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This extraordinary exchange between Genpo Roshi and Jane Koerner
occurred during the Mahayana Sesshin, Salt Lake City, June, 2023

                  See the Video

When Genpo Roshi asked me what her name was, she spoke right up. “Agnes.”

“How old is she?”

“Nine.”

I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. And, oh boy, did she have a lot to say! She was but one of the voices who kept me company throughout childhood and into middle age in response to some very painful experiences. I kept these aspects of myself hidden even though my father had the same tendency. He would sit in his easy chair and chatter away with his imaginary companions, who seemed to comfort him a great deal.

When I was 15, my then-19 year old sister, my only sibling, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized for the rest of her life. That was when I buried my own tendencies even deeper. No psychiatrist was going to lock me up and throw away the key. I went to college, earned a history degree, got married.

In my late thirties the voices I would later come to understand as disowned voices, such as fear and rage, took over and blew up my entire life—my marriage, my prospects for a career, for happiness. Two hospitalizations, medication, years of therapy followed. I didn’t know what was harder to swallow. The diagnosis—schizotypal personality disorder. Or the prognosis—“if you really commit to your therapy, maybe you can hold a part-time job someday.”

With therapy, despite some occasional relapses, I did get a job and a graduate degree and some much-needed relationship skills. But along the way another box was created—an identity constructed around mental illness, or Crazy Jane.   When I first encountered the Big Mind Process in the early 2000s, it came naturally to me even though it was different from what I had experienced before. This time the voices I had been hearing for much of my life were asked to speak.  And both Genpo Roshi and the sangha were interested in what each one of them had to say.

I kept practicing with other sanghas for a while, attended various retreats, then quit altogether for a few years. The death of my entire family and the pandemic prompted a return to practice this past year via Kanzeon and the Big Mind process, and led to this exchange with Genpo Roshi during the retreat in June of this year.

Finally, the biggest secret of all revealed itself, and it was fine.

You know what’s crazy? Burying all these beautiful aspects of yourself in the cemetery of your unconscious mind and sleep-walking through your life like a zombie.

— Jane Koerner

I feel you need to have a daily sitting practice.  If you don't already have one, then you really need to take one on.  And if you're going to go anywhere with the practice, it probably needs to be at least one hour a day, but ideally a minimum one hour, up to a couple, two, three hours.  What you have time for.

Now, I think a lot of us make the excuse we don't have time.  I question that attitude.  We always have time, we just have to take it from something else.  It’s where we put our priorities.  And our priorities, I think, should be at the core of our life.  The core of our life is what we call Zen — that is Zen — the core of our life, the heart of our life.

Maezumi Roshi used to say very often, it's like having an apple.  If it has a rotten spot or two, even three or four, you cut them out.  But if the core is rotten, you have to throw the whole apple out.  And it's the same with our life.

It's crude to put it this way, but it's that important, to realize the core of our life is our spiritual practice.  And everything emanates from the core.

The core of our life is our reality.  That is the oneness we're all really coming from.  Like aspen trees, above the ground they appear to be different, independent trees.  But of course, at the root, it's all one tree, one aspen tree. It's one tree.

We're one Mind.  And to facilitate that and understand that you need to sit as the one Mind.  And the more you sit as the one Mind, the more empowered you are to actually share it with others.  Without sharing it with others, you actually do not learn the skills that you need both for your own practice, but also as a teacher or a coach or a counselor or just as someone who wants to help others.

So I feel it's very important to have a sitting practice.

-- from a talk for the Big Mind Facilitation Training, April 2023

When we take full responsibility for action and reaction, for cause and effect, which is karma, when we take full responsibility for it and we don’t ever project it out there on anything or anybody else— not on God, not on Buddha, not on our husband or our wife, not on our friends, not on our circumstances — we take one hundred percent responsibility for everything, there’s no fear.

Because fear comes from the fact that anything could happen.  We’re in fear because we feel that we are out of control.  “I ran into a car.  That jerk pulled out in front of me, and I ran into his car, and it’s his fault!”  Right?  And then I’m always worried: ‘That car’s going to hit me!.’  ‘I’m going to get run over!’  You see what I’m talking about?

But when I take full responsibility, I don’t put it out there.  So I don’t have any fear, because it’s my life.  You could say I’m in control, or I’m the master, or I’m the boss of my life, in full control.  It’s not about controlling somebody else; it’s about controlling my own self, my own person — and there’s no fear.

So there’s only fear when I’m being irresponsible.  I don’t feel irresponsible just because I blame somebody for running into me, but it’s still not taking full responsibility, hundred percent responsibility for cause and effect, for action and reaction.  It’s so simple.

One of the things that I think is so obvious, but maybe we miss it, and certainly we miss it growing up, is that basically everything we do, every decision we make to protect ourself from pain is a way that we distance ourself from the pain. We encapsulate, or imprison, ourselves in our sense of our self, all to avoid — not accepting, but being one with our pain.

That’s the cause of suffering.  Suffering is not caused because there’s pain, it’s caused because we try to escape the pain, or get away from the pain.  That’s where the suffering comes into effect.

So what Buddhism teaches is the cause of suffering is our self.  We form this self, this primary self, whatever you want to call it, this façade, in order to protect our self, this ego self.  What Zen says is you don’t have to do all those steps, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path and so on; you can do it all at once: be one with your pain.

So all the first koans are about being one with.  “How do you stop the sound of the distant temple bell?”  How do you stop the suffering of your pain?  Well, you be it, just like with the distant temple bell you go ‘bong bong bong,’ you be the sound, you be the pain.  And when you’re the pain there’s no suffering, because there’s no self.

The self is created exactly by trying to escape from the pain.  This goes for everything — attachments, addictions — all of it is just the desire to escape what is, which is pain.  It’s painful.

 And the joy comes when we allow ourself to just be one with the pain.  There’s joy in the pain, because there’s no self.  When there’s a self, it’s not joy.  When there’s no self, then there’s joy.  It’s really quite simple, but somehow it takes us forever to figure it out.  I mean there’s the whole Buddhist teaching right there.

If we practice long enough, we will go through all sorts of things.  And there’s no one answer, there’s no right answer.  Whatever we find that works to deepen and advance our practice is our upaya, is our skillful means.  And whatever works today may not work tomorrow or worked yesterday, but it worked today.  Nothing works all the time.  It’s like having one wrench one size, but not all bolts are the same size.  So that wrench will only work some times when the bolt is the right size.  It won’t work all the time.  It’s the same.  Nothing works forever, nothing works all the time.  So we’re in a constant state of learning and experimenting.

That makes up what we call L-I-F-E.  That makes up our life itself.  The realization is: it’s all my life.  There’s nothing here that’s happening that’s outside my life.  How could it be?  And my life is not outside what’s happening here, and what’s happening here is not outside my life.  My life IS what’s happening, and what’s happening IS my life.  So we just constantly find our way, or discover or refine our way.  Refine over and over again.  It’s all a process of refining our life, or you could say refinding our life.