One night’s lodging brings rest to the body; two nights give peace to the heart; after three nights the drooping and depressed no longer know either trouble. If one asked the reason, the answer is simply—the place. —Po Chu-i (772-864)
Chapin Mill Retreat
Oct. 10-13, 2024
Chapin Mill Retreat Center
Batavia NY
Registration open
All are welcome
For practicing Zen, a quiet room is suitable. Put aside all involvements and suspend all affairs. Do not think “good” or “bad.” Do not judge true or false. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. Have no designs on becoming a buddha.
At your sitting place, spread out a thick mat and put a cushion on it. Sit upright, leaning neither left nor right, neither forward nor backward. Align your ears with your shoulders and your nose with your navel. Rest the tip of your tongue against the front of the roof of your mouth, with teeth together and lips shut. Always keep your eyes open, and breathe softly through your nose.
Once you have adjusted your posture, take a breath and exhale fully, rock your body right and left, and settle into steady, immovable sitting. Think of not thinking, “Not thinking—what kind of thinking is that?” Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.
Having begun, begin again.
Chapin Mill Retreat
Batavia NY
October 6-9, 2022
Registration Open
I washed the shower curtains today. Then the curtain liners, rods, and rings. I scrubbed the tubs and tile, and took off the shower head and soaked it in a bucket of chrome cleaner to dissolve the hard water scale. I don’t often do any of this. I mean, never. So when it occurs to me to do it as it did this morning, it most certainly is the right time. Doing it sets me clear and straight — smack on the path of sanity.
This is what carries me over the squally waters: the dailiness of things, the dishes and the dust. Up until two years ago, a woman would come twice a month and do most everything. Everything I didn’t even know needed doing. And then she disappeared. I don’t know why. But now I see that her leaving was right on time. I have been rescued. Saved by the windows and carpets, coffee spills in the kitchen, breadcrumbs at the bottom of the toaster oven. The whole pile of it restores my faith in—not quite sure. What remains of faith in these disappearing days? Oh yes, life. The fact of life.
I am astonished in this late season of the drama to look up and see the sky—the real sky—still beaming that not-quite nameable shade of blue, the color of better days. Shocking, yes, that when so much falls to pieces, the sky still holds its place, one fact reigning above all the lies and treacheries of small men in broken countries.
A half-turn of my head and I see the regal green of lofty palm and citrus trees, lime-colored moss carpeting a grove of giant bamboo. Doubts do not grow branches and leaves.
Carry on, old girl. You belong here, between heaven and earth, with the soap scum and mildew, water rings on the coffee table. This is the way. Not difficult if you don’t pick and choose.
Verses on the Faith Mind (Hsin Hsin Ming), the first poem in Zen
“The Fact of Faith,” a new dharma talk
Photo by Dovile Ramoskaite on Unsplash
Recently someone asked me about the student-teacher relationship in Zen.
It’s not so different from the way any teaching occurs—that is, the way true teaching takes place and not the rote learning of formulaic answers or information. It occurs in presence. It occurs in seeing and following. It occurs in the mutuality of time and space.
Even in finding a teacher, something has already occurred: an attraction, you might say, that is not the outcome of discriminating thought or evaluation. A true teacher-student relationship is something that neither party has a hand in choosing. We call it Dharma.
When I met my first teacher, I didn’t know who I was meeting. I was drawn to the way he walked and talked. It seemed so natural and genuine, even though it was utterly unfamiliar.
The relationship is thus borne of an inexplicable encounter. We can’t know the infinite causes that lead to the sequence of coincidences culminating in a first meeting.
The relationship always carries fear as well as trust. What we are afraid of is stepping forward beyond our self-consciousness and being seen as we are. But that’s what all teaching requires. Teachers stand in front of you and call you to step out of your fear and self-imposed limitations. Come this way, they say, step free. If we trust, we follow.
So a Zen teacher shows the way. We meet and practice zazen in person as often as possible, and when not, we communicate with mutual interest and intent. In the same way that a face-to-face encounter is intimate and honest (whether we realize it or not), what passes between us is the living truth as we experience it. In Zen, the student-teacher relationship is both silent, as in sitting zazen together, and spoken, as in a private conversation. A teacher is necessary because otherwise we get stuck in our egocentric thinking and fear, repeating the same old mental and emotional patterns that cause us a lifetime of suffering.
