In this episode, Melissa Blacker speaks with Julie Paquette-Moore of the Engaged Mindfulness Institute about addressing challenging topics in mindfulness instruction, the intersection of mindfulness with ethics, and embracing uncertainty.
Teaching online vs. in-person.
Embodiment & improvisation in teaching.
Approaching difficult topics in mindfulness teaching.
Mindfulness, ethics, and not knowing.
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Melissa Blacker served as an MBSR teacher and programs director at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA, USA, established by Jon Kabat-Zinn, from 1992 to 2012. She is also a Zen teacher (Roshi), co-founder, guiding teacher, and Abbot of Boundless Way Zen, a multi-lineage Zen community based in New England. Boundless Way Zen is dedicated to adapting Buddhist practices for contemporary Western contexts, aligning with the modern mindfulness movement. Melissa maintains a private practice in contemplative counseling and offers supervision for mindfulness teaching. More about her work can be found at https://worcesterzen.org/teachers/
Podcast Transcript
Julie Paquette-Moore 0:03
Hello, and welcome to another Teaching Mindfulness Summit. I'm here today with Melissa Myozen Blacker. It's lovely to have you, Melissa.
Melissa Blacker 0:13
Thank you. It's great to be here with you, Julie.
Julie Paquette-Moore 0:15
It's nice to introduce your background and bio first so that the audience can understand where you're coming from. Melissa Myozen Blacker Rōshi is a Soto Zen priest and a Dharma heir to James Myōun Ford, Rōshi in two lineages: An ordained Sōtō transmission through Jiyu Kennett, Rōshi and a lay kōan-teaching lineage through John Tarrant, Rōshi, along with her husband, David Dae An Rynick, Rōshi.
Julie Paquette-Moore 0:54
She is a resident teacher at Boundless Ways and Temple in Worcester, Mass. She holds degrees in Anthropology, Music, and Counseling Psychology. From 1992 to 2012, she was a teacher and director of programs at the Center for Mindfulness, founded by Jon Kabat Zinn. Her writing appears in several collections, including Best Buddhist Writing, 2012, and The Hidden Lamp, and she is co-editor of The Book of Mu: Essential Writings on Zens Most Important Koan. Her writing also appears in Buddhist magazines, including Shambala Sun, Lion's Roar, and Buddhadharma. So welcome, Melissa.
Melissa Blacker 1:38
Thank you, Julie.
Julie Paquette-Moore 1:40
It's good to have you here. I'm wondering if we could dig into your background a little bit further. You have so much experience in Buddhist teachings and mainstream mindfulness teaching and training. So, can you tell us more about your background and how you came to where you are?
Melissa Blacker 2:06
I first met Jon Kabat Zinn at UMass in 1991; I was already a Zen Buddhist student. I'd been studying Buddhism for a few years, maybe about 10 years or so. And I was also functioning as a psychotherapist; that's how I made my money. What little there was of it. When I was introduced to John by another woman, Alana Rosenbaum, who was another teacher at the Center for Mindfulness, she thought I would be a perfect candidate for somebody to do the training with John. He was just starting to do this training with people who were spiritual leaders, psychologists, or doctors to learn his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program.
And that's still an aspect of the training in many mainstream Mindfulness. But in those years, it was new. He had just made it up. He wanted to know how to transmit what he'd created to other people. And so this was one of the early trainings I attended, by chance. My husband had just gotten a job in Worcester, and I was trying to pull things together as a psychotherapist and still studying with my Zen teacher. This eight-week class was revelatory in bringing together what I knew about Buddhism, Zen, and meditation. Everyone listening to this probably knows because mainstream mindfulness is now mainstream. It's a fantastic way to present these ancient teachings to people who usually wouldn't go to, for example, a Zen temple like the one where I teach now. Those who might go to psychotherapy but not directly for meditation instruction.
So it's a beautiful mixture of those two important things in my life. So it felt perfect, and I asked John if he would give me a job. At the end of the eighth class, I approached him and asked, 'Can I work here'? And he said, 'No, we don't have any money. We can't pay you,' and I said, 'I'll work for nothing. I'll work for nothing’. So he found me a job as an assistant to the secretarial staff, and I did filing, answered phones, and just hung around. Little by little, they started giving me talks. You know, somebody needs to give a talk to an arthritis support group, Melissa. Would you do that? Nobody else wanted to do it, so I got to teach.
And my first class was, we had an inner city program, which was free, and it had free childcare. And there was free transportation to the group. And there was a Spanish version and an English-speaking version. I also taught the English-speaking version, but I also spoke Spanish. So, it was helpful to be there in the clinic in Worcester's inner city. That was a great way of learning how to teach people who were not upper-middle-class white people who were well-educated. They often weren't well educated, although sometimes they were, and they'd fallen on hard times.
