Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (6 page)

This reminds me of a story Pema Chödrön tells about a childhood friend who had recurring nightmares in which ferocious monsters would chase her through a house. Whenever she would close a door behind her, the monsters would open it and frighten her. Pema asked her what the monsters looked like, but she realized that she never really looked at them. However, the next time she had the nightmare, just as she was about to open a door to avoid being caught by the monsters, she was somehow able to stop running, turn around, and look at them. Although they were huge, with horrible features, they didn’t attack; they just jumped up and down. As she looked even closer, these three-dimensional colored monsters began to shrink into two-dimensional black-and-white shapes. Then she awoke, never to have that nightmare again.

It is the pushing away of our “monsters” that makes them so solid. As we begin to see through the solidity of this resistance, our life becomes more workable. Although we may not like our life as it is, we still don’t have to wage war against it. We can start by noticing all the ways that we avoid this moment, all the ways we avoid practice, all the ways we resist. We can see it in virtually everything we do. We can see it in how we don’t want to sit, how we don’t want to stay with our physical experience for more than a few seconds, how we choose to relentlessly spin off into thinking about the past or the future. We can see it in our commitment to believing thoughts such as “This is too hard,” “I can’t do it,” “I’ll never measure up.” We see how we’re just a well-oiled resistance machine!

It’s a fact that resistance is one of the most difficult aspects of practice. Its manifestations can be compelling, and it comes at us in so many different ways. Often, when we experience
this difficulty in our practice—that we simply don’t want to do it—we make judgments that we then believe. We might conclude that we’re a failure or that practice doesn’t work. Judgmental thoughts like these might need to be seen clearly and labeled many times before we can unburden ourselves of them. If we can’t bring some spaciousness to such heavy, harsh beliefs, we will solidify our resistance even more, strengthening our habitual stances to avoid entering the practice life. However, when we see these thoughts clearly, we can stop judging what we resist as bad. As well, we can stop judging our resisting selves as bad. Instead, we can develop the curiosity that will allow us to turn and face what we’ve been avoiding. Perhaps we can even welcome each instance of resistance as an opportunity to learn.

When I was finally ready to stop running away from my fears, Joko Beck gave me a practice tool that’s proved invaluable in working with unwanted experiences. The practice is to ask the question “What
is
this?” This question is really a Zen koan, because there is no way the answer can come from thinking about your experience. It can only come from actually experiencing it. In fact, the answer is the experience of the present moment itself. In Pema’s story, for example, when the friend turns around to look at the monsters, she is essentially asking, “What
is
this?”

Whether resistance manifests as seeking distractions, spacing out, fantasizing, planning, or sleeping—what
is
it? What is it that blocks awareness in the present moment? Take a minute right now to simply be here. Feel any resistance to residing in the moment. Ask, “What
is
this?” How does the resistance feel in your body? What is its essence? Where is it located? What is its texture? Does it have a voice?

Again ask the question “What
is
this?” Try to stay with the experience of it. If you drift away, come back and ask the question again. Stay with the resistance. Go deeper. Is it physical discomfort you’re resisting? Is it emotional discomfort? Can
you bring to it the light touch of awareness? Can you stay with it for
just one more breath
? Can you enter into the willingness to experience the “whatness” of this resistance?

Until we’re willing to fully experience this resistance within the context of a wider awareness, we will continue to flounder in our practice. Only after the endless disappointments of resisting our practice might we be able to enter the willingness to reside in the resistance itself. Only then might we be curious enough to make resistance itself the subject of practice. When we finally begin to reside in our resistance, when we finally start to experience how our protective and comfort-seeking strategies hold us back and close us down, when we begin to face those things we never wanted to face—that’s our bridge to living a genuine life. That’s when the fruits of practice—a certain sense of freedom, of openness, of gratitude—begin to manifest in our daily lives.

To willingly include whatever we encounter, not to push the unwanted away, is what it means to say “yes” to our lives. But we can’t force ourselves to say “yes” any more than we can meaningfully say the popular phrase “No problem!” “No problem!” does have, on a profound level, a real meaning; but it falls far short as long as we hold on to our deep-seated desire not to have any problems. That we’ll try to hold on to this desire is a given: it’s what humans do. Nevertheless, in living the practice life, our only real option is to persevere in including all of our experience, because our only other option is to keep pushing life away, with all the suffering that that entails.

6

Three Aspects of Sitting

P
RACTICE CAN NEVER BE LEARNED
just by reading or thinking about it. To awaken clarity based on genuine understanding, we have to learn from our own experience. Nonetheless, it’s good to have a clear overview of what sitting practice is, even if it is, in part, conceptual. How often have you realized, right in the middle of a sitting, that you didn’t even know what the basic practice was? How often have you asked yourself, “What exactly am I supposed to be doing here?” This confusion is a normal part of the practice path, which is a good reason to review basic sitting instructions regularly.

Meditation practice can be divided into three parts. These three are not really separate and distinct; they are a continuum. For purposes of description, however, we will look at these three aspects of sitting as if they were separate entities.

The first aspect of sitting is
being-in-the-body
. This is the basic ground of practice. When we first sit down to meditate, we take a specific posture. The important point is not which posture we take but whether we’re actually present to the physical experience. Being-in-the-body means we’re awake, aware, present to what is actually going on. So even though it’s true that certain postures are conducive to this level of awareness, it’s also true that we can meditate on a subway, standing up, or lying in bed.

