Dear Friends,
There’s a koan in our tradition that goes like this:
A student asked a teacher, “When times of great difficulty visit us, how shall we greet them?”
The teacher replied: “Welcome.”
Times of unpredictability and
upheaval are not only a good time to have a meditation practice, but are actually good for a meditation practice. They drive discovery and innovation and offer a unique opportunity to become more intimate with the workings of the universe and our own minds.
As I’ve been following the coronavirus stories, I notice I’m not freaked out by it. When I hear about people lining up to get into the grocery store at 6am a little voice inside me wonders, “Am I missing something?” But then I come back because I’m burning the pancakes. In my world, mostly things are proceeding as usual, though I’m more conscious of washing my hands and touching my face and sometimes I feel like a kid who’s eagerly awaiting a snow day.
I have noticed a subtle increase in activity in that department of my mind where gloomy fantasies are spun. Wisps of imagination quietly become questions that have never before seemed like serious considerations: Should I own a gun? How defensible is my home? Do we have enough cat food? I begin to wonder if those people on Doomsday Preppers had it right after all.
In a situation like this, it’s easy to think of meditation as a nonessential activity. While it is important to make sure we have enough toilet paper and dried pasta to get us through, the capacity to be present in this moment is just as important a resource as any other. In this moment I am well, my family is well. Blue birds chirp in the tree outside my office window and at the grocery store people laugh and are generous with each other. Things might be different in the future, but right now they are not.
Nevertheless, right now it seems that the most prudent thing to do is suspend our in-person events for the time being. This includes our weekly meditation and discussion group as well as our upcoming one-day retreat on March 28th.
Times like this are also a reminder of the value of community, that our very existence depends on our connection to one another, so we will continue holding events online through the user-friendly video conferencing app Zoom. Our weekly meditation and discussion group will occur at the same time (Wednesdays, 6:30pm – 7:30pm CST), and our one-day retreat will instead be a half-day workshop on crisis as a gateway into freedom (Saturday, March 28th). Please check the events on our MeetUp page for details about how to join us online and to stay apprised of any further changes.
As always, we are member-supported. If you feel you have benefited from our programs, please take this opportunity to give us some money by clicking the PayPal button below. This ensures that we’ll be a live and kicking resource for awakening through many more crises.
As usual, if you have any questions or concerns at all, feel free to reach out at ItsAliveZen@gmail.com
Wishing you health and happiness,
Video of a talk by Jesse Cardin, Roshi about receiving dharma transmission and the magic of letting the world come to you. From PZI Winter retreat, San Rafael, CA, January 2020.
A brief dharma talk given by Jesse Cardin, Roshi, at It’s Alive! Zen’s weekly meditation group in San Antonio, Texas.
The koan:
A young woman named Chien was in love with a young woodworker, but was arranged to be married to a rich merchant. The night before the ceremony, the woodworker, heartbroken, packed his things into a boat to leave the village. As he was about to leave, Chien came running after the boat and they eloped together.
Years later, she and her lover, now married, returned home to make amends to her family for their sudden departure. Chien waited in the boat while her husband approached her father to take responsibility. Her father seemed bewildered. “What are you talking about? After the night you left, she refused to marry and has laid ill in bed ever since.” The father showed the husband to Chien’s bedroom, where she lay unconscious, pale and emaciated.
Astonished, the husband went to tell his wife of this strange happening. Right before his eyes, the Chien he had married came running from the boat where she had been waiting, and the Chien he had left behind came running from her bedroom. Running toward each other, they collided and became one.
Which is the true Chien?
A brief dharma talk given by Jesse Cardin, Sensei, at It’s Alive! Zen’s weekly meditation group in San Antonio, Texas.
The koan:
A young woman named Chien was in love with a young woodworker, but was arranged to be married to a rich merchant. The night before the ceremony, the woodworker, heartbroken, packed his things into a boat to leave the village. As he was about to leave, Chien came running after the boat and they eloped together.
Years later, she and her lover, now married, returned home to make amends to her family for their sudden departure. Chien waited in the boat while her husband approached her father to take responsibility. Her father seemed bewildered. “What are you talking about? After the night you left, she refused to marry and has laid ill in bed ever since.” The father showed the husband to Chien’s bedroom, where she lay unconscious, pale and emaciated.
Astonished, the husband went to tell his wife of this strange happening. Right before his eyes, the Chien he had married came running from the boat where she had been waiting, and the Chien he had left behind came running from her bedroom. Running toward each other, they collided and became one.
Which is the true Chien?
A brief dharma talk given by Jesse Cardin, Sensei, at It’s Alive! Zen’s weekly meditation group in San Antonio, Texas.
