Back? Maybe.

A lot has happened since my last post and I'm sticking with the excuse that most of that is what has kept me from writing.

I will say that I now have a smart phone, giving me the ability to post from nearly anywhere even if it does involve typing on a tiny keyboard with my thumbs.

I was also surprised to learn that I'm done with school (it's a long story, but I now have an AA in culinary arts, go me!), so I now have little taking away from myrecrational computer use.

I also just finished Rohatsu sesshin with my nikyu test for aikido right in the middle. That's two ranks below black belt. I've also been giving lectures on how my zen practice has benefited my aikido and leading short meditations for a handful of students who decide to stick around once a week.

I haven't run out of stuff to say but I have been trying to live as the best teaching possible.

I hope to write more in the coming days as my practice has opened up so much in the past six months.

I Survived Ango and All You Get Is This Crummy Post

45 calender days is a really long time. We had Fridays off, but most days started at 5:15 am with an officer's meeting and didn't end until 9 pm with chanting the Three Refuges. Half day sits changed the schedule for Saturday and the last five days finished it all off with a sesshin, but every other day was spent in zazen, kinhin, soji, oryoki, services, dharma talks, study, and class. Just about a tenth of the year, and it was interesting.

A lot happened over those six weeks that didn't really sink in until it was almost over and I didn't get a chance to write about hardly any of it.

I received the precepts the second weekend, which was a huge event on its own but it was quickly lost in the blur of the following weeks. We had two priests ordained by my teacher come visit for a while back to back, the second of whose ordination I attended late last year. I sat down with him for an hour and we chatted around the theme of ceremony which I'll get to writing about later. We also hosted Brad Warner for a Dharma Punx organized retreat which was fun to attend and cook for. I also got to go out for breakfast with him with two other people one day, so that was cool. Rereading Hardcore Zen after so long was interesting. It's a chicken-or-egg type deal but the book really matches my current attitudes and I read it at an influential time in developing my practice. I had thought all these views were my own but now I'm not so sure. It doesn't matter, they are mine and I don't have them because someone said that I should.

We had two other guests that same weekend so the buildup was something else. The second is the founder of the Dallas Meditation Center and practices in Thich Nhat Hanh's Order of Interbeing. His style was quite different but I intend to get to know him better since his center is down the street from where my parents live in Dallas. (He was out of town when I was there for Father's Day)

As tenzo, my first practice period (and only third sesshin) had its own special challenges. Three meals were served nearly every day; oryoki breakfast and lunch with an informal dinner. During the week we ranged 6 to 10 participants with around 20 for Saturday breakfast.

I started out really organized, planning a week's worth of meals at a time with my own spreadsheet displaying which day, meal, and bowl's food, condiments, number of diners, and who would be preparing/helping prepare the meal. I made two shopping trips a week, one on our off day, Friday. Two dinners a week I was able to let someone else plan and prepare to give me a break.

All this time, I'd been re-reading sections of the Tenzo Kyokun for inspiration and insight and came across something funny. One part I'd always read without too much care is the section where Dogen outlines the day's activities for the tenzo. With my professional training and guidance from within the sangha it never really matched up with Dogen's instruction. As I settled into how I thought things should be done, I realized I was actually doing it the way Dogen suggests. Setting up and soaking the rice for breakfast at night, preparing lunch while breakfast cooks... it was nice.

Before my term in charge, meals were prepared a day in advance and the recipes were overly complicated. With my menu and experience I didn't have to do this. It made storage much easier and I had a greater degree of flexibility if something unexpected came up. Because of this the third week was almost entirely improvised off leftovers.

There were a couple points where the whole thing was getting old and I was ready for it all to be over with, but that's all part of practice. It's not all that different from sitting; once you're in it you have to see it though.

