Back in America

If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. Hello and welcome back. I am so grateful for your taking the time to listen to this episode of Back in America. I have decided to edit my interview with Chris Tyler into three installment. In this first episode, we meet Chris. After being a carpenter for a very long time, he is now thinking about becoming a monk in a Zen monastery. We discover what it's like to sit for hours practicing mindfulness. Chris shares moments of doubts, and awakening when what he calls a voice helps him move forward with his new life.

Today Chris is a graduate student in social studies. Hi Chris. Hi Stan. Thank you for being with us today. Glad to be here. So Chris, as I said, you were a carpenter for how many years? 15 years? I had occasional breaks to do some other things, but I was doing it either full time or significantly part time for about 15 years. What drew you to carpentry?

I fell into it pretty much by accident. After university, I moved to Thailand and I lived there for a year doing some work and came back to the states in 2001 and moved to California to

be with my girlfriend at the time. So I was just a year out of college at that point and had no plan at all. After a couple months, I moved into an intentional community, a small one in Palo Alto where I was living and you can work there in exchange for room and board.

They had just purchased the house next door to grow, to expand into, and it was in terrible, terrible shape. So I moved in and was doing some stuff around the site and had zero training at that point. They said, oh, would you be interested in helping out on this project? I said, sure, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm glad to learn. So as long as you're patient. They said, oh yeah, it's fine. We've got a lot more time than money. So I ended up getting to do everything over three and a half years. So I did that house and then I got married a couple of years after that and had started a meditation group in Palo Alto and that's how I met my wife. She started coming. She was a grad student at Stanford and she was coming to the group. We started dating.

We got married because we're in an actual relationship and we loved each other and there was some pressure for expediency because of a green card. She was Canadian. She is Canadian. Hey Jess, if you're out there. She's back in Calgary now. So we sat often and after we got married, we had had a discussion before that about, we were just feeling kind of restless in Palo Alto and we were both living at this community still. I had said something at one point about wanting to work on a farm at some point just to try it out because I was kind of curious. Also a masculine ideal that some people have. You get your hands in the soil. It's very honest work. There's no smart technology involved and she was like, that would be great. So I had

some friends who live up in New Hampshire in New England. So after we got married, we actually moved there and lived on the farm or worked there for a season. During that time, this is all going to connect, we went to introductory weekend at the Zen monastery.

It was somewhere I had been many years before for an introductory weekend retreat. That was fine but it hadn't really stuck. I didn't take up Zen meditation back in university when I first went. So this was now 14 or 15 years later. But my wife really took to it. She ended up...

So we were on the rocks a little bit already, only like a year in and as we split up, she ended up moving right into the monastery after that. She lived there for three years. I had a very personal, interesting, awakening moment one day while I was living in town right next to the monastery. After we had split up and she was planning to move in and I was planning to go back to California. I had a moment of doing meditation there one afternoon because it's open to the public for certain times to sit. I was sitting and feeling sorry for myself because the marriage hadn't worked. I felt like a failure in a lot of ways and was just sitting there. And in meditation the room's totally silent. This is a big meditation hall. It's beautiful.

And I suddenly had this moment like my mind got super quiet and everything got crystal clear. And there was this voice that maybe it was me. I don't know where it comes from. Someone else can figure that out. And the voice said, oh yeah, you can go back to California and do what you've always done and pick up again and reinvent yourself there. And there was a pause. It's almost like I'm listening to someone else. I'm like, what? Tell me more. And there's this pause and then the voice said, it was literally like a voice, you know, and it said, or you can stay here and find out what this is all about. And then there was another pause for a couple seconds and then gone. And suddenly I'm back in