It was a way to find a translation of what I understood about Zen Buddhism to people who couldn't care less about Buddhism but who were suffering so profoundly. For many reasons, there was a 50% dropout rate in these inner city classes, people would end up in jail, or they'd relapse and start using drugs again, or things would happen in their families; there was always something.
We did a little research, and John wrote a paper with a few other people comparing before-and-after self-reports about health and well-being. What we noticed with the inner-city group is that their self-esteem levels went up from almost the bottom to the middle of the scale. The upper-middle-class white folks started a little bit below that and went way up off the charts. However, the difference between the beginning and end was huge compared to the regular group at the hospital.
So we were very excited about it. After I taught there, I think maybe just one class I got invited to teach at the regular program, which was people paid for it at the time insurance paid for it, and then that petered out, and people were self-pay. So we had a whole range of socioeconomic groups that I was privileged to work with.
And when John first started the program, it was for people with chronic pain. But as the years went on, it was more and more for people with all kinds of suffering, especially psychological suffering, people with anxiety and depression, and all kinds of other diagnoses, both physical and mental. So it's always a mixed group. And I should mention here that I've often told this story about myself in the middle of my story; it always comes out slightly different because there's so much that happened.
But before I started working at the Center for Mindfulness, I was a grief counselor; that was my specialty, and I worked with people who were dying in Connecticut. I then moved to Massachusetts and couldn't find a job, so I answered an ad in a paper; you never get a job by answering the paper; they were looking for people, grief therapists for homicide survivors. And I had no idea what that meant. I thought maybe somebody tried to murder them or something, but it was for family members whose loved ones had been murdered. And it was pretty intense. And there was one group, and it was also an eight-week group. And so I was teaching these people basic coping skills around grief and mourning, and also the particular anger and difficulties that come with violent deaths. And I was also, at the same time teaching a newly offered class.
The mindfulness class and the grief group were very different. In the mindfulness class, we would start in class one with everyone saying why they were there so people would share their stories of suffering. But then we wouldn't go back to that after we started teaching people to meditate and moved away from the individual stories to the more universal feeling of suffering and how to cope with that and all the different ways that happened in the body, in the heart, and in the mind.
In the homicide group, we just kept going over the same ground again and again and again. The idea was that if you told your story enough times, you'd heal from it, but we now know that that's not true.
So we're talking about the early 90s. This was what was in fashion then around grief.
But it helps rehearse the story of suffering to do that. And one thing that Mindfulness is great about is, and Buddhism also teaches, the same thing is that these stories are constructions of the mind to help explain the world to ourselves. So, if you keep going over the same ground, you're going to have a very robust sense of what happened to you. And you know, the injustice of it, if you don't go over it, but keep being suspicious of seeing thoughts as thoughts, as we say, and the emotions that come with it, and the physical sensations that accompany it, then you can free yourself of the grip of the stories.
In the last group I did for the homicide clinic, I had a woman who was in that group, and in my mindfulness group at UMass, her son had been murdered. And when she saw me when she came to class, she said to me, don't tell anybody why I'm here; I don't want anyone to know about my son; I'm just going to say I have arthritis. I said, " That's fine. After a couple of weeks in the grief group, she came to me and said, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to do the mindfulness class. So I'm going to drop out. And I said, Why, and she said, I'm just so tired of being identified as a person whose son was murdered. I am much more than that. This was after three or four weeks of meditating and doing everything we do in a mindfulness class. In the very last class, she told the mindfulness group why she was there, which was very brave of her, and the group had become very bonded and so supportive of her that even remembering that story, that's a constructed story I have about.
It brought me to what I am doing in this grief counseling group- the mindfulness group is much more nourishing for me as a teacher and counselor. So I quit my job there. And by that time, I had been teaching for a while at UMass. So that's what I kept doing. I still had a psychotherapy practice on the side. However, I taught at UMass for quite a while. It was 1999. They asked me to start training people, so I had people in my classes, just like John had done with me.
Saki Santorelli, who took over running the clinic when John retired, created this excellent training template, where people would take the class, have regular meetings with the teacher, as I had, but then go on and do in-depth study and practice, you know, a lot like the group that you're part of.
So, I became the assistant director of that program and the Mindfulness Clinic. I also had a colleague, Florence Milio Meyer, the other assistant director, so we were paired. And so we did that for a while. Simultaneously, I studied Zen and became increasingly involved in the world of Zen. And became a teacher of Zen. That was maybe in the early 2000s. My
teacher gave me what's called transmission. So I became a Sensei, a teacher. And then later a Roshi, which means old teacher. And I was interested, at that point, in the secularization of Mindfulness. I love Buddhism and all the bells and whistles. Buddha's, the statues and the chanting, and the religious aspects of it.
