Now I will focus on the third hindrance, sloth/torpor and the fourth hindrance, restlessness.
Many people read books about meditation and dip in and out of it and that’s ok, but if we want to move from anguish to happiness we need to consistently apply ourselves even if we are too tired/stressed out/agitated to sit on a given day. That may be when we need it the most. Energy arises when we have a clear-cut direction and a goal. Before I started meditating I experienced a lot of sloth/torpor. But I believed my first teacher when he said I could discover my own calm, timeless nature through a daily sitting practice coupled with regular retreats. In my first few years of practice, friends commented on how disciplined I was. But I have never been particularly disciplined. I just decided that I was going to devote myself to piercing through the veneer created by the worries and concerns that dominated my life so I could sink into a spacious peacefulness—which took a while, but it worked! Keeping an energized meditation practice going depends largely on sustaining our commitment. Committing to a goal gives the mind direction, even if its only committing to being present for the next ten breaths. And of course, some sloth/torpor is inevitable, especially during retreats. It’s natural to have sleepiness when you are continually sitting staring at a wall with no stimulation or entertainment. Then the bell ending meditation ends for lunch and you aren’t sleepy any more. Sometimes sloth/torpor during meditation is due to resistance. We committed ourselves to the retreat and we’ve been sitting for a while, but we are bored, tired of paying attention, and want to be somewhere else. Maybe we are resisting unpleasant thoughts or feelings, so our laziness is protecting us against this unpleasantness. Our thoughts can decrease or increase our energy. If my sitting isn’t going well, my thoughts of how bad my meditation is can send me into a downward spiral, which drains my energy. We can think, “oh, no, there’s still 20 minutes left before the bell rings” or we can commit ourselves to being completely present for the next three breaths and discover that we have lots of energy. Sometimes being “relaxed” and calm is overemphasized. Diligence, energy, and vigorous active engagement are all necessary if we are going to transform our suffering into joy. Or, in Sanskrit, dukkha into sukkha. Sometimes sloth/torpor is a reaction to the chronic habit of tension and anxiety, or being chronically excited. When that kind of stress has been normalized for us over time, in our meditation we experience how it has been draining our energy. Sloth and torpor may be a transition some people have to go through, like coffee withdrawal. That’s perfectly OK. And even after we have deepened our sitting, sometimes it is healthy for us just to veg out! Now, a few words on restlessness: Often we create our own entertainment in meditation—planning what we will cook for dinner or planning the rest of your life or just indulging in a pleasurable fantasy. This pretty natural. When we notice we are doing this, there are a number of things we can do: 1. We can narrow our focus by repeating something to ourselves coupled with continually returning to our breath. 2. We can follow my teacher’s instructions “When you want to tame a sheep or a goat, give it a large pasture.” 3. We can do a loving-kindness practice. This calms the mind; and helps us be more kind and accepting. And a happy mind is generally not restless. 4. We can bargain with our mind by saying, “I’ll just pay close attention to the next 5 breaths.” If we do this wholeheartedly often our boredom will go away. 5. We might do some hatha yoga before we sit. Traditionally, in India hatha yoga was considered an essential precursor to meditation. 6. If you find that you are doing some important planning while sitting, make a mental note of what the themes is so you won’t forget it. Often our lives are so busy that we don’t take enough time to plan, which is an important part of living. 7. Often there’s a specific feeling underneath our restlessness and that’s invariably tied into sensations in our body. Just transferring our attention to the feelings or sensations is often all that’s necessary to let go of restlessness. If I am worrying about my finances and I make a mental note and that doesn’t work—then I can just notice the feeling. If it is anxiety I can go into that and see what that is about, including opening to my bodily sensations. Careful attention to my sensations, which are always in flux, will likely dissipate my worry. This is my second of several posts I am writing about five basic hindrances to meditation Buddha talked about—difficult energies that arise in the mind and in life as a part of meditation practice.
