“The mind of the past is ungraspable;
The mind of the future is ungraspable;
The mind of the present is ungraspable.”
The Diamond Sutra
With the core tenets of Zazen published yesterday in part 2 of our series firmly in our minds, we should now meander into a look at the simplicity of the actual practice. Mostly we will say what it is not, rather than what it is for reasons we have previously elaborated on. It is indeed daedalian by design, rather like the elegant simplicity of Japanese interior decor, for example.
The key to Zazen, like all practices designed to reshape or invigorate the body in some way, requires persistence. Alistair Crowley once said that one should ‘make haste slowly’ and this is what is called for here. Practicing for 15 minutes in the morning will certainly obtain one some benefit, and yet the battles one faces will be simply keeping at it. This is magnified greatly when you extend your practice to a 7 day sesshin, for example, in which one can often engage in battle with oneself over the course of hours; one thing remains firm in all of this, that is posture, breath and perspective. I can say for certain many strange states of consciousness can be experienced bordering on psychedelic when one sits for many days. But this is something we should work up to.
Sitting is powerful and it becomes more powerful the more you do it. I firmly believe this path is for the so-called solar Nietzschean noble-man. The man who desires a return to his primordial birth-right. And while the modern disconnection of spirit manifests itself in many ways, a time now exists in which we have the ability to pursue this primordial birthright. This is as the world around us degenerates into inevitable barbarity. There is nothing wrong with this outcome, it is from this that the world is born anew in flame and strength; and amongst this we sit unmoved, entangled within impermanence and the web of interconnection and by this we extract ourselves from compulsive responses. And because of this noble attitude we don’t fear to engage with the world as necessary with an attitude of power and discipline.
We say yes to life, we whole-heartedly embrace the great affirmation and are swept away with the inconceivable beauty, the iridescent coruscating all encompassing intoxication. We are not nihilistic through this practice and praxus.
Our path requires work. You will experience a rush of results and then the drudgery sets in. After one month or even two months your “motivation” will disappear. It’s at this point that we separate the wheat from the chaff. Will you be the one who persists and becomes more? And it is here that you realise how deluded you truly are. You are in pain, and you needed a fix. This is understandable but it is not enough.
It is constant pleasure seeking and a life of apparent Epicurean material excess and satisfaction that we now have and only a madman would question it.
This is not a philosophy of “universal abundance” or “sweetness and light” as are promoted in the world now; these are mere temporary pain killers and nothing more. They are the new opiate of the masses.
Zen is hard work. Zazen is hard work.
Zazen requires persistence. And as usual people in general lust after results. It is this lust and imagination that produces disappointment and eventually abandonment. This polemic is intended to bring me to my next point. Will I become enlightened through Zen? What are the results of which I lust over? Is there even a future point of obtainment at all? I argue not.
The answer is short and simple; the correct posture is to put it out of your mind completely.
Having said that it is perhaps important to understand what enlightenment means in the Buddhist canon and a brief caveat and extension to my point regarding lusting after results. Enlightenment traditionally refers to seeing clearly what is here now. Enlightenment is not about obtaining something. Enlightenment is described as being so simple as to leave people thinking “surely there must be more”. Enlightenment is really about releasing grasping to habits, cultural norms, ideas about the self, inner dialogues and descriptions and our idea of being separate from the rest of existence.
Zazen is like cleaning a dirty window. We can give it a rudimentary clean, but the closer we look the more dirt there appears to be; the more we practice the more it becomes apparent; thus the more closely we clean.
It appears therefore that perception clarifies in stages. Like the metaphor of climbing a mountain we used before, we can climb to a certain height and rest. Or we can keep going and the view will become more all-encompassing as we go higher. Can we ever reach a summit? History and the accounts of the great patriarchs would suggest so. For you and me, I very much doubt it, but this doesn’t matter either.
The scientific method suggests several benefits from meditation in and of itself. I like science and respect science, however I am sceptical of schematisation and reductionism of science when applying it to matters of transcendence or the experiential comprehension of incomprehension.
