I Arise Today
Drawing upon both Buddhist and Christian teachings, Zuisei invites us into the ritual of affirming our own existence— owning our strength, practicing gratitude for aliveness, and standing in our divine power.
“What mighty strength is causing you to arise today and everyday?” asks Zuisei. “What miraculous power is responsible for your existence? Allowing you to be here now, in this time and place, in this opportunity?”
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
I Arise Today
In the last few weeks, there's been a video going around on the web of a father and a daughter who are standing in front of a mirror together and repeating a kind of pep talk. He first says a phrase, and then she repeats it. I am strong. I am smart. I work hard. I am beautiful. I am respectful. I am not better than anyone. No one is better than me. I am amazing, and I am great.
14 million people have watched this video, and she's two years old, so it's cute. But I think it's more than that. I would call it a kind of invocation, because after they say this, he asks her, what is your name? She says, Aliyah Alston. What are you? I am blessed.
I call it an invocation because it's not just positive thinking. It's not just something that you say to yourself as you begin your day to feel better about yourself, to build your self-esteem, which he is helping her to do. But I think of invocation as our liturgy, as words that shape, that create reality, words that transform you from the inside. Between heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one. I alone am fully, wholly blessed.
My name Zuisei means blessed or auspicious vow, and I often say or suspicious vow, depending on who you ask. When Daido Roshi gave me this name, Myotai Sensei said to me, oh, he wants your hair. He got it eventually.
You know, although the form of my vow changed, the vow itself and my commitment to it hasn't changed. When he first gave me the name, I really resisted it. I liked the name itself. I thought it was cool that it was a name with a Z. I wanted a Z name, actually. I didn't say that to him. It worked out that way. I like the name, and I certainly liked what it meant. But I didn't like the Japanese-ness. It just felt kind of contrived or something. I just, I didn't use it for a while. I still introduced myself as Vanessa. He never said anything, until, I told some of you the story, until one day a young man who had been a monk in Japan for a number of years came into residency. He was doing a year of residency. He's American, but he had a Buddhist name. That's how he introduced himself.
One day I was downstairs, and I noticed there was a package for him from like L.L. Bean or something. It had his Buddhist name on it. Something happened. It really touched me. I realized, oh, this is who he is. This is how he sees himself. From that moment, I began using my name. Although when I order something online, I still use Vanessa. I feel that I had to come into my own name. I had to come into my beingness.
Then afterwards, sometime later, I thought, oh, you know, that is just saying it as it is. You know, I am blessed. Every day I am blessed. I was just reflecting on the fact that we're here, sisters in the Dharma, practicing and realizing ourselves together and practicing for a short time apart from our brothers. As Hojo and Osho mentioned yesterday, their support of us. We are doing this so we can see our blessedness as it is, naked and true, not what is reflected in their eyes, not the many ways that they see us or don't see us, the ways they want to see us, but what we see with our own eyes, what we feel and know in our own mind and heart, so I was saying last night.
Confined within walls, facing screen after screen, it's easy to forget that we are earth and that earth is us.
It is necessary, an occasion to be apart, so we can truly come together, not over and under, not better, not less. Together, different but equal, multiple yet unified.
In watching this short video, I was thinking what a wonderful thing this father is doing for his daughter. Doing it early so she learns to do it for herself because she'll have to. Because she lives, as we do, in a world that often highlights, reflects to us, the opposite of our greatness. Not just us women, all of us, but we do hear, as women, we hear a particular message, and so often we believe it. So often we don't believe we're beautiful unless we fit within an extremely narrow range. How often, you know, and if we do believe, how often that belief gets punctured. Those moments, short or long, of insecurity, of self-doubt, of looking elsewhere, outside: you know, am I okay? Is this okay? Will it be enough? Am I enough? Will they like me? It's, I think, in those moments we realize how precarious it is, this human form, but definitely this female form, definitely.
I had this, something very brief but poignant, happened, and it happened last year. I was struck that it happened again, and that it happened immediately. As the men left the dining hall, I just looked around, all the women were kind of having dinner and milling about, and I was hearing the voices. What I immediately felt was, it was almost, well, yes, a kind of relief, a kind of letting go.
I told this to Shugun Sensei. We were talking about something else, and he said, what do you think that is? I said to him, you know, it struck me, because I remember it from last year, and it struck me how immediately I felt it. He said, what do you think that is? I said, I think it's just dropping into another level of feeling safe. I don't feel, in general, unsafe here. Yet, when I reflected, there was this moment, this very strong feeling in my body, and then this next instant in which I reflected on it, and I felt I don't have to hold myself. I don't have to be anything other than me.
