Perhaps no aspect of the Buddha’s teaching has been more misunderstood and neglected than right concentration. Yet right concentration is an integral part of the Buddha’s path to awakening. It is, for instance, one of the qualities cultivated on the eightfold path.

In general, Buddhist teachings can be divided into three parts: sila, samadhi, and prajna: ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom. Or to put it into the vernacular: clean up your act, concentrate your mind, and use your concentrated mind to investigate reality.

The Buddha thus makes it clear that a concentrated mind is necessary for the proper examination of reality. The jhanas are the method he taught over and over again for developing such a mind.

The word jhana literally means “meditation.” In the sutras, there are four jhanas and four immaterial states. In modern times these eight states are simply called the eight jhanas. Thus the jhanas are eight altered states of consciousness, brought on via concentration and each yielding more concentration than the previous. Upon emerging from the jhanas—preferably the fourth or higher—you begin doing an insight practice with your jhanically concentrated, indistractable mind. This is the heart of the method the Buddha discovered. It reminds us that these states are not an end in and of themselves—they are simply a very useful way of preparing your mind, so you can more effectively examine reality and discover the deeper truths that lead to liberation.

Related: The Mindfulness of the Buddha 

The method for entering the jhanas begins with generating access concentration. The phrase access concentration means concentration strong enough to provide access to the jhanas. It is distinguished from momentary concentration—which is less concentrated—and from fixed or one-pointed concentration, which is the stronger concentration associated with the jhanas.

You begin by sitting in a comfortable, upright position. It needs to be comfortable, because if there is too much pain, the unwholesome mental state of aversion will naturally develop. You may be able to sit in a way that looks really good, but if your knees are killing you, you will be in pain and you will not experience any jhanas. So you need to find some way to sit that is comfortable. But you also need to be upright and alert, because that tends to get your energy flowing in a way that keeps you awake. On the other hand, if you are too comfortable, you might be overcome by sloth and torpor, which is also an unwholesome mental state that of course is totally useless for entering the jhanas.

So the first prerequisite for entering the jhanas is to put your body in a position that you can hold for the length of the meditation period. If you have back problems or some other obstacle that prevents you from sitting upright, then you need to find some other alert position you can maintain comfortably.

Now, this is not to say you cannot move. It may be that you have taken a position and you discover something: “My knee is killing me; I have to move because there is too much aversion.” If you have to move, you have to move. Just be mindful of the moving. The intention to move will be there before the movement. Notice that intention; then move very mindfully, and then resettle yourself into the new position; finally notice the mind working to get back to that place of calm it had before you moved.

This process encourages you to find a position you can keep, because you’ll notice the amount of disturbance that even a slight movement generates. And in order to become concentrated enough to have the jhanas manifest, you need a very calm mind.

Generating access concentration can be done in a number of ways. A common means for doing so is through following the breath, a practice known as anapanasati. The first word of this Pali compound, anapana, means “in-breath and out-breath,” while the word sati means “mindfulness.” The practice is therefore “mindfulness of breathing.” When practicing anapanasati, you put your attention on the physical sensations associated with breathing. It is extremely important to not control the breath in any way—just pay attention to the breath as it naturally occurs. If you control the breath, it does make it easier to focus. But it makes it too easy, so you won’t generate sufficient concentration to enter the jhanas.

It is probably better if you can observe the physical sensations at the nostrils or on the area between the nose and the upper lip, rather than at the abdomen or elsewhere. It is better because it is more difficult to do; therefore, you have to concentrate more. Since you are trying to generate access concentration, you take something that is doable, though not terribly easy to do, and then you do it.

When noticing the natural, uncontrolled breath at the nose, you have to pay attention very carefully. In doing so you will notice the tactile sensations, and then your mind will wander off. Then you’ll bring it back, and it will wander off; then you’ll bring it back, and it will wander off. Eventually, though maybe not the next time you sit in meditation, maybe not even tomorrow or next week or next month, you’ll find that the mind locks onto the breath. Any thoughts you have are relegated to the background. The thoughts might be something like, “Wow, I’m really with the breath now,” as opposed to, “When I get to Hawaii, the first thing I’m going to do is…”

Related: Jhana: The Spice Your Meditation Has Been Missing

Whatever method you use to generate access concentration, the sign that you’ve gotten to access concentration is that you are fully present with the object of meditation. So if you are doing metta (lovingkindness meditation), you’re just fully there with the feeling of metta; you’re not getting distracted. If you’re doing the body-sweeping practice, you’re fully there with the sensations in the body as you sweep your attention over the body. You’re not thinking extraneous thoughts; you’re not planning; you’re not worrying; you’re not angry; you’re not wanting something. You are just fully there with whatever your object is.

As you start to become concentrated, you might notice various lights and colors even though your eyes are closed. These are signs that you are starting to get concentrated. There is generally nothing useful that can be done—just ignore them. When you actually do get quite concentrated, the random blobs and laser shows will disappear. They might be replaced by a diffused white light, which is a sign of good concentration. It always appears for some people, it never appears for others, and many people find it sometimes appears and sometimes does not appear. But again, there’s nothing you need to do with that sign either—it’s just a sign. Remain focused on your meditation object.

Not everyone who undertakes jhana practice becomes proficient in this skill, but the only way to find out if it is something that works for you is to try learning it. It is indeed learnable by serious lay practitioners as well as by modern monks and nuns.

May your journey on the spiritual path be of great fruit and great benefit to all beings.

If you’d like to learn more about concentration practice, read Tricycle‘s interview with Brasington as well as other articles that appeared in our Winter 2004 special section on the jhanas.

♦

From Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington, © 2015 by Leigh Brasington. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA.

[This story was first published in 2015.]

The post Entering the Jhanas: Focus Comes First appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“I’ve been meditating for some time, but my mind seems just as chaotic and confused as when I started. Am I doing something wrong?”

Almost everyone who practices meditation has similar concerns, no matter how long they’ve been doing it—whether three weeks, three years, or three decades. When students confront me with the progress question, I just try to redirect their attention. I’ve found that the best thing is for them to just keep practicing.

We call meditation “practice” for a reason. Any form of practice consists of doing something over and over again and failing at it over and over again. Through this process, we gradually build the capacities that make it possible to do what we are practicing. There is nothing special about meditation: like anything else, it’s a collection of skills.

Much of the confusion about meditation results from the fact that the different processes involved tend to get lumped together without clear differentiation. It’s as if in learning how to play the flute, we didn’t distinguish between blowing a long, sustained tone and a full round one, or between the skills of tonguing and fingering.

When it comes to meditation, some people are able to sit still without tension in their bodies; others are able to track the coming and going of the breath; yet others are able to open to everything they experience; and still others excel in clear and sharp focus, in visualization, and so on. There are many ways to practice meditation, but all of them involve a number of separate skills.

As with athletic or artistic endeavors, if we are serious about meditation, we spend a lot of time training in these basic skills. We don’t train in all the necessary skills at the same time; we train one, then another. It’s repetitious and not particularly exciting. But as we acquire competency and proficiency in each, we become capable of combining them in increasingly complex ways. Then things start to get interesting.

But even then, we can’t expect success in every attempt. We are training, and because we know we are training, we need to be willing to learn from our failures. Every failure reveals what we lack in precision, strength, flexibility, resiliency, stamina, or dexterity.

We learn where our weaknesses are and how to compensate for or remedy them. And we also come to appreciate where our strengths are and how to build on them.

If we’re learning to play a piece of music, we practice and practice and gradually it comes together. We become capable of holding sustained notes with good tone so that we can play the slower passages. Our fingers develop the flexibility and dexterity to handle the faster, more complex sections.

I may play lyrical pieces beautifully, but I may never be good at the kind of pyrotechnics needed for solo performances. And you may be able to bring out the passion and power in Beethoven, but miss the nuance in Satie’s subtle duets with silence. And that’s just how it is.

The apps, neuro-feedback devices, and other instruments to track various bodily and neurological states that have entered the spiritual marketplace may be helpful in developing and refining certain abilities. But it makes about as much sense to reduce meditation progress to such measurements as it does to reduce music to how long we can hold a sustained note or how quickly we can play a certain scale.

When it comes to meditation, we have to look at the different skills involved and figure out how to train in each of them.

Take mindfulness, for instance. It has attracted a lot of attention recently, but in terms of meditation skills, it’s just one of many. If we regard the mind as a musical instrument, then mindfulness involves simply learning how to play in tune. That’s very important—if we can’t play in tune, nothing we play sounds good and other people probably won’t want to play music with us—but even after mastering playing in tune, we still have to learn how to play actual melodies, to make real music. Mindfulness may be great for baroque, but when we discover the blues we find a whole new set of skills to learn. The same holds for meditation.

