Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docu-series, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge, with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode, I speak with Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. Zenju, which is the dharma name of Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel—and we’re going to hear more about that, what it means, that Zenju is Zenju’s dharma name—is an author, poet, ordained Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, and artist, and drum medicine woman.
She’s the author of several books, including The Shamanic Bones of Zen, The Way of Tenderness, The Deepest Peace, and now a new book with Sounds True: it’s called Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times. That’s what we’re going to talk about—opening to darkness, and what it means to stay with the darkness on its terms. Here’s my conversation with Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel:
Please join me in welcoming Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. Welcome!
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Hi.
Tami Simon: Tell us about Zenju as your dharma name. What does that mean?
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Zenju means “complete tenderness.” When you get ordained, you get two names. So my dharma name is Ekai Zenju. So Ekai is a more informal Zen name, and according to my teacher Zenkei Blanche Hartman, the late Zenkei Blanche Hartman, it’s very strict. So you’re to use your formal name, not your informal name. So there’s a long story about how I went from Ekai to Zenju. Actually, she got really upset about me not doing the Zenju.
And Zenju means “complete tenderness.” So when the name is given to you, that second name, that is your work. The first name is kind of how you are already in the world. Ekai is “ocean of wisdom.” Second name, Zenju, “complete tenderness”—the work you will do in the world.
Tami Simon: Powerful to think of this notion of complete tenderness. I mean, I have to be honest with you, there’s a part of me when I hear that, what happens inside is I go, “Ouch.” Tell me what complete tenderness is and what it means to you.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Well, when I heard that, the name and the audience, they thought it as sweet like, “Oh, that’s so sweet, tenderness.” And I kind of chuckled because I knew it wasn’t who I was. That’s why she was naming me that.
But to me, it’s to be in that place of gentleness with oneself. And in that, you can be gentle with others. And to acknowledge the things that do hurt you or acknowledge those wounds. But not to stay in them, but to eventually become liberated from that.
So to be named Zenju, being who I am and how I am embodied in the world, was profound. Because how are you going to be tender—or have a way of tenderness, which is the name of one of my books—in the midst of oppression, internalized and imposed upon life, which brings rage and anger. And yet this call, this way, this name, to hold a place of tenderness, whether it hurts or not. But to hold it so that one is not armored, not always defensive.
Tami Simon: Yes.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Not always dying in anger and the rage.
Tami Simon: A powerful image, to not be armored and to feel that kind of complete tenderness. Yes. Now I want to talk about your new book, Opening to Darkness. What brought you to darkness as a theme that you wanted to write about in such depth?
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: I actually never thought I would ever write about something so existential as darkness. Because it’s a hard topic, I think, to write about. I did the same thing with my other book The Deepest Peace. Peace is again, another existential place. Tenderness is existential.
During the pandemic, when it started, I noticed right away that people were struggling with how to be in this very dark place all over the world. And everyone was in it. And I was in one way saying, this is a fantastic time to go into our caves. And even if you didn’t stay at home—you might have had a job where you to had to go out—but the cave was to go in to notice our fear, our rage, our anger. Being on the edge, the inability to be still, the need to get out. Right? Let’s get out of the darkness. And this longing for light. And I said, “This is interesting, how much we long for the light.” And what light are we longing for became, actually, the question.
And while we were in the pandemic—I think this is what made me put the pen to paper, or actually type on my computer—was during the pandemic, there was this rise of anti-Blackness. So we’re in the dark, we’re battling it within ourselves, and we also are battling the people who are carrying the dark skin. So this of course went on with other groups, not just Black people. Went on to anti-Asian and on and on. This went on for a while.
And so I began to see, for me, one, being embodied in darkness, it was important to write from that embodiment while I’m in the darkness. And I think majority of the books on darkness—there may be some that I haven’t seen—are written by people who are not embodied in dark skin.
So I began to feel the darkness and that rise in anti-darkness, anti-Blackness, as a way in which we don’t know how to live with it. So we like to annihilate it, eliminate it. Let’s eliminate darkness. Let’s eliminate dark people, dark matters, dark experiences, as fast as we can.
And so I think it was—we’ll say an idea, I guess, or a philosophy that there’s something that might be missing in our society that we don’t have the rituals and ceremonies that help us deal with darkness. I don’t want to get into what those might be because it could be a whole lot of things, and we would be off into a whole ‘nother world.
