several teachers and masters, among them the most significant for me being Zen
master Gesshin Prabhasadharma Roshi. She founded the International Zen Institute,
a school in the Rinzai line of Zen, in which I was ordained as a nun. She died in
- My training was continued with her successor, a Dutch woman named Jiun
Hogen Roshi from the International Zen Center in the Netherlands. In addition to
Zen meditation, I have had some experience with the Tibetan tradition and with
mindful awareness meditation.
An empty nestDuring my Zen training, which partly took place in a monastery, I did not see any
clients for two years. That was quite an experience, and although my days in the
monastery were filled up from five o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock in the
evening, it could in the beginning probably be best compared with the empty nest
syndrome of mothers whose children have left home. Eventually I felt a freedom of
inner space not having to sympathize with that much pain, sadness, and anger in
others. This was space to experience myself when not working as a therapist. Who
are you when you do office work and you have problems when performing the
simplest tasks, while you used to have a secretary for twenty years? Who are you when
you’re ironing the laundry for hours and hours for the third day in a row on a cold
floor, when previously you had help? Simple questions for which you find the simple
answers in meditation.
Since my monastery time I’m ironing when I’m ironing and when I’m doing
therapy I’m doing therapy. That may have been the case earlier also, but at that time,
when ironing I never had the feeling that it was my real job, it was just something
that had to be done. In Zen one learns to be one hundred percent what one does at
that moment, what you do now, here. Now, here I’m drinking a sip of water.
This momentIn this water here the whole universe manifests itself. Someone drew it off the faucet,
poured it out and put it down here. The water that is drawn from our dunes here in
the Netherlands arrived there from a river flowing down the mountains where it was
snowing from clouds that came floating from the sea. It has been cleaned and
transported by people who were eating bread baked of grain on which the sun was
shining...and so on. It maintains my body, disappears into the sewer, and after being
filtered, flows to the sea again, evaporates, forms clouds which float to the mountains
again and drop the water as rain or snow...and so on. Everything comes together in
this one sip of water. Not only in the material aspects, but also in the intentions of
all who co-operated in making this moment happen. In space, at this spot, everything
is coming together, also in time, now. Sea, sky, and mountains are present in it, and
the climate of our green planet as well. The past is present in it, and this moment is
already carrying the seeds from which the future will germinate. Your past and mine
form this moment and everything that our parents and other people we met did, right
246 COMING HOME: THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES