Friends!

https://emptysqua.re/blog/speak-up-if-youre-stuck-in-a-zazen-rut/

Certain topics seem off-limits in Zen, like: What’s the goal of meditation? How do I get better at it? What is everyone else experiencing when they sit? I spoke at the New Paltz Zen Center about getting stuck at a plateau in meditation skill, and about Zen communities’ reluctance to discuss peak experiences, progress, and goals. Here’s the video and a written version of the talk.

There’s a lot we don’t talk about in Zen.

In my experience, we hardly ever talk about what our daily zazen is like. What’s it usually like for you? Is it groggy, dull, joyful, peaceful, deep, distracted? How long do you usually go between thoughts? Do you usually hear every sound outside your window, or do you kind of space out most of the time?

We also don’t describe the deepest experiences we’ve ever had. And we hardly talk about progress either: have you gotten better at meditation over the years? In fact, I get the sense a lot of people are allergic to two words I just used: “progress” and “better”!

I haven’t read anywhere that we’re not supposed to talk about this. Not that I remember. But I’ve picked it up from hearing what other people say or don’t say. Maybe I just made an assumption that these topics are off-limits, and never questioned it.

When we first learn to meditate, there’s a lot of talk about the contents of our zazen and how to do it better. Like whenever I’ve taught beginning instruction, I meditate with people for a few minutes and then I ask them, “What happened? What was that like?”

But then that kinda … dies? I don’t ask experienced meditators, “What was that last half-hour like for you?” They don’t ask me either.

Maybe you’re all talking about it in private, in dokusan. Dokusan is like sex, I don’t get to see what other people are doing. Maybe you’re always asking the teachers, “I can’t stop worrying about work. How do I reliably achieve samadhi?” There’s nothing stopping me from asking that in dokusan. I mean, nothing overt. But I don’t. Over my years in Zen I’ve come to hide my curiosity, partly because I’ve heard our community’s silence on certain topics and I’ve become silent about them too.

Lately I’ve been talking with some of my fellow students, and they mostly agree: we hesitate to talk intimately about meditation, and it’s a relief when we occasionally break the silence. Some of the core questions we have about our practice—over time we get the message that we’re not supposed to ask. Our strongest spiritual desires—we’re not supposed to express them. Our greatest accomplishments, we’re not supposed to celebrate them. I often feel this way, and I’m not the only one.

So today is an experiment. I’m going to break some silences and see what happens.

One of the deepest meditations I ever had was in late August 2004. I was 23 years old, it was the last night of my last sesshin at the end of a year living at Yokoji monastery, off the grid high up in the mountains in Southern California. I knew that in a few days this monastic life would end, I would fly to New York City and start a new life of some sort. So, on the final night of sesshin, after everyone else had left the zendo, I stayed. The jikido had blown out the candle—we had to be very careful at Yokoji not to burn the monastery down—and all the lights were off—electricity at night at Yokoji was from a couple of car batteries charged from a solar panel during the day, so we used it very sparingly—except there was a dim yellow light in a sconce on the zendo wall. I was sitting in that pool of dim warm light, with the dark room around me and the dark night outside, and the cacti and the pine trees and mountains around me.

For a little while, I stopped. I barely had any thoughts. I heard every single cricket chirp, without missing one, for minutes upon minutes. There was nothing wrong with the world, and nothing wrong with me. For the first time in years, I wasn’t worrying about myself, wasn’t trying to fix myself. I had no preferences. Normally, I’d be impatient to leave the zendo, go down to sit on the tree stump at the bottom of the hill and smoke a cigarette in the moonlight, then read in bed for a few minutes and do all the little indulgences that would comfort me at the end of the day.

But this night, I had no preference. I could leave the zendo, or I could stay all night listening to the crickets. Everything was ok, I had finally stopped trying to fix my life.

Eventually I did leave the zendo of course, smoked my cigarette in the moonlight, and a few days later I flew to New York City and I’ve never had a period of zazen quite like that again. And I was pretty angry about that for a while. I gave a year of my life to Zen, and the second I leave the monastery, my samadhi is all shot and I can’t get back to that peaceful place anymore. I blamed Zen, and I blamed myself. It was actually pretty reasonable to blame myself—I was smoking pot and getting drunk every night, I was a mess, I wasn’t creating the conditions for a strong Zen practice and I knew it. But I couldn’t help remember that one night and wish I was there again.

So this is the trap of being attached to an experience, and comparing the past and the present, right? Zen texts warn us about this trap all the time. But on the other hand, that comparison told me something about how I was living; it was a signpost. I knew I was capable of that kind of samadhi, and the farther my zazen got from the experience of that night, the more clear it was that something was going wrong with how I was living in general.