He said, oh, that's wonderful, it sucks. He said, because if you feel that, you're probably not the only one. I said, yeah.
Rising Through Strength: A Personal Invocation
I have my own version of a daily pep talk, and it's something that I've developed over time, my own invocation. It's adapted from the Lorica of St. Patrick, a Christian prayer of protection. Lorica means breastplate. It is said that St. Patrick sang this Gaelic song when Loguerre, king of Tara, ambushed him, St. Patrick, and his monks, because he was coming to Ireland to bring Christianity. As he was ambushed, St. Patrick sang, and the story goes that then he appeared to the king as a doe and twenty fawns. He was no longer a man. They were saved. Sometimes the prayer is also called the deer's cry.
As I said, I've adapted it for my own use, and actually adapted it a little further for this talk. Sometimes people ask me, can you do that? Can you just change a prayer or a chant, a piece of liturgy? I do it all the time, so clearly you can, on some level. But this is for me, for the privacy of my own being. Liturgy needs to be close. There is bringing yourself to it, certainly. That's a big part of our practice, bringing ourselves to the liturgy, as Shugun Sensei often says, so that at a certain point, the words of the Heart Sutra, for example, are my words. There is such a practice. Very much, I feel, there is creating your own words, your own liturgy, so that it's personal and alive.
If it helps you, if it helps you to remember who you are, by all means, by all means, do it.
I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of you, great mother, creator of all creation. Blessed be your name. What mighty strength is causing you, each one of us, to arise today and every day? What miraculous power is responsible for our birth, our existence? Further, allowing us to be here in this time and place, with this opportunity. We weren't born to Syrian parents, so our homes are being bombed right now. We weren't sold into prostitution by our brother at the age of five. We don't have to walk two hours each way to gather water. We're not birthing babies every year because we're not allowed to use contraception. 7.5 billion lives, and this is the one that you've been gifted.
I think of this when I'm struggling in some way, which is often enough, mind you. I was thinking about that recently. I don't know what to show it, but I can fight. I can fight. I've learned to appreciate that it's part of my grappling, and it's part of what helps me. I mean, sometimes I really tire myself. I wish I didn't have to go through that. But it's part of what both drives me to clarify, but also mobilizes me. It encourages me to look for a different way.
I remind myself of this incredible life that I have, that I've somehow been given, and that my struggle compared to other struggles is really very, very, very small. It is a mighty strength, I think, that has made us female, that has made this our time and place, and we are blessed.
Now this great mother, Prajnaparamita, as you know, is the womb, the source of all Buddhas. We have the unique power to give life, to bring into existence another life, another human being. But are we aware of the many, many other ways in which we can bring life, in which we can create, and are we using them? Why are we afraid of our power? Do you wonder about this? I wonder about this. Because we can be silenced, we can be ignored, we can be hurt. Is this why we don't speak? Or is it we're afraid to make waves? We're afraid to not be liked. But would you rather be liked, or would you rather be alive? Fully alive. Would you not rather stand on your own ground?
I rise today through the strength of heaven, light of the sun, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of the wind, depth of the sea, stability of the earth, and firmness of the rock. Probably as long as human beings have been alive, we have gone to the mountains and the rivers, the oceans and the deserts, to remember, to remember that we are rock and sky and wind and fire and light. You know, confined within walls, facing screen after screen, it's easy to forget that we are earth and that earth is us. When our hands don't touch the soil and what comes of it, it's easy. It's easy to feel disconnected, ungrounded, and we do, so often, that is how we feel.
I'm not saying being in nature is always paradise. It can be hard. It can be very raw and hard. A few weeks ago, I did a hermitage, and it was during that very strong windstorm. At one point, I was sitting, and I had changed the angle of how I was sitting. I was sitting in relationship to the window in a particular way that the wind was... I mean, I felt it in every cell in my body. It was more than that. Actually, at one point, I felt as if I had been thrown into a dryer. It was both a tumbling, like when you put a pair of running shoes in it, and just feel it, ba-boom, ba-boom, boom.
At the same time, there's a wind, a Mediterranean wind, a Sirocco, that blows in from the Sahara into Southern Europe. I read that during the Ottoman Empire, when the wind was blowing, if somebody committed a murder, they would reduce the sentence, because they felt, well, they weren't in the right mind. Being in the midst of the elements is not that it's going to be easy. I knew that I was alive. I did not feel disconnected, distant in any way.
