Interviewee: Trudi Hirsch

Interviewer: Mary Marshall Clark

Session 1, Part 1

March 23, 2004

New York, New York





Q: Good morning, and thank you for being here.



Hirsch: You’re very welcome.



Q: I really appreciate it. Well, this is an oral history, which means it’s your story, and I’d like to start with that, where you were born and how you were raised, and some of the things you did when you were a kid, and how you became who you are.



Hirsch: Okay. Let’s see. It’s a long story.



Q: Start wherever you want.



Hirsch: I was born in New York City. I’m a Lenox Hill Hospital baby. Let’s see. I think we were talking a little about before, about the age of seven I went to my first ballet recital at Lincoln Center. I remember we saw Swan Lake, and I remember being captivated. It was the dying swan, and it was [Maija] Plisetskaya, so that was a Russian ballet company at the time. She was dying on the stage, and I was like, I wanted her not to die, so I was starting to get out of the aisle to go up onstage to help her. My mother was pulling me back, and at that point I can see my path into the future, in a way, because dance was a big part of my life, and eventually working with the sick and dying is a big part of my life. So, you know, at the very early start of one’s life, the seeds are sown, so to speak.

So about the age of seven I was a very dedicated kid, to the point, some point, with toe shoes. You know, you get—those are like, when am I going to grow up so I can wear toe shoes? And pretty much, that was my whole life. I love dance. I love music. And I would say my first spiritual touching the spirit in some way was through music and dance, letting it move through my body and in a way being played by the music. You know, letting your soul dance to music was a very strong, almost ecstasis for me at that point.

I didn’t want to do anything else, so school was like a necessary evil and I had to get through. I did well, but I always wanted the dance part, so I couldn’t wait to be seventeen, when I could—I joined my first company at about seventeen and a half. It was Harkness Ballet Company, and that was amazing for a kid. You know, I didn’t feel like a kid, but I was a kid. We toured and we traveled a lot, and performed, which was great, but not as much fun as just being music.

I did that for about, let’s see, three and a half years in that company, and then went to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and danced with them, doing more contemporary work, and moving from corps to soloist. It’s like a quick leap; because you’re going to Canada, it was in a way a step on the ladder, I guess you could say. Being a soloist, people worked with you, and that was exciting to be working with choreographers and letting the music form the form, which was another piece of that. It was a very exciting time. We traveled a lot and toured a lot with the Canadian company.

Let’s see. During that time—that was about three and a half years, too; it seems to be a thing—I left that company to join an experimental theater group, because I was starting to get a little bit—I wanted to go further, but I didn’t know how. And that’s the religious piece of it. You know, I’d been reading books on Eastern religions and things like that, and starting to learn about meditation, and was curious, just basically curious.

My roots are Jewish, basically secular Jewish, and I looked into those roots, but at that point, being a female and being interested in religion was not open doors at that point. It’s much better today. Who knows what would have happened on my path if it had been more easily accessible. But it wasn’t, so I can remember that.

But in Canada, when I left Les Grands Ballets, I joined this theater group which was basically—it was Richard Pochinko. He’s a Canadian. He’s known almost as a clown guru. He studied in Europe and he’s pretty well known. He’s now deceased, but he’s an amazing teacher. I mean, I would say he’s my first real teacher. Even though it didn’t look theological, for me it was totally a religious teacher.

We worked on mask work, which I still use today to understand different aspects of myself. You work it in a way to—you wear different aspects of character or personality, and study them profoundly, deeply. You learn to—I think what I really learned was to recognize that I create my reality and my world, and the way I see life is through how I’ve almost trained or allowed different parts of myself to be exposed. So that was a learning that really took place way after I left Richard Pochinko’s group, but it was a learning that still affects me today, especially when I see patients, that you realize you are not that different, you know. You find the similarities in yourself that resonate with the similarities in that patient, so you are all those aspects, which later, as I talk about Buddhism, you’ll see how that connects.

So this clowning and mask thing, another great lesson of that was being in the moment, because to be a clown, not in the way of a circus clown, but he taught clowning the way it was to be almost like [Peter D.] Ouspensky, I mean to be totally a human, fully human, to have all your feelings and all aspects of yourself available. He taught more along those lines. And practicing clowning was practicing being in the moment, and that lesson stayed with me, later connected to my Zen Buddhist practice. So you can see how this is all moving towards the future.