My teacher likes to say it this way: the student is in a dark room and can’t see the way out. The teacher understands because they were once in a dark room too. There are many windows and doors leading out of the room, but the student is blind. So the teacher says, “Walk three steps in front and then two steps to the right.” Then, boom! Into the daylight!
That’s how it has worked for me, and that’s what I have to share. But a student has to take all the steps. It’s entirely voluntary. There are no contracts. There is no formal curriculum. You simply have to show up and sit down. And whenever you show up, I’ll be right there with you.
Photo by Edrece Stansberry on Unsplash
Back in May it was time to clean the rain gutters. I knew it was time because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done it. When your house sits under giant bamboo on one side and redwoods on the other, the gutters clog up like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve made it my job to muck them out every year, which might easily turn into every other year or longer if I lose track, and I’ve been losing track. I told myself that at my age I could fall off a ladder and break a leg, so I tried to hire someone else to do it.
In what I now think of as “the old days” there seemed to be more people you could hire for handiwork. A neighbor might give you the name of a reliable fellow who made a decent life that way. These aren’t the old days so I went on Yelp. I found a guy who advertised himself for cleaning windows and gutters and I phoned him.
He asked me to text him since he only communicated by text. When he showed up the next day to give me a bid he walked around looking up at the roof and said one hundred and twenty-five dollars. It sounded like a fair price to keep from breaking a leg, so I agreed. He said it would only take an hour or two, which struck me as peculiar. As I knew it, the job took two days if I was ambitious and two or more years if I wasn’t.
A week later he texted that he was on the way over to do the job. He got on the roof with a leaf blower, which surprised me, since my approach was more basic. Pretty quickly he came down and knocked on my door. The gutters were full of mud, he said, and he didn’t want to blow it all over the sides of my house. The job would have to wait a week or two until things dried out. He wouldn’t charge me for what he’d done so far. I appreciated that. After he left, I walked around the house and saw the mud that had splattered all over the sides and would end up sticking there.
I never heard from that individual again, which was pretty good news.
The other day I hauled out the ladder, climbed up and started in using just my hands. It was good work, and it felt good. I quit after half a day and picked it up again the next. By then I’d had a major breakthrough. My legs are not broken. My hands are not helpless. My thinking was crooked, but two days at the top of a ladder can straighten that out. Nothing is as complicated as we make it out to be.
Here’s a new talk on the practice of Zen, or the serious business of keeping life simple. If you’re facing something you think you can’t do, it might be time to listen.
“You are an experienced meditator, aren’t you?”
Perhaps only an experienced meditator would be stumped by this question, but I answered yes to be cooperative.
“Something happened after I meditated and I wanted to ask you about it.”
She told me that she’s been meditating more and she was getting good at it but the last time she did it she had made it through all the chakras and it was going pretty well and she meditated for longer than she ever had and afterwards some good things had happened to her but then later that day she felt sick and lightheaded and had to lie down and had I ever heard of that and what did I think it meant?
“That does sound like a kind of sickness,” I said.
Which part? she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t even know where my chakras are.”
***
Something happens when you meditate, but it will never be what you expect.
To be sure, no one starts a meditation practice without expecting to get something out of it—the answer, the secret, the pay-off. Just about any motivation is worthwhile if it gets you out of bed and upright for one more day, but what I experience in a room with other people on retreat is never something I’m seeking.
When I stop thinking about myself, I feel the subtle energies around me, like fear and sadness, restlessness and worry. People around me are grieving. They are in crazy pain and shame. There is trouble at home. A marriage is ending, loved ones are lost or leaving, lives are falling apart. The body is breaking, the cancer is spreading, the debt is coming due. And out of this great ache comes a flooding rush of gratitude up my spine and out of my heart because these humans have shared a moment of their lives without a get or a fix, for no good reason and absent any shred of understanding.
What happens is love.
