Because of this, having a commitment to practice rest is an imperative part of Zen practice. Ancient Buddhist teachings have thousands of words on the dangers of sloth and torpor; my sense is that modern students need more encouragement at the other end of the continuum. And so the question: How can we include deep sleep and profound rest in our Zen practice? I like it when my students aren’t nodding off in the Meditation Hall, but I don’t want them swigging gallons of coffee to get there.
Two of the Seven Thresholds speak to creating this symbiotic relationship between resting and activity. The first is a practice of pausing at twilight, becoming aware and still for a moment, and entering the evening hours consciously. As simple as it is, students report that it makes a tremendous difference.
Sundown (recite silently):
Daylight ends; darkness removes all difference
Exhaling, I am at ease
—from the Seven Thresholds
Perhaps it’s that whenever we exhale, our body does relax a bit, so it’s just a nice thing to remember to do. Maybe it’s that it quiets that background tension of Your days are numbered! and allows a moment of This changing light is beautiful. We stop being afraid of the dark at that moment. We rest, for a few breaths, in ourselves and the wholeness of life’s process.
SEEING BEYOND THE BARRIER
Let’s look at a body practice you can do with a friend. First, though, especially if you tend to be a solitary type, here’s another chant that can open the heart to practicing with others:
Repeat silently as you prepare to meet someone:
The myriad ocean waves
each distinct and perfect
I meet myself in every being
—from the Seven Thresholds
A Body Practice Exercise with a Friend
Sometimes there are things we can’t see without a friend to practice with. This is one reason we gassho, greet with respect, when we meet other practitioners. In this exercise, you’ll help another work with how they encounter barriers.
•Stand facing a wall, between six and eight feet from it. Plant your feet solidly about a foot apart. Flex your knees slightly and center your balance in your lower abdomen. Relax your arms and shoulders, letting your hands rest at your sides. Lower your gaze, and spend a minute or two focusing on the movement of your breath.
•Your partner should stand about a foot closer to the wall, their left shoulder perpendicular to your right. When both of you are in place and concentrating, they should then solidly extend their dominant arm out in front of you, forming a barrier, and command, “Try to get through my arm!”
•Open your eyes and walk forward, attempting to break through the barrier of their arm.
•Note (and enjoy) the experience.
•Reset into your original positions. Do your breathing practice for several minutes.
•Your partner should extend their arm solidly in front of you again, but this time instruct you, “Open your eyes, and walk toward the wall with everything you’ve got. Get to the wall!”
•Open your eyes and walk forcefully to the wall, your attention completely and utterly on the wall.
•Note the experience.
Was there a difference? Almost everyone seems to find that when they concentrate on the barrier, it stops them. When they put their attention on the wall, the next thing they know, they’re there!
LET THE BABY SLEEP
I remember a number of years ago, sitting down at an NYC restaurant table to share a meal with a student who’d requested time together. It was in the early days of cell phones being with everyone everywhere all the time, so it was still striking when she put her phone beside her on the table. While she was talking, her eyes would drift down to the phone, checking in on its little beeps and twitterpations. It was like being with someone with a newborn. I didn’t doubt that she really wanted to talk with me, but there was a “crying baby” demanding attention sitting between us.
She’d begin to open up about serious issues going on in her family and work life and then lose the track. She was eating the food we were brought—but again, like a new mom, distractedly, because job one was feeding the equivalent of a cranky baby-phone attention when it cried.
I said, “I think you might need to come talk with me sometime when you can be without your phone, don’t you think?” She immediately put the phone on sleep mode, put it away, and made apologies. As we talked about the challenges in her life, she realized that what she needed to do more generally was exactly what she’d done at our table. To be more present with the people she loved and to do the work she felt so lucky to do, she needed to put the baby-phone down for naps . . . and let her distractions rest.
So, since none of us are immune from “screen preoccupation,” it is good to have some practices to shift toward another possibility. Know that for most of us, this is not an easy corner to turn. A few ideas:
Just like in a theater, practice turning your phone completely off when you are having a meal or conversation. For that hour or so, just be with the person you’re with, the food you’re being served. And don’t worry; it is highly unlikely you’ll forget to turn it back on. Try doing the same thing for time alone with yourself. Turn your phone completely off (or leave it at home), and go shopping, go for a walk, or read a book. Befriend your mind. And as bedtime approaches, power everything down an hour or so ahead of lights-out. I keep a timer set to remind me to do this. Voilà: There’s a perfect bit of “real estate” opened up for meditation.
FIVE
Waking Up
Awakening is not a thing; it isn’t a thought or an experience. It is noticing what is and that there is no solid line between you and all other beings, things, and conditions. Sometimes this is referred to as the “intimacy” of awakening: It is closer than close, because there is nothing outside or other. Words fail a bit here, since they are descriptions.
