Mentally. Physically. It’s fucking challenging. It’s designed to be.

Maybe Sesshin isn’t meant to break you so much as it creates conditions in which some of the things you use to hold yourself together become harder to maintain.

So there’s an opportunity for Sesshin to break you open spiritually, if you’re receptive to it.

Sesshin isn’t the world you leave behind before arriving. It isn’t the “real world,” so to speak. It’s a curated container. For several days, some of the things that normally occupy our attention are stripped away. The emails. The news. The errands. The endless responsibilities and distractions.

That doesn’t mean you leave your real-world shit at the door.

Oh no.

You bring all of that with you and then some.

You bring your history, fears, shame and your habits. You bring your relationships. Your body and Your expectations. You bring whatever you were worried about Sunday morning and whatever somebody said to you ten years ago that, apparently, your clinging ass is still holding on to.

You bring the whole damn suitcase…or in my case an old duffel bag.

Sesshin just gives you enough breathing room to put your choice of travel apparatus down for a moment and look at what you’ve been carrying.

And listen.

Because Sesshin has a way of bringing up old ghosts.

Maybe it doesn’t even bring them up.

So much as Sesshin simply makes the room quiet enough for you to hear them walking around…fucking with shit.

Some of those ghosts remind you how much you still have to learn. Others remind you how much you’ve already learned.

Sometimes an old voice appears, and you recognize it immediately.

Oh. Your ass again…This dude.

The voice that criticizes.

The voice that doubts.

The voice that tells you that you don’t belong here.

The voice that learned long ago that vigilance could keep you safe.

But something may have changed since the last time that voice appeared.

You’re listening differently.

The old ways you once spoke to yourself may no longer serve you. The pattern may still arise, but you don’t necessarily have to follow it.

That’s something practice has been teaching me.

Not necessarily how to silence the ghosts.

How to be in relationship with them.

In Relationship With

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot since Sesshin.

In relationship with.

I think I prefer it to the word belonging.

Belonging hitches somewhere inside me.

As a Black man in the United States, the idea of belonging carries baggage. Black bodies have had a complicated relationship with the idea of belonging in America because historically we have been told where we belong, where we don’t belong, where we can live, where we can sit, where we can learn, where we can worship, where we can travel, and sometimes whether we belong here at all.

So when spiritual communities talk about creating spaces of “belonging,” part of me understands exactly what is meant.

Another part of me pauses.

Relationship feels different.

Relationship doesn’t require me to pretend there is no tension.

I can be in relationship with something that frustrates me.

I can be in relationship with someone I disagree with.

I can be in relationship with a sangha that sometimes makes me feel deeply supported and other times reminds me that I am a Black man practicing inside a predominantly white American Buddhist culture.

I can even be in relationship with my discomfort.

Maybe that’s what Sesshin keeps asking of us.

To stay in relationship.

With the sangha.

With the teachers and forms.

With our bodies.

With our anger.

With our joy.

And, unfortunately, with the person who somehow manages to irritate the shit out of us before breakfast.

And with ourselves.

Being around many people isn’t always some amazing opportunity to become expansively receptive to humanity.

Sometimes people get on your damn nerves.

That is also sangha.

And apparently that is also Dharma.

Ten Thousand Lives

Dōgen wrote about the role of the tenzo and the opportunity we have when our work supports the practice of others:

“You should engage in and carry out this work with the vow to include one thousand or ten thousand lives in one day or one time.”

There is something here about the oneness of this moment, this day and all eternity. What we are doing right now isn’t simply a step toward some future stage where eventually we become better Buddhists.

This moment is the practice.

Dōgen is speaking about something particular here, but the phrase itself opened another door for me.

I started wondering about those ten thousand lives appearing within us.

Because how many versions of ourselves arise over the course of one day?

The patient one.

The irritated one.

Compassionate in one moment.

Frightened in the next.

Joyful.

Exhausted.

The one who suddenly feels connected to everyone in the room.

And the one whose kidney transplant medication and the heat aren’t mixing well with the body; his head is pounding, and he’d rather be in bed.

Ten thousand lives.

Anger. Frustration. Happiness. Joy. Fear. Tenderness.

They arise through our encounters with one another and with the world.

Sensei Dai En Friedman once said:

“A lifetime accumulation of experience of a certain way of life contributes consciously and unconsciously to how we deal with the world. Repetitive patterns are things we’re familiar with and until they become conscious there is no way of changing how we feel or think about our lives. When we begin to recognize the sources of our suffering, we have some options to change the way we live in this body.”

That has stayed with me.

Because some of the voices we hear are old.

Really old.

Sometimes they are personal habit energy. Sometimes they may be patterns learned from family, community, culture, and generations of people who had to figure out how to survive circumstances we inherited but didn’t create.

And sometimes those patterns are useful.

Fear can be information.

Anger can tell us something worth hearing.

Vigilance can keep us safe.

And those very same patterns can also keep us from experiencing what is actually unfolding right now.

So I don’t think the question is always:

How do I let this go?

Sometimes the more useful question is:

What is this trying to tell me?

And then:

Is what it’s telling me true about this moment?

That requires wisdom.

Because telling someone that something is “just a story” can become another way of refusing to listen.

Some stories contain history.

Some stories contain wounds.

Some stories contain wisdom.

The practice, at least as I understand it right now, isn’t necessarily learning how to have no stories.

It is learning how tightly we need to hold them.

What Is Helpful?

I ask myself this question constantly:

What is helpful?

What actually reduces suffering?

What moves us toward liberation?

And because I am a Black American, I naturally ask another question:

What is helpful for my community?

I give a shit about the liberation of all beings.

That vow matters deeply to me.

And I also live in the relative world.

In this relative world, race matters. History matters. Class matters. Institutions matter. Bodies matter.

The absolute does not erase the relative.

I happen to inhabit a Black body in America, inside a society that has historically marginalized bodies that look like mine and continues, in different ways, to do so.

So naturally I wonder how Zen practice can help Black people navigate this world.

Not some imaginary world.

This one.

And that makes me wonder about Zen itself.

I’m American.

A Black American.

Zen did not originate here.

And I don’t believe everything about the way Zen developed in Japan necessarily translates directly into American culture.

That isn’t an insult to the tradition.

Traditions have always changed as they moved.

What we call Zen developed from Chinese Chan, which itself emerged as Buddhist teachings traveling from India and Central Asia encountered Chinese culture.

Dōgen received something and carried it home.

Something was preserved.

Something was transformed.

That is what living traditions do.

They live.

The Living Dharma

Forms matter.

Rituals matter.

Teachers matter.

Lineage matters.

I have deep respect for all of them.

But they matter because they point toward something.

The Dharma.

Dharmata.

Buddha Nature.

The living reality underneath all of our attempts to name it.

The vast tapestry of causes and conditions connecting all things.

The problem is that human beings have a strange habit of becoming fascinated with the finger pointing toward the moon.

Eventually we start polishing the finger.

Decorating the finger.

Arguing about the proper historical method for holding the finger.

Then somebody holds their finger differently, and all hell breaks loose.

Meanwhile—the moon is still right there.

Forms should point us back toward the source.

And if the Dharma is truly living, then its expression must be capable of meeting living people.

People with particular bodies.

Particular histories, cultures, wounds and…

Particular ways of hearing and understanding.

That doesn’t mean abandoning the lineage whenever something becomes uncomfortable.

And it doesn’t mean turning Zen into whatever we personally want it to be.

Roots matter.

But so does growth.

A tree that has roots but cannot grow is dead.

A tree that grows without roots eventually falls.

Maybe our responsibility is to hold both.

Deep respect for the lineage and creative application of the Dharma.

To receive what our ancestors have handed us with gratitude and then ask what it means to practice it here.

In this culture.

In this body.

In this historical moment.

With these people.

Maybe changing the expression of the Dharma isn’t necessarily disrespecting the lineage.

Maybe sometimes changing the expression is exactly how we keep the lineage alive.

Sesshin is always a reminder that Dharma isn’t something happening somewhere else.

It isn’t waiting at the end of the retreat.

Or waiting for me after I become less angry, less frustrated, less Black, less complicated, or more enlightened.

It is right here.

In the irritation and the silence.

In the bow, and in my resistance to the bow.

In the person sitting beside me.

Among the ghosts that still walk around.

Through the laughter and the questions.

Through ten thousand lives appearing and disappearing over the course of a single day.

The living Dharma is always whispering.

The question is whether I am quiet enough to hear it.

And perhaps practice is learning how to stay in relationship with what we hear without immediately grasping it, rejecting it, or turning it into another thing we think we have to believe.

Just listen.

Then respond.

Maybe that is what it means to stay in relationship with the living Dharma.

So, as always…

Stay in your rhythm.

-Fugan

I practice with a predominantly white sangha, and sometimes, I’m the only black person in the room, and most certainly the only black man in the room.

I remember my first sesshin. I wasn't ready. Then again, you're never truly ready for the baggage you bring that doesn't fit in a duffel bag.

All of your emotional societal shit comes to the surface. In the silence, the shit you haven’t dealt with comes for your ass. The things you put off processing… that emotional weight that you run from-as if the struggle won’t find you.

All the shadow stuff Jung be yappin bout? Surprise, bitches!

In the words of The Pharcyde, Can’t keep runnin’ away.

For me, sesshin has a way of uncovering what I think of as institutional trauma. It isn't just the silence. It's the experience of being the only Black person on retreat, and everything my body associates with that kind of isolation.

Feeling unsafe and isolated. And you can't just drop those "stories," because they're not just stories. They're intergenerational trauma that has never been fully processed or metabolized. The institutions that tried to break your lineage are still doing the same dirt in the present. It's hard to heal from a wound that's still being reopened.

Trauma is energy. That shit doesn’t dissipate and disappear… it keeps moving… until someone in the generational chain is able to start the healing process.

I was reading a Substack article by Phil Belight that really hit home for me. (Link to that article is here).

Reading Phil Belight, I finally found language for something I’d been trying to describe for years. Not because he was telling me something I didn’t know—but because he articulated a distinction I’ve struggled to explain.

People often assume these feelings are about individual white people.

They aren’t.

They’re about what the body remembers.

Bodies remember what minds would rather forget.

Being a Black American Zen practitioner means practicing a tradition that emerged from Japan while inhabiting a body shaped by American history.

I find myself wrestling with certain service position roles in the Zen tradition. Service roles like the Jisha role. The jisha is a personal attendant position in Zen Buddhism, serving the teacher, abbot, or service officiant (doshi). Among duties such as ceremonial support, the Jisha acts as a Personal assistant, tending to the immediate physical and logistical needs of the teacher during intensive meditation retreats (sesshin).

A couple of years ago, I struggled with being an attendant to my teacher. Many of my fellow sangha members saw it as a great honor. I didn’t. And if I’m honest, some part of me still doesn’t.

I know that struggle has everything to do with the history of race relations in this country. I can’t simply think my way out of four hundred years of conditioning.

Kōshin Sensei has often encouraged me to hold whatever I’m feeling with care and curiosity.

That teaching has become indispensable.

Because these feelings aren’t problems to solve before I can practice.

They are part of what I am practicing with.

That’s where the Dharma enters.

The irony isn’t lost on me, though…

Zen asks us to study conditioning.

Well…

This is definitely mine.

Not because my parents taught me to distrust white people.

Because history taught Black bodies what survival often required.

Zen doesn’t ask me to pretend that conditioning isn’t there.