But that’s when I started writing about it. And I kept writing about it as I got the contract to write The Shamanic Bones of Zen. And I was like, “Oh no, what am I going to do with these two things?” And I just kept writing on Opening to Darkness and trust that The Shamanic Bones of Zen would be there, which it was, when it was time to write it. And it was right there. It was very simple to put that book together for me.
But Opening to Darkness I think is important to understand that life is dark. Whatever way you defined it. Mystery, trouble, whatever way you defined it, that is what we live in. And it is exactly these things that create the fodder, the soil for us to grow, and to be, and ascend, if we can, as a humanity. That it’s there and it’s going to be there. Pandemic or no pandemic.
Tami Simon: What I noticed was that I had a moment in really digging into Opening to Darkness, where I was tracking with you completely about how as a society and as individuals, we have this bias always towards positivity, and let’s find the light, and let’s find the glass half full. We don’t like dark times. I totally get that. And we haven’t developed skills and capacities to go through dark passages in our lives. Totally with you. And also totally with you in terms of racialized oppression, and the oppression of Black-bodied people.
I’d never connected these two things. And as you connected them in Opening to Darkness, I had a lot of questions about the connection. And I was like, “Huh. Is it like a one-to-one connection?” I’m curious how you see that.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Right. I think that’s a good question. I don’t know if you felt it like a one-to-one, so I’m curious if you felt it as one or as separate.
Tami Simon: I felt it more as a question emerging for me. And I wanted to talk to you, not just the writer, but Black-bodied Zenju, to help me understand how you see the connection.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Yes. So darkness is to me—and I tred not to define it because I want people to explore this. All of my books are explorations, and I go all over, and everybody goes on the journey, and then that’s the end.
So to me, there is an existentialism or essence in darkness. And there also is in blackness. But that existentialism and essence, and let’s add beauty, has been stripped from the Black skin of people. When we see it, it is connected. When we see blackness, it is connected to what we feel about darkness as well.
So there is a blackness that is un-oppressed, that is from an origin of human beings, because here we are. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Black in America or dark in Tamil Nadu in India, you got the same problem going on. So it’s darkness. Or even in our own society, dark eyes, dark hair. Dark, it’s not it. It’s light. It’s got to be light. Got to be blue, got to be blonde, everything.
So I started to feel into this essential blackness of myself through Zen practice, and how dynamic blackness is, and how evolutionary it is. And I think I moved into that evolutionary blackness. I moved into this evolutionary blackness that did not hold the oppression that was imposed upon it—even though I still experience oppression, so I’m not saying that.
So I think this has been a long quest, and it’s a long journey. So I think this writing started way before the pandemic. It started when I began to feel my own life as expansive as the ocean, and that the things imposed upon blackness—when that is taken away, that there’s more expansion, there’s more openness to it. More openness to my own self, my own experiences I’ve had, and openness to life in general. So if we’re opening to darkness, and opening to blackness, we’re opening to life.
Tami Simon: You mentioned you don’t want to define darkness for people. You want them to go on their very own dark exploration. Take us into that for the person who’s listening right now and they’re like, “I’m not sure I even know exactly what you mean by darkness.”
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Right. I think this is good. When I said I didn’t want to define it, I didn’t want to define it in the book as well. So I tried to stay away from it, although there are a few adjectives in front of darkness in various places.
So I believe that darkness, and the path of darkness, and life, and the path of blackness—and you don’t have to be Black to experience blackness. We’re wearing black, both of us. And so you don’t have to experience it in skin only. So this journey is spiritual. It’s a spiritual journey. So it’s one in which we go into the depth of light. We sit in dark Buddha halls. I’ve set in dark sweat lodges. Everywhere we go, to hone in, and to hopefully bring forth our own wisdom about darkness and light. About life, period.
So to describe it and define darkness is to take away the journey, is to take away that walk around darkness and to not be explore it in the way that I’m asking us to explore it, in this book. I have exercises in the book as well to explore it in that way so that you come up with your own.
So as I said, in my context, it became very palpable to be a person in dark skin and explore darkness, all at the same time. And I couldn’t separate it. There was no separation between it. It didn’t make sense to me, even though there was a part of me that was trying in some ways. But it didn’t work because it was important to talk about that experience of darkness. Not only the darkness that’s suppressed or the blackness that suppressed, but the darkness that’s dynamic. Some people say it’s full. It has gifts. People talk about that.
