Ancient and Twisted

Untangling Karma: Intimate Zen Stories on Healing Trauma by Judith Ragir.  Monkfish.  251 pp.  $18.99

Untangling Karma is not quite a dharma book and not quite a memoir, but has elements of both.  Judith Ragir is a longtime Zen practitioner—some forty years—who has looked back at her life of practice and seen what it has done for her, especially in terms of healing.  It isn’t always a happy story—there’s plenty of suffering in these pages—and she doesn’t pretend everything is perfect now; a lot of her healing is ongoing.  So many Buddhist teachers speak from a place of superiority—I’m an enlightened being and you need help (desperately)—but Ragir makes herself vulnerable and tells her story, things that many teachers would have left out.  I have huge admiration for her honesty, and the effect of it is that Untangling Karma becomes a dharma book.  We want to practice more because of what she tells us.

Ragir not only tells stories others wouldn’t; she brings up wayward subjects as well.  One reflects the title itself.

“Sometimes, if I have paid significant attention to my problem areas in between sesshins, I can enter into the stillness and quiet of sesshin and in that silence, something greater than myself, some interconnected energetic functioning, enters me, releases me, and unravels ‘my karmic knots.’  This healing energy is spontaneous and intuitive and does not come from my willpower.  The dharma wheel turns me.”

That has been my experience as well.  You’re not doing anything (doing something gets in the way), but the knots come undone.

And speaking of energy, in a chapter entitled “Do Not Misuse Sexuality,” she brings up another subject that doesn’t get raised a lot.  It comes up because her husband considers her Zen practice “tantamount to an extramarital affair.”  (It’s true.  Spouses can be jealous of practice.)

“I can see now how the self-satisfaction I got from meditation could be construed as another lover.  When my deeper bodily energies opened up, it was like having an orgasm.  Who needed a husband?  This is the kundalini energy that isn’t talked about so much in Zen.  I felt discouraged by the unspoken rules of Zen against speaking of chakras or the human body’s elaborate system of prana or Qi or life force.  Zen practitioners often feel—and in many ways I think they are right—that these energies are a distraction to seeing the existential and greatest reality.  But for me, not talking about what was happening in my body left me, again, feeling alone and misunderstood in the midst of the sangha.  Once again, somehow, I was not supposed to acknowledge my body’s energy.”

One would think, hearing her short bio, that she shouldn’t have a lot of suffering to talk about.  She was raised in a well-off Jewish family in Chicago, danced with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, is an accomplished artist who has made Buddhist-inspired quilts that are on display in a number of Zen Centers, has been a doctor of Chinese medicine, and is a senior dharma teacher, one of the founding members of the Clouds in Water Zen Center in St. Paul, Minnesota.  She studied with two of the great teachers, Dainin Katagiri and Shohaku Okumura.

Sounds like a great career.

But her life has been difficult.  From an early age, almost from birth, it seems, she suffered from severe asthma, also from eczema that sometimes covered her whole body.  Her parents were distant and uncommunicative, and she was sexually molested twice, first by an uncle (“Oh, he did that to everyone,” her mother said years later, having allowed her daughter to spend the night at her Great Uncle’s house), later by an African American maid who worked for the family.  To deal with the trauma, she overate, drank heavily, used drugs, and for a while took place in the extramarital swinging that was common in the seventies (at least people commonly talked about it).  She is a veteran of 12-step programs, and credits Eastern healing practices, acupuncture in particular, with curing her asthma, which at times seemed life-threatening.  She even endured a horrific skiing accident later in adulthood.  She’s had plenty to work with.

But this is a woman who engaged in severe Zen practice.  She certainly did that if she worked with Katagiri and Okumura, but what most impressed me were periods in her life when, as a housewife and mother of young children, she created solitary retreats for herself for months at a time, sitting every morning on a dock near her Minnesota home from 4:00 to 6:00 AM, getting the children ready for school, then sitting again from 9:00 to noon, before letting the rest of the day be more normal.  She went to the dock by herself at four in the morning, sat and walked and did a formal service, sometimes when the temperature was as low as 20 degrees Fahrenheit.  She encouraged herself with a sentence that repeated in her mind: “If I just sit quietly for some long, deep time, the quiet will dissolve all my doubts.  If my mind is quiet enough, I will just know.”

Nothing in this book impresses me more than those solitary retreats.

Ragir talks about the way that she rejected her Jewish heritage as a young person, and the shame she felt at that when she did the Auschwitz-Birkenau retreats with Bernie Glassman; the shame she later felt as an American doing a retreat at Hiroshima.  She talks about how difficult it was to take on child rearing as a practice, even in the midst of her long days of retreat.  Deep meditation didn’t make things easier; it seemed to make them harder.  She also includes a long—seventy-five page—chapter on the subject of race, the way she was largely raised by African American maids, especially one who saw her through high school and was closer to her than her mother.  There were all kinds of complications with that: the way that woman, named Malissa, had to abandon her own family, and her own daughter, to work for the family; the way that Ragir eventually faced her own privilege when she attended that woman’s funeral.  There seems to be no subject too difficult or uncomfortable for Ragir to take on.

I get a little tired of dharma books that make Zen practice sound wonderful (it is wonderful; I get that), saying that if you devote yourself to this practice everything will be great.  No one has been more devoted than Judith Ragir, and everything hasn’t been great.  She’s gone through a lot.  But it is her Zen practice—along with a number of other practices—that has helped pull her through, and in showing how that happened, she lets us know how powerful practice actually is.  This book speaks to the reality of Zen life, not its fantasies.  We need more books like this, and fewer of the other kind.

(My title alludes to the words of the Bodhisattva Ceremony, as we recite them at my Zen Center: All my ancient twisted karma/ from beginingless greed hate and delusion/ born through body speech and mind/ I now fully avow.)