Notes from a Courageous Coward

I wrote this in 2012. It’s still meaningful. It was originally published in the YTTC’s magazine. Thanks, Roy! Namaste!

 

In Zazen, realisation means both to make real, and to understand, or apprehend. Both senses are important. What you make real is not some seed of yourself that requires watering. It’s not something that accumulates with practice, even (though practice is important). It’s what is real already, both in yourself, and in the whole universe, which, by ‘just sitting’ becomes manifest.

It’s no coincidence that ‘asana’ means ‘sitting’ too – ‘sitting’ into a posture, with complete awareness, is also realisation in this sense.

The experience of ‘just sitting’ in padmasana (or whatever other cross-legged position is comfortable) is a really useful addition to your Yoga practice, but if it’s also a chance to experience and create reality, without delusions, then it is more important than that. Delusions, like fears, greed, egotism and other limitations, create pain, fear and suffering.  Zazen, complimenting Yoga, lifts us out of these limitations, realising freedom.

In Zazen, I find myself meeting the raw adrenal rush of fear again and again: I recall the reactive parent, nagging, and then denigrating the kids: ‘why haven’t you cleaned up yet?’ ‘you’re so lazy!’  ‘how are you going to survive if you can’t look after your things?’ Then there’s the post-traumatic stuck-record reel of a housefire that plays itself out endlessly: if only, if only, if only… or the spectre of Death leering at my murmuring heart: will it skip a beat? Will it start after? What if it won’t? Money worries repeat like an earworm, totting up sums: forgot to pay her; still have that outstanding… Letting these go, I realise I’m just sitting, eyes horizontal, nose vertical. For a long moment, there’s nothing but a hiss between my ears, awareness of a swallow chittering on a wire, the wind, the rain, sounds outside and within, all being together without the need for conscious commentary. Dynamic stillness. All too soon the trumpets of self-congratulation sound some thought like, ‘I did it!’ and I’m back in the maze of thinking.

Realising that ‘I’ am empty is thrilling: the ’empty self’ contains a universe of humility. It’s the realisation that ‘I’ am temporary, as passing as a thought. Strangely, this is empowering and liberating. It is all like this. I am like it all, and so I open to the possibility that, being part of all this, it is best if I act in the best interests of all. We are all involved in the situation, dynamic as it is, living, and then not, being conscious, and then just being.

Fear is my personal challenge. Like the lion in the Wizard of Oz, I can act brave, but I cower at the pettiest threat, at least inwardly. Yet even fear, if it has nothing to hold, cannot constrain me. Like Zazen or Yoga itself, this is a practical way of dealing with the terror, the horror, and even the tedium of waiting for acceptance of my broken offering. I come back to it again and again, finding a different way of being with it each time, each realisation beginning again without progress or accumulation of wisdom, yet deepening in satisfaction, like drinking from a well that becomes purer each time.

To understand reality is to apprehend, to grab onto what is happening, right here, right now. This is like riding a wild horse: so much dynamism exists in the moment to moment awareness of reality that it becomes almost impossible to stay with every change. Almost impossible, but not quite: practice does make things easier, in this second sense. You get better at being here, you learn more each time.

‘Being here’ is confusing, too, to grab on to ‘being here’ we have to see if we can understand where ‘here’ is, if anywhere: we’re both here, in what is going on outside, and here, in what is going on inside. More confusingly, we’re neither ‘in here’ nor ‘out there’:  the picture we have of these two separate places is a delusion (admittedly, maintaining the delusion makes it a little easier to get out and about in the world…)

We look at the pool to see the moon while the moon stares down at us from somewhere else and the image takes form in the back of our minds. Our picture of the world is a myth. Even the picture we want to present to the world is a myth: I want to create a face that the world will love. But everything I have ever learnt tells me clearly that here lies emptiness, here lies a world that will judge and be judged just on the basis of faces. We crave more depth than this, to know what is really happening now, so we can reconcile ourselves to it, make peace with it.

So much of our learning takes place through suffering but more takes place through fear of suffering. Learning what is happening by paying attention to a moment by moment awareness creates the realisation that suffering and fear are attempts to resist being present to what is happening and this resistance increases suffering and fear. Pain is not permanent but neither can it be avoided. It ends one way or another. Taking responsibility for reducing our own suffering and fear, through realising what is happening, sends waves of compassionate understanding through us, and out into the world. It creates a culture of calm in the midst of chaos and fear. Good is realised. I am not good but I can realise good by allowing it to express itself through me. Paying attention to this, becoming absorbed in it, leaves no room for anything but the realisation of good. I may only hold it for a moment, but it is a moment more than otherwise. It adds to the expression of good in reality, which is cumulative.

Practicing realisation is part of Yoga, integrating the way we are with the way things are into an appreciation through movement and stillness. Zazen, or ‘just sitting’, enhances the practice by letting us realise that when we sit cross-legged, spine straight, nose over navel, hands linked in the lap, we are in the shape of every enlightened human being, from Buddha back, and forward to now, who has ever sought to relieve pain, find peace, realise good. When we practice each posture, but even more, when we draw the spine upright and soften so that anything excessive to maintaining the position of the body drops away, we are realising enlightenment, or, more properly, it is realising us, because it is what we are, if we can find the space to let it be the way we are.

In the current crisis of economy and ecology, the temptation to withdraw is enormous. Pressure on individuals and societies causes fragmentation: we think we can only look after ourselves, or our closest. Countering this is the very heart of Zazen, as of Yoga. Yoga and Zazen are enlightening practices, letting us realise how limitless we are. Now, as ever, enlightening practices expand our realisation, opening us to embrace, and seek to attune to, all things, as ‘I’, and ‘I’ as empty, free to express a way of being that responds to the realisation of good in all things.