given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
May 13, 2009
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Good evening I'd like to do two different things in my talk this evening. First give an update on my adventures and secondly practice mindfulness together for a while. I think in the end we won't have discussion time this evening, we'll keep it all pretty quiet except for my speaking.
A few months ago I gave a very emotional talk based around Bruce Cochburn's song Pacing the Cage. As I explore my emotional life lately different songs keep popping up as an expression of where things are at. So today I'd like to share with you a Mark Knopfler song. Sung here with Emmy Lou Harris. The Bruce Cochburn song had very interesting and evocative lyrics, digging into the shadow side of life that I would helpful. This one it's not so much the lyrics as the feeling of the song and how the lyrics work together with the music to create a feeling. Please listen.
[play This Is Us by Mark Knopfler. Performed by Mark Knopfler and Emmy Lou Harris]
So it's a simple love song in a way, nothing too earth shattering, but for me it's a powerful expression of contentment and deep acceptance of things as they are. That yes we don't do things perfectly - we have too much to drink sometimes, we can't remember the name of the other parent at our kids' game, we aren't perfect but we are all right, we are content, we are connected. Whether or not we're in a long term marriage like the one in the song we have each other.
As you know I've been studying darkness and stress this last year or so and especially in the last three months I found myself really feeling trapped and hemmed in by life, especially my work life. But my job was I think just the trigger, just the most obvious thing. More central and important was a powerful inner tendency to respond to conditions that I perceive as difficult with a tight and powerful effort. With some tension and intensity. And without really taking my own self into account.
So it seems I've had a challenging run these for about the last 7 years. In the West we are strongly base-10 and we think about things in terms of decades. But in Asia I'm told they think about time more increments of 7 years. It might be that every 7 years or so is a new chapter in our lives. And it could be I'm starting a new chapter now at age 43 which oddly enough will end with I'm 50 so then I can celebrate both 7 and 10 years.
A little over 7 years ago our son was born. Having a child is a powerful watershed and for the first year or two an enormous , wondrous, and stressful undertaking. Just as we were starting to come out of this when Walker was about two and a half my wife got sick. We didn't realize it then but we were on a trip to Europe so it's easy to place the start of this in time. Janet was very tired but constricted, pretty grumpy, on this trip much of the time. I remember sitting this little apartment at the top floor of a building in the medieval center of the Croatian town of Trogir in some distress and despair about our relationship. The thought of breaking up emerged very powerfully in the mind. Oh and at the same time, on that trip, Walker suddenly stopped taking naps which was this 90 minute break from his intensity at the middle of the day we counted on. And he was in the mode of wanting to do imaginative play with his toys al the time - with me if at all possible. So Walker was refusing to leave the hotel room and wants me to play cars with him, we were in this amazing place I wanted to explore, and Janet was tired and grumpy on the bed and it all made no sense. I was pretty upset but luckily I had the sense not to act on my grumpy thoughts and feelings particularly. I don't know if that's wisdom born of experience and spiritual practice or just my male emotional slowness to realize how I was feeling but I do remember walking along the shore of the Adriatic along the sea wall in Trogir just thinking "this isn't working, this isn't working" A tough moment.
We got through the trip somehow not yet realizing that Janet had come down (if "come down" is the right term) with something like chronic fatigue which would continue to this day. The pattern of it wasn't clear yet, these things rarely are at the time. We want to understand what's going on all the time, but mostly we don't.
We got back home and I set about little by little, leaning into a challenging period and working. And working. And working harder. Before this time Janet and I had been working together each of us about 30 hours a week which is pretty good but now Janet wanted to try her hand more seriously at being a writer so I agreed to work full time for a year or so with the understanding that she'd put extra energy into household jobs and caring for Walker. You can see the other foot about to fall maybe.
She took a good stab at it and was writing away but little by little she was getting tired and had fewer and fewer hours in the day. The writing wasn't getting done. The housework wasn't getting done. I was working more than I had in a long time. I got a computer job that quickly became more than full time. Walker was growing fast and needing all the things that 3 and 4 and 5 year olds need. And I was working, working. Taking care of everything.
I think now in this chapter I was essentially a high functioning stress-o-holic. I was getting it all done pretty much. I was staying upright. I wasn't exercising quite enough, but I was exercising some. I wasn't sleeping quite enough, but I was sleeping at night. I was getting things done and getting them done to a pretty high degree of quality. Many good things were happening. The sangha was growing. I was pretty much keeping up my practice. Walker was growing and getting what he needs. We were muddling along. It was all good except that it wasn't.
