Tim Colohan

A  Zen student of the late Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn in the Kwan Um Zen tradition since 1985, Tim attended two 90-day winter kyol che - traditional intensive Zen retreats in silence - at Hwa Gae Sah Temple and Shin Won Sah Temple in S. Korea in 1995 and 1997. In 2022, he received inka, permission to teach from Zen Master Soeng Hyang Barbara Rhodes in the Kwan Um Zen tradition. He has been on the Teachers Council of Long Beach Meditation since 2015. Tim also practices with the “Silver Lake Meditation Group” and a Pasadena interfaith group. He is a retired set decorator, currently teaching set decoration at Chapman University. Tim lives in Los Angeles with his husband Bernie and they enjoy being grandparents. 

Tim Colohan, JDPSN (dharma master), practices and teaches at the Dharma Zen Center in Los Angeles, CA. He is also a teacher at Kwan Um Zen Online, the online community in the Kwan Um Zen tradition. 

To join retreats, practice, or to connect with Tim:

https://www.dharmazen.com/

https://kwanumzenonline.org

P.S. A timely NYT article reminded us how hard, and weirdly competitive, it can be to just be. Check out the “Space-Out Competition” in Seoul, where people try to win… by doing nothing. I had the opportunity to add the Zen take on 'doing nothing' for this article. Please check it out:  Read it here

#TimColohan #ZenArt #Mindfulness #MentalHealth #SparkYourBliss

Takeaways:

• Tim Colohan has been a devoted Zen practitioner since 1985 under the guidance of esteemed Zen masters, significantly shaping his spiritual journey.
• His experiences in the arts, particularly painting, played a pivotal role in his exploration and eventual embrace of Zen philosophy.
• Tim emphasizes the importance of authenticity and self-exploration in both art and Zen practice, advocating for a life aligned with one's true nature.
• The conversation highlights the interconnectedness of personal clarity and environmental stewardship, urging individuals to act compassionately in the face of global challenges.
• Tim reflects on the transformative power of community, suggesting that genuine human connections can foster understanding and acceptance within marginalized groups.
• He encourages newcomers to explore various spiritual traditions, asserting that sincerity in practice can illuminate one's unique path toward liberation.

Foreign.

Welcome to Spark youk Bliss conversations focusing on awareness, deep spiritual inquiry and personal transformation.

I'm your host, Kathy Park, Zen Buddhist Practitioner.

In each episode, I have the privilege of sitting down with diverse meditation leaders and practitioners to explore the profound life changing stories that have shaped their spiritual journeys.

Our conversations are centered on the power of meditation, the great questions of life and death that bring insights and Buddhist teachings that help to digest our experiences.

From moments of deep awakening to the quiet wisdom found in everyday life, we dive into the heart of what it means to live with greater attentiveness and a clear purpose.

Through these stories, I invite you to reflect on your own journey, to open the door to new discoveries and perspectives and share tools that can guide you toward a more fulfilled existence.

Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or just beginning to explore meditation, we hope you'll find inspiration and connection here.

I'm excited to introduce today's guest, Tim Callahan, Dharma Brother and a dear friend.

Tim Callahan, Chita Popsa Nim or Dharma Master, practices and teaches at Dharma Zen center in Los Angeles, California.

He also practices with Silver Lake Meditation Group and a Pasadena interfaith group.

He's a retired set decorator and currently teaches set decoration at Chapman University.

He's currently living in Los Angeles with his husband Bernie and they enjoy being grandparents.

So, Tim, welcome to the show.

So great to have you here.

Thank you, Kathy, so much.

It's a real privilege and a great pleasure.

Always wonderful.

Now, you and I met, I don't know, 24 years ago maybe.

Can't remember.

And it was at Dharma's End Center.

Yeah, yeah.

And probably a three day retreat or a one day.

Yeah.

And you were very kind, very helpful, very compassionate.

And I have to say you really helped me as a very young student in Zen to feel that I really had somebody who I could rely on and trust by just coming to the Zen Center.

So thank you for being that wonderful person at the time.

Well, thanks.

I'm glad I was on my game.

No, it was fantastic.

And, yeah, I'm so excited to have you on the show because this, as you know, the title of this show is called Spark your bliss.

And I know you're a big fan of Joseph Campbell and you started out as a painter, as an artist.

I can relate to that, having started out in sculpture as my major in university.

And so I'd love to have you share with our audience how you began this journey of not only Zen, but from being an artist.

How did the most important thing in your life bring you to Zen?

Sure, sure.

The creative practice, the creative activity that I kept placing on myself even from my teenage years, was always pretty mysterious.