Then comes the question of commitment. Again, the similarities with music are striking. If we practice half an hour a day on a musical instrument, we will slowly learn how to play it. If we practice an hour or several hours a day, our skills will develop more quickly. On the other hand, if we practice too much, we may burn out and be unable to learn at all. Thus, as with many other aspects of life, balance is important.

But why practice at all?

While there are well-documented benefits to meditation, approaching meditation for its particular benefits is very much like exercising to stay fit. It becomes a task, another thing to do. This is not the best approach. Frequently, it results in a not-so-subtle form of resentment that undermines the equanimity and ease necessary for effective practice.

Although meditation is now most frequently presented as something “good for us,” it is closer to an art form. Difficult and challenging, it requires a complex set of skills. And it takes time and effort to learn, let alone master.

Again, the parallels with music are interesting: we may sometimes resent the many hours we’ve had to put into practice, but the enjoyment we experience in playing music brings pleasure to us and to others throughout our lives.

If we take up meditation as we would any other artistic pursuit, it is unlikely we will have any regrets. Quite the contrary, the practice’s significance will grow and unfold throughout our lives.

[This story was first published in 2015.]

The post The Progress Question appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In everyday life, we habitually try to conceal the gaps in our experience of mind and body. These gaps are a bit like an awkward silence around the table at a dinner party. A good host is supposed to keep the conversation going with his or her guests to put them at ease. You might talk about the weather, the latest books you’ve read, or what you are serving for dinner. We treat ourselves similarly. We occupy ourselves with subconscious chatter because we are uncomfortable with any gaps in our conversation with ourselves.

The purpose of the practice of meditation is to experience the gaps. We do nothing, essentially, and see what that brings—either discomfort or relief, whatever the case may be. The starting point for the practice of meditation is the mindfulness discipline of developing peace. The peace we experience in meditation is simply this state of doing nothing, which is experiencing the absence of speed.

Often, in considering the practice of meditation, the question arises as to what you are meditating on. In this approach, meditation has no object. You do work with your body, your thoughts, and your breath, but that is different from concentrating wholeheartedly on one thing. Here, you are not meditating upon anything; you are simply being present in a simple way.

The practice works with what is immediately available to you. You have your experience of being alive; you have a mind and you have a body. So you work with those things. You also work with whatever is going through your mind, whatever the content is, whatever the current issues are, whether painful or pleasurable. Whatever you are experiencing, that’s where you begin. You also use your breath, which is part of the body and is also affected by mind. Breathing expresses the fact that you are alive. If you ‘re alive, you breathe. The technique is basic and direct: you pay heed to breath. You don’t try to use the mindfulness of breathing to entertain yourself, but you use the mindfulness of breathing to simplify matters.

You develop mindfulness of the rising and falling of the breath. You go along with the process of breathing. In particular, you go along with each exhalation. As the breath goes out, you go out with it. And when the outbreath dissolves, you feel that you are also dissolving. The in-breath is a gap, a space, and then you breathe out again. So there is a constant sense of going out and slowing down.

Related: Why Meditation Can, and Should, Be Simple

At the beginning, the technique may be somewhat fascinating, but it quickly becomes boring. You get tired of sitting and breathing, doing nothing again and again and again—and again. You may feel like an awkward fool. It is so uninteresting. You might resent having gotten yourself into this situation. You might also resent the people who encouraged you to do this. You may feel completely foolish, as if the cosmos were mocking you.

Then, as you relax a little bit, you start to call up past experiences, memories of your life as well as your emotions, your aggression and passion. Now you have a private cinema show, and you can review your autobiography while you sit. Then, after a while, you might come back to your breath, thinking that you should try to be a good child and apply the technique. In meditation we have the opportunity to meet ourselves, to see ourselves clearly for the first time. We have never met ourselves properly or spent this kind of time with ourselves before. Of course, we take time for ourselves; we go off to the country or the ocean for a vacation. But we always find things to do on vacation. We make little handicrafts or we read something. We cook, we talk, we take a walk, or we swim. We never just sit with ourselves. It’s a difficult thing to do.

The practice of meditation is not merely hanging out with ourselves, however. We are accomplishing something by being there properly, within the framework of the technique. The technique is simple enough that it doesn’t entertain us. In fact, the technique may begin to fall away at some point. As we become more comfortable with ourselves and develop more understanding of ourselves, our application of the technique becomes less heavy-handed. The technique almost seems unnecessary. In the beginning we need the technique, like using a crutch to help us walk when we’re injured. Then, once we can walk without it, we don’t need the crutch. In meditation it is similar. In the beginning we are very focused on the technique, but eventually we may find that we are just there, simply there.

At that point, we may think that the efficient system we’ve organized around our practice is breaking down. It can be disconcerting, but it’s also refreshing. We sense that there is more to us than our habitual patterns. We have more in us than our bundles of thoughts, emotions, and upheavals. There’s something behind this whole facade. We discover the reservoir of softness within ourselves.

Related: Making Friends with Oneself 

At that point, we begin to truly befriend ourselves, which allows us to see ourselves much more honestly. We can see both aspects, not just the bright side of the picture, how fantastic and good we are, but also how terrible we are. Good and bad somehow don’t make much difference at this point. It all has one flavor. We see it all.

As your sympathy toward yourself expands, you begin to appreciate and enjoy simply being with yourself, being alone. Or at least you are not as irritated with yourself as you used to be! As you become ever more familiar with yourself, you find that you can actually put up with yourself without complaint­—which you have never done before. Your thought patterns, subconscious gossip, and all of your mind’s chatter become much less interesting. In fact, you begin to find them all very boring. However, this is slightly different than our normal experience of boredom, because behind the boredom, or even within it, you feel something refreshing: cool boredom. You’re bored to death, bored to tears, but it is no longer claustrophobic. The boredom is cooling, refreshing, like the water from a cold mountain stream.

Hot boredom is like being locked in a padded cell. You are bored, miserable, and irritated. You will probably experience lots of that in your meditation practice. Beyond that, however, with cool boredom, you don’t feel imprisoned. Cool boredom is quite spacious, and it creates further softness and sympathy toward ourselves. In that space, we are no longer afraid of allowing ourselves to experience a gap. In other words, we realize that existence does not depend on constantly cranking up our egomaniacal machine. There is another way of existing.

From Mindfulness in Action by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. © 2015 Shambhala Publications, Inc.

The post Cool Boredom appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In spite of being a daily walker, I have always regarded walking meditation as a sort of punctuation to, or respite from, the work of sitting; nothing on the order of the sober mind training and investigation to be undertaken on the home base of the cushion. This willful delusion could be a hangover from my earliest forays into zazen, where kinhin really was a respite—but also, it seemed to me, a mad, macho dash around the zendo for which I was ill-suited, even as a teenager. Nor was I ever tolerant of the extreme slow motion of Burmese-style vipassana walking. On the contrary, it sent my kleshas into a tailspin, and just made me want to hurry up and sit down. 

This isn’t to say that walking to grocery store or the recycling bin doesn’t give me infinite chances to be mindful of the breath and the contact of my soles on the pavement. And there have been those revelatory times on retreat when the walking path became the best place to be. But through these many years, only sporadically did I experience my walking body as the locus of refreshment and concentration that I thought was normally and primarily accessible with glutes planted on the floor. It hasn’t been part of a daily practice, where I set my mind and heart to it, bowed and gave it the respect it’s due. I’ve known I was missing out, or rather, that I wasn’t letting myself in.

Related: Mindfulness on the Move 

As with most things that seem hard to undertake, or beyond my ken, it’s usually desperation and the demands of age that force me to really try. Last year, a collusion of physical and emotional shifts shoved me off the cushion and into a series of other postures where I undertook to meditate. In an attempt to jumpstart a better walking practice, I looked for guidance, and came upon a set of instructions for walking meditation online, attributed to Ajahn Mun, the founder of the Thai Forest tradition. The translation is attributed to Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who is quite sure he never did translate them, and a search of Ajahn Mun’s biography and the companion volume, Patipada, both written by the Thai master Ajahn Mahaboowa, turn up no such text. 

Regardless of who uttered these lines, their simplicity and forthrightness were what I needed, and re-oriented me to how very available walking meditation is, and what an act of reverence to the dhamma. Another hangover, one many of us nurse through a lifetime, is the din of interior voices telling us we’re not capable of something, that it really isn’t within our grasp. I felt that way for a long time about my own breath, and it took me years to comprehend that I wasn’t doing it wrong, as some of those voices insisted. That playing with and manipulating and sending my breath into all kinds of real and imagined places was my prerogative. And that’s how I learned to meditate. These little instructions, which are nothing new, re-inspired me to collapse the Cartesian distance I’d erected between my pacing body and my fussy mind, and to find another way of accessing what Ajahn Lee called a safe home for the mind. They’re like a plainspoken voice that says, “Do it, out of compassion for yourself.” 

