News from the Land – Getting Out More These Days25 October 2016

Not sure why it took us so long, but we are finally stepping out in public. 2016 has become the Year of Outreach for the Betsuin and I want to patch you in to some of the ways that is happening.

Enter the Faun – That’s the title of a project based in New York City, the coming together of a noted choreographer and a young actor with cerebral palsy. Together Tamar Rogoff (the choreographer) and Gregg Mozgala (the actor) created a dance performance, a documentary about their year of working together, and a public movement to challenge the perceived limitations of cerebral palsy and other disabilities. So we invited them to Wisconsin for five days last September, asking them to work with as many groups of people as possible, both in Madison and Spring Green. Their teaching is two-fold: “body scripting” as a way for people, disabled or not, to learn more efficient movement; and “body empathy” as a way to get inside the neuromuscular system of someone other than you. Some obvious benefit to Dojo members; and obvious benefits to people in general.

As the sponsor of all the events, we were exposed to hundreds of people in settings such as the UW medical school, the UW education school, the UW department of dance, a community-wide workshop and showing of the documentary, and a workshop with the senior actors at the American Players Theater. Best of all, we finished with an all-day workshop here at the Dojo. Many doors have now opened for us now and we are sorting out how to continue these kinds of community-wide programs.

ZenFlix – We now have our own channel on YouTube, a place to collect our growing number of short teaching videos. At the moment, these include the trailer and some previews of our on-line course called “The Manual Labor of Zen Meditation.” And a series of “Ten Lessons on Facing Suffering,” based on an interview with a reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio. Those are way to showcase lessons learned during my work as a hospital chaplain, Zen priest, father, and medical school educator. We are becoming more active with video work so stay tuned for more to show up on our new channel.

Hara Development – Kushner Roshi has been focusing on bringing hara development to the public. For those of you not familiar with the term, hara is the Japanese word for the lower

abdomen. But hara is much more than that; it is where the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of the human experience come intersect. The term is important in Japanese language and culture and is a crucial element of Chozen-ji Zen.

One aspect of Kushner Roshi’s activities regarding hara development is his continuing work on a blog devoted to the subject. Another is the development of an electronic “harameter”, a digital biofeedback device that can help a person acquire and/or deepen the experience of hara. He has teamed with a group of biomedical engineering students from the University of Wisconsin. They have a working prototype that allows display of abdominal breathing on a

smart phone. They will be improving the device over the course of the academic year. The team won the school’s Tong Biomedical Engineering Design Award in May and they have made the second cut for an award offered by MIT.

Calligraphy website – Kushner Roshi and I have just launched a website that explains something of the training methods we use for ourselves and our students when learning shodo, Zen calligraphy. And offers some of our calligraphy for sale as a way of generating income for the Betsuin. (The domain name you get when you click on the link above will soon be changed to zencalligraphy.org)

You may know that the shodo training at Chozen-ji is based on the work of the great 19th century swordsman, statesman, and calligrapher – Yamaoka Tesshu. But you may not know that his shodo lineage, our shodo lineage, originated with Wang Xizhi, a 4th century Chinese calligrapher. I was recently in Taipei and had a chance to see some of his work at the National Museum there. Here is a section of a letter he wrote to a friend. Though done over 1500 years ago, it still looks remarkably fresh. And anyone who has copied characters from the Tesshu training manual at Chozen-ji would recognize the similarity.

And I’ll close with a glimpse of the sign going up that announces us as “Spring Green Dojo.” Thanks to design work by Zak Opaskar and the stone craft of our fall sesshin crew we are close to having a finished sign. The photo shows the

design printed on paper. That will be glued to a large slab of walnut so that the individual letters can be carved into the wood and then painted white.

GordonSpring Green Dojo