What Zen Meditation is Not

Just as yoga (yoking with the divine) is not Stretch-'n-Bend, meditation is not a stress relief technique.  What's wrong with that?  And hasn't Jon Kabat-Zinn brought meditation to the masses?  Let me start with the second question.  My answer is, I just don't know.  Lots of people have read his books and taken classes.  Years ago Tom and I took a class in healthy eating that incorporated teaching an 18-minute meditation carefully styled to have nothing to do with spirit, ethics, growth or self-knowledge.  It claimed benefits proven by science, and used a body scan picked up perhaps from the vipassana tradition.  We already had a practice.  Otherwise, I'd be surprised if anyone there began and stayed with a daily practice.  Because meditation as stress relief just doesn't work.  (And, as Seung Sahn said, "Meditation is boring.")

That takes me to my first question, What's wrong with teaching it that way? (and isn't it better than no meditation at all?)  Well, take stress.  It is in fact not imposed on us from without, but imposed from within by our reactivity to external events, and by our lifestyle choices and bad habits.  (If you want to think about the stress caused by a bad habit, look up the effect of a cigarette on your body.)  If you choose to live hectic 16-hour days, frequent long evenings drinking with friends, competitive work full of striving and resentment, eating on the run, all that, yes, 18 minutes of meditation, actually sitting still may keep you from having a myocardial infarction at 36.  The sense of being relieved of stress for a few moments is pleasurable.  That's why a great many people, like me, first take up yoga:  one day a week, an hour of peace and quiet, full relaxation, maybe to be followed by a good night's sleep.

I loved that first yoga class, so many years ago, but it didn't save me from the awfully overstressed life I found myself in (to speak of karma).  My teacher had a deep practice, and imparted as much to us of the purpose and meaning of yoga as he could.  I tried to take up the visualization he taught for us, and the guru devotion, but . . . what? I didn't enjoy it - it seemed to get me down.  I had no one to help me see that being forced up against my problems could be a positive thing.

That, you could say, is the purpose of Zen, to make us aware of what we are doing and how it affects us and the world.  To bring us up against reality. That includes the reality that a sssself-centered life, in search of external solutions like pleasure and distraction and romantic love and fame and money and even stress relief - that life does not bring happiness. 

The practice of Zen, sitting still watching your breath, watching what comes into your mind and letting it go, refusing to move even to scratch your head - it has its blissful moments.  I have heard Pema Chodron say that meditation begins in bliss and ends in bliss, but first you have to go through hell.  Doing it with the purpose of being with yourself is, I have found, ultimately relaxing.  The quieter mental state leads me to make the small decisions that ease my life.  Right now, that is that it's time to get ready for bed.  So, goodnight.
[image:  the "nodding onion" we planted this year, growing gracefully in the hottest, dryest spot.]

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

The photos above are of the same sculpture, "Quantum Man," created by Julian Voss-Andreae, the image of a walking man. Made up of over a hundred vertically oriented steel sheets, the 8’ tall sculpture provides a metaphor for the counter-intuitive world of quantum physics. Symbolizing the dual nature of matter, the sculpture seems solid when seen from the front but nearly disappears when seen from the side, as light shines through the spaces between the slabs.

Faithful Reader knows that I have felt somewhat disturbed recently, my usual comfort challenged by Peter Singer's delusion-fracturing book on ending extreme poverty. Then Brenda Shoshann's Zen Miracles asked me to "Find Your Own Pilgrimage."

A word of explanation. My best time for getting in touch with myself and the rest of creation is morning, before my ego structure gets firmly in place and I start making lists of things to do and running around. And this morning I did an idle search on hemoglobin.

That's another element of my personal story - doctor's office called yesterday to say my Hg was low again, and it is time for a Procrit shot. This has gone on for years now, a consequence of kidneys not able to do their rightful work. I learned that Hg is essential for the transport of oxygen - that's why say a competitive biker might want to use it to maximize red blood cells, and why you feel fatigued when you are anemic. But more to the point, I came to the art of the sculptor shown above, because he has done a wonderful sculpture of hemoglobin.