In my last blog I gave a general introduction to these and talked about desire. Now I want to touch on the second hindrance, aversion or dislike. After folks have established a meditation practice, often they are impatient for their minds to settle down and their life to be transformed. Someone with a daily meditation practice that she had stayed with for more than 4 years said to me recently, “I shouldn’t be confused after all this sitting. I wish it would go away. Can you help me with this? I replied, “Every time you hear that voice saying you’re not doing it right or you should do more, or whatever, count the judgments for awhile just to see them.” She tried that and she was still fighting with them. I said, “Alright, continue counting them but give thanks with each count whether you feel thankful or not.” The next time I met with her she seemed much more accepting of her confusion and as a result, not plagued by it. I am writing this on the way home from visiting my grandsons. In the airport there was a family with four young kids who were really misbehaving. The woman next to me and I started chatting, talking about our kids and grandkids. As these kids were bopping and jiving around us, the woman asked me, “Do you remember the time when you really just wanted to pick your kids up and throw them out the window, and you didn’t care?” And I do! (But luckily I didn’t follow through on it.) Whenever we have a strong negative feeling, can we acknowledge that it has arisen and notice the strength of its energy? Can we be aware of the feeling and touch it with our hearts? Can we connect with it from a place of tenderness or caring, making friendswith it? If we can’t let things into our heart, we don’t really let ourselves grow. Trying to get over our aversions or get rid of them simply doesn’t work. Underlying aversion, fear is often lurking. Years ago, when the nested eating bowls call oryoki were introduced at San Francisco Zen Center I was not a happy camper, since they were designed for right handed people and I was left handed. For more than three years we had used knifes and forks during our meals. And we were told that there was only one way to use the bowls. As a “lefty,” I had aversion to using them because I was afraid of being thought poorly of. This was accentuated by the fact that my young wife was one of the oryoki teachers. Finally, they let us lefties do it in a modified manner, but I had negative feelings about these meals for years. The specific movements seemed orchestrated for right-handed people and I was sure everyone was noticing what a klutz I was. I’ve talked over the years about different way we can deal with negative stuff both during meditation and in our daily lives. We can narrow the focus, broaden the focus, or changing our focus in some other way. During group meditation, let’s say the breathing of the person next to us is bothering us. We might narrow our focus by concentrating on our own breath while repeating some calming or centering word to ourselves. Or we might broaden it by incorporating the sound of the person’s breathing into our own meditation. I remember being continually distracted for some time by cars zooming by on the street outside our meditation space in San Francisco. Then I read a book about the musician John Cage in which he talked about welcoming dissonant sounds as music. I began incorporating the traffic noise into my meditation focus and it worked! My mind settled down every time I welcomed the noise. Outside of meditation we can also effectively change focus. When I first was asked to give talks at our Zen center, I was petrified, because I was sure I would make a fool of myself… and the first couple of times I did. But I experimented with changing my focus to what the audience needed to know instead of my desire for the talk to be successful and it worked. Before I began my talks I broadened my focus to look at everyone in the room with awareness that I had something to share that could support them and my nervousness vanished! In certain situations, narrowing our focus can be equally effective in daily life. If you are hiking on a scary path, you can focus on “one step, one breath” instead of the drop 1,000 feet down. In other situations we find aversive, we might ask ourselves what we might learn from this. If we are being harsh with ourselves or someone else, send good vibes to ourselves or them. We just finished a practice period at Zen center that featured loving kindness practices. Feedback was so positive that in our next retreat I am featuring loving kindness practice. I’d like to close with a reminder that the fearthat underlies aversion is always about something that hasn’t yet happened. In periods of short or longer meditation we have the luxury of time to just be with fear as it comes up. As we learn more and more about it without judging or evaluating it, its power naturally dissipates and even vanishes, especially if we keep the tips I have just given in mind. In my next posts I will discuss five basic hindrances to meditation that Buddha talked about. These hindrances are difficult energies, which arise in the mind and in life as a part of meditation practice.
