SITTING PRETTY<
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Last night one of the folks at the weekly Thursday night Zazen to-do asked about some of the yoga meditation techniques she'd been taught. Why didn't I think they were so good? She'd done pranayama practice and visualizations and found them very effective for quieting the chatter of her mind.
As a matter of fact, early on in my meditation days I tried some of those techniques, too. I never had a formal teacher for these things. But I got frustrated with my lack of progress in the "just sitting" Soto style of Zen my first teacher Tim McCarthy advocated. So I got some books and learned how to do Pranayama practice. There was one exercise in which you alternately cover one nostril, then the other, breathe in for like a count of 10, hold it for a count of 20 and slowly exhale for a count of 30. Or something like that. Anyway, the practice did produce very noticable results right away. It was almost like getting high. I'd feel very calm and centered, light headed, almost giddy. But something wasn't quite right about it. So I always went back to the "just sitting" thing.
I think there's something a little fake or forced about all of those practices. And even though the fact you get immediate results from them might make you think you're onto something more powerful than "just sitting," I think it's really very much the opposite. "Just sitting" may be the ultimate meditative practice.
It's hard to describe what constitutes good "just sitting" practice. There's no real formula. That's why the instructions are always so bare bones. Just sit there and keep your back straight. That's about all there is to say. What happens after that is a very personal thing. It's up to each individual to discover for themselves what the practice is for them.
What makes it so much more powerful than anything else I've come across is that it is so basic it covers everything. Take pranayama for example. What I found with that practice was that it was very difficult to take the calm, centered feeling I got from it into my regular life. You can't start plugging up your nostrils and breathing heavy in the middle of a real tense band meeting where the drummer wants his girlfriend to join the group on tambourine and slide whistle and won't take "no" for an answer (plus he owns the rehearsal space and the PA), or in a traffic jam when you gotta be somewhere 20 minutes ago. And yet, the "just sitting" practice was extremely portable. It went wherever I went. It didn't depend upon anything else. It did not even depend upon sitting in the lotus posture. It extends itself into all aspects of life.
See, cuz you can learn a whole lot when you have to just sit there and face everything that your brain throws up at you. Because all of your tension, fear, bad luck, good luck, greed, anger, elation, bliss, all of that stuff is just junk your brain throws up at you. When you learn to transcend that, you can learn to transcend anything. You seem to quiet your mind by focusing on these various things like breathing or koans or what have you. But you're really just putting a lid over the problems, rather than actually dealing with them. It's a lot like what I wrote about on my webpage about going to see KISS in concert. It's so loud it drowns out your mental chatter and gives you the illusion of silence. That's why people enjoy it. That's why people enjoy wars too, for that matter. It's so huge it covers up everything internal. But learn to face down that internal stuff and you have learned to face down everything. Because it's not really that outside stuff that causes you problems. It's your internal, personal reaction to outside stuff that causes you trouble. (In fact, when you get right down to it there's no distinction between the outside stuff & your internal reaction to it, but that's a bit deep for a blog, so we won't go there)
There have been several incidents where I saw really clearly the benefits of "just sitting" to my regular life. One was when I screwed up really bad at work. We introduce a new Ultraman character almost every year. And whenever we do, the new design is usually kept very secret until the moment it's unveiled. One year, I got hold of some postcards showing our new Ultraman character which were supposed to be mailed out on New Year's Day (as per Japanese tradition) -- the day of his official unveiling. I was kinda confused about what to do with the cards and sent a couple to friends as X-mas cards. Within days the image was all over the internet. This made the company pretty mad. So they did what Japanese companies like to do to punish bad employees. They convened a big meeting of all the board of directors and everyone and made me go before them and explain myself (in Japanese, mind you). The odd thing I noticed at the time was that I found it utterly impossible to be tense about the situation. It was kind of mysterious. I expected to be tense. I knew I was supposed to be tense. But I just couldn't muster up the reaction. It wasn't there. I was supposed to be afraid of these powerful people. But they had no power anymore. It would be like making a scary face into the mirror and then reacting with fear to your own reflection. How can you do that?
Ah! But this takes a long time. And the old patterns are still present, and do still come up some times. Even Buddha himself was prone to this and spoke about it. But the more you do the practice, the less of that you have to deal with, and the more comfortable and easy your life becomes.
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