Walking Meditation Instructions

The key technique for walking meditation is to be mindful of walking and aware of the touching of the feet to the ground. Before starting walking meditation, the practitioner should prepare a walking path. The walking path should not be shorter than seventeen steps long. The walking path must be clean and smooth. The direction of the walking path, when part of practice, is from the east to the west. Other directions are acceptable if a suitable direction cannot be found, except avoid the direction from the north to the south and from the south to the north. 

Before starting walking meditation, the practitioner stands at one end and puts the right hand over the left in front of the body. Having thus composed the body, they should then stand still and bring awareness and attention to the body. Then raise one’s hands together (a gesture of respect) and with the eyes shut reflect for a few minutes on the qualities of the Buddha, the dhamma and the sangha. Then bring the hands down and decide on how long you are going to walk. Focus the eyes down on the ground/floor about six feet in front of you or at a suitable distance for each individual. Don’t look around.

While walking, practitioners mindfully note this arising and passing away of feelings as the soles of the feet lift off or touch onto the ground. Keep the full attention on sensations that arise through walking. Walking quick or slow depends on each practitioner. If the mind wanders a lot, walking slowly is suitable. Then bring the mind back to the sensations at the feet and continue walking. While walking the mind may become calm and tranquil. Stop and stand to allow the mind to experience this calmness and tranquility.

Another way to do walking meditation is to use a mantra like bhuddo [awake]. This technique of practice is like the sitting meditation as mentioned earlier. The practitioner mentally repeats buddho with the breath while walking. Be mindful on the breaths as you repeat the mantra, buddho, all the time. This technique will help calm the mind. However, it is not suitable for beginners because the breath is a subtle meditation subject. Walking meditation combined with the breath with the word buddho is fit for one who has attained a certain degree of stability and calmness beforehand.

Related: Tricycle’s Meditation App Roundup

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post Seeking Other Postures appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We all seek out meditation in order to relieve pain of one kind or another. If we weren’t at least vaguely dissatisfied, we wouldn’t try it. 

Many of us sense that by working from the inside, meditation addresses the root of our problems. But that introspective effort remains handicapped if we give way to pain-producing actions and words off the cushion. 

To end suffering, the Buddha prescribed a compound of three essentials: morality, meditation, and wisdom. Meditation practice without morality and wisdom is like a stool with only one leg—it is bound to fall over. 

The Sanskrit term for morality—the first of the three trainings—is sila, which also translates as “discipline.” Both English equivalents creak under the weight of dualistic judgments about right and wrong, good and bad. But in actuality, when upheld in daily life, sila brings lightness and ease to meditation.

The last things we need in meditation are sticky burrs like regret and guilt, yet we invite them into the mind through misconduct. Those without a contemplative practice might be able to hasten through their days and nights without regard for consequences, skating over ethical lapses without a second thought. But once we start sitting on a regular basis, we open ourselves up to sobering reflections from the past. 

Consider the fourth precept of sila: refraining from lying. Common as it might be, lying can take a toll on us. A coworker of mine expressed an understanding of this simple truth when he mused, “I like to tell the truth ‘cause I like travelin’ light.”

Worries also arise following instances of wrong speech like angry words, snarky comments, and arrogant boasts. Hardly crimes, these petty transgressions nevertheless return to awareness during meditation to disturb the mind and disrupt concentration.

Our haphazard bumper-car collisions with the precepts can impede practice not only by haunting our sits, but also by weakening our faith in what in Zen we call our intrinsically enlightened nature. Until we have awakened to the perfection of our fundamental nature, we harbor traces of doubt—about our teacher, our practice, and ultimately ourselves. Any such doubt is bound to show itself sooner or later, usually at pivotal points in our practice, as it did for the Buddha himself in the form of the demon Mara, who visited him as he neared enlightenment. The more effectively we live up to the precepts, the more likely we are to trust and realize our true self.

Wisdom (prajna), the third leg of the stool, is often understood as our original nature, unborn and undying. Until enlightenment, our practice is vulnerable, our meditation and conduct both prone to wobble. Nonetheless, until we do confirm our innate wisdom, we need to work at it as best we can. As the saying goes, we “fake it” with the faith that, realized or not, innate wisdom is still ours to use “until we make it.” 

This we do through mindfulness and concentration, the twin functions of awareness. Put simply, concentration arises from a state of stabilized awareness. But to help us uncover our innate wisdom, concentration requires mindfulness—the noticing of what arises in one’s mind, body, and surroundings. 

Off the cushion, hours can pass as we sit rapt by movies, cat videos, Angry Birds, and the Kardashians. Every once in a while, these lazy afternoons happen to the best of us. But by bringing together concentration and mindfulness, we’re less likely to indulge in such passive activities and more likely to remain alert when taking part in active ones. This will make all the difference when we sit down to meditate.

By cultivating wisdom in this way, we free ourselves from delusive attachment. 

Finally, the three legs of our practice—morality, meditation, and wisdom—work together as a complete unity, and our practice becomes a stool that all the angry birds in the ten directions couldn’t topple.

The post Don’t Just Sit There appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ven. Pannavati is leading weekly guided meditations for Meditation Month. Check back every Monday in March for a new video teaching on the blog.

Download the transcript of this retreat. It has been edited for clarity. 

Ven. Pannavati will respond to reader questions posted below.

Guided Meditation Week 2

Guided Meditation Week 3

Guided Meditation Week 4

The post Guided Meditation—Week 1 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Brad Warner is known around the Buddhist world as the proprietor of the rollicking blog Hardcore Zen (hardcorezen.blogspot.com), and a contributor to the alternative adult site Suicide Girls (suicidegirls.com), as well as the author of irreverent and very personal books about Zen practice, most recently Sex, Sin, and Zen.

Warner was introduced to Zen Buddhism in the early 1980s at Kent State University in a noncredit course offered at the school’s Experimental College. In 1993 he moved to Japan and worked for several years at Tsuburaya Productions, a studio that produced monster movies. In Japan, Warner met Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who gave him dharma transmission in 1999. While studying under Nishijima Roshi, Warner began his blog and published his first book, Hardcore Zen. On his return to the United States in 2004, he started a sitting group at the Hill Street Center in Santa Monica, California. Since then, Warner has relocated to his hometown of Akron, Ohio, but he is a frequent guest speaker and teacher at dharma centers around the world. He’s also a bassist for the punk rock band 0DFx and appears in the independent film Shoplifting from American Apparel, produced by Sangha Films.

Tricycle’s Philip Ryan got a taste of Warner’s maverick approach to Buddhism when they spoke in July 2011. Whether you agree with Warner or disagree with him or just can’t figure him out, you can rely on him to call things as he sees them. And can’t we all use more of that?

You talk about being a Zen teacher, not as a profession, but as someone with experience who tells you what they know. Well, yeah. It’s pretentious to start likening it to art, but if somebody has been painting for 50 years, and they understand a thing or two about how to make a picture look a certain way, they can convey that to you, and you can absorb that and use it. But the picture that you draw is going to be different, because you’re a different person. So if somebody who’s had experience with meditation can convey her or his experience, maybe you can use that as a guide for yourself. But the idea of a profession— for one thing, you’re getting involved in money, which I think is a whole huge topic.

At the Hill Street Center in Santa Monica, you had people coming regularly, but while lots of people showed up for talks, not as many people showed up for actual sitting. Yeah. The Hill Street Center was not my center. It still exists, and there’s a guy—I didn’t give any transmission or anything, but this guy John Graves is out there running the same Zen class that I used to run. I suppose “the same” is a weird phrase to use, but anyway, same time, same day.

I was doing these classes every Saturday. And really, ten people was a big day for us there. Usually five to seven people would show up on a Saturday to do zazen, and it let me know what the actual capacity for real Zen practice, as opposed to the desire to read about Zen practice, was. When Hardcore Zen came out, I was living in Japan. The book had been out maybe two years before I moved back to the U.S. and started giving talks and lectures and things. I was naive at first, but I quickly realized that most of the people I was talking to were never going to do Zen practice. Essentially, when I’m giving a lecture, I just view it as entertainment for the audience. I try to put on a show that will have something of value within it, rather than seeing the audience as potential practitioners, because most of them, realistically, are not.

But if it’s a situation where people are actually really practicing, and the format is that these people are practicing zazen with me, that’s where I feel like real Zen teaching can happen. As far as Zen centers are concerned, I look at the audience, and most of the time I’m invited to speak at a Zen center—I can’t tell you how many times they’ll tell me, and I think this is why I get invited often, is that, wow, we have three times as many people here this morning as we’ve ever had. Which, on the one hand, is sort of gratifying to hear, but on the other hand, it lets me know that about a third of the audience is really genuinely interested in practice, and two-thirds of the audience is there for the show.

