Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Tag: Suzuki Roshi

  • living into what cannot be solved

    living into what cannot be solved

    Mindfulness allows us to live into all that cannot be solved. It’s also a gateway to equanimity, the peace of the present moment.

    The other day, I listened to a podcast of an interview with Frank Osteseki, who is a pioneer in end-of-life care, founding in 1987 the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in the USA.

    He has trained countless caregivers in how to provide compassionate care for those facing life-threatening illness. There was one line Frank used in that interview that struck me.

    Reflecting on current events, Frank remarked:

    We are developing the capacity to bear witness to that which cannot be solved but can be lived into.

    Frank Ostaseski: Lessons to the Living from the Dying

    I often get anxious and go round in circles in my head, trying to solve or deal with some question or problem.

    Will Bird Flu explode into Pandemic 2.0? Will a certain former USA president be re-elected? (typing this last line, I feel my blood pressure spiking.) 

    But listening to Frank I’m reminded we can hold our seat in the unknown, live into our deepest fears, and get to a good place. Most of what comes at us day after day cannot be solved, but it can be lived into, as Frank put it.

    But just how do I do this? How can I be “equanimous”?

    In Buddhism, there is a lot of teaching on “equanimity.” I struggled for years trying to “be equanimous” with my many life struggles. It took me a long time to realize that equanimity is not some fantastic chilled out mental state I might eventually experience in the future. 

    It’s actually right here, right now.

    The some-day-to-be-attained cooled-out space is actually already here; it’s just this regular, ordinary awareness reading this line right now.

    That’s cazy good news.

    curiosity and openness

    Sure, Frank was talking about training healthcare workers how to care for the dying. But he’s also talking about how to meet our own death, and how we can train ourselves to meet any moment in this unrepeatable life of ours, with curiosity and openness. 

    Even in the throes of the most distressing morning we can relish what the poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer describes as the

    great and beautiful secret of meditation practice: you can experience suffering with equanimity.

    Suffering Opens The Real Path

    There is a Zen story that talks about being open and curious I love very much (from the collection: The Book Of Equanimity, Case 20):

    The monk Fayan was going on pilgrimage.
    Master Dizang asked, “Where are you going?”
    Fayan said, “On pilgrimage.”
    Dizang asked, “What sort of thing is pilgrimage?”
    Fayan said: “I don’t know.”
    Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
    Fayan suddenly had a great awakening.

    So this 13th century Chinese monk goes on a pilgrimage, and when asked why he was doing this by a master he is visiting, suddenly realizes he doesn’t really know why. The teacher gives him a high five, encouraging him to stay open and curious:

    Not knowing is most intimate.

    This simple quality of not-knowing allows intimacy, goes the teaching. When we fully open to our not-knowing mind, there’s curiosity and openness.

    This intimacy is available right here, right now as your ordinary awareness reading this. The peace of the present moment, this cooled out space, is hiding in plain sight!

    beginner’s mind

    Suzuki Roshi never tired of teaching about what he called beginner’s mind– which is just another way to describe this ordinary awareness of ours:

    If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

    With the freshness of this not-knowing mind, this beginner’s mind, this always available ordinary awareness of ours, we experience others more intimately.

    listening more deeply.

    To be with another person in this way we are open to listening more deeply, as the poet Rilke teachers us here:

    Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys.

    For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

    Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

    Be well, dear reader.

  • this is why we meditate

    this is why we meditate

    In the present moment we discover a spontaneity beyond time, where there is no aging, no measuring, no comparing to what was, and no worry about what will be.

    Perhaps I get a little carried away with Buddhist contemplation?

    I mean, just the other day I felt compelled to pull over while driving to ponder whether in light of the radical teachings of impermanence, do I continue along as usual, making coffee, going to work and streaming my shows when I get home?

    Perhaps I am ruminating on mortality as I recently had a birthday?

    Aging. It kind of sneaked up on me.

    Am I old? Well, according to John Shoven, a professor at Stanford University, someone age 65 is now considered old. No wonder so many nurses at work ask me when I am retiring.

    I guess I am officially old at 68.

    Woody Allen once remarked about his own mortality:

    I don’t want to live on in the hearts of others. I want to live on in my apartment.