***
Your body knows what to do, and it’s already doing it, so just breathe, I told her. Breathe from the belly, and count your breath to keep your mind still and focused. You don’t have to process anything. Everything is already processed. Try not to look for a result. Don’t judge if it’s good or bad or right or wrong or working or not. Keep it simple. Buddhism is really simple, and Zen meditation is the simplest kind of Buddhism.
“That’s really useful,” she said, even as I prayed she wouldn’t use a word of it.
Letting Go: A Zen Retreat
Aug. 8-11, 2019
Transfiguration Spirituality Center, Cincinnati
Clear Waters: A Zen Retreat
Oct. 10-13, 2019
Chapin Mill Retreat Center
Batavia NY between Rochester and Buffalo
Photo by Zoltan Tasi
Upstate NY
Clear Waters: A Zen Retreat
Oct. 10-13, 2019
Chapin Mill Retreat Center
Batavia NY between Rochester and Buffalo
Registration Open
A traditional three-day retreat including seated and walking meditation, dharma talks, chanting services, oryoki meals, and the opportunity to meet privately with a teacher. Chapin Mill is a peaceful refuge on 135 rural acres that the people of the Iroquois Nation once called “The Place of Clear Running Waters” for its abundant springs, streams and ponds.
A Day of Meditation
Sat., May 25, 2019, 8-4
Southern Palm Zen Group
meeting at
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton
I’ll be a guest teacher for a day of practice including meditation, a dharma talk, the opportunity to meet privately, and a delicious vegetarian lunch. Suggested donation is $45. Please RSVP by May 22 to southernpalmzengroup@gmail.com. Seating is limited; the sky is endless.
About twice a year I spend six hours sitting still and quiet with a small group of total strangers in the converted attic of a century-old house in a tricky neighborhood near downtown LA. That’s what I call a beginner’s Zen meditation retreat. These days, an event like that is probably considered old school. But that’s how we used to learn and practice meditation, and some of us still do: in real life in a real place with real people in real time. When I got home, I had a message from an old friend who said she wasn’t calling for any particular reason. That’s what friends used to do too. Just be friends for no reason.
Today, these two events are so rare, so nearly impossible to believe, that it makes me want to write them down. I don’t write many things down anymore. Someone asked me about that recently. He said, “You don’t write on your blog much anymore.” And it’s true, I don’t. I tried to give him an answer why. There’s the matter of privacy, and the wrenching realization that I have exploited much of my life and family for the sake of . . . just for the sake of me! And then there’s the sad situation that not as many people read anymore. They say they do, but they don’t read blogs, don’t read books, and don’t even search the internet as much as they did last year, let alone last month. It’s even true of me. I read a whole helluva lot all the time but I don’t buy books very often anymore. I borrow them for free from my library’s digital database. And you might argue that kind of reading still counts but I know it doesn’t count for the author or the library.
Last year my hometown library canceled my library card because I hadn’t been to the library for two years. I called up, confused and upset. I told them I read about three e-books a week from them, and they said, but you haven’t been to the library. And you might say setting foot inside a library doesn’t count, but I know it does count when it comes to keeping the library open. Every year they have to fight the good fight at City Hall—where the not-so-hard choice is between keeping the library open or providing water and sanitation services—and so they keep cutting the library hours into fractions of fractions of fractions. They renewed my card because I asked. Librarians will do that for you.
Two weeks ago I heard from a writer at a magazine who was working on a story about “the evolution of iPhone Buddhism and someone said I should talk to you.” I told him I didn’t know what iPhone Buddhism was (although I could make a cynical guess) and he confirmed that my guess was right. Someone is seriously suggesting how important the phone is for the dissemination of Buddhist teachings and practice today, and I admitted that I don’t use a smartphone so I couldn’t comment, but I could suggest a revolutionary new mindfulness app: put the goddamn phone down! The advanced version would be: turn the goddamn phone off. He said that was the most profound thing he’d heard anyone say on the topic.
Whenever I do a beginner’s retreat I am reminded why people would leave their homes, turn off their phones, take off their shoes, come up two flights of stairs and sit with strangers in silence all day.