If anything, it asks me to know it intimately.

In Zen we talk about stories.

Dropping stories.

Seeing through stories.

And yes…

the mind tells stories.

But memory isn’t merely story.

Conditioning isn’t merely story.

Trauma isn’t merely story.

Sometimes they’re the ground from which stories grow.

Memory is something else.

Conditioning is something else.

Trauma is something else.

Zen doesn’t ask us to deny any of those.

It asks us to encounter them completely.

When I talk about feeling unsafe..I’m talking about how my nervous system is navigating institutions. Safety isn’t only about the person standing in front of me.

It’s also about the culture surrounding them.

Safety isn’t only about whether someone intends harm.

It’s about whether people are willing to interrupt harm when it costs them something.

Part of my Bodhisattva vow is to try and heal my intergenerational trauma. Because trauma is energy.

It moves.

Through families.

Through institutions.

Through cultures.

Through nervous systems.

If it isn’t transformed, if it isn’t held with care and respect—it gets transmitted.

That transmission energy can be mutated into abuse and deep-seated anger.

Maybe this is another way of understanding the Bodhisattva Vow.

Somewhere, the transmission has to end—or be held with enough care that what was once carried as trauma can be transformed into something that nurtures rather than wounds.

In a few days I’ll fold my robes.

I’ll pack my rakusu.

I’ll ride the train to sesshin.

And somewhere beneath the silence I’ll meet that old fear again.

Because that’s where it has always been waiting.

My practice isn’t to pretend it isn’t there.

My practice is to bow to it without letting it decide who I become.

Maybe that’s what “saving all beings” begins to mean.

Not saving some abstract collection of people somewhere in the future.

But refusing to pass unexamined suffering on to the next generation.

One breath.

One bow.

One nervous system at a time.

Stay in your rhythm

-DT

Not because they’re jokes.

But because they expose something about the way my own mind works.

They reveal how quickly I become convinced that I’m seeing reality exactly as it is.

The book we’re studying during our practice period at the Zen Center is Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

I’ve been circling two stories.

On the surface, they seem unrelated.

One is about a monk who refuses to drink wine.

The other is about two monks who completely misunderstand one another during a silent debate.

The more I sat with them, the more they began to feel like the same teaching.

One is about attachment to identity.

The other is about attachment to interpretation.

Both point toward the same question:

How often do we mistake our ideas about reality for reality itself?

⸻

In the first story, the monk Unsho is known for keeping the precepts with absolute precision.

He doesn’t drink.

He doesn’t eat after the prescribed hour.

He’s disciplined.

His practice is sincere.

When the eccentric Zen teacher Tanzan offers him wine, Unsho immediately responds,

“I never drink.”

A simple statement.

Or is it?

By the end of the exchange, Tanzan smiles and replies,

“Then you must be a Buddha.”

I’ve read that story many times, but this time something different landed.

Tanzan wasn’t mocking the precepts.

He wasn’t encouraging carelessness.

He was exposing something much subtler.

The moment Unsho says, “I never drink,” the precept quietly shifts from practice to identity.

It is no longer simply something he does.

It has become who he believes himself to be.

Discipline is essential.

Rigidity is something else.

The precepts aren’t meant to become another identity we polish.

They’re meant to help loosen our grip on identity altogether.

⸻

The second kōan is even funnier.

A wandering monk challenges another monk to a silent debate.

The visitor raises one finger.

The resident monk raises two.

Then three.

Then a clenched fist.

The visitor leaves amazed, believing he has witnessed a profound expression of Buddhist realization.

Only afterward do we learn what actually happened.

The one-eyed monk thought he was being insulted.

One finger meant:

“You only have one eye.”

His two fingers meant:

“Well… you have two.”

Three fingers meant:

“Between us, we have three eyes.”

The clenched fist meant he was ready to punch the man.

Neither monk was lying.

Neither intended deception.

Both were completely sincere.

They seemed to inhabit different realities.

More accurately, they inhabited different interpretations of the same reality.

How often do we do the same thing?

We hear someone’s words.

We assume their motives.

We decide what they meant.

We build an entire world inside our own mind.

Then we respond—not to what is actually unfolding—but to the story we’ve already written.

Some of us are like showrunners.

We’ve already written three seasons before we realize we’re the only one watching the show.

⸻

Zen keeps asking us to wake up.

Not simply to some mystical cosmic truth floating somewhere beyond everyday life.

But to this life.

This conversation.

This relationship.

This moment.

Reality is always unfolding before us.

The question is whether we’re meeting reality…

or merely meeting our interpretation of it.

⸻

This is one reason I’ve always appreciated the phrase stay woke.

Stay woke emerged in Black communities as a reminder long before it was misappropriated, weaponized, and turned into a political slogan—or a punchline.

Stay awake.

Stay alert.

Pay attention.

See the world as it is.

It was about survival.

It was about remaining aware of the realities of systemic racism, white supremacist violence, and the dangers that Black people navigated simply by existing in America.

Like so many words, it was eventually pulled into political battles and made to carry meanings far beyond its original context.

But beneath all of that noise, I still hear something deeply familiar.

Stay awake.

Zen has been asking the same thing for centuries.

Not awake to an ideology.

Awake to reality.

They’re not saying the same thing.

But they are both asking us to wake the fuck up.

⸻

The difficulty is that none of us encounter reality without interpretation. That’s part of what it means to inhabit this human life.

Our race shapes us.

So do our gender, sexuality, and culture.

Family.

Grief.

Joy.

Fear.

Politics.

Religion.

Success.

Wounds.

All of them become lenses through which we understand the world.

The problem isn’t that we have lenses.

The problem is forgetting that we’re looking through them.

The moment we mistake the lens for reality itself, we stop listening.

We stop learning.

We stop responding to what this moment is actually asking of us.

⸻

This is why I don’t think the Dharma asks us to abandon doctrine.

Or ignore the precepts.

Or dismiss our lived experience.

It asks something far more difficult.

Hold them lightly.

Practice deeply.

Remain teachable.

The Dharma is living.

It cannot be contained inside doctrines, identities, political parties, philosophies, or even Buddhist ideas.

It keeps unfolding.

And every moment asks us to unfold with it.

⸻

Dōgen wrote that to study the Buddha Way is to study the self.

To study the self is to forget the self.

I don’t think that means forgetting our stories.

We need stories.

They help us make sense of the world.

Sometimes they even keep us alive.

The question is how we hold them.

Tightly enough that nothing new can enter…

or lightly enough that reality is still free to surprise us and teach us something new.

Maybe awakening isn’t learning to see the world through Buddhist ideas.

Maybe it’s learning to see through all of our ideas.

Again and again.

Reality is always more alive than the stories we tell about it.

And the Dharma keeps inviting us back.

Not to certainty.

Not to being right.

Not even to our favorite ideas.

But to intimacy with what is actually here.

Stay in your rhythm.

-DT

Something we recite and carry with us after zazen.

But I’m always questioning.

Always asking what vow is…

and how I’m embodying it.

Practice, at least as I’ve come to understand it, keeps asking those questions.

Because eventually every vow encounters reality.

Not the reality we’d like.

The reality that’s actually unfolding before us.

Our families.

The places we work.

The neighborhoods we call home.

Our relationships.

Even our own hearts.

It’s one thing to say we value compassion, honesty, justice, or dignity.

It’s another when living those values begins to cost us something.

When you have to show up and put some ass behind what you say you believe—and behind the vows you hold..

That’s the moment I’ve been sitting with lately.

I recently walked away from a situation I had been part of for years because I could no longer continue witnessing harm without responding to it.

The details aren’t really the point.

The question it left me with is.

What does it actually mean to live by vow?

Shohaku Okumura Roshi writes in Living by Vow that:

“Our practice is the whole of our life.”

I’ve always loved that sentence.

But another passage reaches me even more deeply:

“We have to live right now, right here, with this body and mind, and in the company of others.”

The more I sit with those words, the more I realize what he’s pointing toward.

The Dharma isn’t somewhere else.

It isn’t confined to the meditation cushion.

Or a monastery, a retreat—Or the pages of a Buddhist text.

It isn’t something we visit for an hour before returning to “real life.”

Reality is where the practice happens.

It happens in conversations.

At work.

In hospital rooms.

Across this country.

Within this very body.

Not after life becomes peaceful or after the circumstances become fair.

Right here.

⸻

Okumura returns again and again to one word:

Reality.

He says the Buddha’s vow was to awaken people to reality.

Not to a philosophy.

Not to a belief system.

Reality.

That sounds simple until reality asks something difficult of us.

Reality sometimes reveals that a relationship is unhealthy.

It reveals injustice we’d rather ignore.

It invites boundaries.

Other times it calls us to stay.

Sometimes it becomes clear that leaving is the more compassionate response.

Living by vow isn’t escaping those moments.

It’s responding to them.

⸻

One passage in Living by Vow stopped me in my tracks.

It’s underlined and highlighted in my copy.

He says “that a life led by vow isn’t watched by the vow, judged by the vow, or scolded by the vow.”

“It’s inspired by the vow.”

Then he writes:

“Our life is itself a vow.”

I’ve been carrying that sentence around ever since I first read it.

Our life is itself a vow.

Not simply because we recite one.

But because every one of us is already organizing our lives around something.

Fear.

Security.

Status.

Comfort.

Approval.

Success.

Justice.

Compassion.

Love.

The question isn’t whether we have a vow.

The question is whether we’ve become aware of the one our life is already expressing.

⸻

When I wrote recently about Chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra, I kept returning to the cries of the world.

The cries from Gaza.

From eastern Congo.

From communities carrying histories of racism and displacement.

I wondered what compassion asks of us when suffering becomes politically inconvenient.

I think this essay is asking a related question.

What happens when reality asks something of us we’d rather not give?

What happens when the vow no longer remains an inspiring idea but asks something concrete of us?

Okumura says that a vow doesn’t come from our intellect.

Nor from emotion alone.

It comes from the deepest part of ourselves.

I love that shit!

Because it explains why some decisions can’t simply be reasoned into existence.

They emerge.

Quietly.

After we’ve listened long enough.

Not because we’ve won an argument.

But because something deeper finally says,

“This is how I must live.”

Maybe that’s why Dōgen wrote that studying the Buddha Way is studying the self.

To study ourselves isn’t merely to examine our thoughts.

It’s to ask:

Who am I becoming?

What am I serving?

What is my life pointing toward?

Every day, our lives answer those questions whether we notice it or not.

And every ordinary choice becomes another opportunity to discover what our life is truly devoted to.

The Bodhisattva Vow isn’t asking us to become perfect.

It’s asking us to wake the fuck up.

To return, again and again, to reality.

To this body.

This mind.

These people.

This world.

Not after life becomes easier.

Now.

Perhaps living by vow isn’t simply keeping a promise we once made.

Perhaps it’s allowing our life to become the expression and embodiment of that promise.

Stay in your rhythm.

—DT

When the bodhisattva Akṣayamati asks why Avalokiteśvara is known as “Perceiver of the World’s Sounds,” the Buddha’s answer is simple: because Avalokiteśvara hears the cries of suffering beings and responds.

Not selectively or because they deserve it.

Not because they belong to one nation, one religion, or one people.

Suffering calls forth compassion.

But what happens when the cries are political?

What happens when those cries come from Gaza?

From eastern Congo?

What happens when those cries echo histories that many in this country would rather remember as finished than ongoing?

