Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi: Embracing Zen and the Path to Shared Aliveness

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello, and welcome to Season Two of Wonderstruck. I am your host, Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us. My guest this time is Nicole Baden, Tatsudo Roshi, a Dharma successor of Zentatsu Richard Baker, Roshi, and Director and a resident teacher at the Zen Buddhist Center, in Schwarzwald, Germany, where she has lived since 2009. Nicole’s life in Zen began with a crisis. She was 17 and stuck, overwhelmed by self-doubt, difficulty coping with her sensitivities, and a feeling she would not survive. With some help from her father, and her own intuition, Nicole looked for relief in the form of her 18th birthday gift. She would travel to the Black Forest and practice Zen meditation for the first time, with the hope of quieting her existential dread. What Nicole learned on that trip, set her on a path that would change her body, her mind, and her experience of the world. The way Nicole talks about Zen is a great service to us all. She clarifies, demystifies, and connects a widely misunderstood term with a kind of freedom that can be found through practice. Nicole says she stopped suffering by connecting with a shared aliveness. She’s here on Wonderstruck, to share her profound experience with you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s wonderful to have you here, Nicole Baden Roshi. You gave this beautiful talk at the Tibet House in New York City. And, you know, you talked about sunyata , or emptiness, which is kind of a complicated topic. And you did such a wonderful, wonderful job of being able to work with having us experience it through some of the stories and the descriptions that you gave. And I was wondering if you would share the story about your realization or awareness of emptiness, which came through an experience you had with your dad?

Nicole Baden:

Yeah, yeah, sure. Maybe to set that up a little bit. It may be important to note that emptiness, sunyata, that’s one of these terms, and maybe the only one really entirely like that. But at least for me, and starting to practice, I just couldn’t map, at all, onto my experience. It, just, you know, other terms, like, say, compassion, or wisdom or equanimity, I’d have some kind of starting point, some basic understanding, which then I could refine through practice. But emptiness, that just didn’t ring any bell whatsoever. So, it’s difficult to find where, if it’s going to be something experiential, where am I even going to look for it? And so, what you’re referring to, for me, when, for the first time, I actually had a sense of oh, that must be what they mean with emptiness was when my dad brought me to the train station. And in my life, I’ve been, usually when I visit my family, and then I leave, I’ll be leaving for a long time, sometimes for a year or something. So, I don’t know how long I was going to leave at that particular time, but probably for several months, at least. And I’m really close with my parents. And so, it’s difficult to leave. And so, when he brought me to the train station, we were standing at the platform, right? Hence, we were saying goodbye as you would, hugging each other and having all the goodbye words spoken. And then the train came in, I was getting onto the train, again, another, waving and so forth. And then I would walk with my luggage to where I was going to be sitting.

