Sometimes to go deeper, we step back

Zen?  What is that?  I can’t say I ever heard of it.  This is how I feel right now, and it is as refreshing as cool mountain air.  This thing, Zen, perhaps I think about it too much, rely on it too much, even identify with it too much.  To not have it in my thoughts and routines is freeing.  I have cancelled my docusan appointments, have not been going to sewing class, to Young Urban Zen.  I even cancelled my training session today at Green Gulch to give garden tours to kids.  Obviously, I have not been writing much, but only recently am I happy about that.

There is only one thing in my life right now, and it is called a thesis.  It’s going to be done in a few weeks.  And it all makes me think that...

Sometimes in life, going deeper means stepping back.  We have all had to do it in our relationships, with our partners, our families, our friends.  Sometimes we need to do it with our professions, with activities we love, with our biggest goals in life... and with our spiritual paths.  Sometimes we need to step back for a long time, sometimes for a short time.  When this thesis is done, I’m stepping back: even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could fruitfully think any more about how history teachers can help students understand prejudice.  This is just the beginning of my work, but before I go deeper, I need some fresh air.  Until my mind stops obsessing over the data gathered, assessed, and synthesized from seventy articles on the subject and a hundred of my own ideas, I am a blind man.  

It was hard to give myself over to the thesis.  For a couple months, my body had been telling me, “Hey Lynn, don’t think about anything else right now.  Let go of Zen.  Let go of other things.  Just sink into the thesis, eat good food, go for runs each day... that’s it”.  I feel really calm having finally accepted my bodies advice.  

Sometimes stepping back means you can let go of anxiety.  Sometimes it means you can attain a better focus or place your focus elsewhere.  It can be a means to gain perspective, to see something more clearly, to understand why something is valuable to you or how it can better fit into your life.  For all these reasons stepping back from Zen for a month feels right.  And then, stepping back from my intellectual work will feel right.  Stepping back from both is right, because I want to go deeper - much deeper - into both.     

Nurturing energy, nurturing life

Just over two weeks ago, I found myself reflecting on on the paramita of virya, or the perfection of energy, and on the first grave precept: I vow not to kill or be thoughtless of life, but to develop energies within myself that nurture life to the greatest extent possible. I was in the midst of feeling my energy acutely and honestly in its relation to the nurturance of self and others.  I was becoming increasingly aware of how certain stories I had about my life, and especially my work, affected my actions, thoughts, and feelings.  Even more importantly, I was noticing how some stories allowed myself to maintain practices and habits that made it difficult for myself to have clear awareness and insight into my own energy and the energy of others - and thus to speak of those energies in a healing way, to explore them, to care for them.

Right now, my practice can essentially be summarized as a reflection on what it means to "nurture life to the greatest extent possible".  In a nutshell, what does it mean to care?  To care means to care for energy, to give energy that nurtures life.  From this point moving forward, the embodied answer to that question has everything to do with creating practices for myself that facilitate rather than dull my awareness of the energy of self and others.  I experience a dull awareness of energy as a decreased closeness to life - a decreased closeness to plants, animals, food, soil, myself, those I love and all beings.  Of course, a decreased closeness to life means an experience of life that reflects that - which is not only about thoughts, feelings, and actions that reflect less closeness, but the very way we experience our senses, the very way we see other beings, the way we feel the ground beneath our feet and the air we breath. 

Practices that bring me closer to life, to feeling and caring for life, are basic: for example, I purchased some new plants and am finding great calm joy in caring for them.  Along with reconnecting with my care for plants, I am paying more attention to food and to eating, from the whole history of the soil and labor from which food comes, to the smells in the kitchen and the feelings I have the day after I eat a meal.  The most miraculous way to care for life, and to manifest myself as a deeply caring individual, is to care for children, which is a mode of caring that has always felt out of reach to me.  But whereas before, I had passively accepted that caring for children could not be a part of my life, I have been seriously considering ways in which I could do this. 

Not drinking coffee or caffeine has been a story unto itself, and a major practice these last two weeks.  I have come into a full awareness of how caffeine dramatically clouds my clear awareness and insight into my own energy and the energy of others.  This last month of thesis writing is no time for total caffeine abstinence, but a simple four days with no caffeine, although quite challenging, also led to a significant energy shift in which I was far more keenly aware of energy.  To put it anther way, I felt much closer to life, more sensitive to and caring for life.  Discipline, held lightly, has much to do with care and closeness: after no caffeine for four days, I kindly let myself drink coffee for two, (yes, I got FAR more work done these two days!), and then I went off for another two days, and then kindly let myself have some more.  This has let myself feel what I am like with and without caffeine, and has also led to truly enjoying and getting pleasure out of coffee when I do drink it. 

...When I sit zazen on my own, I sometimes start to pray, or to make vows.  I bring my hands in front of my heart.  I position my body in whatever way seems to facilitate the prayer, which sometimes means I kneel or lean my head forward so that my forehead touches my hands.  I am so very much in awe of how this human body seems to be made for prayer, for contemplation, for meditation - so in awe of how the positions we put our bodies in naturally facilitate these activities.  Recently I have been saying:  I vow to nurture life.  I vow to honor and nurture the energies within myself.  I vow to feel and love, perceive clearly and care for the life energy of all beings. 

Visualizations naturally arise within me and accompany the vows: I imagine someone I love, and the various energies I see at play in them.  I imagine my own energy, and how it interacts with theirs.  I visualize what that would look like in its most caring form - in its deepest, most healing, most beautiful form.  I imagine doing this with children.  With plants and soil.  With the sky above me, and the ground beneath me. 

Meeting Wendy Johnson

When Young Urban Zen spent a weekend at Green Gulch last month, I spoke with Sukey about volunteering to show elementary and middle school students around the garden twice a month.  I spent yesterday morning training with a handful of others on the basic routine - everything from showing kids the zendo to helping them build their own compost piles (with a little chemistry thrown in for the adults).   

I also had the incredible pleasure of meeting Wendy Johnson, who began the Green Gulch farm in the1970's and ran it for thirty years.  Her book, Gardening at the Dragons Gate, made her a hero of mine when I read portions of it at Green Gulch two years ago.  She writes of the ancient and recent history of the land and geology on which she farmed, of the chemistry involved, and of humankind's relationship to plants with great and grounded spiritual insight.  Wendy makes interconnectedness and interdependence utterly visceral, which for me, is the condition for understanding their place in the realm of love.

I feel that I could not have met Wendy, and began to engage in this project, at a better time.  I have been thinking a great deal, for the past two weeks in particular, about nurturing life, and about nurturing my own energy so that I can nurture the energy of other beings.  This is a bigger story that has to do with cleansing and reassessing my energy and my relationship to Buddhism - but if I tried to write about that now, I'd be up until the wee hours. 

Just one quick story before I get some much needed sleep:  Wendy was telling us that some of the students would be recent immigrants, and that many of them would be excited about farming - she told stories of students who had been raised as farmers racing ahead and excitedly filling boxes with vegetables, only to become embarrassed when they realized no other students had done so.  "By the time these students have been here for a couple of years, they'll have completely forsaken their history, and even scorn farming.  Talk about how important farming is for all cultures, how much we depend on them, how heroic it is!"

It made me think of many of my old students.  I had one Latino boy that never spoke to the other Latino's in an English Language Learner US history class I once taught.  It took me three weeks to realize that he only spoke a little Spanish - he spoke an indigenous language, and had been raised in the mountains far away from Spanish speakers.  When I discovered he had ridden horses all his life, I built the theme of horses into the US history class, which always got his attention and sometimes prompted him to speak up.  I had another Latino student who had been a taxi driver since he was twelve, and had hitchhiked and ridden on top of trains, by himself, all the way from Colombia to the border.  He was an illegal immigrant - a phrase I can't help but despise because it dehumanizes many people whom I care for.  I asked him if he had told anybody else, and he said that the school knew, but that he hadn't told many people his story.

So many students with so many stories - one of my Yemenis students was from a scholarly family and had lived in the capital of Sinaa.  Two other Yemenis had lived lives that would have put them directly at odds with him back home - they had grown up as nomadic traders, leaving before sunrise each morning to ride across long stretches of desert with their fathers, AK 47's slung over their shoulders.  They told me stories about how desert people have an understanding for one another, no matter what the culture is.  If a ship came into port, they always could tell if the guy unloading was a desert man or not.  I had a few African American students who would engage in "gun play" - they would pretend to be using guns, holding their hand up in the air and shouting "bapbapbap!"   When my Yemenis students from the desert saw this, their faces would grow stone cold.  I talked with them about it over tea at lunch and they blew up: "They know nothing!  Nothing!  They have everything they need to make a good life!  Why do they destroy themselves?"  The racial feelings at this school, composed almost entirely of poor students of color, were incredibly complex.  Whether from the city or nomadic, wealthy (back home at least) or poor, the Yemenis took on a tough, urban style.  However, their singing and dancing, a major part of their life and spirit, is highly emotional and even sensual, sometimes putting them at odds with the hard edges they tried to portray.