It would be difficult frankly to apply the method to many of these things, in any meaningful way, nonetheless some of the physical effects measured include:
- Has been shown to make some improvements to focus
- Seems to have an effect in reducing self-perceived stress after 3 months
- Can enhance a sense of well-being – this one is interesting as it appears to reduce the number of neural fibres associated with anxiety and other negative feelings. It also reduces dominance in the amygdala.
- Appears to augment creativity
- Looks to have an effect on the veracity of memory
- Some evidence to suggest improved decision making
- Benefits to cardiovascular health, probably related to stress and cytokine production
- Enhances one’s immune system
- Proven to enhance a flow state
There are many other potential benefits that I won’t bother to list here.
In my view there are a few important things to remember. Firstly, most studies used watered down versions of these traditions for therapy, as I said we are a species in psychic pain. Which is understandable to some degree since you need controls for studies. Benefits are for the most part very moderate as the time frames are generally very short. Aside from this it is the very wrong attitude – therapy implies there is a sickness to be overcome. Usually this is the individuals ability to withstand the meaningless onslaught of modern society. You are apparently sick because you are unhappy with it. So they use meditation to be better able to handle the sick onslaught of degenerate society. This is already the wrong point of origin and you can see how zen or meditation is already utterly diminished from this perspective. It is not there to ‘adapt’ you to enjoy modern society, and to fit in to a sick fold. It has always been the opposite actually, it was a counter-reaction so the constricting sickness of a civilisation in decline, it is not there so you can make yourself happy with it.
Likewise, study sample sizes tend to be small. Whatever the science says or doesn’t say, it is unimportant to the practice, and again it can stray you from your practice because you expect too much. Many of the effects, while being significant, were small in these studies.
Likewise, we don’t encourage the current obsession with modern credentialism like most people. I would like to quote Edward Dutton here, whom with his razor sharp logical wit summed up perfectly the scourge of credentialists, (something I’ve always had a massive distrust for – knowing some academics who are dull-witted knuckle dragging milk fed sub-hominids apparently more susceptible to ideological manipulation than a drunk on a train lying in his own vomit, at least he gets it) and why it is a giant problem for our civilisation:
“Credentialists tend to be low IQ and uncreative. This is why credentials are so important to them. The aim of science is consilience, hence all important thinkers pursue areas they lack formal qualifications in. Your interlocutor is a credentialist and thus a nobody.”
Edward Dutton, esq.
Consilience is an excellent word to encapsulate how meditation can aid one in life. Silence and sitting can act as a solid oak against the raging tempest of life. In my view it does not countenance any other practices you may engage in, in fact it may magnify your experience of them. I myself am a pagan and have found that body-based practices accentuate the experience of surrender and sacrifice, that of connection to various powers. Soon I will be posting some valuable exercises I have found that one can work into their ritual space, but needless to say sitting is amongst the most effective of these body based practices, as it requires discipline in spite of instinctual compulsions.
The experience of many generations cannot be wrong. Zen is a cleansing process of the mind and consciousness and it is a necessary adjunct to thriving in the world and becoming the man you were meant to be. Therefore one should engage in Zazen.
A Quick Foreword to Practice
First, a word from a former teacher on the correct attitude. He hated apps and gurus who promote it as ‘exercising awareness’ or ‘attention’ etc. The idea that it is physical culture is quite absurd, and he always bemused at how the corporate world and startup losers had managed to corporatise and profit from meditation. As we all know, this is one of the hallmarks of modernity, so it is probably of little surprise to the readership here that the bugman would seek to profit from the process of sitting and watching yourself breathe.
How do you exercise awareness? It isn’t a muscle. It is there. One can experience directly the notion that it is in everything, since this is the nature of everything. You can’t exercise it because it is a feature of what is. Through thought we are disconnected from it.
In this society we’re obsessed with these highly Americanised corporate slogans like ‘high performance’, ‘high energy’, ‘optimised consciousness’ and other meaningless catchphrases that instantaneously veer one off in the wrong direction. That kind of tenacious loser Ben Greenfield/Tim Ferris-esque mentality. A cheap marketing nomenclature and not much else (I like Ben actually). To be blunt, Zen meditation is absolutely not in any sense physical culture.