At UMass at the Center for Mindfulness, we were very careful to avoid any religious aspect in our teaching so that it would be more widely acceptable to all kinds of people. Still, a couple of people always want more; they want to dig deeper into their own spirituality.
And I couldn't do that in the classes so much because I was following the curriculum. But some of those people, actually one of them is about to become my dharma heir, a Professor of Psychology, who took my training at UMass. And then he wanted more. So, he started studying Zen with me. And that was probably 15, not 20 years ago. And he's just kept at it like I did, and he is a wonderful guy. So that's very nourishing to me right now.
I kept going, even after I left the Center for Mindfulness. However, I kept working with people individually to supervise them and their mindfulness teaching. And that started to drop away, too, as the years went by; it seemed like my Zen students were taking more time. And it was hard to make time for those folks. But some of them ended up studying Zen with me. I would say a handful of people from that era are still with me, and part of our group is that we have a bigger organization, Boundless Ways and Temple, which is the physical location.
But we have groups from Hawaii to Denmark, all over the country and the world. When the pandemic hit, we didn't know what to do. Within two days, all the techie-minded people in the Zen group figured out how to do it on Zoom, and we'd meet 14 times a week. Every week, there was a session somewhere, and many were at the temple. And it took two days. And there we were, and we started doing retreats online. And we got a bigger group of people who wanted to study with us. So that was that the pandemic was a blessing in a way.
And that's what I'm doing. Now, we have intensive meditation retreats that happen, either in person, online, or hybrid, like many people do. It was the discovery that pretty much everybody needed to survive somehow. So this is how we survived. And we've just kept going with it. And it's pretty satisfying. Sometimes, people came to us through my old mindfulness connections, which is interesting, too.
Julie Paquette-Moore 17:44
You've said so much, and I have several follow-up questions. At the end, you said something interesting about the shift to online teaching. I'd love to hear your process with that. For some people, that's such an adjustment, and now it's a normal part of this world.
Melissa Blacker 18:13
We're in a new space around teaching. Certainly, when I was teaching Mindfulness at the hospital, online stuff was just beginning to be a part of what we were doing. We could do Skype meetings with trainees who had come to UMass from overseas and wanted more nourishment.
And that always felt inadequate, like talking on the phone with pictures. But when we started thinking, this must have been shortly before I left, so maybe around 2009 and 2010, if my memory serves, we had somebody on board at the Center for Mindfulness who wanted to do online teaching. And many of us, including me, said not me, don't include me. I don't want to do it. It felt like nothing would happen without the heart-to-heart connection and the physical, you know, breathing the same air, which is ironic regarding the pandemic, but I couldn't even get my head around it.
But then suddenly, we had to, or we would have had to close down, you know, this moment in 2020. I remember it was March, it was Friday, March 13. We had our last Friday morning practice period at seven o'clock in the morning, Eastern Time. We hugged, and we said good luck. We're going to go online Sunday night. So that will be on Zoom, and we will see how it goes. I was grieving at the end of what I saw; I didn't think it would work; I didn't think we would be able to touch hearts like that. What amazed me was that this had something to do with the human brain's capacity to adjust. Not everybody could do it.
We lost people between that Friday, and that Sunday, we lost people they left, we never saw them again. So okay, that's fine. Bye-bye. But if anyone can join us Sunday night, let's see what happens. We figured out how to do our chanting, which on Zoom is impossible. But you know, everyone's muted. Only when people are leading the chanting can you chant along with yourself. We had to figure out how to do Zen, which is all about individual meetings; teachers give interviews and practice interviews with students. And we thought, how are we going to do that? We figured out how to do it on Zoom. Giving talks wasn't such a big deal.
But we often do Dharma dialogues and question-and-answer periods. How are we going to do that? So that was amazing that we figured out all the technicalities, but the heart connection surprised me the most so that I could log on to Zoom at the beginning of a practice period, and all these faces popped up. Then, we start to ring some bells, and we go into meditation. It was like being with people in the temple for these daily sits; for these 14 or so daily sits, we would get five to 15 people. But now we get lots of people, and it's very powerful to see this screen populate with still not many people, with 20 to 40 people.
Then, we started doing retreats. We thought that would never work. But it turned out they were powerful because people were in their rooms, at home. In the in-between sessions, the rest periods, we would call them at regular retreats, and we instructed people to maintain their meditation practice with their families and their pets and whatever else was going on. And people had these unique experiences. And they'd come back and tell us about them.
