A few months back, I met Grace at an Awakin Circle at Banyan Grove, and was deeply charmed and moved by her wisdom, compassion, humility, and -- well -- grace. :)

When I learned that a film had been made about her journey, I knew it'd be a gift to screen it in the community. Little did I know that Bradley had a similar thought after meeting Grace a year or two back! And many others shared the same idea!

With many invisible hands helping behind the scene, the first film screening at Banyan Grove flowed organically on April 15, as bunch of us gathered in the new zendo on a sunny rainy day in West Marin. After the screening of States of Grace, the audience interacted enthusiastically during the Q&A session with Grace and the filmmaker, Mark! As the event invite read:

The film captures the profound transformation of Dr. Grace Dammann after a head-on car crash on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2008. Like a miracle, she survived the accident after 17 broken bones, 9 surgeries, and 7 weeks in a coma.

Before the accident, Grace had given herself to service as a prominent HIV/AIDS physician, and was honored by the Dalai Lama for her extraordinary work during the height of the epidemic. Recovering in the same institution where she had worked for 20 years, Grace still wanted to be of service, and found it hard for her mind to adapt to the new reality that she was a patient, not a doctor. After the accident, the most basic things in her life -- such as walking and using the toilet -- become as strenuous as daily mountain summits. Being a caregiver most of her life, Grace has to learn to depend on others.

At the start of the film, Mark remarked, "Helen and I were just good friends with Grace. And we happened to make films." In casual conversation, Grace noted, "Disabled individuals make up 1% of physicians, but 20% of the general population." Whether making waves in the world of medicine and healthcare, or in our own journeys of facing impermanence, it's beautiful how much simply being a friend and giving from one's heart can birth such remarkable gifts for so many.



Throughout the afternoon, it was stunning to witness how many remarkable gifts manifested! From Grace immediately saying yes to the gathering (even while having just returned from travels and screenings in the Midwest!), to the invisible volunteers who tested the sound two days in advance, to the lovingly prepared snacks -- like Bradley and Carol's homemade pies!, to so many small touches of care -- like how Jay and everyone around instantly jumped in to hold umbrellas for Grace's wheelchair journey to the main house, or the spontaneous volunteers who did the dishes and clean-up; the homemade wheelchair ramps, the audio-editing, multiple elves on the transcript, and beyond (see photos)!

Below is an edited transcript of the Q&A!


Audience: The film is so very personal, not only physically, but also emotionally so vulnerable. What motivated you to be that open with the whole world? To be public about such personal details of your struggles? What has it been like to be like this?

Grace: When I first agreed to it, well, it organically just happened. They just started filming. I was brain damaged at the time, so I didn't ever think about the consequences. :)

I'm a very private person. You wouldn't know that by the film. But I just got a motto in my life that is... (and this is how we got Sabrina and it's worked out great) you just say yes and trust that the universe will provide you with all the support you need to do your part. This really is true!

All I can say is that I don't think anybody has had the opportunity that I've had. The camera is my witness because I didn't know what I was going through. I had no idea. I actually didn’t start suffering from this until about three years after it was over, just because I was so in the moment. I was loving being in the hospital, you know, I didn't mind it at all. I didn't mind anything. Everybody would come to me as a truth-speaker. I was so bored with talking about myself that I would always turn it around on everybody say, 'how's your life going?'

You know, if you ask anybody in California about their life, meaning their relationships or their work, they'll have some problem. I would listen to their problems and I would say, "If you're not married, get married; if you're married, get divorced; if you don't like what you're doing, do something different…something/be with someone, you love". That was kind of my stock answer for everything. :) So the line that would be out of my hospital room almost went around the block. [laughter]

Mark: I would also just add that one of the reasons that you said yes to doing the film was that you wanted other people to be able to learn from your experience. I mean, it was in the spirit of service again.

Grace: Yeah. I wanted to get a median divide put on the Golden Gate Bridge so that this kind of accident won’t happen to anybody else. We weren't successful in the lawsuit, but we were successful in getting the median barrier. But then I also felt that whatever I had to say -- or whatever the film has to say, particularly about the caregiving role -- we all need to know that. All of us baby boomers, in particular, are facing being disabled for much longer than any of us think that we want to think about that for ourselves. That's just the reality of what our healthcare system is doing, so we better know how to deal with it. And that was the other reason that I agreed to having the film done.

Mark: The median barrier happened couple of years after we finished the film.



