a sip of stillness
I’ve added a one-day beginner’s retreat on Sunday, July 15 in case you need a sip of stillness in your summer. All the information you need to register is right here.
a teacher is a mirror
May 22nd, 2018 - No Comments
because your mascara ran
your lipstick smudged
you have spinach stuck between your teeth
because you broke a nail
wore a hole in the heel of your sock
because your crow’s feet
your frown lines
the circles under your eyes
because what to do about your hair
you’re going bald
you’re going gray
the roots grew out
a lie a fraud a joke
but mostly you’re afraid
afraid to face the mirror
because the mirror just reflects
Here are audio excerpts from a dharma talk given on April 14, 2018 at the Rime Buddhist Center in Kansas City.
Practicing Zen is zazen. For zazen a quiet place is suitable. Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. – Dogen Zenji, “Rules for Zazen”
To start, let go of the ideas you may have about what meditation is supposed to look like or what meditation is supposed to feel like. Let the monkey in your mind go to sleep so that you can wake up and reclaim your rightful home.
Unless you have a meditation cushion, or zafu, do not attempt to sit cross-legged on the floor to meditate. Without adequate support to elevate your buttocks and enable you to anchor your knees on the floor, sitting this way quickly becomes painful. The point of meditation is not pain. Your life is painful enough as it is. The point of meditation is to relieve pain.
What follows are instructions for meditating in a chair. Although you are unlikely to have the perfect chair in your home for meditation, any chair is perfectly okay. So do not delay your practice until your trip to the Furniture Mart.
1. Sit on the forward third of a chair so that your feet rest firmly on the ground. To support your back, place a hard cushion between your spine and the chair back. This will prevent slouching and keep you alert.
2. Space your feet widely apart. Your body is now supported at three points: your two feet and your bottom. In seated meditation, three contact points are essential for endurance and comfort. Your body now evokes the strength of a mountain.
3. Place your hands in the middle of your lap as follows: first, your right hand, palm up; then, your left hand, palm up, resting in your right palm. Lightly touch the tips of your thumbs together. Holding your hands in this way calms agitation and restlessness.
4. To check your posture, align your ears with your shoulders. Align your nose with your navel. Tuck your chin in slightly. Hold your head as though it were supporting the sky, and it will neither hang forward nor fall backward.
5. Relax your belly. A stiff, cinched abdomen restricts your breathing. In meditation, you will try to return to the full, rounded breathing of a baby. Watch a baby breathe and see that the belly rises on inhalation, not the chest. This is a good demonstration for you to learn from.
6. Lower your gaze, but do not close your eyes. If you close your eyes, you will be lulled into daydreaming. Meditation is not practice for sleeping; it is practice for waking up. Look at a spot on the floor or on a wall in front of you. Any spot will do, as long as it is not distracting.
7. Close your teeth and your mouth. Take a breath and exhale completely.
8. On your next inhalation, silently count “one.” When you exhale, silently count “two.” Inhale counting “three.” Count each exhalation and inhalation up to “ten” and then start back at “one.” If you lose the count, begin again at “one.” This meditation practice is called counting your breath.
9. When a thought comes up, let it go away by itself, which it will if you do not pursue it.
10. This is the practice of zazen. Do zazen for up to five minutes. Keep a watch or clock nearby to note the time. As you meditate more often, you may be able to do it for longer. Do not be self-critical or impatient with yourself. Do not push yourself. Do not make meditation one more thing you have to do. If you are gentle, encouraging and consistent with yourself, your meditation practice will naturally deepen and lengthen.
Five minutes is not a long time, but it can take a long time to find five minutes to meditate. Usually, the first five minutes or the last five minutes in the day are the easiest to find. You already have them and they are already quiet.
I will be most happy to answer your questions and encourage you to keep going.
before you were a victim
I knew you before you were a victim,
before you were a wreck, a mess, and a bomb.
Without a crowning success or crippling failure.
Before you had an issue, an axe, or a cross.
No disorder, no syndrome, no label –
without a blemish or scar.
Before that night and the morning after,
before the after and before the before.
Before the fall, the crash, the crime,
without an upgrade or makeover.
no narration, no closed captioning,
no footnotes and no bonus features,
before you remembered to forget and forgot to remember.
I knew you before you were what you say –
what you think, what you fear, what you know.
Do you know yourself before?
Band-aid Carpet by We Make Carpets
How do you know if you are prepared to handle the silence, the stillness, the discipline, and the single-minded focus of a meditation retreat?
Relax. You can’t know. You don’t need to know. There is no way to prepare. The very notion of preparation traps us in false expectation and self-evaluation. It shows us how often we are paralyzed by the feeling of inadequacy in our lives. We are never inadequate but we are immobilized just the same.