How did you go from being a student in Japan to a teacher in America? I never had an ambition to become a Zen teacher. It was Nishijima Roshi who really wanted me to do that and kind of forced the situation by asking me to do certain things. He kept giving over certain of his teaching responsibilities to me, until I basically had all of his teaching responsibilities, and that’s how I became a Zen teacher, and that was in Japan, but I was mostly speaking to non-Japanese. There were a couple of Japanese people who would show up to these lectures, but it was almost entirely foreigners, and not necessarily Americans. So then, going back to America in 2004, I had the book out by then, and people were asking for it. I didn’t really intend the book as a way to launch a career as a Zen teacher in America, but that’s what happened. I don’t know what I intended the book for.

And how did the Hardcore Zen blog begin? You know, I was actually asking myself that very question, because I honestly don’t remember. I was writing these science fiction novels, and I put up a web page based on one of the science fiction novels that I’d written as a way to get some interest in that novel. And the web page had been up for about a year, and I hadn’t managed to get the novel published, and I wanted to do something else. And I just took it down one day and started putting up little articles that I would write about Zen practice; I don’t remember what motivated me to even do that. I do remember that it was 2001, because I put a couple of pieces up and then all of a sudden, September 11 happened. The third thing I put up had to be about September 11, because there was nothing else you could really write about. What I said then bothered a good friend of mine a lot, because I laid the blame for September 11 on religion, not on any specific religion, but on the whole idea of religion, the idea of escaping from this life into something better. So that was my first big negative thing I had to deal with on the blog, and there was lots more to come. I didn’t even learn the word blog until I had done this thing for about a year.

Your blog is one of the most vibrant, active Buddhist blogs anywhere. You get a lot of comments and maybe you’re ambivalent about that, since you’ve turned them off at times. What is your relationship to the people who follow you on the blog? I don’t know who a lot of them are. I went back and forth with the comments section, because it would be great, and then it would quickly turn into something bizarre and off-topic. There would be a lot of fighting and people slandering each other and having these flame wars and things. And I said, What the hell is this? And there were a few people who were sincerely commenting and asking questions. I turned the comments off and then I turned them back on, and—I don’t know, I looked at the section a couple of days ago, and it was really bizarre again. I couldn’t even understand most of what was written on there. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the topic. So my relationship with the blog readers is that I’ve corresponded with a few of those people, and maybe three or four I’ve actually met. Most of them I have no idea about.

I don’t know if people look at the tone of what I write and imagine that I’m writing very casually and off the cuff, but that’s not true. It comes across that way because I’ve created this literary voice that sounds like a guy just typing stuff up and not even reading it before it goes out. But that stuff is mostly really carefully edited, and takes a long time to do. So what people imagine takes a minute and a half actually takes two and a half hours.

People get annoyed sometimes because I put up promotional stuff on the blog, like “I’m going to be in Rotterdam on October 9,” or whatever it is, “see you there.” And people say, “Why isn’t he talking about real Zen practice?” I know Zen teachers who will give a dharma talk once a month, and that’s all they’ll do. That’s as much dharma as they’ve got in them, and I think those people are intelligent. There’s only so much that can be said.

Do you get invited to places because they think Brad Warner is going to bring the young crowd to their center? Yeah, they do, and people will say that to me, very specifically. And I tell them, Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. It’s funny to me, because one of the standard troll comments to put on my blog is like, “You guys should know that Brad Warner is already in his late 40s.” You know, as if that’s going to dissuade anyone from listening to me, or as a sort of a warning to them: Beware. I find it interesting because in my generation there wasn’t a lot of respect for older people, and I find that when I speak to people who are in their 20s and even into their 30s now, there’s a lot more respect for older people. Even Zero Defex (0DFx), the punk rock band I’m in, we’re all in our 40s, and we’re often playing to an audience that’s half people in their 20s, and they’re interested. I don’t know, if there had been a punk rock band full of 45-year-olds in my day, well, that probably would’ve been enough of a novelty to make it interesting right there, but there weren’t any. And most of the people that were in that age group were playing music that none of us had any interest in it all. So I think that it’s changing. That generation gap thing is largely disappearing.

The people who came to Buddhism in the 60s and 70s were all about being young, and now they’re the ones with this anxiety: Oh, where are the young people? Yeah, it’s kind of ironic. They were telling everybody, Don’t trust anyone over 30. Well, what do they expect?

You’re one of the few Zen teachers who openly criticized Genpo Roshi long before the recent scandal. Is that something you think about, that other people weren’t talking about this and you were? Yeah, I have thought a lot about that. You know, to me the recent scandals that happened with Genpo Roshi, are—I don’t want to completely trivialize them out of existence, but to me they’re really minor things. He was presenting himself as a happily married family man and in the background was allegedly having sex with all kinds of people other than his wife. That’s not a good thing. I think it showed a lack of integrity and so on, in the fact that it was hidden. But the thing that really bothered me and continues to bother me about that guy is not what he was hiding, but what he was putting right out there, which is promoting Big Mind. He was relating it to Zen, if not calling it Zen, and it was intended to give you this kind of mindblowing experience right away, which I think is dangerous. I don’t think that’s good Zen practice.

Why aren’t Buddhists talking about sex and power more? They’re starting to talk about it, and that’s a good thing. A lot of people have blinders on where they don’t really look at how things operate in the rest of the world, and when I hear this stuff about the power differential being a factor in romance between teachers and students in Zen, I think, when is it not a factor in any romance? Maybe it’s not a factor in some romances, but a lot of relationships that work just fine are based on a power differential that has nothing to do with the person being a teacher or a student. Everyone knows people are attracted to power, both men and women. And so it happens. Whether you can negotiate that and make the romance about something else, is, I suppose, where the test is.

With teachers, I think it’s up to the students to be wary of who they’re getting into. You actually have to go and listen to a teacher and watch her behavior and see what she’s doing and what she’s really like, and maybe you have to spend some time sitting with that before deciding whether this is going to work for you or not. And that’s just the way it’s got to be. And maybe you wish it weren’t that way, but it’s got to be that way.

At a recent event in New York you were invited to talk about your latest book, and people got upset with the clothes you were wearing. The term “perpetual adolescent” was used. Sometimes that happens. I think there’s a certain kind of person who’s going to respond to somebody who’s dressed in the traditional Zen robes, and I do have a set. I have two sets in my closet that I throw on from time to time. But there’s also a very important segment of people who could potentially find value in Zen, or Buddhist practice, who are going to be turned off by those robes, and they’re not going to listen. I was one of those people, so I know how that is. But I’m not too worried by people who think I present this stuff in a very casual way, that I’ll wear a t-shirt with “Shoplifting from American Apparel,” or Godzilla on it and give a lecture about Zen. I don’t think there’s any problem, and I don’t have problems with people who wear robes, I just have a problem with me wearing robes, because I find them uncomfortable, and I don’t like a lot of the associations of reverence and all of that. I don’t want somebody to immediately revere me just because I have a certain piece of clothing on. That’s kind of ridiculous to me.

Can Zen be taught online? I’ve had some discussions about that, and I’m really suspicious of it. I already knew there was somebody out there giving the precepts online, and now there’s another group doing ordinations online. You could certainly learn how to do zazen online. It’s a simple procedure that’s easily explained. You could learn it from a book or a website, but I always like to give the example of how I remember sitting in Nishijima Roshi’s room one time, having some discussion with him about esoteric Zen stuff, and I look over and see there is a teacup with a dried-up teabag at the bottom that’s probably been sitting there for at least a day, if not several days. And I felt this really human bond with him, like, He’s a person who sometimes doesn’t clean up his teacups. And that made him more of a real person to me, and it was really an important moment in my Zen training, as trivial as it seems. And in a Skype chat, to take one specific example, you’re not going to get that.

What’s it like making a living as a Zen master in the 21st century, or are you making a living doing other things and you’re a Zen teacher on the side? I was hoping to make a living as an author, but the royalty rates I’m getting are so low, I’m not. I see being the author as my job, so I go out and give lectures about the books I write, and I get paid for those lectures. And then, on the side, I do Zen teaching. You can get some donations and stuff and make it work that way, but generally it’s not a job I would recommend, because the pay is much too low to even live on.

I earn just enough. So in economic terms, it’s not that great, but in terms of just enjoying myself, it’s terrific, and I hope it’s doing someone some good. I make a big fuss sometimes, because it’s funny, about hate mail and these things. It’s funny, it’s interesting, and it exposes some things about human nature, and that’s valuable, but if you did the statistical comparison, maybe 5 or 10 percent of what I receive is hate mail and the rest is all really, really positive. People say, You changed my life, and I read that, and say, Wow, that’s nice. I don’t know, maybe what I wrote or said sparked something, but I don’t really think I changed their life. They did it. But I realize that there’s some sort of a need for what I’m doing. In the movie Spinal Tap, there’s a scene where they talk about a critic saying, “Spinal Tap continues to fill a much-needed void.” And I feel like that’s what I do, I continue to fill a much-needed void.