The first time this happens it can be somewhat dramatic, but in practice it continues, again and again and again, usually quite undramatically. There is a flavor to Zen’s traditional descriptions of awakening that can make it seem like a big thing happens, and that changes everything forever. In one way, this is true, of course. It’s a little like having the light flicked on in a dark and unfamiliar room. You see what’s here clearly, and you can’t go back to the same assumptions and fears.
But there is also no steady state—absolutely everything is impermanent, even insight. So, there’s no “special” place you occupy once that insight has happened, where peace is forever and you make no further errors. (In other words, there’s no magical escape to a place your poop doesn’t smell.) This is the spirit of a lovely, almost funny saying, paraphrasing the great thirteenth-century master, Eihei Dogen, “It is all one continuous mistake.” He also encouraged “ceaseless practice,” which is kind of the checkmate to being stuck in those mistakes.
Barry Magid, an NYC Zen teacher, has aptly said, “Awakening is the progressive—or sudden—loss of one fantasy after another (including) of ‘awakening’—until one is left with one’s ordinary mind, just as it is, with no self-centered project of becoming more or other than who one is in the moment.” I would add a caution: The next fantasy will always arrive. That’s how the mind works. To meet that arrival, acknowledge it, and let it go is to practice our lives.
Words you will encounter in Zen’s teaching on enlightenment: kensho, which means to see, and the related term, satori, which means to know—both point to this dropping away of the self, the trance, and imply a transformative opening of heart and mind. Still, when there is real awakening, in a very real sense there is no one “there” to know or see that the “self is forgotten.”
Enlightenment doesn’t change someone into a super-special person. In fact, if some deeply moving spiritual experience has left you feeling kind of special, in all likelihood you’re miles from enlightenment. There are few things less pleasurable than hanging out with someone convinced that they are an enlightened being .
. . while they basically ignore how asleep at the wheel they are!
Let’s explore some techniques, practices, and forms that may assist in developing that “ceaseless practice” that Dogen referred to.
The Zen Way
One key to beginning to take up our lives in a Zen way is to appreciate what the teachings call the absolute and the relative. There’s a great deal of discussion in the teachings about these two aspects of reality and how it’s important not to get “stuck” in one or the other, and sometimes it can all get pretty philosophical and abstract. But let’s see what’s really at play, encounter it with our “beginner’s mind,” and see what might be helpful.
The relative: the dimension of reality in which each and every thing is identified and defined by relative positions and qualities.
The absolute: the dimension in which each and every thing is part of a seamless whole.
I often point to this by saying when we’re thinking and acting as if we’re a wave—particular, unique even, with a distinct direction, an observable beginning and end—all we see is a vast horizon of other waves that are basically crashing into one another all the time. That’s living in the relative. When we’re in touch with being the ocean, that’s the absolute. In the absolute, all things share the same basic nature; are unified; are “empty” of inherent, independent, enduring self-essence. In the relative, there are important differences between things. Some are helpful; others are harmful. Everything that can be touched, sensed, conceived, or experienced is relative. In the absolute, nothing can be differentiated.
There are practical implications of our seeing things only from the relative point of view. We become aware, for instance, of the qualities and circumstances that define our individuality and affect our experience—the unique flavor of our lives and personal karma. Still, it is also in a sense endlessly mundane, because everything in the relative is relatively ordinary, relatively unremarkable. In the absolute, there is no limitation by conditions, time, or space: It was before we were born and will be after we die. The absolute is sometimes referred to as the suchness or thusness of phenomena, which have absolute value given their unique place in the seamless whole, and are therefore “luminous and precious.”
As we go on in this chapter to further explore some techniques to awaken practice in daily life, keep an eye out for how awareness is being shifted from absolute to relative, and where you may be habituated in one or the other. The facility to freely make that shift becomes more available the more we practice. With that facility, we encounter our life with greater clarity about who we really are and what’s at play. Our frustrations and disappointments begin to teach and reveal. The great and obvious, as well as the small and the subtle, all begin to contribute to awakening.
Thresholds
Here’s the full list of the Seven Thresholds that some of my students find helpful. They can be used simply as inner recitations to bring one to presence. (See Resources, if you’d like to order a frameable version.)
Some students also use them as koans, and we work together on how to realize and understand what each points to about the nature of self and reality. In this sense, they, like other koans, present “liminal” moments. (In anthropology, liminality is the ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in a rite of passage, when the pre-ritual state has been released, but the transition hasn’t yet been made to the state available once the rite is complete. During a liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, and community, and a newly awakened way.)
