CHAPTER ONE
OUR SECRET PRACTICE
1. WHAT IS MEDITATION?
A great variety of different techniques from many different cultures and traditions all go by the name âmeditation.â Some call for us to concentrate all our attention on one thing, a single word or mantra, like Mu, for instance. Some advise that we count our breaths from one to ten, over and over. Others suggest that instead of focusing our attention on one thing, we allow our attention to be wide open and simply observe whatever occurs moment after moment. My own teacher, Joko Beck, who herself was trained by a Japanese Zen teacher in America, recommended that students begin with the practice of labeling their thoughts.
As we sit, thoughts inevitably occur; when one arises we simply repeat it silently to ourselves. For example, when we notice ourselves thinking about something from our job, we might say, âthinking: I must get the report in by noon.â Whenever a thought arises we simply repeat it, and as we do this over and over, we start to experience thinking as an ongoing process that has its own pace and rhythm. When we notice certain patterns recurring over and over, we might pick a simple one-word label like âworkâ or âplanningâ to cover all the little variations on the recurrent theme. As we settle into doing this kind of practice, we donât try to make the thoughts go away or cultivate any particular state, we simply notice and label our thoughts and let our mind settle downâor notâall on its own.
Although the word âmeditationâ has many spiritual connotations, all weâre really doing is sitting there. As we sit, we feel ourselves breathe. Thereâs no need to worry about thoughts, we just sit there and feel ourselves breathe. Nowadays, the literal, physical act of sitting is sometimes taken for granted and the emphasis is placed on whatâs going on in our minds. But meditation is a physical activity, not just a mental one. We sit in a particular posture, traditionally cross-legged, so that our knees are firmly on the ground and our back is straight. We might think of meditation as a form of yoga with a single posture that we stay with for a lifetime. Being able to hold a physical posture is an important correlate to being able to remain mentally focused and concentrated. Staying attuned to our body is our most fundamental discipline of awareness.
However, for Western students of Zen, cross-legged sitting traditionally posed problems of endurance as well as of awareness. Indeed, when I started out, it often seemed that the one thing I was learning to do in the zendo, the meditation hall, was to sit absolutely still even though I was in intense pain. The only thing I remember of my first Japanese teacherâs words during my first sesshin (as the intensive meditation retreats are called in the Zen tradition) was his growling the word âenduranceâ in the midst of a painfully long sitting period.
He may have had all sorts of interesting things to say on other subjects, but the only thing I could concentrate on was getting from one painful breath to another while my ankles and knees felt like burning needles had been plunged deep inside my joints. Those early years of zazen were physically very painful onesâand I have chosen not to pass this particular legacy on to my own students. Sitting still amid a certain amount of pain or restlessness is a very valuable form of discipline, but the point of Zen practice is not to train people to hold out under torture. Students can sit still and straight in chairs if sitting cross-legged is unbearable and people need to learn for themselves what amount of difficulty is useful for them to bear and why. Traditional Zen had a very macho side to it, one that thankfully has softened over the years, in no small part due to a new generation of American teachers, especially women teachers, who have found new ways to balance discipline with gentleness.
When we enter the zendo for the first time and look at the stillness of the meditators there, we might imagine that they have all reached a state of complete inner stillness as well. Once we sit down ourselves however, we realize that the two do not automatically go together. Instead, the stillness of our bodies gradually creates a container for our agitated thoughts and feelings. They may gradually settle down or they may seethe and churn for a long while. Whatever is going on inside, we simply sit and breathe.
Itâs really very simple, but itâs hard for us to keep it simple, to let it stay simple. We complicate it by being preoccupied with the content of our thoughts rather than simply letting thoughts float through our mind like clouds through the sky. So much of whatâs involved in meditation instruction is a matter of finding ways to keep it simple. Everyone knows how to breathe; anyone can feel the breath as it fills the chest and moves in and out of the nose. Itâs like climbing stairs. We all know how to take that first step; what is not so easy is taking one step after another after another, especially since in our practice, the staircase is never-ending and we canât be sure where it leads. Yet at each step, all we ever have to do is take the next step, the next breath.
When I give newcomers meditation instruction, I usually tell them to sit down and face the wall as if they were facing a mirror. I tell them that as they sit, their mind will automatically appear and display itself. When we sit in front of a mirror, our face automatically appears. We canât do it right or wrong; the mirror is doing all the work. When we sit in meditation, right there in front of us is our mind. All we have to do is be willing to look and experience what comes up.
What could be easier? The good news is you canât miss it; itâs right there all the time; looking into the mirror your face automatically appears. The bad news is that is not at all what we were looking for when we came to practice. We are not at all happy with the version of ourselves we wake up to every morningâthatâs often why weâve come to practice.
Our discomfort with our mind as it is, is displayed to us by the kinds of thoughts I call âmeta-thoughts.â These are our thoughts about our thoughts. These take the form of judgments or comments on the whole process. These are the âhow am I doing?â or âam I doing this right?â thoughts. When we label our ordinary thoughts about lunch or planning or daydreaming, we simply notice them and let them go, but our meta-thoughts require a slightly different kind of attention, because they can encapsulate all sorts of longings, expectations, and judgments about who we are and why we are practicing. Our meta-thoughts reveal where and how we think we are broken and what are our fantasies of being fixed or cured. These curative fantasies make up the core of what I call our secret practice. Becoming clear about our secret practice is the only path to true practice.
