from Mushin
Renunciation was never something I wanted to practice. It always suggested a narrowing of experience to me, rather than an opening to it. I assumed that spiritual practice should bring relief from the burdens, the emotional restriction we may carry when we are mired in confusion and dissatisfaction. Renunciation in Buddhist teachings is not about sin, guilt, or following a dry, humorless, zestless kind of spirituality. Renouncing the body, sensual pleasures, satisfactions doesn’t sound appealing as a refuge from all the difficulties that life brings us along the way. That understanding of renunciation restricts us and keeps us seeing through a gloomy lens what seems more accurately to be a vast field of lively, universal function underpinning life. So let’s turn to what we renounce in Zen practice. We could say re renounce the closed, locked gates of our illusions. That is, we are not narrow separate entities, but instead are alive in perpetually changing conditions. Not trapped by our beliefs, opinions, ideas about, we can clearly see how our attachment to beliefs and habits is obscuring more workable possibilities. Through a life of continuous practice we give up, over and over, attachment to a narrow self-position. We see more readily when our habits and attitude are not serving our ability to respond creatively and skillfully to the actual situations. Deep listening, active listening is an example of dropping the self-position at the moment of thoroughly listening to another. Dharma gates swing open naturally when we renounce a fixed self-position, as our default position in the world. How refreshing it is to be free to respond to life wholeheartedly, just as it is.