Caitríona Reed and Michele Benzamin-Miki are informed by a lifetime of questioning, and an openness to the continual rediscovering of the miraculous in everyday life. They have practiced Buddhism and Buddhist meditation for an accumulated total of more than sixty years. They are rooted in the principles of socially engaged spiritual practice, and by the central guiding idea that the spiritual life is not separate from all other aspects of living.

They have come to appreciate that Spiritual Practice, including Meditation and Training in Mindfulness Skills, are ways to cultivate awareness, and personal and social responsibility, in all of life's situations.

Together, they have developed a unique way of teaching, integrating the timeless practice of the Dharma, as it is expressed in both the Theravada (Vipassana) and the Tien (Vietnamese Zen) traditions, and their training in multiple modalities of hypnosis and hypnotherapy, with contemporary environmental and social realities. They are co-founders of Ordinary Dharma and Manzanita Village. They are currently teaching a second two year training program for social activists.

 

Michele is also founder and guiding Sensei of the Aikido Sho Bi Juku Dojo (Los Angeles) in the lineage of Morihei Ueshiba O'Sensei and Shoji Nishio Sensei. She also has affiliate dojos in New York, Minnesota and Northern California where she is a guiding teacher.

I am grateful beyond words for the remarkable work of Caitríona and Michele. No spiritual teachers I know bring a broader, more relevant range of knowledge, experience, and well-honed skills for awakening us to fullness of being. While thoroughly schooled in ancient traditions, their work is fresh and bold, igniting both courage and joy for meeting the challenges of today's world. For over a decade my own life and teaching has been enriched by their adventurous creativity and passionate respect for life.

Joanna Macy, activist, teacher, and author of "World as Lover, World as Self" and "Coming Back to Life", and co-founder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship

In 1992 she co-founded Manzanita Village retreat center where she lives and teaches with her partner Caitriona. She has taught Meditation and the principles of Non-violence and peace education throughout the US and Europe since 1986.

She has taught Meditation and peace education to children in the Los Angeles city schools, particularly within the inner city programs in East and South Central Los Angeles for youth at risk, as well as within the probation systems. She worked in the Central Juvenile Hall prison in Los Angeles for 2½ years teaching Meditation and Non-violence in the system's school programs and special units in the 'Scared Straight' programs for special high-risk offender, the lock down section and special protection units. Her work has inspired programs that have continued since that time.

Michele also teaches retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, in the San Francisco Bay Area, for People of Color. She is a pioneer in finding skillful ways to bring the Dharma out its context of Euro-centric sensibility (as it so often manifests in its recent North American forms) and fostering practice among communities of color. She and Caitríona are strong advocates for diversity and inclusiveness, seeking to create a Sangha that address racism through the Dharma.

Michele is a high-ranking woman martial artist with her own school, Aikido Sho Bi Juku, and is the guiding teacher of three other schools in New York, Minneapolis, and Ukiah. She has a 5th degree Black belt in Aikido through the Aiki-Kai Federation, Hombu Dojo, Japan; and a 4th degree Black belt in Aiki Toho Iaido, through the Japan Iaido Federation, both under Shoji Nishio Sensei. She is vice president of the International Shinrenbukai Federation, a US based organization of Sosho Ryu Iaido, and is a 5th degree Black belt in that style, through Masakazu Tazaki Sensei.  

She teaches at the summer training camps for the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists (PAWMA), The National Women's Martial Arts Federation Steering Committee (NWMAF), and The Association of Women Martial Arts Instructors. She demonstrates, performs, and lectures on non-violence with her sword worldwide.  

She is a painter and performance artist. She is also a clinical Hypnotherapist. With Caitríona, she is also co-founder of Five Changes Foundation, an organization to further Non-violence Education, Community Building, and Social Justice.

Caitríona: "By chance I met Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche and Akong Rimpoche as a teenager when they first arrived in the U.K. from India in the mid 1960's. They were staying at one of the Oxford colleges and had been invited to visit my school, which was not far from Oxford. My life in the Dharma has since been marked by a number of other fortunate accidental encounters." Caitríona began her practice at Same Ling Monastery in Scotland in 1970, and went on to study with teachers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. She has led retreats since 1981.

She was a senior teacher in Thich Nhat Hahn's Order of Interbeing, and received the Lamp transmission from him in 1992. Prior to meeting Thich Nhat Hanh she trained in Vipassana in Sri Lanka at Kanduboda Monastery (with Sivali Thera) and at Rockhill Hermitage (with Akasa Thera and Kassapa Thera); in the U.K. (with Ajahn Summedo); and in the U.S. with teachers at the Insight Meditation Society with Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Dipa Ma, Munindra, Mahaghosananda and others. Through most of the 80's and until the establishment of Manzanita Village in 1993, she led retreats at Dhamma Dena, Ruth Denison's Retreat Center in the Mojave Desert, She continues to look to Ruth as a significant inspiration and is clear that it would never have been possible to establish Manzanita Village retreat center without the inspiration of Dhamma Dena.

