In the beginning of January, I committed myself to attending my first 7-day Sesshin, or Zen Buddhist meditation retreat. Throughout 2020, I had felt the need to deepen my practice. This was a culmination of 15 years of meditation practice with sporadic individual and group practice. I started practicing while living in Cleveland after reading The Three Pillars of Zen, an introduction to Zen written by the founder of the Rochester Zen Center. I’ve also sat with groups in Savannah, GA, Portland, Oregon, and finally settling to Louisville where I’ve been a member of the Louisville Zen Center for the past 2 years). My desire to deepen my practice was also spurred by the acute suffering of millions across the country and the world caused by COVID, racial injustice and political malfeasance in the past year (and beyond). For most of my life, I’ve also felt the deep instinctual call to help others in need, from being a peer mediator in middle school, leading a contemplative retreat in high school, working in Residence Life in college, volunteering two years of my post-graduate life to tutor at-risk elementary students, volunteering in the Red Cross Relief effort after Hurricane Katrina, working in a Level One Trauma Unit helping patients and the families of patients in times of crisis to now seeking to become a spiritual guide/companion for those in need of someone to be present with them through deep listening to help them along their spiritual path. I am now looking to apply to the low residency Interfaith/Interspiritual Spiritual Guidance Training & Certificate Program at the SGTI in Chicago to take my practice even further to help others.
This sesshin started on Friday evening and lasted through the following Friday morning. Saturday and Sunday, I sat full time. This consisted of 4 blocks of sitting from six in the morning until nine thirty at night. Because this was an online sesshin, ample breaks were provided for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. During the work week, I sat for two blocks (six to eight in the morning and seven to nine thirty in the evening). Each block consisted of between four or five 35-minute rounds of zazen (meditation). Between each round of meditation there was a 5-minute kinhin (walking meditation) round to (thankfully) allow your legs to get some movement in them while still maintaining the meditative state of awareness of breath and surroundings. While I had done all-day sittings three times before in my 15 years of sitting, this would be my first 7-day sesshin. The set up for this online sesshin (and all our other daily sittings) was to have my laptop sitting next to me at three to four o’clock, that way the monitor (or person assigned to keep time, ring bells, check on people sitting, make announcements) could see you. We could also see everyone else when turning to face the screen to bow at the end of block. Even though I did it part time, I still found it invaluable for the insights it provided. Below is a day-by-day diary of notes I took from my experience, with some explanation added.
Day 1, Friday Evening:
The noise of the keisaku stick (also known as the encouragement stick) reverberating in a mostly empty meditation hall sounds like gunshots. I almost jump off of my mat and look around to the laptop to make sure everyone is ok. It’s interesting that, on my first night of the retreat, the first place my mind goes when hearing this sound is to imagine that some criminal has broken into the meditation hall where the permanent residents of the zen center are participating in the remote sesshin and opened fire. I also wonder if they’ve employed a former baseball player to be the one wielding the keisaku. A short note about this stick. For the first eleven years of my practice, I avoided it. Halfway through sitting, in the Rochester Zen Center tradition, the monitor gets up and goes to the Buddha altar to get the stick. The monitor then walks around the zendo (meditation room or hall) and if the meditator so desires, raises their arms palm to palm in a silent request for the stick. The monitor then gently taps the meditator on the shoulder with the stick, the meditator lowers their arms and the monitor then places two precise whacks on the area between the shoulder blade and the spine. These hit an acupressure point in this area that helps relieve tension and invigorate the mind at the same time. It is helpful to request this if your mind is wandering a bit too much or if you are tired halfway through the sitting block. There always seem to be much hesitation with newcomers around the stick. I mean, it took me 11 years to try it. In its defense, I was a bit of a nomad during those eleven years, bouncing around the country with no zendo to call home for most of it. We live in a culture of fear and anxiety in America, where we view strangers and strange things with suspicion and doubt, allowing our imaginations to go to dark places, quickly placing judgement and ruling things out without contemplation. So, it is understandable that one might dispel the encouragement stick as some form of corporal punishment brought over from a rigid Japanese monastic experience. All I can tell you is from personal experience; it is welcome! Have your partner or friend press their thumbs in that always-so-tense area between the spine and the shoulder blade and tell me that’s not a welcome relief! Besides sitting side-by-side with my fellow practitioners in the zendo and the energy it brings to one’s meditation practice, the stick is something I sorely missed. For further reading, another great explanation of this encouragement stick can be found here
Saturday and Sunday:
Pain, lots of pain. My knees and legs are not used to sitting cross legged this long. Even with kinhin and the meal breaks, my mind goes directly to the pain I experience. During dokusan, mentioning the pain gets me the answer of “go back to the breath” from Roshi. I immediately interall scoff at this suggestion. I want relief, not a simple “follow my breath” suggestion. But over time, sticking to the plan, the pain slowly dissipates towards the end of Sunday’s sittings. It can be discouraging to not hear what you want to hear, but if you maintain discipline in a practice and push through adversity, the rewards on the other side is well deserved. Besides, the body is but a temporary nuisance while sitting. The true dragon to slay is the incessant rabbit holes of the mind stealing one away from the awareness of the breath and the insightful calm that comes with pure practice.
It should be noted for new meditators, that pain is normal when first starting a practice. Usually, you’ll feel it in your shoulders, lower back and/or legs or knees. This goes away in time as you build up your practice. Meditation is a sport in that the more you do it, the better you get, unless you are me playing soccer in high school. The only time to change positions is if and when the pain becomes an unbearable distraction or immediately if you feel any sharp pain. I encourage everyone to first take an intro to meditation before starting a practice. Just as with any new sport or activity, getting some professional training is encouraged. You can also reach out to me personally and I would be happy to walk you through setting up a daily practice. Feel free to reach me on my Contact Form at the bottom of my homepage.