At the beginning of that year at the monastery, when I arrived at Yokoji, there was another young guy my age, Wes, who showed up the same day. I was very impressed with all the monastics at Yokoji, of course, I wanted to be just like them and I wanted them to approve of me. But I kind of hated Wes. He was maybe a year younger than me, big and goofy and enthusiastic. Once he came into the monastery kitchen, took a gallon of milk from the fridge and chugged the entire thing in one go, right in front of everybody.

My worst fear was that the legit Zen monks at Yokoji would see me and Wes as the same. I had to distinguish myself in their eyes from this milk-chugger. I had to be better than him, more sophisticated. One day, Wes and I and a few of the monks were hanging out in the kitchen, and Wes said that the day before, he’d been concentrating on Mu, and he had some kind of mind-blowing experience where everything was dark and empty and Mu was everything and he fell into it. I was so jealous. How could big, goofy Wes have achieved this state already, after a few weeks, and not me!

That was more than 20 years ago, and I still remember that moment in the kitchen, listening to Wes, feeling my envy. It got deep into me and grew into something bigger, something that lasted. I think this is one of the reasons we don’t generally talk about our zazen experiences in public. What if other people compare themselves to us? What if they feel jealous, or on the other hand, what if their zazen is better and they feel arrogant?

A subtler danger is that, by describing something aloud, I make it into a thing. I fix that memory, like a sticking a needle through an insect specimen. I took that risk by describing my samadhi to you just now. Now my memory of that final night has been permanently changed by describing it to you. It’s changed and it’s hardened.

And you know what? Life goes on. I get jealous sometimes, or self-satisfied other times, and my practice continues and I get over it. I have nice experiences, and then they end, and I’m disappointed, and I get over that too. Jealousy and comparison and attachment to past experiences, these are just natural human feelings, and I don’t think we have to be so concerned about protecting ourselves from them. The benefits of talking about practice openly might outweigh these risks.

Sometimes I have arguments with Dogen. The arguments are a bit one-sided, because I’m angry and he isn’t, plus he’s been dead for 800 years. He sits there in his black robe. He has a pale round baby face and a little rosebud mouth, like in that one painting I’ve seen of him. He’ll start with some innocuous instruction, like: “Sit stably in samadhi.”

I say: I’ve been trying for half my life and hardly ever achieved stable samadhi. The best sit I ever had was after a year in a monastery, do I have go back to the monastery?

Dogen: There is no reason to leave your own seat at home and take a meaningless trip to the dusty places of other countries. The treasure house will open of itself, and you will be able to use it at will.

Me: I’ve been waiting more than 20 years and the treasure house seems mostly closed. I definitely can’t “use it at will,” I have so little control. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. I need to change something before I waste any more time.

Dogen: How can we distinguish practice from enlightenment? The Vehicle of Reality is in the Self. Why should we waste our efforts trying to attain it?

Me: At this point I’ve long since given up on “attaining enlightenment.” I’m just trying to be a bit more enlightened from moment to moment, and I’m looking for a meditation practice that supports me better. Surely it’s ok to experiment a bit and see if something works better?

Dogen: Learn to step back, turning the light inwards, illuminating the Self. Doing so, your body and mind will drop off naturally, and Original Self will manifest. If you wish to attain suchness, practice suchness immediately.

Me: This is beautiful. I really mean it, Dogen, I appreciate your beautiful poetic writing. But it’s not very helpful for me. Can you break it down at all?

Dogen: Think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential way of zazen. The zazen which I am talking about is not step-by-step meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of peace and comfort. It is the practice-enlightenment of the ultimate Way.

Me: But it doesn’t feel like “the dharma gate of peace and comfort” most of the time. Instead, it’s been a dharma gate of struggle and frustration.

At this point Dogen sits in serene and irritating silence.

I’ve felt quite stuck in my zazen. Some retreats are deep, some are just “whatever,” some I spend in awful anxious obsession. I can’t predict or control it. And my half-hour morning meditation has just been groggy mind-wandering; I wonder if it’s worth it or if it would be better to just sleep in.

I’ve been on this disappointing plateau for many years, and I stopped asking teachers about it at some point. I got embarrassed to admit how stuck I was. I teach meditation to other people, I give dharma talks, I’ve been doing this so long, I’m ashamed to admit how little I still understand about how my mind works and how to guide my own zazen. And also I’d gotten the impression that everything I’ve just said isn’t Zen—I’m not supposed to evaluate my progress, I’m not supposed to want progress, I’m not supposed to want my zazen to be a certain way!