the room, you know, like fully aware of myself and something had shifted in my body. It wasn't a thought. It wasn't a feeling. It was bigger than everything. You know, it wasn't scary. It was 100% certain. And so I went home that evening after the sit and canceled my tickets and everything. I had actually begun looking at master's programs then. This was eight years ago, I think, and ended up staying in town and was very eager to practice then and was going in a lot of retreats and doing carpentry again on my own, but really prioritizing then. So I did pretty much every other month, I would do a whole week of silent retreat there. They do one at the end of every month. And my wife was my ex wife was in residency and we were amicable enough, but also

not super excited to be like living in close proximity. And so me in town was like close enough and we would talk sometimes and that was fine. But I was like, okay, this is stable. And then some things changed at the monastery and she ended up leaving on her own spiritual journey that involved Tibetan Buddhism and things. And after that, I felt like a deep curiosity because there was part of me that said, I wonder if I could do monastic life as my life because they have fully ordained monastics there who live there in a more traditional sense who, you know, they're there all the time. They depend on the monastery. They don't get income from elsewhere. They don't do other jobs. It's very serious and very compelling. And a lot of people think that they want that. And few

people actually do because it's very demanding in a lot of ways. And you can try it out. You can live there for a year on schedule just as if you're a monastic, but you're not committed for life. That's what you do. And that's what I did. So and you figure out that that wasn't for you. Yeah, I knew it's kind of funny. I knew about two weeks in to the year, but I was still glad that I did it. The schedule is very rigorous and you have to follow the schedule. It's not a retreat place where you're there to do your version of spiritual work. You're there to put yourself in the container and then see what happens. So you have to be at morning meditation at five. You can't come to most of them or some of them or coming at 5 15. So every day, everyone there,

all 30 or 40 residents, and then the handful of monastics and folks like that, everyone's up, down in the dining hall at 4 30, having a cup of coffee or tea in silence. It starts at five, the meditation. That's how it goes every day. And you did that for a year. You do it for a year. And when you're in residency, you do all of the week long silent retreat. So every month, your first three weeks, there's a fair bit of silence during the day, but you're also allowed to talk and we host people from the outside who come for a weekend retreat or whatever. And then that last week of every month, so there'll be this one this month, just like every month is full silence. So no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no physical contact with

other people. And you're in the Zendo meditating most of the day, you have obviously your meals, some of which are actually taken in the Zendo in a formal style, which is cool. And then there's a little bit of work mid morning for about an hour and a half, which, believe me, is a lifesaver. If you're in a rocky period of your meditation, you love everything besides sitting. But then the work period ends at 10 30 or whatever and the bell rings and you're like, Oh man, I got to be back there in 15 minutes. And what did you learn? I learned that, yeah, that I can maybe tie this to masculinity. Yeah, that I carried a lot of self hate inside. And it really becomes clear when you spend that much time in meditation. I did the math

a couple times over while sitting there, you know, sometimes you get something to do in your head and I would figure out how many hours you get to to sit meditation if you do a year of residency, and it's just over 900 if you participate in all of them. So it's a lot of time with yourself.

It's a very strong practice that you're not fidgeting, there's walking meditation in between, but that's how many hours of literally just sitting on the floor on a cushion, breathing, and paying attention to that. And so yeah, I would just you begin to notice subtler and subtler things about yourself and the energy that we all carry that can get really like stuck.

You notice how much you're communicating. And this is definitely tied to masculinity and femininity and everything. The human condition, you notice how much you interact with the people around you in a nonverbal way, which, you know, doing many weeks of silent retreat where you're literally not making eye contact. That's like a key part, like people sometimes like, what's the big deal? And I'm like, a whole world opens up when you make eye contact. And that's fine. Depriving yourself of that, or letting go of it, we should say, let's not talk about depriving. But for a whole week, really turns you inwards, but yet there's a whole universe still going on inside. So we could be sitting like this. But if we've been maybe in the Zendo, like next to each other, like that's where

we got assigned for the week, it gets randomized every month it changes. You feel like, oh my God, like, it's kind of new agey. And you don't really know for sure. But often you talk afterwards and find out like, I'll be like, oh man, Stan's having like an amazing sit right now. And it's because maybe you're like extra calm, the way you walk, though all the fine grain details in life just emerge, good and bad. Like you can sometimes I'd be sitting by the fireplace in the big hall, just having a cup of tea looking down at 45 degree angle, because you don't like walk around with your eyes closed. You just look down. So you still see a lot. And you can see someone walk past and it might be the new guy. He's on his first retreat. He thought it was going to be great.