I was little by little losing the thread of what I need. I was putting out so much more than I was taking in. I was getting support in various ways but in some fundamental way I was not being nourished because I was not nourishing myself. No one else can nourish you if you aren't nourishing yourself. For example: I came to practice and spirituality largely through time in nature, I used to be a real wilderness nut and organized my college degree and my first stab at career in an attempt to be in wilderness all the time, but in the last 7 years I can count on one hand how many times I've been out on a hike or a paddle. Well I've recently gone hiking a few times so I'm up to two hands now.
And then to top it off the Earth Room donor showed up almost exactly two years ago now and asked to speak to me after a dharma class. And proceeded to knock my socks off with the promise of $100,000 and a new dharma center. I won't go into that story right now but if you go online and read through the responding gate newsletters there is much about the history of that. That wasn't just me of course, it was the whole sangha, but I was in the middle of the storm. It was wonderful and stressful and everything in between and I'm so happy that we're stable now and have this place. It does look like we are at least breaking even at the moment by the way. Thanks to our generous members and friends and to BIMS and many other small and large sources. But mostly small. I've said a few times and I'll say it again that a big lesson there is that many small donations is so much better than one big one.
So we went through it with the building and the Earth Room project, that has it's own kind of cycle. And then the final kicker that helped me turn the corner into a new chapter was that things got worse at work. I'm grateful now about this actually. We have the turn of phrase a "blessing in disguise" which I guess is accurate here. But there's something a bit narrow about that attitude too. A kind of dualistic assumption that the world is full of two categories of experience. Blessings and curses. Good luck and bad luck. There are so many ways that our language can wall ourselves off from the richness and continuity of actual experience. We talk so much about dualistic thinking in Zen sometimes that it becomes trite almost but is it still a central and important point. The way we think blinds us from our experience and we do think this way. If it's not a blessing maybe it's a blessing in disguise.
Anyway my job became more and more chaotic and corporate and confused with a project that it's clear is not really do-able and will end badly due to some earlier technical and management choices. And I was put in the hot seat as the savior of the situation. Many phone conferences and weekend crisis calls and so on. It got so unpleasant that in the middle of the current economic situation I was able to consider leaving what is objectively one of the better jobs anyone in Bellingham could imagine. Making a high salary with a lot of stability for a major American corporation from home in my pajamas. I mentioned to various people about my job and how I was struggling with it and mostly the response came back, born of their own economic fears I guess, that I must feel lucky to have such a job, what a good job that is. Sounds good but I was miserable and stressed out. It had gotten under my skin in a big way.
And gradually it was dawning on me that all of the signs of stress were in evidence: weight gain, anxiety, fatigue, I was starting to drink some beer (all of a few a week but still), grumpiness with Walker. The last was an important realization. If I can get present and happy with my 7 year old son, what am I doing?
I finally figured out to reach out a little. I got more helpful advice and support when it finally occurred to me to ask for it. I often talk about our strong conditioning to try to go it alone always, how silly that is, but in an important way I was not listening to my good advice these last seven years. I was surrounded by others but very much going it alone. The world was on my shoulder and I was able to hold it there pretty well thanks very much. So finally when I was really having a hard time I reached out for help. I called colleagues and old friends. People who I knew would actually listen to my experience. I got some much needed support there. And I got an enormous amount of support from my wife Janet as well who knows me about as well as anyone after living together for 20 years.
And then a pretty good contract for freelance work which is much simpler and less stressful landed in my lap. Not a huge contract, a few months of work, and not a huge rate about what I was making as an employee, but a good contract and with good people. So that helped psych me up. It seems almost silly in retrospect to be talking about all of this now. I was stressed out an miserable in a job so I left the job, sure - makes sense, what's the big deal? But the me of then was not finding it so simple.
I found that I was deeply held by a strong fear around leaving my job. It wasn't the fear of running out of money. I seem to have some faith there that it will all work out. It was a fear of disappointing others. And I mean others - like all others. Fear of disappointing my boss at Ernst & Young, my co-workers, my boss at the local consulting company that got me there, even fear of disappointing my mom popped up. Very visually too - I'm kind of looking within trying to figure out what I'm afraid of here and an image of my mom pops up. Hi, mom! What are you doing here?
And then Buddha sent me a little encouragement. I've enjoyed telling this story. I finally psyched myself up to leave my great and horrible job (it was both) and I'm literally reaching for the office phone to call and give notice and the home phone rings at that very moment. Usually when I'm working Janet answers that - it'll be her mom or other parents arranging playdates or something - but she was out so I reach away from the office phone and over to that one and answer it. It wasn't about play dates. It was an old client of mine, from about 7 years ago when I was freelancing before. I'd built some software for him then, my largest project at the time, and he was calling to see if I was available for a totally new version. And in the end after more discussions it's turned out to be a major contract as they go - probably 4 to 6 months of work and I asked for the highest consulting rate I've ever gotten and he's agreed. I was very validating too because I'd built them software in 2001 which is still working pretty well while more recent revisions and components they'd had built by other people hadn't worked so well. He said to me later, "it may be simple minded of me but I just looked at all of these different custom software projects we've done and I thought you know the only one that really worked out well was the one by Tim Burnett. Let's see if we can get him back." And yes it was from about 7 years ago, a more flexible and happy-making work from the previous chapter was calling me back. And calling me back just as I was reaching for the phone to end the current chapter. Isn't that interesting?
One of the things that held me in a situation that wasn't right for me was our great desire for things to make sense. I think this was another fear beside disappointing others - the fear of being someone who doesn't make sense. Why would it make sense to my co-workers who were staying on the job that someone apparently like them would want to leave? If they were basically doing okay why was I not doing okay? We want things to make sense and we also expect that giving the same apparent external conditions the other people should be experiencing the same inner experience that we are. So I think sense making got in my way. And that's something to notice too. Can you just report to the people in your life how you're doing without worrying about whether it makes sense to them? Without apology or prevarication or righteousness or any of these other things we do to cover for our fear of being the one who doesn't make sense. And the one who doesn't make sense is also the one who doesn't fit in. Conversely in working with this fear there are people who tried hard not to fit in which is the same thing in a way.
This is more detail than you need but I thought you'd enjoy the story. The important point here is my journey, our journey, to actually feel what we're really feeling and learn how to take care of ourselves. And how do we take care of ourselves? We don't wall ourselves off or try to make ourselves into something we're not. Taking care of ourselves sometimes sounds like pulling ourselves out of the world, off to one side somewhere, where we can sort of repair the damage and oil ourselves up again before we re-enter the madness. I am seeing more and more that taking care of ourselves is more like living in a more harmonious relationship with the rest of the world. That we take care of ourselves in cooperation with the world. If we think we are separate, if we believe too strongly that there is a self to take care of then we don't take care of ourselves very well. By turning towards my own experience and feeling how I was relating to the work world I was able to initiate a change which the universe instantly responded to. Strange but true it seems.
When we vow to save all beings in our bodhisattva vows we can think that all beings are out there somehow. That we are the one who's over here saving those beings out there. And it's hard work. Hard, hard work saving beings in that way. I've tried it these last 7 years. Now I've studied the Diamond Sutra a few times which makes the point very emphatically and repeatedly that this is not the case.
The Buddha said, "And beings, Subhuti, 'beings' are said by the Tathagata to be no beings. Thus are they called 'beings.' And thus does the Tathagata say 'all beings no self, all beings have no individuality, all beings have no soul."
But the thing about really understanding dharma, which is to say really understanding this human life, is it's a lived experience. You read all the sutras and wise phrases you want and go to all kinds of teachings but the truth is in the living of these teachings and it seems that I had to suffer a little bit for the seven years to understand this point a little bit more. And once you understand a little more the emptiness of self and other and the full including of this non-self self into the assembly of all beings you can lighten up a little.
I still have all of my habits of mind, I am still have my proud inheritance from my father and my father's father to work too hard and take things just a little bit too seriously, but at the same time I've lightened up. I am feeling my life more fully and feeling more joy and contentment and that is really wonderful. And that song by Mark Knopfler really expresses something of that feeling. But like any practice it's a feeling I have to remember about and touch. I have to open to it. Otherwise my habits pull back into my shell. Into the tight and exhausting life of being the one who's saving all beings.