Nor is it a petty witchcraft in which someone is prostrating themselves for ‘good karma’ or some other boon; you would be surprised how susceptible the hooman mind is to this kind of magical ‘wish-fulfilment’ thinking.
You are not working for freedom or liberation, not climbing some sort of staircase, I suppose my own prior metaphor was also slightly misleading. It is the act itself which is the actualisation of liberation. Meditation and specifically Zazen is the actualisation of truth in and of the act itself. Nevertheless over time the act itself will deepen in richness.
The ‘Superman Burden’: A Word of Caution
And yet it is because of these influences/influencers I have referred to, that the scourge of modern practice, what I term as the ‘superman’ burden of ‘over performance’ – that people are effectively missing the point in their practice of sitting.
Modern man has a tendency to push things too far, well beyond the pale, and to consequently drive themselves into the ground. You are only given so much of ‘the stuff’.
What follows is a succinct description on awareness and truth in your meditative practice:
“Truth is perfect and complete in itself. It is not something newly discovered; it has always existed. Truth is not far away; it is ever present. It is not something to be attained since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the wordless voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realise the unity of all things.
The slightest movement of your dualistic thinking process will prevent you from entering the palace of meditation and wisdom.
The practice of meditation is not a method for the attainment of realisation – it is enlightenment itself.
Your search among many books, word upon word, may lead you to the depths of intellectual knowledge. But to illuminate your true Self you must learn to withdraw, turning the light of your attention inwards.
When your ideas as to mind and body have dropped off naturally, the original truth will fully appear. Zen is simply the expression of truth; therefore longing and striving (for enlightenment) are not true attitudes of Zen.”
It has been my experience that Zazen is an effective means of character change. In a psychoanalytic context, which is most useful here, this means through the act of sitting and observing, sensing and feeling you can begin to notice physical sensations in the body, patterns of thought and the general composition of your body-mind character.
In this way it does not differ too much from a body-based psychotherapeutic practice and I have been convinced for many years it is indeed very similar in some ways. Consequently Zazen should be treated with the same respect.
This means that meditation is not a race. There is no finish line, nor will you receive a medal for your EXTREME MEDITATIONtm. You may receive the misplaced accolades of others whom have chosen you as some sort of guru, like in the Ferris-esque world of bug-man startup-homo.
However in the real world you will not be rewarded for ‘outstanding performance in the field of meditational excellence’. Sorry to all you credentialists out there. As a teacher of mine once said, ‘there may be no medals for performance, but indeed there are punishments for pushing yourself too hard’. What I have been discussing here I refer to as the ‘superman mindset’ and it is something I myself have fallen prey to on several occasions.
There is a reason why monks who practice Zazen do so within the confines of a monastery, under supervision. It is hard work and it brings things up that pose a serious challenge to your character. As you all know it is a feature of being hooman that we don’t want to change. We have a subconscious block towards not changing. Our character clearly prefers a strict homeostasis; no matter how self-defeating this state may be both personally and rationally. The reason for this is unknown to me…perhaps in times of greatness and strong eugenics this was a benefit. Needless to say in the confines of modernity with its resolute compulsions and sicknesses it is anything but. With Zen meditation you are going to change that and thus you will experience some strange states of mind and resistance.
Think of it this way; you have spent your entire life constructing this personality and character edifice. The edifice of your character and how you face the world, how you filter your experience, your mind-prison. This character is a homeostatic construction of parental influence (often terrible as in my own case), culture and misconstrued assumptions made on your own, often during the vulnerable years of childhood when you were unable to properly reason on something. Simply put, many of your structures are not of you and may well be self-defeating and yet they are how you face and filter the world around you. Because they are not of-you it is safe to say that you are in fact being lived, you are not living on your own terms.
It is your edifice, your homeostasis. Because you’ve had this type of character for so long and because it is hardwired like it is I can assure you you will face some resistance when you try to change it.
And this is why it’s not a race. This is why the people selling this practice have a lot to answer for. You are not here to be more enlightened, smarter, more noble than anyone else. Some people I have come across appear to become more crazy during this practice. I like this story from the enlightenment of the Buddha, the demon Mara says :
“How presumptuous of Siddhartha … to assume the cross-legged posture on the seat of Wisdom! He is desirous of passing beyond my control but I will never allow it.”