Monday:
The transition from meditating all weekend and for the first two hours after waking to signing into work can only be described as what an alien might feel like stepping onto a foreign planet. I had to work on some Salesforce training and watching scripted videos with all the business-speak tropes flying at my ears and eyes made me question what planet I had stepped back upon. There was definitely a reason why sesshins normally (outside of a pandemic) take place in a meditation center where you stay full time for the entire experience with no contact with the outside world. The abrupt transition at eight o’clock sharp was, well, very sharp!
The monitor announcing when to go to dokusan (one-on-one teaching with Roshi, the leader of the Zen center) should record audiobooks. I also want them to read me a bedtime story.
As noted above about hearing the encouragement stick, the audio is left on for the meditation hall where a handful of practitioners meditate. This hall, or zendo, is usually full of 70+ people. I cringe at the echoing of the participants coughing and sneezing and am thankful that this is an online sesshin. The pandemic puts a lot of our previously normal day-to-day activities in a new light and I question whether I could do an in-person retreat like this in the future given the past year’s events. The good thing about this particular event is that the in-person participants at the zendo have been quarantining together, so I am not so worried about their health as I am projecting my own fears of being around others during the pandemic. I could write a whole other blog post about trust in the post-pandemic world.
Tuesday:
Anger – Two types of volcano – You can choose to let feelings of anger build unhealthily until it violently explodes like a volcano eruption or ooze out your feelings over time slowly like magma crossing the fields building new land on which to grow.
Body and Mind – Body is a vessel – a ship. Think of the 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria in your body making it all function. The mind only temporarily occupies the body. All that we perceive is capital “M” Mind (Western scholars who know of Carl Jung would also describe this as Collective Unconsciousness though Mind in Zen encapsulates all things in the Universe and beyond, not just humanity). Our ego is lowercase “m” mind. When we die our body-mind is lost and we return to Mind. This insight may beg for more explanation. I spent over an hour discussing this with my wife a few months ago and it ended in frustration. However, this is one of those things you must experience viscerally rather than intellectualizing. This comes from your sitting practice.
Wednesday:
In the morning sitting hours, I wrote in my notebook, “Reading books about the path is like pointing to the moon – the books are the finger, the moon is experience through sitting zazen.” The previous Tuesday note is a good example of this. It is great to read books as a primer, for motivation and for guideposts along the path, but you must put each foot in front of the other each day by following the breath in meditation practice to get anywhere.
I am pretty convinced that the spot on the molding on the wall in front me has moved over the past several days. I am seriously considering getting the tape measure to scientifically confirm this before the retreat is over.
If all our perceptions are illusion, then what is there to hold onto? The breath is what we hold onto. Breath is the practice, and we are aware of the breath as we let everything pass through our minds like leaves on a stream.
I have had a vision since my early twenties of myself on a forested path aiming to get to a distant mountaintop. Much like the Mount Analogue. For the longest time in my twenties and thirties, I felt as though the path simply melted in this forest, obscuring not only the way forward, but also the mountain peak that was my goal. Towards the end of the retreat, I found that I had come through this forest to a clearing. I once again could see the mountaintop, but I also discovered a cave just off the path. The cave entrance was the color of the darkest void. I was at the same time scared to deviate from the path to enter the cave as I was excited to see where it would lead. I was afraid of the unknown, of losing the way I had built up myself to believe was the right direction. But what was the previous destination? The mountaintop? I was foolish to believe that the destination was the goal when the journey itself was the destination. In some small way, I believed reaching the top of the mountain of my life would cease all struggle. Peace would be perpetually achieved as I rested on the highest of most high laurels in some sort of eternal stasis, neglecting, in my youth, the ancient dictum “Life is Impermanence.”
Thursday:
I’ve finally learned the location of all the creaky parts of our upstairs floor(s), having got up at 5:15am each morning for the past 6 days and having done kinhin (walking meditation) in the office between rounds of sitting.
I am no longer afraid of death. Woah, even reading these notes now, I know that’s a heavy random statement. It begs some sort of lengthy explanation, but as I’ve said before, it comes down to experiential knowledge and is something you and I need to experience through deep meditation. I’ll let this quote from the Buddha try and express some meaning here:
"You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?"
Don't get me wrong, I am seriously fearful of pain of all kinds. I often wonder if the pain in my side is from sitting in my office chair too long or some weird disease rearing its ugly head. I am also terribly afraid of losing my loved ones and pain and feel the pain and suffering of others in this world. However, when it comes to this body-mind aging, decaying over time, finally returning to star stuff, I am at peace with that process just as I am with taking in a breath and letting out a breath. It's another process of life and I can rest easy in the interconnectedness of all things.
Day 7, Friday morning:
Zen is the raw diet of practice: you see it, you eat it. Very little preparation (getting the body aligned on the zabuton (mat) and zafu (round cushion) and pure awareness experience. Zen is a practice more than it is a religion. It is the most secular sect of Buddhism, focusing primarily on zazen meditation and little else.
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed my experience at this sesshin. My practice deepened significantly during the retreat, and I feel like the insights I realized will last me for the rest of my life. Roshi talked about how there was a particular flow in most sesshins where the first two days or so are very difficult physically. I was nervous to attend sesshin for this very reason, but continuing to persevere in following the breath was the key to success in this retreat. Above all, in our ever day existence, this holds true as well. Whether you are a seasoned meditator or someone just starting a practice, hold onto your breath with full awareness and consistency.
May you be held in compassion,
May your pain and suffering be eased,
May you be at peace.