Practice isn't just sitting; nor is it just form.
Practice is what happens in your head while you're out living.
This truth may be a little more accessible to hermits, who seldom congregate for zazen, and whose indulgence in other forms is necessarily spare and simplified. But the stuff you do at Zen centre, while valuable and worthwhile, is only a rehearsal for practice.
The actual practice begins when you leave the zendo.
Or the cushion, for free-range monks like me.
(Photo courtesy of Petr Sidorov and Unsplash.com.)
It's been a long time since I had a dramatic sit – the thing Zenners call kensho. This is mostly down to lifestyle constraints that have made practice scattered in recent years, as well as the fact that I've been doing this for 22 years. (After the first few, your brain acclimates to the meditative state, becoming simultaneously more inured to and less precious about it.)
Which is why the other night thrilled me as I've seldom been since those early days.
The set-up was predictable: I'd had an opportunity to sit regularly and deeply for several days, and also to sit outdoors, in a quiet, rural setting, which is always productive for me.
If the sea is also involved, so much the better, result no doubt of a lifetime as a bay boy, itself the product of my family's centuries-deep maritime tradition. And as it happens, I was sitting on a bluff over a particularly active passage – a narrow channel where the tide runs like a river, during a week of deep, still summer nights. But on the last one the temperature plummeted, a storm blew up, and I found myself sitting at midnight in a tearing wind, bundled to the chin. Still didn't help my hands, frozen in dhyana mudra.
I did this because I'm a macho Japanese-trained Zen hermit, determined to log half an hour of pointless suffering to prove my monastic manhood.
But that's not what happened.
Instead, my mind spent about twenty minutes (I imagine; could have been ten, might have been 50) confronting the gale, complaining about the cold, starting at alarming sounds soft and loud in the dark around me.
And then I slipped into The Zone.
My mind settled into an equanimous hum. My consciousness assumed high alert, a sort of excitement that's neither fear nor expectation, just… receiver-on. I thought nothing, but noted everything. The gusts iced my face, roared in my ears, yanked my clothes, tore branches off the huge firs around me, and I neither defied nor surrendered to any of it.
The storm, the night, the planet, and I, just, like, were.
It's been a long time since I saw that place.
Why I did that night, in that location, is an open question. Certainly, I was awash in 190-proof oxygen; the stuff was practically forcing itself into my lungs. And the very fact that the storm was an unremitting distraction probably made it a trigger; the symbiotic relationship between concentration and disruption being well-documented in Zen.
(This would be a good time to remind fellow seekers that your meditation practice is your own and so are the results. The cushion stories of others can infamously cue feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction, leading some to conclude they're no good at practice or not doing it right or using the wrong incense or whatever. If my account inspires you to go sit in a windstorm, and the result is nothing more than a head cold, you might just have more common sense than I do.)
But one way or the other, I took delivery. Thanks for the encouraging experience. On to the next.
(A Storm Off The Normandy Coast, by Eugène Isabey, courtesy of The Eugene Victor Thaw Art Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wikimedia Commons.)
(Cornu aspersum,
the brown garden snail. Originally imported to the North Coast from Europe to be eaten as escargot; now it's eating us.)
Appearing also on
My Corner of the World.
Practice isn't just sitting; nor is it just form.
