “Just lighten up, just relax, it's good enough, it's okay, just relax.” It doesn't help. Right? We know this. "You don't have to try so hard." What does help?
In general terms, I think of working on two levels: the level of conventional truth, this, the world of form, the everyday world, and then ultimate truth. It's working with those protective mechanisms and beginning to shift them. It is to realize there was a point at which these mechanisms were extremely helpful. My own teacher, Shugen Roshi, says to have great respect for those patterns in you because they protected you, which is exactly what they were meant to do. So, it's not to criticize them or to fight with them, but to be in relationship with them by saying, You were so helpful to me for so long, you took care of me and now we need to part ways. Now I need something else. Then go further and see that the whole scaffolding, the frame on which we hung those patterns is really an illusion. The ground that the scaffolding is on is like sand. The scaffolding itself is like fog. It's not solid in the way that we believe it to be. As long as I believe in my me-ness and my mother believes in her me-ness, calling Aunt Silvia means more than just calling her.
As Buddhism says, the moment I see that I am conditioned; that this situation, this occurrence, depends on a whole lot of ideas, circumstances, roles and interactions, causes and effects; the moment I catch a glimpse of that web, get close; and see that what is there is mostly space—that's when a crack appears. That's when I began to see—Oh, I have a choice. When my mother says X, I can actually respond in this, or this, or this, or this, or this way. It doesn't feel that way most of the time. Then all of a sudden, when what you're interacting with is more space, the burrs have nothing to stick to, they just fall to the ground.
As I was writing this earlier today, I remembered a story in the Vimalakirti sutra. For those of you who may not know it's a Mahayana sutra, in which Vimalakirti was a lay practitioner who was said to be as enlightened as the Buddha. He's really held up in the Mahayana tradition as the epitome of a lay practitioner, of a home-dweller. Vimalakirti is sick. He's in his house, and all of the buddhas and bodhisattvas and great disciples are packed into his house, kind of doing Dharma-encounter with him. There's a very pivotal conversation between Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and Vimalakirti. They have this whole exchange.
There's a goddess who apparently also lives in the house. Witnessing this exchange she is delighted. So she manifests a shower of flowers, and they all fall on the bodhisattvas and the great disciples. When they fall on the bodhisattvas, they just slide off and fall to the ground. When they fall on the disciples, they stick. So then you have a bunch of guys with flowers all over themselves. They are freaking out because one of the rules is to not wear any adornments. They're all trying to shake the flowers off. The goddess, I'm sure, is having a blast watching them do this. Then, in fact, she goes up to one of them, Shariputra—the fall guy, as my teacher used to call him. In the sutras, he's always the one who asks the questions that nobody wants to ask. Shariputra asks the “dumb” question, and then the Buddha or, in this case, the Goddess has a chance to answer. Everybody else, then, is safe.
The goddess says to Shariputra (I’m paraphrasing here), “Why are you shaking off the flowers?”
“Because they are improper for a great disciple.”
“You are still thinking in terms of proper and improper, the flower doesn't know impropriety. The flower doesn't know bodhisattvas and great disciples, deluded or enlightened. You're the one who's thinking about it this way, and that's why the flowers are sticking to you,” the goddess essentially says.
He kind of looks at her, then says, “How long have you been here? Why are you so realized?”
"I've been here as long as you have been in liberation."
"Oh, so you've been here for quite a while?"
She says, "Well, have you been in liberation for quite a while?"
And he doesn't answer.
"Why don't you answer?"
"Well, because liberation is basically immeasurable. I couldn't use any words."
Again, she pushes at him and says, "Liberation is not about being silent." "Well isn't liberation to be free of sensual desire, of adornment?" he asks.
"No liberation is liberation within it. Liberation is to be free within desire," she answers.
That's when he begins to actually really pay attention to what she says. Even though later she asks him, “Well, why don't you turn into a guy?” [Zuisei laughs] That's a whole other dialog. I'll talk about it some other time.
Then she says something very interesting to him. She says, "Those intimidated by fear of the world are in the power of forms, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. You're afraid of those flowers." Of course, he's not afraid of the flowers themselves. He's afraid of what the flower means, and how the others may see him with all those flowers stuck all over him. You understand? It's not so different from any of us. It's no different at all. It's not about the flower. It's not about the sweater. It's not about the phone call. You're afraid, and that's why forms and sounds and smells have power over you. Of course, the other side of that is not just don't care where anything goes, flowers, no flowers. Of course, it doesn't mean that.