The koan:
The teacher said to the gathering, “If you get it the first time you hear it, you will teach the buddhas and ancestors. If you get it the second time you hear it, you will teach gods and humans. If you don’t get it till the third time you hear it, you won’t even be able to save yourself.”
A student asked, “When did you get it?”
The teacher said, “The moon sets at midnight, I walk alone through the town.”
A Brief dharma talk given by Jesse Cardin, Sensei, at It’s Alive! Zen’s weekly meditation group in San Antonio, Texas.
A brief dharma talk by Jesse Cardin, Sensei, from the It’s Alive! Zen weekly meditation group in San Antonio, Texas on 11/13/19.
“The Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by the 10,000 things. When you are awakened by the 10,000 things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.”
– Dogen Kigen
Koan: Go straight on a narrow mountain road with 99 curves.
Life is full of twists and turns and Buddhism has always been concerned with the very real question of how to navigate them. Governments that seemed stable on Monday collapse on Tuesday, leaving people with currencies that are worth no more than the paper they are printed on. Marriages fall apart seemingly without warning and babies are born at the least opportune times. There are joyful twists as well: the unexpected promotion, news of a friend’s recovery from illness, a welcome rain after months of drought. Enlightenment is like this, too: an impossible occurrence, often at the least likely time.
There is no shortage of prescriptions available for navigating these perils. Humanity is fond of making rules and principles that we hope will carry us through times of uncertainty, from moral codes to legal structures to vast religious paradigms about the creation of the universe, death, and what happens after. The architecture of the human mind knows no bounds in its complexity when trying to outsmart uncertainty.
We simply can’t help it. That’s what the mind does. But we can also notice when it runs afoul of reality. A young man with Asperger’s sees the world in purely logical terms. His reasoning is theoretically impeccable, save for one fatal flaw: he’s wrong a lot of the time. We are not so different, he and I: it’s often difficult for me to give up my theories, even when everything around me is chanting to the contrary.
Going straight can mean rigidity, but it also suggests directness, immediacy, and intimacy. Like Newton’s apple, we are drawn toward whatever matter holds our greatest gravity. When I eat a hamburger, my cat is not concerned at all with proper etiquette: he hangs his head over my shoulder, purring and meowing, and has been known to reach out an unexpected paw to snag a bit of my dinner. The heart doesn’t consult us about what it loves or hates, desires or is averse to, and there is a clarity in that.
A woman in her seventies mourns the death of her domineering husband while simultaneously celebrating the possibilities of a new life. She discovers long dormant dreams beginning to blossom, wild and inviting worlds full of poetry and imagination beckoning her from the distance. “I’m afraid,” she says, “but I am an explorer.”
We too are explorers, not that we ever asked to be, but alas: this is our lot. The question is whether we will accept the invitation to journey. To feel the dirt beneath our bare feet is to not pick and choose, to avoid avoiding what is true. We can decline the invitation to curl up in cul-de-sacs of worry and regret and lean into the turns, orienting ourselves into the full truth of our blindness about what is around the bend.
It’s Alive! Zen is a home for Zen meditation and koans in San Antonio, Texas.
The koan: Why can’t the clear-eyed bodhisattva sever the red thread?
There are so many things that bind us to this life. The bulk and weight of the body with its unwieldy wants and needs, frail and incomplete. The mind, largely hidden, capable of blindly butchering reality with the steely edge of its prejudices in one moment while birthing shining worlds of possibility the next. Emotions that wash over and through us, exhilarating and dangerous, at times urging us to act when stillness is warranted or to lie stagnant when movement would heal. Connection with others and the world alternately comforts and frightens and dizzies in ways that no language can fully convey.
The human is fundamentally a joyous animal, reveling in the rush and release of activity and rest, consumption and elimination, equipped from the start with a magnificent capacity for receiving the world’s bounty. But beneath the refinements of the prefrontal cortex lives a creature whose belly still scrapes the earth as it moves. Despite countless generations’ attempts at domestication, at the core the body remains feral. It can be unpredictable, uncouth, and at times brutally violent yet is simultaneously honest, guileless, and innocent.
There is an impulse to flee these bewildering contradictions, whether by ascension into the purity and freedom of spirit or complete fusion with the insatiable appetites of the soul, yet to be consumed by one at the exclusion of the other is to beg the gods for catastrophe. Thus we are travelers through light and dark, making our clumsy way through the confused brambles of a life we cannot hope to understand. While bursting into meadows of clarity brings exalted relief, perhaps the greatest life is the one that comes to love the animal because it bleeds.
Questions
- What does being “clear-eyed” mean for you?
