You and I Are Probably Both Toddlers of Zen in the Grand Scheme of Things

Yesterday's post was sort of rushed, the kind of thing that comes when you want to say something, but are struggling with writer's block.

Anyway, I received the following comment on that post:

Yes, well perhaps you should actually find "peace and calm" before you attempt to push your idea of what it is onto other people.

If you must act as a mouthpiece for the dharma, we would prefer that you had something real to say about it.

That is just a quick tip from someone who's been practicing a hell of a lot longer than you.

And in that regard, it would benefit you to be open to that which has come before you, instead of pouting and stamping your feet like an indignant toddler whenever you are presented with something outside your comfort zone. As a student of the Japanese tradition, you should already understand that kind of relationship quite clearly, if you are actually serious about such matters.

At this time, I will step aside and allow nature to take its course with you - for better or worse. Good bye and good luck.

Usually, I just leave these comments go, but for a few minutes, I was just pissed off by this one. Not because I think the other post was "wise" or great by any stretch of the imagination, but because this just strikes me as flat out trolling. The kind of thing people do to just piss others off. The fact that it was anonymous just lends to that image, as does the deliberately insulting language.

There's been more of these kinds of comments in recent months. They might be from the same person, or they might be multiple people. I don't know. I have a couple of ideas as to individuals that could be behind them, but I'm not interested in moving beyond cursory level speculation.

One thing I have witnessed in the years of blogging about spiritual practice is a lot of people quitting their blogs over these kinds of comments. They give their writing away. Give their ideas, thoughts, and experiences - however muddled - away, and in return, they're body slammed by trolls and sometime regular readers as well. I'm not talking about bloggers who write obnoxious, inflammatory content. I'm talking about sincere folks, sometimes sharing deep from the heart, or taking a risk in offering something that might not be popular.

Not all of us have the ability to shake or laugh nasty responses off. And while some may argue that you should just develop a thick skin, I argue that if you're life is devoted to spiritual practice, your comments on blog posts should reflect that. Whether my words are soft and supportive, or more harsh and questioning, I try to consider how the other person will take them. Try to see if what I have to say might actually be about communication, and not just bashing someone on the head.

Anonymous, calling me an "indignant toddler" is an asshat move. You want to teach me something? Leave the insults out. If you think I'm a lost cause, that's fine. I never claimed to be an enlightened spokesperson for the practice. I'm a regular practitioner like most of the other readers here. Which I think you believe is a much higher number than it actually is. If your greatest concern is that I'm spreading "bad dharma" - don't worry, this blog's readership is tiny. Maybe you'd be better trolling the blogs of popular dharma teachers you disagree with. It's a better use of your time than pestering a small fry like myself.

What I think some readers easily forget about bloggers is that we're humans first, with all the usual struggles and maladies. Not every post is going to be gleaming with brilliance. Not every post is going to inspire nodding heads, even from the most aligned of readers. Furthermore, and perhaps most important, is the fact that we bloggers - even the most prolific amongst us - rarely cover the full spectrum of our thoughts and experiences of our chosen topic(s).

I'm well aware that public writing can give rise to all sorts of ego trips. I also am aware that I sometimes write contentious posts, during which I sometimes overstep the lines of what I know and don't know in terms of practice. As such, I'm grateful to regular readers who share a different take, show me where I've missed something, or even call out ways I might be violating the precepts I vow to uphold (Marcus, a former regular commenter, instantly comes to mind here.) There are times when even these kind of harsh, not terribly caring comments can arouse gratitude within me. But most days, I just think of all the folks who have quit writing, quit sharing their voices because they felt harassed and hated.

This post isn't a plea for personal sympathy. I've been a public writer for years, and rejection in its various forms doesn't destroy me. No, it's more a plea for more respectful discourse. Online and off. We can stand tall in very different positions and views without tearing each other to shreds. When I consider peace and calm, the ability to do this is one of the main things that comes to mind.

I vow to keep bringing this to mind, again and again, instead of letting the heat of emotion carry the day. That's all I really have to offer today. May you all be well.

Seeking Peace and Calm

There's nothing that does not grow light
through habit and familiarity,
putting up with little cares,
I'll train myself to bear with great adversity.

I've been working with these lines from Shantidevafor about four years now. In order to keep them with me daily, I chant them silently to myself as I brush my teeth every night before bed (for the most part).

Those "little cares" that arrive in our lives have the ability to muck things up greatly, if we can't meet them as they are in the moment. The pain in your back, for example, easily can lead to tension, and then irritation, and then angry acting out of some kind. So it often goes.

Many people come to Buddhism seeking relief from all of this. Seeking something they call peace and calm. But how many of us really understand what calm and peace actually are? It's easy to mistake "relaxed dullness" found through things like television, drinking, eating, and other such commonplace activities, as peace and calm. In fact, such dullness can become so pervasive in your life that you fail to notice the presence of actual calm and actual peace.