In the classroom, I watch students embrace parts of their culture, and leave much of it behind.  However, what is left behind is replaced by re-imagining and re-creating culture.  It's a natural process of acclimating, but it takes a great deal of their mental and emotional energy.  All students - white local students certainly not excluded! - are acclimating and exploring the shifting energy of adolescence.  They all live in a complex world, and need spaces of quiet, spaces that are about feeling themselves, spaces that are beautiful and settling - spaces like Green Gulch, even for just an afternoon.  They are all spiritual beings, deep down, and benefit from becoming closer to the processes of life, and understanding how to care for those processes.    

For the past couple of months my energy has been scattered, and the time has come for me to honestly sit and feel that scattered energy, feel where it comes from, and feel what heals it.  And as I begin to sit and cleanse, I increasingly understand that nurturing life, be it the life of plants or of students, may well be the most healing action I can take for myself.  Working with kids on the farm feels like one of many actions I can take that allow me to more fully understand, connect with, and honor life in its many forms.  It is so very healing to help children learn to nurture life, to honor it, to be in awe of this wonderful existence.  Even though I will only be with each group of students for a few hours, it is very meaningful, and representative of the direction I want my life to take. 

Journaling: My first memory of Paul

The past month has been a busy one.  While that is true, the busyness of this month has also been a major story I've been telling myself.  It is more the story than the busyness that has led to me feeling more stressed than I have in been in a while, and that has led to my practice slipping and the awareness of my mind and heart been somewhat cloudy.  So this is what I have to practice with right now: life, right? 

In the midst of this especially busy week, I felt a real need to do some journaling - I've been thinking and writing constantly, but none of that has been about myself and how I'm doing - a recipe for feeling out of sorts.  I opened up some of the old journals on my computer and found my notes from the first lecture I heard Paul give.  I think they're from August 2010, and thought they would be fun to share.

First talk I ever heard Paul, the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, give: he speaks of sila, ‘the deliberate engagement with the internal,’ and of cultivating the supportive structures for Samadhi. 

-          “The disposition of zazen is non-doing”.  (Shikantaza, the practice of ‘justness,’ is non-doing.) 

-          “Stop, pause, and breath: then you notice what you are actually feeling”.  (A good way for me to think about it.  I often think, ‘breath, and create that space of calm from which awareness can arise.’) 

-          Stopping and breathing is an action that that takes no effort.  It may take effort to convince oneself to stop and breath, but actually stopping and breathing is effortless. 

-          “Attending to the moment as its own event” and not just a method to achieve something higher.  Stop and breath simply in order to stop and breath. 

-          “When we settle our perceptions become more subtle”.

-          Bringing your awareness back to the self thousands of times enhances the neural pathways that enable you to do that.

-          “Let the request for awareness be granted”.  “On the inhale, let the natural request of the body be granted”.

                      - “When you let go of language, you let go of conceptualization.  The practice of silence is                     the practice of letting go of conceptualization”.

And, from that same journal entry, a funny little note to myself:

  

           "Story about the sound of Buddha's heartbeat".  

         

Cross-post: yoga, tantrism, colonialism

Think some of you might enjoy the post I left on my other blog - debunking a NYT article riddled with serious (and common) misconceptions of yoga and tantrism. 

I feel conflicted sometimes - but it passes

Strange zen dream last night... there were initiation rights about getting into YUZ... one had to prove oneself to be accepted into the group.  The dream was shadowy, all the colors were dark, the atmosphere was bleak and somber.

I fluctuate with YUZ - at times I am very excited about building the sangha; at other times I feel like my relationship to zen has been more geared towards socializing and less towards zazen, the precepts, or deepening the sangha.  At my most cynical (yesterday) I feel like its not even a sangha - just people using the group and the readings and discussions as an opportunity to hang out rather than to deepen their practice and learn to support one another (including myself).  I feel blessed that a single period of zazen wipes out such cynicism.  I know its much harder for many people...

We usually break up into groups and discuss a reading, which is what we did last night.  There have been other discussions where I haven't spoken - but those times, I was just consciously observing.  Last night was the first time where I really felt I had nothing to say.  It was more than that - I felt like I wasn't a part of it.  I even felt alienated, on a different page.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the group - purely a dynamic within myself. 

I spoke up one time during the large conversation: someone had mentioned that the mind is never completely still. In response, someone mentioned that reciting Buddhist spells can lead to complete stillness of mind.  There was a silence in which I felt compelled to speak up in the spirit of solidarity: "I appreciate you saying that - some of the calmest moments in my life have been while reciting a mantra for hours".

