May I Truly Be of Benefit

Emyo Darlene Tataryn

Emyo Darlene Tataryn comes from a background working deeply with somatic healing, dance therapy, developmental and expressive movement, meditation, and other "mystic" practices. As a long time Meditation instructor and Counselor with an Expressive Therapy bias, Darlene understands and is able to navigate between the disciplines of therapy and meditation. She is steeped in the understanding of the interconnection and interdependence of all of nature. As a Zen Priest and Mondo Zen facilitator, she is able to guide and orient healthy ego function to the service of clarity and depth of heart and mind. Darlene's history includes the Rinzai Zen Hollow Bones Lineage, The Karma Kagyu Lineage, and Sahaja Marg.

Ekai: Emyo Darlene Tataryn is a very active Hollow Bones Zen priest. She runs One Wisdom Zen in Selkirk, Manitoba, Canada. Emyo, you’ve been on a long journey of becoming a teacher of multiple lineages, what are the origins of your teaching?

Emyo: Throughout this lifetime, I’ve been trying to make sense out of being here, starting with a kind of awakening at four years old while looking into the sun. When I was 14 years old, I had my little method of explanation with paper dolls and a thread. I would take this thread, and I would ask people to agree with me ahead of time that this thread represented all that is common to all people, all beings.  In other words, this thread could be God, or I would use the word the field. I would put this thread of paper dolls, and I would say, see this, this particular place where this thread and this doll intersect is the individual soul being a part of the greater spirit. Then I would rip the doll off… gone. But there was no actual disappearance. The place on the thread remained the same, still part of the greater whole. I would take two dolls, and I'd put them together and say, you know, this is why we can have telepathy, because we are connected. I was very enthusiastic about this. And I would just tell anybody who wanted to listen. When I was 19, I started writing poetry to express the profound yet terrifying nature of the ongoing formation of existence.

Ekai: Amazing. You were already pretty tuned in. How did you find your way to meditation?

Emyo: Like many people, I would be meditating without knowing I was actually meditating, just focusing on my hand and hanging out, or focusing on a spot in my room. But I really knew nothing about meditation itself. I would do that and end up with what I would call “being on the beam,” which meant I would have an insight that I would contemplate until the next time I ended up on the beam. In terms of more formal practice, I had belonged to a group that worked with a book called The American Book of the Dead and based on the Tibetan Book. More formally, I came in contact with a teacher Kema Ananda in a retreat center outside Thunder Bay. He was Theravadin, but also Karma Kagyu. 

Basically, I needed to do something. I was going through a lot at the time, and I had a very young child. I blindly walked into a Mahasi style vipassana retreat, 20 of 24 hours a day, an hour’s walk, an hour's sit. It was one of the most excruciating things I'd ever done in my life.  But at the same time, every now and again, the bliss would come.

Ekai: That meant you got a very structured style of meditation as a seminal teaching. It's like studying classical music or ballet. You were a dancer, did you study ballet too? 

Emyo: Yes. You don't have to grow up to do ballet, but having done it, and having done Mahasi, you know that core basic structure of meditation. I'm quite grateful for it.  I'm one of these folks that really emphasizes how to sit and how to sit in meditation that's comfortable and maintains itself. In a short time, you can become relatively pain free. I just really don't want to see people having to go through hours and hours of sitting in pain because they just need to sit two inches higher on their pillow.

Ekai: That doesn't necessarily come from having done the Mahasi vipassana. I imagine that's your dance teaching and somatic training.

Emyo: Yeah, the dance training makes a huge difference, and no, it came from the Mahasi training. We sat and slept in the same spot. It's a South Asian kind of thing. My hips were not elevated at all during the sit. So there was a lot of pain. They didn't actually adjust people's posture. 

Ekai: You went on to study with Culadasa, or did you go somewhere else for Karma Kagyu before Culadasa?

Emyo: Yeah, I came in contact with Tibetan teachers. I did not realize what it was.  The Dharma Center of Winnipeg had gatherings, and there was a teacher called Namgyal Rinpoche. He was a very significant figure in bringing these teachings to the west. He was western being from Toronto, but he trained a number of teachers, and many of these teachers were my teachers. I got the full training in Anupam, directly from Namgyal, which was very important. My major teachers are Lama Tsultrim and Lama Lodro.

Ekai: That means you are well trained in the Vajrayana perspective of three yanas, right? 

Emyo: That's right. One of the things I always say is that confusion has been such an incredible teacher for me because it's been a real driver to try to make sense of the variations in the teachings, the teaching styles, what's acceptable and what's not. Fortunately, there's something called direct experience. And so often I thank God that I was able to have the causes and the conditions to directly experience right view. Actually listening to teachers who are trying to represent verbally that which is very difficult to represent, concretizes something that is so profoundly abstract it becomes a tangled mess.

And that's my prayer, may I truly be of benefit. May these words be aligned in such a way that I can really transmit. There is a tendency for people to cling to the teacher's words or the teacher's style. There's the accuracy, the openness, and then there's also the habitual habits of folks to getting caught up in a single, solitary learning style. You know, in a lot of ways it's interesting. 