As a black man and Buddhist practitioner, I don’t encounter this chapter from nowhere.

Like every practitioner, I read it through the experiences that have shaped me.

I carry histories where entire peoples were declared less than human…

Indigenous nations were driven from their lands.

Africans were stolen into slavery.

Jim Crow.

Redlining.

Mass incarceration.

Those histories don’t sit outside my practice.

They shape how I hear the cries Avalokiteśvara is said to hear.

To me, Buddhist practice isn’t about hiding behind doctrine so that we never have to wrestle with the world as it is.

It asks something much harder.

To listen.

To question.

To remain present even when what we hear unsettles us.

Can the Bodhisattva hear some cries and ignore others?

Because the answer, if Chapter 25 is taken seriously, has to be no.

Not if they’re Palestinian, Congolese, Israeli, or Sudanese.

Not if they’re Native American, Black, white, civilian, prisoner, or soldier.

The cry comes first.

The Universal Gate doesn’t ask for passports before it opens.

Compassion crosses borders.

Accountability does not disappear at them.

That doesn’t flatten moral responsibility. It expands moral concern.

The hardest part of compassion isn’t loving those who suffer. It’s refusing to surrender the humanity of those causing suffering while never surrendering the truth about what they’re doing.

The practice isn’t asking us to abandon our convictions.

It’s asking us to hold them with enough humility that we remain teachable.

Because certainty, when it hardens into dogma, can become another way of refusing to see.

The Living Dharma has taught me not to be afraid of questions.

Questions don’t weaken my practice.

They keep it alive.

They remind me that the Dharma is something I enter into, not something I possess.

The moment I become certain I’ve arrived, I’ve probably stopped listening.

What becomes of the Bodhisattva Vow when the cries of the world are politically inconvenient?

I don’t know that Chapter 25 gives us an easy answer.

But I do think it refuses to let us choose which cries are worthy of our compassion.

And perhaps that refusal is where the practice begins.

Stay in your rhythm.

-DT

They reveal our attachments, our fears, our patience, our compassion, and sometimes our anger.

But they’re also reminders.

They remind us to return.

Return to our values and integrity.

Return to the vow we made long before this particular moment found us.

The Bodhisattva Vow is often spoken as if we’re always facing outward:

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.

But the one making that vow is also a sentient being.

The past year has reminded me how easy it is to drift away from myself.

Every day seemed to offer another outrage. Another argument. Another invitation to become reactive instead of responsive.

The Bodhisattva doesn’t practice apart from society. We practice within it.

Politics is not separate from the Dharma because politics shapes the conditions under which sentient beings live, suffer, flourish, and die. Policies, institutions, and the stories we tell about one another all become part of the web of causes and conditions that shape our shared lives.

We inherit these conditions, but we also participate in them. Every choice we make becomes another cause, another condition, shaping the lives of others and our own.

To pretend otherwise is to divide the world into “spiritual things” and “worldly things,” when the Dharma has always invited us to become intimate with all of it.

Some policies intentionally wound people. There are cultural narratives that tell us whose suffering matters and whose doesn’t. There are workplaces where dignity quietly erodes one conversation at a time.

None of that disappears simply because we meditate. Zazen doesn’t remove us from the world. It returns us to it with clearer eyes and a more compassionate heart.

The Dharma doesn’t ask us to become passive, or be a fucking doormat.

Intimacy with reality isn’t being in agreement with it.

Seeing clearly doesn’t require me to remain where harm is unfolding.

There are moments when the most compassionate response is not endurance.

It’s refusing to participate in harm.

Sometimes…that refusal is a boundary.

Compassion without wisdom becomes enabling.

Wisdom without compassion becomes indifference.

We need both.

One keeps our hearts open.

The other keeps us from mistaking harm for compassion.

When we chant,

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them…

I think we sometimes quietly edit the vow.

We imagine everyone else.

The stranger, neighbor, difficult coworker, or the politician we disagree with.

We rarely imagine ourselves.

Yet the one carrying the vow is also a sentient being worthy of compassion. Something my teacher, Kōshin Sensei, reminds me of often.

The vow doesn’t always ask the same thing of us.

Sometimes it asks us to speak.

Other times, to remain silent.

To stay.

To leave.

To protect another.

And, when wisdom calls for it…

to protect the one making the vow.

All can arise from the same vow.

The vow isn’t asking me to sacrifice my humanity.

It’s asking me to express it.

To meet each circumstance with wisdom and compassion.

To remember that the person standing here—the one breathing, struggling, doubting, beginning again—is also one of the numberless beings.

Saving all sentient beings has never excluded the one making the vow.

Perhaps the vow has always been inviting us to live with greater wisdom,

deeper compassion,

more honest relationship,

and the understanding that we, too, are one more life entrusted to our care.

Today, I begin there too.

Stay in your Rhythm.

-DT

Outside my chair window, the sky is impossibly blue.

My nurse, Barbara, is hanging my chemotherapy medication. She has a wonderful sense of humor—just as mischievous as mine. As usual, our conversation wandered to music. Our shared love of the Rubber Soul album by The Beatles.

Barbara and I have been singing random ass lyrics back and forth since 2012. That’s our thing.

For a few minutes we weren’t nurse and patient.

We were simply two people talking about a great album.

The needle in my port quietly does its work.

The medicine enters my body.

I breathe.

Years ago, I imagined Zen practice looking very different.

I imagined monasteries, long meditation periods, incense, bells, and perfectly still minds.

Those things certainly have their place. They continue to nourish my practice.

But life has slowly shown me something much simpler.

Practice isn’t somewhere else.

Practice is always this.

This conversation.

This breath.

This view from the window.

This body receiving care.

This moment that will never happen again.

The Living Dharma keeps teaching me that awakening isn’t hidden behind ordinary life.

It is found within ordinary life.

Within the everyday things we so easily overlook.

Sometimes we spend so much energy wishing for different circumstances that we miss the extraordinary beauty already unfolding in front of us.

Everything here is temporary.

The blue sky outside my window.

Barbara’s laughter.

The medicine entering my body.

The uncertainty I still carry.

The quiet gratitude beneath it all.

All of it temporary.

Knowing these things are temporary doesn’t make them less precious.

It makes them infinitely more precious.

Shohaku Okumura Roshi writes,

“Our practice is the whole of our life…”

Those words have become less of an idea for me and more of an invitation.

The path doesn’t ask me to wait until life becomes easier.

It asks me to wake up to the life that is already here.

We follow the Living Dharma.

Sometimes that path looks exactly like our teacher’s.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes it unfolds in places we never expected—a hospital room, an office, a grocery store, or sitting beside someone we love.

The important thing isn’t whether our life resembles someone else’s picture of practice.

The important thing is whether we are fully present for the life that has been placed into our hands.

Today, part of my practice is an infusion chair.

Tomorrow it will be something else.

Neither is more sacred than the other.

Both are the Way.

The Way of being completely with what is unfolding, and experiencing what we are experiencing.

The Dharma doesn’t ask us to escape the moment.

It asks us to become intimate with it.

I often return to these words:

“No matter how profound my experiences, they are not as valuable as embodying the Dharma.”

A person can have visions, insights, mystical experiences, or spiritual attainments.

Yet eventually every experience asks the same question:

Who am I becoming?

Or

How am I becoming?

My teacher, Koshin Sensei, often asks:

“How are you experiencing what you’re experiencing, as you’re experiencing it?”

That question has become a koan I carry everywhere.

My answer, at least in this moment, is simple.

Just sitting in this infusion chair.

Just breathing.

Just listening to Barbara sing Beatles lyrics.

Just watching the blue sky outside my window.

Just expressing Buddha Nature through this very body and this very mind.

Nothing special, yet special.

Just this.

And somehow…

that is everything.

Stay in your rhythm!

-DT

Not quietly or neatly.

Anger.

Aggravation.

And at times… a kind of indifference that unsettles me more than either.

Typical human shit.

⸻

I’ve been sitting with a chapter from The Lotus Sutra, which we’re studying at NYZC.

A bodhisattva who does something simple—and almost impossible:

He refuses to reduce anyone.

He approaches people and says:

I do not disparage you.

You will all become Buddhas.

Even when they mock him.

Shout at him.

Throw stones.

He doesn’t argue.

He doesn’t withdraw from the vow.

He simply refuses to collapse people into what they are showing in that moment.

⸻

I’ve been asking myself what that looks like… here.

Not in a sutra.

But in this country.

In this body.

And in this moment.

⸻

A coworker came to me upset and frustrated about how things are unfolding in the country.

This is someone who supported the Republican agenda. Voted for it.

And honestly, my first thought was:

I give zero fucks…

This is what you voted for.

You knew who this man was.

You saw what he represented.

And still, you chose it. You chose harm.

But I didn’t say that.

Because I could see something else in that moment:

Regret.

Distress…all on his face.

Cause and effect landing in real time.

So I met him with compassion.

⸻

But afterward, I sat with something uncomfortable.

In order to meet him with compassion, it felt like I had to make myself smaller to do it.

And I know that “smallness” belongs to the relative self.

But the feeling was still real.

⸻

And this isn’t just about one interaction.

There’s a pattern here—one I’ve seen my whole life.

And you can’t just “Zen” that shit away.

As Black Americans, we are constantly expected to absorb the tension, steady the room, and remain compassionate—even when we’re the ones being harmed.

Let’s keep it a buck, that compassion feels one-sided.

⸻

I think about something James Baldwin once asked:

“What is it you want me to reconcile myself to?”

Because that’s what it can feel like.

Not simply being asked to understand—but being asked to accept.

To wait patiently for “progress.”

To widen ourselves around conditions that continue diminishing us in the present.

⸻

So I’ve been sitting in a different question:

What does it mean to not disparage…

without disappearing?

⸻

A few weeks ago, in our Buddhist People of Color group, I brought in this chapter from The Lotus Sutra for discussion.

We talked about it in the context of what’s happening in this country right now—voting rights being dismantled, districts being redrawn to diminish Black political power, protections people marched, bled, and died for slowly being stripped apart in front of us.

The Dharma always meets us where we actually are.

And one of my dharma brothers, Mike—deeply rooted in practice and unapologetically Black—said something that hit me hard.

He said:

“We have to meet these people who mean to do us harm right where they are. We gotta get down in the dirt with them.

That ‘when they go low, we go high’ shit don’t work.

When do we stop showing up with flowers from the moral high ground while these bitches are showing up with real ways to harm us?”

And honestly?

I understood exactly what he meant.

I still do.

Everyone in that room did.

Because there’s exhaustion in constantly being asked to respond to harm with endless grace while the harm itself remains active and material.

There comes a point where “taking the high road” can begin to feel less like wisdom…

and more like slow erasure.

But sitting with that conversation, I realized something else, too.

Meeting people where they are does not mean abandoning vow.

It does not mean surrendering ourselves to fear, hatred, greed, or domination simply because those forces are present in the conditions around us.

It means we meet what is happening directly.

Without illusion.

Without pretending harm is harmless.

But we meet it led by vow instead of being consumed by the very fear, hatred, and domination deforming the world around us.

⸻

Not disparaging does not blur my vision.

I can still recognize harm for what it is.

I can still reject injustice.

And I do not owe anyone my diminishment in the name of spiritual maturity.

⸻

But it also means something else.

It means I am practicing not reducing people to the harm they participate in.

Not because that harm doesn’t matter.