Asked why she is no longer formally associated with Thich Nhat Hanh and his tradition she replied. "I have immense respect and gratitude for the contribution that Thich Nhat Hanh has made to our understanding of Buddhist teachings and practice, and of course deep gratitude for the years I spent with him as his student. For very personal reasons I felt the need to distance myself as best as I could from hierarchical institutions of all kinds, and to connect instead with the Dharma, as well as with my friends and with my students, in a more personal and intimate way; not to dilute the teachings, rather to go more fully into them so that they might meet my own need for an ever more integrated practice . . . then to do my best to communicate that intimacy and integration in my own teaching."

"By 'integrated' I mean a practice that does not in any way make a hierarchical distinction between the political/social/cultural/environmental as well as spiritual needs of our time. So much Buddhist Practice in America seems to have become somewhat commodified, recreational spirituality for the privileged. I am interested in helping build those 'communities of resistance' where Dharma practice is used to address issues of cultural, structural as well as direct violence, in addition to meeting our personal needs for self-actualization. My instinct is that we cannot separate those two functions of practice. We cannot have one without the other."

Caitríona is also poet who "experienced a difficult twenty-year gap between one poem and the next." Since "coming home to her life" as a (transsexual) woman she has happily returned to writing poetry and has started reading publicly and publishing again.

She is a Clinical Hypnotherapist with a practice based in Los Angeles (Westwood) and at Manzanita Village.

Man, Woman, Other

by Caitríona Reed

Outside of feminist and queer communities, and apart from the occasional gender-bending icons of the past few decades-David Bowie, Michael Jackson-there is remarkably little public discussion of this binary system. "Is it a boy or a girl?" is the first question asked when someone is born. When we meet someone for the first time we automatically look for the clues that will determine their gender. If there is any uncertainty, most of us become extremely uncomfortable.

More disturbing are the accounts of physicians surgically altering the genitalia of ambiguously sexed infants; as well as the daily violence perpetrated against ambiguously gendered and otherwise queer folk.

For years, I bought into that same binary system. As a male-child who felt that she did not fit either the body she inhabited, or the social identity she imagined was projected onto her, I believed that I was doomed to a shadow life of confusion and hidden desire. When I emerged into transsexual identity I thought, as did the professionals I turned to for help, that my best and only hope was to conform to society's idea of what a woman is supposed to be. I bought into that same heterosexist system.

Heterosexism and intolerance are by no means universal. In Navajo culture there is said to be at least forty-nine genders and gender designations. Well into the twentieth century, in places as far apart as Central Asia, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, and Africa, people with varieties of gender expression and sexual preference were accepted in the community, and often held respected positions-as healers, shamans, oracles, and leaders.

But today, on the anniversary of 9/11/2001, what I really want to say is this: we live by constructed identities-of gender, sexuality, class, race, culture, and religion. Though it is assumed that we live in a materialistic society, we have little respect for material things. We respect the constructs of power, and the money by which we measure them. We are afraid of our bodies. We deny their process, as we deny our own loving, aging, and dying. We hide our desires and fears, imagining that they would otherwise consume us. The violence of our denial erupts into the violence that is perpetrated in our names, and which we have come to tolerate in our society and in our lives.

My experience as a transsexual has radicalized me in ways I never expected. In this time of deception and fabricated war I have come to see, more clearly than ever, how we use constructs of 'difference' and 'other ' to marginalize those who do not conform to the status quo-"queer," "transgendered," "Muslim," "liberal," "terrorist," "immigrant," "homeless," "welfare recipient" "black," "white," "brown," etc.

For all the lip service we pay to individuality, we are extremely wary of the 'other'. Unwilling to accept complexity and difference, we settle for oversimplifications-personally, politically and spiritually-that perpetuate division, dehumanize people, and create real suffering in real lives.

I sometimes tell people that I underwent surgery to become a middle-aged virgin. In truth, by being transsexual, I became 'other'. That experience has led me to a far deeper awareness of racism, violence, economic exploitation, the manipulation of public opinion, and the perpetuation of mythologies that distance us, as individuals, and as a society from our experience of life and from our responsibilities. I shifted my own personal identity to align myself, and the work that I do, not with women, or with queer communities, but rather with oppressed communities and individuals, wherever they are, whoever they are. My experience has become a doorway to a larger world.

But my experience is not unique. I took a risk in order to embody my own personal authenticity. It is something anyone can do. In Buddhist terminology we talk of 'Dharma Doors' as anything that catalyses awakening and compassion. There are said to be ten thousand Dharma Doors. Perhaps there are as many doors as there are people to pass through them.