And my dad followed that on the platform until he was right next to me, just with a window between us. And so, there is when you’re then seated, there can be this really awkward time. You’ve already waved 10,000 times, you’ve thrown all the kisses there are, and you just don’t know what to do anymore, but the train still isn’t leaving. And so, we were in that there was this interim period in which, on the one hand, he was already gone, I was on the train, there was that glass between us. But on the other hand, he was still there. He was right there. I mean, we could, I touched my hand to the glass, and he did too, so he was there, but also gone. And it was then that his eyes teared up. And that’s really unusual for my dad. And he’s not exactly a super-emotional person. So, his eyes teared up. And when they teared up, something really different, a new kind of notion happened for me. And I was recognizing that I had been understanding the situation as I am sitting in the train, my dad is staying home, and I’m now going to leave, and then we won’t see each other. That sounds reasonable, right? That was my understanding of the situation. And I felt the sadness. But at that moment, when I saw his eyes tear up, that understanding suddenly meant nothing. What I saw instead in his tears was more like, I don’t know, I’d say, I saw what I mean to him. And what he means to me. And, yeah, so there’s this phrase, and in one particular Zen koan, in which, what they are asking in that koan is about the nature of what’s called suchness. And suchness, being a concept that’s very closely just like on the other side of emptiness, conceptually. So, there’s suchness and there’s emptiness. And as an answer to the question about the nature of suchness, and therefore also emptiness, the koan says, it is that in me, which comes and goes with you. So, in seeing my dad tear up like that, I felt that very clearly, I felt there’s that in me, which comes and goes with him, and vice versa. So, there’s that relationship. And while it comes and goes with him, it also stays with me. And there’s something in him that will also stay about me. So, as the train was leaving, with that shift in mind, or in really much more in the heart or in the body, I felt his absence. You know, suddenly, I couldn’t see him anymore. I felt his absence, but not as absence. What I felt so clearly at that moment, was the presence of his absence. Yeah, and so I think that was the first time that I actually was able to sense a whole world was opening up of how to feel that I would call it has a lot to do with what’s meant with sunyata and emptiness. That combination of the presence of absence, you know, there’s never nothing. Nothing isn’t nothing. Absence isn’t absence. There’s a presence of absence, but it’s still a presence. There’s the presence of presence. And there’s the presence of absence. And that is an opening into feeling and relating to that in me, which comes and goes with you. And that’s just such a different way of inhabiting, you know, this, this life, and this world.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s such a, like, embodied experience or a visceral, emotional mental experience, even listening as you tell that story. And, you know, it’s, it’s evoking it, I’m feeling it within myself, and I’m feeling moved by that story. And I remember someone in the audience was saying that you told that story, and she felt as though she understood somehow. And then she also felt sad. Like it was, it was not just, of course, an understanding it was a full, embodied understanding with emotions and everything else. And, you know, there’s definitions and so forth of emptiness, and until you shared that story, well, I want to just read this little thing about emptiness, because I feel as though that story makes it come alive. It’s “To know the truth of change, impermanence and interconnectedness rooted in a basic sense of appreciation,” as you’ve described it, and it’s like, oh, yeah. That’s so beautiful and it leads me into these next questions for you about Zen, and what is Zen and what is Zen practice and how it evolves this kind of, and you will tell me, but like – this participatory experience, and how it’s very much, the body is involved, and the subtle body, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about what is Zen.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah, yeah, sure. If you’re actually going to practice– Zen is not a thing, right? It’s not. If we’re really going to talk about Zen, we can’t really talk about it in the sense that it’s not a topic to know something about. It’s a way of knowing. It’s a way of knowing, and as you’re evoking here, a participatory way of knowing, maybe an engaged way of knowing, and a way of, for lack of a better word, of being, even, the activity of being, of alivening, maybe. And so, I mean, Zen is a school, obviously, with a certain pedagogy and a practice, teachings. But all that, the forms of Zen, I think, are entirely in the service, while they are meant to be an embodiment and, like an enactment of a particular way of being in the world, the forms meaning including things like, you know, doing the bow, doing the bowing, lifting your hands for the gassho, bowing to another person, chanting the sutras, or sitting zazen together in the very way that we do and practice centers. All that is an enactment of a particular teaching, and a sense of what it could be like, and what it should be like to be in this world. And I would say, if I was to point to anything with regard to what is Zen, what is that way of knowing that’s different, maybe, you know, like to just to look at the contrast, what is that way of knowing, how is that different from what maybe most of us or at least for me, I can say, what I grew up into, how was that different way of knowing than the way I’m learning and incubating through Zen practice? The difference I would say, my teacher Baker Roshi makes that distinction, wonderfully clear, talks about it’s not, first of all, it’s not conceptuality, but it’s attentionality, and that just through attention, attention is enough, attention knows, you can know through attention. You don’t need to conceptualize. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with conceptualizing. And oftentimes, we’re going to need to conceptualize in order to get something done and to plan. There’s not, like, I’m not setting up this contrast with this narrative sense of, that’s the bad guy and attentionality is the good guy. That’s not what it’s like. But conceptuality is, from the point of view of Zen practice, thinking and conceptuality is more fundamentally embedded in a wider, more inclusive sense of what aliveness is. And so, it’s more about opening our, I would say identity. So, opening where we inhabit, what we are. We tend to inhabit who we are, oh, I am such and such a person, such and such, it’s important to me, this is what I want to do. And this is what I care about. These are my needs, my fears, my traumas, and so forth. We inhabit who we are. And Zen is saying, you don’t need to only inhabit that. You can relax into what you are. And more fundamentally, what you are is first of all, just aliveness. So, you know, you’re becoming this alive creature that’s interacting with an alive world. And it’s a meeting of alivenesses. And then at that level, there’s much less–and, actually, none–what I like and what I don’t like, you know, the whole, the role of say preference, needs and the entirety of our conceptual and psychological lives is just one aspect that emerges from the more fundamental interaction of aliveness. But first of all, you’re just relating as aliveness to aliveness.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s almost like it clears away a lot of just obstacles. I mean, you described it, I think, you know, at one point when we were talking about, clearing away some of the conceptual aspects of how we are, or think and be, to sort of into this aliveness in a way that feels like this incredible sense of freedom. And makes me think of how, you know, your journey and how you came to Zen and Zen practice and stayed. I mean, you’ve been, I know, for like, the last 17 years you’ve been living in the Center, either in Colorado or in the Black Forest in Germany, in such a way that it brought something that became very alive and freeing for you. And I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that journey.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

So, for me, the starting point was suffering. I just, I couldn’t stand being myself. And I figured I was 17 at the time, and I just figured, oh, my God, okay, 17, say I live to 80. So, I did the math and I thought, if I’m going to have to live as this person for another, say, 63 years, that’ll be hell. So, I started looking for, how can I change what it’s like to be me? I didn’t think I was a bad person. I just thought that the way I experienced what it was like, you know, I had, I was a teenager, obviously. So, it was sheer horror for me when other people, you know, when I wasn’t popular, or when I didn’t bring home good grades and stuff. I just, there was so much I felt so much pressure in so many different ways. And I noticed how I think I was probably a pretty, like, sensitive or vulnerable person. And I couldn’t deal with it very well. It was like, when I felt my own pain, or also other people’s pain. I just couldn’t handle it. It was too much. I had no, I didn’t know how to be with what I felt. And also, not with how my mind was out of control. Like it was constantly caught up in loops of insecurities, justifications, and all that. So, that was the starting point. And I had a strong sense, I mean, existential sense. Literally, I thought, I am not going to survive if I have to be this way for another 63 years. That’s just not acceptable. So, I was looking for what to do, and how could that be changed? And I thought, probably psychotherapy and religion were my best guesses. So, I started with reading the Bible, and all that kind of thing. But I couldn’t really find anything that satisfied the kind of search, that seeking that I felt. So, then the just also as a little anecdote, and then the short story of how I ended up specifically with what I’m doing, that was more or less coincidence, whatever that means exactly. I told my dad that I couldn’t live this way. And he was like, what do you mean? Your life is pretty good, like he didn’t understand. But he did understand that I was serious. And so, he asked a colleague from work who had uttered similar thoughts, like, he was on some kind of spiritual journey or something. And his colleague gave him, upon his request, something like 20 or so brochures of places that he said, you can send your daughter to any of these places, they’re safe. And so, my dad gave me these brochures and said, you can pick one thing and I will pay for you, and I will drive you there for your 18th birthday. That was his gift to me. Yeah. And so, then I looked at the brochures, but I didn’t know what was going on. You know, they all said, were advertising themselves, basically. And that didn’t work for me because I just didn’t trust advertisements. So, what I did is I piled them all up. And I quite literally, I closed my eyes, and I said out loud to myself. If there’s anything like intuition, I really need it to work right now. It was kind of like a prayer. So, I grabbed into the pile. And I pulled out the brochure that was for Johanneshof, the center that Baker Roshi founded in the Black Forest. And I just went there. And I liked the brochure, too, because it was the only brochure that literally, like, had zero advertisements, it