But if I collapse them entirely into it, I lose something in myself, too.

⸻

This is not easy.

Because anger has its own clarity.

It says:

This is wrong and harmful.

It’s fucked up.

It should not be happening.

And that clarity matters.

I’m not trying to get rid of that.

⸻

What I’m trying to do is not let that clarity harden into something that closes the door completely.

⸻

The bodhisattva in the sutra doesn’t just stand there and let a bunch of salty-ass people crack his dome open with rocks either.

He steps the fuck back.

There’s movement.

Adjustment.

Wisdom.

But he doesn’t abandon the vow.

I do not disparage you.

⸻

I’m realizing something:

Compassion did not require me to become smaller.

But the space I was in was not wide enough to hold both my truth and his distress at the same time.

So I adjusted.

And my body felt that.

⸻

That feeling matters.

Not as something to fix.

But as something to listen to.

⸻

Because my vow is not asking me to disappear or become neutral in the face of harm.

And it damn sure ain’t asking me to make others comfortable at the expense of my own reality.

⸻

My vow is asking for something harder.

To remain human in conditions that make that difficult.

⸻

To tell the truth about harm without reducing people entirely to it.

It’s about staying open without pretending I’m untouched.

And meeting others where they are, without abandoning where I stand.

⸻

I don’t know how to do this.

I just feel my way through it.

Some days I feel steady.

Other days I feel angry.

Tired.

Pulled toward indifference.

⸻

But I know this:

I will not reconcile myself to harm.

And I will not give up on the possibility that we are more than what we are showing each other right now.

⸻

So for now—I’m learning to stay open without being erased.

And to stay honest without closing the door.

⸻

That’s the practice.

That’s the vow.

See you soon,

-DT

“One of the definitions of a bodhisattva: Ordinary people are those who live being pulled by their karma; bodhisattvas are those who live led by their vows.”

I’ve quoted it before.

But this morning it landed somewhere deeper.

Maybe because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about conditioning, politics, systems, and identity.

About inherited suffering.

About the ways human beings become shaped by the worlds that shape them.

Not just individually—but collectively.

How much of what we call personality, instinct, identity, fear, anger, even desire—is actually habit energy.

Loops.

Human beings inherit ways of seeing and reacting to the world long before we ever consciously choose anything.

Sometimes I wonder how much of what we call “choice” is conditioning wearing our face.

⸻

When it comes to Buddhism and karma, many misunderstand it as punishment or cosmic reward.

But a lot of the time karma looks more ordinary than that.

It looks like momentum.

Conditioning.

Stored reaction.

The body remembers what the mind hasn’t even caught up to yet.

Trauma passed between generations.

Fear passed through households.

Shame passed through institutions.

Violence passed through nations.

Ideas about race, class, masculinity, worth, power, success, and survival passed from body to body until they begin to feel natural.

Until people stop questioning them.

Until suffering starts sounding like common sense.

⸻

I found myself thinking again about James Baldwin this morning.

Particularly, his letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time.

What struck me wasn’t just Baldwin’s clarity.

It was his refusal to become consumed by the thing he was describing.

Baldwin saw the machinery clearly.

He understood that people are shaped by history they often do not understand.

That societies condition human beings into roles and identities.

That entire systems are built to make certain people doubt their humanity while others perform innocence rather than face the domination they participate in.

And yet—

He keeps reaching toward something beyond hatred.

Not because he’s naive.

Not because he’s bypassing suffering.

But because he understands that becoming fully possessed by hatred is another kind of imprisonment.

That feels deeply connected to vow.

To me, that’s bodhisattva energy.

And honestly?

That’s some powerful shit.

⸻

There’s a line in Baldwin’s letter where he tells his nephew not to accept the lies constructed around him.

Not because those lies aren’t powerful.

But because internalizing them would mean allowing the world’s delusion to become his identity.

That hit me hard.

Because I think many of us are walking around inside identities constructed through conditioning we did not choose.

Some are inherited through family.

Some through race, gender, religion, capitalism, and nationalism.

And oh… You best believe—

through trauma.

And most of us spend years—sometimes entire lifetimes—reacting from those inherited structures without ever realizing we are reacting.

That’s the loop.

⸻

Which brings me back to Okumura’s quote.

Ordinary people live being pulled by karma.

That doesn’t mean “bad people.”

It means unconscious momentum.

Living entirely from conditioning.

From reaction, fear, and craving.

From inherited scripts.

But a bodhisattva lives led by vow.

Not free from karma.

Not untouched by suffering.

Not spiritually pure.

Led by vow.

That distinction matters.

Because vow does not erase conditioning.

It interrupts identification with it.

⸻

To live by vow is not to bypass suffering or flatten history into inspirational quotes and spiritual slogans.

It is seeing clearly what shaped you—while refusing to let that shaping become the final authority over your life.

It is saying:

Yes, this suffering exists.

This conditioning exists.

This history lives in me.

And still—

I will orient myself toward compassion, clarity, wisdom, and liberation—toward the reduction of suffering for myself and others.

Not because it is easy.

But because I refuse to hand the steering wheel entirely to karma.

⸻

I think that’s part of what practice really is.

Not becoming some perfected spiritual being.

But slowly learning how to stop mistaking inherited momentum for destiny.

And maybe that’s the work.

To remember that we are shaped by history—but not reducible to it.

That conditioning is powerful—but not absolute.

That suffering is real—but not the only thing that is real.

And to keep returning, over and over again, to vow.

Even when the world keeps trying to pull us somewhere else.

Stay in your rhythm.

See you soon.

-DT

To stay in conversation with my own mind.

and keep walking the vow I’ve committed to.

My Dharma name is Fugan—Universal Vow.

Like all Dharma names, it’s not a statement of arrival. It’s an aspiration.

And there are days when that aspiration isn’t clear.

Where it feels distant.

Where I lose the thread.

And if I’m being honest, some days that aspiration gets a little foggy.

But even then, I keep walking the vow.

⸻

Something’s been sitting with me.

Not just as a reaction to the news.

Or just as frustration.

But as a question I can’t shake.

⸻

I was reading about the Virginia redistricting vote.

How close it was.

How divided people still are.

And I felt that familiar tightening.

That moment where you look around and think:

How are we still here?

With everything that’s happened.

Everything that’s visible.

Everything that’s been revealed.

How do we keep choosing the same patterns?

⸻

And it’s easy—really easy—to stop there.

To point and name who’s getting it wrong.

To say: “They can’t see what’s happening.”

⸻

But honestly…That answer felt too clean.

Too damn comfortable.

⸻

Because the more I sat with it, the more something deeper came forward:

People are shaped by systems… and still responsible for how they move within them.

⸻

That tension doesn’t resolve nicely.

It doesn’t let anyone fully off the hook.

But it also doesn’t flatten people into villains.

It asks something harder.

⸻

Because what we’re dealing with isn’t just policy.

It’s identity and belonging.

It’s the stories we’ve been handed about who we are—and who we’re not.

⸻

We like to think people vote based on logic.

But most of us don’t move through the world like that.

We move through stories.

Stories about:

• what safety feels like

• what’s being threatened

• what we deserve

• who we stand with

And those stories get reinforced over time—through family, culture, media, history.

⸻

At a certain point, those stories don’t feel like stories anymore.

They feel like truth.

⸻

And that’s where it gets dangerous.

Because when something feels like truth, we don’t question it.

We defend it.

Even when it harms others.

Or when it harms us.

⸻

That part is hard to sit with.

Especially when you look at how systems in this country have impacted people of color—and continue to.

There’s real harm there.

Documented, lived, undeniable.

⸻

And still—You see people, even those who are struggling themselves,

stand in defense of the very systems that limit them.

And the question comes back again:

Why?

⸻

Zen practice has been quietly answering that for me.

Not in a way that excuses anything.

But in a way that exposes something deeper.

⸻

We are all conditioned.

Not just politically or socially.

But fundamentally.

⸻

We’re shaped by what we’re taught.

By what we repeat and what we never stop to question.

And most of the time—

We don’t even know it’s happening.

⸻

Because conditioning doesn’t feel like conditioning from the inside.

It feels like:

• “This is just how things are.”

• “This is common sense.”

• “This is reality.”

⸻

So when someone challenges that…

It doesn’t feel like an invitation.

It feels like a threat.

⸻

And now we’re not dealing with ideas anymore.

We’re dealing with identity.

⸻

That’s why people will defend things that don’t make logical sense.

That’s why people will double down instead of pausing.

That’s why clarity is so rare.

⸻

Because clarity requires something most of us aren’t trained to do:

Stop.

Breathe.

And question the lens we’re looking through.

⸻

Not just out there.

But in here.

⸻

That’s the part that humbles me.

Because it’s easy to say:

“They’re conditioned.”

But harder to ask:

Where am I?

Where am I reacting instead of seeing?

Where am I defending a story because it’s familiar?

Where am I mistaking my perspective for truth?

⸻

And if I sit with that long enough…

Something else shows up.

⸻

Even the way I’m trying to see clearly—even this lens of practice, of awareness, of Zen—is shaping how I understand the world.

⸻

We tell stories about clarity, too.

We inherit language about awareness.

We repeat teachings about letting go.

Even koans—these simple, beautiful stories—

are still stories.

They point.

But they also shape.

⸻

There’s one that keeps coming back to me.

Two monks traveling together come to a river.

A young woman is struggling to cross.

They’ve taken vows not to touch a woman.

The older monk picks her up, carries her across, sets her down, and keeps walking.

Hours later, the younger monk can’t hold it in anymore:

“How could you do that? We’re not permitted to touch a woman.”

The older monk looks at him and says:

“I set her down at the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

⸻

It’s easy to hear that as a lesson about letting go.

About not carrying the past.

⸻

But sitting with it now…

I hear something else too.

⸻

How often do we carry ideas—

rules, identities, beliefs—

long after the moment has passed?

How often do we hold onto them so tightly that we can’t actually respond to what’s right in front of us?

⸻

And then the harder question:

How often do we carry the teaching itself?

Turn it into something fixed.

Something we rely on.

Something we identify with.

⸻

Because even clarity can become something we cling to.

Even awareness can become identity.

Practice can become something we carry

long after it’s already done its work.

⸻

That doesn’t mean the teachings are wrong.

It means we’re human.

⸻

And maybe that’s the real work.

Not escaping conditioning.

Or pretending we’re outside of it.

But learning to notice:

what we’re holding…

and whether we’re still carrying it

when we don’t need to anymore.

⸻

That doesn’t erase accountability.

It deepens it.

⸻

Because if we’re all shaped by systems…

Then responsibility isn’t about pretending we’re free of them.

It’s about how willing we are to see them.

To pause.

To question.

To not let every thought and feeling drive the next action.

⸻

That’s not easy work.

Especially in a world that rewards reaction, speed, and certainty.

⸻

But without that pause…

Without that breath…

We don’t really choose.

We just repeat.

⸻

And maybe that’s what I’m really sitting with.

Not just how people vote.

Not just what systems do.

But how rare it is for any of us

to step outside the conditioning long enough

to see clearly.

⸻

And what it might look like…if more of us actually tried.

⸻

Stay in your rhythm.

See you soon.

-DT

And I’ve been thinking about something that doesn’t sit easily.

Compassion.

Not the kind that comes naturally.

Not the kind we offer to people we understand, agree with, or feel safe around.

I mean the other kind.