So it’s a state of being, I think, darkness. It’s a state of our lives that I think is supposed to be there. It’s not something that comes and then we fight it up like a monster. You know, bring out all the weapons, bring out all the remedies, bring out everything to fight it. But rather to, “Oh, here it is,” which is what I have to deal with as a person of color, a person who’s dark. Here it is. Now what do I do with it? How do I use it? How does it expand my life, and where do I contract? And how can I use this darkness as fodder?
So let’s take for instance, racism. So when I was a child and I heard about all these things—when you’re young, you hear about what not to do because you’re Black. And I was just like, “Wow.” I told my mother, “They do know I didn’t choose this color. Or maybe I did, but they do know I didn’t do this.” And there was no answer to that. There was no answer from her to that.
But I knew I was not going to live my life with this imposed—hatred might be a big word, but imposed disdain that was put upon me because of the color of my skin. I refused that, but I didn’t know what to do with the refusal.
And so I just walked with it. I was wounded by it. I cried, I suffered. I didn’t want to live anymore. I went off. I went out of this. And so it was important for me if I wanted to live and live fully, that I find a way to live within this darkness. And what was given to me, this soil. And to see ways in which I could create within racism, which is what most people of color do. That’s why you find so much creativity. And I do talk about creativity somewhere in the book. But there’s so much creativity because you must find a way how to use the darkness, how to have it benefit your life, have it open your eyes, have it expand your life.
And that’s what it did when I went into it as a Zen practitioner. It opened my whole life and I said, “Oh my God.” And it wasn’t about, “I’m Black, and I’m proud, and now I’m happy.” That kind of thing. Or, “Black is beautiful,” which these are some of the things I was taught in the ‘70s and ‘60s. But I needed something more concrete, because it seemed like all the time something was happening, and a lot of it was affecting my life. And so it was important to me, and I wanted to share that with others, this whole experience of being able to be with dark matters, dark experiences. With blackness, with dark people, with all those things we have been taught and trained to turn away from. And then to consider light in a different way. So I do talk about light. It’s for those who get nervous about the book. I do talk about light in one chapter. So it’s there.
So it is related, I think, to how we see darkness, blackness, lightness, whiteness. We use all of those terms politically. In my field, the way I walk in the world is spiritually. So I wanted to see how this was going to play out in a spiritual exploration, not only a political one.
All of my books are dharma, or about Buddhism. And most often, the keywords are not Buddhism, they’re not Zen. It’s always maybe political, or it’s always thrown into some other category other than where I am exploring, which is spiritual. Because if you bring up blackness, it has to be that. But the blackness I bring up is spiritual.
Tami Simon: Well, what I was going to share with you a little bit, you mentioned how Opening to Darkness is a type of exploration. And I just want to share with you a little bit here about my journey inside myself, and then have you comment and have us dialogue about it.
Because at first when you were talking about darkness as the absence of light, I had a moment of, “I don’t know if I know that darkness.” That was my first thing. I thought darkness has this sparkle in it, even when it’s—so that was my first place. I was like, “I don’t understand the absence of light. I want to. I want to understand that, but I’m not sure I do.”
And then as you shared a story later in the book about an experience you had with anaphylactic shock, where you almost died, and you talked about the allergic reaction you had, and how it was hard for you to breathe and everything. Then suddenly I had a moment of, “I get what the absence of light is.” Because like most people, I’ve had experiences of being very, very ill, and wondering if I was going to make it. I think a lot of people have had some experience like that. And there’s no light in that experience. Let’s just say it the way it is: it’s looking at death. You’re looking at death. And looking at it in my own experience, I was like, “OK, now I understand the absence of light.”
So I’m just curious just to take a moment and step back. And I’d love to hear your thoughts about this whole notion of the absence of light. And maybe you could also share your discoveries of that experience you had when you went into anaphylactic shock. It was so powerful.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Yes. So when you were talking about, you see little sparkly things or something you said, in darkness. So I challenge you, what is that sparkly thing? And when we say we see light, what is that? Is it something of our mind, something of the movies, something of a book, something of something else outside of ourselves? What’s sparkling, what’s shining, and is it shining?
So even when in the book I talk about light, you can’t see it either. You can’t see light really. Personally, that’s what I believe. It’s just as unknown as darkness. And I think that that’s what makes it very frustrating to be in the dark and to be in dark experiences. Because you don’t know where it is and you don’t know how to get out of the darkness. So you’re just in there and you’ve been taught to wait for this light, to wait for whatever gift darkness has. What if we don’t strip the darkness? We’re just there.