The post Sex, Sin, and Zen appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For most of us, don’t-know is a place of get-me-out-of-here-quick. As a writer, sitting down to a blank page makes me instantly want to wash dishes, dust under beds, or finally sew those buttons on a coat I haven’t worn in years. But Eugene Gendlin doesn’t see don’t-know as the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche; to him it is just unexplored frontier, seas as yet uncharted—but friendly—that we can learn to navigate. For years, Gendlin offered a class at the University of Chicago in which he taught exactly that. The purpose of the class was to get students to tap into their implicit knowing—Gendlin’s term for what someone knows but is not yet able to express. “It took weeks to explain that the usual criteria were reversed in my course,” Gendlin says. Everywhere else in the university only what was clear counted at all, he explains. “Here we cared only about what was as yet unclear.” Gendlin impressed the point on his students that if what they were thinking was already clear, “We don’t need you for this; we have it in the library already.”

Founder of a popular self-actualization technique called Focusing, Gendlin has had an enthusiastic reception among North American Buddhists. Gendlin’s Buddhist students find Focusing to be compatible with meditation and use it to complement traditional contemplative practices. (For instructions on Focusing, click here). Perhaps a clue to Gendlin’s appeal among many Western Buddhists is hinted at in one of his own favorite terms: resonance. Gendlin’s approach grows out of the Western philosophical tradition (especially phenomenology) in which he is firmly rooted, yet it emphasizes transformative practice based on working with awareness in the present moment. Its relationship to Buddhist practice is close but not too close, different but not too different. Gendlin offers not a bridge between Buddhism and Western tradition but an experiential space in which the two can act upon one another—resonate—and in so doing allow something new and unforeseeable and grounded in both to emerge.

As a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, Gendlin was grappling with the relationship between symbols and lived experience. Curious about whether the process of psychotherapy might shed light on the matter, he got accepted in a therapy practicum taught by Carl Rogers, now legendary as a founder of humanistic psychology and the originator of client-centered therapy. The two began a research collaboration that would continue for eleven years.

Examination of hundreds of hours of recorded therapy sessions showed that certain clients were doomed to fail and that you could pick out those clients from the get-go. Listening to these recordings, Gendlin observed that when a therapy client turned inward in a particular way, he or she moved forward; clients who didn’t do this turning inward remained stuck. “The wisdom of the time said to separate those people who were good prospects for therapy from those who weren’t and just take those who could succeed,” he recalls, “but we couldn’t stand that.” Gendlin began to look for a method to teach the stuck clients how to get unstuck. These instructions for how to “find your inner contact” later became the technique of Focusing. Therapy clients learned to get in touch with an at first vague, bodily-felt meaning (what Gendlin calls a felt sense) and to draw that experience into articulation.

But Focusing has significance far beyond the therapist’s office. Focusing practitioners say that Gendlin’s instructions are equally the key to tapping creative waters, to bringing any kind of as yet unclear inner experience into expression. Artists, writers, and scientists all report positive results. But what caught my attention was this: some say that by honing in on precisely that inner act that separates psychological movement from stasis, Gendlin has hit on the quintessence of self-transformation. No wonder Buddhists are interested.

Gendlin is a thinker steeped in the Western tradition concerned with working past many of the dichotomies that characterize a long-standing impasse of modern thought. His Philosophy of the Implicit pulls the ground out from under classic dualities such as body/mind, material/mental, and individual/ environment. Cartesian dualism is upside down, Gendlin says. He wants to turn it right side up. In what Gendlin terms “the old view,” subjective experience is a freak of nature in a fundamentally objective, mechanistic, and dead world. In the “new view,” the living process itself is fundamental, and you and I and the world are embodied aspects of that activity. “Living is always a fresh process, forming itself freshly now,” he says.

According to Gendlin, we know a lot more than we think we do. Everything we’ve ever thought, said, or done is within us right now in an implicit complexity that both frames our possible choices and actions and is itself changed by them. In Gendlinspeak: “Whatever occurs happens into an implying and carries living forward.” This complexity is bodily and can be felt. Through Focusing, we can learn to tap this vast storehouse of bodily knowledge, and to think, speak, and act—more wisely—from this wider field.

From 1963 until 1995, Gendlin taught at the University of Chicago. Though now professor emeritus, he’s still thinking and writing—just don’t call him before noon. He has been honored four times by the American Psychological Association for his founding contributions to the field of experiential psychology, but he reports, “I never left philosophy. I want to make that clear.” He currently heads the Focusing Institute, founded in 1986 to promote felt-meaning literacy worldwide.

When Tricycle invited me to interview Gendlin, I blithely went about making my usual preparations for meeting a professor. I bought Gendlin’s book, read his papers, and prepared a five-page bulleted list of questions. In retrospect, I might have known better. That story about the Chicago class should have tipped me off. But I was a right-angle thinker about to run straight into curves.

During my three-hour conversation with Gendlin, I pitched him what I thought were straightforward questions. Again and again, his replies left me mystified. We seemed to be communicating, but I couldn’t figure out what he was saying: his words were in English, but at times it seemed he was speaking another language. Trying to nail down Gendlin’s ideas turned out to be like sitting by a goldfish pond and willing the fish to stay at the top. I would toss him a question and our conversation momentarily surfaced in shared understanding. But before I could pin him down, get him to define his terms, or resolve a lingering doubt, Gendlin dropped out of view. There would be a meaningful flurry of fins below the surface, and up he would pop—over there—with another idea that made perfect sense, for a moment. But as soon as I would try to follow him to that place, down he would go again.

Then we would pause, and he would check in to see how much I had understood. I hedged my replies, embarrassed to admit—not much! Desperately hoping for more success with a different topic, I quickly pitched a new question, and off we went again.

Eventually I got the rhythm of this dance. In the course of follow-up interviews, I learned to listen to Gendlin with my eyes closed, not just with my ears but with my whole being. And oddly, he began to make more sense that way. Eventually it dawned on me that of course he was speaking from the place he was describing and in the language he calls “fresh.” He was demonstrating Focusing through our conversation. When I started Focusing too, we began to meet.

But as a journalist on assignment, I was up against a wall. How was I going to bring readers along on the ride? I wrestled with editing those transcripts. I tried extracting just the surface snippets of our talk and stitching them together to force a logical flow: lifeless. I tried including Gendlin’s fresh phrases but restating them in ordinary English: inauthentic. I tried leaving Gendlin- speak unedited: baffling. Day after day when I sat down to write, I suddenly found myself washing dishes, doing laundry, or weeding the yard. Finally I admitted it to myself: I was flat-out stuck.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I was trying to report on a method for overcoming stuck-ness while bogged down and immobilized in my own creative quicksand. Finally I began to suspect my problem wasn’t personal, that it pointed to an important fact about language. I asked Gendlin. He understood my predicament right away. Ordinary language, he explained, is steeped in the old Cartesian dualism. Because Gendlin’s ideas express a new ontology, they require new language.

I finally caved; the struggle to write this article was going to have to be part of the article. There was simply no way to avoid bringing my own process into the story.
And that, after all, was the point.

–Linda Heuman

When I first learned Focusing, I made sense of it by relating it to my Buddhist practice. But then I read articles on your website by other Buddhists. They too interpreted Focusing in terms of whatever Buddhist tradition they practiced. But the interpretations were all different. Is this a problem? It is natural to say this new thing is that old thing. People make sense of what they learn in terms of what they already know. You cannot immediately tell people what Focusing is. You don’t immediately explain to people what meditation is either. You tell them what it does for them, but you don’t tell them what it is. If you use ordinary language to say what meditation is, they will say, “Oh yeah, I do that all the time. That’s what I do when I take a break.” [Laughs]

Back in the late 1950s, when you were studying recordings of clients in therapy, what exactly did you see successful clients doing that the unsuccessful ones weren’t doing? They speak from and about their inside experiencing. They often pause, then use phrases like, “No, not quite what I said. More like…uh….” They check inside.

The therapist would say back what the client tried to say. Then the client would correct, “No, I meant it more like that…” Then the therapist would accept the correction and say back, “Oh, I see, more like that….” Therapists speak from feeling what the client wants to convey. They repeat only a few main words. The client would say, “Yes, but another thing is this and this about it.” The therapist would say, “Oh, there’s this and this about it.” Then maybe they would say once more, “Well, there’s still this.” The therapist would say this back. And then the client would exhale and say, “Ah.” [Sighs]

At this point there is always this characteristic little silence there, because they’ve finished saying what they wanted to say and they got heard, more deeply than ever. That makes one feel more connected inside. For the moment they don’t know what they’re going to say next. The people who do come from inside naturally go deeper at that point, but we needed to teach this also to the others.

