In my last blog I mentioned that a meditation practice provides us with an opportunity to notice how dominated we can become by fear, especially when our external culture is so fear based, as ours seems to currently be.
As you deepen and strengthen your sitting practice, fears, which you may not even know were present, may gradually show themselves. I have found over the years that it can be very healthy to bring an attitude of curiosity toward this type of experience. Being alert and curious allows fear to become your teacher. “Curiouser and curiouser,” cried Alice in Wonderland as she saw her body grow larger and larger and larger. “Curiouser and curiouser,” said my student Wendy, who had the courage to see the depth and breadth of the fear within as she persisted in her meditation practice. Wendy’s persistence in this process resulted in her coming to realize that none of her fears were absolutely true and most of them were memories from childhood or adolescence that were deeply buried in her psyche and body. I had another student who I will call Jethro who was about 6’6” and very gangly. He looked very placid during his sitting in the meditation hall day after day, but gradually he let me know that he lived in a frozen, fear-based state. He sat and walked with his shoulders slightly hunched, something he had learned as a kid to continually avoid drawing attention to his size and to help armor himself against verbal blows from other kids’ teasing. My support for him was very simple, helping him bring attention to all of the sensations in his shoulders. Jethro spent two years noticing and being curious about tightness, unease, or numbness in his shoulders and how these sensations manifested themselves in fear-based thought and emotion. Eventually, his shoulders relaxed and opened up. His sense of separation from the world around him diminished, and fear lost its grip. During the time Jethro worked with me he began and ended each sitting with the following loving-kindness practice: “May I find freedom from fear in my life. May I also help others find freedom from fear. May I meet the fear with the courage of the open heart, acting with decisiveness rather than divisiveness.” By doing this practice over and over and over, he not only let go of his fear, he liberated the natural happiness, which is the bedrock of our existence- his so-called Buddha Nature, or T.S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world.” If Wendy and Jethro can do this, so can you!
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I gave a talk recently titled, “Moving through Fear and Liberating Happiness.” I pointed out three things we may do when we are dominated by fear:
First, we may become more compliant, more willing to surrender our rights for vague promises of safety. Second, we may withdraw either into our “tribe” or into a sense of hopelessness about our lives. Third, we become more security-oriented, less open to new possibilities, viewing out future through the lens of fear or hopelessness. When we focus on the negative, as I do when I Google “Trump Russia” at every opportunity, we inevitably end up exaggerating the potentially threatening parts of our lives. Out of the urgent need to survive, I may compromise my commitment to acting compassionately toward myself and others, overlooking my interdependence with everyone and everything. Fear, when not named, narrows our vision, shuts down intuition as well as ability to be reflective, and promotes violence. Zen practice is not only about meditating. It’s about both having the courage to name our fears and insecurities and share them with a trusted spiritual friend. Time after time I have supported students in naming their fears and watched how this unburdening has freed them up to be fully present in their moments and their lives. This is what the 13th century Zen teacher Dogen calls, “enlightening our delusion.” If you are a member of our Zen Center you might want to develop an ongoing relationship with a teacher who may help you in this process. There are six of us who are ready, willing, and able to give you support on an ongoing basis. And if you are part of another sangha, you may want to develop a relationship with the teacher(s) there. Lately, I have been thinking about the emphasis that my root teacher, Suzuki Roshi, placed on embracing “things as it is.” To do this we need to relinquish our hold on an image of how things need to be, or should be, or might have been. By practicing not resisting what is over and over again, we begin to say “yes” to life as it is unfolding.