The kind that gets talked about in dharma talks, but feels very different when it shows up in real life—When the person in front of you represents something you don’t trust.

Or something that has caused harm.

Or something that feels completely opposed to who you are.

⸻

Because let’s keep it a buck—There are people I don’t like.

Not in a casual way.

Not in a “we just see things differently” kind of way.

I mean people whose words, actions, or beliefs feel rooted in something deeper—

something conditioned, something inherited, something that has a real impact on the world.

And in this country, in this body, that’s not abstract.

In this country, the rights and humanity of people of color have never been a given.

They’ve been negotiated, legislated, and contested—through my parents’ time, my grandparents’, and long before that.

The body remembers that.

Even when the room pretends otherwise.

⸻

I keep coming back to James Baldwin.

In The Fire Next Time, he writes to his nephew:

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were Black and for no other reason.

There’s no softening that.

No spiritual framing that makes it easier to digest.

Just clarity.

And he keeps going—naming how the world constructs identity, how it limits, how it shapes what a life is allowed to be.

He doesn’t pretend it’s neutral.

He doesn’t pretend it’s fair.

⸻

So when I think about compassion in that context…

I have to be honest about what’s actually being asked.

Because this isn’t neutral ground.

These are conditions that are layered, historical, and embodied.

The kind the body recognizes immediately.

The kind you don’t have to think about to feel.

⸻

And still, I practice in a tradition that says something else is also true.

Shohaku Okumura Roshi writes about continuous practice as a circle—

a way with no break, no outside.

Not something we move along from beginning to end.

But something we are already inside of.

Practicing together with all beings.

All buddhas.

All ancestors.

All beings.

⸻

That sounds beautiful.

Until you really consider what “all beings” includes.

⸻

It includes the people I love.

The people I trust.

The people who feel safe.

And it includes—the people I don’t like.

The people I don’t trust.

The people who don’t see me clearly.

And the people who move through the world in ways that feel harmful.

There’s no exemption clause in the vow.

⸻

And this is where it gets real.

Because Baldwin also says something that feels almost impossible when you first hear it:

You must accept them. And accept them with love.

Not because what they’ve done is acceptable.

Not because their behavior should be excused.

But because they are trapped in something they do not understand.

A history shaped through violence, genocide, and slavery—one they’ve inherited and continue to participate in, often without ever having to question it.

⸻

That doesn’t make the harm disappear.

But it does change the question.

⸻

The question is no longer:

“How do I feel differently about them?”

Or “How do I become more comfortable with this?”

⸻

It becomes:

What does it mean to see clearly… and still not lose my humanity?

⸻

Dislike doesn’t erase interconnection.

Disagreement doesn’t erase conditioning.

And recognizing harm doesn’t require reducing someone to only that harm.

⸻

This is where practice lives for me right now.

Right on that edge.

⸻

Anger can be felt.

Harm can be named.

What’s happening can be seen without dressing it up as something else.

And there’s also a moment—right before that clarity hardens—where another choice appears.

Not to collapse.

Not to become defined by the same patterns I’m seeing.

⸻

Because vow doesn’t ask me to abandon myself.

It doesn’t ask for silence.

And it doesn’t ask me to accept harm.

⸻

But it does ask something more difficult.

It asks:

Can you see the full picture…

and not turn away?

Can you recognize conditioning—yours and theirs—without collapsing into it?

Can you stay present without needing the world to be different first?

⸻

There’s something Baldwin says that I keep coming back to:

The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you…but what they believe does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.

That line holds two things at once:

Clarity.

And refusal.

⸻

What was projected onto me doesn’t have to be carried forward.

And it doesn’t have to be returned in the same form.

⸻

So no—Liking everyone isn’t the point.

Agreement isn’t required.

And pretending things are different from what they are isn’t practice.

⸻

But staying is.

Seeing is.

And choosing not to abandon the vow—even here—is.

⸻

Because the truth is—

The people I don’t like are included, too.

Not as an idea.

Not as a concept.

But right here, in the middle of real life.

⸻

And maybe this is what practice actually asks of us:

Not to feel differently—but to meet what’s here

without losing ourselves in the process.

⸻

That’s the work.

And today—that’s where I’m practicing.

See you soon.

-DT

Not a passing irritation.

Not something subtle I could dress up in soft language.

I mean real anger.

The kind that sits in your chest.

The kind that tightens your jaw.

The kind that doesn’t ask for permission to be there.

⸻

I was in a meeting.

The only Black person in the room.

In a room with no allies.

Again.

And if you’ve lived that experience, you already know—

there are things that get said in those spaces.

Not always loud.

Not always explicit.

But present.

In tone.

In assumption.

In the way certain ideas are dismissed without consideration—

and others are accepted without question.

The micro-expressions and lack of awareness.

The casualness of it.

The kind of energy that lets you know:

You’re here… and not respected.

⸻

I sat there expressionless.

Listening.

Not reacting outwardly.

But inside?

I was on fire.

And the thing is…

I didn’t try to make it anything else.

I didn’t reach for calm.

I didn’t try to “practice it away.”

I didn’t pretend I was above it.

I was angry.

And I let that be true.

⸻

Later, I kept thinking about something Shohaku Okumura Roshi wrote:

“In zazen many things come up: thoughts, emotions, sometimes anger and hatred…

Don’t attach to thoughts and emotions, just let them return to emptiness. Just be present there…”

I’ve read that before.

But yesterday, it landed differently.

Because I wasn’t on a cushion.

I was in a conference room.

⸻

And that made me ask a real question:

What does it actually mean to “not attach”

when the anger isn’t abstract?

When it’s tied to lived experience?

To history and being in a body that has to navigate spaces like this over and over again?

⸻

Because let’s be honest—Some things aren’t neutral.

Some things aren’t just passing thoughts.

Some conditions are shaped by systems, by conditioning, by long-standing patterns that don’t disappear just because we’re practicing.

And the body knows that.

The body feels that.

⸻

So no—I wasn’t trying to transcend my anger.

I was sitting with it.

Breathing with it.

Letting it move without letting it take over.

Not suppressing it.

Not acting it out.

Just… holding it.

⸻

There’s something my teacher, Koshin Sensei, says that I come back to often:

How do we stand on the receptive ground of the dharma and use our awakened mind—not our deluded mind?

I’ve been sitting with that.

Because in a moment like that meeting, the question isn’t:

“How do I feel something different?”

It’s:

“What am I moving from right now?”

Am I moving from habit?

From conditioning?

From the part of me that’s been shaped by years of navigating spaces like this?

Or am I able—right here, in the middle of it—to stand on that receptive ground?

To actually be present for what’s unfolding without immediately reacting to it?

⸻

And if I’m being honest—I was right on that edge.

The anger was real and the conditions were real.

But I wasn’t lost in it.

I was aware of it.

Breathing with it.

Letting it be there

without letting it decide what happened next.

⸻

And to me—that’s what it means to be in flow with the living, breathing dharma.

Not somewhere else.

But right there in the moment—present enough to feel everything,

clear enough not to be run by it.

And in that moment—that was the practice.

That was living by vow.

⸻

Katagiri Roshi said that wholehearted practice of zazen is itself living by vow.

Yesterday, that meeting was my zazen.

The chair was the cushion and the room was the zendo.

The tension in my body was the bell ringing again and again.

And the practice was simple, but not easy:

Stay.

Don’t run.

Don’t explode.

Don’t abandon yourself.

Just stay.

⸻

There’s something else I had to be honest about too.

Vow includes all beings.

But it includes me.

And that matters.

Because sometimes compassion gets distorted into something else—

Silence.

Endurance.

Self-erasure.

That’s not what this is.

I’m not here to abandon myself in the name of being “spiritual.”

⸻

In that moment, I needed to feel what I was feeling.

Fully.

Without guilt.

Without performance.

Without trying to clean it up.

And at the same time—

I didn’t let it turn into harm.

⸻

That’s the edge, isn’t it?

To feel everything

without letting it control everything.

To recognize what’s happening

without becoming consumed by it.

To stay present

without disappearing.

⸻

I didn’t speak in that meeting.

Not because I didn’t have anything to say.

But because that moment wasn’t about reacting.

It was about seeing clearly.

There may be a moment to speak.

To set a boundary.

To shift the room.

But clarity doesn’t always shout.

Sometimes it sits quietly

and refuses to be moved.

⸻

Okumura Roshi says:

“Just be present there and swim in buddha-nature.”

Yesterday, that didn’t feel peaceful.

It felt heavy.

It felt tight.

It felt like sitting in something I’ve known my whole life.

But I stayed.

And maybe that’s what this is—

Not escaping the conditions of our lives,

but meeting them directly.

Even when they don’t feel “spiritual”.

Even when they don’t feel fair.

Even when they make us angry.

⸻

Living by vow isn’t about becoming someone who never feels anger.

It’s about becoming someone who can hold it without losing themselves in it.

Someone who can stay

in the middle of it

and still choose not to cause harm.

⸻

Yesterday, I was angry.

And I was practicing.

Both were true.

And maybe that’s enough.

See you soon.

-DT

At the time, I didn’t have the language for it the way I do now—but I knew I was circling something real.

I wrote:

Being Black in America is a special kind of “different.”

And the more I sit with that now, the more I realize—it wasn’t just an observation.

It was a recognition of a tension I’ve been living with my entire life.

⸻

A friend once shared a quote with me:

“Being Black in this country is like dealing with an absurd fiction every day of your life. You know it’s not real, but you have to treat it as if it is.”

That stayed with me.

Because it names something that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it.

There’s a kind of double awareness that develops.

On one level, I know—deep in my bones—that I am not what the world projects onto me.

But on another level, I have to move through systems that respond to me as if I am.

⸻

In Buddhism, there’s the teaching of relative and absolute truth.

Absolute truth says:

There is no fixed self. No inherent identity. Nothing solid to cling to.

Relative truth says:

This world still functions through roles, labels, and consequences.

Most of the time, these teachings are discussed in quiet spaces—places that appear removed from the conditions of everyday life.

But those conditions don’t disappear when we walk into the room.

We carry them in our bodies.

And not everyone is carrying the same weight into that silence.

But what does that look like when you’re navigating a racialized body in America?

⸻

Because here, identity isn’t just something you “let go of.”

It’s something that has been constructed through racialization, reinforced through history, and maintained by systems rooted in white supremacy.

So even if you see through it, you still have to live inside it.

⸻

That’s the paradox.

I know the story isn’t real.

But I still have to survive inside it.

⸻

And survival shapes behavior.

It teaches vigilance.

You learn to read rooms.

To track tone shifts.

To anticipate how you might be perceived before you even open your mouth.

Over time, that awareness becomes second nature.

Not because something is wrong with you—but because you adapted to the conditions you were placed in.

⸻

But adaptation comes with a cost.

Because what begins as awareness can harden into identity.

A posture.

A way of being that says:

This is who I have to be to make it through.

And if you’re not careful, that can start to feel like the only version of yourself that exists.

⸻

So now the work isn’t as simple as “letting go of identity.”

Because what are you letting go of?

The identity that was imposed on you?

Or the one you built to survive it?

⸻

This is where the practice becomes real.

Not abstract or philosophical.

But lived.

⸻

For me, it looks like holding two truths at once.

The truth I know internally:

I am not what this world says I am.

And the truth I have to navigate externally:

This world will respond to me as if I am.

⸻

Holding those two without collapsing into either one—that’s the work.

Some days I do ok.

