10 Good Reasons to Practice Zen: #1

       Maru demonstrates things you can do in a bucket

Reason #1:  You will seldom be bored.

Today we ate lunch at the healthy-food cafe in our health club, partly because my doctor warned me that my cholesterol has inched up these last six months over that magic number, 200.  Furthermore, he explained, my "bad" cholesterol was up, too.  I did not feel I needed to confess about my primary addiction, Lay's potato chips and Heluva French Onion dip.  But it did make me rethink my cavalier attitude about that and bacon and cheese and eggs - you get the idea.  I will work on this; I hate the idea of a statin drug, not without reason.

A lot of people wanted today's hot lunch, a turkey Reuben (which ended up bearing no resemblance to a real Reuben, of course), so I waited in line to pay.  Right ahead of me was a fire-type woman who just could hardly stand the five-minute wait.  She bounced away to get napkin and fork, came back, and then was pretty much bouncing on her toes with impatience, like your teenage boy, though she was well into her fifties, I thought.

The cafe's credit card machine is old-fashioned, so a credit transaction takes oh, maybe two minutes start to finish.  As the woman waited for hers to process, she said to anyone, "This is so boring!  I am so bored!" 

Later I told Tom, "The thing about Zen is you are never bored standing in line."  Now, this is true, and it is also true for sincere practitioners of other disciplines, I imagine.  My tai chi teacher talked to us more than once about using time waiting in the checkout line to stand in wu wei, balance, and breathe.  What I was doing in this line was practicing being there.

That's actually what we do when we meditate:  we are practicing being with the reality of the present moment, which is to say, reality.  During the early years of Zen practice we are taught to follow our breath, in and out, a way of focusing on the basic mechanism of the body.  Later in Zen you can take up shikantaza, just sit there watching not only your breath but also your sensations and thoughts.  You have many profound thoughts, like Ring the damn bell! or Nobody ever died from not scratching an itch.  

Nevertheless, there are times in sitting meditation when you are bored.  I suspect many people give up meditation for exactly that reason.  We Americans are the worst, I imagine, so addicted to speed and exploration and entertainment and getting somewhere and having fun.  We actually list our desires, the things we want to see and do before we die, which is called "the bucket list" after some movie. 

Maybe because of these bad habits, one of our cultural icons is a man who built a little cabin in the woods and made a big point of simplifying his life.  Henry David Thoreau.  Google him and you get over 4 million results.  I'm happy to say Buddha gets even more.  He should - the Buddha didn't get bored and give it up after two years.

Imagining Old Age

I have been meditating about another way to think about aging, a new paradigm. And my heart is stirred this morning by reading in the NY Times "Metropolitan Diary" about a woman whose sister created suicide because "she couldn't face being sixty."  How very sad.  But very American.

The way we think here is that life is a bell-shaped curve, up from being useless to becoming an energetic adult and working and being productive and active and always youthful and energetic, then aging, a steep downhill fall to being useless again.

[Here, picture that curve in red.]

We may not be aware of this picture in our minds, but we do, as a culture, think that way.  It is a way that emphasizes "productivity," in terms of earning money and other benefits, like fame and power, which are seen as good, rather than something to be avoided.

But you can imagine the course of a human life differently.  You can see life as a slow, gradual climb into wisdom and spiritual depth.
[Imagine that line as a pilgrimage, going gradually up toward light.]

You can think that at the same time as we grow in compassion and wisdom, our life unfolds into the world.

[Like so many colored strands of thread moving into the world like rivers, curling around, embracing it.]

That is a life of connecting and giving that can become richer in a peaceful old age.

Offering birds bits of yarn in a suet feeder for their nests

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.