Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 557: Teijo Munnich

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

Teijo Munnich, Abbess of the Great Tree Zen Women's Temple and the person who introduced Duncan to Buddhism, re-joins the DTFH! Check out the Great Tree Zen Women's Temple to learn more about them, and see their calendar of upcoming events. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: MyBookie - Use code DUNCAN and deposit $50 or more to receive a FREE Instant Cash Bonus! Hello Fresh - Visit HelloFresh.com/21Duncan and use code 21DUNCAN at checkout for 21 FREE MEALS + Free Shipping!

Greetings friends! We have a very special podcast for you today. Today's guest is Tejo Munich. She is the first person to really introduce me to Buddhism. When I was in college, I did an internship at a Zen temple and it was her temple and it was amazing. She is an incredible person. If you live in Asheville, check out the Great Tree Temple. If you don't live in Asheville, I would highly recommend going to their website. You can find all those links at dunkintrustle.com. They have weekly meditations, among other things, and of course they do retreats there. So that's Great Tree Temple in Asheville, North Carolina. Okay everybody, strap in. Here we go. Welcome back to the DTFH, Tejo Munich.

Welcome! One of my favorite moments in my, I hate to say this word, spiritual life, big moment for me, happened when I was doing this internship at your Zen temple and my preconceived notions about Buddhism were based, I think, mostly on movies and a fantasy that I would meet someone like you and you would impart to me some kind of data that then I could use to, I mean I don't think I would have used these words back then, but gain power or something, you know, like I would become wise and I would become interesting, I would become more attractive, maybe, you know, like cool, he's a Buddhist, he meant. So when I met you to start this internship,

the internship involved cleaning the floors of your temple. You had me clean and you taught me a way of cleaning floors that I've used throughout my entire life. You said this is the way that they clean floors in the temples in Japan. You explained to me that they have these rice walls that are very delicate. If you hit them too hard, you could break through them potentially. I thought that was so cool and weird and like inconvenient, knowing me, if I lived in one of those, I would have torn many of them down, but this method of cleaning the floors is you take, and I'm sorry if many of you already know this, but you take these cloths, dip them in water, and push them across the floor with your body weight. Basically, you turn yourself into human

swiffer and oh my goodness, it just, the floors are sparkling after this and it's one of the most pragmatic things that I've taken from Buddhism is like, I can polish a floor. But then I remember becoming frustrated after a few of these meetings. Also, of course, you were having to meditate and you had to sit in the lotus position, which back then was hard for me, but I could still do it. It's a little more painful these days than it was then, but at some point, I remember becoming very frustrated because you were not giving me what I wanted, no books. Where is the data? And I finally said to you, aren't you going to give me a book or something? Like, isn't there something I should read or study

here? And you said, what was the Buddha doing when he gained realization? And I thought about it for a second. I was like, right, he was meditating. And I've carried that with me through my whole life anytime I get that ferocious hunger for more information. How, you know, down the road, I've read things about a practice, a balanced practice. I've read that I've heard the comparison between two wings of a bird, one wing of the bird, contemplation, study, the other wing of the bird practice that you need these two together, that you just won by itself is an imbalance. But if I was that weird bird right now, I would be like flapping around with one wing, which is, I can parrot so many things. I think that's one of my talents. I can hear a thing, I can parrot it

out. But the sitting part, the meditation part, Tejo, that's very difficult for me, very difficult. And I would love to talk to you a little bit about that, the resistance that why is it hard? Why is why? Why, why isn't this a thing that you would think it would be so easy? You know, sitting down, I mean, I could sit down and watch TV for hours. Why can I sit down and watch my own mind? Did she hang up? No, I'm here. I just don't have an answer. Sorry. Here we go again. You know, I still have resistance. I talk about that all the time. And why? I don't know why. Yeah. Just like, you know, I mean, I do ask that question. I ask that question of myself all the time. It's like, why is human life the way it

is? You know, I sort of agree with the way Buddhism talks about it. But just recently, I was saying, you know, but why? You know, but it's just an unanswerable question. And I don't know why, you know, people ask me sometimes, well, do you think you can, you can kind of get addicted to meditation? Like, not me personally, because I have too much precepts to say, you know. So yeah, I don't know why the resistance, but I do know that one thing that I have discovered is that when we take one step beyond the resistance, that's awakening. Yeah. Because letting go is awakening. Right? Do you have anything to add?