In Egypt in the second century, Christian Desert Father Evagrius talked about being assailed by demons while meditating which were similar to Buddha’s five: 1. Desire: Like wanting to give up meditating to experience something comfortable like a soft bed 2. Aversion: Because it was too hot or too cold to meditate; 3. Sloth and torpor: Once you get rid of desire and aversion in your sitting, the demon of sleepiness arrives 4. Restlessness: You could be home relaxing instead of sitting staring at a wall or into space 5. Doubt: The demon of doubting the entire meditative process When Buddha talked about these hindrances, he used the metaphor of a poisoned tree. He suggested that we have three options: First, we can chop it down and try to get rid of it. Second, we can put up a sign near the tree that says, “This is a poisoned tree. Don’t eat the berries, don’t eat the leaves,” and instead of killing it, take shade in it rather than freaking out. Finally, we can say, “Oh, a poisoned tree, just what I’ve been looking for. These berries make the best medicine for curing a number of illnesses, including the illness of desire, aversion, restlessness, sloth, and doubt. I’ll take the very energies that are difficult and work with them, distill them in my own body and heart until I have converted them into medicine to support my life.” All of us have desires. All of us hate certain things. All of us get exhausted and want to veg out now and then. And at times we all have doubts about our meditation practice and ourselves. I’ll spend the rest of this piece talking about the first hindrance, desire. We experience both physical desires (e.g., food, comfort, and sex) and emotional desires (e.g., feeling connected to others and the world beyond ourselves). Often we are driven as much or more by these emotional desires than the physical ones, reaching out time and time again to our lover, our friend, our teacher. We have a fundamental insecurity about our identity or place in the world. In my early days of Zen practice, I watched my friends imitate my teacher; shaving their heads, wearing black (this was before any of us had been ordained), and even making some of the same grammatical mistakes he did because they so much wanted to be like him to relieve their own insecurity. When we are thrown off balance by a particular desire, how can we work with the energy emanating from that desire rather than repressing it? Zen teacher Dogen suggested we study it. Each desire has a beginning, middle, and end. For example, I love chocolate. And if I want to practice around my almost insatiable desire for chocolate, instead of just grabbing for a piece, I can feel the desire in my body, notice my anticipatory salivation, imagine the satisfaction of putting a piece in my mouth. I can feel the tension and pain in my craving for it. I can notice how quickly the tension and pain dissipates as the chocolate touches my tongue and melts in my mouth. What great happiness I feel! And how much of this is relief that the desire has ended. And we can study the negative emotions that emanate from desire in the same way. We can discover what triggers that anger, that confusion, that hatred, that sadness, and how it intensifies, what thoughts come up, and even what physiological changes occur and how, at a certain moment, these end. How much healthier this is than just saying, “I’ll get rid of this.” By studying our emotions we learn how we actually relate to our family, to the people nearest to us, our Sangha, both when we get what we want and when our desires are thwarted. As a first child, the former CEO of a large non-profit agency, and guiding teacher at Zen Center for the last 16 years, I am used to people following my direction, which used to work pretty well. One of my desires is to be right. I love to be right. It feels good to be right and have everyone follow me along. But my wife has needed to remind me from time to time that, “You’re not my CEO!” And now for the first time I am sharing leadership at Zen Center with Ted O’Toole. What do I do when he disagrees with me? Can I listen to Ted’s voice, notice my immediate resistance, my felt sense, the tension in my body, what it does in that moment to my relationship with Ted, and notice what the sense of self is that is built around that story that I’m right. Can we relate to each of our desires in a friendly, compassionate, wise way, focusing not on the object of desire, but the feeling including the pain or fear that evokes it? It takes courage to do this, and it takes a regular meditation practice to slow down enough so we can really pay attention. But we can also do it with lightheartedness. The Dalai Lama, speaking at Gethsemane monastery, said that he had just been given a piece of cheese and he really wanted cake and he guffawed. If we experience the feeling that lies behind our desire, it loses it power over us and we can just guffaw! This is not to say that desire is all bad. To be human is to experience desire. If we desire something that might be appropriate, but we are clinging to that desire, we can focus on its impermanent nature. If we desire something that is harmful to us, we can focus on the consequences of getting what we want. Sometimes I need to remind myself that the sugar in chocolate is likely to activate my Lyme’s Disease symptoms. Buddha spoke to his son Rahula about desire. He