Like Prince Siddhartha we all have these demons to face. Some are very obvious to us, perhaps even without practice. It may be alcoholism or being quick to anger for example. Yet it is others, the most powerful demons that are not obvious to us that are the most powerful. They lie deep within us. And thusly deep work will sometimes release energies within us that can be very disturbing. When something like this confronts us I would suggest to back off, engage in physical exercise and not to push yourself beyond your own abilities. Do not fall prey to the Superman Burden.
Having said that, as our life ebbs surely away we also know not what the future should bring us. As a member of a defective modern species, sitting while you have the chance is critical. You must pay your dues. Open yourself to the all encompassing awareness around you. Remember that your determination should be absolutely firm, like that of the virile Siddhartha, your pure intention site you against the raging tempest of Mara.
Zazen: Practical
We have completed our required forewarnings, now comes the practical section. Some quick tips on preparedness for Zazen:
- Your meditation room should be clean and quiet. This include food and drink; everything should be clean and moderate when engaging in meditation.
- Calming your mind is the first requirement, thus we must let go of all associations, and put all affairs aside.
- Do not dwell in thoughts of good or bad, or be concerned with either right or wrong. Moralism and dogmatism is weakness in this practice.
- Many thoughts will crowd into your mind – watch them impassively as if they’re an illusory imposter, not of you. If they persist be aware of them with the awareness that does not think. Awareness is and does not think itself into being. Awareness is that from which you learn to ‘position yourself’ against the raging tempest of non-awareness.
- Just relax and forget that you are meditating.
- Put aside the operation of your intellect. Meditation is non-intellectual.
- Your memory, imagination and contemplation will want to contextualise, refrain from this.
- Do not desire enlightenment. This will merely confuse you like any other by-product of intellect or desire.
The Methods of Zen Meditation
Tying in with my comments on the Americanised obsession with corporatised, high-performance, disingenuous homosexual bug-man proclivities that clearly irk me greatly, I cannot emphasise enough that you should at no time be extremely rigorous or harsh on yourself in the context of your meditation practice.
Meditation is amongst many ways in which one can explore the present moment silently. Zen has two primary aims and its method aims at these single-mindedly, which makes it different from other forms of Buddhist practice. The first of these aims is calmness or the fostering of calm. The second is concentration. One is, of course, built on the other. It is said through this distillation of mind that indeed a mind unburdened by the flux of thought and chaotic consciousness can develop an extremely profound sense of awareness about its own state.
First there is the need to quieten, or let go of, wandering thoughts. You need to develop the facility of gathering your attention so that you can better control your mind, to let your mind be calm and stable so that it does not lead you off where you don’t want to go. If you succeed in quietening the mind, it will no longer be wild and scattered. At that point pain, numbness and itching that arise during meditation will not bother you or draw your attention, and neither will passing moods, feelings or emotions.
Second, one develops the ability to concentrate, either on what exists right here and now (shikantaza), or on a meditation method such as a koan, which we will cover in more detail below. The fruit of this concentration is insight into your own mind and by extension all things.
The most commonly encountered methods are breath counting, following the breath, koans and shikantaza.
Breath Counting
The practice of breath counting is critical in my own practice of Zazen and I constantly return to it depending on external variables. For the beginner it is especially important to engage in breath counting. Breath is life, awareness is breath. Your breath is the totality of awareness. Every worthy practice focuses on breath. As you deepen your practice the true gravity of the realisation will begin to occur to you.
The practice is quite simple, and yet for the disordered mind immensely challenging. Although there are variations I find it most effective to count to 10; focusing on counting from 1 to 10 mentally, not out loud obviously. Slowly state the number in your mind whilst staying entirely focused on the counting. Invest yourself therefore in experiencing each breath whilst mentally counting. With the entirety of your focus, be within your breath: “one”, “two”, “three”, and so on, without thinking about it. For example, on the inhale “ooonnneeee” on the exhale “tttwwwooooo”.
Don’t expect anything, and don’t become attached to any clear state you experience, nor reject any confused or drowsy state that may occur. Just mentally count each exhalation, from one to ten, and then start again at one. Do this for the whole sitting period. When you become aware that you have become diverted by a distracting thought, just return to the counting, starting again at one.