The term awakening. You know, I'm sure you know how it is. Over time, you know, you hear these words over and over again. And when you hear them initially, and they somehow make sense, awakening, that sounds good. But what are we awakening from? What is the thing we're waking up from? Our own delusion. Thanks to my bookie for supporting this episode of the DTFH, whether you bet to earn or to make the games more exciting, which is why I do it. My bookie gives you the most for your money with a redesigned deposit bonus. Getting started is easy. Easy. Just visit mybookie.ag, use promo code Duncan to claim a welcome bonus up to $1,000 plus a free $150,000 March Madness

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But what are we awakening from? What is the thing we're waking up from? Our own delusion, right? Yeah, and that delusion is, you know, this is another thing. My teacher, David Nickturn, you know, he choked him trumpet rights about this, but sort of this, he talks about, you know, finer grades of sandpaper. When you're sanding something, you use finer and finer grades of it. Again, initially, you hear something like that, and you think, oh, yeah, of course, my delusion. I'm deluded in the sense that I think ignoring my own suffering is a solution that this is somehow alleviating the problem or that by distracting myself from the suffering,

or by blaming other people for the suffering, whatever the game is. But then, at least, and again, any correction would be very grateful for, but then suddenly, you start realizing, well, this delusion, it seems to go deeper than that. I'm not just dealing with some kind of like surface level obvious sort of delusion, but it appears that something about my idea of who I am in relation to everything else might be fundamentally incorrect or something. And then, at some point, it becomes almost unbearable to imagine this letting go of this thing. It becomes almost unbearable. You know, you hear, look, there is suffering, the cause of suffering is attachment. You think, oh, well, that's easy. I'll just let go.

But this seems more like an electric fence situation, you know, or grabbing something that letting go of feels almost suicidal. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I know exactly. I was talking about Tsunyata, which is the teaching about, it's usually called emptiness. I sometimes I call it everythingness because really, what we experience is not lack of something, but rather the completeness of life, you know, a lot of life working together. And which is really what Tsunyata is, but actually the actual experience of Tsunyata is it feels like, you know, we don't have anything to hold on to. It feels like we're suspended in space or in free fall or something like that. And I was talking about,

well, actually I was teaching a class at Warren Wilson on it, on emptiness for a while. And so I was talking about the Zen Center. And we were discussing the Garjuna and the various teachers about emptiness. And somebody came to talk to me and she said, I think I've had an experience of emptiness. And, you know, it sort of feels like the bottom falls out. And she described it to me. And I said, yeah, that's an experience. And she said, well, I don't like it. And I said, okay, so why do you hate it? She says, because I don't, I don't know what's coming next. And she never came back. But you know, there's a guy by the name of Shenzhen Yang who's studied various kinds of Buddhism.

And right now, I think he identifies as a Zen teacher, while I don't even know if he's still alive. But I heard him speak years ago. And he said that experience of Shunyata is what John of the Cross describes as the dark night of the soul. And when you experience it, what you need to do is just walk into it or just step into it. And I mean, I was thinking as you were talking that actually to say, to step one, take one step beyond the resistance, actually, I think it should be to take one step into the resistance. And I think when we experience that emptiness, that sort of free fall, like, what the hell, you know, even asking a question like, yeah, but why do we suffer? Why do we suffer in this way? Why do we have this sense of dissatisfaction?

Do you know, I ask that question is to want to have something to respond to again, it's Yuka itself. Yeah, because who can answer this question? All we can talk about is what the experience is, you know? Yes. Yeah, you know, the experience of emptiness, I like to imagine I've had that. But now these days, anytime I have some kind of epiphanous moment, when I'm meditating, I get worried, because I'm an addict, I get attached to that moment. I found there to be like the sort of resonance with the descriptions of emptiness that I've read about, heard about. But then what I found to be difficult was not the emptiness as much as sort of returning or forgetting or sort of having like, not just a

moment of it, but, you know, a month, you know, enough of a sense of, wow, I don't just don't feel as compressed into my identity as I did before. I don't feel, I think I understand what they mean when they say there is a compassion and emptiness that are kind of the same thing. I can see how there would be a sense of wanting to not just alleviate yourself of the, of all the things that go along with being self-identified, but other people too, how you could see this as some kind of, I don't know, seed of neurosis or disorders, and an antidote to that. So I did not feel, I did feel a, not in a sense of freefall, but just more of a sense of, I don't know, liberation or something, went away.