How did you realize that connecting inside was a skill that could be taught? I didn’t realize it. I insisted it had to be teachable! But I didn’t know if it was. We put Focusing instructions together, and then we tested. It took a lot of nerve, because it was counter to the understanding at that time that therapy was an art, and that being a patient in therapy was an art, and that you can’t tell anybody how to do it. So it wasn’t just that I didn’t know whether it was teachable; it was absolutely the religion that it was not teachable.

The key to connecting inside through the practice of Focusing seems to be locating an inner experience you call a felt sense. You describe the felt sense in various ways: the body’s sense of a particular problem or situation; a bodysense of meaning; an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time; a big, round, unclear feeling. How is a felt sense different from an emotion? Emotions are already cut up and packaged. They’re part of the story. The felt sense is not part of the story. It makes its own story, you could say; or it is a beginning of what could be a new story.

How did you discover the felt sense? I brought it from my philosophy. (Then I called it “preconceptual feeling.”) When I came to these therapists, I was learning everything from them about therapy. But I kept telling them about the preconceptual feeling, and they didn’t understand it whatsoever. They were talking about emotions and feelings. They still are! When we looked at what you actually did as a therapist when you were listening, you were not just responding to the emotion. You were responding to this whole ball of wool that the client is telling you. I wanted the client to sit with that—“I don’t know what to do, but I’ve got this…uh.”

Is the felt sense unconscious? No. You aren’t going to be able to say any of this in the old language. Everything in the old language is divided into conscious and unconscious—and this isn’t like that. Everything is divided into the same or different—and this isn’t like that. Everything is divided into thinking and feeling—and this isn’t like that. You have to make new phrase

So it’s a new kind of body experience we have all the time, but we don’t notice it because we don’t have a grid for it? It isn’t already there, but you can let a felt sense “come” any time. The felt sense is a little further down. If we refer to that place, then it comes and develops.

How would you teach beginners to find the felt sense? Suppose you are stuck. You make a spot from the stuck—a place. You say to yourself, “This spot here has me stuck; there seems to be no way out here.” After a while you learn it will have a way out; it just seems in the ordinary thinking to have no way out. Once you make a felt sense of it—that takes a little time— it will generate new points, new possibilities, and new distinctions.

You have to say: “This is a spot. It is going to be a felt sense in a minute. What quality does the body feel of it have?—Jumpy? Or heavy? Or no word for it, maybe, just that quality.” That is not just your anxiety; it isn’t the feeling. It is the whole of it that comes—all that—the underneath too. You have to have that whole thing. Then your body shifts. Then you are truly detached.

So at that point you are not the spot; you are the observer of the spot? But you have to have the having of the spot, just observing is not enough.

The way most people I’ve spoken with practice mindfulness is that they sit upstairs and everything comes up the stairs and they say, Oh, he’s angry, Oh, he is this, and Oh, he is that. They just sit upstairs and look at it all. I say, No! Go downstairs! But of course, not back into the feelings, rather the body feel of the whole thing. Then you have a felt sense, and that is how you can truly detach. Just being frozen upstairs is a kind of strong discipline, but it doesn’t give you the body easing, the body shift. If you are just the observer, you don’t change.

I have a hard time finding the felt sense. It is not easy for many people.

Do you have any advice for how to… [Gendlin suddenly contorts. For a few seconds, he flails his arms. Then he leans back in his chair.] What did I do to you?

You stopped my mind. I did at least that, but go to your body and tell me. [Silence]

I’m having an adrenaline rush because I thought something happened to you. Keep going.

I was worried… Is that a felt sense? So now you know nothing happened to me. Stay a minute and see what comes.

Uh-huh… [Outstretched hand shaking] It felt like that. And what is that? And you don’t know yet, right?

It’s hard to define. It disappears. It is there for a second, and then it just drops away. Say to yourself, knowing it’s probably not true, “That is perfectly all right with me that he did that.” [Silence]

Feels like…[hand shaking] Exactly. It brings it right back! If you attend in your body and if you say everything is fine, right away the felt sense [of not so fine] comes. So one way to let the felt sense come is to say, “Oh, isn’t that wonderful—really not angry—(or whatever)…” This could be useful when you’ve been working with a particular felt sense of a problem, and it just went away but you didn’t have a sense of resolution.

I have to apologize always when I do this surprise thing. It’s not pleasant to have that experience. But it is a very quick way to get a body sense, because there’s no way the body is not going to respond to that.

I got this sort of scared feeling, like a nervous feeling in the body. But if I sit with that now…. It doesn’t turn into anything. It doesn’t go anywhere. No, that doesn’t. But if we say, “Except for that, you’re fine,” I’m not so sure.

Not so sure. [Laughs] Now you’re Focusing and you don’t have to be good at it right away, but you’re not far from it either.

When you talk about “the body,” you seem to use that word in a whole new way. “The body is not just some kind of structure,” you have written, “the body is also the body from the inside.” Elsewhere you say, “Consciousness is bodily.” What is wrong with our ordinary view of body? The body that we have is aliving body. Mostly we were taught that the body is what we leave here when we die. I think that is a terrible mistake. The body that we have is not a dead body. We don’t know exactly how dead bodies come to be, but it is absolutely clear that this body is the living body. So we need to draw the basic concepts about “the body” from the living process.

What most people today think of as the body comes from science, and that conception changes through time. In Kant and Hegel’s time, it was mechanical. When I was younger, it was chemistry. Now it’s neurology. By the time my grandchildren grow up, it’ll be some other thing. Human beings are capable of thinking analytically. They can create a grid with abstract variables. And then if you map observations and experiences on that grid, you can take them apart and get patterns for different things and move these patterns around. You learn a great deal. If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have any technology. Seven billion of us couldn’t all live on this planet without that capability. So there’s no denigrating science. But you have to know that a living process is a wider story than that. Those analytic, cognitive units are not alive, and they can’t literally be read back into living.

What is the body in your view? The living body has many different meanings. The body builds itself from the embryo on. The structure is not like a machine in the sense that first you build a machine, then you turn it on. It’s turned on from the first cell, and it develops itself, and that developing never stops.

The body includes behavior possibilities. It has the sense of space in which you can do things, not just move around. The possibilities of “what we can do from here” is the space that we really live in; we don’t live in empty, abstract, geometric space.

And then on top of that, you have your thinking capacity. The thinking that you are doing varies your behavior possibilities. You might think of something and then see that you can do such and such, which you hadn’t seen before. So the thinking changes the behavior possibilities, and that in turn is reconstituting your body in various ways.

Your body takes everything you learn with you. But your body understanding is more than what you learned. It absorbs what you learn, and then it still implies further. A body isn’t only an is; it is an is and implies further.

I was just thinking how remarkable it is that the body heals itself. Is that what you are tapping into when you talk about embodied insight—this natural intelligence? No, you’re using “body” in the old meaning—that’s why it seems “remarkable” that it can heal or think. I’m talking about an inherent way that the body can think; or at least, that when we think, the body is part of that. I’m talking about the inherent way that the body has language; when we talk, the body is part of that—it’s not just the muscles or the vocal chords. It’s clear that the body is linguistic and logical. It senses clarity and also senses itself.

Is your model of the body also a shifting of viewpoint? You talk from a perspective of first-person lived experience, from the inside, rather than describing lived experience from the outside, as an objective observer would? It’s not “rather than.” I would say “in addition to.” I learn everything that I can learn from objective science, and I understand and incorporate that. Then I come back to the corpus that incorporates it. And that corpus is the body, of course.

I love every kind of research—mechanical, chemical, neurological, whatever. But you always have to take the understanding it gives you and then refer to how your understanding can go wider. That goes wider isn’t just mental; it is also bodily.

For example, if you feel some excitement or some opposition or some discomfort, go to the quality. The first thing you get on this felt sense is just a quality, and you won’t even know what to call it. You have to say it’s “ugh,” or it’s uncomfortable, or it’s “something important is happening in here and I don’t know what, but I can feel it.” If you go there and just to that quality, it very soon opens, and you say, “Oh!” And then there is a whole field of wider. You can’t do that without a living body.

Can we trust the going-wider? Is this process always moving toward the good? Definitely. It is always trustworthy. What “trustworthy” means, though, depends here: it is your living forward, that it moves toward. It moves toward being able to breathe if you can’t breathe. It moves toward relaxing when you’re tense. It moves toward mobilizing when you’re in a funk and you can’t get moving. It moves toward more life. And yet—what that means varies.

What do you mean? Where we really speak from is always a unique implicit intricacy, and yet we can understand each person if we listen and they keep correcting our understanding.