Other days it’s exhausting.

Because maintaining a soft heart in a world that constantly misreads you takes effort.

It takes discipline not to become hardened.

Not to let frustration turn into bitterness.

Or to let misperception rewrite your internal sense of self.

⸻

And yet…there’s something deeper underneath all of it.

Something that existed before the projection.

Before the conditioning and before the identity was shaped by survival.

⸻

If I’ve learned anything from both African spirituality and Buddhism, it’s this:

The work isn’t about becoming something new.

It’s about remembering what was never actually lost.

⸻

We were shaped by the conditions we survived—

but we are not limited to the identities those conditions required.

⸻

That doesn’t mean the conditions disappear.

It doesn’t mean the world suddenly sees clearly.

But it does mean I don’t have to internalize every distortion I encounter.

I don’t have to become the fiction.

⸻

Some days, the practice isn’t about “awakening”.

It’s about not losing myself in the story.

It’s about moving through a world that insists on a version of me—

and choosing, again and again,

to return to what I know is true.

See you soon,

DT

They became a way to honor my journey—my ancestors, my practice, the path that brought me here.

My first teacher had tattoos.

I saw them not as decoration, but as something alive.

So I followed that thread.

⸻

There was a time—growing up—when tattoos carried a stigma.

Thuggish. Criminal. Unprofessional.

Something to be judged.

Now they’re everywhere.

Almost ordinary.

But even then—and especially now—I’ve come to see that tattoos hold stories.

Not just aesthetic choices.

Not just trends.

Stories etched into the body.

⸻

Over time, it became a kind of ritual.

Symbols etched into skin—alive with energy, with rhythm.

Not separate from the Living Dharma, but expressions of it.

Buddhist imagery. African symbols. Sacred geometry.

Prayers. Vow. Memory.

Not as superstition—but as embodied reminders.

A kind of spiritual armor.

Not armor that protects me from life, but armor that reminds me to stay present within it.

To remember the path and remember what holds me.

⸻

There’s also something sacred in the exchange itself.

Between my tattoo artist and me—there’s an understanding.

A quiet energy.

This isn’t just ink.

It’s transmission.

So many causes and conditions had to align to bring us to that exact moment.

Their years of training.

My life unfolding the way it has.

Everything that led me to that chair.

Ink meeting skin.

Attention meeting intention.

A moment of giving and receiving—fully present.

⸻

I received my first tattoo after my first teacher, Sato Sensei, passed.

Around that time, I was diagnosed with aHUS.

What followed was the unraveling of a fourteen-year mystery—what had caused me to lose my native kidneys.

So that first tattoo… it wasn’t casual.

It marked something.

The passing of my teacher.

Questions answered, but new questions to be explored.

The beginning of a life navigating illness in a completely different way.

Looking back, it feels less like something I chose—and more like something I stepped into.

Or something I received.

⸻

That’s the word I use intentionally.

I received my tattoos.

The same way we receive vows.

Not as possessions or as achievements.

But as moments of alignment.

Markers of something unfolding.

⸻

My practice has always been a weaving of African spirituality and

Buddhist practice.

Different forms… same source.

Different languages… same current.

And somewhere in that current, I started to understand something my teacher had been telling me all along.

⸻

Sato used to say I had to surrender to the universal energy as it unfolds in my life.

That I wasn’t in control.

That the wisdom of the dharma is already moving—already expressing itself.

And all I had to do… was allow it. Or be in flow with it.

But I couldn’t hear that back then.

I was too stubborn.

Too caught in my own patterns.

Too consumed by illness and the weight of it.

I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Still struggling with this.

⸻

Now I think about what it really means to “surrender” to that unfolding.

Not in a passive way.

But in a way that trusts.

Because every time I’ve shown up and… be with—really be with—what’s unfolding,

something unexpected opens.

Something I couldn’t have planned.

And in those moments, it becomes clear:

There is an intelligence moving through this life

that isn’t mine alone.

Tattoos, like written words, are portals to expansion.

⸻

Life isn’t a problem I’m here to solve.

It’s something I’m inside of—

something already moving before I even try to understand it.

The moment I try to stop it,

to pin it down,

to make sense of it so I can feel in control…

I’m already out of rhythm.

Because this isn’t something I get to figure out by stepping outside of it.

It only reveals itself in motion.

In showing up.

In allowing.

In being with what’s here.

⸻

So the practice—at least how I’m learning it—isn’t about solving the mystery of life.

It’s about moving with it.

Joining it.

Letting it shape me

while I learn, again and again, how to stay in my rhythm.

⸻

My body tells more than one story, though.

Some tattoos mark my journey through illness—

through hospitals, infusions, the quiet negotiations of a body trying to survive.

And there are tattoos from earlier in my life—

from a different kind of hunger, a different kind of attention.

I won’t cover those.

That was me, too.

Still is.

Those markings don’t disappear just because my understanding has changed.

They’re part of the same path.

Same body.

Same unfolding.

⸻

These markings don’t make me anything.

They don’t make me realized.

They don’t make me whole.

But they remind me.

Of where I’ve been and what I’ve carried.

Of what I’m still learning to hold.

This body—inked, altered, and still changing—is where the practice lives.

Still learning how to move with it—right here, in this body, staying in my rhythm.

See you soon.

-DT

Not as a concept or a title.

Not as something someone else confirms.

But in the middle of real life—

in a body that gets tired,

in a mind that still reacts,

in a world already in motion long before I got here.

Because if I’m being honest…

Each moment asks for something different.

There’s no fixed response.

No script.

Just conditions arising—

and whatever meets them.

So what exactly are we measuring—and who’s doing the measuring?

⸻

Lately, my body hasn’t been letting me escape the question.

The infusions have me fucked up lately.

Exhaustion.

No appetite.

Nausea that just sits there like an unwelcome guest that won’t leave.

And I’ll be real—none of this is giving me some special spiritual insight.

There’s no hidden enlightenment hiding inside feeling like shit.

But…

feeling it this directly in my body does something else.

It cuts through the story.

⸻

It reminds me of a Dharma talk from my teacher’s teacher, Dai En Friedman Sensei.

She said:

The body is our teacher.

The body has its own language.

And that language is sensation.

Not the story in the head.

Not the narrative we build around what’s happening.

Just what’s actually being felt.

⸻

Because most of what I call “myself”…

is habit.

Conditioning.

Reactions that started way before I knew what I was doing.

Ancient habit energy, just playing itself out.

And usually?

I’m in my head about it.

Trying to think my way through it.

Trying to control it.

Trying to make it make sense.

⸻

But the body doesn’t care about any of that.

The body tells the truth.

If I’m exhausted—it says it.

If something is off, it says it.

If I’m holding tension, fear, resistance—it shows up before I can even explain it.

⸻

And sitting here, dealing with these side effects…

there’s no philosophy that makes it go away.

No lineage.

No title.

No “level of realization.”

Just this:

This body.

Doing what it’s doing.

⸻

Which brings me back to all the stuff I’ve been thinking about…

I’ve been reading books and critiques of Zen institutions lately—questions about lineage, Dharma transmission, the idea of an unbroken chain going all the way back to the Buddha.

And yeah… some of it feels like a stretch.

Not in a cynical way.

Just… when you really look at it.

It starts to feel less like a clean historical record

and more like something constructed to preserve authority, continuity, and legitimacy.

Noam Chomsky calls this a “useful doctrinal fabrication.”

A useful story.

And I get it.

Institutions need structure.

They need a way to say, “This is real. This is valid. This is ours to carry forward.”

But somewhere in that process, something subtle can happen.

The robe starts to matter more than what it points to.

I know this from experience. I’ve caught myself getting pulled into my own ideas about the robe.

⸻

I’ve seen what happens when we confuse:

the role

for the realization

the title

for the embodiment

the transmission

for the living truth

We start projecting and idealizing.

We start handing over our own clarity

for the comfort of certainty.

⸻

But my body right now?

It doesn’t care about any of that.

It’s not impressed by robes.

It’s not moved by lineage charts.

It’s just here… feeling what it feels.

And strangely—that’s more honest than most of the stories I can tell myself.

⸻

So what is practice then?

Not escaping the body.

Not transcending experience.

But learning how to be with it.

To actually listen to what’s here.

To recognize: this is happening

without immediately turning it into a story about

who I am, or what this means, or how this should be different.

⸻

Dai En Sensei also talked about “not knowing.”

And how difficult that is for us.

Because we’re trained to know.

To figure it out.

To get ahead of it.

To control the outcome.

But this?

This body.

This moment.

It doesn’t care what I think I know—

especially when I can’t keep my food down, and I’m upchucking into a bucket at my bedside.

⸻

So I come back to vow.

Not as something abstract.

But as something lived.

When I feel like shit—can I still show up?

When I’m reactive—can I recognize it?

When I drift into the story—can I return?

Not perfectly.

But honestly.

⸻

Because the truth is…

I can’t outsource this.

No teacher can do this for me.

No lineage guarantees this.

No amount of sitting hours locks this in.

This isn’t a certification process.

This is a relationship

with what’s actually happening.

⸻

So yeah…

I respect the robe.

But I’m not bowing to the fabric.

I’m bowing to what it points to—

or at least trying to.

⸻

Because the Living Dharma isn’t in the cloth robe.

It’s in this:

this breath

this body

this nausea and exhaustion

this quiet return

again

and again

and again

staying in rhythm.

We don’t put the robe on.

We realize we’ve been wearing it.

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction.

I wear the Tathagata’s teaching,

Saving all sentient beings.

See you soon.

-DT

Not in a philosophical way—

but in the middle of discomfort, medication, and a body negotiating its own survival.

The side effects of this medication have been kicking my ass some days.

Medication designed to help with the antibodies that are trying to attack my kidney transplant.

The fatigue, the nausea, and the muscle pain.

Some days I want to run from it—

and curl up somewhere and say, “Not today.”

As if the struggle won’t find me anyway.

It always does.

You can’t outrun yourself.

⸻

Earlier that morning at the Transplant Center, while receiving my pre-meds, I found myself thinking about something simple and profound:

There is another person’s kidney in my body.

Helping to prolong my life.

Improving my quality of life.

Two sentient beings—two completely different lives—

have shared this one organ.

That’s not philosophy.

It’s not metaphor.

That’s interdependence made flesh.

⸻

Around that same time, I had been reflecting on a Dharma talk by Jisho Warner, where she was discussing the teachings of Kosho Uchiyama in Opening the Hand of Thought.

She spoke about the tension many of us feel—

This sense that we are too small, too narrow…

and the desire to become something wider, deeper, more expansive.

And because we want that, we try to abandon what we are.

The messy parts.

Our dissatisfied parts.

All the parts that hurt.

We want to shed them like a snake sheds its skin—

in favor of some “better” self.

Some “enlightened” version of ourselves.

But that move…

is already a misunderstanding.

⸻

Because I don’t get to leave this self.

Not this body.

This history.

Or this condition.

Not the body navigating chronic illness.

Not the body shaped by race in America.

Not the body sitting in an infusion chair while the world outside feels like it’s unraveling.

I don’t get to step outside of that and then practice the Dharma.

This is where the practice is happening.

⸻

Uchiyama Roshi points to something that, at first, sounds subtle—but is actually radical:

The personal self and the universal self are not two separate things.

The personal self—with all its fears, memories, preferences, and habits—is not something to transcend.

It’s the very place where wisdom and compassion arise.

But so does greed.