So we didn't dumb down or dull down any essential teachings. I was afraid that would happen, too. I ended up putting up a physical screen here, so it's not too distracting if you see my bookshelves. But the mind does this weird thing where I feel like I'm sitting with you. I'm almost 70 years old; I didn't think this would be possible all my life; I had been in person with my teacher. And just these last four years, something clicked; an adjustment was made, and most people in our community could adjust. So now the temple is open again for in-person practice, and hardly anybody comes. That's not true. But we get, you know, just like we used to, maybe 10, five to 15 people come to a hybrid practice. So we put television screens in the Zendo, with microphones everywhere and cameras. And so we can be sitting there instructing, and people can log in and see us, and we can see them and talk to them. And we're noticing now that there's a drift away from the hybrid practice to in-person or fully Zoom practice. We're watching that to see where it goes.
Melissa Blacker 24:30
A small group of people come to the daily sits in person. However, for retreats, many people want to come in person and not on Zoom. So, even on our hybrids, we have very few Zoom people and many more people in the physical temple.
So, it's a little of a pioneering time for teaching the Dharma, which has always been a physical and emotional connection. And this flat screen here with a little pixels, our brains actually can turn that and see you three-dimensionally, you're not three dimensional, you're just a little tiny. But that's also how brains work, how the visual cortex works, you know, the different little pieces of information are coming in through the eyes, and the brain rearranges them into identifiable shapes. So it's not surprising this is happening. Yeah, I am curious about what will happen. We have our overseas students. One woman comes in from Thailand and sits at night, and it's our morning. It's her morning, and it's our night. And you know, I don't think she'll ever get to the temple. She might; she has been there before on her travels. But it's terrific to see her settling in. And, you know, we all know her intimately now, in a funny way.
Julie Paquette-Moore 26:12
Yes, you said so many exciting things. I love how you talked about your adjustment. As a teacher, it's interesting to learn about your adaptability and how you responded to that.
You then said some critical things about how you set up the container, like this whole technical aspect that went on very quickly to get people online and figure out how to present this. You talked about setting up the container for the folks who were coming online. And so I'm curious about teaching: Were there things you felt you had to adjust to being online? Or is there something about embodiment that ends up shining through?
Melissa Blacker 27:24
The embodiment and something shining through, that's been my experience. And as you were talking, it made me reflect a little bit on some other factors that informed my teaching. Right from the beginning, even when we had a little practice group, I was officially a teacher and taught at the Center for Mindfulness.
My husband and I had been in an improvisational dance and music group in our 20s. And we performed; I was a musician more and a dancer, but we would start and, as a musician, I'd make a sound, and he'd make a movement, or the other dancers and musicians would join us sometimes. We had almost no structure. So we had to have a form because we were presenting this in a concert or rehearsing with each other. And this complete improvisational quality, I think, it seeped into our bones.
I was trained as a classical musician and a jazz musician. And there's a little improvisation in classical music. Of course, there's a tremendous amount of jazz. But this free improvisation made me trust that whatever I started saying or doing, I could sort of let it ride, and I would follow it. So that was certainly true when I taught Mindfulness. We had this eight-week curriculum. It wasn't rigid, but it was clear that this happened. And that happened, and this happened. But I could move with the energies of the people in the room. And sometimes, something that wasn't supposed to happen in class ended up happening in class because that's where things were happening. And so there was a lot of improvisation like that.
My husband also trained in teaching Mindfulness, and he and I taught a lot of Mindfulness together overseas. We taught mindfulness retreats. So, we had to take the basic structures of a retreat, which are sitting and walking, talks, individual meetings, and group discussions, and improvise within them to bring whoever happened to show up for these retreats into the flow of what was happening. But also, as you mentioned, a structure that we've always had a container structure for all this, that's clear, we start at this time this happens, that happens. You have a score with chords and a melody like a jazz score. And that's it. You take it wherever it happens to go.
Yeah, so I always felt like that teaching mindfulness. And then teaching Zen, which is also very straightforward. Traditionally, you do a few things. And there's a lot of silence. We brought some mindfulness teachings into teaching Zen, especially the group process that I learned from my teachers at UMass from John and everyone who followed this skill with responding to someone, and almost not responding to the words, but to the energy that was coming through the words. Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet who wrote a book called The Words Under the Words.