Elizabeth Rovere:

They’re not trying to sell you anything.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Nothing. Like I mean, if they were then they were really bad at it. So, it just said, it gave me a date. And then it said work week. That’s perfect. That’s like the last thing I would choose.
Yeah, so I went, and for me the power, like to get to the point of that you, bringing up your question, the point of the freedom that is so important to me on my path, at least, I got there is a lot to say about that, but I won’t. When I sat meditation for the first time. I had never sat still.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That was the very first time you had ever meditated?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Oh, yeah. I had no idea about Buddhism. Wow. Nothing. I just did not know what I was getting into. Wow, zero. Yeah, I mean, to such an extent. Like I also I just didn’t, I think the internet wasn’t really there yet. At least we didn’t have it, so I couldn’t I didn’t do research or anything. And it said work week, and I went to the work. So that’s all. Yeah, it said Buddhist Study Center, I know that I knew that much. But I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Yeah. And so yeah, when I was there, people would say things like, oh, Baker Roshi says such and such, and I didn’t know what Baker Roshi was or who, or, you know, just that was just something that was being said all the time. And coming from a Christian background, it sounded to me the kind of feel and atmosphere if it was a little bit like the Bible, you know, o, the Bible says such and such was reiterated. So, I figured Baker Roshi, that must be some old Buddhist book. That was my feeling. Yeah, I knew nothing. But when I sat still, for the first time, it was on all levels, excruciating. It was way too early in the morning, it was four o’clock, I sleep late, you know, I get up. When I’m left to my own devices, I get up at 11. So, it was four o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t allowed to move, which I didn’t know. But they made sure once I sat down, I wasn’t going to move. It was bodily extremely painful. And it was mentally, almost a kind of torture. You know, all that stuff came up that, how much, as I said, I just couldn’t stand being me. And so, it was just like, all of that. Here, there was nothing but me on that one square meter of a meditation mat. Like a full dose of me. I couldn’t go anywhere. So. okay, that happens. And while it was excruciating, after like, I went into it, this is terrible, this is the worst. This is horrible. It’s so painful. But then after like, maybe 20 minutes or so, there was some laughter. I can’t explain it. But suddenly I started [giggles] so bad. And it’s perfect. That’s exactly what I’m running away from. Everything that’s here on that one square meter, is exactly what I’m running away from. And then I thought, maybe it’s the running away from that’s making everything so terrible. So, what if I stop running away? And if I’m just going to be here, with that experience of being me. And once I did that, something shifted in me, and I knew I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. I didn’t know I was actually going to stay at the monastery for the rest of my life. That wasn’t the plan. But I knew I would never, like, I would engage with myself in this very way for the rest of my life. And with everything that I encountered. That decision was very clear, I think, during the first meditation period and that was freedom.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And that was the very first meditation period?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yes, exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s really profound. But it’s that thing where you’re saying, like you’re sitting there, you can’t go anywhere, you have no other option, but to experience this, face it, not run from it. And it starts to like, it overcomes you and then it dissolves, or dissipates.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yes, yes. Yeah. I mean, it was I should say the, the suffering, it didn’t exactly dissolve, but accepting it made it workable, and made it: this is just my life. My life doesn’t have to be good. More fundamentally, I wanted to just inhabit my life. And I realized that before, I hadn’t done that. I was better off inhabiting, but fully inhabiting, a life I didn’t like – I could still turn it into a life that I do like – than running away inside myself from something I can’t run away from. So, it was an improvement.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s that letting go aspect.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And you started laughing?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah. Yeah. It was like, Yeah, I don’t know. There was something that was utterly ridiculous about the whole situation for me.

Elizabeth Rovere:

When you say that it’s like, I sometimes feel like sometimes when things are revelatory, there’s kind of like a humor to it.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah. That’s right.

Elizabeth Rovere:
You just didn’t see it. It’s like…

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s really phenomenal. And then, you know, as you were saying that you had this experience about hearing, you know, Baker Roshi said this, that in the other, what is this? Or is it a book? Is it a person? Is it you know, who is he? And he became your teacher? And you’re now the successor. And it’s just quite a profound path. That you, I mean, what was your what I mean, that’s, as you describe that, what has been your experience of learning and being the student of Baker Roshi, and getting to these points where you became the successor?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah. How much time do we have? [laughs]

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. Give us a couple of highlights [laughs].

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah. That is, though, I think, one of the most complex questions on the Buddhist path, the teacher-disciple relationship. Its complexities. And what it really is.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Because it’s an inherent part of Zen, right?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Really, it’s complete, yeah, Zen is, it’s called a face-to-face teaching. And a so-called mind to mind transmission. And the idea is, for a disciple, the way I understand it, the idea is you’re meant to fully, first of all, just to know, you know, another person, you learn how to actually know another person. And by knowing another person, you can learn how to know yourself. And that other person, the teacher, their main job is to be willing to be known, to be fully known. Not to try to be somebody they’re not. And that, I felt, I am so lucky with my teacher, who is that, like, he just, he’s just there. And so, there was always from the moment on I met him, I knew there’s always a known address. That address won’t shift. I knew that that changed my life. And so, it’s not the teacher-disciple relationship. And my experience isn’t just this revelatory, insightful, oh you learn this, you learn that more profoundly. It’s the willingness to be known, and to know. And there’s an intimacy that includes the whole spectrum of human relationships. I once asked him, because I was confused about like, the relationship can be so, it’s so much. Sometimes it’s extremely distant. Right? I mean, the teacher can be, can say the very things you want to, like you don’t want to hear at all. And he’s not always right, either. But it’s like the disciple’s job is to make the teacher right. Well, there’s some feeling like I mean, not at all costs. Obviously, you don’t lose yourself into the relationship either. It’s a profound way of becoming yourself, but with a more profound understanding of what it means to share, coexist, so you don’t become yourself at the cost of losing connection. It’s not the self that separated. It’s a self that knows how to arise from otherness.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean, that’s complicated and profound, and yet – and, deeply meaningful. And it’s like, as you’re speaking about that, it’s making me think about yes, yes, yes, it makes sense. And then it’s like, wait, no, I’m confused. But the idea of being so profoundly in a relationship, that you don’t lose yourself. Which is really important.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