And I’m not talking about wallowing in it until you’ve lost your mind. If you don’t have a mental capacity to do it, I think you should not. Or if you do it, get help. So I want to say that. It’s not for everybody to do a dark practice. But even though the darkness is right there, even the thing that’s keeping you from being in it.
So I feel like when I had that anaphylactic shock, I could tell by—I went to my neighbor’s house, when I was having it. I was having it at her house, and then I went upstairs to my apartment. And that’s when I began to notice I couldn’t breathe, and I was hanging my head out the window trying to breathe. And that wasn’t doing anything. And I said, “Oh my God, I really can’t breathe.”
So I called 9-1-1, and I was able to do that. And of course, I couldn’t talk. And so then the next thing is I ran to the bathroom because I noticed I couldn’t see either, and my eyes were like golf balls. They were all purple, huge out here. And I said, “Oh my God.” And I couldn’t walk. I could tell I was getting weak. So I crawled back down the stairs to my friend’s apartment. And the way she looked at me was like, “You’re going to die.” I could feel it without her saying any of those words.
So she brought me in. She had a Benadryl, which is an antihistamine. She stuffs it down my throat with her finger, because the throat is closed. So she stuffs it down me, and proceeds to go to bed, and I do too.
So I’m laying there though, before the morning comes. I’m laying there and I’m going, “I cannot breathe, and I am dying here.” I didn’t say it to her. I just knew I was dying, in my own little space where I was laying down. And somehow I just heard this voice say, “Use your skin. Breathe through your skin. Your skin can breathe.” And I just laid there and kind of pretended that the skin was my diaphragm, or everything—it was my lungs, everything that would help to breathe.
And of course I did not go to sleep. The morning came. My friend rush rushed off to work. I’m still in my room, in my bed. And I decided I think I’d better—everything has gone down a little bit on the inside. I decide to go to the doctor’s. On my own, drove, can barely see. I’m holding my eyes up like this to see. When I get there, the doctors, they look at me like I just got up out of my grave. And they brought me into a room really fast. They said, “You had an anaphylactic shock.” They said it. And I said, “Yes.” And they said, “You had a full-blown one that should have killed you. No one lives through a full-blown anaphylactic shock.”
And I said, “Well, my friend gave me a Benadryl.” He said, “No, that’s too small of a thing. You would’ve needed a whole lot more than that.” And brought in all the doctors to look at me. And they kind of just blessed me and said, whatever you’re here to do in your life, to do it.
There was no light in the sense that we talk about light. Something bright, an aha, a major transformation from that experience. But it was staying with, and not trying to get out, not struggling. I really feel if I would’ve struggled, I would’ve died. I really feel that. But I did not. But I did not struggle. I was not afraid. I don’t know why, but I was not afraid.
When I share that experience in the book, it’s I think in a way of allowing life to be what it is, even though it doesn’t measure up to how you want to be in the moment. OK, it is my body betraying me. Why am I leaving? All of a sudden, there’s so many other things I could have died from. What has happened? I don’t even know what has happened. I didn’t even know it was an anaphylactic shock, and maybe that was good. I was clueless to all of that. And I think that being with it, and dwelling with it all those hours was a discovery that there is something of the darkness, of the essential darkness—we want to call it abundant, or expansive, all of that—that has something to say to us and to give to us.
Now, we don’t go get the gifts. “I’m looking for a gift. Darkness should have gave me a gift. Darkness gave me the gift of life.” But I think it was beyond that. It was beyond gift of life. It was just an awakening, in its very subtle way. Not a big bang. A very subtle way of showing me how I could breathe without breathing. I mean, it was closed. Nose, throat, everything was closed. There was no flow. I’m serious. No flow through my body.
So I feel that I’m still exploring it, will always explore it as to what is this darkness in the absence of light. So kind of inviting everybody to let go of this whole light. The sparkle you talk about. Even if you think you see it, to let it go, and to not say, “I know what it is.” Or to force people, like, to come out if they’re not feeling in a way that you want them to feel. “Come on, let’s go do this and you’ll feel better. You’ll get happy. Come on out, stop crying. Stop wallowing.” These things we say to each other. Or they decide, “It should be about over now. Whatever you are dealing with should be over. Because when I deal with things, it’s over within a month, and you’ve gone on too long now. It’s six months.” This is currently happening to me in some ways, so I can really speak from a very visceral place right now.