    We know we are going to die. It’s only a question of when. Yet we console ourselves we have lots of time, much of which is spent planning on some better version of now.

    Christopher Titmus recently gave a talk in which he quipped,

    Taking an exam in chemistry is a picnic compared to taking chemotherapy.

    Ulla-Carin Lindquist, at the height of a successful career as a newscaster in Sweden, was diagnosed with ALS. She kept of journal of her few years, published as Rowing Without Oars: A Memoir of Living and Dying, in which she wrote:

    There is no bright future for me, but there is a bright present.

    Reflecting on her line, I suspect life itself let her in on a little secret–that her mortality is not a problem to be solved, but a “brightness” disclosing itself right here, right now, in the present moment.

    Even though I started studying Buddhism when I was 22, the depth of the teachings is really hitting me much deeper now. I appreciate aging as at the heart of the Buddha’s message.

    Suzuki Roshi, whose talks in the 1960s became the classic book Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, taught that each breath was like a whole life, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

    And that each exhale is a kind of dying.

    In our practice, we especially get to know our out-breath, fading into a “sheet of white paper” as Suzuki Roshi described it. To which his student Mel Weitsman adds,

    When the moment of death comes, our last breath is familiar and comfortable. There is no need to be afraid.

    As we journey through the pages of our human story, our practice encourages us to be softer, more vulnerable, more caring, and loving.

    And to flow with change.

    In the present moment we discover a spontaneity beyond time, where there is no aging, no measuring, no comparing to what was, and no worry about what will be.

    Ulla-Carin Lindquist, suffering from a terminal illness, was spot on:

    There is no bright future… but there is a bright present.

    This is freedom. This is love. This is peace.

    This is why we meditate.

  • the most important thing

    the most important thing

    This meditation is a self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.

    Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, the pioneering Zen teacher from Japan who founded the Zen Center of San Francisco in 1969:

    “Roshi, what’s the most important thing?” and he answered:

    To find out what’s the most important thing.

    Byron Katie, who teaches a practice called self-inquiry, said that the world’s number one problem is confusion. As we hang in there with meditation practice, week after week, a little clarity starts to emerge.

    The most important thing that brought us to the meditation cushion may not seem so important as we progress. We may have signed up to get an edge in academia or our social life, maybe to find a group to hang out with.

    After a while, it sinks in: meditation is not self improvement, it’s self-discovery. It’s more about undoing and unlearning conditioned habits rather than getting some special meditation goodies.

    We all just want to be happy and feel at home in our own lives

    And to feel a connection with the world and other beings. 

    But, as the song goes, we are looking in all the wrong places. By habitually looking outside of our skin for fulfillment and happiness, we struggle.

    So many of the voices we listen to- both in our own head and outside, through the media, lead us on a long walk on the hedonic treadmill Buddhists call samsara.

    But one day we have this marvelous insight: We already have what we need.

    This meditation is a self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.

    As one of my teachers Sharon Salzberg says:

    We learn not to get caught in trying to reach out and grasp after things we never really needed to begin with.

    The Healing Is In The Return

    Along these lines, the poet Rumi asks:

    How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones?
    Let the world go.
    Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne.

    Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around so we can be airborne and travel lightly in this world.

    This letting go can be subtle, nuanced. We usually associate letting go as letting go of something. But as the teacher Gil Fronsdal points out, there is a complimentary movement here. 

    With enough practice we appreciate the story doesn’t end with letting go: we discover we are letting go of something but we also are letting go into something else.

    Gil Fronsdal offers this metaphor: a diver lets go of the diving board the seconds later dives into the cool water of the pool, much as we let go of impatience then seconds later relaxing into a feeling of ease.

    If we find ourselves gripped in panic or fear, we learn to let go into the felt safety of relaxation. 

    We eventually get how much nicer it is to relax into our natural, free and easy being-ness than it is to struggle with something.

    But if we haven’t tasted this free-and-easy being-ness, it’s a hard sell to the psyche.

    You’ll know the sweet taste of being-ness by accidentally stumbling upon it in your practice. You can’t make this happen on purpose. You just need to meditate every day and hang in there. 

    Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough. Nothing missing or lacking, as the Zen teachers of old would say.

    Every moment is appreciated as profound and meaningful.