Following the Breath
When concentration on breathing becomes such that awareness of the counting is clear and the count is not lost, the next step, a slightly more difficult type of zazen, involves following the inhalations and exhalations of the breath with the mind’s eye only, again in natural rhythm.
Koan
Although I am not an ordained monk and my experience in koan is lacking, I would like to engage in a quick word on it and my understanding of koan.
It is in the Japanese nomenclature typically categorised and derived from the following contexts and can be either:
- A phrase from a teaching on realisation,
- An episode from the life of an ancient master;
- Or any sort of incident, which points to the nature of ultimate reality, can be a koan.
There is ironically a sort of logic to koans. To the untrained eye they appear to be sort of dialogues being conducted between various insaneoids or lunatics, however these important paradoxical situations are in fact lessons on ones own life. They are by definition meant to be paradoxical and to outline the limitations of reason and conceptualisation.
They are necessarily only solvable on another level of comprehension, on an empirical and experiential level. This ties in with my own analysis of the problem of criterion, which I have spoken about in depth in blogpoast 2 on Zen, so please read that paragraph for a further treatment on this. A koan therefore should make it abundantly clear to the student the limitations of thought. A koan should challenge our limited, conditioned viewpoint, and refine our alignment with our deeper selves to untangle us from rational problems.
Students who have sufficiently settled the wandering nature of their minds may be given, or where no teacher is available, themselves select a koan on which to meditate. The koan may come from one of the classical Zen collections (e.g. “What is the sound of one hand?”), or it may be a more immediate case, based on the practitioner’s own situation, such as the question “Who am I?”. I’ve always enjoyed the following story on the practical outcome of koan:
“There is a Zen story (very funny — ha-ha) about a monk who, having failed to achieve “enlightenment” (brain-change) through the normal Zen methods, was told by his teacher to think of nothing but an ox. Day after day after day, the monk thought of the ox, visualized the ox, meditated on the ox. Finally, one day, the teacher came to the monk’s cell and said, “Come out here — I want to talk to you.” “I can’t get out,” the monk said. “My horns won’t fit through the door.” I can’t get out . . . At these words, the monk was “enlightened.” Never mind what “enlightenment” means, right now. The monk went through some species of brain change, obviously. He had developed the delusion that he was an ox, and awakening from that hypnoidal state he saw through the mechanism of all other delusions and how they robotize us”
Prometheus Rising – Robert Anton wilson
Koans are used as a meditation subject and are looked into unremittingly by practitioners during sitting meditation and whenever possible throughout the day. During intensive retreats the koan is looked into constantly.
Shikantaza
Japanese for “just sitting”. This refers to alert non-reflective attention that neither pursues nor suppresses thoughts, sensations, etc., but rather gives alert detached attention to whatever arises in and vanishes from consciousness, whether inside your body or outside. It is full awareness that your body is sitting.
Zen master Dogen regarded that “presence itself” is itself a koan which, when correctly grasped, indicates “things as they really are”. “Correctly grasping” this koan proceeds from the prereflective experience manifested by “without-thinking”. A famous passage in Dogen’s 13th Century Japanese Genjkan states:
“To learn the truth is to learn ourselves. To learn ourselves is to forget ourselves. To forget ourselves is to be experienced by the myriad things. To be experienced by the myriad things is to let our own body-and-mind, and the body-and-mind of the external world, fall away. There is a state in which the traces of realisation are forgotten; and it manifests the traces of forgotten realisation for a long, long time.”
Being “experienced by the myriad things” expresses the mental activity of “without-thinking” wherein the personal self (and also “others”) is “forgotten”, because awareness of such distinctions is not present. No separate self is present to perceive “other” things. Rather, the Self is all these things, and vice versa, existing in this flux, this moment of perception. From “without-thinking” flows the only identifiable “reality”, namely the unceasing, ever-changing, impermanent unfolding of experience.