How can we feel our strength when we don't walk on the earth? Feel, in fact, its stability and its firmness. Its yielding nature. You know, concrete doesn't yield, it cracks. Earth yields and moves and settles as it needs to. We are made of this earth. We can yield and bend and move as we need to.
How do we feel our depth, our wisdom, which is like the oceans, when we hardly ever have time nowadays to just skim the surface of our increasingly digital lives? Yet, this strength, this firmness and this depth, are in us. I think we know that, even for microseconds, when we can feel at home in these bodies, when we accept, and dare I say, love who we are. We don't have to love everything about us; we just need to have an entry point, the tiniest little crack for the light to get in, as Leonard Kahn would say.
Unshakable: Claiming Our Power and Light
In Vajrayana Buddhism, there are five female Buddhas, or prajnas, associated with the five elements. Lokana is wind and mirror-like wisdom, and she embodies clear seeing. Mamakki is earth and is the wisdom of equality, the wisdom of unity, of seeing the oneness, and actually the life force. Parandavasini is fire and discriminating wisdom, and she sees multiplicity, uniqueness, difference. Tara is air and all-encompassing wisdom, and she embodies the aspiration and compassion that arises out of bodhicitta, the raising of the body-mind. Akasada Tejvari is space and wisdom of the Dharmadattu, the realm of truth, the realm of suchness, and she encompasses all the other four.
So really, this great mother is five, a thousand great mothers, a million, four billion female Buddhas that are walking this earth, knowing or not knowing, depending on their karma, that they are Buddhas, manifesting according to their power, to the power of their penetrating insight, anywhere within that range of vision. That is why practice is always. That is why there's no limit to it. That's why you don't graduate. Thank you.
I arise today through your strength to uphold me, your wisdom to guide me, your eyes to look before me, your ears to hear me, your words to speak for me, your hand to guard me, your way to lie before me, your shield to protect me from pride, envy, hatred, and ill will. From all those who desire me ill, afar and near, alone and in a multitude. By coincidence, I found in the Visuddhimagga Buddhaghosa speaking about these near and far enemies. It was a different context, obviously, but the near enemy is greed, and the far enemy is ill will. By this great mother's strength, I am sustained by her wisdom. We are guided. We see, we hear, we speak goodness, loving kindness. Her wisdom is her protection from everything that would get in our way, from negative, harmful thoughts of others.
But perhaps most importantly, ours. We can be ferocious, not necessarily in a good way, either competing with one another, or just beating ourselves up. This shield is an invocation, a protection from that habit. You know, if we all knew we don't fail ever to cover the ground upon which we stand, we wouldn't need to stand in front of a mirror and remind ourselves we are perfect, we are beautiful, we are loved. We would just be ourselves, and that would be enough. It would be more than enough.
A woman comes out of surgery, and in the first few moments after she's woken up from anesthesia, she is lying in bed, and her wife is sitting on the bed next to her, just holding her hand. The woman in bed has just had a tumor removed from her cheek, but the nerve in her cheek had to be cut, so the corner of her mouth is tilted down. The surgeon is there in the room, and she is watching the two women, thinking to herself, who are they? Who are these women that are so loving, that are touching each other so lovingly and so generously? They are clearly very close. The woman in bed touches her lips and feels their shape. She turns to the surgeon and asks, is this how my mouth is going to be? The surgeon says yes, because we had to cut the nerve. The woman gets quiet, nods, and remains quiet. Her wife says to her, I like it. I think it’s kind of cute. The doctor thinks to herself, oh, this is who this woman is. She lowers her eyes because she says, you do not act boldly in the presence of a goddess. She’s very close. She can see, as the wife leans forward to kiss the woman in bed, how she adjusts her lips to fit the lips of her partner, to tell her that their kiss still works.
Because we’re told so often, or we believe, or we think we know, that we fail to cover the ground, we need not only every possible reminder we can conjure up, and that we can give each other, but also the ever-deepening realization of what is unalterable perfection. We may be cut down, turned away from, and this turning away does not diminish our blessedness. If we could understand that, we wouldn’t need to understand anything else. No one can diminish your or my blessedness. Let me say that again. No one can diminish your blessedness. You alone are the honored one. I alone am the honored one. Yet, it’s possible to forget. We should take every opportunity to remind ourselves as often as we need to.
I am not broken. I am not wrong. I am not mistaken. I am not small. I am not better. I am certainly not less. I am not too emotional. I’m not confused. I’m not just hormonal. I’m not too masculine. I’m not too feminine. I’m not clingy. I’m not overbearing. I’m not too demanding. I’m not too aggressive. I’m not too soft. I’m not eye candy. I’m not a prop. I do not ask for too much when I ask you to just see me fully and respect me. I am not an imposter. When you praise me, it is because I deserve it. This is not some cover-up, some act that somebody is about to find out. I know my strength, and no one can take it away from me. Being myself, that is everything. That is everything.