The other side, which is all sides, is liberation. And really, we should not shortchange ourselves here. I know I've said this before, but I was just speaking about this again, with my group of noble friends, fellow teachers. I just saw them last Friday, and we were talking about liberation and Buddhahood, and how we understand it in each of our traditions. They're all Buddhist teachers, but we're all from different schools. It was a really fascinating conversation. I shared with them how, many years ago in a retreat, I brought up the question, do you think that you can become enlightened? People were a bit shocked that I even asked it. In Zen, certainly in our lineage in the Mountains and Rivers Order, it's kind of bad etiquette to talk about enlightenment too much. I mean, certainly it's not good form to say that you want it. I guess I say, Why? Why? What I remember saying during that retreat is that if you're standing in front of your altar every morning and saying, “May I realize myself,” then go stand on a roof and yell it over the rooftops. My own view is we should not be shy about it.
It was always the young guys. They would come to the monastery, having just been listening to Alan Watts, and they had no problem saying, “I'm here to get enlightened.” Those of us who were there for a longer time, we would kind of smile and roll our eyes a little bit. Now I'm thinking, more power to you. All of us should feel that, entitled. I mean that in a good way, this time. I can become liberated. I can attain Buddhahood. This is where one of my fellow teachers was like, Rah! Rah! That's what I say to all of my students. Then one of the other teachers was like, I want to go to your sangha. She was not shy about it. She's in the tradition of Master Sheng Yen. I believe she is doing a retreat at Zen Mountain Monastery this weekend—Rebecca Li. I agree. If we have the chutzpah to say all sorts of things, why not have the chutzpah to say I want to be free and then put our actions behind that. As I've said many times before, Why just be satisfied with being a little calm? You can just take Xanax for that; you don't need liberation; you don't need to work so hard. [Zuisei laughs] The moment that it becomes a goal, the moment that it becomes a thing, then it becomes a thing. But it's the same thing with the flowers. They're not a thing. That's what the goddess is trying to show Shariputra. It's not a thing, you are turning it into a thing, don't turn it into a thing. And then you'll be fine.
So, working in the realm of conventional truth, you work to change those habits. I've shared this story with some of you, but I love it so much. It's about a woman who attended an anti-racism workshop. It was online and there was a PowerPoint presentation that the woman running the workshop was doing. My friend who was attending the workshop noticed that the font was different sizes. There was one key paragraph that was a different size than the others. My friend starts thinking, God, she couldn't fix this? She's doing this really important work with a large group of people. It is really important to look professional. And this looks like she just didn't care. My friend was going on and on quite a bit in her mind about this. And the presenter went through her presentation. At the end she says, “By the way, I just want to share something with you. Could you raise your hand, those of you who noticed that the font is different in my PowerPoint?” Two-thirds of the room raised their hands. She then said, "I'm a recovering perfectionist. I made a mistake. I created my presentation and saw that. I decided to leave it. Not just for me, but to undo the system—patriarchal, largely white—that thrives on my perfectionism. So by leaving the mistake there I'm not only dismantling my own habitual pattern, but I’m also doing my tiny little part to dismantle this larger noxious system." Exactly. Liberation small, small l liberation, but still… This is working with conventional truth.
Then working in the realm of ultimate truth is to realize that, through practice, through study, things are good enough. Things are perfect as they are. They don't need me to make them perfect. That's my idea. That's me turning them into things. Really it is to work to see the one who is afraid of the world and needs to put everything in order. That's what I realized: at a certain point, my perfectionism, in my wanting to be the first and the best, was about control on the surface. It did, in fact, help me to move through very difficult teenage years. It did save me in many ways. Afterwards though, it was me living out of fear.
In the Mountains and Rivers sutra Master Dogen says that without such a resting place, the resting place of me, of first, of best, that without such a resting place, things would not abide. We think we have to abide. We have to be a certain way because it's safe, and it's known. That's understandable. I've said before that so much of practice is working with fear. My teacher used to say, trust yourself, really give yourself permission to be yourself.
I say stand on your own two feet. Realize you're standing on water, or you're standing on shifting ground, but stand on your own two feet, not somebody else's. The self is not only weighty and sticky, it is also endlessly hungry. It will never be satisfied in the way that we normally try to satisfy it through validation, through sensual pleasure. It's a nice hit, it lasts a moment, and then we need the next one. Want is so interesting, because it doesn't fulfill the self, it fulfills itself. Want is an engine that keeps itself going. That is why it plays such a central role in the creation of suffering in Buddhism. That doesn't mean don't want anything because that's not reasonable, but how, and what, and how much? I think in an oblique way, this is what Ellen Bass’ poem is pointing to. You can think of it as a poem about grief or about the loss of a loved one. I was thinking about it, in the context of practice, about the loss of that self that no longer serves us, that solidity that we realized is crumbling, like burned paper in our fingers. I think so much of the path is first understanding that really the whole thing is not what we thought it was. I think sometimes we come into practice thinking it is going to fix a particular problem. Then, we begin to realize the more we get into practice, into training, that there's no problem. It was the way that we were interacting with ourselves and the world. I think of it more in terms of stepping into the person, the being, the one that I really am which cannot be without the rest of you, and the rest of everything.