I didn't have a gigantic confidence as to why I was painting, but I had an impulse and I defined myself that way.

But there was always this big question, what's the point of the painting?

Whether it's the particular one or the career, and what good is it doing?

How is it changing the world?

And.

And what am I communicating?

And the guidance I had gotten.

I was in art school for a while, but I dropped out when my girlfriend got pregnant.

And so I started a family and became kind of a working class guy.

And I did my painting part time in the studio.

It was always a question, what is it am I trying to express?

And I was a fairly immature person, and I had the obligations of children early in my life.

And the painting started to become a little bit like therapy or a little bit like a mirror showing me components of myself that I wasn't comfortable with, my sexual orientation and kind of my own confusion.

And my peers that were painters, they never said anything.

And I don't know that I received enough criticism that I would have had some insight about my own work.

So to some degree, I thought I was floundering at that time.

And then when I came out of the closet, suddenly there was a much greater coherence between what I was expressing in the studio, in my art, and who I was.

And I did see kind of myself as immature.

And also coming out of the closet, I saw myself as an enormous fraud because I had fundamentally been devoted to my children, devoted to Catholicism.

I had boxed up whole components of my personality, and I thought I could just keep those off limits and still be 100% of a person or 100% of who I was.

But that was misguided, misinformed.

But also I came from a really big, devout Catholic family, and it was much easier for me to be a parent than it was for me to be myself, because I was fourth born out of 12.

So I was giving babies bottles and changing diapers and babysitting my younger siblings for the first 15 years of my life.

So, oh, becoming a father at 19.

Oh, I know this drill.

Like it was familiar.

I also didn't like the idea of not being able to have children.

So my own internalized homophobia had kind of made being gay off limits.

So that upheaval shattered all my reference points, really, except being an artist, except defining myself as an artist.

So I started to use art as my religion because the Catholic church had thrown me out and the whole community had ostracized me.

And really all my friends decided it was just too complicated to be friends with me, which was fine with me.

I felt a sense of liberation that I really hadn't had.

And even though it was a conditioned liberation, it was still extraordinarily important for me to start trusting myself, whatever that meant, and trusting what I was going to try to express in the painting, in the art.

And I had not been exposed to Zen.

So this was roughly.

I was 27 years old when I came out of the closet.

I was 19 when I got married.

The children, I'd had two children with Sharon, my ex wife.

And when I came out, they were the ages of 6 and 8 or 7 and 9.

So it was a traumatic upheaval for everyone.

And we all did our best, but we were not clear, we were not kind to each other.

The children paid a high price for my not understanding myself.

However, both their mother and myself were 100% devoted to them.

So even with all our confusion, we were determined to provide for them some sort of connection and some sort of view.

But it was pretty out of control for a while and I took refuge basically in, in art.

I felt a connection sometimes to various paintings or experiences in art that were the same as my so called religious experiences.

When I was younger, I was very active in the church with singing and choirs and high holy days and things like that.

So I had had lots of kind of big experiences out of devotion.

And to me, I had never abandoned that.

Everybody else thought I had abandoned it, but it just felt so internal, so part of a core experience.

I didn't see any distinctions, just everyone around me was making those distinctions.

What I really relate to are two things.

One, we have talked about this before.

Joseph Campbell shares that following your bliss will help you become aligned with your true self.

And that that allows us to live a life that is authentic and meaningful.

And we often talk about attaining your true nature and Zen.

Yeah, so as you said, the art was a kind of refuge for you.

Painting was a refuge in a way.

It was saving you amid all the chaos that was happening or the confusion.

Still, art was this place where you could feel safe, where you could somehow be a part of yourself that was authentic.

And I know we spoke about having that question, what am I?

Why do I create this painting?

Why do I paint?

Even those fundamental questions about our impetus for creating art, it sounds like that was really powerful in that period of time, and that somehow, did that bring you to Zen?

Well, I think it made me ready for keeping a question because I was used to having a sense of, what, why am I doing this?

And what exactly am I doing?

And why is it better than the work that I did before?

What kind of metric do I use?

And when I would look internally, what is it am I expressing?

I wasn't afraid to feel that way about the work.

I thought that was the appropriate way.

So I think that's why it was also joyful.

There was this sense of connection with the process and with the paintings themselves.

So there was this joy or bliss component.

And when I was exposed to the videos of Joseph Campbell and read some of his text, finally there was someone saying, oh, there's a correlation to your direct experience, and it's correlated to your true nature.

I knew he was using Buddhist references, but I didn't know anything about Buddhism.

And I like the sound of everything he was saying.

And he also would articulate a thing that had no opposites in it.

I didn't know that at the time.

