Release

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
A contemplative practice is a practice of continuous release. We let go of our grip on everything as each thing’s tightness is noticed. Breathe in, notice; breathe out, release.
Releasing is essential to discovering serenity.
We are animals who, when we perceive we are threatened, tighten. Chemistry kicks it. In the Army, we would call it going on “Alert.”
It is a natural and normal response, but one that is often unneeded and, too often, not dealt with well because we do not know how or we do not notice the response in the first place. Contemplative practice creates awareness necessary to notice and helps to develop a skill set in dealing with it once it happens.
Pay attention! Wake up! Each is bluntly asking us to notice. As we go through our day is mindfulness, we naturally notice. We notice our breath caught in our lungs. We notice an increase in the flushness of our face or our respiration becoming shallow and more rapid.
In each case, we practice to release. Opening our grip on things, we let go of control in order to experience our situation, we are in a place to release ourselves into it.

If we were not in a situation we would not be alive, which is to say, life is one continuous situation. A contemplative’s practice is to be alive in it and this requires release.

I picture my mind as having closed. I practice unlocking it and opening it, like a flower opening in the sunlight. On the other hand, my lungs, locked up, opening and releasing air. The release is an essential feeling to experience fully and completely.

In such a release, we learn to abide in our lives freely and easily.

Be well.

Holiness

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

The morning moon is stunning against a black sky the fullness of which takes my breath away. Standing on the edge of darkness has that effect.

Darkness gets a bad rep. I remember a moment in childhood standing on the edge of an ocean. I could not see a thing. But I could feel. That vast expanse of emptiness is deep. I remember feeling awestruck.

As a child I did a dance both loving and fearing this vast darkness. As an adult, I know that we spend our lives trying to avoid it or meekly throw light at it or pretend it isn’t what it is. Open mystery.

Turn off your lights and go outside in the dark. Walk under the trees, under the stars, and open your heart to the universe. It is there to accept you.

Holiness is on such an edge. It is the point between light and dark, the edge of awareness, where taking any step with throw you off balance and into seeming oblivion. If you know it, it is not it, you must know it as a deep and abiding part of you.

Like a warm enfolding blanket, the Infinite embraces. It’s no wonder we humans love our robes be they simple shawls, tallit, or kesas. We wrap ourselves with the edge of holiness, and reside in wonder.

Be well

Sacred

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
Last night we lit the havdallah candle and passed the spice box, marking the close of the Sabbath and the entering of a new week. While a beautiful ceremony, this whole notion of marking the sacred and profane is annoying. On the one hand, we invest in a time and space, creating a dualism, on the other hand we come to realize there is no place or time where the Infinite is not. Everything is. Simple.
Yet, here we are, even in Zen, lighting candles, bowing, treating this as somehow invested with meaning and that as not.
Perhaps we must: a sacred life would be a life lived with no automatic pilot. No rest. No letting go. A sacred life would be a life without meaning. When everything is sacred, nothing is.
The very definition of sacred demands a separation of one thing from another, investing holiness through mindful attention.
On the other hand, nothing can be profane as everything matters. Everything is deeply and intimately interconnected. One is many, many is one.
Only when we look to the function of ceremony do we begin to understand. Ceremony does not mark, create, or underscore anything at all. Ceremony invites us to recognize what already is. A mindfulness bell does not create our true home, it invites us to open ourselves to it as it is with us always.
Our place is our heart: wherever we go, there we are. We might consider relaxing into it.

Be well.

Re-Enchantment

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
Study is one of the dharma gates I enter often. Last night was Erev Shabbat and we stopped what we were doing to light candles, say blessings, and welcome a day of rest and holiness with a family dinner. The thing is, what I was doing was an expression of that very thing. I was studying and writing. My paper’s working title is the Sacralization of Reform Judaism.
As a Buddhist priest and a Jewish lay religious teacher/student, I practice to keep my dharma eye open to see such expressions and as an expression of holiness itself. I know, I know…words can be serious obstacles. What holiness is is another topic.
Anyway, I am noticing a tension between the rational, linear processes utilized in study and my willingness to open my heart to the sacred itself in that very process. Study requires a ‘what’s this in relation to that?’ sort of thinking. Holiness requires entering both this and that at the same time. It’s an immersion.
In Buddhist and Jewish traditions we have prayers for both entering study and wrapping ourselves in the sacred. In the end, we should come to understand they are not separate at all as we discover everything is sacred, everything is holy.
Unfortunately today, both study and the holy are either tortured or eschewed. Study has become a fact finding process with brain cells storing as much as possible while the holy is rarely encountered in our post-modern conscience. And if it is, we see it as anachronistic. Therein, the tension. We want holiness.
Such tension is a shadow, though, of our mind at play in multilayered playgrounds. These playgrounds are built as a result of our moving away from the natural, the powerful dark, edges of things. In the light we see the sacred is everywhere in everything. Non-duality dispels such a tension. Religion today seems to be rolling along that track. People seem to need a way to touch the sacred in their lives. We want to get to the edge and take a step.
A flower is opening.
That a religious group like Reform Judaism, born in the Age of Enlightenment and wedded to the principles of universality, science, and reason has itself begun to ask itself how to be an avenue to the holy for its members is testimony to this third millennia blossom.
Zen, often cold and indifferent feeling, has taken on a similar thrust. Our Order was created to take us out of the cold monastic walls of Japanese tradition and into the warm light of engaged practice with the world. We are in a place where our task is to re-enchant the world. It is best to do this by beginning with ourselves.