One friend came to see me. He was about 35 or 40 years old and had a wife the same age. It turned out she was dying of cancer. When I heard that, I felt bad, of course. Then I said to him, “That’s terrible! Somebody young with young children shouldn’t die.” Well, I’ve said that to many people, but when I said it to him, it broke him up. He cried and sobbed and was so relieved. It turned out that he had this internal conviction that what happens is what God wants, so it has to be right. He was forcing himself to feel that it is right. Since he invested me with a certain amount of respect, what I said came as a huge relief that he didn’t have to feel it was right. It is actually wrong for a young person to die.

Many years later, a friend from Germany came to see me. He was also in his 40s. He told me a friend his own age had recently died. After that, he couldn’t get over his fear that he too might die soon. Then, with the Focusing, he discovered it wasn’t really death that he feared. It was that he believed that dying when you are that age is wrong. Es ist nicht erlaubt—it is not permitted! And as soon as he realized that that was what it was, it dissolved completely. It was really a deep place in him where he didn’t want to do what ist nicht erlaubt. And so he was holding his breath and trying to prevent doing this bad thing.

These principles would seem to be opposites. One person is freed by hearing it is wrong to die when you’re young; and the other one is freed by realizing it is not wrong to die when you’re young. When we listen to the implicit intricacy that the person is coming from, then both people are right and we can understand both.

So the process is good in the sense that it is toward life, toward freedom, toward openness? It’s trustworthy in the sense that you can go with it. But if you take the words literally, that doesn’t work either. The very next step, the road may turn and you may realize, “Oh, it really is this other way.”

Buddhist meditators generally take for granted that if they practice over time, meditation will change them. Has your long-term practice of Focusing had a transformative effect on you? Oh, yes. Every day I’m becoming more able to do things I wasn’t able to do but always wanted to; like write certain things or really listen to my wife. You never get to the end, once you’re in that process. When somebody tells me they got to the end of it, I don’t believe them. I don’t think they know this process, then.

So it’s built into the practice that it’s continual and inexhaustive? People get stuck for decades with the same problems over and over. Focusing expands you. Then you live in more ways and have new problems. Somebody once asked me what I thought mental health was. I said, “New problems!”

Can Focusing help people with oppositional worldviews to understand each other better? How? It isn’t a matter of integrating opposites! It is a matter of going to a different place. If you don’t go to this body-sense place, if you stay at the level of conceptual formulation, then you can’t integrate opposites; they round each other off and you have nothing. If you go to the felt sense, then you can look for how the opposite statement also comes from there. Then the opposite understanding doesn’t actually make an opposite. If we listen to your felt sense and you are willing to keep correcting my understanding of it, then I will discover, “Oh, in that meaning it makes sense.”

Is there some built-in limitation with language, that it has a hard time getting at this experience of felt sense? Yes, if what you mean by language is standard phrases. But language is vastly more than standard phrases. Language can come up fresh from your body sense right now; it can make new phrases and speak from there; words and sentences and phrases come. Then it sounds funny, and a lot of people won’t understand it. But they won’t misunderstand it either, because it is so clearly not the old thing. When they know they don’t understand it, they can say, “What do you mean?” And you get a chance to say more.

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We have to be careful not to think that meditation is about getting rid of thoughts. On the contrary, I would say that meditation helps us to creatively engage with our thoughts and not fixate on them. When people say they cannot concentrate, I say, “No, no, no! You are concentrating—too much on any one thought!”

It is interesting in meditation to notice all the different places where our thoughts lead us—what distracts us and what occupies our minds. It is important to notice these things in meditation because these will be the same things that occupy our minds in daily life. As we become more familiar with our thoughts in meditation, we will see how repetitive our thoughts are. We often think very similar things over and over again and it is actually rare to have what I would call a creative, original thought.

What I recommend is to follow the breath, or let sounds be the object of your concentration [see instructions below], or try body-awareness meditation. Then ask yourself, Where did I go? When I was distracted, what did I do? And then you can see that you have many different types of thoughts, which generally fall into three categories: light, intense, and habitual.

Often we try to work with our thoughts only when they reach a high level of intensity. By then I would say it is too late, because they are already so strong and so powerful that it is very hard to work with them. The only thing we can do when we are really caught in heavy, obsessive thoughts is to realize the cause—maybe something happened and you are upset. Just be careful not to feed the intensity. I think that meditation practices can help here. For example, when coming back to the breath time after time, if you’re really obsessive then you’ll eventually notice, “Oh, I’m obsessive.” Then try to come back to the breath just a little bit, just for a few seconds. Then keep coming back. This may not remove the intensity of the thoughts completely, but at least their intensity will diminish, and generally the thoughts won’t last as long.

As we meditate, we become more aware of the habitual nature of our thoughts. I think of this level as consisting of the mental grooves that our thoughts habitually follow. Meditation helps us break free of these habitual patterns and unleash the original and creative power of thought.

Daydreaming is an important mental habit to be aware of. Daydreaming can be very frustrating. If you have a tendency to daydream in daily life, then you will often compare what you experience in your life to what happened in your daydream, where everything went according to plan. Daydreams are seductive. It’s like a film where we are the actor, the scriptwriter, the director, the producer. We even sell the popcorn. It can be wonderful, we can tweak whatever we like and do whatever we want—but then we have to come back to reality, where things don’t always go our way. I think we need to know when we are daydreaming— not in order to judge but to come back to the moment and say, “Oh, I’m lost in a daydream.”

I remember when I was a nun and was meditating ten hours a day. Instead of meditating, though, I would daydream about it! I would daydream about going to a hermitage, practicing very hard, becoming awakened, and saving everybody. When I realized this was not meditation, I went back to truly cultivating my practice. I was then able to restore the mental energy I spent daydreaming to its original purpose: creative imagination. When I write a book, I don’t daydream about writing a book. I just think: What about this? What about that? When I go to write, I become very imaginative and creative. I bring it all back to creative imagination.

Light mental patterning is natural, and it is the easiest level to work with. A live brain is active, constantly firing and thinking of something. We will have aimless trains of thoughts, weird association of ideas, shopping lists or light planning. These are interesting in that due to their lightness, we can play with them more easily and also laugh at them as we recognize certain motifs and see how unnecessary they are. I can see a “preparing luggage” loop. Since I recognized this loop, I only indulge in it near to the time of departure and not for very long. Having become aware of it, I find it pointless, as I know that I am quite able to do my luggage quickly and efficiently.

We need to recognize light mental patterning, because under certain circumstances we move quickly from light to habitual to intense and we find ourselves in the grip of an obsession, which just started as a faint wisp of thought in the mind. We do not need to be afraid of our mind. We can go on a journey of discovery and experiment. Then we are able to play with our mental processes and develop our mental ability in wisdom and compassion.

Instructions for Listening Meditation

Try to sit stable like a mountain and vast like the ocean.

Listen to the sounds as they occur.
Do not imagine, name, or analyze the sounds.
Just listen with wide-open awareness.

Let the sounds come to you and touch your eardrums.
Go inside the sounds and notice their fluid nature.
If there are no sounds, listen, and rest in this moment of silence.
Notice how sounds arise upon certain conditions and disappear upon others.
Do not grasp at any sounds.
Do not reject any sounds.
Just be aware of sounds as they arise and pass away. Open yourself to the music of the world in this moment, in this place.
In your daily life notice the positive and negative habits you might have in your approach to listening.
What helps you to listen fully and spaciously?

If you are in a place that is very noisy, how can you help yourself? Must you find a quieter place or wear earplugs? Or can you be with these sounds in a different way?

See if you can learn to move freely between being in silence and with sounds.

♦

This is an except from Martine Batchelor’s Tricycle Dharma Talk, “Break Your Addictive Patterns.”

Related: “Thoughts Are Not the Enemy: A Mindfulness of Thinking Meditation Practice” 

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The painting was George Seurat’s Neo-impressionist work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his famous scene of Parisians in a waterside park. As my eye scanned the canvas, jumping from boats to people to clouds, it caught on a tree.

Here were no seamless bands of color, no blended patches of tint as in so many other paintings. The tree was made up of countless specks—a smattering of separate orange, yellow, and blue dots. The boats on the water, the people on the lawn, their faces and clothes—all were a sprinkling of motes, as if the canvas had been caught out in a rain of paint.

Out of the blue, I remembered the ascetic Bahiya, who asked the Buddha to teach him the path leading to happiness. “When seeing,” the Buddha said, “just see; when hearing, just hear; when knowing, just know; and when thinking, just think.” (Udana 1.10) It was all in how you looked at it. The Bahiya text is deceptively simple. In one sense, it means: Don’t daydream. Pay full attention to what you’re seeing. But there’s more to these words than you might think. Or maybe less.