One thing that I really enjoyed about the practice period was it's intermediate nature between daily life and sesshin. Daily life (for me, especially while unemployed) is very dynamic with almost no structure. Sesshin is completely regimented with nearly every moment planned out. During Ango, each piece of the day was optional and we could come and go as our outside life needed. This allowed a daily blending of “lay” and “monastic” life whereas the two extremes usually exist pretty independently. Sesshin is also really short so as soon as you're really settled it's over. But as I said 6 weeks is a long time.

All of this makes for a powerful reminder that practice is all the time. The practice period really helps establish practice as a daily habit and six weeks provides a good amount of momentum.

I really enjoyed participating and intend to go into some more detail about some aspects of it soon.

Right Here Between Two Worlds

Halfway into this third week of Ango, my fellow participants and I have made some interesting observations of the atmosphere of practice now that the excitement of receiving so many guests has passed.

While this is my first practice period, it is the third for Houston Zen Center and others have made some thought inspiring comments about how it feels.  Having only done two week long retreats and a handful of half day sittings, this hasn't quite had the same feeling.

With sesshin, you're there.  You're there to practice and that's it: sitting, eating, and working.  It's a full immersion experience for the week.  For most you only leave to sleep.  It's very different than daily life in that you don't have the distractions or responsibilities of the outside world to interfere with... well it's called a "retreat" for a reason.

In our daily life, practice is something we sometimes only do on the cushion.  It's easy to forget about it as the distractions of every day life get in the way.  Yeah, that's not how it's supposed to be, and even though I pride myself on how my practice is especially my everyday life, none of us is perfect and we all forget.

What's been interesting about the practice period is that it has us situated between those two extremes.  We're all participating in different ways, but there's always someone there practicing away.  There's the intensity of sesshin, but with each of us venturing out back into the world to conduct our affairs independently then returning in various capacities.



Normally a handful of us show up in the morning and get everything going for a little more than an hours worth of activities and then the place is cold until the evening when it happens again.  Four hours on Saturday we have activities but each time we have to get back in the mood.  During this practice period, someone has been there to keep the place warm by feeding the practice fire.

It's been an interesting experience in the kitchen for me as this practice blends my usual daily life with life at the Zen Center.  I spend a lot of time planning menus and preparing shopping lists if not shopping myself.  One of my first comments to my teacher upon completing my first sesshin was of how different it seemed from everyday life, to run away to Tassajara was especially exotic after living a taste of what it could be like for a week.  It troubled me how easy it was to assume the culture of monastic life and how much I would miss "normal life" if I spent a summer there.  She told me that when you're there, that is normal life, which didn't exactly ease my concerns.
But nearly a month into living a life between the two, the "practice" life has become my daily life.  I don't feel I have had to, or become, a different person to live it.  There's an extreme nature to monastic life that, while I can see the appeal, it still doesn't seem like the life for me.  In the Ox Herding series, "returning to the marketplace" is the last step and refers to coming returning to mundane life to live as an example of enlightened activity.  The tradition is that temples were up in mountains so returning to the market place was synonymous with leaving the monastery.  I've always said that I never want to leave the marketplace.  I'm not interested in an enlightenment that involves going somewhere else.  Even if it takes longer, I want it right here.

I really feel that 45 days of this with an actual sesshin at the end will be very different and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.  The regime of sesshin helped my provide my own structure to life afterwards but wore off fairly quickly.  Maybe a little over a long time will build better habits and I'll continue to live right here, between the two worlds of mundane life and the monastic.

Two Months of Fun (?/!)

Ango started today and I'm not too sure what to expect out of this summer practice period so I'm trying not to expect anything.  It marks my first official assignment as tenzo (as far as I'm concerned, all the other stuff was a warm up).  I have full control over the kitchen as well as all planning and purchasing.

Since I can't take two months off (my supercool and exciting) job, I'll only be able to prepare breakfasts and a couple dinners during the week.  I've planned out all of the meals with the exception of two dinners a week and will coordinate purchasing and prep for all of them.

My activities this week will be limited in the evenings by Aikido since I have a test Thursday, and this weekend because my dad will be coming into town for the weekend for a visit and to attend my jukai ceremony (which I'll write about later).


