It’s good to be back. I took a month off from writing this column in January in order to focus on a memoir project. As it happened, I didn’t get a whole lot of actual writing done. Perhaps like many of you, the incoming US presidential administration took up a great deal of my emotional and attention bandwidth. But the writing process is made up of many parts, and writing is only one of them. Taking the backward step, as it is called in Zen, is a necessary ingredient to the creative life, and I am grateful for the spaciousness of this past month and grateful to the readers who continue to show up here and engage with these words.
This reflective time brought to my heart/mind a couple of portals of practice, which I’ll try to weave together here.
Way-seeking mind
During the years when I lived in or nearby San Francisco Zen Center, I would participate in the regular practice periods that the center observed. These are concentrated times of study and practice focused around a particular sutra or theme. In some traditions, this is called ango, the Japanese word for “peaceful dwelling.”
At San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), practice periods usually run for about 6–8 weeks, and during that time all students make an agreement to fully participate in the schedule, which starts at 5:20 in the morning with zazen, kinhin, and liturgy services, and continues throughout the day with mindful meals, work practice, classes, a Dharma talk, and two more periods of zazen at noon and in the evening. It was a rigorous schedule but one that was mostly a joy to keep. Let me be more precise, it was a joy to keep. The exception was when my mind put up a fuss about it and then I got a living lesson in the workings of duhkha (Skt. dissatisfaction).
Sangha is a big element of a practice period. We aren’t just individuals sitting in the zendo, we actively support each other’s practice in all kinds of ways, both spoken and silent. As a result, a lot of intimacy arises in the container of a practice period and by the end you can feel like you’ve fallen in love with your fellow students, even if you never exchange a word.
One practice period tradition is to invite participants to offer a “way-seeking mind” talk. Soju Mel Weitsman, the late abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, once said, “Way-seeking mind is a deep intention to align oneself with a true path.” (Chapel Hill Zen Center) The talk is an opportunity to reflect on the causes and conditions of your life that brought you to this moment—to Zen practice, to this particular place and time and container, to the people around you. Many years ago, I was invited to offer my way-seeking mind talk during a practice period at SFZC. I can’t remember the details of what I said, but I do remember what a gift it was to look back on my life and to consider the wondrous combination of intention and accident that landed me at SFZC, with that sangha, and with the woman who would become my own Zen teacher, Victoria Shosan Austin. For me, the real gift of the way-seeking mind talk was being so deeply listened to by a room full of fellow seekers.
It seems to me we have so little of that opportunity for in-depth reflection and sharing these days, and it’s a rare thing to feel completely witnessed by another.
Steadiness
Some years ago, I was fortunate to travel to northern Thailand and be part of a “Find Your Elephant Self” journey with musician Jami Sieber. We spent time at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang and we shadowed the mahouts as they took care of their elephants every day. Some mornings we got aboard the elephants’ broad backs and took the journey with them from the forest down to the main area of the center. I was amazed at how such a massive creature could walk so tenderly on the earth. It turns out that elephants actually do walk on their tiptoes! And their gait was not only gentle, it was steady.
The reassuring sensation of that steadiness has stayed with me, and in these tumultuous times I’m realizing the value of that quality. I think of the people in my life who show up through rain or shine. Each Monday, my teacher Shosan sends an email to her students offering weekly teachings. She does this without fail, other than a few exceptions when she takes a short break and gives us advance notice. I think of the people who show up in zendos across the world every morning, to light incense, to chant, to sit in silence, to mindfully clean the temple. They are continuously making a choice every day to show up, to renew their vows, to walk gently on the earth.
In her book Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet (Flatiron Books 2018), Roshi Joan Halifax relates a story about a student who wonders how she has done so much in her life. Roshi responds, “On a good day, I rest a lot.” She goes on to explain that the kind of rest she is talking about isn’t the escapist kind:
Rather, it is the kind of rest found in the experience of being relatively at ease in the midst of things, even quite difficult situations; ease that is about having a lack of resistance to what is before me, and being fully present and steady. This mix of no-resistance and steadiness is something we cultivate in Buddhist meditation. In my own meditation practice, I learned that giving full attention to an object (such as the breath) engenders steadiness and ease, as well as power and rest.
(Upaya Zen Center)
I am by no means a paragon of steadiness. As they say, we teach—and in this case, write—what we need to learn. I’m not here to lecture you on that quality but to share that it’s my aspiration as well: to ground myself in meditation practice on a consistent basis—as in every morning—and be a steady presence for myself and for others.
We are witnessing the dissolution of the United States, as we have known it—a very difficult situation, indeed. While the US has been far from a perfect democracy, we have been able to count on various institutions, such as public health and social security, in ways that are very quickly disappearing under the Trump regime. For me, this dissolution is engendering a potent mix of anger, sadness, and grief. It’s quite a practice to surf those emotional waves and not give into despair and hopelessness.
I find the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha to be essential these days to maintain what Joanna Macy calls “active hope.” And I wonder what nourishment we might find in these simple practices of bearing witness to each other’s way-seeking minds, and showing up, in steadiness and reliability, day after day.
See more
Way-Seeking Mind: a Dharma Talk by Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi (Chapel Hill Zen Center)
Rest by Roshi Joan Halifax (Upaya Zen Center)
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