2. WHY ARE WE (REALLY) MEDITATING?
When I ask someone what his or her practice is, Iâll usually be told something like âcounting my breaths.â But what is that person really doing? Whatever method of meditation we adopt, we are inevitably going to try to enlist that practice in the service of one or more of our curative fantasies. A curative fantasy is a personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better. Sometimes these fantasies are quite explicit: weâre sure we know whatâs wrong and weâre sure we know what weâre after. Feeling certain, of course, is no guarantee of being right. As we go along we may have to radically question our definition of what counts as a problem and a solution. Sometimes these fantasies lurk behind the scenes, operating more or less unconsciously, and the teacher and student together must work out a way to bring them out in the open and make their assumptions explicit before they can be challenged. Curative fantasies take many forms, and when you know where to look, they can be seen in all sorts of places.
One classic curative fantasy, one about being cured by love, can be found in Plato. Aristophanes, cast as a character in Platoâs Symposium, tells a parable about the nature of love in which the ancestors of mankind have been punished by the gods by being literally cut in half, so that we, their descendants, are destined to be searching forever for our missing half. What we call love, Aristophanes says, is the desire and pursuit of that lost wholeness. It seems mankind has been searching forever for some version of that lost wholeness. Buddhism and Plato however seem to offer very different accounts of the loss of that wholeness and the role of desire in its original disruption and possible repair. For Plato, desire and love are what overcomes our experience of separation; they are what glue us back together when weâve been torn apart.
Buddhism offers us a vision of a life in which originally nothing is lacking. Desire, on the other hand, always seems to arise from an experience of something missing. Does fulfilling our desires genuinely restore us to wholeness or does it send us on an endless, frustrating quest for what we can never have?
âDualismâ is a word that Buddhists use to describe the experience of being cut off from whatâs vital in life. Wherever we are, we feel that what we want or need is somewhere else. We may feel isolated and alienated from life, as if a curtain has come down and has separated us from being fully present and engaged with other people and with the life going on all around us. We imagine, in our curative fantasies, what weâre missing and at the same time we assign blame for why we donât have it. We can blame ourselves or blame others or blame fate. Sometimes we imagine someone else really has what we are missing and we try to attach ourselves to that person. We can attach ourselves as a lover, as a student, as a disciple or a patient. But as long as we approach people from a feeling of deficiency and longing, we cannot approach them as equals. And by definition, it is only as an equal that we will have what they have.
No matter how much we look outside of ourselves for whatâs missing, we always will have to come back to the question of whatâs missing in the first place, and why we think we donât have it. What has stood in our way? Almost always we conclude that there is something wrong with us as we are. That is why we have been unable to achieve what we want or why we havenât been given the love or attention we need. Our curative fantasies always contain within them a corresponding fantasy of whatâs wrong with us, a private explanation of the way in which weâre damaged, deficient, or unworthy. So in looking to overcome our suffering, we have to look at the ways we have come to blame ourselves for suffering in the first place. If we practice Buddhism, we are tempted to blame our desires or our self-centeredness for our sufferingâthatâs what Buddha said we are doing wrong, isnât it?
We imagine: âIf only I could get rid of those bad parts of my self, everything would be OK.â Or maybe I have to get rid of my âselfâ entirely! Then âIâ get entangled in the paradox of wanting to get rid of âme.â âIâ? âMeâ? My âselfâ? How many of us are in there, and which side am I on? How did I end up in so many pieces?
The fundamental dualism we face on the cushion is not some metaphysical abstraction, it is the all too down-to-earth experience of a person divided against herself in the pursuit of a curative fantasy. All too often, or perhaps I should say, inevitably, one side of a person takes up arms against another side and enlists practice itself as the weapon of choice. We do this, of course, in very high-minded terms, telling ourselves we want to be spiritual not materialistic, compassionate not self-centered, self-contained instead of needy, calm instead of anxious, and on and on and on. And while these are seemingly worthy goals, our so-called aspiration is a mask our self-hate wears for the world, putting a spiritual face on our inner conflict.
Over and over again, I see students whose secret goal in practice is the extirpation of some hated part of themselves. Sometimes it is their anger, sometimes their sexuality, their emotional vulnerability, their bodies, or sometimes their very minds which are blamed as the source of their suffering. âIf only I could just once and for all get rid ofâŠâ Try filling in the blank yourself. This attitude toward practice, if unchallenged, turns students into spiritual (and sometimes literal) anorectics: practice becomes a high-minded way of purging ourselves of aspects of ourselves that we hate. Our hatred for our own physical mortality and imperfection fuels a war against our own bodies, a war in which we strive to turn our bodies into invulnerable machines that can endure anything, or discard them as irrelevant husks that merely clothe some true, inner, idealized self. We go to war against our own minds, trying to cut off emotion or thought altogether as if we could rest once and for all in an untroubled blankness. We want practice to be a kind of mental lobotomy, cutting out everything that scares or shames us, perhaps even cutting out thinking itself.