- What does the color red symbolize for you?
- What is something “red” in your life that you have tried unsuccessfully to rid yourself of? How do you imagine your life would be different if you got rid of it?
- Can you be “clear-eyed” while still being attached to this “red” thing?
- What is something “red” in your life that you appreciate? How do you benefit from being connected to it?
It’s Alive! Zen is a home for Zen meditation and koans in San Antonio, Texas
The priest Xiangyan said, “It is as though you were up in a tree, hanging from a branch with your teeth. Your hands and feet can’t touch any branch. Someone appears beneath the tree and asks, ‘What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West?’ If you do not answer, you evade your responsibility. If you do answer, you lose your life. What do you do?”
Life is fundamentally fraught. To open our mouth is to invite argument and to make any decision is to risk regret. To take a step in any direction is to put our life – or at our least ego – in danger.
Day in and out, we are nibbled or gnawed at by crises large and small. A trauma survivor agonizes over the question of how, and whether, to put words to her experiences. A professional struggles to decide between the stability of the job she hates or the risk of plunging into an exciting new career field. A dear friend asks if you like his appalling new haircut.
Crises are agents of transformation. They present the possibility of new life, but like all changes worth making they also bear the dangers of the unknown. In order to step into this new life, we must wager safety and familiarity for the prospect of freedom. One woman described it like this:
“I grew up around water. We were always going to the beach, going to the lake, always swimming. But right now I feel like I’ve swum out too far. I’m on a sandbar so I’m safe for the moment, but I don’t think I have the strength to swim back to shore and I’m afraid to go any further.”
If we are in a place like this, it means that something deep within us has shifted and cannot be put back. There is no way to un-know what we have discovered or undo what has been done, yet we also may feel we lack the strength or skill to carry out the tasks that lie ahead. Sometimes movement is impossible and all we can do is wait for a door to appear.
It is tempting to refuse a crisis because the tension they generate can seem unbearable. Our thoughts appear racing and confused, or abandon us completely, and we become inhabited by emotions that are seemingly at odds with each other and reality. We might attempt to return to familiar ways of being, swimming backward only to find that the shore recedes from us. We can try to slip through unnoticed by wearing a mask of nonchalance or create a smoke screen of chaos to distract from the situation. But there is something reassuringly inevitable about a crisis–even if we do not face it this time, it will call again and again with different faces until we no longer refuse to greet it.
I recently had a dilemma. A contractor we hired to repair some rotted siding on our house broke a few unrelated (and rather expensive) things in the process. For weeks, we were locked in a cold war of suspicion and accusation via text message and heated phone calls, arguing about responsibility and reparations.
My default strategy in situations like this is to accept, forgive, and avoid conflict at all costs, but when I groped for my trusty playbook I instead found defensiveness, suspicion, and self-righteous anger. Over the course of several days, I watched myself vacillate wildly between various positions in the argument. I would entertain revenge fantasies, then sympathize with the contractor, then feel desperate to pay him just so it would all be over, all in the span of an hour.
In the end, it all worked out fine. We got new siding, the contractor got his check, and what needed to get fixed got fixed. But in a way, the most important thing about a crisis is not whether the outcome is in our favor, but how sincerely we have inhabited our experience of the situation as it unfolds.
How we respond to our inevitable difficulties is a reflection of who we think we are, and in some way informs how life will respond to us. While there is nothing wrong with trying to prevent, avoid, outsmart, deny, escape, ignore, con, bully or buy our way out of a crisis, we starve some part of us when we do. If we make a habit of this, we become like an aging Pinocchio, not quite real because we haven’t done the soul-making work that occurs when we are forced to confront the depths of our own life.
There seems to be a correlation between our capacity for joy and our ability to be present with the pains that come with being human, and meditation is a way of increasing both. And so while most of us come to Zen in the hopes of having more moments of peace or wisdom or great compassion, we come to value the times where we cannot seem to find any resolution at all. Like figuring out how to end a blog post.
Some questions, if you’re interested:
1. What is a dilemma or crisis right now, in your life, that just won’t seem to resolve? If you take a few minutes to imagine it in detail, what sensations do you feel in your body? Just notice that.
2. Do you tend to favor one position or the other, keeping your mouth shut to save your skin or speaking to help someone else? What might be a way to experiment with the other side?
3. What is your Big Question that can’t be answered simply or easily? What is it like to live inside that question without knowing the answer?
4. Has speaking about this matter caused me to fall to my death? If it has, would you be willing to tell me?
Photo Credit: Person on the dock photo by Byron Young.
It’s Alive! Zen is a home for Zen meditation and koans in San Antonio, Texas