Last week, Dr. Gala put in my third and fourth stents, nine months after he’d done the first two. He’d expected to do them last spring, but what with my bleed and my pseudo embolism and the three surgeries it took to resolve all the complications, my body and my psyche needed time to recuperate before going under again. It’s finally done, and I’m cleared to return to the gym and resistance training. I want to rebuild the muscle I’ve lost. I want my body to continue to function. I want to make sure I could get up from a chair without leaning on the dinner table.
I think about Zen training in much the same way. What are we doing when we do zazen? I love Maezumi’s answer when Bernie asked him what we’re doing when we do walking meditation. In classic Zen fashion, Roshi answered, “When we walk, we walk.” I love the simplicity of that answer. When we do zazen, we just sit. All of our energy, all of our attention is right there. At least, that’s the idea.
But there may have been more to Bernie’s question. There’s more to my question. I am not asking about the purpose of zazen while I’m sitting on my cushion. I get it, just sit. I’m asking about the purpose of zazen the rest of the day, when I’m not on my cushion. How does zazen function in my life?
Lifting a dumbbell in the gym, all my attention is focused on the muscles that are doing the work. I’m not thinking about getting up from the table after dinner while I’m lifting. But that is why I went to the gym. Why am I sitting? When I began zazen practice regularly, I had my answer. “Without inner peace, nothing else matters; with inner peace, nothing else matters.” I was sitting because I’d caught a glimpse in Kyudo Roshi’s stillness of a pathway to inner peace, not just peace in the half-hour a day that I was on my cushion but the rest of the day.
I’d learned this lesson earlier. Before Zen, I spent seven years in psychoanalysis. At first, the best hours of my week were my therapy sessions, especially the group therapy sessions. I looked forward to those hours of escape from anxiety, but that was never the goal. The goal was to suffer less the rest of the week.
I look at my half-hour a day of zazen as my spiritual gym time. I am building spiritual muscle. I have an imagining of how it works. On the cushion, thoughts arise, and I practice letting go. As I build spiritual muscle, letting go gets easier – most days – and more importantly my capacity to face my demons, my anger and my fears, increases. I’m getting stronger, spiritually.
At first, as I began Zen practice, nothing off my cushion changed. But soon changes became noticeable. At first, others needed to point them out to me. On a supermarket line, my mother remarked that I was very patient. No one had ever before accused me of being “patient.” Could this be a result of Zen practice? I couldn’t believe it. How was it possible? But I couldn’t find any other explanation.
How could a half hour a day make a difference? It’s made a difference in my life, but some meditators don’t believe half an hour a day can really make a difference. In the Zen world, there have always been two forms of practice, monastic Zen and householder Zen. The monastics renounce family and career and dedicate their lives to spiritual exercises. They are the spiritual gym rats, working out all the time. The householders remain in the mundane world of jobs and parents and partners and children. They’re lucky to get to the gym two or three times a week. The gym rats and even some Zen teachers pity us householders. They may not be saying it, but they’re thinking I should be sitting more. I should be going to more sesshins.
I’ve always been a householder. Sitting a half hour a day is the practice that fits my householder life. I’m not sitting for the occasional taste of inner peace that I get on my cushion. Most of my day, most of my life is off the cushion. I sit for inner peace off my cushion. On my cushion. I’m building muscle. On my cushion, I learned to be less reactive. When on my cushion, seemingly from nowhere, anger arose, I learned to sit through the storm, no shouting, no cursing, no slamming doors, just continuing to sit cross-legged, breathing as my anger bubbled off. Nice, but not the end of the story. What happens the rest of the day when anger arises is more important. On the job and with the family when anger arises, if I’m strong enough, if I’ve built enough spiritual muscle, I can let that anger bubble off too. That’s householder Zen.
My householder practice is to work through the day with what’s arising and the stories which lie behind and ground the feelings, recognizing that my stories are just my stories. Often these stories have been with me all my life, hidden, forgotten, the demons locked in my closets. Opening doors, allowing my demons to breathe, I smile. As I practice, as I build spiritual muscle, I can open the doors to scarier demons. There are always more stories, more doors to open, more demons -- some who have not seen the light in years -- waiting to be befriended. The practice is endless. Sitting I am building capacity to open my doors and face my demons. As I practice, I feel the peace expanding.
As we begin to practice with our demons, we often imagine it would be nice if we could open a door and befriend a demon and be finished with that demon once and for all, but some demons with whom I’ve settled accounts have a way of returning. I’m still working with my impatience. I befriended that demon and thought that he was behind me.
But some mornings, I wake up with my mental list of writing projects and the thought that I will not live to complete them. I’m still feeling pressed for time. I smile at that demon, and old friend, but there’s a story there behind a closet door tightly closed. My demon is waiting. He’s there not just while I’m sitting on my cushion but throughout the day, writing, drinking coffee, eating my healthy breakfast of fruit and yogurt and granola, walking on the boardwalk, talking with Dee, paying bills. Even in retirement, I am sometimes still in such a hurry. I’m still building the spiritual muscle to sit still, to slow down.
There was a time when the idea of endless practice was discouraging. When I first heard Kyudo Roshi say that the Ryutakuji monks just count their breath – a preliminary practice – for seven years, I was horrified. I’d already been through my seven-year analysis. I was looking for instant inner peace, seven weeks to enlightenment or at most seven months. Now at least, the endlessness of practice is wonderful. As long as I live, as much as I practice, there is still more to learn.