730. Julie Nelson

Buddha at the Gas Pump

Rick Archer

Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.7 • 695 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2025

⏱️ 128 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Julie Seido Nelson is a transmitted teacher (Sensei) in the Maezumi Roshi Zen lineage. Her home Zen community is the Greater Boston Zen Center, a sangha which has experienced three major upheavals due to teacher arrogance and abuses of power over the last several years. She is also a teacher at the Great Plains Zen Center in Monroe, Wisconsin, and has written for Buddhist audiences in Tricycle magazine and on her blog. Having begun Zen practice in 2004, she has found it to be of immense value. She is deeply saddened when people, either in addition to or instead of realizing the benefits, suffer great harm. When not reflecting writing about Zen, she sometimes writes and give talks based on her pre-retirement academic work as a feminist and ecological economist. She enjoys visiting her two children and two grandchildren and enjoying the New England outdoors. Books: Practicing Safe Zen: Navigating the Pitfalls on the Road to Liberation (Monkfish, 2025) Amazon Indie Pubs Economics for Humans (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 2018) Website: julieanelson.com Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group Interview recorded May 11, 2025

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think the idea of teachers as exemplars actually tends to get both teachers and students in trouble.
0:05.1	Because the students come in with the attitude that this person should be an exemplar
0:09.3	and may project a lot of idealized virtues onto this teacher.
0:14.3	And a fortune from what I saw, I think a lot of teachers come to believe their own PR.
0:19.0	People are acting kind of worshipable towards them,
0:22.1	so they start to think that they really are those exemplars.
0:32.1	Welcome to Buddha at the gas pump.
0:34.2	My name is Rick Archer.
0:36.0	My guest today is Julie Nelson. And I read Julie's book called
0:41.6	Practicing Safe Zen. And as I read the book, I was thinking, this would be one of those
0:47.6	interviews where I wish we could just talk for 24 hours and read the book aloud and then
0:53.3	keep stopping every other sentence to
0:55.2	discuss the point being made because there were so many good points made in the book but
0:59.6	that would be an awfully long interview i think we'd have a lot of drop-offs um so what i'm going to do
1:05.3	for starters is just have julie introduce herself and then we'll get into it so tell us a bit
1:10.1	about yourself, Julie.
1:11.6	Yeah.
1:12.0	So I am in my 60s with a couple grandkids.
1:16.8	I just had brunch with today since today is Mother's Day.
1:19.6	I practiced Zen for about 20 years.
1:23.2	I did some Biphasana meditation before that.
1:27.4	I started in Robert Lakeaca Aiken's lineage later
	...

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