If you fail, I fail

This morning, because I’m part of a Zen teacher email group, I received a missive from a Dharma sister, a wonderful teacher from whom over the years I have learned so much, announcing the failure of one of her successors, the rigorous action taken to discipline the miscreant, and the steps taken to heal the Sangha. I reacted with sadness. Of course, I don’t know what this successor did. Are the police involved? Child abuse? That’s not where my mind goes. I’m imagining another story of a male, Zen teacher’s affairs with female sangha members. I think of the Richard Baker scandal at the San Francisco Zen Center, of Katagiri Roshi, of scandals closer to home, involving Dharma brothers and uncles and the big one, my Dharma grandpa.

At the core of my sadness was not the “misdeed” – I am no longer shocked by these stories – but by the absence of expressed compassion and shared responsibility in the email. Where was the Oneness of Life? It brought me back to the first crisis in my professional career. I was in my second year of social work school, and I was doing well. The plunge into clinical practice was hugely challenging and an incredible dive into learning about myself. I was receiving high praise from my supervisor for my work in a cottage for pre-teen boys at a Westchester residential treatment center. This was cutting-edge group work practice, and I was doing well.

But I ran into trouble, not in the field but in class. You may have heard this story before. I’ve told it many contexts. Anticipating my wedding that winter, my mother took me to a Great Neck diet doctor. Mom wanted me to look my best, and the doc put me on the little blue capsules. I had no idea what they were or what side effects they might have. I didn’t learn until years later, sitting in on a pharmacology course for psychiatric residents, about the effects of amphetamines, the clang associations. Unknowing, in group work class with one of the Columbia faculty stars, we were challenged, “It’s Thanksgiving, you’re working at settlement house, and a truckload of turkeys are donated. What do you do?”

Some of my classmates suggested gifting them to the poor families served by the settlement. Wrong. We should form a client committee to decide how the turkeys should be distributed: the group process was more important than the turkeys.

In the back of the room, I muttered under my breath, “Process schmocess.” Apparently, not so under my breath. The star professor heard me, and within a few days, I was summoned into my faculty advisor’s office. I was told that I was failing field work. I barely escaped expulsion and had to and begin second-year field work again, this time at the Mt. Vernon YM-YWHA. I showed up with my tail between my legs to meet my new supervisor. Selma Stevens was going to get me through this. She’d never met me before, and yet she sat with me in her office and told me, “You’re going to get your degree. If you fail, I fail.”

I am thinking of Selma as I reread this morning’s email. Teacher and student play different roles, and we are one. Therapist and patient. You have to see both sides.  It’s crucial in psychiatry when dealing with the suicide. From one side, there is the power of the patient’s life: the patient who suicides had been on that track for a long time. Nothing likely could have been done to stem the tide. And, from the other, what could we have done differently that might have saved this patient’s life? There are always things to see, to learn, to regret not having tried. If we look from only one side, we are callous and uncaring. We might as well quit the field. If we look only from the other side, we burn out and probably quit the field too.

The Oneness is crucial in education too. As we built our network of charter schools, striving to level the playing field for students living with emotional challenges, we did not always succeed. Each of our failures was another failure for a child who had already had too many failures and for his family. In the beginning, when we were small enough, I was always part of the exit interviews: “I’m sorry we weren’t able to help your child. We didn’t have the skills. We didn’t have what he needed. We’re going to keep learning. Hopefully, we will be ready to help the next student who arrives with these needs. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t much, but it was the lesson that Selma taught me. If you fail, I fail.

It's not an easy lesson. In our schools, it was a struggle for some of our teachers. Faced with student failures on statewide, standardized tests, some teachers jumped to defend themselves. “I covered that material in class.” But the students didn’t learn it. Our teachers did do their best, and they learned to do better.

When our Zen students fail, we fail. When our best students, the students we have empowered as the next generation of teachers fail, our failure is magnified. I am saddened that faced with repeated scandals, so much of our effort seems bent on strengthening complaint procedures and disciplinary practices. I want us spend more effort on improving teacher training. How did we let you down? How did we fail to prepare you to be a teacher?

When the widely publicized scandals involving some of the most widely esteemed Zen teachers rocked our world, the Zen teacher community struggled to respond. A code of ethics for Zen teachers is a good thing. Instituting a process so that students who feel they have been abused and victimized can be heard is a good thing. But as scandals continue, it seems that something else is needed. Maybe it’s time for the Zen world to look at teacher preparation.

As you may have heard me say recently, I have two reference points when I think about Zen teacher training. I taught four years in college, and no one guided me into the process. Based on my years in college and graduate school, I was supposed to figure it out. How different this was from my training in social work and psychotherapy. Courses on methods and psychopathology grounded supervised clinical practice.  Our supervisors reviewed our sessions with clients/patients in meticulous detail. That was where the real learning happened. In my experience, becoming a Zen teacher was more like becoming a college teacher than a social worker. I look at my experience, and it seems to me we can do better at preparing Zen teachers for the pitfalls of practice. We don’t need to make Zen teachers into therapists, but we do need to do better.

If you fail, I fail.