I would have never characterized it at the time, but I'm sure that's what I was responding to.

And so I was looking at those.

I was in Los Angeles by then.

And right around that time, working in a restaurant.

And it was a co worker who told me about Zen Master Seung Song giving a talk at Dharma Zen center at the beginning of a retreat.

And I said to him, well, is he a real Zen master?

Because you could hit a spiritual teacher in Los Angeles if you just threw a stone.

I was going to ask you.

There were probably a lot of interesting teachers around, and they were good.

I was suspicious, like, if they were getting a lot of coverage in the LA Weekly, the kind of local art, I didn't trust them.

So Ram was, you know, giving lectures.

Thich Nhat Hanh was coming through town.

The Dalai Lama paid a visit later on in the late 90s.

All superstars.

Yeah, I was skeptical about a lot of them?

Well, not Thich Nhat Hanh, but to me, I just had never known much about him.

He was very, very out there, sort of with Dr. Martin Luther King.

And in that, yes, I didn't have an initial motivation to explore Zen.

I was a little mystified by it.

I like Japanese sensibilities and culture.

I was a little bit of a Japanophile and loved having Little Tokyo to eat dinner and look at all art.

But it just looked too mysterious and also extreme.

So I.

It never occurred to me to like go sit at a Zen center, find a Zen center and see what they were like.

I did a little experimenting After I had met Seung Song.

I dropped in on ZCLA's and center Los Angeles just to see what it was like.

I felt a little confidence and felt like I could just drop in for morning practice.

But the temperature of it and the tone of it was kind of off putting and nobody was very friendly.

So I just didn't stay.

I have since met people from that Sangha.

I'm very, very close friends with people in that Sangha.

Joe, Koshi, Blackwell.

At the time, there wasn't a connection, a sense of connection, so I didn't hang out.

So among all those great teachers, somehow you felt that connection with Zen Master Seung San, a Korean Zen master who, you know, at that time he was sort of known, but not quite like the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh.

So what was so compelling about him or his teaching?

So my friend Richard, the co worker, he invited me to the talk.

I show up at the talk.

This may be 25 people in the room.

It's a charming little house.

It's a kind of local neighborhood.

It was only two or three miles from my own house.

So it all felt very familiar and cool.

85.

I met him and then within a month sat a three day retreat, you know, heard the talk, and then came back a month later.

And in those days it seemed like two me.

Zen Master Seung Song was living in the center or@thomasa 3 months out of the year, like January, February, March.

And then it seemed like he wasn't around, which later on I realized he was probably traveling.

But in the dead of winter, it seemed like he was with us in California.

So this talk he quoted the five Precepts poem.

And in it he said, a good and evil have no self.

Nature, holy and unholy are empty names.

Outside of the door is the land of stillness and light.

Spring comes and the grass grows by itself.

So I hear this poem and the top of my head blew up because I considered him dead serious.

I considered him real, authentic.

He's a big gold Buddha.

He's in his robes as a teacher and he's surrounded with an entourage and there's a lot of people in the room with five precept robes and stuff.

So I was taking the whole thing as completely legit, equivalent to my sense of the Catholic Church as an institution that preserves some wisdom and truth.

And he took away all opposites.

How could good and evil not have self nature?

That had been drilled into me from the age of four or five.

And he was so easygoing and had a sense of humor and telling jokes and telling stories and doing all of these other things that were so warm and inspiring and yet had this non dual liberating thing.

And I couldn't have even used those words at the time.

It was like, what is he talking about?

He just blew your mind away.

He did.

He did.

It gave him an enormous question.

It made no sense.

And yet here's the gold Buddha, here's all the stuff like this is real.

And it made no sense.

So I thought, I need to get to the bottom of this or at least lean into it enough so I. I get a bead on what they're talking about, what that actually meant, because what it meant made no sense in my.

So he totally sparked your curiosity.

Oh, yeah.

He gave you this don't know.

Yeah, and he gave me this huge don't know.

And he also embodied it in this kind of really warm and friendly way.

It wasn't pedantic, it wasn't intellectual.

Yeah, there was the poem, but he would just told stories, you know, kind of Korean style storytelling.

And even during the talk I thought, well, this is a lot like a story out of the Bible.

I mean, it makes a point.

And it doesn't matter even if the story is true or not, it's making some point.

Just like the stories I heard growing up like a biblical story.

So I was familiar with storytelling as a vehicle to make a point.

And Joseph Campbell's always talking about how storytelling is so effective for getting us to look at something we don't see.

So.

And artists talk about being storytellers all the time.

So all of that was really familiar.

What wasn't familiar was, how can this be?