A Zen retreat, which is the only kind of retreat I’ve experienced, is designed to cure you of that paralysis. It is intended to rid you of hobbling second thoughts and hesitation. I like to tell people to leave preparation aside and just bring readiness to a retreat. Readiness is no small thing. It can be quite compelling and even desperate, but it does not require preparation.
So here are a few tips on getting ready for a retreat:
1. The organizers will tell you when to come and what to bring. Follow those instructions to the letter. It is good practice for a retreat, which consists entirely of following instructions.
2. Find a pet sitter, a house sitter, a babysitter, and every other kind of sitter you think you need in order to leave home and its responsibilities completely. You are creating a trusted community to support you in your ongoing practice. Reliable surrogates may not relieve you of anxiety, but they rob you of excuses.
3. You may be inclined to read about retreats before you attempt one. This is natural, but it’s not such a good idea. You are bound to form erroneous preconceptions about what you haven’t yet experienced. I read Robert Aitken Roshi’s Taking the Path of Zen before my first retreat, and of all the books I read it helped me to prepare the least.
4. Leave all books at home. Books aren’t the subject of retreats, so you’ll only be discussing it with yourself, probably on the cushion. Not helpful.
5. Leave your laptop, your tablet, your every little ringing thing behind, or just turned off. (Except bring an alarm clock!) You are without a doubt central to the universe, you just aren’t all that important. Your retreat will be richly enhanced if your keypad is out of reach, so you’re not tempted to live tweet your retreat or Instagram your sudden enlightenment. In this way you can see how the dharma works by itself when we truly commit ourselves to doing nothing, not even Facebook.
6. What’s holding you back? Pack your fear in your suitcase and bring it along. You won’t need it, and next time you’ll be unafraid to pack lighter.
In practice centers everywhere, summer is retreat season. What’s still on your mind? Leave it out of the suitcase.
Cincinnati – June 29-July 2
One Mind: A Weekend Zen Retreat in Ohio
Washington DC – Oct. 5-Oct. 8
Autumn Moon Zen Retreat
As we practice together sincerely, we become increasingly aware that such terms as internal and external cannot be separated. Our environment and our consciousness are inseparable. The two are one.
A friend told me that I had shown up in her dream. In the dream she was infuriated with someone, raging mad and ready to fight, and in the middle of it I had appeared and said, “This is your mind.” The thing is, I have been telling myself something like that as I go to bed at night. Perhaps word is getting around.
Lying in bed is when my mind is most likely to start spinning with worry or preoccupation. That’s when I say to myself, “calm mind.” And again, “calm mind.” Just those two words. No matter what has been racing around in my head up until then, at the moment I say “calm mind,” my mind really is calm, and that calm pervades throughout all space and time. I doubt that you believe it, but it is true. Our environment and our consciousness are one.
Even now as you read this to yourself, “calm mind,” it is so, and can’t be otherwise. Go ahead, read it again.
That’s the power we have—complete—and the responsibility—total. This is your mind. What kind of mind is it? You might consider taking a look. You hold the universe in your sway.
One Mind: A Zen Retreat in Ohio
Jesuit Spiritual Center of Milford
Autumn Moon: A Zen Retreat in Washington DC
February 20th, 2017 - 1 Comment
August 22nd, 2016 - 7 Comments
If you subscribe via email and cannot see this video, please click here.
A while ago someone reached my blog by Googling “teaching children about the beginning of time.” It made me wonder if what they really wanted to teach children was about the end of time. From time to time someone predicts time, or the world of time, is going to end soon. Anyone coming here for those kinds of answers is looking in the wrong place. I don’t know the answers. I don’t even ask the questions.
I don’t normally pay too much attention to how people reach this blog. Most of those who come for the first time come with this question in mind, another one that I answer, more or less, by saying I don’t know.
There’s a lot of talk out there about deep questions and dark fears, especially these days. I wish we’d all answer them more honestly than we allow ourselves. I wish we were more courageous about saying “I don’t know.”
That’s the answer to most things our children ask; that’s the answer to most things, period. Don’t know. Don’t even try to know. You can’t know.
That brings me to beginner’s mind.
If you’ve read Suzuki Roshi’s little book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind you may know a little something about what Zen calls “beginner’s mind.”
Some define it as having an open mind. Some equate it with a child’s mind. I’ve seen it called a central concept in Zen.
Whenever you start thinking about beginner’s mind it’s no longer beginner’s mind, because it’s not something you do inside your head. It’s something you don’t do. You don’t conceive it, define it, explain it, or label it. You don’t measure it like we do with the finite concept of time; you live in it as your infinite universe. Isn’t it lovely?
You don’t know beginner’s mind, but if you learn to slow down and stay in one place, you can begin to see it. And seeing it, you can totally be it.
There is an end to what any of us can know. But there is no end to this beginning. Can you see?
Have another look. There’s still time to begin.