It's three days in and he is struggling. And you don't have to know the contents of his mind, but you can see like, oh man, that guy is in a spot right now. Like those guys who will go outside and walk laps around the big field, like, you know, you're not supposed to do heavy duty exercise, but you can do everything but. And there's someone who's clearly just their mind is going crazy and they got to be out there like doing it. And you feel for them because you know that you've been there too. And you're in this like collection of humans together who are all at different places and all really affecting each other. And guys carry it one way, you know, or people who are who are identified more as the mask on, I should say. And, you know, it's we're in the 21st century

and things are expanding and changing. But I still often I think of not I don't worry so much about men and women and labels like that, but I do think of it energetically as if you're identified majority masculine, I kind of use that word or majority feminine in terms of energy. And it can be, you know, your biological gender can be whatever. But it's how you're presenting with with that energetic quality. I identify as I always use percentages, which is kind of funny. I got it from a book I read years ago, but it works like I think I'm like 70% masculine, 30% feminine, you know, I look pretty masculine. And my energetic response to the world is that I have like a natural tendency a little bit towards like aggression towards, you know,

doing singular creative activities, loving the idea of meditation, you know, sitting for long periods of time, I think is don't take this personally any women who are listening because it's not about that. But I think it's a little bit more of a masculine tendency to want to do that in a way to reduce the life to some kind of essence that you're going to figure out.

And that shows up there in the monastery for sure.

I've got a question, which is the voice that you heard. The voice told you that you were going to figure it out or you were going to discover what it is all about, something like that. And what was it? I'm gonna I'm gonna be the voice's ally for a minute and say that it didn't say I was going to figure it all out. But it said you can stay here and see what this holds for you. Right. It's one of those moments where you're like, I'll always remember it exactly. But I've told the story, obviously, like a couple dozen times. And now I'm making it but the spirit that was it, it was like to see what this holds. And what it held was what I think is the promise of any mindfulness practice for any person is the deeper you go. And obviously, living in a Zen monastery for a year is very deep.

Like I when I started, I was sitting just a couple days a week for a half hour on my own, no teacher. And that's nice. You know, I got something out of it. But it was always a bit of a struggle. And then you go there and they're they say, you know, in a nice way, nope, you're sitting every morning, two periods, you're sitting every evening, two periods, etc. You can't help but but meet yourself. And in that practice, what I met was the fact that, as far as I can tell, there is no permanent me. There is no seat of my consciousness that is unchanging and solid and objectively real in any way. I think neuroscience, as far as I know, is still backing that up, which is good. But I discovered that for myself. And that's freaky. Yeah. Because

that's not the story that we're usually told. You know, there's a Judeo Christian idea of the soul, which is nice. Like I'm not totally against it, but I haven't found it for myself. And to be and to be to discover that in spite of that, you still wake up every day and you have to go forward in life. We still find ourselves in partnership, we still find ourselves being masculine identified or feminine identified, we still find ourselves succeeding and failing, we still find ourselves facing death eventually at the end of our life. All these things are still there. Nothing goes away by that discovery. Nothing is actually resolved. One of my teachers said, the Dharma, which is the word for the Buddhist teachings, the Dharma doesn't deposit money into

your bank account. You can't get around anything in life by sitting a whole bunch. So that's one year. You discover you don't want to be a monk. Yes. But you learn a lot. It was great though. You don't know a lot about yourself, right? What do you do next? Two-thirds of the way through my year of residency at the monastery. Another kind of moment of sitting there in the Zendo. And you know, the year is nice because you're kind of protected from the world. You're in this container that people tell you what to do and it's very safe and it's nice. It's a good, which is good. You have to have that for deep spiritual practice, I think. But especially after halfway through, you start to remember, oh, when I'm done,

they're going to make me leave if I don't want to stay and be a monk. And they're nice about it. And everyone knows it. There's no, and they have really good boundaries because there's Zen folks. So you can't be like, can I stay a little bit longer? Like, nope. So I was like that. So I started in September, which was nice. It had that feeling of an academic year almost, but late spring comes around. I'm like, oh boy, I got four months left.