The well-known psychiatrist Milton Erickson referred to this as the “yes set.” In his work with clients who had an overall negative attitude, he found that if he could get them to say “yes” once, that single utterance could be an entrée into a series of yeses and that series could result in the individual beginning to say “yes” to life. Suzuki Roshi used to talk about the expectation in some Zen monasteries that a student immediately say “yes” to whatever his teacher asked him to do as a way to move out of yourself and fully embrace whatever activity is at hand. Saying “yes” can be a powerful spiritual practice. Embracing “things as it is” doesn’t mean bypassing our disappointment, sadness, or anger about something that has happened. It means accepting both the situation and the negative feeling we might have about it, without suffering about our suffering by talking to ourselves about it, which drains our energy and is a total waste of time. Suzuki’s combination of the singular and the plural in “things as it is,” while grammatically incorrect, underscores his teaching that everything is separate and yet undivided from everything else. Take the poem by the Japanese Zen master, Ryokan: the thief / left it behind, / the moon at the window Ryokan had lost all of his belongings in one fell swoop. And yet, rather than needlessly complaining about his loss, he used it as an opportunity to poetically express his embracing of “things as it is.” The moon is often used in Zen as a symbol of the enlightened mind. This mind is like the moonlight that enlivens everything it shines on. Everything is separate, and yet everything is undivided since each object bathes in the same warm glow. The neighborhood around Zen Center has become somewhat gentrified in the last couple of decades, so that it has become almost impossible to find an affordable place to rent. Someone said to me recently, “I can’t stand that our neighborhood has become so chi-chi. It shouldn’t be this way,” and then went on and on about how unfair it was. But his ranting and raving was not getting him anywhere and I began to feel exhausted listening to him. So both of us began to suffer needlessly, rather than saying, “Yes, this is the way things are,” what some Vipassana teachers have referred to as radical acceptance. Radical acceptance does not mean being a doormat, however. Once we have fully accepted something, we can move on to decide if we want to try to modify it in the future. “Yes, the neighborhood has become chi-chi and I feel sad about it, but instead of complaining I am going to do something to try to make it more livable.” Even the term “radical acceptance” is insufficient to express the warm, calming glow we can all feel when we fully embrace “things as it is.” One of my friends is fond of saying that Zen is Buddhism with jokes. Playfulness, laughter, and overall good humor was something I appreciated in my two teachers, Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri Roshi. We can trace this humor, laughter, and playfulness all the way back to early Zen, as exemplified by Pu Tai, Han Shan, and Shih Te.
All three of these characters renounced the life of privilege available to Buddhist teachers in 10th century China. Instead, in their rambunctiousness and tomfoolery they demonstrated a childlike lack of self-consciousness. A few words about Pu Tai follow: Pu Tai is the laughing Buddha that we see in so many Chinese restaurants. He had no desire to call himself a Zen master or to gather disciples. Instead he wandered around with a sack full of oranges, which he freely gave to children who gathered around him. Adults gathered around him too, thinking he was mad to laugh so much, but often finding themselves doubled over with laughter, themselves. Notice next time you have a good laugh, how your senses are sharpened and how much lighter you feel. It’s impossible to laugh and be anxious at the same time! There’s a story about Pu Tai sitting down under a tree, with his eyes closed, not laughing, not even smiling, completely still and peaceful. A villager came up to him and asked “You are not laughing, Pu Tai?” “I am preparing.” The villager did not understand. He said, “What do you mean by preparing?” Pu Tai replied, “I have to prepare myself for laughter. I have to go within. I have to forget the whole world so that I can recharge, and then I can be filled with laughter again.” The ability to re-charge our batteries so we can deeply enjoy our lives is something that naturally develops out of a steady meditation practice. In a future blog entry I will give examples of how my own first teacher’s playfulness and laughter rubbed off on me during my time with him. Sometimes people ask me what the outcome of a long-term meditation practice is. My reply is that you may become more placid and better able to roll with the punches, but most important, you become more truly yourself. Many of the Buddhist teachers who have impacted me were quite eccentric, and at the same time true to themselves in deep, and sometimes inspiring ways. When I say more truly yourself, I mean not transfixed by your own image, instead able to engage fully in your life without continually needing to evaluate how you are coming off to others. This is what my first teacher called “Zen beyond self-consciousness.”
One of these eccentric teachers is the early 19th-century Japanese Zen adept, Ryokan, who fully immersed himself in Zen practice at a young age, devoting himself to meditation in a sequestered monastic environment. I call this the “cocoon phase” of his practice. At some point the cocoon broke open and a strangely beautiful butterfly emerged. Here’s a poem he wrote years after he left the monastery in which Ryokan alludes to his life afterword: With no mind, flowers lure the butterfly; with no mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms. Yet when flowers bloom, the butterfly comes; when the butterfly comes flowers bloom. The monastic (or “cocoon”) practice which Ryokan engaged in before flying freely was based on the model developed by the 13th century Zen teacher, Dogen. Dogen articulated two complementary facets of training: 1. Constraining the impulsivity of the small self through ritualizing each aspect of life in the sequestered setting of a retreat or monastery. He gave precise instructions on how to sit in meditation, brush teeth, receive and eat food, even use the restroom. This ritualization of each detail can enable a practitioner to fully engage in each activity while maintaining a meditative flow. 2. Cultivating and expressing parental mind. Dogen tells many stories of monks who exhibited this feature. He mentions visiting a Chinese monastery and encountering the head cook, who he finds outside in the sweltering heat drying mushrooms. Dogen asks him “What are you doing working out here at this time when the sun is so hot?” The monk replies “What other time is there than this,” and continues with his work. In our urban, American Zen practice, we also do our best to honor this commitment to caring for practitioners’ well-being, so they can practice inside the cocoon until it breaks open and they flap their wings with abandon, no longer being trapped by thoughts or images of themselves or others. One ancient Chinese Zen teacher referred to this emerging into authenticity as “letting the person of naked red flesh come forth.” |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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