So, if you like, recognize these liminal moments by pausing and reciting one of the Seven Thresholds to yourself at the various thresholds of your day:
DAYSTART
This day of being blessed by blessing
being honored by honoring
being love by loving, I awaken
ORDINARY WATER
One taste, one life
this ordinary tap water
impossible to earn
INNER MEAL
The undivided life of all beings
I vow to taste, appreciate, and continue it with
wisdom and compassion
REAL WORK
Not knowing the full outcome of my effort
I will be generous, resilient, and creative in my service
And work to benefit life and relieve suffering
NO OTHER
The myriad ocean waves
each distinct and perfect
I meet myself in every being
SUNDOWN
Daylight ends;
darkness removes all difference
Exhaling, I am at ease
SLEEP
May this rest
reflect my trust in being
and faith in mind
Hairy Old Heart
When I was preparing to ordain as a Zen monastic, I neither liked nor understood the requirement to shave my head. I was a novice, several years into the discernment process, when Maezumi Roshi came to the monastery for a month. I respected him deeply and one day, after I’d presented several koans during the private meeting time (dokusan; heart-to-heart), he asked how I was doing relative to my upcoming ceremony.
I knew shaving the head was supposed to be about letting go of vanity and worldly agendas and putting the dharma and sangha in the center of one’s life. I questioned the method, however, and shyly told him so. “I wouldn’t poke out my eyes or pierce my eardrums to express commitment; why shave my hair off, which is like a sense organ to me? I know the wind when my hair lifts in a breeze; I swim and know the ocean as it moves through my hair.” I went on and on then, saying it seemed more a male-centric confusion, thinking the body was somehow bad, making the physical out to be nothing but hindrance and provocation. . . .
When I finally wound down, he said quietly, “Not about hair, Myotai-san. Much more important: Shave the heart. Always shave the heart of ego, see?” Of course. That hairy old heart. . . . We left the meeting with the good kind of tears on both our faces.
And so consider this practice, irrespective of hairstyle: How do we shave the heart of ego? For men, perhaps as you shave each morning, link this question in as a practice. And for men or women, whenever we shampoo our hair, “the part we hold most high,” can we also take a moment to notice how we may be “carrying the self forward,” identifying, positively or negatively, with physical appearance? What would it be to let go a little, of whatever extra we’re carrying, whether it veers in the direction of pride or dips into self-doubt? That shaved heart might notice the world a little bit more, don’t you think?
The Gratitudinals
Imagine doing an exercise where one person is assigned to get up every morning and write down ten things they are unhappy about—basically to practice complaining. Another person is assigned, likewise, to get up every day and write a list, but in this case, to write down ten things they are grateful for, that support them and bring happiness or contentment. Imagine meeting these two people at the end of a year. You’d have, predictably, two very different people, two very different orientations and attitudes.
It’s in this spirit that Zen centers usually chant the names of teachers throughout history. It’s also why meals are made such a big deal of: Gratitude and vows to the future are celebrated on the occasion of receiving food.
One way to bring this practice home is to actually write down five to ten “fresh gratitudes” each morning. I say “fresh” to encourage coming up with items from that very day, the period since the last list was made. Recount a kindness, something beautiful, how you were supported, a taste. Just make a note, a few words that will trigger you to remember. People who like to write as part of their practice may want to spend ten to fifteen minutes writing out the list more fully, but the important thing is to just engage with your “gratitudinals.” See where you are at the end of a year.
WANTING IT
Bella is disabled with a very intense disease that inc
reasingly limits her movement. When I first met her, she was in remission. We sat together a number of times, and then she had a very bad flare-up that had her bedbound and receiving home care services.
When I came to see her, she was very frustrated—like all of us who get stymied and can’t do what we want to do, plus she was hurting. She explained, “I lie here and my mind just roils with thoughts and fears. Is it going to get worse? I try to be an ‘adult,’ but I’m so lonely and angry. I just don’t want any of this!” After talking a bit, we did some breath practice, and she asked why I did this work of sitting with those who can’t come to group sittings. I fessed up that I faced something a bit similar to her challenges, and I felt called to support others who otherwise would be alone in their practice.
I shared how I moved to a Zen monastery knowing that with my brand and degree of polyneuropathy, it was improbable that I could do the rigorous schedule. I’d been diagnosed when in my teens, and on good days my muscles usually felt like I had the flu. On bad days, I’d be out of commission with nerve pain. But there was a moment I just risked it: Since I’d likely have pain wherever I was, I might as well be where I could study. I was willing to be kicked out, but I wanted to give it my best shot. And it was hard, sometimes impossible, but also life-changing.
What happened at the monastery was that I learned how to practice. I learned how to trust myself (and others, too) to a degree I had lost track of being possible. I found my breath and, most importantly, zazen gave me a home in my heart-mind that transcended conditions or feelings. I wanted that for everyone who wanted it. Bella said, “I want it!” and smiled big. “We’re on,” I said, and rang the little bell to call us back to breath practice.
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