Clowning was really exciting. I did street clowning after that. I couldn’t go back to the ballet company because I felt changed, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I taught improvisational dance for a while in one of the dance schools in Ottawa, because I like Canada, I like living there. But it still wasn’t right or enough or, you know, I was still searching, still seeking.

So I tried to, with the improvisational dance and teaching that, I was trying to incorporate what I’d learned from mask work and clowning, so that the dance would come out of the moment as well. It was a fun thing to do. It was exciting. I did that for a while, and did some street clowning off the Parliament steps in Ottawa for a while, which was—I just let myself be present to people as a—I guess they saw me as a clown, but I didn’t see myself as a clown, and by that point would work through different masks. The last mask you wear in learning to be a clown is called, it’s the clown mask, which is maskless, basically, so you take off all masks. That doesn’t have a red nose or anything. But I remember putting a red dot on my nose just for others, because I realized, well, they need to see, you know.

That was a really amazing time, you know, of just being with people you don’t know, and again, this works into going, visiting patients. You walk into somebody’s reality and participate in it without any barriers, and it was very much like that. Children responded much better than parents, who were more cautious. But the kids were great, and it was fun. It was a fun time.

But I couldn’t do that forever, and at that point I went back to Les Grands Ballets and asked if I could choreograph, because I thought, well, this would be a place that I could continue. I remember working on different things for a little bit, but basically, it wasn’t right, and I didn’t like—I guess what was frustrating was that people wanted to be told what to do, and I didn’t want to tell them what to do. I mean, that wasn’t what it was about for me. So that got frustrating pretty fast.

Let’s see. At that point I went back to New York City. I always had done art painting and sculpture. I went back to the Art Students League at that point and started painting, and that was an in-the-moment kind of process, too. Did Abstract Expressionism for a bit, and did sculpture, and studied with Jose de Creeft, who let me be his apprentice. He was an amazing guy, an amazing teacher. So that part was sort of like a little interlude.

Then I wanted to get back into dance, so I started taking lessons again, and auditioned for Bat-Dor, which was auditioning in, like, two weeks since I decided to get back to dance, so I felt very—I felt not ready, not in my full potential. I got accepted as a soloist for Bat-Dor, and I felt like I needed to work really hard to get myself up to par. And I did, because one thing I can do is focus really well.

I remember working very, very hard, you know, to be in a place that I thought I should be, actually. That company was fabulous. We toured all over Europe and Mexico.

Let’s see where I’m at. If this gets too long, you let me know.



Q: No, it’s interesting.



Hirsch: I’m just trying to get the sequence of it.



Q: I’m following all the different genres of art that you’re responding to and combining.



Hirsch: I’m trying to keep the sequence in specifics, because I think it does all come together in what I’m doing now, which is sort of really nice.

I had an injury in Acapulco, which tore the ligaments on the side of my neck and put me flat on my back for about, I’d say almost five months, which was, for a dancer who’s totally active, to being totally passive, was devastating. I would say that was a huge spiritual change in my life.

So I decided to heal myself with all the—I’d done a lot of reading on Eastern religions, especially in Israel where I visited a temple of my great-great grandfather’s, in Safat. I come from a Kabbalahistic line, so that was always interesting to me. So I went back to get into my own roots, which was again difficult, then turned to the Eastern religions to understand more about energy and light and compassion and, you know, all the rest of the mysterious unknowns, or interesting—



Q: Talk to me a little bit about the Kabbalahist tradition, how you became aware of that.



Hirsch: I’d studied it a little bit. You know, it was always running around my family as I was growing up, like, “Oh, Great-granddad did this, and he was the—.” I had a picture of him, which I still have, which is very poignant for me, because he’s giving a straight-ahead look and he’s got those kind of blue, steely blue eyes, and you cannot not look right into his eyes with this picture. I remember even as a kid just being mesmerized by his eyes, you know.

So, that was like—and I always wanted—well, what did he do? What is the Kabbalah? What is studying that? I always got the response, “Well, you can’t. First, you’re a woman, and, second, you have to wait till—.” They used to say when you’ve finished your home, bringing up your children, and you’ve got gray hairs on your head, at that point you could—you know, basically way over fifty—you could start studying. It was a serious endeavor.