My interest is in embodiment. I maintain that the body, and the body of the world, is sacred, and given to us in sacred trust. What I have learned as a transsexual woman is that life reveals itself and that I can always trust the revelation, beyond the categories by which I seek to define them.

. . . and so, in writing this, if I identify as just your average radicalized bi-lesbian white femme transsexual Buddhist sista, with attitude and a passion for social justice, you know that that's just a construct, just a way of talkin'. And we both know it could all change in a heartbeat!

Originally Published in Vision Magazine, San Diego. September 2002

Fertile Ground For A Warrior

by Michele Benzamin-Miki

When I was a small child, this cross cultural heritage was my playground and I was happy in it. As I grew older I felt my parents' discomfort as they adjusted to a biracial marriage and their decision to raise us in America. I found myself having to pledge allegiance to only one country, America, and profess only one faith, Catholicism. This created in me confusion, frustration, and, worst of all, a sense of oppression. . . .

On Being Biracial
. . . . There is a field of all possibilities, where I could go beyond race, religion, and economic class to a place much like a borderland. I lived here, in between, not completely American or Japanese. I walked a path in the middle of the two worlds, where I need be loyal to no other authority other than my own heart.

A trip to Japan at twenty-one, my first time back since I was three, stirred up childhood memories and reunited me with a part of myself I had disowned. It was strangely familiar, walking inside those enormous hollow bodies of bronze Buddhas in Kamakura, Nara, and Kyoto. I was amazed to see my mother resurrected there in her homeland, after suffering the many hardships of adjusting to life in America. I watched her reconnect to her heritage and root religion, and regain personal sovereignty. Despite language barriers, I too reclaimed bonds to my Japanese family that would later change my entire view of life and spirituality.

I came back to America and continued seeking ways of enriching my experience in Japan. I began training in the martial arts, starting with karatedo, and soon after that I took up vipassana meditation. My father had studied martial arts and meditation while in Japan, and had taught me some basic self-defense when I was a girl. When my mother was a young girl, during the war, it was part of physical education training in school to learn how to use a short staff and some fighting techniques. It was in my blood, so I felt right at home in the martial arts. . . .

Meditation
. . . I discovered the benefits of meditation when I walked into a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles with a friend who had invited me to attend a yoga class with her. Here I was, once again, standing in front of an enormous Buddha statue, more colorful that the ones I had seen in Japan. A bald man in ocher robes approached us and said, "Come in, you are early, we start in half an hour." We both felt this was probably the wrong place for a stretch class, but the man was interesting and we were adventurous. So began my vipassana practice.

Inside the enormous body of the Buddha, inside the Dharma I found there was room for everything. I was now embarking on the well-trodden path of integrating the martial arts and meditation, as well as beginning to put together the puzzle-pieces of my life. I could recognize my relatives from Japan and America, my relation to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, Jesus and Mary, Shakyamuni and Tara, angels and bodhisattvas. In the body of the Dharma all the opposites of my life merged. I signed a peace treaty with all the warring factions inside myself, and became aware of the path set before me.

I am a warrior. The word "war," from the Old English and Old French werra, means "bring into confusion." In times of great anguish and confusion-times like ours-warriors are born, arise, and called forth into action to help restore peace and bring about understanding and clarity.

It is easy to fall asleep in the middle-class comfort and convenience of late twentieth-century America. Whatever our economic background, we are living in an era in which leading a simple and content life is neither valued nor supported. In order to be happy, we constantly try to upgrade our lifestyles. We buy consumer conveniences that are supposed to save us time, yet we find ourselves so busy trying to keep up with our possessions that we have lost contact with one another, and lost touch with what we are doing to the planet. Our communication falters and our patience with one another wears thin in a world of fast food, mini-malls on every block, "instant cash" to immediately gratify every whim, and "virtual reality." These things are seen as progress, designed so that we cannot see the long term effects of living this way.

When we create a closed system where only human values and desires are honored, we sever our relationship to this planet. We see the planet and every other life form as either a commodity or a resource to use as we see fit. It is a point of religious argument that humans are at the top of a spiritual hierarchy that renders the earth as our domain. Even the point of view that we are caretakers, in a role of stewardship to the planet, breeds arrogance. We are a part of the planet, in symbiotic relationship with and interconnected to all life-human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. . . .