It’s completely important, and the relationship will not work. If you lose yourself.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right, then it’s not a relationship anymore.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden:

Exactly. Yeah. It can go through phases. So, when I asked Baker Roshi, when I was so confused, to tell me what are the differences like what is the teacher disciple relationship. And the contrast I asked about, and my question was, like, how is it different, for instance, from a psychotherapist?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right, right.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden:

And a client.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

And he said, well, the teacher disciple relationship is both way more intimate than that. And it’s also way more distant.

Elizabeth Rovere:

[laughs]

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

But yeah, so you can go through a phase where you’re losing yourself. But that’s like, the teacher’s job is to both, on some level, that may sometimes be good, because then you’re loosening patterns. That might be good to loosen up. So, there is an experience of losing yourself. But the teacher’s pretty profound job is to, on some fundamental level, not let ever the disciple lose themselves, and to keep pushing them back into. And that can sometimes mean pushing them away. Yes. And I now know that now too, with people who I’m also practicing with, sometimes the best thing we can do is push them away. So, it’s pretty. I don’t know.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean, it’s a great responsibility. And yeah, yeah. To really be able to work in that way and be in a relationship in that way.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

The implicit agreement is two things, that what’s meant with awakening and real transformation, that that is possible, and that the relationship is going to be dedicated to that purpose. That’s the implicit agreement. It’s not that I’m going to confirm you. I’m not… I may not validate your views at all. The implicit agreement, if it’s going to be a real relationship, is that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s really beautiful. Is that what is meant on some level with Dharma transmission?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah, I think so. I think, the way I understand it, is that Dharma transmission is a shared commitment to, yes, to each other. But to the Dharma, first of all.

Elizabeth Rovere:

The word transmission is used because it is more than just a cognitive, or a learning. It’s not just an education. It’s experiential.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah. And I should say, maybe – Yeah, exactly. And transmission is not just, there’s transmission, the moment you start practicing with a sangha. So, it’s, it shouldn’t be the way I want to talk about it right now, it’s not some, you know, there’s something happening when you’ve practiced together for 25 years or something, but like, right now, us talking, we’re transmitting to each other. So, transmission is really that, to recognize and be in relationship with the feeling of that in me, which comes and goes with you, and cultivating that openness. And that’s just brought to a certain consequentiality, when it becomes Zen path with a teacher, but it’s transmission can happen really, in any meeting that means something.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And I think, you know, when I was thinking about talking with you today, it was like, wondering, like, what is it like, at the Zen Center, whether it’s here – is it similar in Colorado as it is in the Black Forest? And does your day start at four o’clock in the morning? What does it look like? You also talked about the chanting…what does it look like? And the people that come, do they come and stay for a month, or a week, or an evening,

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

All across the board. You can visit either one of the centers for whatever length of time I’m, as possible at that time and the year. And the centers are both in some way, there’s some profound family type similarity. It’s a little bit like if you visit your family, say, in Bulgaria, and then you visit them later in California, there’s a similarity, but you’re just at a very different place. So, Crestone, the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, is just in terms of the campus, and the campus that’s, that’s really in Zen. The campus as a body is considered a body of practice. It’s not just a practicality, where you can sleep or something. It’s, it is the, in some ways, it is the body of practice. And so, the campus is extremely important–

Elizabeth Rovere:

Alive and embodied. It runs through.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

And Baker Roshi speaks about the campus as an alive being, as a mandala. So, you need, I mean, Zen is Zen practice, should work in a person, as I said, in the very beginning, not like a topic to know something about – but more like a culture, and how do you absorb a culture? You don’t really. You can learn about a culture, but you learn, you really learn by living in it. And it makes a huge difference, the aesthetics of the culture, the way inside and outside is conceived, the way the relationship to the physical world, and to, say, buildings amongst each other. All that, you live that, and that’s how you know it. And so, I think Crestone Mountain Zen Center is, from that point of view, an ideal practice location. That’s, I can’t believe that Dharma Sangha, the organization, Baker Roshi founded with both of these centers, Dharma Sangha, which includes the Zen Buddhist center in the Black Forest, and the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, and also an online school sort of, not really yet, but we’re getting there an online program at least. So, at least three things and guess what the Dharma Sangha is made up of. And Crestone Mountain Zen Center is, I think, an ideal practice location, in terms of its campus and what it’s like. Yes, we do follow, oh, by the way, Black Forest as well as a really nice, super good place. Very different. It’s in the middle of a German village while a Crestone, is at, what is it in feet? In meters, it’s 2400 meters, and feet, I think it’s 4000 feet or something. Super high, remote. And so, the locations are quite different, and each totally charming in their own way, and also powerful. And a day looks similar in both centers. So yes, we do get up very early, but no longer at four. In practice periods, sometimes we get up at four, or in sesshins, which is a seven-day silent retreat, meditation retreat. And so, then there’s earlier wakeup times, but just daily life, ordinary daily life, as you get up, say, 5:30, or five. And then there’s, we always start the day with meditation. And there’s, everything as, you don’t ideally, you don’t need a watch when you’re at a center, the like, there’s a wake-up bell. There’s a sound for each thing. That’s like, every next thing is announced through some board or a bell or something. Because you do want to live in a kind of timelessness. But yeah, you know, so there’s the morning meditation. And then there’s, we do the so-called ōryōki meals, which is a mindfulness practice for meals, a monastic, Japanese ritual. And Baker Roshi has done, from my point of view, a really great job at both importing the monasticism from Japan but paying attention to really asking what of that has a real, I would call it now a Dharma import that’s independent of the cultural aspects because some things are done in Japanese monasteries for Japanese reasons, just part of their culture. And that we may not need as Western practitioners. But we’ve looked for the embodiment of the practice. And so, we’ve designed our rituals and forms in such a way that it becomes an embodiment practice for Western practitioners like that. So yeah, there’s sutra recitation, there’s ōryōki meals and there’s lots of work, always lots of work.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What kind of work?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