I used to meditate like mad, trying to break through the dullness, thinking zazen was kind of an endurance contest I had to win somehow. In this, there was no room for the world to fully enter, no room for the peace and calm that comes when being "confirmed by the ten thousand things" as Dogen once said.

Zen Weeds

As a gardener, I was intrigued by this post, especially the first section:

A few months ago I saw a notice of Zen center calling for volunteers to come in on Saturday to remove weeds from the lawn. I had trouble with the apparent picking and choosing in that, and asked the author if he also saw trouble in his invitation.

I received the response that he was celebrating the life that the weather has brought us, and he was looking for help to extinguish some forms of the life he was celebrating. He explained he was holding two opposing views at the same time, and that's OK. Also, he did not consider the plants that are in certain places to be "bad" plants, nor did he consider certain types of plants "bad" plants. He just had a preference for both the location and types of plants in the landscape, and so he was planning to take out some plants to enjoy others. He felt preferences are not bad per se. It's his relationship to his preferences that can cause suffering, not the preferences themselves.

I felt a bit like he was not seriously addressing the question of whether this weeding was really right action. But I also thought I was possibly being a bit immature in my concepts of picking and choosing and the related Buddhist sin.

About the time I started regularly gardening, towards the end of my undergrad days, I become interested in herbal medicine. And quickly learned that many of the common weeds gardeners, farmers, and lawn enthusiasts tends to despise are, in fact, medicines. Dandelion, plantain, goldenrod, milk thistle, nettle. All of these have excellent health benefits and - their tenaciousness usually translates into invasiveness if left unchecked.

Probably reminds some of you of certain habit patterns you have. The critical thinking that turns into heavy negativity and pessimism. The awareness of potential dangers that turns into chronic worry. The desire to satisfy your sweet tooth that turns into overeating.

Like with "weeds," I've noticed a lot of all or nothing thinking surrounding these things. Note the presence of anti-intellectualism in some spiritual circles, thinking that thinking itself must be eradicated or else it destroy our chance at liberation. Or how people decide to become vegans and remove all possible "toxins" from their diet, not because of it being an appropriate response to their conditions, but because they believe this is the "only way" to be in accord with the precepts.

There's a lot of ignorance when it comes to the nature of ecosystems. Conventional gardeners and farmers think nothing of removing - often eradicating - every last plant they deem "unnecessary." Never mind the medicinal qualities of a given weed, how many folks are simply clueless as to how these plants are supporting other species and the soil, which benefits the plants they want to grow?

The author of the post above seems, in the end, to fall on the opposite side. He tries to sound open to the possibility that removing some "weeds" could be right action, but his words in total point towards not intervening.

Which brings us back to the first precept. The precept of not killing. A lifelong koan because it's impossible on a relative level to not kill anything. Our lives depend upon killing something in order to feed ourselves. That's the bare minimum.

In my own garden, plenty of "weeds" flourish. I leave wild patches grow, which brings in more bees and butterflies. I have a patch of nettles that I trim throughout the summer, both for teas and greens, and also for growth control. I also regularly remove those plants that attempt to take over the plants I'm intending to grow, and use their decayed bodies to enrich the soil.

I'll readily admit struggling with hatred towards the grapevines that spread like mad every year, despite the annual attempts to remove them completely. Perhaps they are my ecosystem teacher, and I probably would do well to accept that I'll never rid that yard of them completely anyway.

Your thoughts?

Zen Time

You may suppose that time is only passing away, and not understand that time never arrives. Although understanding itself is time, understanding does not depend on its own arrival. People only see time's coming and going, and do not thoroughly understand that the time-being abides in each moment.

from Zen Master Dogen's essay "Being Time"

The problem with time is that it appears to be moving in a certain direction. That is, until we will it, through things like Daylight Savings Time, to move the opposite way.

And of, people tend to think they know what time is. As if the question "What is time?" never occurred to them.

Whatever it is, there's clearly constant change in the relative, everyday world. Certainly, this body of "mine" has grown, and gotten older over the last thirty six years. And when I look around, everything else has shifted as well, even if only in tiny ways. But it's not the whole story. How could it be?

The thing is, each of us is a "time-being" in each moment. Inside the movement of life is also a timelessness not separate from that movement.

I think a lot of the resistance I feel to whatever is happening in the now comes from forgetting this timelessness. Being disembodied in some manner or another. Literally out of touch.

That's about all I have to say at this time.

Any thoughts?

Self Care and the Spiritual Activist

The following is from a post I just wrote on one of my other blogs. It's related to the material I tend to offer here, so I though I'd share part of it.

