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This weekend I attended a retreat at the monastery called ‘Liberation Beyond Belief.’ Here are some of my reflections coming out of that retreat…

Liberation. This is why we practice. This is the point of all dharma teachings and practices, to help us to get free from that which binds us. But what binds us? What binds you? Are you bound?

Perhaps you feel bound by the things you think you need to get done or accomplish? Perhaps by the image, the person, you believe you should be? Perhaps you feel bound by other people or your life situation, or by your habits of body, speech, and mind. Wherever you feel bound, caught, stressed, irritated, anxious, or any of the myriad flavors of unease, you will find an unexamined belief about how you think that you, or the world, should be.

For example, we might feel stressed and think ‘I have too much to do today.’ If we examine this thought we will find beliefs under it like ‘I should be responsible,’ ‘I can’t fail,’ ‘People will disapprove of me,’ ‘Things have to be a certain way in order for me to be at ease,’ ‘I have to manage my life,’ etc…

Practicing identifying these beliefs is an important part of dharma practice. Dhukka, the Pali word for unease, often translated as ‘suffering,’ signifies friction. The friction between how things are and how we think they should be. Our dissatisfaction in life always amounts to the difference between how things are and how we believe they should be.

Get curious. What are you thinking and believing that is not in accord with how reality is in this moment? What belief(s) are driving those thoughts. Are they true? Maybe it’s ok to fail. Maybe it’s ok if people disapprove? Maybe nothing has to be any particular way in order for you to feel genuinely happy and at ease, right here, right now.  Life just as it is.

Is zazen necessary, or what? How much? What is too much? And what is just right?

Life is short. Many take for granted the fact that we were apparently born, ended up with this or that responsibility, and now somehow feel like we’re trying to keep up with something – success, bills, clarity of mind, physical health, relationships, etc…This is samsara. Samsara is founded upon our karma – the way we see the world, and our actions that follow thereupon. In the Diamond Sutra the Buddha says, ‘the world is not what we name it, or think it’. So, how do we name or think the world?

Zazen is necessary proportionally to our desire to clarify our view. The view of our self, the world, and the gap in between. In so far as we are satisfied with our view, we may act accordingly. In so far as we are not, we must sit zazen. Although there are many spiritual modalities, most are integratory. Zazen points directly to the root of karma – the place from which the self, and the world, co-arise. If you, like many, are gifted with dissatisfaction, please use this precious opportunity to clarify what this life is really about. We can proceed clearly. We can proceed kindly. Please prioritize wisdom and compassion. Why else would we be here?

Soten

You don’t have to have it all figured out. Well, maybe the next few steps. Maybe the plan for today, maybe even the plan for next year. But when it just plain looks like things are going to turn out badly, it’s time to throw out the future and just put one foot in front of the other. This is the practice of faith.

Faith has nothing to do with what will happen. That’s hope. Faith is different than hope. Faith is remembering that life is not about our survival. Faith is remembering that the universe simply was not designed to fit within our agenda. Faith is allowing that perhaps, just perhaps, we don’t understand this.

Now, it is easy to talk about the lack of importance of our survival while I have a steaming quesadilla right in front of me, but it’s also easy to talk about running a marathon. A lot of people that talk about running marathons end up running them. This is practice. Practice is never about what is easy or difficult, it is simpler than that.

We have every reason to fear what is to come. We won’t survive it. No one will. No one ever has. When what we know to be true is cleaned of self-concern, the way forward is clear. This takes practice, diligent practice. Don’t settle for confusion. Please use this life well.

When we come to Zen practice we are answering the call of the Way-seeking mind. The mind that seeks the Way knows what is essential, what it is to be free to be true to what is. Honoring what our life brings our way and responding to it with wholehearted and clear life energy is the work of Way-seeking mind. The mind that seeks the Way emanates from what we could call “Big Mind”, the mind of a self that isn’t constricted by all the habits and hurts of our life lived already.

This is true of all of us, we have the capacity to realize this mind that is essential. Whole and all-embracing, but cut-off and hindered by old habits. These habits may go way back. We’ve formed some on our own, but also inherited much from families and culture – attitudes, values, ways to perform the self. We figure out strategies as we go along that help us cope, in reaction to being hurt, cut off and narrow down our functioning. We may have discovered that ignoring our disappointment rather than feeling it or avoiding a parent’s anger by always pleasing them or disappearing, will keep us safe and able to carry on. But at the cost of being able to feel alive, connected and fulfilled. Maybe even at the cost of physical health. We could say that our underlying wholeness wants to have a clear path to share and express the gifts, the uniqueness, the intelligence that each of us carries within.

So Way-seeking mind moves us to investigate the self that got us this far. In being able to settle our minds, our hearts, we can get a closer look at anything that wants to be noticed. What karmic knots tie up our wholeness and cut us off from being able to realize and manifest this true path? We ask, “What is this Way that I can wake up to, that I share with all life? Following this question, we find that the Way that we seek is where we always are, right now. Right here.

What do we mean by ‘Presence’? In one sense we are always present, there is nothing outside this present moment. Right? This ‘presence’ is all there is. And yet we have the experience of being present and the experience of not being present. It is like night and day. What is actually happening in the moment where we seem to not be present? This is worth investigating firsthand.

Dogen Zenji says in the Fukanzazengi “It is never apart from this very place; what is the use of traveling around to practice? And yet, if there is a hairsbreadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion.”
What is this ‘like and dislike’? This ‘seeking’ that pulls us from activity to activity, from thought to thought, and propels us to live in a state of, often subtle, but sometime very obvious, dissatisfaction? If we look closely at what propels our incessant and obsessive thinking, we find this sense of wanting and not-wanting, this sense that something isn’t quiet right and that we need to make it right. The steady stream of stressful past and future thoughts that most of us experience are the flowers of a deeper root. The Buddha called this root ‘dukkha’ which is often translated as ‘suffering’ or ‘friction.’ As we practice we often become more aware of it.

Zazen, although it includes this dukkha, is at the same time it’s opposite. Zazen is the practice of satisfaction. We sit down and we say, with our whole being, this, right here, this entire universe right here, exactly as it is, dukkha and all, is enough. Just for this moment we stop trying to make it something else. We become exactly this present moment and this present moment become exactly us. We enter the samadhi of life being itself. How utterly simple! How relieving! How free!

Zazen is an art and like all forms of art it takes devotion to master. “If there is a hairsbreadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth.” So let’s keep practicing until there is no gap!  And let’s see that already there is no gap!

‘What is my true path?’ A simple zen answer might be, ‘Well, the one you’re on’. The subsequent exchange follows quite rationally: ‘but where does it go??’; ‘well, walk it and find out’. Where do decisions come from? Do we rightly bear responsibility for making them, and for receiving their consequences? The Buddha said it is as simple as ‘good actions bring good results’, loosely quoted. Yet the Dalai Lama says to have patience with complexity.

Sometimes we are ripe to make a decision, sometimes we are not. Even after having made a good decision with a clear mind, there is plenty of room for doubt to sneak in. Doubt obstructs our clarity in the moment. It is unproductive inquiry, taking us away from things. Yet the spiritual path is a path of doubting our firmly help assumptions, dissolving them, and liberating ourselves from their captivity, right? What is the difference?

It may very well be that the wisdom of today is the delusion of tomorrow. We are learning and growing. What we call anything – helpful or harmful – is a matter of our view. May we practice with such steadiness that we see ourselves as wise, yet continually look back upon ourselves as foolish.

Soten