The reason why is that something is missing from our screens. There’s no social in our social; no life in our life. There has to be something real, something that can’t be digitized, monetized, and sold. And there is. It’s what keeps me going, and perhaps it will keep you going too.
Beginner’s Mind One-Day Retreat
March 31, 2019, 9-3
Hazy Moon Zen Center
Register by email
This post was originally published on Mar. 21, 2016, and look! It’s still going.
If you don’t see the Way,
you don’t see it even as you walk on it.
—Identity of Relative and Absolute
Over the last 20-plus years, I’ve heard my teacher tell a lot of stories. Actually, I’ve heard him tell one or two stories a lot of times. One of them is about Maezumi Roshi visiting a psychiatric hospital.
A member of the sangha was having trouble, and she had ended up in psychiatric care. When Maezumi heard about the powerful drugs the doctors were giving her, he said, “We have to go get her.” So they went to the hospital. Maezumi was wearing his traveling robes. There were many times Maezumi wore Western clothes, so for this trip, he must have thought the robes were appropriate.
They were standing near the day room talking to the staff about a discharge. The room was full of patients. Some were visibly disturbed or aggressive. Maezumi just stood there, a funny little man in a weird get-up, and didn’t say anything. One of the patients walked up to him carrying a chair. He signaled for Maezumi to sit down in it. Maezumi sat. Then the guy pulled up a chair and sat right next to him. And so did others. Soon Maezumi was sitting in a circle of psychiatric patients. Everyone was still and quiet, like it was nothing special.
When you walk the Way it is not near, it is not far
If you are deluded you are mountains and rivers away from it.
My teacher says that none of the staff or doctors even noticed what had happened.
“They didn’t see,” he would say everytime he told the story.
I used to wonder what it was that they didn’t see, and why. For awhile I thought he was saying that the whole event was come sort of glitch in the matrix, a hidden world on the other side of the space-time continuum. Zen students can be deluded by woo-woo like that.
“Oh,” I’d repeat, “they didn’t see!” still not seeing.
Not so long ago I realized what the doctors didn’t see: what was right in front of them. Reality. What most of us don’t see even as we walk on it.
In taking a seat and wearing robes, observe it for yourself later on. — Case 32, Book of Serenity
It used to be that if I was giving a talk or leading a workshop, I would put on a sleek J. Jill outfit and use a PowerPoint. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, or alarm anyone else, by doing anything Buddhist. I was an entertainer of sorts, and I was good at it. But entertainment doesn’t last. So I gave up trying to be popular and started going out in my robes to do what we do in Zen: sit. Instantly, it made everything easier. I didn’t have to make up what to say, and even strangers were consoled by it. I realized that it wasn’t me that made the difference, it was the robe.
In Zen, the teaching is said to be conveyed from teacher to student by “the robe and the bowl.”
The robe is the Dharma, or the teaching. The Dharma is as it is with nothing extra, nothing fabricated. It’s a powerful thing—what is—and it heals—when nothing is added to it—so maybe that’s why Maezumi wore his robe into the room where people were sick and suffering, their minds spinning in psychotic storms. It must have seemed like heaven to step into the quiet calm of his non-distracted presence, or samadhi. A passerby might have thought he was one more crazy person in a room of crazy people. And that would have been true too. Wherever he went, Maezumi left no trace of himself.
The robe was a signal that he was there to share the Dharma, pure presence, which shares itself when we don’t add our judgments to it.
The Great Way is not difficult;
it only avoids picking and choosing.
—Verses on the Faith Mind
I ran across a survey the other day asking “What is the greatest challenge Zen faces in the West today?” That’s a pretty common question among those who compare good versus bad, right versus wrong, past versus future. People have opinions. The truth, however, could not be clearer. The Way is not difficult. Reality is not hidden. There are no challenges to being present except the walls we erect by our judgmental mind, liking one thing and disliking another, cherishing our views of this or that.
It reminds me of Maezumi Roshi in the psychiatric ward. The doctors and nurses whizzing past, lost in their expertise, seeing only diagnoses and prognoses, cases and labels, in a room full of human beings just like them.
The more you talk and think about it,
The further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking
And there is nothing that you will not be able to know.
