In It for the Long Haul

"As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything 

within and without becomes clear to us.”

-- Zen Teacher Norman Fischer

 

 “Be still.  Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity.
When there is silence one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself.”
― Lao Tzu

In the midst of the scurry of the past couple of weeks, I was especially aware of how precious each morning's meditation was to me.  

 

Sitting here at this aging MacBook Pro,  I take a long, deep conscious breath.  Feet firmly on the floor, sitting relatively erect, I take a full conscious breath.  My belly expands, then my rib cage.  Then, as I continue to inhale, my attention rises to my heart center -- and my awareness expands beyond the sensations in my body into the gracious spaciousness of Open Awareness.  

 

Here, I rest in the still, silent, expansive presence of the present moment.

 

Breath continues to breathe. Bodily sensations arise.  Eyes see.  Ears hear.  Thoughts emerge.  My fingers tap dance on the keyboard.   Letters appear on the screen.  I return to my breath, the sensations of my body and senses.  The spacious silence that exists within each moment reappears.

 

In my mind's eye, an image emerges.  I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  At age 80, I have now entered my ninth decade of life on this planet.  (Yikes.  I feel even older conceptualizing it like that.  I best just settle in with saying that I'm 80 years old. LOL)  

 

However I choose to hold it in my mind, it's clear that in the long haul of human life, I'm somewhere in the final lap.  I've got more many more yesterdays in my pockets than tomorrows.   I know that I'm not getting out of here alive.  

 

Taking another full, conscious breath, continuing to relax into an open-hearted presence, the tunnel and the light dissolve into the clear, expansive, luminous brilliance that is beyond endings and beginnings.  I'm at peace.

 

Once again, I know.  Home is where the Heart is.

 

Touching this silent stillness, even for a few brief moments, is like feeling the warm glow of a fireplace, snuggling at home on a snowy evening peering through the window at the moon.  Paradoxically, touching this silent stillness is also like sipping clear, crisp spring water on a steamy summer day.  In Stillness, a Presence emerges.  In a silent whisper, it sings of the Ineffable, an infinite space where the fundamentally mysterious and completely ordinary meet to form the fabric of Life itself.  

Simply Sitting Still

 

Although I use a variety of meditation techniques, have an active prayer life, and practice a set of daily spiritual rituals, the foundation of my personal practice for decades has been shikantaza.  I simply sit still with what Zen teacher Norman Fischer calls "the basic feeling of being alive."   (An article on Shikantaza by Suzuki Roshi)

 

Sometimes, it may take awhile for the dust to settle.  Yet, often enough, I can Simply Sit Still and allow the restless energy embedded in my body and mind to dissipate.  I can relax into the embrace of the expansive spaciousness of what contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls the Eternal Now.  Resting in the spaciousness of open awareness, a subtle, yet very real, healing emerges.

 

Of course, this is often easier said than done.

Conditioned as we are in this society, our attention is usually drawn into the thoughts, images, memories, and daydreams cascading through our mind.  Rather than sitting still, observing the experience of the present moment with a relaxed open gaze, we find ourselves lost in thoughts and images of the future or the past.  

Yet, the moment I simply notice this, a moment of Practice emerges.  If that noticing is precise, clear, open, calm, and non-judgmental, I have engaged Mindfulness.  It is a qualitatively different mode of consciousness.  There I approach the Gateless Gate to our True Nature.

At times, it is just that simple.  Yet, simple doesn't necessarily mean easy.   

 

Why?

Without Practice, moment to moment, how we experience our lives, is mostly just a bad habit.  The way we see and react to our experience, is primarily a result of our conditioning.  Thoughts and feelings arise, unbidden, to dominate our attention.  Most the time, we don't choose to think what we are thinking or to feel what we are feeling.  It just bubbles up from our subconscious.  

 

Without a conscious commitment to put in the time and effort to discover what so often remains beneath the threshold of our awareness, we are held in bondage by our past.   Creatures of habit, we are likely to create a future that contains the same old, same old.  We continue to experience the suffering that characterizes much of the human condition.   

 

Thankfully, there is Practice.

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Body of Wisdom

 “Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. 
Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.”

― Thích Nhat Hạnh, Being Peace

"When you listen to your body in this way, you can also feel that it’s the Earth’s body. Its bones are made of Earth minerals, calcium and magnesium, and there is seawater in your blood. Your body is everything you eat. It’s not just your body but part of something bigger: you are the Earth come alive."

-- Jack Kornfield

Reverend Gyomay Kubose (1905 - 2000)

When I observed my first Zen teacher dry mopping the wooden floor of the Zendo at the Buddhist Temple of Chicago years ago, I was awestruck.  

 

I hadn't seen anything like it before. 

There was a simple grace in his bearing, a Presence in his slow mindful steps that was astonishing. 

It was obvious to me that Reverend Gyomay Kubose, in his 70's at the time, was connected to his body, to the smooth wooden floors of the Buddhist Temple of Chicago -- and to Life itself -- in an entirely different way. 

