Practice

This morning I got up for my morning meditation at the usual time in my little meditation hut behind the house. I go out to sit most mornings at about 6:30. For the past several months that has meant sitting in the dark by candlelight. But now the change of light is catching back up with me. The spring equinox is not far away. I can literally feel the slow journey of the earth around the sun, and the turning of the seasons, by the migration of light in and out of my morning meditation practice. I started this morning to the sound of owls, moved on to rooster calls, and ended with the first round of spring robins that I have heard this year as night turned slowly to morning. My Zen teacher Harada says that the change of light is the most powerful time to sit. I'm glad to have the company of daylight again.

This will be my last journal entry for about a week and a half. Tomorrow I lead a day long meditation retreat at the VA Hospital as a kind of "final exam" in my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Class for veterans. It will be a day of sustained silence with only brief conversational check-ins. Most of these vets have never done anything remotely like this before in their lives, and they are pretty nervous. There are several VA staff in the group, including two nurses and two mental health counselors, and they are probably more nervous than the vets. But they have all been working up to this for the past six weeks, and I'm confident it will turn out to be a rich experience for them. The benefits of mindfulness are already well evident in their lives. 

From that retreat I will get back on a bus and go directly to a week-long Zen retreat at the Tahoma Zen Monastery on Whidbey Island. My Zen teacher, Shodo Harada, comes over twice a year from Sogenji, his home temple in Okayama Japan. The Zen training model is very intense, a full-immersion experience. It is not for everyone, and sometimes I still think it is not for me. Rising at 4:00 AM and sitting eight to ten hours a day is hard work, no question about it.  

 

But it has been the core of my practice for many years to do this at least once a year, and there is something deeply cleansing and grounding about it. I am reminded of T.S. Eliot's words from The Four Quartets, "Quick, now, here, now, always / A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything". These deep dives are also an essential part of my Circling Home year, source work, I figure, in the art of coming home. I'll share some reflections from the sesshin retreat when I finish a week from Sunday.