Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Someone asked if I get challenged about being a middle-aged white guy who gets to do the talking while everyone else listens, in a time when this set-up is no longer taken for granted. Surprisingly rarely, is the honest answer, though I take the question seriously.

My sense is that the reason this kind of challenge rarely comes up is that, if I’m playing my part and listening for the music, then despite the demographic similarities, I won’t be reproducing the patterns associated with the “sage on the stage”. Something else is happening, something that doesn’t come from me.

What strengthens my sense of this is that, on those occasions when I do get this kind of challenge, it’s almost always the case that something else has already gone wrong. Maybe the room is set up badly, so it’s impossible to make eye contact with anyone beyond the front row, or maybe I didn’t sleep the night before. If I’m on tour for three weeks, there will be one night when it goes like this, two at the most – but I’m the only person in the room who was there all the other nights, and all the audience has to go on is what’s happening here and now. So someone will speak up from a true sense of discomfort, and what they say may take the form of a “call-out”, speaking to the truth of other experiences they have had, patterns they are tired of – with good reason – and which they find echoed in what’s happened in the room so far tonight.

When a question like that comes, my job is to slow down. Take a breath, let the change in the temperature of the room call in what’s been missing from the way I was showing up until now. Because if I can be there, on the receiving end of what could feel like a verbal hand grenade, and not go into fight or flight or fawn, then this can be the moment that saves the night, the point at which something happens that makes it worth us all being here together, the rupture through which a gift arrives. Between us, we can rewrite the script.’ (from the Writing Home Substack)