Final Thoughts on Thoughts
When thoughts arise in your mind, do not give energy to them by becoming caught up by them or struggling with them; neither pursue or try to escape from them. Just leave them alone, allowing them to come up and go away freely. The most essential thing in doing zazen is to be aware of, and thus awaken from, distractive thinking or drowsy dullness and, moment by moment, to return to your method (e.g. right posture, counting the breath or your koan). In another text Master Dogen wrote:
“Steady and immovable, settle into sitting and think of what is not thinking. How do you think of what is not thinking? Beyond-thinking.”
When engaged in sitting, counting or observing breath and observing thoughts, when we do not become involved in our thoughts, and watch them as if watching an impermanent flux, we must let them arise and depart freely. This is not thinking for this very reason, the very reason that we do not grasp, they simply arise and depart like other phenomena in this universe that we consider apart from ourselves. Paradoxical realisation arises here.
Zazen is not the negation of thinking, not-non-thinking like it is not-thinking. Like weather in the sky, clouds roll through, coming and going, and our thoughts are of this nature.
A good metaphor is that of our digestion. Our stomachs are always functioning, engaged in digestion as are other less perceptible organs in our bodies, like our brains for example. Like this, sometimes our minds are extremely busy, sometimes calm.
The art of zazen therefore is to sit without caring or becoming attached to the conditions of the mind. The zen masters indicate when we are in this state we are already at one with reality, and that there’s nothing beyond this to be grasped.
Zazen: Some Practical Considerations
I have posted here some helpful tips and diagrams on sitting and breathing, well as some photographs that should go some ways in demonstrating how to practice Zazen. It is of course a starting point as your practice will naturally evolve, as many of these things will never be perfect – they will continue to become better over time.
Seated Zen meditation, called Zazen, can be performed in a number of positions, either on a cushion on the floor, or on a Seiza bench as pictured. As I am athletic and don’t wish to destroy my knees, it is the latter that I use and that is pictured above. I recommend this method for frog-twatter athletes who wish to retain use of their knees and not end up like a crippled monk.
The buddhist texts indicate that the full lotus is preferable. It is not my intention to dispute this, however, if you do workout and have an active exercise or muscularity this may prove difficult. A Zafu or cushion would be preferable for this form of sitting. Whatever you do the key is to allow 2 critical things:
- You must enable enough space to engage with abdominal breathing
- You must allow yourself to have the correct spinal integrity during meditation – as this and the following pictures will demonstrate.
If seated in lotus or half lotus both knees must be rested on the floor as demonstrated in the following diagram. On the seiza bench your knees will be straight out in front of you. The next step is to straighten the lower part of your back, push your buttocks outward and hips forward, and straighten your spine. The next picture shows correct lotus and head posture:
Pull in your chin, and extend your neck as though piercing the ceiling. Your ears should be parallel to your shoulders, and your nose should be in line with your navel. After straightening your back, relax your shoulders, back, and abdomen without changing your posture. Sit upright, leaning neither to the left nor right, neither forward nor backward. Your spine should now have its natural curve and be free of tension.
My posture is not particularly good and I choose to use a posture correcting tool when in the office or at home meditating on occasion, sort of like a non-living portable teacher.
The Hands
Place your right hand palm-up on your left foot, and your left hand palm-up on your right palm. The tips of your thumbs should be lightly touching each other. Place the tips of your thumbs in front of your navel, and your arms slightly apart from your body. A good example of hand posture is as follows:
The Mouth
Keep the mouth closed, placing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, leaving no air space. Interesting perspective – I wonder if buddhist monks were the original mewing practitioners also.
The Eyes
Keep your eyes slightly open. Cast them downwards at about a 45 degree angle as the above picture indicates. Without focusing on any particular thing, let everything have its place in your field of vision. If your eyes are closed, you may more easily drift off into drowsiness or daydreaming. This ties into my upcoming series on mahasattiphtana, closing the eyes is never a good thing for this exact reason. Part of the challenge of these exercises is remaining aware and focused at all times on bodily sensations and arising thoughts and feelings. The only way you will effectively do this is by keeping the eyes open. The correct “angle of the gaze” as I put it:
Abdominal breathing
Breathing should always be though the nose. Right now I would suggest you integrate this idea of oral and nasal posture as something to keep focus on. Many people have some difficulty in maintaining this position. Breath of course should at all time be quiet and composed.