I know many people from other Zen groups were surprised that there was so much improvisation and responsiveness in the group practice. So when we went online, we had all that, like everyone who studied with us up until that point, and we had that feeling of being met, physically, emotionally, a little bit, cognitively, probably a lot. But definitely, the embodiment part had been there. So that even though we were just pixels, meeting pixels, and you know, the auditory stuff, of course, talking on the phone was something we were all used to. The physical part was missing: no smells, tastes, or touch. But it all came through, and I just kept being surprised. But I've had many moments since the pandemic began in March of 2020 of incredibly intense connection with individuals and with groups. People softened and were present in ways they hadn't known they could be. So this is the way of Mindfulness, improvisational music, and Zen teachings-they are all informed by each other.
Julie Paquette-Moore 32:47
Yeah, that's funny. I was thinking about the intersection of all of it, and I was curious about that intersection in Zen Buddhism. You also mentioned jazz and trust, trust in yourself, in the teachings, the practice, etc.
Melissa Blacker 33:55
Yeah, I love that you picked that out on what I was saying because I think it's not necessarily a trust of my capacity, although that plays into it. So we're all unique human beings with unique histories and different places of ease in our teaching, but we also trust in the material. And trust in the practice of meditation itself. There's not much that we have to do. We have been trying to trace who initially said this, and we think Krishna Murthy is the source of this quote, saying that enlightenment is an accident. But meditation makes you accident-prone.
Yeah, who knows who said it? But I love it. The idea is that you set up certain conditions, and you don't have to work that hard for those conditions to bear fruit; that people have insights and clarity and a little loosening of their attachment to the self-story. As I said before, there's more freedom, there's more, even in the middle of terrible things happening, intense suffering, there's the possibility of moving into your life with this freedom and clarity so that we're not stuck in this place of despair and discouragement.
And these days, that's one of the most important things personally, I teach. There's so much negativity right now in the world; at least, I perceive it because things are terrible. But also, they're not. Other things are going on simultaneously, but we ignore them. I'm gonna say this: it's a little risky. But when the war started in Ukraine, everybody's minds turned to Ukraine. And then when the war started in Gaza, Ukraine-whatever, now Gaza. And this is what human beings do; we forget that suffering happens all the time, everywhere. And we can only perceive little bits of it, and then we get entrained.
And what meditation does is that it opens us up, broken hearts or open hearts. There's a way of saying all this is happening and how do I meet it without getting overwhelmed because it's easy to do. I just mentioned two world conflicts; there are hundreds of things going on, 1000s of things every day, everywhere, and millions of things.
So, how do we live our lives that way? Whether it's Mindfulness, Zen, or psychotherapy, the idea behind any of those teachings is to meet suffering directly and make some space around it so that we see there's more than suffering; there's a beautiful variety of experiences that can be touched at any moment. Then, it doesn't matter whether it's online or in person. There's some essence, quality that I think people want the relief of being able just to be present with whatever this is, even if it's intense anger or intense pain, there's a way of meeting it, it doesn't mean that it's not wrenching. We're just about to do a funeral for a little girl who only lived for a day; just even thinking about that, it's so painful. And, of course, it's not a unique situation, but these things happen and are so terrible. And yet, the couple when we met with them, the parents were so present in a very impressive way. They were devastated and awake.
Julie Paquette-Moore 38:27
It's so interesting. It goes back to meeting the moment in a very specific way. And you also talked about flexibility. So, I imagine that the more open and flexible we are when meeting the moment, the more possibilities there are. You talk specifically about how we turn our attention to certain things like this war and that war, and how, if that's the only place that our attention, we can see the world as just one negative one big cloud of negativity or the way it might be. So it's interesting what you're saying in terms of being able to meet the moment and having some flexibility and openness in how we are meeting these situations that are so difficult.
Melissa Blacker 39:25
Yeah, and it's not to be callous or turn away from things, but really to be able to face what's going on in the world entirely. And then through that capacity to say, 'Because of who I am, I could meet that situation this way.' Everybody's got a different way, and if everybody's energies are freed up to go toward healing and clarity, I think there's some reason for being optimistic.
Julie Paquette-Moore 40:06
I agree with that. You said something interesting: How do we as teachers bring this into our teachings, whether it's mainstream mindfulness teachers or through Zen? How do we bring in these topics and these talks? Is it what your students are coming to you with? I'm just curious for you, as a teacher and teaching many others, many different avenues. How do you approach these subjects?
Melissa Blacker 40:44
Well, you know, it's a beautiful question, Julie, because if I'm going to give a talk, I need to practice what I'm talking about. Right now, you, this clarity, this open-mindedness, this grief of grief is present, the anger of anger is present, to the happiness of happiness is present, and then it comes together that this is what my students have been talking about. You know, because I do get to meet with people individually. Not everybody in the community meets individually. That's a choice they have. But I get a sense of what's going on. And then I have to digest it, really taste it for myself. What is it about this that's connected to the teachings?