pointed out that if Rahula saw that his desires would lead to harm for himself or others, he shouldn’t act on them. If, on the other hand, he saw no harmful consequences from his actions, he should take joy in his progress on the path, and use that joy to nourish his continued practice. Finally we can ask ourselves when a desire comes up, “Is this something I really want,” or “what really matters to me? If I only had another month or another six months to live, what would I do?” Since I am already 76, I do this frequently. I realize how fortunate I am to have two healthy desires to return to whenever I get swept away by negative ones: to support folks at Zen Center in unburdening their minds of weighty thought and emotion, and to spend time with my grandchildren. I hope you can tap into desires that bring joy to your life as well. This will be my last piece on chapter one of Transmission of the Light by Keizan, which ends with an early poem in the spirit of Wabi Sabi:
A splendid branch issues forth from the old plum tree. Thorns come forth at the same time. Wabi Sabi has three primary features, including appreciation of: imperfection and irregularity; age; simplicity and naturalness. In my last piece I spoke about imperfection. Now I will discuss age and simplicity/naturalness. In Japanese Zen, an older teacher is generally referred to as a Roshi, an honorific title reserved for people who have steeped themselves in meditation practice for many years. On the down side, as we age our cognitions slow, our memory fades. On the up side, long-term practitioners have learned to see habit patterns within themselves, have learned to dis-identify with these patterns and can help other practitioners do the same. They can help folks learn to say to themselves, “Oh, I’ve seen that movie before. I can enjoy old movies without getting hooked on them or charged up.” Once I was visiting with Suzuki Roshi’s son who was a barber in San Francisco. I said something like, “It must have been wonderful to grow up with a father who was so supportive and easy going!” His son replied, “That man you know is not the man I grew up with. He’s a different man.” One of the best-known Zen haikus by Basho honors age: the old pond /a frog jumps in / plop! The frog jumps into something huge and old, so ancient that it’s before time. It contains all life within it- algae, microorganisms, fish, and amphibians, living interdependently. This valuing of age we find in many of the records of exchanges between teachers and practitioners in China and Japan. Take Case #52 of The Blue Cliff Record, for instance: The travelling monk says to Zao Zhou, “The stone bridge of Zao Zhou is widely renowned. But coming here I only see stepping stones.” Zao Zhou replies, “You do not see the stone bridge. You only see stepping stones.” The monk asks, “What is the stone bridge? Zao Zhou again replies, “It lets horses cross over and donkeys cross over.” At this time in China there were three well-known stone bridges. This one was so ancient that it didn’t stick out and announce itself. The monk made a long journey to both see this world-renowned stone bridge and the famous Zen master who lived by it. But he both missed the beauty of the carefully placed stepping-stones and the piercing eyes of the simply dressed man living by the water. The teacher’s second response is so artful, “It lets horses cross over and donkeys cross over.” He is saying that both he and the bridge welcome everyone who wants to visit, even if they are judgmental as this monk is. Either you shrivel up when you become old or your meditation practice enables you to become both more authentic and accepting. The final feature of Wabi Sabi is simplicity and naturalness. The monk misses the simplicity and naturalness of the placement of the stones. It doesn’t even look like a bridge. And as for the teacher who is not wearing elegant robes, looking very ordinary, but able to compassionately reflect back the monk’s frustration without criticizing or judging,“You do not see the stone bridge, you only see stepping stones.” He completely enters the monk’s world without one upping the monk or giving unsolicited advice. As Suzuki said about another teacher, “I wish I could be like that!” Here’s another example of simplicity and naturalness from Case #7 of The Blue Cliff Record: A monk named Ekko asked Zen master Hogen, “What is the Buddha? Hogen replied,“You are Ekko.” When we are just who we are, we are free from any image of who we should be. For my final example of simplicity and naturalness I return to another haiku by Basho written about 600 years after The Blue Cliff Record. a butterfly also / comes to sip the vinegar / from mums and pickles He also explains the context of the poem: “While I was staying in Awazu, a man who liked tea ceremony very much, invited me and served vinegar boiled chrysanthemum flowers picked from a nearby beach.” Our heart mind or Buddha nature is very simple. It doesn’t need any adornment. A final haiku of Basho’s that speaks to that is: wake up wake up / be my friend / sleeping butterfly When we emerge from our cocoon of meditation practice, we can find our own grace and naturalness, just like the butterfly finds hers. The splendid branch, (thorns and all) issues from the old plum tree. |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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