I still have a very old book—I think it’s in ancient Hebrew—that this rabbi had done. Actually, I fight with my mother for it, because I think it’s mine and she says it’s hers. But we both know that it’s an incredibly valuable piece, you know, just religiously valuable. It’s commentaries on—and he used to give talks, so it’s the work that he did to give talks. It’s his temple. Of course I can’t read it; I can’t read ancient Hebrew.

Anyway, we’re diverting. He was—because of that, I started to look into Kabbalah. You get the books that are around, and they’re very—it wasn’t what I was looking for. You know, they’re how-to or easy, you know, do-it-yourself Kabbalah things, in the same way Tarot does these quick Tarot books, and the study of Tarot was never that way either. These are very intense practices that should be taken up very seriously. So I knew I wasn’t able to really get inside of any of this stuff, that way, anyway, and I thought, well, if you’re going to get inside of anything, get inside of whatever it is you love most, you know, where your passions live.

So for me, again, that would be music and movement. So something in me knew that, that if I was ever going to touch the foundation of spirituality for myself, it would have to be through some practice that you would seek within yourself, to contact the universe in all its mystery. So that’s basically how I was thinking in those days. So I studied Eastern religion, Hinduism, at that point.



Q: How did you go about studying it? Formally, informally?



Hirsch: I took a [BKS] Iyengar book, and he’s got one book that’s like this thick [gestures], with, in the back of it, it’s, like, got week by week how to progress in yoga, and then he’s got this other book on pranayama. So I’ve sort of got an independent streak, which has helped me and hurt me at times in my life. But I decided at that point that I didn’t need a teacher, you know. It was very much—and I was going to be my own teacher, because if there is an answer, it’s going to be found through my own efforts. I mean, that was, like, clear to me.

So, getting his book with, in a way, a how-to, which to me, he’s a scientist. He’s got that kind of a mind. Everything he describes in the book is so clear, you know, where to place your finger. So that made sense to me. I knew I had the discipline to follow it, and I went through his two-year course; just went through it and at the end of that started to teach yoga, because I felt I had a good grasp on it.

And the pranayama was a way to start working internally. Pranayama and meditation sort of go hand in hand. Actually, yoga is like, you deal with the physical, and the pranayama deals with the mind, so you work from the outside to the inside, so it goes from body to mind, and from mind to meditation, which is, well, how do we create this mind? So that process made a lot of sense to me, you know, start from the outside and work in.

So I went into pranayama the way I went into dance, you know, wholeheartedly and wanting to really get to the core of what everything was about; the question of, I guess, truth, you know. What’s the truth of this whole reality? Who am I? Who’s God? What’s God? How have we created, or what is this entity or nonentity that exists in the universe? How is this universe created? You know, all those questions were like always there for me.

So I could label myself as a searcher. I think that’s how I was, anyway. I don’t think I’m that anymore. I’m know I’m not, anymore.



Q: You’re not a searcher anymore?



Hirsch: No.



Q: How come?



Hirsch: I think—I mean, I could never say I—how can I put this? Well, let me continue my story and maybe that’ll make sense for you.

Okay. So where was I? I left off at pranayama meditation, and also being flat on my back. So this gave me a chance to really see if meditation and pranayama breathing techniques could work for healing, for myself. You know, here I was, a victim of injury, and could I heal myself through some of these methods? So that was like, hmm, you know, put it to work here. Let’s see if there’s truth to any of this.

They had told me in the hospital that I needed to really be collared for quite some time, and I refused. I said, I’m either going to heal myself, or I’ll die. And at that point that was fine with me. You know, my career in dance had ended and I was, I guess, going through a depression of—I could say that I was going through a depression, but trying to figure out a way to continue my life in a healthy, healing way. But it was not what it used to be. I wasn’t a dancer anymore, and I didn’t know much about anything else except maybe art.

So, doing this healing was like maybe I could turn all this into doing something for others. So, it worked. I mean, I really worked on energy and light and internal movement of energies in the body, and with the breath and with focused attention. And you know, that’s powerful stuff. And they’re starting to do research, or they have, on the power of breath and focused energy, concentration in the body. You can do amazing things. I mean, most—not most of these, but a lot of diseases we exasperate through our worry or our—you know, we focus almost bad energy into areas that are hurt, rather than trying to heal them and know that we’re empowered to do so, you know, a lot of times. I mean, there are diseases of the body that we can’t do anything about, but some chronic pain and some healing parts of different diseases, I think we could.