It’s useful to have a routine to bring awareness to the physical reality of the moment, especially when we first sit down to
meditate. For example, when I sit down, I ask myself, “What is going on right now?” Then I touch in with my physical state, my mental/emotional state, and the environmental input (temperature, sound, light, and so on). This check might require only a few seconds, but it immediately takes me out of my mental realm and grounds me in the more concrete physical world. The point is not to
think
about the body, the emotions, or the environment but to actually feel them. After this quick check, I return awareness to the posture by telling myself: “Allow the head to float to the top, so that the lower back can lengthen, broaden, and soften.” This reminder brings me further into my bodily experience. Throughout the sitting period, whenever I find myself spinning off into thoughts, I use this reminder to bring my awareness back to the present moment. The essence of being-in-the-body is simply to be here.

Normally, after settling into the sitting posture, I bring awareness to the breath in a very concentrated way for just a few minutes. I am not thinking about the breath but bringing awareness to the actual sensations of its entering and leaving my body. For this brief period, when thoughts arise, I don’t label them; I narrow my awareness to focus solely on the experience of breathing. The value of this practice is that it allows me to settle into sitting.

But the value of this (or any other) concentrative practice—that it can shut life out—is also its limitation. Practice is about opening to life, not about shutting it out. And even though continuous concentration on the breath can make us feel calm and relaxed as well as focused and centered, this is not the point of sitting practice. As much as we would like to have pleasing or special experiences, the path of meditation is about being awake. It’s about being awake to
whatever
we feel. It’s ultimately about learning to be with our life as it is. So although concentration practices can certainly be helpful at times, we aspire to spend most of our sitting time in a more wide-open awareness.

In order to make the transition from concentration on the breath to a wide-open awareness, I usually do a few rounds of Three-by-Three’s. This forces me to stay focused and at the same time expand the awareness to become more wide open. Three-by-Three’s help to bring a groundedness to practice without which wide-open awareness can tend to be too spacey and amorphous.

Yet, wide-open awareness is the essence of being-in-the-body. This is where we become aware of bodily sensations, thoughts, changing states of mind, and input from the environment. I try to keep about one third of my attention on the breath, to stay grounded, but the basic practice is just to be aware, to simply observe and experience whatever is happening. There is really nothing special about this approach—it is very low key. We’re attempting to see and experience life as it arises by letting it just be there—minus our opinions and judgments. Yet, as low-key as this approach is, there is still the never-ending struggle between just being here and our addiction to the comfort and security of our mental world.

So this first aspect of sitting—being-in-the-body—simple as it sounds, is actually very difficult. Why? Because we
don’t
want to be here. A strong part of us prefers the self-centered dream of plans and fantasies. That’s what makes this practice so difficult: the constant, unromantic, nonexotic struggle just to be here. As we sit in wide-open awareness, however, as the body/mind gradually settles down, we can begin to enter the silence, in which passing thoughts no longer hook us. We enter the silence not by trying to enter, but through the constant soft effort to be present, allowing life to just be.

The second mode of sitting is
labeling and experiencing
. As we sit, emotions arise. Sometimes they simply pass through when we become aware of them. But sometimes they demand our attention. When that happens, we become more focused in our practice. With precision we begin to label our thoughts. As well, we focus on experiencing the bodily state that is an inextricable
part of an emotional reaction.

As emotions arise, we can ask, “What
is
this?” The answer to this question is never analytical. It cannot be reached with thought, because it is not what the emotion is about. It’s what it is. So we look to our experience itself, noticing where we feel the emotion in the body. We notice its quality or texture. We notice its changing faces. And we come to know, as if for the first time, what the emotion actually feels like.

Invariably we will slip back into thinking. As long as we are caught in thinking, we can’t continue to experience the bodily component of our emotions. In fact, the more intense the emotion, the more we will want to believe our thoughts. So the practice is to label the thoughts over and over—to see them clearly and to break our identification with them. It will almost always involve moving back and forth between labeling and experiencing.

Learning to stay with—to reside in—our emotions in this way allows us to see how most of our emotional distress is based on our conditioning, and particularly on the decisions and beliefs that arose out of that conditioning. We come to see that these emotional reactions—which we often fear and prefer to avoid—amount to little more than believed thoughts and strong or unpleasant physical sensations. We can see that when we are willing to experience them with precision and curiosity, we no longer have to fear them or push them away. Thus our belief systems become clarified.

The third aspect of our sitting practice is
opening into the heart of experiencing
. On those occasions when we experience dense, intense, or even overwhelming emotions, when we seem so confused that we don’t even know how to practice, what can we do?

When the precision of labeling thoughts is not an option, the practice is to breathe the painful reaction into the center of the chest. Although eventually we will still need to clarify the believed thoughts that are an inextricable part of our emotional
reaction, for now we simply open to our deepest fears and humiliations. We pull our swirling physical sensations, via the inbreath, into the center of the chest, allowing the center of the chest to be a container of awareness for our strong emotions. We’re not trying to change anything. We’re just learning to fully experience our emotions. Why? Because experiencing our emotions fully will allow them to break through the layers of self-protective armor and awaken our heart. Fully felt, our emotions may clear the path to the deep well of love and compassion that is the essence of our being.

It is in these darker moments, when we feel overwhelmed, that we are apt to judge ourselves most harshly. We’re likely to solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves, seeing ourselves as weak, as losers, as hopeless. It’s at this point that we most need a sense of heart, of kindness, of lightness, in the practice. We do this by learning to breathe into the heartspace, thereby undercutting the relentless self-judgment of our deeply held beliefs. As we breathe into this space, piercing our armoring and awakening the heart, we can open into a more benign awareness toward ourselves and the human predicament. We can begin to relate to ourselves as we might relate to a defenseless child in distress—nonjudgmentally, with friendliness, tolerance, and kindness. Our willingness to breathe into the heart, to stay in that space for
just one more breath
, shows us our strength, our courage, to go on.