So this June, my partner Keishin and I did a weeklong retreat with a company called Jhourney, which is trying to teach people to reach specific states in meditation. This company was founded a few years ago in San Francisco by some young guys who’d been practicing jhana meditation. The jhanas are levels of meditative absorption, they’re described in a few suttas of the Pali canon, written 2000 years ago. There are eight levels of jhana, give or take. In the Mahāsaccaka Sutta, Buddha says,

I recall once, when my father was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then—quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities—I entered and remained in the first jhana: rapture and pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought and evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening? Then following on that memory came the realization: That is the path to Awakening.

In recent years some Western Buddhists have become very interested in bringing the jhanas to the West and learning or rediscovering how to enter these states reliably. And these young San Francisco guys had been studying under some teachers, comparing notes with each other about what sort of meditation techniques worked more or less well to enter the jhana states, and they decided to create a company to teach the jhanas to others. That’s Jhourney.

So, doing this Jhourney retreat was a chance to get out of my zazen rut. Jhourney is fairly scientific. They say a certain percentage of people on their retreats reach the first jhana or the second jhana. They run experiments with different methods for teaching the jhanas, and they measure their retreats’ outcomes and try to optimize the path to the jhanas. That seemed really attractive to me, just a fresh way of doing things. It seemed like the opposite of Zen. Plus, I could walk into a room of strangers and admit how frustrated and stupid I feel, because I didn’t care what they thought of me.

The Jhourney retreat was, indeed, the opposite of Zen. We were handed a 120-page instruction book the first night of retreat. Most of the retreat was unscheduled free time, but we had a lot to do in that time. We had to read most of the instruction book in the first few days. The book told us to try a bunch of experiments on ourselves and write down the results. Like, when I recite a metta mantra, does it produce a feeling somewhere in my body? What’s that like? What about if I visualize a tree of compassion growing from my chest, or if I just smile? How is it different to sit or lie down, to be silent or listen to music, to sit for 45 minutes, or an hour, or more? We tried all these experiments in our meditations, figured out what seemed to work to produce a peaceful, openhearted, effortless feeling. That feeling is the ember that can grow into a roaring fire, and that’s the first jhana. Once we could produce that feeling, we kept refining and experimenting and writing down the results.

We had regular interviews with “coaches,” asking what we tried, how well it worked, and what we were going to try next. One time I meditated with my coach for 20 minutes, narrating my experience moment by moment, while she directed me on how to use my attention and my imagination to steer the meditation.

The retreat was mostly silent. But partway through, the retreat managers split us into groups of four to have dinner together and discuss our experiences with the other participants. We were encouraged to say what we’d experienced, whether it was a jhana or something else, and swap tips about how to go deeper in meditation. I have to admit I was really apprehensive about this—what if someone else has gone much deeper than I have, will I be really jealous and disappointed? What if that person is some meditation noobie who doesn’t deserve to succeed more than me, someone who got to some profound jhana from beginner’s luck? If that happens I’ll feel like a fool. It’ll be Wes in the kitchen all over again. Luckily I had reached Jhana One a couple times before this dinner, and that was on par with the other people, so I felt good about myself. But I noticed how the fear of being jealous was a big deal for me!

Talking in detail about what we’d tried and how it was going, it was helpful. And it brought us together. On sesshin, it’s easy for me to assume that some people have it all figured out. If you’re sitting still and upright, I’m guessing you’ve got zazen figured out. I am also sitting still and upright, and my zazen is a catastrophe, but I assume I’m the only one who’s struggling. But if we talk about it, and I hear that you’re struggling too, I’m not alone anymore.

On the Jhourney retreat, the coaches set up laptops in a separate room, where we could go watch videos of past participants describing the jhanas they reached. I did not go watch the videos, again because of my fear of jealousy. And also because, towards the end of the retreat, I was enjoying meditation so much I didn’t want to spend my free time doing much else.

One of the goals of the Jhourney retreat is to enter a jhana. The jhanas for most people go in a certain order, starting at Jhana One, and indeed the jhana that I entered matched the description of Jhana One. I was following the instructions: I relaxed and I smiled a little bit, I welcomed all feelings and thoughts that arose. Whereas usually in zazen I try to drop my thoughts, and let feelings come and go, with jhana meditation I welcomed each thought and feeling, I invited them to join my meditation. I focused on a feeling in my body, Jhourney calls this an “openhearted feeling,” for me it’s like a bittersweet heartache. It was the bittersweet joy and relief at finally being compassionate with myself.