Tami Simon: I want to deepen my understanding of the absence of light. So it’s one thing when I hear you say you don’t have to look for the silver lining, the positive thing. Stop it, everybody, telling me to see the gift. I get that. I totally get that. I’m curious about visually, do you have an experience of darkness in the absence of light, and what that’s like for you from a visual immersion?
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: It’s not seeing, not hearing, not tasting, not knowing, not touching, not feeling it with my hands. It’s being lost. I think it might be the scariest thing for us to think of ourselves falling into some dark well, while we’re taking a walk or something and suddenly falling into the ground, into the dark pit.
So it’s being there. You can’t really see into it, but you can feel that you’re there. You can feel that you’re there. You can maybe even see it if you are in a dark hole, or something has happened in which you can’t—no longer see with your eyes.
There’s so many dimensions to light and dark when we talk about it—even myself—when we’re talking about, it’s almost ridiculous because it’s so beyond us. It’s so beyond us as human beings, but there it is. And we do have words for what we think we’re feeling, or think we’re seeing. But yet, there’s something beyond that.
And that’s what I want to explore so that when we get the true essence of it, what’s been imposed in terms of fear about it, fear of darkness, or what’s been imposed about stay away from, avoid all darkness at all costs. What we’ve learned, to me, is to stay away from life basically. You cannot not have darkness.
Now what kind of light? Oh yes, we have the word light. It does exist. And I think I mentioned something about a dark light in the book. Because I think for me, if I were to add on more concepts and more perception about it, that the light is still dark. It’s dark in it’s unknown. It’s dark in that we don’t always see the light. It’s dark in that we don’t really know what it is. We have in our minds an idea of what we want light to be. But existentially and spiritually, we don’t really know it. We can experience it. There are times we feel we experience it.
And I just invite everyone to note that. If you have the book and you’re reading it, just note it for yourself, what is the experience as opposed to what is the definition, or how is it formed so that you could hold onto it? So it’s formed this way—when I was in the dark, light was this. And so every time you’re in the dark, you’re going, “Come on now. Come on, bring it. Bring that light, bring that butterfly,” whatever it was, you formed in—and then you’re like, “Wow, no butterfly. Darn it.” Because it’s a form in your mind that you think. And it may come another way. You don’t know. We don’t know. We only know or we can only experience it.
So I always invite discovery, even in asking the question. I always tell people I don’t have any answers. I don’t. I don’t have any answers, but I do have something I’d like to share. And I do have explorations and experiences I like to share. But answers, like they always say, are pretty cheap. It’s the journey that’s going to bring, and I’m very interested in what people’s journeys are.
Tami Simon: And in Opening to Darkness, you offer gateways. Gateways, portals. And many of them, many options. And they’re brilliant. I want to talk about a couple of them. One of them, you write, “One of our greatest teachers of darkness is death.” And I think that is, for many people, a very accessible gateway. Meaning to get to that place of absolute unknowing of what’s going to happen, and to be confronted with, what’s that going to be like? So I wonder if you can share a little bit more how somebody could explore their own relationship with their own dying as a way of relating more deeply with darkness.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Well, as the ancient ones say, we die every day. And there’s something that is lost and taken away from us, things that are out of our control. People of color live with that oppression, out of your control.
So that feels like something’s been taken away. Life is ended. Remember I was saying I was feeling like, “Oh no, I don’t know if I could live a life like this, where there’s hatred, just if I appear in front of someone. I don’t know if I can live that kind of a life.”
So I feel like you can find a lot of experience—I was, I guess, fortunate in some ways and unfortunate in others that I lost a young friend at six years old. We were both six years old, and she died. And it was my first time even knowing that children died. Because at that time, they weren’t showing children dying even on TV. Not even in movies or anything. They just didn’t show that very much. So I was shocked by it. And I probably began my exploration then, at six, as to what is this thing, this life, and where did she go? Where am I going?
And I feel like the way to maybe start to explore is to look at the places in which there’s no control, and yet you’re suffering. So I’m going to add that component of suffering to it. Because a lot of people say, “Well, I love the dark.” And me too, I will sit in the dark and watch the sun go down, in my house with the lights out. I will do that and enjoy that. But there’s no suffering in that darkness. And no, I’m not controlling the sun going down, but there’s no suffering. So I’m just adding the component suffering.
Because in my exploration, I’m always at the crossroads of our suffering. Not of what we enjoy. That’s great. For everyone, that’s joy. And that’s important, that we do have that too. But I am at the crossroads of where there is suffering. So I invite you to look at something that’s uncontrollable, something that causes suffering.