That is so incredibly liberating because that means, you don’t have to carry the whole thing, even though last week, we said that it is all your responsibility. But it's all of our responsibilities. Sometimes people ask me, How do I do X, Y, or Z? I don't know. Sometimes I'll give a suggestion. Really, the question is, What do I need to shift? This is true especially in that very uncomfortable and tricky transition time, when you are no longer satisfied with the person that you are because that person is no longer serving you, but you don't know, yet, how to do it differently. That's a very uncomfortable time. A lot of it is just bearing that discomfort and trusting that you will know. Each of us needs something different. I remember when that book came out, Quiet by Susan Cain. It was all about introverts, and so all of these introverts were coming out of the woodwork like, Finally, we're being validated. We're actually okay. We don't have to be extroverts. It's okay to be who I am. I was thinking, We need a whole book, we need experiments, we need data to confirm, Oh, I'm okay because I like quiet on a Friday night?
I get it. We're social beings, yes, but we can just go in. We can just turn in and be like, what do I want? This is what satisfies me. Okay. For somebody else it's staying up all night, right at the center of the crowd. Great. It's to know yourself—not the self you think you are, not the self that you were 10 years ago, or five years ago, or even last month. Now. The best authority on you is you. If you work with a teacher, if you work with a therapist, if they're halfway decent, hopefully they won't tell you what to do. They might ask you a question. They might hold up what they see. If they do tell you what to do then run the other way, as fast as you can. Don't look back. Trust yourself because the more you can see, then the more you can see. That's always true.
There's not that many koans that are mystical in Zen. This is a really nice koan, it is very long, so I'm not going to say the whole thing. I'm going to shorten it a little bit.
There's a monk who asks Jiashan, “What is the dharma body?” What is the body of reality essentially?”
And Jiashan says, “The dharma body has no form.”
“Well, what is the Dharma eye?”
“The Dharma eye has no scratch.”
Another teacher, Daowu, hears this and he laughs. Jiashan is the abbot of a big monastery. So when everybody leaves, Jianshan gets down from the teaching seat, and he goes to Daowu and says, “I heard you laughing. Was my answer not right?”
Daowu essentially says, “Eeehhhhhh, almost, but not quite.” “Well then, what do I do?”
“Well, why don't you go see another—Chuanzi? He's a ferryman. Go talk to him, but don't go dressed like that. Take off your robes.”
To Jiashan’s credit he actually does disband his community. He is probably thinking, I don't have it. Why am I even teaching? He disbands his community. He takes off his robes, and he goes off to walk down the river. Chuanzi sees him coming.
He asks, “Which monastery are you the abbot of?”
Jiashan is so cute. He says, “I'm not the abbot of a monastery. Otherwise, I wouldn't look like this.”
“What do you mean by like this?
“Well, it's not like anything.”
“Eehh, eehh, no, not quite,” Chuanzi says.
And so Jiashan begins to ask something, and Chuanzi takes his oar and knocks him off the boat. He falls into the water. As he's climbing back up, Chuanzi says, “Well say something, say something.” Jiashan opens his mouth, and Chuanzi hits him again. At this point, Jiashan becomes enlightened, and he makes three bows. I assume he's back in the boat when he makes the three bows. Jiashan starts to say something when Chuanzi interrupts him and begins to essentially give him a teaching. Jiashan covers his ears and just walks away.
Exactly. In Zen, we say don't put ahead another head on top of your own. Do you really need my approval?
So, basically, Chuanzi gives him his blessing.
He says, “Well just just stay away for a while and let your insight mature, and then you can teach,” which is usually what the teachers will say. Jiashan thanks Chuanzi and starts to walk away.
Just as he's leaving Chuanzi calls out, “Hey, Reverend.”
Jiashan turns around.
Chuanzi holds up his oar and says, “There is more.”
Then Chuanzi jumps off the boat and disappears, the koan says, into the mist and waves.
It's at that moment, just when you're thinking, How can I do this? How can anyone do this? Will we ever stop fighting ourselves or each other? It's in that moment when you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes… No embellishment, no contrivance, no I'm going to make you feel better, no you're going to be okay. It's plainer than that—a plain face. And you say:
Yes, I will take you.
You see your life.
I will love you again.
And if we can do that then everything else just falls into place.
Explore further
01 : The Thing Is by Ellen Bass
02 : Vimalakirti Sutra translated by Robert A. F. Thurman
03 : True Dharma Eye, Dogen’s 300 Koans, Case 90: Jiashan Sees the Ferryman with Commentary and Verse by John Daido Loori
04 : After No Comes Yes with Zuisei Goddard