I sat like this for an hour and a half, occasionally shifting position, but I didn’t want to get up. At some point there was a warm achy swelling feeling in my heart, on the actual left side of my chest. I understood for the first time why all our old phrases for emotions talk about the “heart lifting” or “heart bursting,” for the first time I noticed that these feelings are literally centered in my heart. My whole body tingled, I felt joyful and excited, my heart raced, and I felt like I was being lifted off the floor by the lightness of my joy.

Of course, as soon as this happened, I started to wonder: How do I make this last? This is clearly Jhana One, how do I progress through this to Jhana Two? And I lost it, like a kid who gets so excited the first time they balance on a bike that they fall right off. I entered Jhana One a few times over the retreat, and I found it fascinating and exciting. After so many years, something totally new was happening in my meditation.

So what? So I figured out how to make a nice tingling feeling, big whoop.

Jhourney has a slogan, something like: come for the jhanas and stay for the transformed relationship with your emotions.

Well, now that I’m back home, my zazen is transformed. I’ve gone from sitting half an hour each morning to a full hour. And the hour feels easy. Instead of resisting distracting thoughts, or coldly watching them pass by, I actually embrace them as a welcome addition to the whole messy total. Like, if I catch myself thinking about rock climbing, I just think, “I love rock climbing,” and welcome it in to quietly join the meditation. If I have a Radiohead song stuck in my head, I think, “May Radiohead be happy,” and I welcome Thom Yorke and the band to join the meditation. They usually quiet down after a while. But I’m not trying to make them be quiet, I’m welcoming them in.

Zazen isn’t a battle against my mind anymore, so I enjoy it, and find it much less effortful. I haven’t returned to Jhana One, which is a little disappointing, I was hoping to continue to later jhanas, which sound much more valuable than just tingly excitement. That’s ok, I’ll keep working on it and trying things.

Since jhanas have gotten more attention in the West in the last few years, there’s been a common reaction among Western Buddhists: trying to achieve a jhana state is striving, and it will only reinforce the ego. It’s counterproductive, it’s a symptom of the exact thing Buddha said is the source of suffering: thirst, trishna, the desire for things to be different from how they are.

It’s funny when Zen people have this reaction. It’s funny because jhana in Pali is the same as the Sanskrit word dhyana, which in Chinese is pronounced Chan, which in Japanese is pronounced Zen. We are the jhana school. It’s funny, too, that some Zen people are allergic to saying there are levels of meditation, when our koan curriculum is hundreds of ordered, numbered, pass-fail exams. Is it more dangerous to have meditation goals than koan goals?

The key to entering jhana is, in my experience, to very gently try, and not be too attached to the outcome. It’s like pissing—it’s learning a way of relaxing and letting in the joy, or letting out the piss or whatever.

The zazen instructions I’ve read have said to relax, of course, but the missing part was for me to enjoy letting the mind be as it is. The stereotype is that jhana meditation is about striving for a goal. But it’s paradoxical, like so many things in Buddhism: the more I accept my mind as it is, the more I welcome all my thoughts and emotions as they naturally arise, the less effort I make to change how I feel, the more easily I fall into a jhana.

After the Jhourney retreat I had dokusan, and a VZ teacher told me that the way I’m meditating now, after the retreat, sounds perfectly compatible with Zen. I won’t name the teacher in case they’re listening to me now and changing their mind, concluding that in fact I’ve fallen into heresy and they disown me. But I also think it’s compatible with Zen —I think the content is mostly the same, but the teaching method is totally different, and it’s what I needed to get out of my rut. That’s just upaya, skillful means: the message was better tailored for me.

Right now, I think there’s a middle path. On one side of the path, you can fall into obsessive desire to achieve something in meditation. You can compare yourself with others and get jealous. You can get attached to an experience in the past and disappointed by your experience now. That’s a danger that lots of Zen texts warn us against, and it’s a real danger. But also, I’ve found that I can get jealous and attached and disappointed, and it isn’t fatal. Eventually I get over it.

But what about the danger on the other side of the middle path? What about giving up, deciding that I’m not supposed to want to get better at meditation, that I can’t get better at meditation, that my groggy mind-wandering is the best there is? I’ve fallen down on that side of the path and spent years there, wasting thousands of hours sitting on the cushion with very little benefit. I now think it’s helpful to evaluate my meditation. After a period of zazen, do I feel relaxed, happy, focused? Do I enjoy it, do I look forward to it? Is it getting easier, more enjoyable, over the years? How does the rest of my day go after an hour of zazen in the morning?

There are dangers in asking these questions. I could get so focused on the relative that I forget the absolute—like, thinking that if my zazen doesn’t feel good, it isn’t the manifestation of Buddha mind. I can hear Dogen saying, “You are endowed with the essential functioning of the Buddha Way, why pursue worthless pleasures that are like sparks from a flint?” And that’s a great point, Dogen, we should remember that this mind has always been the Buddha mind, there is nothing to strive for and no one who can attain it. But also, it’s helpful for me to set some goals, and evaluate my progress, and distinguish what works and what doesn’t. It’s like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.