Beginner’s Mind One-Day Retreat
March 31, 2019
Hazy Moon Zen Center
Register by email
Let all karma be wiped out and the mind-flower bloom in eternal spring!
This April I’ll be returning to the wide-open prairies of Holy Wisdom Monastery in Madison, Wisconsin to observe the flow of spring amid the stillness of Zen. All levels of practitioners are invited to join this weekend of seated meditation (zazen), walking meditation (kinhin), chanting, and Dharma talks.
Holy Wisdom Monastery is less than 10 miles outside of Madison. This ecumenical center welcomes visitors with inspiring views, comfortable rooms and lovingly prepared meals. It is the perfect place to come alive again.
Spring Wind: A Zen Retreat
April 11-14, 2019
Holy Wisdom Monastery
Registration open
A practitioner at a meditation retreat asks a question.
Q: What am I practicing here that helps me be more present and connected in my daily life?
A: Here, what you’re practicing is presence and connection, so that you can be more present and connected. Although right now you’re in a different place doing something different than usual, this really is your daily life. Yours alone. Even among all of us gathered here in one place, no one else is having the experience that you are having. Furthermore, if I were to tell you that practice is transactional, that if you sit like this you’re going to have a certain wonderful experience in your other, “normal” life someday – that would be a lie. This isn’t a transaction. Practice isn’t a product, a course of study or a life hack. There are not two things: your life and your practice. They are the same thing. You never leave your life, and the point is to never leave your practice. It’s all one thing.
We are here practicing being human beings. This is the practice of being a human being. In the old days they called Zen the practice of everyday life. You think, “This isn’t my everyday life. This is the opposite of my everyday life.” But nonetheless, this is your everyday life. Since the very beginning, and I don’t know why, human beings are not so good at everyday life. Unless they really practice everyday life.
Can I practice handling just this moment, however it is? Because when I’m out and about in my everyday life, I’m perfectly fine until someone does something that I don’t like or something happens that I don’t want. That’s where it gets tough, and it can get tough every day. It can get tough today. This environment here is very artificial and contrived. We’ve arranged ourselves in this nearly empty room, everyone in funny clothes trying to sit still and be silent. We don’t intentionally add stress here, but you experience stress here. I promise you that in your life, you experience stress. Can you sit it out? Wait it out? Breathe it out? Refrain from involving yourself in sticky situations that you don’t need to be in?
I can only speak from my own experience. At a certain point in my everyday life, I just could not handle it! I didn’t want any more of it! I tried everything I could think of to fix the problems and nothing worked. So when I finally sat down like this, it was an act of complete surrender. A sign of total failure. I’m going to have to do this on my own, I said. I’m going to have to figure out how to be a human being, with a life that has other people and things in it.
That’s what we’re here to do. And why do we do it? I think it’s why we do everything. Not because we’re high-minded or religious. This is not a religion. It’s a practice. You do not worship Buddha, and you do not worship me. Let’s see for a moment if you can stop worshipping yourself.
We’re here for love, because we have a capacity for love and we want to love and we want to be loved. That’s the connection. It’s not romantic love. It’s unconditional love. Unconditional love is pure presence.
Here we are among strangers. It’s a good idea to find love among strangers. It gets complicated after you know each other’s names and stories. When you know all that, you might find that you can’t relate to someone else. You might not even be able to tolerate them. But here you can simply have respect and gratitude for one another. Here you can just be present with everyone and everything.
It’s a beautiful practice, this practice of presence. It comes in many shapes and forms. Some people find connection on a swim team, or a cooking class, or off-road racing. And then you wonder how does that apply to life? But it does.
What we’re doing here this weekend requires a very modest amount of time, compared to how long it takes to stream a Netflix series. And it is relatively painless. So ask yourself. Why am I here?
Beginner’s Mind One-Day Retreat
Hazy Moon Zen Center
Los Angeles
March 31, 2019
Spring Wind Weekend Retreat
Holy Wisdom Monastery
Madison, WI
April 11-14, 2019
Photo: The Dewdrop Sangha by Rick McCleary.
This is an excerpt from an informal Q&A at one of this year’s Dewdrop Sangha meditation retreats. You can listen to the full recording here.