And prayer works in very similar ways, so I think that’s an important piece of a healing as well. Prayer is opening yourself up to receive the universe, energies, healing energies. So, there’s a lot that, I think, can be done. Anyway, I hope we keep working towards those areas, because as I said, I know it works. So that’s a strong feeling. You’ve seen it yourself.

You know, it’s like when somebody’s gone through breast cancer and has recovered, they’re the best chaplains for people who have breast cancer, because they’ve experienced it through their own body and they know the process internally. So, it’s not that different, you know. If you know something through your own life experience, you know it in a different way than if you’ve learned it from a book.

So, let’s see. So I did this thing, and then I still continued to teach yoga, and got very interested in healing. At that point I was still taking at the Art Students League. Let’s see. That’s when I met my future husband-to-be. We were both artists. He’s a large Abstract Expressionist artist, so his life has changed towards healing services as well. So we’re both sort of parallel paths to this day. I think we’ve been together twenty-two, twenty-three years now, or something. He actually was the one who taught me love in relationship, you know. I mean, I knew love of God, love of spirit, love of energy, love of light, but not through love of another being in the same way, so intimately. He taught me intimacy, and that’s been amazing. You know, that’s been so helpful, as being a chaplain, because chaplaincy is all about intimacy, in my mind, intimacy in relationship. To me that’s, in a way, what it’s all about. I don’t know if there’s much more than that.

Let’s see. So, okay. We met, and then he—at one point we had a studio in Yonkers, as two artists, and he showed me this ad for Zen Mountain Monastery, which was a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Catskills. At this point I’d been really getting involved in meditation, still doing pranayama techniques, and doing about three, four hours of intense practice daily. I mean, looking back, it’s sort of foolish, but I was one of those who eclectically tried anything that I felt would work, you know. So I’m one of those who those warnings go out to, you know. You should find yourself a teacher. You should not think you could do this all on your own. And I was getting to the point in my practices where this is true, you know. I mean, and in me I knew that at this point in my practice I needed a guide, at least for some time.

So, when my husband showed me this ad, I thought, well, I could go to the Zen monastery and do my practices there, and have some quiet and peace, because I was living in, you know, concrete land and the hustle-bustle of the city, and it was driving me nuts, because I love nature and I love—that’s very nourishing.

So here’s this monastery on the beautiful, paradisiacal grounds, and I thought, hmm, you know, this looks good. At least for a month they had an artist-in-residency program, so I did that. I went up there knowing that I wasn’t interested in Zen, so that’s sort of a funny kind of aside, but Zen, to me—at that point in my life, I was interested in transcendence, and I wasn’t interested in—in Zen you go up to the mountaintop, but then the rest of the practice is coming down into the marketplace. So it’s a full circle. And at that point in my life I could go up to the mountaintop, but I wanted to keep going. I did not want to go back into the marketplace.



Q: What does that mean, from the mountain back into the marketplace?



Hirsch: It’s like to have an experience of enlightenment and then return, offering—that the end of the religion is really being extraordinarily ordinary, that there’s no—just to be totally human is as miraculous as it gets. So that piece really took me twelve years of monastic training to get, to really get, because I went to the monastery and lived there as a monastic for twelve years, in a very intense practice. And as you’re probably getting a hint, I’m a pretty intense person, so that worked for me.

One week out of every month we’d sit for what’s called a session, which is you sit for ten hours a day in silent—it’s a silent meditation. You work with a teacher, and the work with the teacher is called face-to-face teaching, and it’s actually face to face. You know, you sit right opposite the teacher. You’d be very far away right now.

Like in chaplaincy that’s one of the things I love, too, because when you’re with a patient you’re—you are dokusan after dokusan, which is the meetings with the teacher. I see my patients always as my teachers, so we’re always in that relationship with each other. But the face-to-face teaching is basically the teacher—in a way, it’s about intimacy in relationship. The teacher becomes a reflection of what you’re presenting or creating in the moment, in relationship with him or her.

In that reflection, and in that room which is designed to have nothing extra—you know, Zen is a practice of, some people call it bare bones practice, where you learn to let go of everything—I could stop there—everything. And what’s left is everything, basically. So the practice works—sometimes you work with a koan, which is, it’s an apparently paradoxical statement, but they’re pretty much stories, very similar in some sense to Orthodox Judaism in a way, in the stories of the master and the disciple, you know, having a meeting and there’s teachings within that.

