Meditation

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

Someone suggested the topic, meditation, as a thread for the Zen Living list. Interesting. Zen living is about contemplative living. Every post is about meditation in the largest sense of the word. My sense is the writer wanted to focus more on seated meditation, our practice of zazen.

Zazen is nothing special. Zazen requires us to select a time and place. It requires us to be willing to gather our mind and body together on a cushion facing a wall in that time and place. It requires us to place our hands together in the cosmic mudra and our attention on our breath, in that time and place. It requires us to sit there for a predetermined period of time. All of this means, of course, that zazen requires us to face ourselves completely; alone and, essentially, naked. We sit stripped of our distractions: no radio, no CD, no television, no book, no eating, no gum chewing, no magazine, no talking, no drugging, no drinking, no getting sticky. Just sit.

On that cushion, everything about us is exposed. We experience our distractibility, our lack of patience, our lack of vigilance, and worse, our actual lives. No mind candy allowed. Just sit. Just paying complete attention to nothing.

Many say they cannot do this. They say they need music or bells, chanting or some other distraction from the work at hand. Yes, we are a culture enculturated to need distraction. This is why we need to practice zazen. Zazen teaches us, over time, that we are enough as we are. What a wonderful lesson!

Be well.