And note if you are expanding or constricting in that experience, or interaction, or in that discovery. And then notice—not immediately, but maybe time. Give it time, nine months, a year, to see how that darkness shaped you. Because in that shaping, it’s also shaping the light. It’s also shaping the light. And rather than you shaping it and creating it as the butterfly, so you’re not going off looking for that butterfly all the time. Or waiting like, “OK, that that’s long enough.” We still have COVID-19.
Tami Simon: What do you think are the inner capacities that are required to stay in the way you’re describing, to stay with darkness?
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: I think that’s a really good question. I really am thankful you asked it. I feel that it gives, I think hopefully, people another way to look at meditation, or qi gong, or tai chi, or any of those practices in which the breath is important in order for it to even be executed.
So what we are doing in meditation is not only trying to be calm, which some people are, but also learning to be in the expansiveness of your life in that moment. So meditation, all of these practices we have in our Western world that came from other places, in those other places, those were practices of the dark. Learning how to be in this life so that when these things we’re confronted with, all that’s going to happen, there’s always going to be a disruption. There is no such a thing as life without disruption. And so these practices came to help us be with those things.
So you could be in meditation and you’re saying, “My life is not getting any better,” but it is expanding. It is expanding with each breath. When you do yoga, or qi gong, or any of these practices, ancient practices, you are expanding your life. You are expanding into more vastness than the constricted stories that we have. I could rattle off a whole bunch more stories of darkness right now, but I will not.
And those stories are stories, they’re experiences. But then my practice as a person who has been sitting for decades, I note how I can sit in the expansiveness of the suffering, because suffering is expansive too.
It could be constricting. It could be wounding. Tenderness could be wounding, or it could be expansive. It could be liberating. Not you deciding it, because I said, “OK, I’m going to make it expansive. Next time I’m suffering, I’m going to really go out there.” Still, you’re not in it. You’re not in this. And the way that you’re in it is how you have embodied some type of practice. It could be prayer too. So I don’t want to just leave it there with—it could be chanting. It could be singing. There are some people who sing. And you know the note. When the note hits, everyone just goes into a state. So it could be that too. So it doesn’t have to be meditation. I just want to put that out there.
But it has to be something where you’re in this place, and you’re with it, and it’s helping you to be still. It’s helping you to listen to the silence. And in that, you will begin to see suffering different and experience suffering different, experience darkness different, lightness, whiteness, and blackness. All of it will be experienced differently.
Mostly, we experience these things with whiteness and blackness politically. We don’t experience it spiritually. But there is a spiritual component to all of it, because it started there. All of it came out of the dark. All of it came from the dark. So that’s what makes a spiritual aspect to all of these things that we talk about all the time.
So yes, I am trying to shift the dialogue a little bit, kick in something that’s a little bit different than what we’ve been talking about since the rise of some of our movements in our country. I’m not anti-political either. But to add a component that will help us stay with and create something far beyond our imaginations, and allow our hands and ourselves to be used to create.
When I was writing this book, I had no idea there’d be eight gateways. And when I was writing it, I was resisting those gateways a lot. And then I realized the gateways—because I don’t like writing curriculum where if we do this, you get this. You get this result. But I realized that the exercises are ways of expanding, and expanding by using your intuition. So you’re building intuition in the exercises to the eight gateways. Each gateway. Building an intuition and going beyond what is taught and what is learned, about darkness and blackness.
And then not taking a definition from Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, but from your own lives as you learn, and as you expand over time. And you’re not constricted to just what’s hurting. It’s hurting. I’m in deep pain right now personally. But if it’s hurting—because I’m going through some experiences—if it’s hurting, then it’s hurting. You’re just there with that hurting. You might need help with that hurting, with that sadness, with whatever. Or the frustration, and rage, and anger is also part of all of that waiting and being.
It hasn’t been easy for me to develop this capacity. It’s taken time. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. Zen didn’t do it. But I put myself in a place in which it could be done. That could be a cave, it could be a sweat lodge. I put myself on these paths, not knowing maybe that I’d be writing a book about opening to darkness. Surprise.
Tami Simon: Zenju, you said, “I’m going through something. I’m in great pain right now.” And I don’t know if we would’ve known that at the beginning of our conversation. You have a gorgeous smile. And I was like, “Wow, what a beautiful smile,” I was thinking. And what I’m wondering to know more about— and really it’s a way for you to illustrate what it means to be with that intersection of suffering and darkness. How are you doing it?