All kinds, everything. Everything. Gardening, fixing things, building things, kitchen, always kitchen. Cleaning, guest, we have guest accommodations, you know, we host retreats, like guest retreats, but also meditation retreats.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And everybody has a job, right?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Everybody has a job, like we don’t have, in either one of the centers, where we’ve decided in Germany, for a couple jobs now, we need to give them to people who have professional skills, but mostly the monks or the practitioners run the centers, as part of the monk training as well. So yeah, everybody has a job.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean, I love that actually about retreats and having that…I mean, it’s kind of funny. I love that way of having those types of jobs, whether it’s loading the dishwasher or clearing the table. It just makes them, you know, I guess as you have described, things come to life in a way. And having deeper meaning rather than something to just get done. It’s in, you’re actually in this experience. It can come alive in a very positive way, or interesting way. It’s not always necessarily positive, but it’s meaningful.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah, that’s the point. You know, it’s all participatory. You can’t, as a Zen practitioner, you can’t ever consume Zen. You have to create the situation that you’re in.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Which is why there was no marketing on your pamphlet.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yes, that’s right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Nothing to be consumed.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

That’s exactly right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah. Just going into this, the Dharma Sangha center, I wanted to, there’s something that was very profound on the website that I wanted to ask you about. So, I’m just going to – bear with me, so I’m just going to read it. And I might paraphrase a little bit, but we the human race are in the midst of a slow-motion Earth wreck. That’s unfortunate, right, but it’s unfolding directly in front of us, around us and within us. And we can’t quite get what we ought to do or could do. So, we need to discover how to face the planetary crisis individually, socially, generationally. So, the practice, and teaching at Dharma Sangha, is that personal and societal transformation is possible. Very hopeful, it’s possible and necessary. And it’s based in this way of the four possibles, the following assumptions: one, personal and societal transformation is possible. Living in accord with how everything actually exists is possible. Freedom from suffering is possible. Living in beneficial ways for all is possible. So, can you possibly share how, you know you can take it to an individual or just like moments level of, you know, how, how has Zen helped transform, you know, how may it be of help? How can this start to unfold? And, you know, I can share that I know, just being with you and sharing and exploring these ideas and experiencing things, shifts and has ripple effects. But this is a pretty intense and profound and meaningful statement.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah, so, okay. The basic assumption here is that all suffering, and I mean suffering here now as duḥkha , and the Buddhist sense, and duḥkha doesn’t mean negative experience. It means, what happens when we human beings function through attachments and resistances, or aversions. Both of which, more fundamentally, come from inhabiting a sense as if we were other than the world we arise from.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Say that again, it’s really powerful as if we are other–

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

As if we are other than the world that we arise from. But we aren’t. We are not. There is in our functioning, I think it’s evolutionarily, we could look at that. It has made us the most powerful species on this planet. The fact that we are somehow able to create this illusion that we are, that we can exist as other, as someone independent. The great delusion of the stuff that we are made from. There’s a really foundational separation, but I think is built into our brains even. That’s my sense. It’s, I think, a kind of cognitive operation that sets on very early in the perceptual process. And it creates this illusion that is very convincing. Now that would, there’s a whole, like, logic and investigation, even scientific investigation that we could go into here, cognitive neuroscientific, and so forth. But let’s just leave it there for now. And say that the claim is, suffering and not understood as negative experience, but understood as that which separates itself from shared aliveness. In some way, I’d say that’s one way to look at suffering, that which separates itself from shared aliveness.

Elizabeth Rovere: 

Yeah, that’s intense.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

So, there’s an illusion there. And how has Zen – well, it’s not been very successful. Look at it. I mean, how many people are really practicing anything, be it Zen or other transformative practices that are meant to reroute us into shared aliveness? Not very many people do that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Why? I mean, sorry to interrupt you. But like, it would seem that we would want to be participating in shared aliveness. It would seem that it would be glorious and joyful, and, you know, bring tears. It would be very meaningful. Why are we so afraid of it? Why do we separate ourselves?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

I think we’re, sometimes I think, maybe we human beings are almost too sensitive to bear what it means to exist. I mean, on some level, you could say, it’s going to sound schmaltzy, but it is based on my own experience. When I feel what I’m calling shared aliveness, I feel profoundly connected with you. Everything here, everything here. So, then the fact of impermanence becomes almost unbearable. And also, the fact of death becomes almost unbearable. And also, what it really means to be intimate, one is so vulnerable, and how often then do we make the experience we’re really opening up to someone or something, and then not just is it impermanent, but it can also be pretty mean. So, it can separate like otherness. We don’t have otherness under control. That is, so the kind of connectedness I’m talking about has to be able to tolerate that it’s going to disappear. And that it’s not under my control. And I think that is, those skills, we have the sensitivity, and we can feel that way. But we don’t, most of us don’t really have the tolerance to bear the pain of that intensity.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, you know, it’s very interesting. It’s almost like an evolutionary skill set that needs to develop, because it’s, you know, it can be almost unbearable. And it’s funny that you say it, because that is on the one hand, and then sometimes on the other hand, it’s like, you sitting on the cushion for the first time, and you’re like, this is going to be unbearable, and then it’s somehow tolerable in 20 minutes, so it’s weird. Like, sometimes we don’t know. Yes. And then I jump into like, when I went to the New York Philharmonic once in my life, because it was so powerful and beautiful. I couldn’t handle it, it was like, I can’t go back! It’s too beautiful. So yeah, these are just some of my associations. I Want you to keep speaking about it.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