Ekai: So then you study with Culadasa. He is a very coherent, clear teacher who takes a traditional teaching but is able to bring in a very 20th-century scientific, rational approach to it.

Emyo: Yes, that includes some neuroscience. And everything else that people are looking for it seems. 

Ekai: Direct mystical experience is not enough. We need science to validate.

Emyo: It is a version of whole-brain in a certain way, because we don't really trust our internal experience or direct experience. So I trust it more if it's been validated in some way. Culadasa does a good job with that. He's brilliant in his scientific validations, and he's still insightful in a traditional way. My husband Doug and I met Culadasa just as he was about to start training teachers. At that time, I was interested in the Yogacara teachings, because Jun Po asked me how traditional yoga interfaces with Zen. From what I could tell, Yogacara was the meeting place of all of the different traditions, really.  Both Doug and I were starting to teach Vasabandu and Asanga’s different stages of meditation. Then we found Culadasa and jumped right in. He was an incredible teacher. We were very fortunate to spend about four years with him before he passed.

Ekai: You hadn't been ordained by Jun Po at that point in time?

Emyo: Actually, I was already ordained. I think I took Jukai in around 2012 and was ordained in 2014. I talked with Jun Po about Culadasa, and he gave me his blessing 100%.  And then he said, bring it back to us.

Ekai: I know him through his book The Mind Illuminated. 

Emyo: Yes, it's well written; it's well conceived. The significant thing about that particular manual that I'd really like people to understand is that, while there's a lot of information, experientially it's very simple. We don't have to over-complicate things. Find what works, concentrate the mind, enter into Dhyana or actual meditation. Find your way through the jhanas one by one and it will all unfold. A little bit of instruction can go a long way. 

Ekai: When did you start One Wisdom?

Emyo: One Wisdom became a formal name at my ordination as a priest. It was either One Wisdom, Many Dharmas, or One Wisdom Zen. Just depends. It was many dharmas, because my background was in dance, dance movement therapy, and nursing.  I've got what turns out to be an integral background. One Wisdom Zen has been around as a Hollow Bones sangha for 10 years.

The teachings change over the years, depending on sometimes what I'm doing and what people are asking for. Sometimes we've been far more movement focused, working with mental states through embodiment and cleaning up the system, opening up the body so that the nervous system could actually handle some of the higher frequencies that take place during spiritual practice.

Ekai: That's actually something important about your particular teachings. I think a lot of people resonate with it because you emphasize the somatic. 

Emyo:  This is my experience. When you sit and really attune to what's happening in your body, then different mental constructs appear, emotional or mental, and you then get to work with them in a lot of ways that you won't see or find unless you slow down long enough to notice, to attune. The somatic is central to your style. Particularly people who are not beginners, when they discover that, they get it. This is, that they need to keep doing this. It's not just gonna fix in one shot. It's an ongoing work.

Ekai: We can get off subject by having a whole conversation going back to Mahasi yoga and whether Buddhist modernism is a type of bypassing. But at this stage, our teachings are much more about what's happening in the body. It is essential that you attune to and make sense of the body as part of the awakening process. You don't get to skip it. We include it. You have created this wonderful integrated movement practice called Maitreya’s chair, which I want to make sure that we hear you talk about. Tell me a little bit about that. You know, what is it, and where does it come from? How'd you come up with this?

Emyo:  Maitri is a word that I heard many years ago when I was at Naropa, and it means kindness or love. Actually Maitreya is the name of the coming Buddha and represents love, or could be universal love and compassion in action, and Maitreya’s chair is a very simple practice, so simple that it's easy to bypass it or brush it off as not being effective enough. It is profoundly effective because it actually works with so many of the different body systems. It is an easy way of moving into bliss states or jhana states that are very healing for an individual. It's a way of working through and working with stress responses that a lot of the teaching around the vagal system brings in. So you know, we can talk about all kinds of systems that Maitreya’s Chair addresses in its simplicity. So what I am trying to do with this practice and with this teaching is what I call a seed form, a natural, organic movement of this body that works directly with the mind. Some people do not have to have access to numerous teachers or books, or all kinds of things that just do this simple seed form and allow it very organically to  express, and it will take us through a tremendous amount of relief of contraction and distress and so on. 

Ekai: What’s next for you? 

Emyo: I would like to bring Maitreya’s Chair to more people.  Make it more accessible. I'm realizing I'm one of the oldest ones at any gathering and that I need to take more seriously making accessible things that I've been working on over the years. I think when we have, as they say, turned the light around, so to speak, and we become aware of awareness, the fact that there is this is awareness, expressing, there's a tendency to identify the timeless aspect, and to disregard the fact that there is an aging body, that there is such a thing as old age and eventual death, right? So this is something I am waking up to more and more, and I plan to try to do something about it.

Ekai: I appreciate you taking the time to share and give us a little bit of the back the story

Emyo: Thank you so much for the invitation.