I, and I blabbered about it. It was so embarrassing. I talked to my teacher about it. Over the years of meditating, I've like gotten better at not like trumpeting out some fleeting experience that seems mystical, but this one, wow, this really seemed to be it. And I told my wife about it, then the next fight that we got in, she's like, wow, huh? You really had an awakening. I'm like, I didn't. All right, I didn't. I clearly didn't. So yeah, I think what about that suffering? The suffering of having these fleeting or false glimpses of something that you've imagined to be this or that, but when in fact, it's just another delusion, another passing, whatever. Yeah, great. You had some sense of emptiness,

but look at you now. Look at you now. Your ego is back at the wheel, driving your car, you're defending everything all over again. What about that? That seems to be so painful, Tejo, you know, those moments of not the emptiness, but returning to the stuff. Well, the problem isn't that the experience wasn't authentic, I don't think. I think the problem is that we somehow think we can hold on to that. Yes. That's the heartbreak. That's it right there. You know, that's the heartbreak. This is the unbearable thing for me. I mean, I have kids and talk about wanting to hold on to something. I mean, you know, it's like they're so beautiful,

but they're growing up. It's all the cliches that parents say. Look how quickly this situation is changing. Look how quickly time is going by, and that is so, that pisses me off. I'll be honest, that really does make me angry. I don't know who I'm angry at, but that situation is so, I know this sounds childish. It just doesn't seem fair. I mean, it wouldn't be fair to crystallize my children either as some kind of horrific infinite babies. That would make anyone who did that would be a monster. I mean, the idea that you would want to trap anyone in any kind of condition, especially as like an infinite kid because it pleases you is, oh, I mean, that's monstrous, but yet it's there. And I guess it's the identical mistake

when you're experiencing this moment of suddenly waking up from a nightmare or something. You know, it's like that. I mean, I would say my experience of the emptiness, I'm not saying my life is necessarily a nightmare, but you know, when you're in the nightmare and getting chased by the lion or whatever, and you really remember, oh, I'm dreaming. Oh, it's no longer a nightmare. Now it's a really great dream. And I think those moments of emptiness, that's what it was like. That's the experience for me, that kind of relief of like, oh, right. Like a little bubble, a bubble of our ideas pops. Yes. But remembering, I didn't remember it once we had that experience. I mean, I had some experiences like that in the monastery where I

was just like, one was everything, you know? Yeah. And then I found myself for the next two or three days, this was like during a session, trying to get that feeling back or trying to hold onto that experience. So it wasn't that it wasn't an authentic experience, but it was that I wanted to hold on to it, you know? And so you go down the line and say, yeah, where is that emptiness now? It's way back there because it's past experience, you know? Yeah. And we have to, what we learned, what Zazen can teach us, I think, is to just recognize delusion and by recognizing it, it dissolves, it starts to go away. It doesn't have a, you know, because delusion is something like it's how to hold on us until we see it. And then when we see it, we're in charge of what we

can do. Well, let's talk about that. You know, I, I mean, I believe you, but and right now things are really great in my life, like there's harmony, everything's nice and there's good luck and feel inspired. But, you know, in and I recognize, oh, great, great. Now I'm attaching to this, you know, in the same way, you know, the winter was not great for me. Like I have, I think I probably have seasonal effectiveness where every winter I get kind of depressed and gloomy and just awful to be around. And then the spring starts coming and I get like, I start like waking up early again, making my bed. It's great. But I recognize, oh, well, now I'm, now I'm attaching to this. Now I'm

like allowing my conditions to be the progenitor of my great mood. And I know that this one is fleeting as well. And also I recognize whatever this, you know, temporary condition might be, it's not the same. What's the kind of like happiness I'm feeling now it's not the same as that waking up from a nightmare feeling became when I was meditating. It's not the same. It's more, I don't know, matter based. There's a component of greediness in it or something. I don't know. All the, you know, ambitious and ego gratifying. So even though intellectually, I can look back to that moment and think, well, there was that. It's very similar to remembering a dream. It's all foggy now. It's kind of like, I don't know if

that was anything at all. And so I can't, when I place, even when I place my attention on the fleeting nature of gain or loss or whatever, it doesn't seem to do what you're saying. I don't feel a dissolution. I don't feel a return to that emptiness. I just feel like a sense of kind of failure or like running my head against a wall or something or throw, you know, like that. The kind of like, well, and I don't mind that necessarily. It's just, yeah, I'm very attached to those moments of bliss that derive from a practice. So I think though, from my experience that, yeah, when we have that kind of experience, it's like a surprise, but then it becomes, you know, it sort of integrates itself into our lives.