Audience: I feel profoundly touched by this story. I think everybody in the world should see, for the reasons that you alluded to at the end, that relationships are so vital to our existence because you don't know when that thing will turn to either a reason to give somebody care like this or to receive care like this and it looks like, basically, it's your community that's made you live this long if anything. That's profound. That's so important.

Audience: The part that amazes me is that you have clips, I mean the conviction with which you went into filming the stuff so early on to know that the story could be brought out at some point. But then the question I have is what about the clips which are from before the accident?

Grace: Right. That was done by my brother-in-law. He had a flip cam. We adopted Sabrina when she was three and a half weeks old. She only weighed four pounds when she came to us from the hospital, so she was really preemie. She was very small and luckily Albert, my brother-in-law, just happened to be there and he did a great job shooting that piece showing Sabrina. That woman that I'm kissing, that's my youngest sister, Frankie. Fu, my partner, took a lot of flip cam pictures also. She did the flip cams when we're in the car and I'm saying I've lost my best friend, which I think she did well. There were no pictures. Nobody could find any pictures of me with the stethoscope.

Mark: Doctors don't seem to document themselves very well. :) We used every ounce of material that we had to give as much context as we could.

Audience: The question that I wanted to ask was about that scene in the car that you just referred to where it becomes clear that you haven't processed yet. You're just beginning. And then you said you went through a period of three years. Especially with the zen meditation background, how do you integrate that being in the present moment and really deeply being able to be real and authentic with whatever is arising for you?

Grace: Great -- that is the practice question of the century, you know. :) I haven't gotten it down, let me tell you. But I think we all operate on our own psychological clocks. At the point that my psychological clock got really ready to deal with grief -- and I think it took me having to move out of Green Gulch also -- I had to lose both my body, my home, my community, and my relationship with Fu. It was tense, but we're fine right now. So, you know, it's all come together really well. But you know, who wants to grieve? Really, who wants to grieve?

So I think unless you know that you got to, that you cannot move forward without it, and that you have good support systems around you to do it, and a skilled therapist among other people to do it. It's hard when people don't want to do it, you know? I mean there're so many people who are so sad about the state of the world now and I keep saying, "You know, life has gone through cycles." We're in a particularly bad cycle now, and I can say I was in bad cycle for about five years, but it's not the end. It's never the end. We never know how it's going to turn out. That's what I would say. And I have strong faith because of my zen practice, I've got faith that really practicing it makes a difference. That's all I can do. I can't do anything but try to follow the eightfold path as best as I can, right livelihood, right intention, right meditation, right concentration, etc.

Audience: I'm curious about the emphasis that the inspiration to move towards zen priesthood. I know you mentioned there's some uncertainty to the end of that journey, but what motivates you in the first place?

Grace: I went to divinity school as an atheist and I came out as an agnostic. Big change, and I went there right after I was in college. It was the best education I ever had, seriously. There was some part of me that was just driven by this kind of questioning and inquiry. I'd also gone to Quaker high-school. We sat a lot. When I found or when Buddhism found me, and I don’t think you find Buddhism, I think it finds you. When I realized, at one point, that I'd been swallowed by the Green Dragon, I said to anybody who would listen, how can I come to live at Green Gulch. And they said, you can't unless you're willing to give up medicine because we need everybody to be working, which is really true. They need to be part of the community and I didn't want to give up medicine then.

I couldn't do that. So luckily I got in a relationship. [laughter] Then luckily, I got a child after the relationship started going sour. The community, of course, made me its spouse. By that point, I really had become a Buddhist. I was going to the zendo every day before I went to work, and it really made it possible to do the AIDS work I was doing. There was no way I could've done that. There was no way. Even though I had to stop doing it once we adopted Sabrina just because it was too complicated, emotionally too complicated. I couldn't keep my boundaries. So that's the answer to the priest question. I have a teacher who is also Fu’s teacher, and we've been talking about. I've been in every priest training group that he's had, all the other members, they get ordained.

And I don't, because I haven't done the whole nine yards. I have to do two practice periods at Tassajara, which isn’t possible for someone in a wheelchair. Before the accident, I. was busy being a mom and doctor and couldn't do it. Then once I'd been in the accident, I thought, not so clearly, that it was a perfect time to get ordained. I sewed my robes and then we both (Reb and I) realized I can't do the forms at all. Ours is a very formal practice, meaning body-based practice, unlike a lot of practices. How you sit, walk, eat, bow is important. It's all about body. Reb and I came to the point where we decided not to discuss it anymore and I gave him my okesa and I gave him my rakusu and my zagu. I will get them when I die, if not before. But anyway, he asked me to be head student next fall, and they are going to give me a lot of help to make it possible.