When I was a young boy going to elementary school, my mother, along with some of the other mothers in the neighborhood, would take turns driving us to school. Four or five rambunctious kids would be squeezed into the car for the ride to school in the morning and home in the afternoon. I was a shy, skinny, bookish kidâwhat would later be called a nerdâand I often felt bullied by the other, tougher kids. When they teased me or got too wild in the car and wouldnât listen to the mom doing the driving shouting to them to be quiet, I remember simply closing my eyes and making them all disappear. I just blanked them out. That worked well, up to a pointâbut sometimes if they noticed what I was doing, it just provoked them to try to get a rise out of me, which they inevitably could if they tried hard enough. That memory came back to me the other day when I was trying to sit zazen at home with my son shouting and playing in another room while I tried to meditate. As I sat, I realized I simply wanted to shut everything out, just as I did all those years ago in the back seat of that carpool. My secret practice, at that moment, was a fantasy of imperturbable calm. Now, as then, I knew it wouldnât work for long. My teacher Joko used to hate it when anybody called our long intensive practice periods a âretreat.â âWhat are you retreating from?â sheâd ask. Sometimes, the answer is painfully obvious.
It takes a long time to give up on our secret practice, and to accept that weâre not sitting here to get away from anything, but that weâre here precisely to face all the things we want to avoid. A regular sitting practice makes all those aspects of life, of our body and mind, all the things that we keep ordinarily at armâs length, increasingly unavoidable. Itâs not what we might have had in mind when we first signed up, but itâs what we get.
We may have had the ideal that practice will make us compassionate, and so we end up trying to do away with our self-centeredness or even do away with our desiresâbut in doing so we set up one part of the self in opposition to another part. We may say we want to dissolve the dualism of subject and object, but itâs the dualism of self-hate that we really have to struggle with: one part of ourselves constantly judging another part, one part endlessly needing and trying to destroy another partâand all in the name of compassion and oneness! The real nitty-gritty of practice involves learning to recognize all these subtle forms of self-hate.
How often are we preoccupied in our sitting with judging thoughts? How often does one part of us say to another: âBe Quiet!â How often are we preoccupied with some version or another of the question, âHow am I doing?â or âWhy is my mind not becoming calm or quiet; why am I still feeling anger or anxiety?â We watch these same preoccupations recycling themselves through our minds, over and over and over. The same handful of thoughtsâonce we see their repetitive nature, it can get quite boring. Actually, being bored is a big part of practice; we have to get bored with our own preoccupations. We get tired of them, and when that happens, we can start to simply leave them alone. Thatâs what happens to all those judging thoughts: we donât banish them once and for all, we just donât make getting rid of our judgmental side our new project. We see that judging thoughts are just more thoughts and we leave them alone too and eventually we get bored with them and let our attention to move on to other things.
In a way, we allow our life to become much more superficial. We are no longer so preoccupied with our important thoughts and deep feelings that we donât see whatâs right in front of us. Practice allows us to actually pay attention to all these nice trivial things that are happening around us. We donât have to make our preoccupations go away either, they become just one of many things happeningâno longer the only things that count. They are just things hanging around in the corners of our minds; they donât stand in the center of our universe any more.
After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized, spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative. Weâre not here to fix or improve ourselvesâI like to say practice actually puts an end to self-improvement. But itâs very hard to stay with that sense of not needing to do anything, not to turn the zendo into a spiritual gymnasium where we get ourselves mentally in shape. Itâs hard to really do nothing at all. Over and over, we watch our mind trying to avoid or fix, fix or avoid; to either not look at it or change it. Leaving that mind just as it is the hardest thing to do.
3. THREE STAGES OF PRACTICE
After weâve been sitting for some time, we may see that our practice naturally flows through a number of different stages. In the first stage, we are primarily concerned with our private experience of sitting. We might focus on the physical difficulties we have sitting with pain or with the psychological difficulties associated with thoughts that seem to wander and proliferate out of control. Or as we settle into our practice, sitting may become the source of various sorts of pleasure. We might use our sitting to calm or relax our minds, to create a daily oasis of quiet and peace within our hectic lives. Perhaps we may even experience moments of intense joy. Thereâs nothing wrong with any of these feelings, of course. However, when we are starting out, weâre experiencing them in the context of an essentially self-centered practiceâa practice pre-occupied with the quality or feel of our own moment-to-moment experience. At this stage, we may feel that our secret practice is actually working and that weâre beginning to get from practice all the things we came to it to find.
Even when so-called enlightenment experiences give us a moment of light, at this stage, instead of using that light to illuminate our life, we become infatuated with our own brightness; or perhaps we become like Zen moths, dazzled by and circling around what we imagine to be our own brilliance. Often practice never goes beyond this stage. Even people who have meditated for years and years can settle into a preoccupation with their own meditative accomplishments or secretly continue to use practice in the service of cultivating one inner state or another. Again, thereâs nothing wrong with that; itâs just not the whole story.
We move out of this phase when we start to be less preoccupied with our own condition and into a...