So when it was mindfulness teaching, they would be the teachings about being present in the moment. If there are Zen teachings, there are certain things that we want to get across to people. Traditional teachings in Zen, for example, I taught a lot of Zen in disguise as a mindfulness teacher. I was doing a lot of simultaneous translation, which was important. A bunch of us did; many people with deep spiritual backgrounds had come to the center around that time, and, you know, Sufis, Buddhists, and Hindus, and all kinds of different religious backgrounds like that. We always talked about how we translate stuff we know about how the heart and mind work.
However, one of the teachings in Zen, and found throughout Buddhism, is focused on the three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. And all you have to do is look at the front page of The New York Times and see evidence for those things. You know, ignorance. So, in some Buddhist traditions, those are called the three poisons. And there are antidotes for them. But in Zen, instead of thinking, here's anger, and we need to be kinder, and that's the antidote. We let the anger get bigger and clearer to free it from its stories. Then, the energy of that anger turns not into kindness but wisdom and clarity; it can cut through a lot of bull if you own the anger, and the same thing happens with greed, the 'I want' mind. If you give that some space to blossom, it turns into compassion, just naturally, like I want to connect to you, I want to be here, I want to have us have a connection. 'Oh, you're suffering. Oh, well, I want to feel that too with you. It's not mine, exactly. But it is mine. It's ours.
And the ignorance thing, too, I love that because ignorance, when you leave it alone and just let it blossom, turns into equanimity and balance, like there's a kind of easeful quality that arises. So this is the teaching I use in various ways, mostly to reassure people that what you're feeling as a negative thing in your heart is human, and you don’t want to be angry if there's something to be angry about. You don't want to open up if what you need to be is diluted to protect your heart. You don't need to get everything on the internet if you know that you're longing for this connection. That's just one small example of a screen I might see through.
Julie Paquette-Moore
You can also hear the universality in that, even though you're talking about it specifically through a Zen lens. Regardless of your belief, we all suffer from greed, ignorance, and delusion. I would be curious how you would speak to that and if it's very different from when you taught more in a secular realm.
Melissa Blacker
I do have to keep adjusting to the audience even now. Right? If I teach at a university, I must see who's in the audience and start from the secular place. But the secular place is rooted in the universality of suffering. It doesn't matter if you've ever heard a word of Buddhism. That was the Buddha's first teaching. He called it the noble truth of suffering. It's just that this is what human beings do; we suffer. We always want things to be different than the way they are. So if I say that to a secular group that so you have cancer, you don't want to have cancer. You know, as I said before, your baby just died; you don't want your baby to have just died. These are powerful things in us.
It means that we have to move through our grief or sadness or anger, the unfairness of things, and not be afraid, not try to be like a mindfulness robot we used to call it, or a zen robot, you know, like, I'm fine. I have a lot of equanimity. Nothing touches me. I've had people say that to me, and I wish them well, and then, you know, they have to be ready to work this edge, so I've tried to find the edge they are willing to work on.
You asked a question earlier, which I wanted to speak to just a bit. The best way to do this, I think, to do this kind of teaching is to do the work oneself. You have to practice these things. We can't get them from reading books. We can't get them from thoroughly understanding a curriculum. That's all helpful and inspiring and gives us some structure. But the real thing is, what do I do when I'm sitting by myself with my own life and all the difficult things I have to deal with? How can I meet them before I ask anybody else to meet them? I have to be able to do that.
Julie Paquette-Moore 48:05
Yeah. In some ways, you teach what you know from experience. It's not just this theoretical process where you go and read something. It's like the teaching has to come from your own experience with the practice. The practice becomes the teacher.
Melissa Blacker 48:31
Life is the teacher of all grievances. Life is not just smooth sailing all the time. It's never been; it's always been one thing after the other. Like Gilda Radner said, it's now, what now, what now. Mindfulness and Zen have always given me a way not to turn away unless I have to because I can't stand it any longer. Thank goodness; human beings are mammals, and we sleep.
Julie Paquette-Moore 49:21
Yeah. It's amazing. There's something about going through the theme that you keep going back to. There's no ignoring the matter. The difficulty is that there's still something that we must be able to see and be with it to move through. Moving through rather than around or looking at it from a distance.
Melissa Blacker 49:48
I think of the pandemic. We sometimes talk in our Zen group about the blessing of the pandemic. How could you have a blessing in a death or a sudden or violent death, a blessing of a war? But the thing is, there are always things that fall out of the binary. It's not. Is it good or bad? Is it right or wrong? If it hadn't been for the pandemic, I don't think you and I would be talking now. It would feel a little odd to have an interview. So, my first teacher used to talk about letting yourself be surprised. You would say you may be surprised. You may. I'm permitting you; you may be surprised. Life is full of the unexpected.