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You know, it sort of integrates itself into our lives. And so it's not it's not such a big deal anymore. It's a little more familiar. You know, and so yeah, you don't feel it. But it doesn't mean that the very fact that you're recognizing all these things that you're doing that you just described to me, that's that's part of the awakening process is to just keep recognizing these things and recognizing how our mind is deceiving us. Yeah, I think I see what you're saying now. That's really awesome. Yeah, it's kind of like it's a very that's very sweet. It's um, okay grief. When my mom died, I went through the grief process. I mean, I don't know if you ever stop going through that process. But you know, the initial experience of grief is it's wild,

you know, like sobbing fits just brokenheartedness just devastated. And I remember I I was lucky enough to get to chat with Joan Halifax, Rosie Joan Halifax, and I was all busted up. And she said, well, you know, just recognize a window is open in this grief that won't it won't stay open forever, the window closes. And I, you know, you know, when I was in though, when I heard her say that I always think it was like, well, can I close it now? Like, it's close. I don't want this window open. This is terrible. But then yeah, sure enough, the grief starts dissipating or, you know, becomes more bearable, softer. And then I found myself grieving for the grief. I wanted the grief back. It was the grief was making me feel connected to my mom. You know, it was it was like as close as I

could get to her with in and when it started going away, it was like, Oh, great. So now I won't even have that anymore. Now that's gone too. So I don't even get the grief. I don't even get to feel this anymore. Though it still comes back sometimes. And I when it comes back now, I welcome it. But I think this is what we're talking about here is like, like that, that maybe the grief isn't really gone. It's just inundated everything. It's just become a part of your life. It's this is just life now. And yeah, and this emptiness or this these experiences, it's not that they go anywhere. It's just that how long can you be astounded by anything? How long can you be astounded and and high intoxicated? It just becomes part of who you are. That's really cool. Thank you.

Thank you. And you know, I was thinking about my experience of grief, as you were talking about it, and I think it's, it's, it's not just that we're grieving the loss of that person, which we are, but I think we're also grieving our own demise. You know, our fear of death, because it puts us like, it puts impermanence right in front of us, or I remember when my sister died suddenly, I remember coming back after her funeral, and just allowing myself the time to kind of process that he not engaging me too much. And what kept coming up for me was, oh, yes, this is a great opportunity to experience the impermanence of life, because like you say, it's a window. It's just a window of time that we shut down after a while, when we sort of lost

our connection with this person because of their own, you know, they're biodegradable, and they can't be sickled, right? So you don't have that same presence as when you're alive. So that, that dissipates. So we do, and I remember after kind of your Roshi died, you know, there's that period that is identified as anger in the grieving process. And I, how it manifested for me was that I just wouldn't bullshit anybody, anybody that would say anything. I just like, I was just like, you know, everything just came blubbering out, however, however I thought of it, you know, and I really, really liked it. And I thought, oh, this is, this is something I really had to embrace. And I think that, you know, there's two ways of approaching

emptiness, which is really what you experience when you, when you're grieving, you're experiencing the impermanence of life, which is what emptiness is about. You know, the things that are always changing in that we just kind of let ourselves be with it, even though we have to have some direction in our lives in order to survive. Otherwise we wouldn't be, we wouldn't cook, you know, but to be able to experience that impermanence is actually a great thing, but it's also a very scary thing. And so we want to run away with it, run away from it. Like you described, can I just close this window? Yeah. But then we lose our connection. And then we say, oh, that's right. I mean, oh, that was something good. And then we, we can't go back because we've already

kind of walked away from it and entered back into that delusionary, delusionary world, which says there is something I can hold on to. I had this experience when I was reading this book called The Externation of No Self by Bernadette Roberts, who was a, she was a Catholic nun that left the convent and got married and had children. And then she yearned for the, the, the contemplation of life. And so she would go off, you know, when the kids got to the point where she could leave them. And she would go off and she had this one experience that she lost her whole sense of who she was, and it really scared her. And so she wrote three books about it. The first book she talked about right away after she had this experience. And it was so, I was so taken with her description of it.