I summon today all these powers between me and delusion, that I may save all beings without fail. Of course, this includes me. It has to start with me. I summon today all of my power. I will not be afraid to speak. I will not be afraid to act. I will not hesitate to take space and to use it when the need is large. When the need is small, I will not overlook it. I will serve you. I will meet you. I will follow you when the current flows rightly. I will lead you when you’re not certain where to step. I will work hard to see clearly because delusion is not knowing my ground and that I’m standing on it. Delusion is trampling on someone else’s ground. It’s like putting a hood over their head where all around them there is light.
Therefore I say unto you, light with me, light before me, light behind me, and light in me, light beneath me, light above me, light to my right, light to my left, light when I lie down, light when I sit, light when I stand, light in the hearts of all those who think of me, light in the mouths of those who speak of me, light in all the eyes that see me, light in all the ears that hear me. This is the better-known section of the Lourica. The original has the word Christ, but the version that I first came across used light. I’ve always liked the image of light, but I like it in this context because in a tradition wholly based on enlightenment, this is a protection, this is the breastplate. It’s also a state of the union, if you will. I give rise to this light in and around me, but that’s only because it has always been there. It’s there when I sit, it’s there when I walk, it’s there when I eat. It’s there when we argue, when we make peace. It’s there in what I do, especially what is good and what I say, and it is not mine, and I don’t command it. It’s there when I speak truth to myself and to everyone else. It’s there when I don’t know what to say. If I’m patient, it will guide me. Before me, it’s illuminated. Behind me, it’s illuminated. The ten directions, all of space and time, are all illuminated. That is why we cannot fail to cover the ground, even when we think we’re failing most miserably. We’re still standing on our own two feet. If we’re not standing, let’s say you’re lying on the ground, crumpled up, it’s still your body on that ground. It’s still our bodies being that ground, always.
That is the realization of the indestructible dharma, which doesn’t change with the weather, so it doesn’t change with my state of mind. Although it will affect, of course, how available that is to me. I mean, I can stand in front of the mirror and say, I am bright and luminous and clear, and it will be true. I can stand in front of the mirror and say, is this a shitty day? I feel awful, I’m confused, I’m unlovable. The bright, clear luminosity will be covered up, but it will still be there. It’s forgetting this that gets us into trouble. It’s in those moments in which we don’t believe and we can’t see and don’t feel this luminosity. It’s in those moments where everything feels dark. There is no absolute darkness, just as there is no absolute light.
Returning to Our Own Light
Those days when we believe our stories are old, old stories, painful stories, but there’s something comforting about them because they’re familiar. They’re familiar. I’ve told this story before. There’s a blind man sitting in a busy plaza, begging. There’s a cup next to him, and a handwritten sign that says, I need, please give alms for food. People just keep walking by, without even looking at him. Then a young man suddenly passes by, stops, looks at the old man sitting on the ground, looks at his sign, and comes down on his haunches. He says, do you mind if I change your sign? I think you just need a little help. The old man says sure. He writes something on the sign and puts it next to the blind man. Then, all of a sudden, every time somebody comes by, they stop, and someone throws a few coins. A woman with her child stops first, tugs at the woman’s hand, then stops, looks at the sign, throws a few bills. This keeps happening all morning. The old man with his hat sees the money overflowing everywhere. The young man comes back towards the end of the day, and the blind man recognizes him by his tread. He grabs his pants and says, wait a second, I just want to ask you, what did you do? Look at what’s happened. What did you do? What did you put on that sign? The man says, today is a beautiful day, and I cannot see it. Today, I am perfect. I am magnificent, and I cannot see it. Every single one of us has those moments. That is why turning to yourself matters. Sometimes silence is enough. Sometimes silence is the medicine. But sometimes words like these are what is needed. These are just words, of course. But they’re true words. They just need to be true for you. So that when others speak of you, think of you, what they think and speak of is that light. That is what they’ll see, that is what they’ll hear, if you let it permeate everything. That is why we summon our strength. We do so over and over again, like Aliyah Alston, until the day when we don’t have to, when that is who we are.
I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of you, Great Mother, creator of all creation. Blessed be your name. This is probably superfluous, but this Great Mother is you, is me. Let me ask you this: what would you do? Who would you be if you didn’t hold back?
I Arise Today, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.