Julie Paquette-Moore 50:42
I love that. And you have to be willing to look. If you're not looking, you can't be surprised.
Melissa Blacker 50:48
That's right. It takes a lot of courage to open, perceive, and be present.
Julie Paquette-Moore 50:57
One more specific question is how you balance the preservation of traditional Dharma teachings with the evolving needs of mindfulness students. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Melissa Blacker 51:15
You know, even in our Zen community, there's a bell curve of people at one end who don't want to hear any of this Zen malarkey. The Zen nonsense, they're just there to meditate. And that's what they want. And then there's all the way over on the other side, there's a little group that's totally into it the way I am. I was ordained as a priest and shaved my head, but not anymore. I've grown up my hair, but every time I ordained a priest, I shave again. I'm just wearing my little mini robe. But you know, all that stuff.
So there are the people on that side and the people on the other side; in a mindfulness class, you wouldn't get the other side of the curve so much if you picture that bell curve. But what I would recommend to meet the needs of people is to develop the capacity to listen to what they're asking. Go back to that wonderful woman who was my teacher, whose son had been murdered. She knew what she needed and was very specific about that. She started the conversation because I don't want to be known, and I don't want to be identified as a person with this story. I'm much more than that.
Of course, that's what people say in mindfulness classes all the time, especially by the end of a mindfulness group. So listen to what people are asking for. Almost everybody who comes to mindfulness classes says they want to be at peace. That's not going to happen. If they open their hearts, they're going to struggle more and feel more suffering. It gets very dark sometimes.
Melissa Blacker 53:23
One of the fruits of practice is a piece that's not dependent upon circumstances. So that's different from the kind of piece people ask about. But to follow the trail, everybody always leaves breadcrumbs about what they want. Often, at the beginning of a Zen retreat, we ask people to do a guided contemplation and guide them into what they want. Set that aside. What do you want? And then set that aside. What do you really, really want? Then, people share with the group. And the themes are regular there. They match mindfulness class themes. I want to stop suffering. I want my life to go better. Some people say I want to be enlightened, and then you know, who knows what they mean by that?
So, I think this quality has to develop in a teacher: the capacity to listen to what people say they want, find a match for that, and move in that direction based on what the teaching offers.
Julie Paquette-Moore 55:11
I think a theme you were discussing was the capacity to listen as a teacher. You're talking about listening to ourselves in a way, getting to know ourselves better. That same capacity helps us get to know our students and know what's relevant in the stories that you share and the practices that you teach.
Melissa Blacker 55:40
Yeah, I love what you're saying. I also want to add that I've had plenty of people unwilling to do the courageous work of being present; they're just not ready for it, or it's just not what they think they signed on for. And they'll leave, they'll drop out. That has to be part of the process. I'm not here to save everybody with my particular way of meeting people. There are many teachers and many methodologies.
Julie Paquette-Moore 56:27
That is a wise and mature view, in the sense that I often think that, as teachers, we can think we want to help everyone. We want to be able to offer something useful because we want to help people find a way to alleviate suffering, but at the same time maybe it's not the right time, we're not the right person. Perhaps the way that we present things doesn't match for someone else. So, we need the maturity to know that we can offer from the heart and can't fix those people.
Melissa Blacker 56:59
Luckily, we're not the only teacher. We're just one person. As a Zen Buddhist, I vow every day to save all beings. Now, what does that mean? If I really took that literally, it would get me in a lot of trouble. But my sense of that vow is that every time I touch my pain, I'm able to cope with it and then touch the pain of another so that they can cope with it. It's contagious. It goes, but I will never see the results. But the vow is about knowing, trusting again, going back to that word, that there's some process going on. And I'm only a little part of it. And you know, I want to keep it moving in this direction.
Julie Paquette-Moore 57:56
I am of service with no idea that I deserve anything back. If I'm hearing you correctly, it's really like giving from the heart.
Melissa Blacker 58:16
I am glad you brought up the word service. To understand what service is, I think it does take a lifetime.
Julie Paquette-Moore 58:27
Can I ask you one more question?
Melissa Blacker 58:32
This is so much fun; I am enjoying it, Julie.
Julie Paquette-Moore 58:37
I was hoping it wasn't keeping you over. But the conversation we just had in terms of listening and connecting with what people are asking for and then having your practice, I wonder about the difference or where these intersect. In Buddhism, there's so much with solid ethics, and it's a part of the process, the practice, the tradition. So I'm curious about mainstream Mindfulness, your views and ideas, and how you bring in these ethical pieces. How do you speak to that?