Be well.

Karma

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

Chan practitioner JM recently posted a note to ZenLiving at YahooGroups regarding Karma. I would like to add my three cents. Karma is often misunderstood; it seems to me, as a sort of punishment/reward system or something akin to fate. It is neither.

Karma is simply cause and effect, that’s it. If we look at a living system such as a pond, it may have a karmic balance we might call homeostasis. This is cause and effect in action. If the system goes into disequilibrium, that process is also a cause and effect. This is also cause and effect in action. Now, both equilibrium and disequilibrium are mental constructs. We add our understanding of these to what we experience in the pond. We make discriminations about them: balance good, imbalance, bad, and so on. Yet, in the grand scheme and the long view, no problem. This pond is temporary and is part of the whole environmental system, also temporary, and part of the Earth, also temporary, and so on. Everything changes.

Now, in the relative world, if I add something good to the pond, something good ripples out. If I add something bad to the pond, something bad ripples out. If I expect to use the pond, and I have added something bad, I will receive bad karmic effect. This effect may take on dimensions I do not foresee. Perhaps my children will want to swim in the pond and now they are sick. Or perhaps someone finds out I have done this and puts me in jail. Or perhaps, I recognize I did something wrong and offer amends…each action has a reaction and this reaction ripples out. But, here’s the thing, we are in the ripples and these ripples change us and as we change others change and so on and so on…

So, on the one hand, the Big Mind hand, everything is as it should be and nothing is this or that; on the other hand, in the Small Mind hand, everything happens because everything else happens and we are in the water when it does.

Is there karma or not?

Be well.

Coping

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

There is no sense in crying about the world, it has enough crying in it. There is no sense in worry, things are what they are. There is no sense in coping, it just gets us through the night. What is crucial is our willingness to deal with what is presented to us.

Dealing with something is quite different from coping with something. I do not like the notions contained in the phrase “coping skills” as these amount to Ora-gel for a toothache or a shot of whiskey when tense: Just soothers of nerve-endings, nothing more.

We rise and face our world, a world of our own construction, and ask it meet our expectations. We fail to realize our expectations are our fantasies, and the world we create reflects our lack of skill, our desire, and our lack of vision. We add to the world our problems, usually defined as unmet expectations, lack of basic needs or even higher needs. And go about kvetching.

Nike had it right, “Just do it”. Elegant. Direct. To the point. We practice Engaged Zen in his Order. Our way is to meet the world directly, offering what we can, withholding when necessary, and working through, hand in hand with those affected, the issues that confront them.

“Working through” is an old ego-psychology term and our lack of understanding it reflects our social norms. It is not a quick fix, instant karma, or salve. To work through something is to enter it. Like a entering a koan, we drop away the expectation of a solution and live with paradox or contradiction, duality or powerlessness. We experience our feelings, letting our grip on them open so they may slip away eventually, but not before processing their relation to our thoughts and perceptions.

We do. We suck it up. We “gird our loins” in biblical terms. Diligence is a necessary ally in our work. We experience frustration like a duck floating on water. Nibble here, nibble there, float on.

So today, experience your world as it is, not as you wish it to be. Notice. Process. Do. Enjoy. But watch out for the inclination to cope.

Be well.

Culture

With palms together,

Good Morning Everyone,



The sky is wet this morning. I sit in the Zendo with my mini notebook and coffee waiting for any early morning students. Wednesday morning I open my Zendo to the public for practice. Not the “public” at large, mind you, but to my small sangha here in Las Cruces.



My morning practice actually starts late. 6:30 AM is nearly midday at some practice centers, but we are Americans and this is not a practice center, but my home. We are not affiliated with Soto Shu in Japan, nor do we wish to be. We are our own Order here in the United States.



Rev. Soyu Matsuoka-roshi , my Dharma Grandfather, did not bother to register most of his disciples with Soto Shu. He actually did what other Japanese Zen Teachers said should be done, let the Japanese recede and allow our own cultural elements to arise to be integrated. Sensei, according to my Teacher, taught his heirs to be open to the Americanization of Zen. Later developments have created an impulse to re-align with Soto Shu and many centers now eschew a more relaxed Center practice, in favor of the far more stylized Japanese monastic style. Most people attending such centers believe there is a “right” way and this way is the Japanese way.



I strongly disagree. Right is not external or culturally specific. Right is internal, an orientation of mind, body, and environment. Zen is not about the bells and whistles, the robes, or whether we bow at this word or that. Although these are important to the order and flow of a service composed of a variety of people, it is not Zen, per se.



Practice should consider environment. It is in an environmental, cultural context, that meanings arise and make sense. When we vow to cease doing evil, we understand evil in a cultural context, doing good also in such a context, and clearly creating conditions for addressing the cries of the world is a cultural phenomenon. We reside in an environment that is specific to us. Zen practice attempts to crack these wide open. Bringing in a foreign culture can lead to a false sense of specialness. And works against this necessity. Teachers who use choppy English can be perceived as somehow more esoteric, mystical, or “enlightened”. Koromos are more “elegant” and high class than scrubs or jeans and a t-shirt.



The Order I have established is less about form than about mindful, compassionate presence. Although form is important, (it does, after all provide the container), it is not the thing itself. I am more inclined to celebrate the use of a hammer than reside placidly in specialness.

Be well,