Being In the Body
. . . . Buddhist scriptures talk much about awakened mind, "enlightenment." Here I find the danger of interpreting this to mean mind separate from body, setting up an epic battle between the "defiled" body and the "supreme" mind. When we view our bodies just as a vehicle for enlightenment, not intrinsic to the very experience of enlightenment, we turn them into a spiritual commodity. We may use spiritual practice to disengage and retreat from the world, if we see the world, like our bodies, only as a field of endless suffering (samsara). There is the danger of splitting mind from body, nirvana from samsara, a danger of repeating the battle of duality from other "civilized" cultures and religions: the Greeks' psyche and soma, Christianity's Spirit and the flesh, the Victorian division between reason and emotion. As Sam Keen writes, "If we were fully integrated persons we might refer to ourselves as being bodyminds, rather than as having bodies." We would then engage in life fully and compassionately, understanding that samsara and nirvana coexist, as in the Gospel of John: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." In the words of Lama Anagarika Govinda: "To the enlightened man ... whose consciousness embraces the universe, to him the universe becomes his 'Body."'

If we continue to exist in a way that disconnects us from our bodies and the planet, we will soon die as a species. We have already created a legacy of suffering that will last a long time after our extinction. Is this the function of a spiritual life? Perhaps we feel helpless or overwhelmed, and would rather leave it up to someone else stronger or more capable to change our situation, or, as some would have it, to "just leave it in God's hands."

The most common and convenient denial for Buddhists is not to be attached to anything, even to this life, this planet. Yet we are attached, interconnected, and inseparable. We are in a constant flow of interconnection: this very body, this life, this world, is the body of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. We create more suffering, more karma, by continuing to separate ourselves and act as if our actions don't count. Thich Nhat Hanh has said, "Someday there will be an instrument that can measure the effect of a leaf falling to earth on a distant star." I see mindfulness as that instrument. With our mindfulness we can see that our intentions and smallest actions have an effect on the world.

I see the interrelationship of our complacency, denial, and fear, hidden sometimes behind the mask of "spiritual detachment," with the destruction of life on earth. It recalls to me the image of a frog immersed in a kettle of lukewarm water on a stove, the flame low, simmering, slowly being cooked. The frog does not realize its imminent demise, and so has no reason to jump out of the kettle. Are we dead already? Dead Buddhists? Or is it time to wake up and smell the toxins, and act before it is too late? The action can be as simple as a shift in the way we view our part in this world, not as spectators but as active participants in the world as it is, in its present state. . . .

The Sword
. . . . The path of the Buddhadharma has brought the sword of compassion and wisdom into my martial arts training. With these tools a warrior can develop tireless energy and a clear focus in action. She or he has the inner strength to be steady and still at times, sustaining an immovable gaze, and the freedom and abandon to jump in and take risks when necessary. To know intimately the beauty of failure. To let go of attachment to outcome only after having given everything you have to give. The warrior realizes the only true enemy is complacency and self-righteousness.

Without compassion and wisdom the warrior loses sight; energy and zeal turn into a destructive, out-of-control force. With misguided passions, she or he can be bought and soldiered into acts of self righteous"benevolence," lashing out irresponsibility without understanding the full consequences of their actions. When there is an enemy to fight against, we are for the moment safe from having to look into our own deep wounds. But we do not heal, and the problem remains.

I have been teaching meditation and contemplation on compassion along with the nonviolence principles of aikido for some time now, and countless times I am asked if I would kill someone in order to protect myself or a loved one. I've answered, "I would kill. I'd kill their action, not the person." Yet now, as I write this, another thought enters my mind: Yes, I could indeed kill the person. I feel this is important for me to acknowledge. I am reminded of a story a friend told me. He was participating in a peace rally, and someone angrily threw a question to him: "What would you do if you met the person who killed your loved ones? Don't tell me you wouldn't be angry and want to take their life!" He replied, "Yes, but then I would count on you, brother, to restrain me." We are not alone in our struggle; it is necessary to know to ask for help.

As I walk the path of the warrior, I find love and tolerance to be my great teachers. I call myself a "warrior" because I am a woman who is discovering her strengths, who has taken up a path traditionally walked by men. In doing so, I am uncovering a long lineage of female warriors, and bringing these archetypes of strength back for myself and other women. I feel strongly that women need to acknowledge their personal power.

Everyone has a legacy of stories and rituals deriving from their culture, background, and lineage. These myths give us security and identity, but they can also create intolerance, selective blindness, and rigidity. As women we need to uncover our own myths, handed down through history and by our families. If we understand how our actions have been controlled by these myths, and ask the question "For whom does it serve," and the reply is not "women"- ourselves then it is time to reevaluate and rewrite them.

I feel my role as a woman in Buddhism is to pay homage to, honor, and love deeply my own mother, grandmother, and the ancestral mothers and sisters within the Buddhist tradition. If we as women can do this, we can begin to reclaim and bring back to life the rich heritage of women's participation in Buddhism, often obscured in history, and blaze new trails for ourselves as well as the mothers and daughters of the future.

This earth is fertile ground for a woman warrior to walk upon.

Extracts taken from Michele's essay Fertile Ground For A Warrior
published in Buddhist Women on The Edge: Contemporary Perspectives from the Western Frontier
North Atlantic Books, 1996.

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