And I was like, oh man, I'm back at that place where I often have been in my life, which is what am I going to do with my life? All the years being a carpenter, I had a fair amount of insecurity and questions inside about like, is this all, is this what I'm going to do with my life? And I was sitting there having the same kind of thoughts and not in a particular way. And then suddenly I had another moment where I said, again, it was like, is that me or is it some other voice? It said, it flipped it. Instead of saying, what do I want to do with my life? I suddenly said, at the end of my life, looking back, what do I want to have done? And just that rephrasing changes the energy of it because

for me, it launched me into thinking, you know, if I'm very lucky, I'll make it into my 80s. If I'm super duper lucky, I'll make it in my 90s. Maybe I'm like 90. I will be looking back over my life. I won't be working like I am now, you know, just my life will be all but done. And maybe all the tombstone that says something and that's it came over. And

I'd been a hospital chaplain for a couple of years as well. So I got to meet with some people who were dying. And that kind of was probably infusing some of my thinking. And just that moment was very illuminating. And the answer was not just do carpentry until the end, which is

great, you know, very useful. And it's like, okay, cool. Like, I'm down with that. Like, let's do something else. And I also felt like the fear that I had often felt that kept me from doing more, you know, graduate school, I always said, Oh, it's expensive, you know, I'll go into some debt, or I won't get accepted, or the program won't be quite right or whatever. Making excuses. Yeah. And I suddenly had that feeling of them as excuses. You know, you can call them reasons for a long time, and then something happens. And again, I think everything flipped, you know, they flipped from reasons to excuses, etc. And that was it. And, you know, got up at the end of

that evening and went to bed knowing that I was going to do something different. But you didn't know what? Not really. But I had a strong inkling because the universe has brought me lots of friends who are social workers, including in that Buddhist community up there. Several near and dear friends are social workers, they have their MSWs, a good friend of mine had just gotten his like finished his like two years before and he's my same age, you know, which is great. So it's inspiring, like, Oh, yeah, you can do this even in your late 30s. I'm turning 42 next week, but this was a couple years ago. And so the precedent was there, the space was there. And when I talked with people,

they said, Oh, yeah, great, like, you'll be good at this. You know, it's a good profession, you can do lots of stuff. And so I finished that year at the end of August, and moved back into a little house down the road. But the first thing I did was apply to a couple schools, got accepted, and chose Westchester where I am right now. And have had, you know, my fair share of moments of like, Oh, is this the right thing? But it doesn't have that same flavor of the anxiety that I had when I was younger before making the step. And once again, proof that we all know, but we forget, which is, you just put one foot in front of the other. And after you make that next step, a whole new set of challenges will come and present itself. And the basic anxiety of life of,

you know, am I going to do the right thing? Was this a mistake? What do I do next? We'll always be there. And if you let it keep you from doing stuff, then you get stuck with that anxiety, but you're not having fresh experiences. So you're not moving forward. I feel at least now like, Oh, like I'm moving forward into an interesting profession. I've gotten to do amazing work here in Philadelphia with other people who are doing super amazing work. And so, Oh, the anxiety is still there. Great. Like same as before, but now at least the external world is changing and moving on. And I'm moving along with it. That's where we're going to leave Chris for the moment. After a year of meditation, he's ready to move on. Chris is driven towards social work.

Listen to the second part of this interview to learn how Chris is now working with victims of domestic violence and men abuser.