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Yes. So great question again. For today, and for this moment, and for this talk, I had to rise to a level. When I teach or share—sometimes I say share, because mostly it’s what I’m doing. When I share, I feel supported by my ancestors, and by my family and friends, and by you for inviting me. I feel supported in being here in this moment. And then if you follow me an hour later, I will be in my bed in tears.
So there are tears right now in my life because I just lost my companion, partner, beloved, of 23 years being together. And every day for 60 days, I have cried. It’s been many days, maybe more than 60. And I laugh because in this moment, there’s a joy in those tears, because I’m supported in this moment. And then when I’m alone, the tears bust a gateway.
And it’s not like I haven’t cried while sharing, but I think I’ve been in this portal of in-between world for a while now, that I was able to come to this talk. I could not have come any sooner, no sooner than even last week. So I feel like the ancestor timed it because that’s like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, how I’m going to be, when I come to this talk.” But I do know I’m in a portal, and I’m interested in seeing and feeling with you and everyone what I’m experiencing. And I’m listening to myself. I’m listening as I speak. And I feel my sadness. I feel my aloneness. And then I just feel all this joy of you all being here with me in it. So it’s expansive. It’s multidimensional.
And some of my smiling is, I’m a very nervous person. I’m an introvert, and all writers are. And I always tell writers, “Don’t write a book now if you’re an introvert,” and most writers do write a book. And I am totally an introvert. So laughing is an energy to help me stay connected to my body. It’s just like the breath. So we have a lot of things that help us connect to our bodies, not just breathing. So I use it quite a bit to connect to myself, and to connect to who I’m sharing with, and who I’m interacting with.
And yes, there are times—of course in the beginning, I could have not have done this in November when she died. I could not have done this in January. But I’ve been held all these months by many, many people, who have helped me to lay in their lap and in the lap of darkness, and to experience it without stopping it.
So we’ve always heard this thing when someone dies and everyone disappears eventually, after the funeral and all that. And that’s true. That happens because people decide, that’s it. They don’t know this is a two year, three year, four year, five year—I will be here. Or even a year, or even nine months to birth this new person.
I am in joy of this new incarnation that is coming through because of her death. And she too is being reincarnated in some way. She’s changed. She’s transformed. And so have I. I am totally in that darkness as a transformer, the darkness being the transformer, and not me. It’s not me. I can’t. I don’t even know what to change, but things are changing. I can feel it in myself, and I can feel the grief. And it’s familiar. It’s not just because she died. It’s more because she died, but the grief is always there. It’s part of life. This grief has been here with me from the day probably I cried for the first time. It’s old, old, old. Ancient.
Tami Simon: Now one thing I want to say, Zenju, is that the support you feel is real. I do feel the support myself and also on behalf of Sounds True, of you, and your work, and the vessel of creation that you are, and the way that you articulate opening to darkness. You have our love and support. So thank you for being here, even right in the midst of your experience.
I did want to see if we could connect two things. Which is, I asked you what capacities are required, and you talked about spiritual training, spiritual practice, and all of the different practices including prayer, that we do. How has that helped you now through a passage like that directly? How does the training in those capacities play out?
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Well, I’m never sure what it’s going to do. Every time something comes to me, I’m like, “We’re going to see.” I call it the crucial instant, the crucial moment. We all have them. We have this crucial moment in which we don’t really know about all the medicines we have gathered, whether they’re going to work for us or not.
So I had no idea if anything I had gathered would work for me. And I watched myself. I didn’t make myself practice. I have done no meditation. None. I have not sat down. I have been quiet. I have been silent. I have been still. But I don’t go into zazen. I’m not going into anything. Zazen is meditation for Zen practitioners.
So I feel that you never can know how anything is going to affect you. And the joy is to be opened and discover how it is. So I wondered, especially in the beginning with so much crying, I wondered whether or not—sometimes what I was crying about, sometimes. But then there would be this observation that would come in. This witnessing of life in front of me, and witnessing the visions of the things I saw in the dying process, and in the final death in the body.
So I had this whole witnessing going on and this whole observation, within and without. And then this complete discombobulation, which I allowed, at any time, moment. Some people might not have known what to do with it, because I don’t normally cry a lot. I think I’m not a leaky person. I don’t cry a lot. So when people do experience that with me, they’re like— I can sense the “Oh my God, I don’t know what to do with a crying Zenju. We’re so used to this other person.”
