Awake in This Life

As heady as all of these words might strike us, pointing to Infinity is fairly simple. In fact, everything is Infinity, so there is no way to avoid it. Knowing this deeply, all things change to reflect our realization, and we begin to inhabit a different place of being. Just sitting still ignites a mysterious process. It’s not unlike water of stillness being poured on the dry sponge of the contracted, always moving small self. The more stillness, the more the small self expands its form into an uncontracted Big Self. Once this expansion begins to occur, we become more intensely aware of everything that arises in life. In fact, the whole world can open us up to an intense fire of Freedom. As we soak our contracted sense of self with this timeless and boundless communion with everything and then allow all of our action to come from this infinitely expansive and fluid place, we can’t avoid becoming profoundly helpful. This helpfulness spontaneously expresses itself as we become what Buddhism refers to as bodhisattvas.

But bodhisattvahood won’t necessarily come if we are merely excellent at meditating and accessing marvelous and dramatic states of mind. States won’t enlighten us. They arise and cease like everything else. They are bound by time and can offer the mind a nice playground, but no matter how great any meditative state might strike us, it is not Enlightenment. It might point us in the right direction, but no state that can be achieved can be considered complete Enlightenment. On the other hand, our relationship to the intensified presence that comes from meditative practice and its resulting states can work to create a space for a deeper humanity to unfold in each of us. In this way, our meditative states support the behaviors we manifest in the world. Thus, our states have the opportunity to evolve into traits. All we have to do is practice being still and then integrate its offerings into our activity. When this experience of deep stillness of mind and body arises in awareness, we are acting from a spacious release. Once we can consistently act from this release, we simply exist as this release and we are no longer anything other than a single point of Awakened consciousness. We are just sitting. And while this whole experience may be felt as a “single point” of stillness, it is also simultaneously recognized as universally comprehensive and vast.

As committed as we might be, meditation is tough on most of us. Practicing stillness is the physical act of reaching toward the Infinite that creates an opening into the Awareness beyond the boundary of our minds. Enlightenment is a slip or fall that fundamentally changes the way we meet the world, while our stillness practice throws banana peels all over the floor. “Enlightenment is an accident,” as we say in Zen. “Meditation makes us accident prone.” Becoming accident prone causes intense stress to the mind and body. In many cases, our minds do what they can to avoid stress during meditation by sabotaging the experience. This sabotage happens in any number of ways: perhaps sleepiness is brought on; maybe physical pain shows up, or even constant mental noise might flood our experience. Regardless, letting patience inform our sitting can help lessen the impact of these impediments.

Some time ago a group of senior monks at the Zen Center were sharing lunch and rather animatedly discussing problems that they were facing in their stillness practice. A friend and I sat at the adjacent table and listened, amazed that people who had embraced a practice for decades still had difficulty on their cushions. We chewed our food quietly so that we wouldn’t miss any of the conversation.

“My knees still kill me every morning,” said one middle-aged man.

“Wait until your hips go,” responded a smiling woman who must have been in her late sixties.

“I still deal with intense grief,” said another monk. “It always surprises me when the tears come up over the loss of my son. Twenty years ago and it still crushes me every once in a while.”

I couldn’t believe it. After all this time, all of these monks still had to deal with small self issues such as physical and emotional discomfort. Was there any hope for a guy like me who had been sitting regularly for a comparatively short time of only five or six years?

My friend then wisely pointed out, in between bites of green salad and brown rice, “But they don’t seem caught by any of it.” She was right. They didn’t seem to be the least bit worried.

“More for us to let go of,” said the most senior monk at the other table, a lady who wore her baldness with amazing dignity. This beautiful bald woman then started to laugh from some place deep within. It was like a song of forgiveness.

Practice for even the most experienced meditators will always and forever be just that: a practice. None of us will ever be finished with this work. We won’t arrive at some endpoint and be done attaining stillness, since the Universe will keep moving, always showing us that there is more to meet. More grace and resistance to observe and then release.

This observe-and-release practice helps us not only recognize the traps and snares of our lives, but it also has the power to move us beyond them without causing harm to anything in the process. We cultivate a mental and bodily awareness where any and all resistance to stillness can be exposed and then addressed. Our freedom from meditative obstacles requires patience, compassion, and a dedicated use of the Witness in whatever state we find ourselves.

Just sit. There are a number of ways to do this, and much to the chagrin of my Zen teachers, I don’t believe there is a right way to do this. I devoted years to getting my legs in just the right position and getting my posture to reflect my dedicated intention as much as possible. This sincere and continuous effort has served me well, and I will always feel deep gratitude for what I was taught. I don’t regret any of the training. But as a teacher, I’ve found that the body’s position matters less than the intention behind the meditation. We can consciously meet our lives at any time, from any place, in any mind state. Ultimately, there doesn’t need to be a technique for this to occur. Just sit down and be quiet, over and over again, and watch what happens. Teachings, teachers, and groups of spiritual friends will help this process along, but ultimately there isn’t anything that isn’t meditation as long as we are dedicated to Awakening. Regardless of our sitting posture or our ability to attain certain proscribed states of consciousness, the non-action of simple stillness is the Way.

However, it is important to know that until we commit to sitting still with our full body and mind, we will not be ready to assimilate what awaits us as our practice deepens and expands. This isn’t said to discourage. But the enlightened perspective cannot unfold in any transformative way until we are ready for it. In order to get ready, we need to practice completely letting go of the old habits of the small self that have governed our lives. Only when we’re ready to release our mental narratives that define our past, and any deliverance we think we might find in the future, can we expect Enlightenment to find fertile ground in this body of ours. In the process of practicing stillness, profound insights may show up at any time or at any stage of our work, but what the insights point to can’t truly inform us unless we can integrate the expansiveness of the experience. Meditation will always deepen our stillness, and the level of stillness we attain will always determine the extent to which our insights will resonate. The more we practice stillness, the greater our capacity for integrating our insights in meaningful ways.

And how do we stay focused and engaged in this whole process? Inspiration for sitting still can come from a number of sources. But it is always helpful, regardless of our deepest reasons for sitting, to recognize that the thing in us that doesn’t want to meditate is the thing keeping us from Enlightenment. A great question to ask ourselves when we don’t want to meditate is, “What do I want more than anything else in the time that I have left in this life?” Once you truly ask yourself this question, watch what arises from within yourself. Watch for any and all forms of resistance and grasping, and know that this is nothing other than the activity of the small self fighting for its very survival against the threats posed by the Big Self’s eternal offering of Freedom.