And frustration.

And fear.

They all arise here.

⸻

The mistake isn’t that we have a self-centered mind.

We come by that honestly.

The mistake is believing that this small corner—this personal perspective—

is the whole of reality.

And then trying to fix that by becoming something else.

⸻

But sitting there, in that chair, feeling the weight of the medication in my body, I wasn’t experiencing two selves.

I wasn’t experiencing some “higher” universal self floating somewhere above my situation.

I was experiencing this:

A body that carries someone else’s organ.

A life extended through another life.

A moment shaped by countless conditions—medical, historical, social, biological.

This is the universal.

Not apart from the personal—

but expressed through it.

⸻

And outside that room?

There’s a world in motion.

War.

Fear.

Policies.

People navigating systems that weren’t built with them in mind—

and people who have historically benefited from those systems with more access, more protection, more room to breathe.

And I feel that too.

Not just my own preferences, my own discomfort—but the pressure of everyone else’s.

Their fear, anger, and uncertainty.

All of it is moving through the same shared field of life.

⸻

It becomes easy to want to escape.

To clean it up.

Or simplify it.

To divide it into something manageable—

good/bad

right/wrong

self/other

Republican/Democrat

personal/universal

But life doesn’t actually move that way.

That’s language trying to organize something that is fundamentally seamless.

And sometimes… language does a damn good job.

And sometimes—it gets in the way.

⸻

The universal self isn’t something I gain access to once I fix myself.

It’s not something I earn by becoming calmer, more spiritual, more composed.

It’s already here.

It’s the life moving through all of this—

before I label it, before I judge it, before I try to rearrange it into something more comfortable.

⸻

Practice, then, isn’t about abandoning the personal self.

It’s about meeting it—fully.

Not being driven blindly by its preferences…

but not rejecting it either.

Standing in it.

Listening.

Responding.

⸻

Some days, that looks like strength.

And other days, it looks like raw as fuck honesty:

“This shit is hard.”

“My body hurts.”

“This is not what I would choose.”

And still—

not turning away.

⸻

Because I don’t need to become wide and deep.

I need to stop abandoning what’s already here.

⸻

This body.

This moment.

This shared, interwoven life.

Not two.

⸻

Because if this is true—if the personal and universal are not two—then the question becomes:

How do I live this?

⸻

Vow and the Living Dharma

For me, this is where vow enters.

Not as something abstract.

Not as something separate from my life.

But as the way I meet it.

⸻

Vow isn’t about becoming a better version of myself.

It’s not a self-improvement project.

It’s not a way of polishing the personal self into something more acceptable.

Vow is what remains

when I stop trying to escape my life.

⸻

It’s the quiet commitment to stay.

To stay with this body—

even when it hurts.

staying with this moment—

even when it doesn’t match my preferences.

staying with others—

even when the world feels unstable, divided, or heavy.

And the truth is—the world has always been unstable, divided, and heavy.

We just have new ways of seeing it now.

And yeah… humans have a way of making shit even more complicated than it needs to be.

That preference thing again.

⸻

Because if the universal self is not separate from the personal, then vow isn’t something I take on behalf of the world.

It’s something that arises

as this life.

⸻

Sitting in that infusion chair,

feeling the weight of the medication move through my body,

aware that this life is being sustained by another life—

I’m not outside of the Dharma, trying to align with it.

This is it.

This is the field where vow lives.

⸻

The Living Dharma isn’t something I access once I’ve figured things out.

It’s what’s already functioning—in the IV line,

in the breath moving through my lungs, it’s in the donor whose life continues in mine,

in the systems I navigate, in the histories carried in this body.

⸻

To live in accord with the Living Dharma

is not to escape any of that.

It’s to stop turning away.

⸻

It’s to meet selfishness on open ground

without being driven by it.

To feel fear without collapsing into it.

To acknowledge preference

without letting it dictate everything.

⸻

And maybe most importantly—

to recognize that I’m not holding this moment alone.

⸻

Everything that has ever happened

has made this moment possible.

Every cause.

Every condition.

Every person.

Every loss.

Every gift.

All of it… here.

⸻

So vow, for me, becomes something simple.

Not easy—

but simple.

⸻

Stay.

Stay present, honest and responsive.

Stay in rhythm with what’s actually here.

⸻

Not trying to become something else.

Or trying to split myself into pieces—personal here, universal there.

⸻

Just this one life.

Lived fully.

Without turning away.

⸻

Not two.

Stay in your rhythm.

See you soon.

-DT

Recently, someone asked me a question in response to a quote I restacked from a Substack I follow called IN THE MOUNTAIN RETREAT.

The quote came from an article titled “A Life of Illusion — Kōdō Sawaki, Zen Talks.”

It read:

“Life is a dream. It is an illusion. And yet, deceived by that very illusion, human beings commit acts that cannot be undone—not merely for a lifetime, but for eternity.”

And the question they asked was simple:

“How does it matter if it’s really a dream?”

⸻

It’s a fair question.

Because if this is all a dream…

what’s the point?

Why take anything seriously?

But that’s not what’s being pointed to.

Because even in a dream, experience is real while it’s happening.

Pain feels like pain.

Kindness feels like kindness.

Harm lands. Care lands.

The dream-like nature of life doesn’t erase consequence.

If anything… it reveals it more clearly.

⸻

And for me, this isn’t abstract.

I live with a rare disease that requires monthly infusions.

Those treatments put my body through real pain, real exhaustion, real limits.

There’s nothing theoretical about that.

At the same time, I’m navigating a world shaped by identity, history, and perception.

Being Black in America, especially in this moment, can sometimes feel like moving through an absurd kind of fiction—

not because it isn’t real,

but because of how distorted and unequal the experience can be.

And I say this moment in history…

because this is the one I’m currently living in.

But my ancestors had their own version of that “dream”—

one whose consequences are still unfolding now.

Cause and effect doesn’t disappear just because we’re uncomfortable with it.

⸻

Recently, my study group reflected on the Second Pure Precept:

Bearing Witness / Doing Good.

And I realized—I can’t separate that precept from the body I’m practicing in.

Bearing witness isn’t abstract for me.

It happens in a body that carries illness.

A body that carries history.

A body moving through systems that weren’t built with my flourishing in mind.

So sometimes, bearing witness means seeing very clearly:

The conditions I’m standing in.

The ways oppression operates.

The ways illness shapes my energy and capacity.

The realities that may be invisible to others, but are present for me every day.

And often… I feel it in my body first.

A tightening in my jaw.

A contraction that says—something here needs attention.

Practice doesn’t ask me to turn away from that.

It asks me to stay.

⸻

But the precept doesn’t stop at witnessing.

It also asks:

What does doing good look like from here?

And sometimes… doing good doesn’t look like anything heroic.

Sometimes it means telling the truth about what’s happening.

It could mean caring for the body that is carrying so much.

Or it means refusing to internalize systems that say certain lives matter less.

Doing good might look like advocacy.

Or it might look like rest—so that harm doesn’t keep reproducing itself through me.

⸻

So when I hear the question—

“Does it matter if it’s a dream?”

I come back to this:

We don’t all experience the dream the same way.

What feels light and passing to one person

may feel heavy and unrelenting to another.

So I feel that question isn’t something anyone can answer for you.

I think it’s something each of us has to work through

in the conditions we’re actually living in.

⸻

For me, the question shifts.

Not “does it matter?”

But:

How do I move through this life—this dream—

without causing unnecessary harm?

How do I see clearly

without turning away, without letting my anger and frustration blind me?

How do I respond

with as much wisdom and compassion as I can

in these conditions—

not the ones I wish I had,

but the ones that are here?

⸻

Because dream or not…

what we do still matters.

Stay in your rhythm.

See you soon.

-DT

I tell myself that throughout the work day.

Sometimes the mind is quiet enough to receive it.

Sometimes… not so much.

There are moments when everything in me wants to tighten—

to judge, to resist, to push back against what’s happening.

And then there are moments when I remember:

You can’t be upset at things for being what they are.

An apple tree produces apples.

A mind conditioned by fear and ignorance produces harmful speech and action.

That doesn’t make it okay.

But it does make it understandable.

And if I can understand it—even for a moment—

I don’t have to be controlled by my reaction to it.

Easier said than done—but that’s where the work begins.

Not in pretending things aren’t painful.

Not in bypassing what’s difficult or unjust.

But in seeing clearly:

This is what’s here.

Sometimes that clarity comes with a simple thought—

This is fucked up.

And that’s fine. That’s honest.

But I don’t stay there long.

I gather myself.

I take inventory.

Then I move—skillfully.

Because there is work to do.

I can feel what I feel—anger, frustration, grief—

But I don’t have to become those feelings. Because usually my first inclination is to slap the shit outta someone. It ain’t worth the jail time.

It’s best to just observe those things.

And in that observation, something opens.

A small space.

A gap.

A place where I’m no longer trapped inside my own reaction.

From there, I can begin to see more clearly—

past my own conditioning,

past someone else’s conditioning,

past the small, separate worlds we all carry.

And in that seeing, something else becomes available:

Empathy.

Clarity.

Choice.

Not passive acceptance.

Not indifference.

But a grounded response.

Grounded in Faith.

⸻

Faith is not the same as belief.

Belief lives in the mind. It accepts ideas in order to feel steady, to find comfort, to create a sense of ground. It names things, organizes them, and in doing so, tries to manage the uncertainty of experience.

Faith moves in the opposite direction.

Faith does not resolve uncertainty—it enters it.

It is the willingness to remain in not-knowing, to stay present with what arises before the mind can label it, soften it, or turn it into something manageable. Faith is not an idea we hold. It is a surrender we live.

It is the quiet consent to be pulled by something deeper than preference, deeper than identity—into the unfolding of the Living Dharma.

And that pull isn’t coming from outside of us.

It’s not something we acquire.

Not something we’re given.

Not something we have to go searching for.

It’s already here.

Faith isn’t an external force acting on us—it’s something inherent.

Something we remember more than something we build.

The symbols, the teachings, the practices—they don’t give us faith.

They point us back to it.

And in that remembering, the self we try to stabilize begins to loosen… to dissolve… to fall away.

Not as loss, but as passage.

Through the gateless gate.

⸻

Because we’re human, we get distracted.

We get caught on what we can see, what we can hold, what we can point to.

We mistake the symbol for the source.

We fixate on the person pointing the way, instead of the way itself.

And that’s natural.

External symbols aren’t the problem.

They have their place.

They help when our faith isn’t steady enough to carry us.

They help make the path visible when our vision is blurred—when we’ve lost our sense of direction.

A teaching, a teacher, a practice, a ritual—these can all serve as reminders.

But they are reminders.

Not the thing itself.

At some point, the invitation is to see clearly:

What we’re looking for was never outside of us.

The symbol points.

The teacher points.

The practice points.

But the seeing—the walking—the returning—that’s ours.

It always has been.

⸻

So faith, for me, isn’t something I reach for when life gets easy.

It’s what I return to in the middle of the storm.

Not to escape it—

but to stand in it

without losing my rhythm.

Because seeing things as they are doesn’t mean becoming passive.

It means showing up for what is—clearly.

It means staying steady enough to respond instead of reacting.

To help instead of harm.

To act with the best understanding available in this moment.

Even when the moment is messy.

Even when it hurts.

So I return—again and again—

to that steady place.

Not perfect.

Not always successful.

But willing.

Willing to see.

