It’s been a nice experience to hang around the Zen Center. It’s a beautiful building with a tranquil atmosphere, full of lovely Buddhist art and objects. A building where people meditate all the time has a nice vibe.
Being part of Establishing the Path of Practice has changed my daily meditation practice in two ways. One is holding my hands in a particular position, which is one more thing to be aware of, and the other is sitting with my eyes open, which is a major difference, and which took a bit of getting used to.
I realized I had somewhat been thinking of meditating as visiting some other realm, where sometimes I have some type of special experience. At first, paying attention to my hands and keeping my eyes open seemed physically uncomfortable and so non-special that I thought it would be day after day of misery.
But I found that, after a couple of days, it was more comfortable and I could feel the same types of intermittent pleasant sensations in my body that I typically feel when meditating, which shouldn’t really be necessary, but was reassuring to me.
After a week, I had come very much to appreciate the value of keeping my eyes open. For one thing, it really cuts down on the time spent daydreaming; I realize what’s happening much sooner. And for some reason, keeping my eyes open makes the ebb and flow of sleepiness glaringly obvious, something I never really noticed before! Second to second, I can feel myself falling asleep and waking up.
And because sitting with my eyes open is so similar to what I do the rest of the day, it erases much of the mental division between sitting and not-sitting, so there are moments during the day when I realize, “Oh, here I am with my eyes open, noticing the floor in front of me—just like when I was meditating this morning.” And that is an awake moment, so there are more awake moments.
However, I’m very glad that I began meditating in the kinder and gentler vipassana tradition than in the Zen tradition (not sure if that needs a capital letter or not and the Internet isn’t helping)—this past Saturday, we sat for an hour and a half, with intermittent periods of walking, in the zendo, and I COULD NOT WAIT for that final bell to ring. Of course, I did wait, but I was suffering. Physical comfort is not a big priority, or so it seemed. It appeared to me that it would not be the thing to pile cushions on a chair to form a cushy throne, so I was fairly uncomfortable, and I was also surprised by the dead silence.
Not that they chat all the time during vipassana sitting periods, but it’s not uncommon for a teacher to throw in a little pep talk now and then—“If you find you’ve drifted off into thinking, that’s OK. Just gently return your attention to the sensations of your breath”—and I think it would be absolutely unheard of for a teacher to expect beginning students (which I think most of the people in EPP are) to sit/walk for 90 minutes without a word of encouragement, though one teacher did come around to correct posture, and when she got to me, she just put her very warm hands on my shoulders for a bit and then squeezed a little, which felt very nice indeed. Maybe that’s the equivalent.
At heart, I believe Buddhism is Buddhism and that it’s about being awake with a more or less kind heart in this very moment. I don’t see any fundamental contradiction at all, but in practice, vipassana teachers seem not to be particular about a lot of things as long as you’re trying to be present with what is, whereas the forms are obviously very important in Zen. All to the same end, but, again, I’m glad I began with vipassana teachers.
People often report being turned off by the bowing and so forth in Zen, but when I went to an introductory session at the Zen Center not long ago, the person who led the session likened the forms to rules in sports—things you need to know to enjoy the game and to be able to play with others. I like the bowing and rituals, though there is some anxiety when I don’t know what is required at a given moment. I was walking behind a teacher who suddenly stopped dead and bowed deeply for some reason I couldn’t fathom, and it took me several beats to emulate her. She explained later what it had all been about, and I’m sure there are a million things like that.
One day at the Zen Center, we did koan practice (e.g., “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”), which I’ve never had the slightest desire to try: I don’t understand, I don’t know how you figure out the answer, I don’t know how anyone knows what the right answer is, this does not sound fun.
I won’t claim to know the first thing about it now, either, but I will say that we did do an exercise where, working with a partner, one person asked over and over, “How do you suffer?” and, after receiving the answer, offered one of three previously assigned koans.
As a veteran of support groups where you’re “as sick as your secrets,” I find it extremely easy to tell anyone anything about myself, though I did hesitate for one second before telling a complete stranger, someone I’d never even noticed before, that one thing that makes me suffer is trying to punish people for doing things I think they shouldn’t be doing. Then I just went ahead and told her I do that, and she looked gravely into my eyes for some long seconds, and then she said, “This very mind is the Buddha.”
The idea was not to offer a literal prescription, but to offer whichever of the three koans seemed to arise somatically. It was nice for the answerer (and for the sufferer), because the answerer was NOT trying to fix anything, NOT trying to give advice, NOT trying to pick the right koan, but just to go with whatever her body seemed to want.
It ended up being a powerful and intimate thing—from now on, I’ll always have a special feeling about that particular person, for one thing—and I saw that it was, like everything else, about being awake and present.
Another good thing about this class is much focus on listening with presence, without trying to fix or advise or change anything. I’m not good at this. It’s extraordinarily difficult for me not to nod and smile, at the very least, so it’s excellent to hang around people who expect you to listen with much less affect.
When I talk to certain people, I’ve been practicing pausing and counting one, two, three breaths, after the person ends a sentence, in case she or he wants to say anything else. With that long of a pause, the other person almost always starts talking again, giving me another opportunity to listen. (Which may come in handy in hospice volunteering, too.)
I’ve met lots of lovely people in the class. I have a small peer group that meets every two weeks. My group gets along very nicely. The whole thing has been very good.
No comments:
Post a Comment