Abdominal breathing is then a natural outcome of the posturing we have discussed in detail above. The idea of not controlling breathing is important though difficult to obtain for most beginners. Like a baby sitting and sleeping, breath in meditation is ideally automatic and natural. The aim should not be to have a specific mechanical consciously controlled style of deep breath all the time, rather one should seek to relinquish control of breathing to an automatic status. Being abdominal this is conducted in the belly so to speak which helps the body enter a relaxed state.
One should be careful not to engage in paradoxical breathing; that is to say that on the inhale the belly automatically expands outwards, and exhale contracts inwards. While at the start when you count breath you may be in a state of control, slowly you will learn to have the body automatically breathe, and you should then take a position of observation like everything else in this form of practice. Eventually after running through the breath count exercise for focus, or let’s say if you return to breath counting for whatever reason, sinply let long breaths be long, and short breaths be short. Do not make noise by breathing heavily.
Though this all sounds deceptively easy, I in fact struggled greatly in allowing automatic breathing to occur. When it does, it is an unmistakeable reflexive breathing, that in turn led me to ever greater levels of depth in my own practice.
Before moving position, it can sometimes be helpful to consider the sensations that you are experiencing. By looking closely at what we might ordinarily regard as “pain”, we can sometimes see that, in the stillness of the meditation room, we are magnifying the significance of the sensation. We can see this sometimes when in the middle of “pain” (for example a burning need to scratch an itch), we notice that if we hear a noise or if something happens outside we suddenly forget the pain and become absorbed in this new intrigue.
Sleepiness
If you work full time like myself and exert yourself in other ways, you may well become very drowsy or sleepy while meditating. A former teacher of mine once taught that it can help to open ones eyes widely, shrug the shoulder to the ears and release, then deeply breath inwards, expanding the musculature in the chest. Walking meditation can also be extremely helpful and we will talk on this now.
Walking Meditation (Kinhin in Japanese)
Periods of sitting meditation are usually punctuated with walking meditation for about five minutes. While doing walking meditation, continue your meditation practice.
Walk clockwise around the room holding your hands in shashu or isshu position. From the waist up, your spinal posture should be the same as in seated meditation. Take the first step with your right foot. Advance by taking only half a step for each full breath (one exhalation and inhalation). Walk slowly and smoothly as if you were standing in one place. Do not drag your feet or make noise.
Walk, with your hands in gassh position, at a normal pace around the room until you return to your seat.
A Final Word
I believe that in my 3 part series, I have done a reasonable job of distilling just about everything one needs to know to get a solid start in Zen practice, as well as touching upon ideas and contexts that do not really exist within this canon. An important thing to remember is that as you consistently practice, and you begin to draw down awareness into your everyday experience, is that Zen practice is in fact really a mode of being and cannot therefore be separated from living. Living, at all times, can be one’s meditation practice.
The idea of focusing with the entirety of ones consciousness on a task is really an excellence. A hard to obtain excellence for someone like me, but nonetheless an excellence of mind. To be completely engaged in the task at hand and to completely clear about what you are doing at any one moment is the excellence and the consistent state obtained from this practice. It ties in with part one of the series when I expounded on this being the state of the ancient mind, the mind that the traditionalist, through his own efforts should seek to recapture. And this of course is why this practice should be so important.
When mastered, there will be very little disturbance to one’s emotions in carrying your daily activities. Even if your emotions are disturbed, you can easily return to clarity about what you are doing. Rather than tying oneself into endless knots, word streams and destructive habits to escape the out of control nature of your emotions, in fact by forming these new unconscious habits you are taking back control of your being. You are not dancing around the ‘problem’ or the ‘knot’. You have chosen to engage with it directly and it is through this engagement that the problem or knot will dissolve into nothingness. You can return to your clear purposes whole heartedly. Through your practice you will see the knot clearly, for what it is.
Always beware, however. If you are experiencing ease or pleasure, indeed that may be now. As with negative emotions, you must learn not to try and hold on to feelings of pleasure or ease either, as the next moment will have its own characteristics; and so on. Seeking pleasure is almost worse than escaping pain.