Besides, the old man backs me up! Buddha said in the Kalama Sutta, that we should evaluate various practices and behaviors for ourselves. If they lead to harm and suffering, abandon them; if they lead to welfare and happiness, enter and remain in them. Don’t just follow tradition or a teacher or scripture.

Why did it take me so long to admit my frustration with meditation, and try something new? I take responsibility for this, I’m a perfectionist, and I care what other people think of me. I get embarrassed if I don’t understand something, so I hide it.

I also think that, for someone like me, there are some dangers lurking in Zen specifically. A lot of the old koans look like competitions between monks. They’re one-upping each other, they’re pretentious, they’re quoting sutras and Chinese literature, they’re hitting each other. Nansen killed a cat because no one could answer his question. Gutei cut off his servant’s finger because his servant didn’t understand. And then the commentaries compare them to generals and swordsmen, or tigers and dragons. I like this fierceness, but it can make Zen into a competition where I don’t want to admit my weakness. I think this competitive, even violent streak, has passed from China through Japan and the samurai era all the way to today. Even at the fuzzy cuddly Village Zendo, we have this aspect. So if you’re like me, check yourself: are you stuck in a rut, because you’re afraid to admit when you don’t get it?

When I was embarrassed to talk openly with teachers, at least I had spiritual friends. The Buddha was a big fan of spiritual friendship. In the Kalyāṇamitta Sutta there’s a story where Buddha’s student Ananda says, “I’ve heard that good friends are half of the spiritual life.” Buddha replies, “No, Ananda, no, that’s not true at all. Good friends are the whole of the spiritual life. Someone with good friends can expect to develop and cultivate the noble eightfold path.” In other Pali suttas the Buddha says that monastics and householders all benefit from spiritual friendship, from kalyanamitta, that if a friend has attained a greater understanding on some subject of the dharma, we should engage our friend in discussion to learn what they know.

For me, spiritual friendships with my peers has been essential. With teachers it’s hard for me to really express my doubt and confusion, to say, “I hate this entire book of 100 koans,” “My zazen is a catastrophe,” “I wasted every minute of that sesshin thinking about work,” “I passed that koan by imitating a car horn, but I still don’t understand it.” But with my close friends it’s easy to be real. It’s a relief to admit what a mess my practice is, how I doubt myself and the practice. I find out that most people are going through this kind of thing, at least the ones I talk to, and I’m not alone and there’s nothing wrong with me. And once I’ve calmed down a bit, hope returns. I can imagine ways to change my practice, to improve it.

Let me close with some caveats and clarifications and qualifications about the jhanas, and about Zen silences. I’m not saying everyone should practice jhana meditation. I am saying that if you feel stuck, try something new, maybe try some techniques from other traditions. I’m not claiming that the teachers and ancestors created all these Zen silences deliberately. I think they mostly arise subtly and implicitly in the community. I’m not claiming these silences are absolute: sometimes we break them, different people are bolder or more cautious. I’m not even claiming they’re all worthless and we should break them: We should be cautious talking about our practice with others, we should be mindful of Right Speech. We should be careful talking about goals.

Here’s what I’m saying: Real Zen is freedom. Freedom to break silences, or maintain them, according to circumstances. It’s a human instinct to conform to the group, but Zen is liberation from that conformity, freedom to go with the flow and to go against it.

As for me, I’m going to talk more with my teachers, more with my friends, about how my practice is really going. Intimately, in detail. I won’t pretend anymore, or hide my confusion and my curiosity.

I hope you all talk more openly with your spiritual friends, and trust your own wisdom, especially when it doesn’t seem to conform.

There’s a story about when Buddha was dying, he was talking with his beloved student Ananda, who was probably panicking a bit at the thought of life without his teacher. Ananda asked how the sangha should continue without the Buddha. Buddha said everyone in the sangha must be islands unto themselves, or perhaps lamps unto themselves. The Pali word dipa is the same for island and lamp, so maybe he’s saying we must all be our own light to illuminate the path, or all be our own islands, safe in the flood of samsara.

He said, in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta:

I am frail, Ananda, old, aged, far gone in years. This is my eightieth year, and my life is spent. Even as an old cart, Ananda, is held together with much difficulty, so this body is kept going only with supports.

Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the truth as your island, the truth as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.

Photos © A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.

https://emptysqua.re/blog/speak-up-if-youre-stuck-in-a-zazen-rut/