Meditation Retreat
On the fifth day of a week-long meditation retreat with Suzuki Roshi, the students were feeling tired and sore from the long hours of meditation.
The morning wake-up bell for the first sitting rang at four a.m., and the last sitting ended at ten at night. Most of the people who had come on retreat were not monastics, but were lay people who had families and jobs in the world.
The rigorous schedule was a struggle for everyone, yet they maintained it with the belief that as the days passed their bodies would adjust and their minds would settle.
That afternoon, as was the custom, Suzuki Roshi went to the front of the meditation hall to give his daily dharma talk. He settled down and looked around at the retreatants who were assembled and sitting attentively.
In a quiet voice thick with accent he said, “The problems you are now experiencing…” and paused. Everyone leaned closer with expectation - of course he would say that with time and diligent practice they would vanish; “…will be with you for the rest of your lives.”
Despite the great disappointment, everyone couldn’t help break out in laughter.
In Search Of Inner Freedom
Of course Suzuki Roshi was playing on the expectation that many people think that meditation or spiritual practice can serve as a kind of magic wand or pill that will make life all well and good.
In another instance, a student asked him if enlightenment was a remedy for everything, and he quickly responded: No.
He added that if you want to be relaxed, there are many easier ways to achieve that: get a massage, listen to some calm music, watch a sunset on the beach, or have a good night’s sleep. If you want great ideas there are many writings and books to fill our minds.
So what exactly is going to give us inner freedom? What is going to help us to live our lives in a better way, with greater wisdom, composure, kindness and integrity?
What Suzuki suggests is not to think about getting rid of life’s difficulties and problems, but rather to change our approach to those problems.
Power Of Acceptance
When we stop wanting our lives to be something other than what they are, our difficulties become our challenges, and our problems become our path.
Meditation practice is a good laboratory for this approach. When you first sit down on your cushion it seems alright, your body is comfortable and your breathing is steady.
Yet within a few moments things begin to rapidly change: the mind becomes flooded with thoughts, events are replayed, cars honk and race by outside, the phone rings and you have an internal debate over whether to answer it or not, an email you forgot to send comes back to you, and then your legs and back begin to hurt. What happened? Why did everything go terribly wrong? Why couldn’t the sitting have remained just as pleasant as it had been in the first two minutes?
Everything Is Impermanent
You come face to face with the most basic spiritual truth that Buddhism has to offer: things change. On the Buddha’s deathbed he summarized his life of teaching with his last words to his students: “All things are impermanent.” He didn’t just mean coffees and flowers and governments, but more relevant to us, our very states of body and mind.
When we sit still in meditation we bear witness to this truth again and again, and it often is revealed to us in ways we wouldn’t necessarily choose.
When we sit resolutely and observe the passage of mental and physical phenomena - the thoughts, the sensations, the pains, the emotions - our relationship to them shifts subtly.
Beyond Judgement
We go from a reactive state of being which divides everything between what I like and what I don’t like, to a more open, receptive mode which accepts things as they are in this moment without judgment.
As this shift begins to occur, our practice becomes more inquisitive: we ask the question “what is this…” rather than automatically branding it as good or bad. What is this pain? What is this emotion? What is this thought? What is this sound?
There is no answer, but rather a response - we look, listen, and accept.
In this way we open ourselves to what is called in Zen a beginner’s mind. As Suzuki Roshi famously said, in the beginner’s mind there are many opportunities, in the expert’s mind few.
When we know what is a problem and what is a solution, we are the experts of our own lives. That doesn’t, however, afford us many options in dealing with the changes that are constantly coming our way.
When a challenge arises in our lives, before we immediately judge it as a problem, we can simply sit with it and observe it with an open heart and mind. In this way we are no longer seeking to solve the problem as quickly as possible, but to engage with life more fully in an open and fresh way.
Embracing Problems
The problems we have truly will continue with us for the rest of our lives, but that is actually the good news. It means we will encounter countless changes and challenges to our spiritual lives, and we will be given many opportunities to develop an open heart.
Each challenge we face will be another chance to begin again, to open our beginner’s mind, and to receive life with full awareness.
Do I respond with habitual defensiveness, or to I look deeply into the moment with interest?
This approach is captured beautifully by the ancient Zen poem:
In the spring, fresh rain; in the summer, a cool breeze;
In the autumn, falling leaves; in the winter, white snow;
If your mind is unclouded by disturbing thoughts,
Every day is a good one for you.