Science/art has insisted on coming my way lately, beginning when? Well, a couple of weeks ago we went to a presentation by a local sculptor, a woman who works in bronze and sometimes paper. What I learned was how messy sculpture can be, how it is literally down to earth, down to clay and metals and fire, and work with the hands. I have been dissatisfied lately with the flat plane of paper on which to draw or write. Writing and talking are such thin things. Words have a very odd kind of reality, intangible, and lately I have been enjoying working with my plants, a way of getting into the earth.

Next I ran into a TED presentation on a scientist/artist who puts paint cans in a pendulum and lets or helps the natural flow create a painting. What was very odd there was that Tom also ran into it and watched it on the new TV. Now there's this, coming to me from Wikipedia as I tried to find out just what a Hg count refers to. I didn't find that yet, but no matter.

My title today is the famous line from the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. (I guess not everyone in the world was an English major, or wouldn't we be in trouble when the drains clog up?) I think it is famous in part because it so neatly targets that sense of Spring, that desire to be fresh and renewed. Surely that is a big part of why we do this amazing thing, going on retreat.

For Shoshanna, a pilgrimage is when you stop clinging to something, get out of your stuckness. Mine goes to always doing small, private things so I don't get hurt, perhaps, or because of some tiny twist in my DNA. But I think of big things. I admire huge art, like an installation I saw a while back at a fiber art show. I'm sorry, but I don't recall the artist's name. She had created huge panels of barely colored silk that hung from the ceiling, one after the other, and that stirred with your passing. The room seemed to engulf you and make you tender.

Yes, there was yet another sculptor who came my way recently, who does Buddhist work in mosaic. Art that is out there shattering light in garden.

So what is my next step after writing this? I don't know. As often, I hear Seung Sahn (whom I never met) nodding and telling me, "Good. Only keep that don't-know mind."

Urgently Meditating

[yes, that lower picture is a web built by a spider on caffeine)

It is something a Zen retreat tries to tell us with The Evening Gatha - You could die any minute. You don’t have forever to get with your life. You can’t be waiting for It to happen. Teachers say it in their dharma talks. You begin to get it.

I got it big in the early seventies. I have written before about how a book helped me think closely about what really mattered to me. I came up with the understanding that I urgently needed "to learn to relax." Well, that's a long story of not understanding what it would take, how I needed to change my life down to the very foundations. I'd rather do a bit of memoir on the arrythmia I experienced last month. It was called "a heart event."

Don't you like the term, an "event"? It was not a heart attack, nor was my heart damaged. I didn't have a blockage - I went out of rhythm. I find that evocative, because I did have the feeling in the weeks before that that I was too speeded up. It was a fact that my heart rate was higher than usual. It was a sort of too-much-caffeine feeling, though I never drank coffee after noon. (In the hospital I got off caffeine against my will, but have stayed off.)

The event . . . my heart began thumping, like an engine that's missing, and then felt like it was bounding around in all directions, racing faster, so that I got shorter of breath. When it peaked I realized I could be dying right now right here on this couch with no warning I could die!

This was the second time in my adult life that I knew that - nothing about dying from fear or grief, it was the genuine thing, the body. (The first time was the cancer diagnosis in 1997, which caused me to begin meditating.) Facing death is much harder if you think it is the very end of you, that there is nothing beyond. And since our beloved cat Sherlock died four months ago, I have been convinced that the death of the body is the end, for in no way has he come back to give me a sign. Our bond with that animal was so deep that I believe if such a thing were possible, he would have done it.

Dying, I felt, was just going to be descending into blackness. Gone. I haven't even recorded myself singing Keep Me in Your Heart for a While (but here is a lovely version).

Well, there is so much time in the heart hospital, time when you are awakened at 3:00 a.m. by someone taking your vitals or drawing your blood, and can't get back to sleep. No laptop, nothing much to do but think. Sense how worn out you are from that "event," how it battered your heart. Think about how you had been sliding on your meditation practice. Skipping days, doing it lightly, just ten minutes maybe, or just sitting outside in a lawn chair letting the universe be with me, contemplating. But not meditating.