 

Embodied Practice

The first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Body, is a concept that stretches back to the earliest texts of Buddhism.  The Anapanasati and Maha Satipathana Suttas spell out the details of meditative techniques which have been widely taught for about 2,500 years.  In these teachings, the development of a fuller awareness of our bodies is seen as a means of cultivating a calmer and clearer sense of the entire realm of our own experience.  

Beginning with focusing our attention on the process of breathing, attention can be directed in a number of ways to more fully experience our embodied existence.  As Mindfulness Practice deepens and we become more fully present to what we are experiencing on deeper and subtler levels, Reality asserts itself.

At a certain point, the Real Deal becomes self-evident.  
 

Getting From There to Here

Conditioned as we are, most of us are "in our heads" most of the time.  Although we are always breathing, and our bodies and our sensory apparatus are operating to generate a whole realm of experiences, most of this occurs without our conscious awareness.  Generally, conditioned as we are, the focus of our attention is primarily captured by the thoughts running through our head.

Fueled by emotional energies, subconscious beliefs, and conditioned filters, these thoughts dominate our attention in a way that sweeps us along the stream of our own conditioned ego patterns more often than not.  Mindfulness Practice, both on and off the meditation cushion, offers us a means to  expand our range of awareness to include a universe of experience that we generally aren't aware of.  Without Practice we are liable to "sleepwalk,"only half-awake,  throughout our lives. 

Reverend Kubose, most definitely, was not sleepwalking that day.  He was awake to the present moment, to the Oneness of Life Itself. 
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When It Rains

"The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to face...When we want to complain about the rain, we could feel it's wetness instead."

-- Pema Chodron

“The best thing one can do when it is raining is to let it rain. ” 

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When it rains, it pours...

It seems that Mother Nature saved our April showers for the second week of May this year.  Helping to alleviate the Northeast's drought conditions, Her showers reigned for days and days. 

We got Drizzled upon. Misted. Doused. Drenched.  

The flowers loved it.  So did I.

This wasn't always the case.  

There was a time that "rainy days and Monday's would always get me down."  Prone to bouts of depression, primarily propelled by the unexplored grief of a traumatic childhood, I'd invariably cloud up on gray days, and rain on my own parade. 

Nowadays, I find gray days and stormy weather both comforting and energizing.  It is always a chance to get real.

Whether it's an overcast sky, a soft foggy drizzle, a thunder-booming rip-snorting whizzbanger -- or anything in-between --  once I remember to just be present for the actual experience, there is something immensely alive and vibrant about rainy days.  Dancing beyond our ability to control it, Mother Nature just is.  She will just do what she will do -- no matter how we think or feel about it.  

So, why not relax and dig it!? 

At this very moment

I feel a lot of gratitude for Mindfulness Practice.

As I sit here with fingers dancing across the keyboard, I see the sun finally emerging to play hide and seek with the storm clouds. Through the open window, I hear the wind singing in the trees, a collection of birds twittering, the pulsating surf of tires hissing along the rain-slickened asphalt of High Street here in Greenfield, MA.

Pausing, letting go for a moment of "thinking mind," I'm aware of my breath and the sensations of my body sitting here.  I feel the wind dancing across my skin through that same open window.  The sounds ebb and flow.  The sensations ebb and flow. 

Life is like that, too.  
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Sad But True

This world - 
absolutely pure
As is. 
Behind the fear,

Vulnerability. 
Behind that,
Sadness, 
then compassion
And behind that the vast sky.

 --Rick Fields

 “When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.”
― Pema Chödrön

Sometimes, insight and healing emerge slowly during the course of our lives. 

Like spring unfolding across the palette of April and May, our Practice deepens.  Green shoots appear.  Buds open.  What was tan, stark, and frigid, gradually brightens, softens, and warms. 

Then, at a certain point, we notice.  It's different now than it was before.  Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. 

At other times, Zap! Insight and Healing emerge like a bolt of lightning.

Sometimes, this Peak Experience bursts forth with a torrential downpour of tears. Sometimes not. Yet, in that moment, we experience a Grand Gestalt.  There is Crystalline Clarity.  We really get It!  Or perhaps -- more accurately-- It gets us! 

In a flash, everything has changed, but nothing has changed.  Yet, it is different now than it was before.

The Genuine Heart of Sadness

Years ago, I had the good fortunate to stop by Himalayan Views, a nearby spiritual bookstore and gift store, to hear a woman describe one of those moments.  She was sitting in the back reading area of the store, and as is often the case, I made the effort to smile and say hello.  (A childhood rebel, I never agreed with "don't talk to strangers.")  Soon, I found myself chatting with her about the book she was reading.  Soon, she and I were comparing notes on our lives and spiritual practice.  

Her eyes were clear and kind.  Her voice was gentle, yet powerful, as she shared her story.  

She was in her mid-thirties at the time of her Awakening.   Suffering from what had been diagnosed as "clinical depression," medicated since early adolescence, she had come across a book of Pema Chodron's teachings.  Page by page, she was drawn  into an deepening awareness of a truth she felt she had always known.  It was a truth she had never had from the people around her.

 

Then, when she read of what Pema's teacher, Chogyam Trungpa had called "the genuine heart of sadness," in a flash, Reality asserted itself.

Zap!

At that very moment, She knew. 
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