But part of me really wanted to burst that bubble of silence and address whatever lay behind it:  "I find that really interesting.  There is something about recitation that stops the mind.  Event though you are speaking words, the mind has stopped, is far more still than we ordinarily experience while in zazen.  Reciting a mantra, there is not a need to concentrate, to attempt to do anything - the mind is simply still.  Which makes me want to ask, what is the benefit of, or what is profound about the still mind... as opposed to the mind that is involved in noticing?  (I recently re-read an essay I wrote about yoga years ago - I consciously refrained from describing Patanjali's descriptions of various stages of samadhi because I couldn't understand them, and I still can't comment on various stages of stillness of mind today.  His definition of yoga as the cessation of the minds activity has always stuck with me).  

"Regarding spells, in so much of the Buddhist world, spells are very real.  People will write the Heart Sutra on their bodies to ward off ill-will, or recite a mantra to gain the favor of a deity.  And in the West, we might judge that - we might judge any belief in magic, or any belief in a deity or bodhisattva.  The impulse to judge may be so strong that we fail to recognize what a profound spiritual practice it is.  The impulse to reject something like magic may be so strong that we don't even attempt to make sense of it.

"For us, bodhisattvas can only exist as allegories or archetypes.  Perhaps we can accept that Buddhists hold these beliefs in other countries, but we feel awkward when a Buddhist who believes in magic or spells comes to the United States and talks about it (but for some reason westerners who reject magic or deities find reincarnation appealing... but for some reason most westerners find a soul going to heaven more sensible than a soul being reincarnated.  I think the reasons behind this are primarily sociological).  Maybe we'll even be deluded into thinking we're being historical and say that the Buddha de-emphasized or even rejected deities and magic, despite knowing full well that his teachings weren't actually written down until Buddhism became a state-sponsored religion a couple hundred years later.  But why do we make such arguments or experience such discomfort?  Where does that judgment come from?  Why do we assume that we know what magic is, or what spells are?  Where do we get our conceptions of those?  From fantasy novels and movies? From Richard Dawkins-style anti-religious polemics that have been handed down to us from the time of Voltaire?  Such polemics are as deeply ingrained in our culture as Protestantism and we should reject their inheritance".  

I feel like all of that would have been out of place to say, but that's what I was actually thinking.  My concern was simple: perhaps this is a man from Southeast Asia, and spells are an ordinary part of Buddhist life.  And then he comes to the Zen Center and gets judged for it, despite the fact that profoundly wise people from all cultures have believed in magic (Socrates (through Plato) and Issac Newton included...)  Now, I have no idea what the real situation is, but I always err on the side of supporting what someone has said unless its clearly harmful, and then I try to say something that helps the speaker recognize the harmfulness of their speech without feeling attacked.

As far as the precepts concerning speech go, speaking "truthfully" is rarely the issue: how do we speak in such a way that supports all beings?  Last night, I had a great deal of trouble in figuring out how to do so.

Practice Together, Way Seeking Minds...

Last night at Young Urban Zen Lydia gave a wonderful way-seeking mind talk - as always, I felt humbled by hearing about how the twists and turns, the ups and downs of life lead us all to this place.  Every person has a different set of circumstances that have brought them here, and hearing about those circumstances always leaves me with a certain emotion - a grounded sense of how large this is.   This is about Buddhism, but also not about Buddhism: just supporting all beings.  Each way-seeking mind talk is a small window into humanity.

After the talk, I had a few short conversations: one woman was telling me that she had just moved to San Francisco, and had never meditated before.  She told me that if she had not been in the room with us, she would have decided after five minutes that this whole sitting still thing just wasn't worth much.  She stayed - and gave meditation a try - only because she was part of a group. She expressed how astounded she was by being around so many people, being so quiet, for such a long time.  It was difficult and surreal for her but she opened up to it, and when Lydia began talking about her own path and process after zazen was over, it began to make sense to her. 

We're all in this together: if it wasn't for each other, we might never have been able to start a practice, or to maintain it, or to make sense of it.  What might seem utterly odd - or at least foreign - on television or in a magazine or book, or when tried all alone or thought of in the abstract, becomes something we can feel close to if done in a supportive community.  On Sunday at Green Gulch, Fu talked about how we need to be around others in order to go deep into ourselves.  By sitting zazen together, we are able to really be alone - we often need to be together to be alone.  Alone together, we can look at and feel the truth of ourselves in zazen.  Alone-alone, this work is difficult.