Published on August 6, 2025 5:41 PM GMT
I didn’t have time to write a post this week because I was away at a sesshin (meditation retreat) for several days. But, I decided to try out Substack’s built-in video upload feature to quickly record and post a short video blog. Let me know if you found this interesting, as it’s certainly easier and quicker to produce than a typical blog post, and maybe I can mix these in with the regular blog posts if you like it.
Here’s is the transcript, lightly edited by Claude into paragraphs, if you’d prefer to read:
Hi. Well, I wasn't going to do a post today, but I thought maybe I'd try using this feature on Substack to record a video. I didn't have time to write a post today or for this Wednesday because I was on a sesshin—a meditation retreat—from Thursday through Sunday. That just ate up the time that I would normally need to produce a weekly post. But I thought maybe I could record a video and just talk a little bit about something that came up for me during the sesshin that people might find interesting. So I thought I'd give this a try.
During the sesshin, I was Tenzo, which is the cook. This is a role with, as you can imagine, a lot of responsibility. It also gives me a chance to interact with a lot of folks at the sesshin—not only indirectly in the sense that I'm preparing everyone's food and I'm responsible for making sure that they're fed and well-nourished, but also more directly with some of the other folks there: people that are serving food, dishwashers, my assistant cook, and so on.
I was reminded during this sesshin that sometimes when we make mistakes, we cause problems for other people, and it's not our place to fix those problems. This might sound a little strange because most of the time you would think about taking responsibility for your actions, and certainly I think this is quite important. Most of the time this is the right thing to do—you cause harm, you should try to address that harm and fix it, try to make it right. But sesshin is kind of a funny place, and one of the things that we try to really focus on is that people have particular roles that they are assigned during the sesshin, particular jobs.
So in the example I want to talk about today, I was the Tenzo, the cook, and there was another person who was a dishwasher. A couple times I gave him particularly hard dishes to clean. This was not on purpose. Things just happened and food got burnt, caked onto dishes that was hard to scrape off and get cleaned.
When that happened, one time I tried to soften the blow and said, "Oh, I'm sorry that I did this and that now you have to clean this, and I'm greatly appreciative of what you're doing." Another time, he had to leave the dish to soak, and he was off doing something else. I came into the kitchen and saw that the dish had soaked enough that it could be cleaned, and I said, "Oh, I'll just wash it up."
But actually, this was the wrong thing to do. I stole his practice away. He had the opportunity during the sesshin to face whatever emotions and thoughts came up as a result of my actions, including the trouble I was causing for him—making him work hard when he was already working very hard, now with these extra things to deal with. But in some ways, that's not right. That actually takes away his opportunity to face that situation. I soften the blow.
I thought this would be interesting to talk about just because this is a little area where I think Zen maybe differs from how we typically interact in the world. We think a lot about "I did something, I'm responsible, how do I own up to that and deal with it?" And I want to be clear that of course Zen takes that part quite seriously too. I've taken these precepts, and they include a bunch of things that really push me in terms of behaving in ethical ways that are for the benefit of other people.
But there is, I think, this deeper understanding that no matter how hard we try, there's nothing we can do to protect everyone from our actions. We simply don't know what all the consequences of our actions are or going to be. They extend far beyond what we even get the opportunity to know about.
I'm sure I've certainly experienced this, and I'm sure most of you have too—you talk to someone and you find out that something that you had totally forgotten about had a huge impact on their life. Maybe something you said, maybe something you did. I had my 20th high school reunion a few years ago, and I remember meeting people that I couldn't even remember who they were. I didn't remember them from high school. They remembered me. They had some story about a time we did a thing and how meaningful it was. I was like, "Are you sure that was me? I think you're mixing me up with someone else," but they were sure it was me. Similarly, I have things that I remember that have happened with other people that to me were a big deal and to them were nothing.
So one of the gifts, I think, of sesshin is this opportunity to really sit with our practice. And one of the things that I really got to practice with this weekend is that, yeah, there are these situations where I do something, I make a mistake, and it's someone else's problem. And that's just how it is. And then the question becomes: how do I live with that? How do all of us live with that? How do all of us live with the fact that we do things that may cause harm to others and we can't do anything about it?
Anyway, I don't have any answers for you. I certainly have my own approach to dealing with this. But it's ultimately up to all of us to figure out how we are going to live with those things.
That's it. I just thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about that and my experience at this most recent sesshin and share it with you all, and try out the video feature and see how it works. So if folks like this, let me know. I don't know that I want to do it all the time, but it's certainly easier to talk for 10 minutes than it is to write a post. The standard is a little bit different. And yeah, if this works well, maybe I'll do a little more of it. So let me know what you think. Thanks. See y'all.
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