Willing to feel.

Willing to act.

This is what it means, for me,

to offer service to the Living Dharma.

To meet what is—clearly, honestly—and still choose to show up.

See you soon.

-DT

Not because the information isn’t there, but because the conditions for truly seeing and receiving it clearly haven’t yet come together.

When I went back on dialysis in the fall of 2008—after losing my second kidney transplant and being misdiagnosed with TTP—it was a bitter pill to swallow. Some days it was hard to sit with.

That’s the thing about Zazen.

It’s just you sitting with things as they are.

Including the shit you bring with you—the spoiled stench of sorrow, regret, preference, and lost dreams.

Zen teachers often say we must “put things down.”

Let them go.

Drop the baggage we carry.

But sometimes you can’t.

Sometimes life asks you to keep moving while you’re still holding it. Illness. Grief. Fear. Responsibilities that don’t disappear just because we wish they would.

Stillness isn’t what happens when you drop everything.

It’s what you practice while carrying it all—with clarity.

My current teacher, Koshin Sensei, often asks:

How do we stand on the receptive ground of the Dharma and respond with our awakened mind, rather than our deluded mind?

In 2008, I didn’t realize it, but this was the beginning of learning how to stay in my rhythm.

During that time, I simply continued sitting with where I was. All of it. I tried not to turn away from the anger or the grief. I allowed myself to mourn the losses.

I think we have to grieve the parts of ourselves we lose.

Growth is strange that way. We celebrate becoming someone new, while also grieving the person we used to be.

There’s a quote from Steven Moffat, the writer and showrunner for Doctor Who, that has always stayed with me:

“We all change when you think about it. We’re all different people throughout our lives. And that’s OK, that’s good, you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.”

My third stretch on dialysis lasted from the fall of 2008 until November of 2014.

During that time, I deepened my practice. I moved into a steadier rhythm. I continued working. I continued sitting.

And I followed a suggestion Barbara, my transplant coordinator at VCU, had given me when I lost my second kidney.

“Keep researching,” she said. “Check every so often. See if anything new is emerging.”

So every few months, I would search.

Not obsessively. Just a quiet check-in.

Then in 2012, something strange happened.

I came across an article about a woman in Maine whose case mirrored mine almost exactly. She had lost her kidney at twenty-five. She had gone through two transplants and lost both.

But there was a new drug that allowed her to receive another transplant.

The drug was called Soliris.

At my next dialysis treatment, I brought it up to my nephrologist.

Before I could finish explaining, she stopped me.

She had been researching something as well.

A rare genetic disorder called aHUS—a disease that could easily be misdiagnosed as being TTP.

And there was a new drug being used in treatment.

I interrupted her mid-sentence.

“Soliris?”

She laughed and nodded.

What followed was a long collaboration between doctors. My nephrologist referred me to a hematologist at the oncology center. Tests were run. My team at VCU reopened my case. As it turned out, they were already studying Soliris and its potential for transplant patients.

I had unknowingly become one of the cases they were examining.

After years of uncertainty about why my native kidneys had failed so catastrophically, the answer finally arrived.

aHUS.

I began Soliris treatment soon after.

For the first time in a long while, I felt relief.

I remember telling my teacher, Sato Sensei, about the discovery.

In his usual blunt way, he listened, nodded once, and said:

“This is a damn good present moment to be in.”

And he was right.

After so many years of not knowing, there was finally an answer. The body was still fragile, dialysis still part of my life, but there was direction again.

I didn’t realize at the time that it would be one of the last teachings I would receive from him.

Six months later, Sato Sensei died from cardiovascular complications related to diabetes and dialysis. Patients with diabetes on dialysis face a significantly higher mortality risk—nearly forty percent higher—primarily because of cardiovascular disease.

I was heartbroken.

Sato Sensei had been my first Zen teacher. And one of the things he used to say to me often was simple:

“Stay in your rhythm.”

At the time, I thought he meant posture.

Breath.

Discipline.

But over the years, I’ve come to understand that he was pointing to something much larger.

There is a rhythm to the Living Dharma.

A rhythm to breathing in and breathing out.

A rhythm to illness and healing.

A rhythm to grief, anger, joy, and returning again and again to practice.

When we fall out of rhythm, life feels like resistance.

When we return to it, even difficult moments begin to move.

2013 turned into 2014.

Two years after beginning Soliris treatment, on Thanksgiving evening in 2014—five years after my second rejected transplant—I received a call.

A kidney had become available.

“Get to the hospital.”

And just like that, another turning in the rhythm of my life.

⸻

The Thing About Vow

Human beings like to imagine we stand alone at the center of things.

Separate. Special. Entitled.

But nothing in this life happens alone.

It is all an interconnected, messy, beautiful movement.

We draw small borders around our lives and declare:

This is mine.

These are my desires.

These are my victories and losses.

We guard those borders like a fortress and call that identity.

But the fortress is too small.

Too small for what we actually are.

You possess nothing.

Nothing possesses you.

You and the world are part of one unbroken motion.

The moment you believe your life exists only for you, you have already stepped off the path.

The bodhisattva vows are not poetry.

They are coordinates.

A way of orienting a life toward all beings, not toward our own reflection.

Sato Sensei used to say something else:

When you drift—and you will drift—you don’t hide.

You don’t perform guilt.

You return.

You bow to your misalignment.

You steady your breath.

And you step back into vow.

This is how practice becomes endless.

Not because we chase enlightenment.

But because we refuse to abandon the world—or ourselves—no matter how messy, selfish, frightened, or broken we may become.

And so we keep returning.

Back into the rhythm.

Vow does not make life easier.

Bodies fail. Teachers die. Kidneys collapse. Plans dissolve.

But vow gives us a direction to walk when everything else feels uncertain.

And if we drift—as we all will—practice simply asks that we return.

Return to the breath.

Return to the body.

Return to the rhythm of the Living Dharma that was there all along—waiting for the conditions to reveal it.

See you soon,

-DT

Supplemental Note

A friend asked about the section where I wrote that stillness isn’t about “dropping everything,” but about practicing while carrying what life places in our hands.

What I’m pointing to there isn’t indifference or denial. One of the teachings I’ve received from Koshin Sensei is—

Zen practice doesn’t ask us to pretend that something painful isn’t painful. Illness still hurts. Loss still hurts. Fear still feels like fear.

The practice is not about dropping the reality of what we are experiencing.

It’s about loosening our grip on the idea that the experience should be different from what it is.

We don’t have to like what is happening.

But we do have to see it clearly.

When we cling tightly to how we want things to be, we end up fighting reality itself. That struggle adds another layer of suffering on top of the conditions we are already facing.

Practice invites us to meet the moment as it actually is—without denial, without pretending, and without the extra burden of insisting that life conform to our preferences.

We’re not dropping the difficulty.

We’re dropping the demand that it be something else.

And from that clarity, we can finally respond to life as it is.

There’s something about being stuck in a medical chair that forces you to slow down. You can’t rush anywhere. You can’t multitask. Eventually, your mind runs out of distractions.

At some point, you just shut the fuck up and start noticing things.

Somewhere between the blood draw and the IV drip, I started thinking about how many people it took for me to be sitting in that chair.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

I drove to the clinic in my truck designed by engineers and built by workers I’ll never meet. I drove on roads paved by construction crews. I stopped at traffic lights designed by someone who studied electrical systems.

Street signs. Roads. The building itself.

People made all of it.

Inside the clinic, the chain continued.

I checked in at the desk. My information was sent electronically to the lab, so they knew I had arrived. Eventually, a nurse called my name and drew blood using needles designed by engineers, manufactured by workers, packaged by someone else, labeled and shipped, and delivered through a long invisible chain of labor.

And that nurse standing in front of me had her own chain of causes and conditions: childhood, teachers, mentors, financial decisions, and the moment, somewhere along the way, when she decided to train as a nurse.

Her path and mine—two long rivers of conditions—intersected in a small lab room on a random-ass weekday morning.

Sitting there in that chair, it hit me again:

We never hold vow alone.

The Living Dharma isn’t an individual sport.

It’s a team sport.

Not a team in the conventional sense—like an organized group with jerseys and a scoreboard—but an organic, interdependent, ever-moving network of conditions.

Events giving rise to other events.

This is because of that.

That is because of something before it.

A chain stretching far beyond what any one person can see.

⸻

In Buddhism, we often talk about the self and no-self.

Zen teachings often say there is no fixed, permanent self.

Not that we don’t exist, but that we don’t exist independently.

We’re more like a flame than a statue. Always changing. Always shaped by conditions around us.

Zen often calls this the Middle Way.

Not an eternal soul.

Not nothingness either.

Just this dynamic, interconnected flow.

⸻

In Zen practice, we often talk about the small self and the big self.

The small self is the personal “I”—the personality, the identity, the individual story.

Practice encourages us to widen that view into big mind, the vast field where everything is interconnected.

But here’s the thing I keep returning to:

We can’t forget the small self.

Because the universe doesn’t express itself in abstraction.

It expresses itself through particular lives.

Through particular bodies.

Through particular histories.

Zen teacher Eihei Dōgen once said that when we forget the separate self, we are “actualized by the ten thousand things.”

In other words, life itself is constantly expressed through the conditions around us — through people, places, systems, histories, and relationships.

In my case, it expresses itself through a life shaped by illness, by healthcare systems, by creative work, by community, and by living in a Black body in America.

That shit matters.

Those conditions are not illusions.

They are part of the reality through which practice unfolds.

Zen sometimes speaks about relative truth and absolute truth.

Absolute truth points to the vast, boundless nature of reality where nothing is separate.

Relative truth is the world of lived experience: bodies, histories, systems, culture, power, suffering, joy.

Real practice holds both.

The absolute reminds us that everything is interconnected.

The relative reminds us that conditions matter.

⸻

Teachers like Zen Master Dōgen spoke about this beautifully.

He said that when one person practices, the entire world practices with them.

At first that can sound poetic or mystical.

But when you start looking closely at life, it begins to make sense.

Nothing we do happens alone.

Even something as simple as two people having a conversation carries enormous history inside it.

Each person arrives carrying culture, language, family history, education, trauma, memory, mood, and the conditions of their life.

The moment that unfolds between them is not just two individuals interacting.

It’s an entire universe of causes and conditions meeting itself.

⸻

This is where vow becomes important.

Because while conditions shape the situation, vow shapes how we participate in it.

We don’t control the entire web of interdependence.

But we do have some agency in the direction we move within it.

Vow is the direction.

It’s the compass.

The Bodhisattva vow isn’t about heroic self-sacrifice.

It’s about allowing compassion and wisdom to move through the particular conditions of our life.

Through illness.

Through race.

Through work.

Through relationships.

Through community.

Through the very ordinary moments where life is unfolding.

Even an infusion chair on a random weekday morning.

⸻

This is why I say:

We never hold vow alone.

Every step of practice rests on the labor, care, and presence of countless beings.

Seen and unseen.

Past and present.

The Living Dharma is happening everywhere.

In nurses drawing blood.

Construction crews paving roads.

Teachers passing down wisdom.

Conversations between two people, trying to understand each other.

All of it is the universe expressing itself through particular lives.

And vow is how we choose to move within that unfolding.

The Living Dharma isn’t something any of us practices alone.

It’s the quiet teamwork of an interconnected world.

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.

To study the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be actualized by the ten thousand things.” - Eihei Dōgen Genjōkōan

See you soon.

-DT