Melissa Blacker 59:29
It never was explicit when we taught Mindfulness at the Center for Mindfulness. And we were criticized for that by certain groups, especially over the years. And Jon Kabat Zinn always said, and I agreed with him, or at least I remember him saying, that there was an implicit quality that if you were paying attention to how we were teaching, ethics and morality would be just a natural outcome. And there's a lot of disagreement about that. I noticed in the Zen community that we are very explicit about ethics because we have a system of studying their 16 precepts; they're called about ethical behavior. In studying them, we learned that we use three different approaches to teach our students.
One is the literal thing, not killing. You just don't kill anything. But then there's the compassion view, which is particularly Mahayana Buddhist. And that's where you understand that sometimes killing is necessary, like swatting a mosquito carrying West Nile virus. It is just always fluid. And then there's the emptiness view. And this is where things get dangerous, where it's like, well, there's no real killing or being killed. There's no life and death. That's just a construction of the mind.
So, we say in our Zen practice and study that you can get caught in one of these views. And then the world shapes itself to you. So people who were very literal about right and wrong get caught in that. People who live by the compassionate view never know what to do. Everything has consequences. Then, the emptiness view, like that there's nothing to hold on to, can get very dangerous. That's a way for people to say nothing matters, and it can go into nihilism quickly.
So, we talk about having all three views. So, we will talk about that explicitly. As I look back to my mindfulness teachings, I realize we never really had trouble with people who subscribe to the emptiness view because that would take some weird, transformative brain thing to happen there, especially with people new to meditation. However, the compassionate view and the literal view sometimes conflict with each other. And so it's not that we explicitly said, here's how you do this. But it was more. I don't think I said this at any time in our conversation. However, one of the things that mindfulness helps with, and all forms of meditation based on Buddhist meditation, is to get to a place of questioning everything.
And so that questioning means that there's a lot of leaning back and saying, I don't know what the best thing to do here is, I think I know, but I don't know, let me as we like to say, Sit with this. Let me see. You know, somebody said this thing to me, and I immediately reacted. And I want to strike out, but sitting with it doesn't mean ruminating about it; it means being present with the physicality of the reaction, the emotions connected to it, thoughts and stories going on.
As I sit with it, it is just letting them run their course; just like I said about greed, anger, and ignorance, there's an expansion of attention. And then things get clearer. And it's, I know what I need to do. I need to write postcards to Arizona voters to ensure they're registered. It is as explicit as that, but I would impose that on people so they find their way through that pause, going deep with the reactivity and the expansion. To me, that's ethical. When in mindfulness classes where we couldn't speak about a moral code, an implicit moral code comes up just from being present, and I know our time is going on.
But we did a big study at the center when I was there. We also had a conference where the results were presented. The group was divided in half. There was a group of people funded by the army to teach soldiers at that time in Iraq, that war, how to be mindful in combat, which meant that they were better at shooting targets, and just the debate that went on. It was pretty moving because there were many different points of view. We shouldn't be contributing to war, but these are human beings who are suffering, and what are we going to do for them? So things get very muddy when everything gets put into a this versus that. And the best mindfulness teaching I've seen, witnessed, and been part of, as well as the best Zen teaching, those things start to fall away. And you know, what can I do here? Why would I want to contribute to the suffering in the world by getting into a
big argument in the middle of a conference or understanding what people are thinking and feeling? So again, it's that meeting.
Julie Paquette-Moore 1:05:29
Yeah. That's great. Thank you. That's, that's helpful. That's something that comes up a lot. And when you talk about ethics, sometimes things can be seen in a black-and-white way. And I think the way that you named it. Yeah, exactly. In naming the three aspects, you said that you can look at. It feels a little bit more like, oh, it depends. And, like you said, that question.
Melissa Blacker 1:06:00
Part of Zen teaching is this capacity not to know, to authentically not know the answer to all these important questions. Who am I? What is this? What's the best thing to do here? There's this we've got to be comfortable with not knowing. So that clarity can arise in that big field. Not only don't know, the Korean teacher Seung Sahn said.
Julie Paquette-Moore 1:06:33
I think that's a great way to end.
Melissa Blacker 1:06:39
To make a real loop, I just realized Seung Sahn was Jon Kabat Zinn's first teacher, his first meditation teacher. So, he studied Zen before anything else in the Korean tradition.
Julie Paquette-Moore 1:06:59
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
Melissa Blacker 1:07:05
I enjoyed our interview. So thank you.
Julie Paquette-Moore 1:07:10
Me too. I appreciate you