Audience: Is there a way you have come to understand the accident itself, in terms of karma?

Grace: I mean it's my Karma. For all of this, I have no doubt. I met the guy who hit me. I have no strong feelings toward him. No negative feelings. We were just both in the wrong place at the wrong time. I even asked for the police report. I just wanted to see if any of us were on our cell phone. We all had our cell phones on. Luckily nobody was talking. Thank God. At one point I thought you're the perfect chosen figure. I mean, I could look around my whole environment realize that there wasn't anybody else could have withstood this. For whatever reason, I decided to live. That was way beyond my choosing, consciously. That was made by some life force that’s residing in and around me, and I honored that force and that's all part of the Karma. That is how I understand the accident. It’s completely changed my life. Thank God. I mean, I've looked at a piece of life that most people don't have to look at. I'm not sad about that. I am not regretful about any of it. Don't wish it hadn't happened. I don't wish it had happened. The accident DID happen. That's the way I understand it.

Audience: I have a question for Mark. You mentioned cinematography, and I notice the scene with the sunset and the sort of like vanilla sky purple clouds and a few birds flying across. Kind of like a very elegant, cinematographic scene. Where has your journey in filmmaking and cinematography taken you?

Mark: Thank you for that question. It's interesting. I'll actually start earlier to try to lead into an answer to that. When Helen and I started to make the film, we talked pretty early on about wanting to make it poetic in some way. We felt that in order for an audience to take in a story like this, there was going to need to be some balance between this very challenging situation that Grace was dealing with. And we were really drawn to nature as a counter balance to that and Green Gulch Zen Center is such a gorgeous place too.

There is actually a wildlife sanctuary in the central valley that I had been going to for quite a while. At the beginning of the film, there's birds rising up from a pond, and I've been filming there now for six or seven years. So there's a number of bird shots in the film that are taking there. There are some actually in Green Gulch.

I'm actually moving toward doing video installation work, surround soundscapes in nature. In that place where the birds were filmed. So that's the direction that I've been drawn since doing this.

Audience: I just want to say thanks for sharing your story and for sharing it in such a gentle way that we could relate to it without feeling sad. How do you have such a nice sense of humor through everything?

Grace: You've seen me when I haven't had a sense of humor. Well, basically, I love to laugh and I love to be happy. Let's face it, it's always a choice point. So part of my sense of humor is making a choice in that moment. Just see it as funny. See the glass is half-full.

Mark: I have to say, just from the filmmaking side, that was part of the delight in being in doing this. Both Fu and Grace are very funny, and Sabrina in her own teenage way in that film. And Fu, it's interesting in terms of the caregiving side of it, who really saw a key part of her role as providing the humor that could pull Grace off the cliff when she stepped out a little too far close to the edge. So humor is a really powerful tool in a lot of different ways in both the film and in their lives.

Audience: I'm so grateful to be here and really feeling the strength of each of your presence has, and how much grace and gentleness there is. What's staying with me most from the film, and seeing Grace, is your determination and resilience in some of the really challenging moments. Just watching your face, there was so much determination, and that's very inspiring. I'm curious how you see that when you watch the film?

Grace: Fu's other name for me was Mack Truck, Tank, The Tank. I mean, I'm glad I was born with that. That certainly is the quality that kept me alive for all of this time. I mean, in those whole Bardo state days when I was here. I look at that and I think I can see how you did it, but I was born with that kind of quality. I think I had it from the time I came out of the womb. According to my mother.

Audience: One of my favorite definitions of the word grace is, I think by Friedrich Schiller, who said that grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom. And so I see that you are embodying your name, you are graceful. And I'm wondering, given that your form has changed, has the sense of freedom also changed?

Grace: Totally. I mean my whole way of being in life was to get up and go and all of a sudden I'm a dead ringer for anyone who wanted a listening ear. I mean, the first time I went to a party I was horrified because I realized how much time I'd spent getting away from people and how I didn't have that luxury anymore. And that's a really horrible thing to learn about oneself, that was a self-indictment. Also I hated my name until I became about 60. I learned to surf when I was 50. When I was 60, I learned how to be a patient, meaning I learned how to be totally immobile for many months. I couldn't move either my legs or my arms at all. So I really learned a lot about mobility or immobile. I feel like I don't have much freedom physically, which is true objectively, too. I do feel like I've got tremendous freedom psychologically, psychically, intellectually just because I've had this experience and it's like I walked through crack. I know what I really know and nobody and nothing can take that away.

[View more photos of the afternoon.]