It's an odd feeling with so much to do and no real choice about doing it.  It has to get done and I'm best qualified to do it.  I feel some resistance at times, it comes and goes.  The meals don't have to be fancy, people just need to get fed.  It's definitely far easier to do what I need to do when I'm in charge.  I've always been more comfortable as a second in command, just making sure nothing slips through the cracks, but it's good to be calling the shots and being successful.

By the time the sesshin rolls around the last week of June, everything should be running super smooth and should be a very different experience than the last two sesshin I worked. The previous retreats have had a huge buildup right before the start as we go from normal life to retreat life with meal planning and coordinating to do, but all of that anticipation will have been burned off by then, it already feels like a relief just to have it started.  All the meals for the whole practice period are oryoki, so by the final week I will have run through most of my recipes a couple times leaving no questions about prep, leaving me more mental space to just relax and enjoy it.

Every meal I prepare for the sangha feels like a session of zazen and after so many it feels so much more comfortable to slip into tomai sanmai (rice-washing samadhi)*.   It should be interesting to see what happens after  I've prepared the next 80 something meals in the Zen kitchen.

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*a new term I discovered that my girlfriend refers to as "cooking face."  Apparently I do a mean Bodhidharma impression while I'm cooking and have for years.  Virtual high-five to anyone who can find the kanji for "toumai sanmai"

Ecstacy and the Mediocrity Principle

There is a principle in science that says that no place in the universe is any different than any other place.  This "Mediocrity Principle" has had powerful implications through the centuries.  Its weightiest application is that Earth is not special in giving rise to and sustaining life; that because the Earth isn't special life can exist elsewhere.

Furthermore this principle can be extended to the "Temporal Mediocrity Principle," stating that no time is any different than any other.  For those of us trying to live in the moment, this should be somewhat comforting; science backing up our beliefs.

Where this can get tricky is that the implication of each space or moment being no different is no more or less special than any other.  Any sort of special experiences such as enlightenment, satori, kensho, or even ecstasy exist in a moment and that moment, no matter how mind blowing it is, is still just a moment. So when something "special" happens we may get hung up on the circumstances of its causes or effects.

Since these experiences, being special, are not all the time happenings,what good does this serve us?  Why does it matter that every moment is the same as every other moment, and is it really even true?  Mediocrity isn't even all that cool.  It's mediocre.

Obviously we experience moments to be different, otherwise this would just be common sense.  So what makes this so, what's the variable?  We are what makes each moment different than others.  Each moment arrives waiting for us to assign values to it.  Not every moment is a blank canvas, sometimes life throws us some pretty tricky situations, but we still determine what it means to us.

Usually this process is unconscious.  Situations arise and our experiences tell us what to think about them.  Zen training helps us take control of that though.

We develop our minds to take charge over the unconscious mind.  We tame the unconscious so that it can no longer drag us and our emotions and thoughts all over.  Using the five skandhas as windows to examine the emptiness of each moment, we can use our conscious thoughts to fill them up with whatever emotions we want.  Left to its own devices, the unconscious will play the game according to the ego's rules.  Because the ego's deluded, this usually leads to suffering.  By taking control, we change the rules and the outcome.

A lot of times, people, especially spiritual gurus, harp on this.  The problem is that it has become buzz words that are left unexplained unless you pay whatever sum they ask to find out how.  But it's nothing special.  Buddhists have been spreading this idea for more than 2500 years.  The book I've been reading, Just Use This Mind, is built upon it with "change your mind, change your life" as its slogan.

As I prepare for Rohatsu Sesshin, I have an exciting and unbelievably boring adventure ahead of me.  I know it will be challenging, but in surrendering my freedom, I'm freeing myself to experience something special.  If I sit with escape on my mind, I'll miss out on what I can experience each moment.

There will be boredom, there may be powerful experiences.  I don't know, and won't know until each moment arrives.  All I have to do is keep these principles at hand.