I did a double take when my meditation teacher, Achan Sobin Namto, explained the deeper meaning of this attention practice. “If we could focus precisely on the present moment…,” he once wrote, “the eye would not be able to identify objects coming into the area of perception.” Ultimately, he said, following the Bahiya formula meant to see mere color instead of recognizing what you were looking at. It was possible to do this because there was a split-second time lag between (1) sensing the bare image and (2) recognition. (The same applies to perceiving sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental phenomena such as feeling.) If mindfulness were quick enough, you could catch the moment of bare seeing.

Related: Appearance and Reality

Wait a minute—had I heard right? “So if I really stay in the present moment,” I asked, “I’ll see a cup in front of me and not recognize it?”

The Bahiya teaching tells us to break our habit of looking at experience in terms of labels or concepts and instead observe ultimate reality directly. This is done by paying attention to bare seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, and feeling in their most primitive state, before your inner narrator names them.

“Absolutely,” Achan said.

“When pigs fly,” you might be thinking. Achan Sobin was once skeptical, too. “Impossible!” he’d said when his own instructor explained the idea. Later he spent decades teaching it to others.

To understand the teaching Bahiya received, it helps to remember the Buddhist distinction between ultimate and conventional truth. Consider the painting again: close-up, you see meaningless flecks of tint that don’t represent anything. Beings and objects, time and place, have vanished. The Seine, the trees, the woman’s face—all have exploded into particles, scattered across space. But when you step back from the picture, recognizable shapes leap into view as the eye “pulls” the specks together.

The individual points of color, and the identities that coalesce when the eye connects them, occupy the same space. From one vantage point there is a vista of permanent beings and things. From another, there’s no solid ground—only empty sensation that you can’t name. The painting presents a visual metaphor for conventional truth versus ultimate reality; self versus nonself.

The Bahiya teaching tells us to break our habit of looking at experience in terms of labels or concepts and instead observe ultimate reality directly. This is done by paying attention to bare seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, and feeling in their most primitive state, before your inner narrator names them. By repeatedly watching these events you’ll discover there is nothing personal about the act of perception.

Normally you think, “I am seeing.” Yet in the ultimate sense, the seeing that happens isn’t anyone’s. Although hearing occurs, there’s no self who hears. Rather than a homogeneous entity, we find a collection of parts. Unless observed closely, what we regard as the self appears to be a solid, personal identity that perceives things. But in truth there is no metabeing who unifies the parts. All our actions happen without an agent, or self, performing them. There is no seer, just the seeing; no hearer, just the hearing.

Distinguishing the tree in the painting from the specks it consists of may be a walk in the park. But it’s much more challenging to learn to separate the named things we’re familiar with from the bare seeing, hearing, and touching of actual experience. To master this skill, we must turn our attention again and again to direct experience until our mindfulness is fast enough to notice bare sights, sounds, touches and so on before recognition takes place. Even when practicing very diligently, the remarkable experience of observing bare sense-perception usually only happens when we’re least expecting it.

One morning, during a meditation retreat, I heard the sound of a bird. A mundane event, right? Except the sound was a quick whiplash of sensation that wasn’t connected to any named thing—least of all a creature called “blackcapped chickadee.”

At first I didn’t even recognize the sensation as an auditory form as opposed to a sight or smell. The next moment, the mental dots connected and the word “bird” slid into the mind. But the label didn’t erase the experience. Some veil had slipped, if just for a second.

When Achan Sobin walked in, I could hardly wait to blurt out: “It’s just a sound! It has nothing to do with the bird.” The event had somehow shaken my world.

“Nothing to do with the bird?” he asked.

Bingo.

He laughed and nodded. “Very good!”

“But it’s not even a sound.”

“No,” he confirmed, “by the truth, not even a sound.”

Stories of meditators experiencing bare awareness are common in the Buddhist world. The English monk Kapilavaddho Bhikkhu describes casually looking at his left hand, when “suddenly… the hand had lost all sense of solidity… Here, all that was presented to the eye was color.” In her memoir Hidden Spring: A Buddhist Woman Confronts Cancer, Sandy Boucher reports that when she first tried to mindfully observe pain, the feeling seemed very solid and she wanted to scream. But when she stopped labeling the pain as anything and ceased defining it as part of her self, a shift happened: “Finally there were only the sensations—without a name or a definition or association—only an elemental vibration of phenomena expressing life. For a few moments I was able to stay with this… separate from my identifications and desires. Then I fell back into my ‘I’ and experienced the sensations as if they were attached to ‘me,’ and they became pain again.”

The clincher for me came when my Christian mother attended a meditation retreat, expecting nothing but sore knees. “For the first time,” she said afterward, “I’d seen color only, without any label attached, and only a moment later did I realize I’d been looking at the familiar orange drapes.” But is it possible to function in ordinary life when seeing only color patches? No, you have to recognize sights and other sense-impressions when writing, cooking, and even teaching the dharma. To follow the Bahiya teaching doesn’t mean giving up the concepts of conventional reality altogether. The point is to devote some time every day to formal insight meditation during which you focus on bare sense-perception, until that practice gives rise to clear and direct insight into nonself (during daily activities you can use broader attention). By paying attention to sensory experience as it is happening—and not getting caught up in the labels, preferences, thoughts, and emotions that happen in the split seconds after bare sense-data impinge on our awareness—we learn to see the suffering involved in getting caught up. And by seeing that suffering, we learn to free ourselves from it.

We learn this because when we can separate bare perception from conventional meanings, the feeling that an experience is happening to “me” begins to drop away. We discover that instead of being inherent in perception, the notion of a self is a deep-seated belief unconsciously added to it. If we focus on stopping short at bare perception before any concepts arise to complicate it, nonself will get clearer and clearer, since it’s the natural state of things, always there to be seen. And the clearer our understanding of nonself, the less we’ll suffer. Although initially the clinging to self disappears only when we’re very mindful, those moments free of delusion give deeper insight a chance to arise, and eventually wisdom becomes strong enough to trigger a permanent change of outlook. But even before that permanent change, the memory of having seen nonself directly—even for one moment—stays with us, and most of the time we feel much lighter than we used to.

For most of us, however, the permanent change of outlook is a long way down the path. Even observing bare sense-data for a few moments, if we truly do it, is nothing to sneeze at. The Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw wrote, “It is no easy matter to stop short at just seeing.” Although the aim from day one in insight meditation practice is to observe bare perception, it won’t actually happen, he says, until mindfulness and other factors reach an intermediate level.

We’re not going to live in a world of nameless sensation forever. But glimpsing nonself clearly, even for one moment, puts ordinary truth in perspective.

In the early stages of meditation, you’ll still perceive only named, conventional objects, which are concepts. That’s fine. But it will help to focus on the knowing itself––that is, on the act of hearing, touching, seeing, and so on––rather than on the sense-impression per se. Further, right understanding will guide your effort toward the target. If you realize the aim is to know bare perception before the mind names or describes the experience, you’ll eventually be able to do it—paradoxically, though, only when you aren’t consciously trying to. (And by the way, although I’ve been emphasizing color and sound, in practice you’ll observe tactile sensations more often than any others.)

As we reach the intermediate stages of insight meditation, we begin to see that our experience isn’t an unbroken flow but rather a series of separate moments of consciousness that arise and die out, one at a time, with incredible speed. The mind that sees something quickly dies, and a different consciousness hears a sound. No self or soul carries over from one perceptual act to the next. In truth, your life-span is only one moment long. Buddhaghosa, the fifth-century Indian Buddhist scholar, wrote: “The being of the present moment has not lived, it does live just now, but it will not live in the future.” While you’ve been reading this article, thousands of different “beings” have arisen and died in the very chair you’re sitting in. No wonder the Buddha called consciousness a “conjuring trick”! (Samyutta Nikaya 22.95)

In daily life the separate moments seem to blur together, concealing the truth that birth and death are always occurring. This is part of the reason we buy into the conventional picture of a lasting self. Nonself only begins to be clear when the illusion of seamlessness disappears and we experience the gaps in the continuity, when we actually see the mind and its object arising and dying together from instant to instant. Then we may discover, as Mahasi Sayadaw wrote, that “the concept of a human form with its head, hands, and other parts is nowhere to be found.”

We’re not going to live in a world of nameless sensation forever. But glimpsing nonself clearly, even for one moment, puts ordinary truth in perspective. When the conventional picture returns, we regard it differently. What a relief when we no longer have to take our “selves” so seriously! We can still be responsible family members and effective employees; but we won’t suffer as much when problems arise. The anger, hurt, or fear that usually comes up when the boss berates us—or a loved one betrays us or the body gets sick—will be much weaker and shorter-lived. And when it’s absolutely clear that no phenomenon, including consciousness, truly belongs to us, we can realize the happiness of nibbana as Bahiya did.

Oh, I almost forgot. Last week I read about a woman whose pet pig—named “Freedom”—accompanied her to Seattle by plane. I guess some pigs do fly.

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