You know, how can good and evil have no self nature?

What does that even mean?

It just wipes out our entire mode of seeing the universe.

Yeah.

And he did it with warmth.

He reminded me in my childhood.

I was an altar boy and I was with not Bishop Russell, but there was a bishop before him who was in his 80s when I was an altar boy.

He had the same quality of friendliness and warmth and light.

Just what we call mind light.

I couldn't have used that word then.

But the bishop glowed like that when I was an altar boy and he was performing mass or saying mass.

So to me, those were two people doing the same thing.

There was no disruption between that.

This was just Zen Buddhism.

And I was going to figure it out or learn about it.

Yeah.

That is amazing.

I love that story.

And it's really a beautiful poem actually, which he recited because that is the poem that's in the precept ceremony.

For anyone who takes the first five Buddhist precepts, you will hear this poem.

Yes.

He just pulled it out in the context of the talk.

And of course he was hitting the table and teaching.

Don't know.

And that was just great.

Completely over my head.

Completely went over well, you know, he.

Seems to be enjoying himself.

Everyone in the room is enjoying themselves.

I have no idea what's going on here.

Yeah.

So you mentioned about the golden Buddha statue and all that religious form as somewhat convincing, but I know you also talked about it once before.

Oh yeah.

Why?

You were more convinced because it wasn't the form that you thought it was in terms of how he presented this religious form.

Yes.

So this first exposure, it was all pretty overwhelming about two or three months into it.

That was in January, I think.

We had a precept ceremony in the spring, maybe April or June.

I wasn't really involved in the Sangha.

I would come sit a three day retreat, have an interview.

I had interviews with him at first, and then I was having interviews with the senior students that were living there after that.

But then this ceremony came up and I thought, oh, this ought to be cool.

Let's see how they do a ceremony.

And I walked into the Dharma Room and sat down and the Zen center had taken a folding table and placed it in front of the altar and taken a laundered used sheet bed sheet as a tablecloth and Dixie paper cup for the incense sticks on the front table because there's later on an incense offering.

And then they moved the candles onto the table and put some folding chairs.

That's so Los Angeles.

Yeah, well, first of all, so Los Angeles and Darmen center was pretty funky.

A lot of great people made it what it was, but they just did the best they could with the resources they had, which for me was completely endearing, you know, coming from Catholic church, where this would have been gold brocade, blood red or sparkly blue and gold, and it would have been thousands and thousands of dollars worth of something to make something beautiful or special and holy.

We're gonna have a precept cerem.

And the paper cup will do, and this sheet will do, and off you go.

Take some precepts.

And I love that.

I just trusted them more.

I went, oh, they're not controlled.

They're like.

They're not putting a pretense.

What they were interested in were the precepts and people taking them.

And I mean, I clearly had the sense that, well, what's important here are the human beings, not the ritual.

And even to the point of anyone who's attended a Quantum school ceremony, as far as I can tell, there's always a fair amount of confusion.

And when Zen master Seung Song would run them, there was confusion because he would change things and direct people to do something, and then a few minutes would go by and he would correct them and then move them over and, okay, do it this way or.

And he always was quite jovial about it.

But to the newbie of myself, it was like the intention was so clear and they just weren't attached to how the form was going to go.

Because I was used to very rigid ritual and rigid protocol.

Rigidity was not in play at all.

Every step of the ceremony was spontaneous.

I had similar experiences that way in various ceremonies in the Quantum tradition.

And the mistakes or the missteps in those rituals was part of the training and the way we were corrected or left to deal with it on our own.

Yeah, itself was a beautiful teaching.

That's how I saw it too.

And there is no judgment about how one does it.

It's really about the sincerity that you bring to moment, no matter what your role is in the situation.

That's the beauty of the teaching.

I like that quality.

Like, I even Paul park and I, and this is almost 40 years later, we do a ceremony.

We're pretty relaxed about it, and we both have our minds what's going to happen, but it doesn't always work out.

You know, the Muktak master maybe not sitting in the right spot or, you know, and.

But we have a lot of experienced people, but we're just not tight with form.

But it gives the whole thing, I think, some air and some joy.

So that's right.

Really appreciate it.

I feel obligated to embody that the same way I was taken in at the time.

So unless somebody really leans on me to become really tight, I probably won't go there.

Going back to this theme about stewardship, or I would say, caring for and trying in our own ways individually, but also as communities and dharma communities, to support as many people and also as many beings as possible to not leave anyone behind.

Can you share about what it means for you to steward the Dharma or steward, I would say, humanity in the situation we're living in now.

You as being a member of the LGBTQ community, but also being a parent and a grandparent, a professional, and just being a human being in the world today.