Meditation is hard work. Seung Sahn said Americans won't do it because it is boring, and he laughed. Maybe the truth is right there - that America is a culture of Getting Somewhere, Getting Some Thing, you know, fame, money, status, going for it, just doing it, accomplishing. It is our heredity, and it surrounds us everywhere. This is why there needs to be an American form of Zen that truly takes this psychology into account. In my opinion, such an approach to Buddhism will keep before us the issues of our yang. How, for instance, being aggressive increases testoserone, which makes an individual tend toward aggression.

I got it during that event - I could die. If it hadn't calmed down, I would have. In my three days in the lovely private room in the privileged heart hospital I began meditating again. Out of bed, sit in a chair, do the posture as well as you can.

Home I didn't have to take a vow - I just started my morning practice again, sitting upright now with the incense I get from Zen Mountain Monastery, and a tea candle in a rose quartz holder. Started inching my time up from 20 minutes in case I decide to go to the Ama Samy retreat later this month, where the sits are 25 minutes. A retreat costs a lot, takes me away from my doctors and all my comforts and protections, most of all, asks a great deal of me. Follow the schedule. Meditate all day. No distracting. Some people call it "facing the wall." I think about that, how it is a metaphor. What is the wall you face? Is death a wall?

A retreat always stimulates my practice. What else would make me stay with it? besides this motivation, this urgent feeling that I could die, which is coupled with the conviction that meditation does destress me, and gives me a space to touch down on my true self, to be myself before I die. That's a good question, so I'll end with it.

Forgotten by the World

[image from Ryokan: Forgotten by the World]
In America we don't share religious celebrations, so national holidays are about something else. The meaning of Labor Day, the reason it was founded, is almost forgotten, as are the desperate struggles of ordinary workers to have decent lives. Labor Day is now the last big weekend of summer, last chance to grab some fun before life gets serious again. Preferably outdoor fun.

Here on Wynding Drive the trees are quiet. 11:00 a.m., no fireworks, at least so far. Bird calls. I still don't know how to identify any of them, except the ones I have seen - a cardinal going chip-chip-chip from a high branch; a mockingbird doing everything but a ring tone. No language for a bird call - this is all right. I have been reading Seung Sahn this morning -

Take away your opinion - your condition, situation - then your mind is clear like space. Clear like space means clear like a mirror. A mirror reflects everything: the sky is blue, tree is green, sugar is sweet. Just be one with the truth - that’s Zen style. Only talking, talking no good. No truth.

In the true style of Zen masters, Seung Sahn used words, many of them, to say - No words will get you there. Lacking his presence, the words are like finding a scrap of fabric off his robe, at least letting me get a sense of him.

Our house has something of the air of a temple, lots of hardwood floors, a window wall on our woods, a sense of quiet. There is a cowbell (what else?) inside the front door, and we own some Zen instruments, but there is no bell or wooden percussion to call us to meditate in the morning. We're on our own. Equally, we are not joining in the weekend fun, constrained by my body. We used to go to the church's Labor Day retreat, but it turned out last year to be more fun than I could handle.

It is interesting to fit together two opposing pieces that seem to have different edges: the relaxed silence of Zen, and a talent for words - a small thing, but mine own, the saying goes. And these days, I can do very little but what I can do at the computer. ?If what you are good at is words, how do you use words to heal all beings - "Save all beings from suffering." Seung Sahn often ended his letters to students that way.

I try to write from a brain in alpha, a brain saturated in the leaves and sky framed in the big west window over my computer. The scent of the out of doors comes in through side windows cranked wide open today. Once in a while sitting here contemplating this produces a good poem. It hasn't today, so I am going to copy in a poem from Ryokan, translated by John Stevens, which came to me this morning through my subscription to the Pacific Zen e-list. I wonder how many other invalids who will never be able to fly to the west coast for a koan seminar subscribe to this little window on Zen? and to Tricycle's Daily Dharma. Enlightenment in your in-box? Seems unlikely, but if that's your window, look there.

A single path among ten thousand trees,
A misty valley hidden among a thousand peaks.
Not yet autumn but already leaves are falling;
Not much rain but still the rocks grow dark.
With my basket I hunt for mushrooms;
With my bucket I draw pure spring water.
Unless you got lost on purpose
You would never get this far.