That’s an interesting, you know, but that is part of, I think, the complexity that we’re talking about here. There’s a whole other track that sheds a different kind of light on us humans, which is that also, evolutionarily speaking, you know, to have a cognitive apparatus that
externalizes the world. And that creates the illusion of an independent self. And then that I’m going to say neurologically, or biologically now that then rewards the system, when the self gets more of what it wants, which is like the basis for say, greed. So, there’s a reward system. And there’s a whole system of addictions. And of also, when you have something, we human beings we are such, and I know this from drinking green tea and loving green tea, if anyone is ever so cruel to give me a better grade of green tea than the one that I’ve had before, then I get used to that, and I don’t want to go back to the lesser grade. You know, we habituate so quickly to a higher, to more, to more. And so, I mean, there’s, there are so many things about that, how our entire system is set up to want more always and then to get used to it very quickly. And that makes us evolutionarily successful because we are extremely selfish. We can be extremely selfish creatures. On the other hand, we are able to transform; transformation is possible. It’s on some level against our biology, which is unfortunate. Like, there’s something pretty intrinsic about how we function that doesn’t like to be engaged in that way. I mean, for some people more, for others less. But there’s, to some extent, we’re going against the grain, I think, of our biology, by that kind of transformation. But we don’t, I mean, it can be engaged differently, it can also be as a whole good book on, if you shift, that’s then again, about knowing the world differently. Sorry, if that may end up being too, like, we haven’t established certain terms. But from the perspective of the so-called independent self, the one that thinks, I’m an independent person, it’s going against the grain. But if you learn, which meditation can teach you, how to release that identity from a different point of view, you can be satisfied with anything at any moment. So, from the perspective of oh, I have learned how to inhabit what I’ve now called shared aliveness. And not I have learned, already the DNA of our language, our grammar makes it super complicated, because not I have learned than already there’s a self that now owns something which is shared aliveness; No, it’s more like attention now resides in this organism, attention now resides more in what I’m calling shared aliveness. Then, it’s a different physiology I’m claiming, and you function differently. You are much more – you, you step out in the morning, out of your house, and there’s a fundamental sense of stillness. Let’s just first, oh! And they’re just receptive, your sense fields, there’s no noise, you know, how there can be noise and the eyes, and in the ears, like you can’t hear anything. You can’t see anything. So much clutter, and all our sense fields. And the modern world supports that a lot. So, they put more clutter in there. And you need food. That’s more and more. They feed our greed. And like, even the taste, you know, that by the way, it’s a difference I noticed between Europe and the States. They put so much more stuff in the food here. Like, I taste something that will look way too sugary. So, but that’s when our senses are habituated already, and they always need more and more. So anyways, if you locate yourself, if not yourself, but if you locate attention, if attention is located differently, you step out of your door in the morning. And first of all, there’s just stillness. Your senses are pretty uncluttered, and just receptive. And they let the world in. You know, it’s like, oh, a breeze, and there’s appreciation. An Apple. How wonderful. What else do I need? There’s some fundamental sense this aliveness doesn’t need anything other than air, space, and connections.

Elizabeth Rovere:

There’s nothing missing.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Nothing missing.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Because it’s already aliveness, shared. Whether it’s an apple or what you’re eating or your tea, or you’re talking to a friend or looking at the sun, the day. You know, it’s interesting to me that, you know, when you were talking again, like, as you’re speaking, different, I’m having different experiences of what you’re saying, I’m thinking about things. And you know, when you say that shared aliveness is a different physiology than my identity as an independent self. And yet, right, it’s still this physiology. And then I think of us as being selfish or evolving, because we’re selfish. And then I still think, though, that we’re evolving, we have to evolve together, because we can’t really be alone, completely. So, we have to trust and have a sense of community as well. And then I think about it as, what, what is coming, what is alive, which part of my physiology is alive? Is it the selfish physiology or independent self? Is it the shared aliveness, that’s, you know, what gets awakened, and then how does it get awakened through various practices and experiences that kind of like, switch it on? In a way? Does that make sense?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah. And I think the process I mean, that’s some of Buddhist debate about, of course, you know, what gets awakened and how? Is it a gradual process or were you born with it? So, I’ll give you the answer from the school that I’m part of. And so, first of all, awakening is always a potential. So even, it’s here, right now, where else should it be? It’s a potential that’s always here right now. It cannot be owned. Certainly not by the self, it cannot be owned. It’s more like, it can only be activated. Now, what can activate it? Again, it’s not going to be the self. That’s a lot like Einstein says this thing about the mind in which a problem is a problem cannot be the same mind that solves the problem. So, it’s very much that’s some of the huge part of the whole craft of practice: you start from a certain point of view, or from a certain point of departure. And usually, the image we have is something like, oh, I want now this new thing, like, the benefits of practice, the fruits of practice just added to this thing that I am. But that’s just not how it works. You have to release the thing that you think you are, and just live the qualities. The fruits of practice, you just live them. You don’t separate yourself from the mess, and oh, I want to be compassionate. And I’m so far away from compassion. No, you just, it’s again, the presence of absence. If there’s a longing for say, compassion, then that longing is not an absence. But compassion is right here in the presence of the longing. And so, you just live as it. That’s the, that’s the basic activity and practice you live as it. We don’t sit to become a Buddha. We sit as the Buddha. And you just do that, and you don’t think Oh, but if I sit as the Buddha, then I will become a Buddha. No, you just do it anyways, it’s the best thing one can do. And even if this person doesn’t feel like a Buddha, you can still sit as the Buddha. And then you’re maintaining, you’re continuing the practice for everyone. And I’m just part of everyone. It doesn’t matter what I experience, just continuing the practice, because I believe in the practice, and somebody will feel something.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s really meaningful. I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s very difficult and easy at the same time.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yes, it is. Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, like the simple. It’s simple and yet, it’s very powerful. I have to ask you this question. Just because, you know, this podcast is called Wonderstruck. And my question is, I mean, I know we’ve actually touched upon it through the conversation. But how do you see, how do you experience–I’m not going to ask you what you think, how do you experience rather than what–wonder or awe, within the context of your practice and Zen?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