I recently went through another round of what might be called activist burnout. After several months of devotion to multiple aspects of the Occupy movement here in Minneapolis, I hit a wall. Having left a teaching job the year before Occupy started, I was running out of money, and the few potential options for income that had developed during Occupy hadn't materialized. I was flat broke. Getting concerned comments from a few members of my family and friend circle. And when I surveyed the group of folks who had stuck it out in Occupy, what I mostly saw were middle class, white Boomer activists and broke folks like myself. (There's definitely more diversity than this, but this is the makeup of the two largest groups.) And although there have been some amazing acts of mutual care, including a few Occupy members sharing homes and trading skills to get work done without having to hire expensive help - there hasn't, at this point, developed something like a culture of community care. Not a thriving one anyway. It's a minority viewpoint, the idea that part of revolution - a big part of it perhaps - is modeling what moving beyond the privatization of our needs might look like.

If you want to read the rest of this post, please go here. Given how important this topic has become for me in recent months, I'm sure I'll have more to say about it at some point. However, if it's not your cup of tea, feel free to wait for the next post. May you all be well.

Attachment to Meditation Practice

This is a repost from last fall. I've had a lot on my plate recently, including doing work to promote the new book I have an essay in. There are a few blog post topics brewing, so I'll be back with new content soon. However, having spent the last year studying Dogen with several sangha friends, I'm still wrestling with some of the ideas in this post. So, here it is for you.

I really enjoyed this post by Andre over at Zen and Back Again. Mostly because it's familiar to me, and is something I've written about on here before.

If Zen is the practice of complete non-abiding, requiring the relinquishment of all attachments, then doesn't it serve to reason that we should let go of Zen too? For as I have found, Zen, namely zazen, can become a form of attachment.

We hear more about this regarding koans, where teachers caution their students against attaching to koans, since they are merely a raft to carry us to the other shore. Like the Buddha's teachings, they are upaya, skillful means.

But we seldom hear that said about zazen; instead, meditation, especially in Soto Zen, is regarded as the holiest of holies.

It almost feels anathema to imply that zazen can turn into a form of attachment, but try skipping 0ne day of meditation and you will soon realize how attached you are to the practice. Shame, guilt, anxiety commonly accompany a missed zazen session of mine.

Yesterday, we started a new group down at the zen center for those who have completed jukai. As one of the facilitators of the group, I introduced myself as "an eclectic practitioner" who is always experimenting. Which isn't to say I can stick with a form - such as zazen - only that I've grown more interested in how form flows in everyday life.

Having spent the last three weeks or so reading a lot about Dogen, as well as practicing with a few of his teachings, I find myself returning to some of the same things Andre is speaking about.

Dogen says that sitting is what a Buddha does. But isn't that making zazen something special by elevating it above all of our other daily activities?

The thing about Dogen's writing is that sometimes it really does seem like seated meditation is his sole focus, while other times he uses the word "Zazen" as an action in each moment. Some Soto teachers seem to lean in one direction, emphasizing seated meditation nearly all the time. While others seem to lean in the other direction, saying that Dogen applies zazen to all activities. I'm more inclined towards the latter, but sometimes it feels like a gloss over, an apology for a founding teacher that simply might have gotten too focused on seated meditation.

It's important to note the the openness to, and deep interest in, lay practitioners Dogen had during the middle of his teaching life greatly waned as he got older. At the same time, he maintained connections with at least a couple of lay disciples until the end, spending his last days in the home of one of them in Kyoto. Given the frequent social/political upheaval that marked 13th century Japan, I can imagine there was always a tension for him between upholding the practice of householders, and feeling the need to emphasize breaking away from it all and practicing in seclusion with a small group of dedicated others.

When I go back to Andre's consideration of attachment to practice, I find myself returning to the value of just paying attention. Noticing what kind of stories are arising. For example, sometimes that desire I have "to experiment" has a bit of extra added to it. Like wanting to do something novel, instead of "the same old thing." And sometimes I'm just plain giving in to laziness.

So, I have to stay vigilant around these kinds of questions, lest they become intellectual ways to trick myself, or justify opting out.

And yet, I have always felt a crunchy rub around Dogen's teachings about "zazen," and how they have come to be practiced today. Because just doing seated meditation and some ritual bows and chants doesn't constitute living the spiritual life.

What are your thoughts?

Zen Bodhisattva Vow Poem

How Long Must I Wait?

“Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.”
From the Four Great Bodhisattva Vow

For what? I don't know.
Unable to figure it out on my own,
I run straight to the temple
looking for answers.

The questions of my suffering,
like so many yellow leaves
hitting the newly frozen ground.

They, too, must wait
until the rain turns to snow,
until the moon returns,

a blue blossom
in the middle of the forest
where no one,
not even the ever watchful crow,
is at home.