And so I've become interested in questions of energy, ambition, and attachment. And also I've been looking at how our powerful desire for things to make sense clouds our vision of what's actually happening. I esecially recommend the study of energy. Notice what the effects are on your energy of actions of body, speech and mind. Not just how you think it goes but notice how it actually goes. Like I notice how my energy is so deflated and reduced if I complain to myself about things. Another thing I notice consistently is coming to practice, even in the evening or early morning when I might be tired or not feel a great desire to come, always seems to leave me feeling energized and more alive.
And in addition to all of this heady and interesting inner psychological stuff I've become interested anew in the incredible power of simple mindfulness of the present moment. Of the healing power of just returning to the breath in the body. Because pretty much throughout this 7 year chapter I've kept on with zazen somehow. I've sat most days early in the morning at home. I've gone to a sesshin or two every year and several shorter retreats. That's been the background. I think my practice was sometimes as constricted by the tightness of my understanding just like everything else and not as full and liberating as it could have been. But that is okay, our inner experience is conditioned and the unconditioned leaks in somehow if we make any space for it at all.
But you know what's helped me re-discover the simple power of mindfulness is starting to work on teaching it outside the familiar context of Zen. I've been reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's work on mindfulness with medical patients with great interest as some opportunities to teach meditation in that style - what he's termed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or MBSR - meditation for everyone as healing and opening to the wholeness of our living. I've know about this for years in a way but in a way I wasn't paying much attention to it, or maybe on some level I was judgmental of that as a kind of watered-down Buddhism. And much as I continue to love exploring the incredible power of the ritual and cultural container of Buddhism I am thrilled, I mean literally thrilled, lately by the potential to bring mindfulness and meditation out into our regular culture and into other faith cultures.
Somehow in sharing meditation with others outside this context I've starting to see it and feel it with fresh eyes. When I went down to Samish Island for their 50th anniversary celebration and led them in a little stretching, sitting meditation, and walking meditation, even just for a fairly brief time, it was a deep and powerful experience for me and for many of them too. To just return to what's really happening. To re-align our attention with our experience is just amazing. My judgmental scientific mind is feeling embarrassed by my enthusiasm a little actually, it sounds naïve but it's really true. And it seems like it really helps to have someone talk us through this. So much as I love the quiet and the dignity of zazen with our bowing and ritual I am learning anew about the powerful of mindfulness by guiding Christians and MS patients through some simple meditation practice.
So for the rest of our time this evening I thought we'd do a little of that too if that's okay. Seeing as how it's part of the turning of my chapter it's a kind of experiential extension of my talk. We'll end our formal Zen talk and do our bows and then magically convert our Soto Zen establishment into an MBSR clinic for a few minutes. And if anyone needs to use the bathroom during the switch over please just do so. And let's keep the silence. One thing the MBSR guys have thankfully understood is that silence is a key ingredient in mindfulness so while we set aside bowing and allow for more instruction and so on we do keep silence. And some of us may need to set aside our expectations of what's supposed to go on in a zendo. Stretching, guided meditation and so on.
And if you'd rather keep to just formal Zen that's fine too, you can certainly say goodnight after we bow. No problems at all there. So let me return to that feeling of contentment and joy and close our talk with a song. I guess I'm already not so formally ZEN anyway - maybe I should close with a great Zen shout or a mysterious poem instead of a pop song!
This is Us by Mark Knopfler
This is us down at the Mardi gras
This is us in your Daddy's car
You and the missing link
Yeah, I'd had a little too much to drink, now
Too long in the sun
Having too much fun
You and me and our memories
This is us
This is us, this is us, this is us, this is us.
Rocking at the barbecue
Yeah, when said I do
Hand giving on the ballroom floor
You in that wedding coat you wore
And you in that amazing dress
I was stoned on love I guess
You and me were meant to be
This is us
This is us, this is us, this is us, this is us.
This is us our Honeymoon
In our hotel room
Sitting by the wishing well
Check out of the love motel
Making plans for the sunshine state
Waiting at the terminal gate
You and me making history
This is us
This is us, this is us, this is us, this is us.
This is us, this is us, this is us, this is us.
And our baby boy
With our pride and joy
You at the Sunday Game
Standing next to What's hisname?
On our anniversary
With the family
You and me and our memories
This is us
This is us, this is us, this is us, this is us.
This is us, this is us, this is us, this is us.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.