I would say, just hearing the words wonder and awe. It’s the very wonder, awe, and I would add appreciation, that cluster of the kind of experience that these words are scooping up. I think it’s how we know, how we can know shared aliveness. I think all of these sometimes people wonder, and again, in the same sentence structure, am I in shared aliveness now? Well, of course, it’s the wrong kind of question. But shared aliveness, I think, comes with wonder, with awe, and with profound appreciation. So, there’s some sense of returning one’s roots into, it’s almost like a birthright, we can live in wonder and awe and in appreciation, all the time, just as a side effect of being alive. And so, I think that’s a really good name.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Do you experience it kind of all the time in that way? Like, you’re just like you said, when I see the apple?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

The honest answer is, I don’t experience it all the way. All the time. I think the craft of the, what I would say is that, but I think people can, yeah, and one should strive to. It is possible to live, really, with a basic sense of that being present all the time. But what I would say practice has helped me a lot, a capacity I’m developing through practice, is to travel. And to shift pretty easily back into that sense. I know where, like, I know, inside my self-awareness, right. And that’s available all the time. So, a yogi, from the Zen tradition point of view, is somebody who knows the bridge. And, you know, it’s not so much about, oh, I have to live in it all the time, at least not, that’s not how I understand it. But it’s basically it’s, it’s your first home. So, you’ve shifted, as oftentimes, the two truths are considered as two worlds, almost, the world, say, of the self, and the more fundamental truth of shared existence. And they can be experienced almost like they are two worlds. They are not, you don’t have to. One doesn’t have to live them as two worlds. One can live them, as you know, as they say, in the sutras form, that which form is emptiness. And emptiness is form. So, one can live them as the same world at all times. But first of all, I think the craft, especially for lay Zen practice, would be to learn how to navigate both worlds, and then how to shift between them. How to not suffer, sometimes people suffer from feeling separated from one world or the other? And how just learning how to travel between them pretty easily.

Elizabeth Rovere:

How does Buddhism look at consciousness? Or do we, is that like a six-month class?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

It is. Yeah, but just very, very briefly, one thing I will say as we totally lack language for those territories, like that would be one of the big jobs of the next what, ideally, we don’t have that much time. So, if we can be quicker, that’s great. But usually, it could easily take 500 years or something, to develop real language to map out. We have one word for mind, and we have one word for thinking. It’s not adequate. Consciousness and Buddhism, I don’t know about Buddhism in general, but the way I’ve learned is defined as what’s called the fifth of the five skandhas, and it’s that which makes the world predictable, or relatively predictable, and externalizes it. Baker Roshi has distinguished that from awareness. Awareness as being a mind that is much more connected, first of all, and that has a sense of spatiality for instance, which consciousness just doesn’t have to have a sense of space. It’s more like a tunnel, a self-identity stream type tunnel. But anyways, there’s that six-month class.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You’ve mentioned a lot. And it’s been very impactful to hear you talk about shared aliveness. And I’m thinking that our listeners are going to be drawn to that, and wonder about that experience, and how to tap into that. Is there any kind of suggestions, advice, or instructions of how they might be able to do that? I mean, certainly, I would like them to come to your center. But I’m wondering, is there a breath practice or something they could do?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Well, the best way is, you can start sitting at home, you know, even if just in homeopathic doses. If you just start introducing bodily stillness into your daily life, that would be a really good start. And then, you know, as you cultivate that bodily stillness, it’s good to be really attentive and some way in which you allow yourself to be surprised by what that really means. So, in other words, don’t conceptualize, oh, now I’m going to feel more like this; don’t kill the experience with your expectations. But literally, just learn how to sit still. And I do recommend, first of all, you need to sit stable, like in a stable position, that allows you to relax. And then there’s always an emphasis on a certain physical uprightness in meditation. But I tend to recommend that you let the uprightness sort of arise more like, from within, from within the relaxation. And you don’t do the uprightness because that can be really stiff. So, if you find the physical posture that has those qualities of a relaxed uprightness, awakeness, attentiveness, that posture that you can practice, you know, for, say, from the Zen perspective, we would actually recommend sitting for about 20 minutes. For some people that may be long for a start. But you should have some sense of working yourself up to 20 minutes, because as I said, this is a physiological practice. And the overall experience is that at around 20 minutes, certain kinds of shifts start happening, can start happening. So yeah, you just introduce, you can introduce that practice into your daily life. It’s good to do it, whether you feel like it or don’t. So, to do it, independent of your preferences. It’s like vacation from preferences, you just do it as something you’ve agreed to yourself, with yourself, to do. And then you can, again, with a kind of receptive attentionality, notice or “know-tice,” as Baker Roshi says, notice with a kind of knowing in it, how it affects you. You just watch it, but you don’t try to turn it into something. Yes, you don’t instrumentalize it, you let the stillness kind of spread throughout your life and let it do its work.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s fantastic. I keep going back to this association with a memory of my father in-law, sitting for the very first time and a meditation. Never been in a meditation ever before. And it was actually a long meditation that you had provided for us, it was like, 30 minutes. He was just like, wait what? That was only a minute or seconds, he’s like, did she do a meditation? Like what? He was bewildered. And it was unexpected. No expectations. You know, probably even he was maybe like, even not sure if he wanted to sit that long. And that was just seconds.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s good. Like that kind of openness is a huge part in the practice. It’s like, as I say, sometimes the physiology of bodily stillness, and you can actually feel it when there’s bodily stillness, and you cultivate that. And again, that’s not you don’t feel it, but oh, but I am not bodily still. No, it’s just, bodily stillness is possible, and I’m just going to act as if, or feel as if, let belonging be its presence. It’s kind of like, even if you just have some imagination of it, that is a presence that you can bathe yourself in. Bathe your whole body, mind in that feeling. And yeah, so that becomes, I call it an organ. It’s like an organ, you know, like a sense organ, like the ears can do the hearing. The bodily stillness can do, primarily it can do openness. It has a profound capacity for real, real, the kind of receptivity that relates to wonder, and awe, and appreciation.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And shared aliveness.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