Well, the climate crisis is heartbreaking.

I don't think there's any other way to respond except to let our hearts get broken at what we're losing and then use that grief to energize us to act and energize us to become clear.

When we're clear, then our actions arise out of the situation and our stewardship of each other and the environment are not separate.

The first time I learned a formal meal and the form was so meticulous about not wasting any food and just rinsing the bowls and drinking the tea water and then making an offering of clear water, I was stunned by that.

And I didn't think that was a metaphor.

I thought, oh, this is the way to live, that we can do this with every component of the resources we were born into.

Now, I was a hippie and against the Vietnam War and against the pollution of the planet.

You know, Red Silent Spring was against ddt.

So in my consciousness, even as an individual, we were wasting the planet at that point.

And I didn't think my generation did a very good job at all at slowing that down or redirecting it.

And once I have had children in the world, I knew the world they were headed for was not going to be the world that I had.

The sense of powerlessness went away when I found this practice, because I realized, oh, there is always something that I can do that will reach out to people who have been othered, reach out to other minorities.

When you're a gay person, you're a minority in your own family without even knowing it.

And that takes a lot out of you.

It creates a lot of trauma with a lowercase T that has to be sorted out and digested.

And for me, practice was the foundation for doing that.

Well, I certainly used therapy.

I took advantage of friendship and relationships and falling in love and falling out of love and living wholeheartedly, making those mistakes.

Fully engaged.

But practice gave me the ability to do all of that and feel like I had a North Star for.

Okay, how does this correct?

How does this correct?

And the environment.

I don't think there's any separation between us becoming clear and becoming not just stewards of the planet, but also stewards of our communities and making the dharma available to communities that are left outside of it, organically and aggressively, making it inclusive.

And sure, we make distinctions and we'll make mistakes in that activity.

We just correct it as we go, is my view.

And we can only work with what we have.

No longer am I overwhelmed by the scale of what's going wrong.

Because I feel like I've met enough people taking clear action and dedicating themselves to that for their whole lives.

I feel like, well, that's the best we can do.

And if this wave of karma is going to take us all down, it'll just take us all down.

If it takes half of us down, it'll take half of us down.

But we're just going to do our best.

Sometimes they're guided by their true nature, and then their actions are clear.

I'm not suggesting they all have to be practicing in quantum or something.

The people that are.

That's right, yeah.

Guided by wisdom and compassion.

Their actions and results are often clear and helpful.

And it moves the ball forward in a good, good way.

I personally felt like the most important thing I could do was apply myself to this tradition, understand what it means to be a human being and bring that forward in the world and encourage people to take that on as they're doing all these other things.

Thank you, Tim.

This has been a really great conversation.

Is there something you would like to share more with the audience in terms of going forward with a meditation tradition or if somebody was interested in Buddhism or a practice?

What would you recommend or advise for somebody who's new seeking a spiritual path?

The first thing I always say that's a great question is follow what resonates for you.

And that's a rephrasing of Joseph Campbell's follow your bliss.

And that sensation of joy or clarity or correctness.

If a person has that in their body, they should follow that impulse.

And then there'll be obstacles and there'll be checking mind and doubts, but just keep returning to that core sensation.

Liberation is possible.

And as we liberate ourselves, we are liberating everybody else.

Not just metaphorically, but also actually.

And that's an incomprehensible process.

And it happens in every meditating community.

I never narrow it down to one particular tradition, one wisdom tradition, one religious institution.

I think they're all ultimately making the same effort, coming out of every complex tradition, indigenous tradition, old, new.

But if a person stays sincere and they practice their own practice will light their own path.

And if they meet people and feel like they can trust them, trust them and see how that goes.

Keep a certain skepticism, but also keep practicing.

Keep the skepticism and the practice right side by side and I think people will find their way.

Thank you so much, Tim.

This was wonderful to talk with you and hear your wisdom.

Well, I hope it helps.

It sure does help me.

Thanks for being my Dharma sister on this.

You do a remarkable amount of work bringing this to this online level, and I think this has to be done for the Dharma to become available to more people.

Well, it's my joy.

Yeah, I get joy out of it.

Fantastic.

Because I get to talk to people like you.

Well, thank you so much and I want to thank everyone who's joining us today for Spark youk Bliss with Tim Callahan.

I hope you find inspiration, insight from Tim's journey and that it sparks a sense of curiosity and openness within your own life.

For more about Tim or to join meditation practice with him, please visit Dharmazen.com we are grateful for the Dharma teachings that are handed down to us so that we can continue to look more closely at our life, to wake up and become fully present to all its possibilities.

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