I didn’t let that stop me. I cried with my sangha members. I cried with everybody. I cried in the beginning so much, because that’s all I could do. All my sessions, my counsel sessions on grief were just me sitting in the Zoom, because it’s in Zoom I had to do it. The person I’m doing it with is in California. The first month was just turning on Zoom and crying in front of her, and trying to breathe.
So I think that my practice allowed me to do all of it. Everything. Rather than, “Your practice is to—she’s not dead. She’s right with you.” These kind of things people would say. And I would breathe that in and keep going. I didn’t take it in as—“Doesn’t matter, she’s not here or she is here. That’s not what’s mattering for me. But thank you.” I was grateful. That’s when I say I breathed in the gratitude of somebody trying to take care of this person, this spirit, this heart. I love that, everyone trying their best, and not knowing what to say. But the silent ones were the best ones, just silent. That way, I could be there to allow it all in, because a lot was happening. Because you had to have a little business going on too, setting up the funeral, going to the funeral. There’s a lot of business. Money, and having to do all of that.
So I felt like a lot of people were saying, “I can’t believe how you did all that.” I created three ceremonies, and I was doing all the business, crying, and all that. And I just felt that that was a practice that I was able to—and still. I’m still in it, I’m still doing. And then do my life, and then be here for a new book that just came out Tuesday. And to embrace that as well. Everyone’s like, “You’re not going to be— you better call them up and cancel.” I did cancel some things. Want people to know that I had to. And hopefully I’ll return to those events.
But it allowed me to be here. My practice is allowing me to be here and to speak from my heart, even though it’s aching. To still speak, that an aching heart can have many, many expressions. The book is written from an aching heart. All my work is from an aching heart. I believe I use the dark to create. To go in, and feel into what life brings, period. How do you hold it?
And I put it in words. So they’re not words to keep, or to quote, or to know. For anyone to do that, not even myself. Because I rarely know sometimes what I wrote until I read it again. I rarely know. So it’s always scary to do an interview like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what I’ve written.” Because it’s something that’s just come through me. And then it moves on to something else coming through me. And often feeling not as an author, but a messenger.
And I will do that. I will write in that vein as a messenger, not so much an author. And I remember my first publication, I asked, “Do I have to put my name on it?” And they said, “We could write ‘Anonymous.’”
Tami Simon: I’m sure the publisher said, “Yes, we would like to have your byline.” OK, Zenju, I just have two final questions for you. You mentioned silence. Silence, and how when people were with you in silence, there was a support there. And in Opening to Darkness, you write about the connection between silence and darkness. And you wrote, “I was guided once to sip on silence as if enjoying a fine tea.” I thought that was so beautiful. And I’d love to know in your experience, the connection between silence and darkness.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Yes. Yes. Completely. I think these words that I speak and these words that you speak, too, came from silence. Out of the dark. If we slowed ourselves down a bit, like really slow, we could see it coming.
I have a haiku I wrote in The Deepest Peace. It’s the same thing. And I said, “The dharma talk is the breath before the words.” That’s the dharma talk, when I breathe. I felt that one time. I said, “OK, that’s the end of—that’s my presentation.” But I know people weren’t going to allow that either. Like, “OK, bye. She didn’t say anything.”
But everything comes from the darkness. Everything is created, everything comes from the place of the womb. These places are dark. And they come from the silence, out of the silence. And we can actually send them back. I think they go back on their own.
So all of these words I’m saying, a lot of them will go back into the silence, and you’ll forget everything I said or half of what I said. And I think that that’s quite the way it’s supposed to be. You just let go. And then you might hold on to something, but it will go away too. It will go back into that silence. And then you’ll have to ask me all over again, all those questions.
Tami Simon: And finally, I would love to invite you to use the power of language, power of your words to—if you would, it’s an invitation—to leave us with some kind of blessing for that person, especially, who’s listening right now, and is not experiencing darkness in an expanded way, bur instead is in the constriction of darkness.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: OK, great. Thank you. I’d like to share something from the book, if that’s OK.
Tami Simon: Please.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Let’s see. OK. I have a lot of them that are my favorites. So this one—OK. Let me make sure just in case somebody’s not in the process of—that one’s mostly dying, so hold on. I should have put a bookmark as I did hear this was going to happen in my mind. And these meditations—OK, how about this one?
“I trust the darkness for the light it is giving at this time. I know the darkness is filled to the brim. And I need only be aware of how it generously overflows into my life for the sake of wellness. May I be ready and willing, even in pain, to let the unknown light show me its space.”
Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. She’s reading from her new book, Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times.
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