And shared aliveness. Exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s fantastic. So, Nicole, I just wanted to ask you, you know, when we started the conversation, and when you started this journey, you talked about how, when, as a teenager, that, you know, you’re just so frustrated and uncomfortable with the sort of ruminations or thoughts and you, you’ve said, I just don’t like being me. I don’t want to have to live this way for another 70 years. And where are you now? What are those thoughts like for you now? What does it feel like? Is it a faded memory?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

It is. It’s a faded memory. Yes. And I think what has happened is something like, I changed the kinds of questions I was asking. And I changed the kind of expectations I brought to life.
And miraculously, by changing the questions, and dropping, maybe, the expectations, suddenly there was no problem.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, think about this with teenagers and teenage girls. And this question of, you know, you had mentioned at one point, like, am I popular? Like, how, if I’m not popular, how it just sucks, you know? It’s just awful to show up at school or you feel bad about yourself. And, you know, kids feel this way, a lot. And now, I just wonder, like, if you even think of that question, am I popular? You know, am I popular, what does it bring up for you?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Empathy, I get it. I get it. It’s yeah, I know. I feel so sorry. I feel so empathetic when we have that question. Yeah, and then what when the answer is no, you’re not. Nobody likes you. I mean, it’s such a vulnerable place. But the underlying question is, how do you validate your life? What makes you valid? What needs to happen so that you feel, I’m okay. And that’s what I meant by changing the questions. The original question in which the, you know, degree of popularity was immensely important. The question, or the assumption behind it was, I am validated when other people do it, like they have to validate me. Others have to validate, and it’s in their eyes, that I am going to either be worth something or not. It’s like, you can validate your life through money, you can validate your life through a career, whatever, through a spousal relationship, through whether or not one has children or, you know, whatever.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Or how great your exercise program is going.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Yeah, nowadays, we validate our lives through our smartwatch. Completely. And it’s, what I so deeply hope for those of us caught in the suffering of those external validation cycles, that is horrible. But the suffering, like what we tend to not see when we’re in that, is we think but, oh, but if they like me, and if my smartwatch says I did my program well, and once I have more money, then I’ll be okay. We will never be okay in that realm. Never, never. The real okayness happens when we stop seeking outside. When we start validating, the validation is already there. It’s like a birthright. As I said before, if you’re alive, you’re alive. No validation required.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And you’re connected.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

And you’re connected.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, yeah, it reminds me of what we were talking about, like feeling outside of, and what, whether I belong. And you shared that story of, I think it was, right? Of Baker Roshi and, like hearing the music from the outside. Do you want to share that?

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

I hope I’m telling it correctly. What I remember is Baker Roshi telling the story of wanting to be at a party that he was hoping to be invited to. And then somehow, he wasn’t. And so, there was a feeling of being excluded. But I remember him saying that he walked along the street and heard the music of the party, like the street where the party was happening, and feeling lonely and excluded and stuff. Then hearing the music, and suddenly realizing, Oh, there’s the music, I’m at the party. And suddenly dropping that sense of being excluded and being lonely. But more like, I am participating, here’s the music, I am hearing it. It’s something like that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s like, it’s like that shift. And perspective and experience of like, you know, sometimes, I mean, it’s not always the case, right? But sometimes it’s, we’re the ones that are excluding ourselves in a way. Rather than, if we can sort of open to the possibility, or not the possibility, but I don’t want to keep overusing shared aliveness, but this connectedness somehow.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

And sometimes, I mean, sometimes we are excluded. Most of the times I’ve experienced, people exclude themselves, in effect, but sometimes we are excluded. But even if so, the point here being that there is a way in which we’re not excluded that’s much more existential. And what we are conflating, is we’re bringing that existentiality into whether we’re included or excluded, but there is no existentiality there. Existentially, we are included, again, as part of shared aliveness. And that’s never at stake.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right. Thank you so much, Nicole Baden Roshi for being with us today on Wonderstruck. It’s just been a pleasure and an honor to be sitting here with you today. Thank you.

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi:

Thank you so much for that invitation and your hospitality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That was Nicole Baden, Tatsudo Roshi. Thank you so much, Nicole. To learn more about Nicole’s work, check out www.DharmaSangha.org and www.Dharma–Sangha.de.

Please come back next time on Wonderstruck. I’ll be talking with Dr. Sue Morter about life-changing visions, divinely supported truth, and waking up to why we’re really here and what we’re really capable of.

For more information about Wonderstruck, our guests and our events, check out Wonderstruck.org and please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe on YouTube. We truly want to hear from you with your feedback, reviews, and ratings. You can also follow us on Instagram, X , TikTok and Facebook @wonderstruckpod.

Wonderstruck is produced by Wonderstruck productions along with the teams at Baillie Newman and FreeTime Media. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou, Travis Reece, and Josh Wilcox.

Thank you for listening. And remember, be open to the wonder in your own life.