And I kept, and she kept going round and round like, how do I understand this? How do I understand this? And then she'd spit it all out. I don't be like, Oh my gosh, you got it. You understand it. But then she was, she kept going around and around and around. And I kept telling her, don't you understand? Don't you understand? You're talking to the book. Every time I close the book, I was myself in a transition place. I had just come back from the Sahara, and I was getting ready to go to practice period at our monastery in Minnesota. And so I didn't really have, I couldn't really, I didn't have time to get a job. There was only about a month. And then, you know, but I was sort of working for a friend and she was paying for paying me and I paid my rent. And I realized that I

had for a sense of exactly what, what Bernadette Roberts was talking about, of, you know, feeling like, Oh, I need something to hold on to. I mean, I need, maybe I need a real life and not this stuff that just kept me floating around from one monastery to another. You know, maybe I need a job and a car and, you know, be a real person and like everybody else, you know. And I realized that there were two options here. One was to think that I was a failure and I had grasped onto something. And the other was to recognize that this was an opportunity for infinite possibility. Right. A real creative moment because I wasn't attaching to anything. And I think this is what we have to

navigate in life is this relative world that we live in, which does require some level of kind of holding onto stuff and making some kind of structure and the ultimate reality, which is also a part of the reality in which we live. How do we bring those two together and find that mental path? Yeah. So and, and we can't hold on to absolute reality. And we really can't hold on to relative reality either. But that recognition, those moments of recognition are those moments where they come together. But how do we see it? Do we see it as failure or do we see it as infinite possibility? That's the thing. Yeah, that's where it comes back to the remembering that you imagined.

Yeah. Well, you know, I am. So yeah, I'm sure you're aware of like Carol Act, the beat poets. And I can remember reading because I always thought they were called the beat poets because like, you know, the beat drums, I don't know, some beatnik jazz, whatever. I read that and maybe it meant that, but it also meant no, we're defeated. We're beat, beat. And yeah, it's cool. It's cool. You know, Carol Act was very, it really ended Buddhism. So many great poems about it. But so as far as the failure thing goes, I think on one level, I do align myself with that idea. I mean, if you do catch a glimpse of that thing, aren't you beat then in the sense that if you haven't caught a glimpse of that, and if you have been entertaining the idea that maybe you're

actually immortal, I entertain that idea. When I was younger, before I got testicular cancer, I would kick around the idea. Well, I'm the only one who knows I have sin. I'm aware. I don't know everyone else. Maybe they're not aware, like true solipsism, you know, didn't really believe it all the way, but it's a way to delude yourself into thinking you're not going to die. Kick around the idea that just maybe this is a dream. You're not going to die. Or even worse, subscribe to some transhumanist prophecy. Well, we're going to be able to extend our lifespans, put our consciousness into a chip. Whatever the thing is, all these, you know, are mechanisms to amplify confusion surrounding mortality, probably. But so you catch a glimpse of this thing

that you are mentioning, this oneness or whatever the zillions of ways it's been described. And you're beat because you lose your, you lose death. You don't lose the physical death. You know, you're still going to die. It's not like you have that glimpse and you're now an idiot and think you're not going to die. But more along the lines of the earth stuff, it does pale in comparison to that. And that is a kind of remembering more than a discovery or something. It's not like when you encounter it, there isn't some sense of like, oh, right, like in a dream, it's not like suddenly you freak out in the dream. You're like, wait a minute, I'm dreaming, like, oh, right, it's a dream. So in that moment, it's defeat in a certain way. If your goal was to

succeed at living forever or getting high on the earth as much as you are getting high on the imaginary finish lines that you'd set up for yourself and you're going across that line, that's when I'll be happy. So that is a form of defeat, I think, or failure or something. I mean, not in the negative sense, but just. Yeah, I think there's a difference between being beat and beat down though. Yes, there is. Absolutely. So anyway, I want to say thank you, Duncan, because we're daddy loving a pot. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for allowing me to do this. I'm always so happy to spend time with you, Tejo. And I hope we can do a podcast together soon. It is very nice to meet all of you. And I hope I see you in person someday. The next time

we end up in Asheville, I would love to hang out. Definitely. And next time I'm in Austin. So now we're going to give back the merit. May the merit of this practice. May the merit of this practice. Benefit all beings. Benefit all beings. And bring peace. And bring peace. Thank you. That was Tejo Munich, everybody. Check out Great Tree Temple. You can find the links at dunkitrussell.com. Much thanks to my sponsors. And come see me. I'm going to be in Kansas City next week. That's the 23rd, 24th, and 25th with a great William Montgomery. I love you guys. I'll see you next week. The NTT IndyCar Series. It's human versus machine. Against all odds, every single lap. The ones who risk it all battling not just each other, but the menaces

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