You work on—well, we did, like, four hundred of these, or I did four hundred koans, where you work basically with the same question in different robes, is basically what it is. Basically, who are you? And to be able to be present to every moment means to allow yourself at least to let go of the moment before, or the future intention or expectation, and to really be present to this very moment.

So, the twelve years at the monastery was, for me, looking at places I stuck, you know. Just as I work with students today as a supervisor, teaching people to be chaplains, I, in a way, take that part of where are they stuck? What patient are they not able to be with, and why? What part of themselves have they not accepted or looked at, to withdraw from or push away from? So, to me, it’s very similar practices.

Working with—I worked with Roshi Lorry [phonetic] up at the monastery. I would say he’s my teacher, and he’ll always be my teacher, even though I haven’t really seen him in I’d say about four years now, actually. It’s a very intimate bond. He really, in a nutshell, helped me to let go of the biggest sticking koan for me, which was I would say my clinging to ecstasy, you know, my clinging to the desire to be—what do they call it? Even in Christianity they call it—can’t think of the word now. There’s a word for ecstasy; can’t think of it.

Anyway, you get caught in wanting the highest fulfillment, let’s say, which is another place of being stuck. And I did not want to see that, because it comes with such a package of joy, you know, that, why would you want to let go of that, too? That doesn’t make sense. Let go of all the crap, but don’t let go of the good stuff. But every place we hold or are attached to becomes crap, in a way. So, learning to—the process of letting go is a very Zen practice, and then learning to realize what you’re clinging to, which is—it’s hard to do this without going into Buddhism a little bit.



Q: Go ahead.



Hirsch: The Buddha’s basic foundation of teachings is the four noble truths, and the first truth is, life is suffering. I mean, just that as a fact. You know, look around you. Life is suffering. That’s the first noble truth.

Then the second noble truth is, there’s a cause, a cause to our suffering. So that, like, perks your ears up. What might that be? And basically it’s called duka, which is attachment or desire, which leads to greed and ignorance and anger; greed, anger, and ignorance. Now, all those things aren’t bad in themselves. It’s the clinging that gets us in a funk, you know. So, suffering is due to our clinging to things we’re attached to.

Now, for me it was easy to understand I clung to certain things that I was greedy for. That’s even Starbucks coffee or chocolate or, you know, those are easy to start to let go of and see how that affects you. But to start to let go of things that you love, or you think, “I can’t live without this,” and then to realize, I can’t live without my own idea of my own identity, you know, of who I am. I’ve created this being and this is—how can I—what would it be like not to live with this creation, you know. I mean, what’s underneath all of that?

And looking back on my work with mask work, one of the most terrifying experiences in the mask work was realizing that you could be anybody, you know, that you could put different faces on and take them off. At one point we wore a neutral mask, which was, anytime you’d wear a mask you’d always take that mask off and put a neutral mask on, you know, just to, again, find a center within yourself. It’s like a balance.

And the neutral mask was an amazing thing to really wear, because you’re neutral. It’s without desire, without—you know, without the mind working a thousand miles a minute. It’s just present. You’re just present. And, you know, that was my really first Zen Buddhist experience, just what would it be just to be present? I call it 360 awareness, where you’re no longer focused on your work; just to have everything, wake up to everything all at once.

So that was like—that was something I was interested in. So that kept me at the monastery, in a way, for twelve years, eleven years. I became a monastic, and it was an amazing time, an amazing practice of really looking at places I was sticking, and at the same time starting to work in the community for—we had some people around the monastery who had AIDS or other problems. I found myself drawn to be that person who could be at the bedside. I found it nourishing, in a way, to be there for another that way.

The more I did that, the more—one person came to me and said, “Well, have you ever thought of being a chaplain?” I swear, I didn’t even have the faintest idea what that was, except for army chaplains and those sort of rabbis or priests, you know. Is that what it’s about? And this person said, “No. You could go to study chaplaincy in New York City.” And I thought, well, that sounds interesting.

Then I asked the abbot if I could do that, and he said I could, so I did one summer with Reverend [Paul] Steinke at NYU [New York University], and it was amazing. It was just like a duck to water. You know, it was like, oh my God, you know, this is something that I felt I could do, I was good at, and it was nourishing as well. I was able to be there for another in the way that all my past education and learning provided the path towards. So, it was like a good fit, you know, when something’s a good fit.