I have to imagine that, say, a thousand years ago, a group of fiendish Zen masters got together to find a way to really torture their students, and they came up with sesshin.
First off, there is the schedule. You can’t do anything when you want to, and usually just when you get into something a bell rings and you have to do something else. And, of course, you can’t watch TV and you can’t go to the refrigerator to grab a snack.
But the worst of it is Oryoki. You can’t even daydream or you will get one of the utensils in the wrong place or who knows what. One of my funniest memories of Oryoki from sesshins past is when we all got to the place in the verses where we held up our bowls and said "Now I eat this food with everyone." But we looked down, and there was no food in our bowls. We had forgotten to serve ourselves the food!
So we all have some state of mind, constantly changing of course, and in ordinary life we can kind of avoid this state of mind by medicating ourselves. You know, watch TV, go to the refrigerator, or daydream. But in sesshin… the medication is taken away…
…And we get to see our state of mind as it is. Nobody is actually torturing anybody in our sesshins here. You don’t have to sit in pain or anything. You just have to sit here. It is pretty hard to say that your state is caused by anything in sesshin. You are just sitting there facing the wall…
…And what happens? Probably all sorts of states of mind and emotions go on.
Tonight I want to sort through this mess of states and emotions and talk about one that is different from all of the others: joy.
Joy is not a state, nor is it an emotion. Joy is a taste of your true being, your true essence.
Joy is aliveness. Joy is presence.
I sat a lot of retreats in Los Angeles, at ZCLA, back in the early 1980s. And what I remember about them is this joy. This joy of just sitting there with the sounds of life going on around me. The sounds of the traffic. The dogs barking.
Every year we did a retreat that started the day after Christmas and ended just after midnight of the new year. Those retreats were the best. You could just feel the increasing excitement as New Years approached — in the rush of the noises, and in the sounds of people’s voices.
One of the most memorable times of my life was during a later retreat, in San Diego, at ZCSD. A woman walked by with a stroller. The sounds of the woman, of the baby… something in me just gave way, opened up.
This joyful sitting, as I’ve described above, often doesn’t come until the end of a sesshin. Often in the first part of sesshin, sitting feels more like tension and struggle.
Sesshin is a turning away from my life as I want it to be, as I hope it will be, a coming into contact with my life as it is, and, if joy happens, it is because of an acceptance of my life as it is. Joy is really the same as this acceptance. The process of going from the life I want and hope for to acceptance of my life as it is, is a process of grieving.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described five stages in the grieving process. Here they are with some sesshin thoughts attached:
denial - "I love sesshin."
anger - "I hate Sam because he makes us do Oryoki."
bargaining - "OK. If I sit really well this first half-hour, then I will get enlightened and the other hour-and-a-half will go easy."
depression - "Grace didn’t happen. I didn’t get enlightened, and I still have an hour-and-a-half to go."
acceptance - "Ahhhhh." Something finally just gave up.
Now wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go straight from step 1 to step 5? "I love sesshin.", then "Ahhhhh." Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to work like this. I think the best one can hope for is finding how to facilitate this process, so that the steps go more quickly.
I have found that I can facilitate this process, greatly facilitate this process by:
Recognizing that it is a grieving process.
Developing the willingness and skill to delve into grieving.
How does this work?
"I want it to be this way." But it is not. I just drop right into grieving the loss of the way I want it to be. I really feel into it. Then acceptance comes.
"I want myself to be this way." But I am not. I just drop right into grieving the loss of the image of myself that no longer fits reality.
The ability to grieve, the willingness to drop into grieving whenever it might be necessary, gives me freedom. I am less and less afraid of anything that might come my way. If what comes my way brings a loss, then I know I can handle it. I can grieve the loss. Then acceptance will come, and there will be joy.
With the willingness to grieve, thoughts can pass fairly freely through my mind. If a thought does get hung up by triggering some fear, I can grieve the potential loss of what I am afraid to lose, and then the thought can move on. This gives me a real freedom from being troubled by thoughts.
Joy is certainly a good indicator that the work I am doing in my sitting is on the right track. If I am getting to joy, acceptance, then I must be doing something right.
At some point, when my sitting gets deeper, I find that joy itself can become the guide. I just follow joy, stay with it.
I find that there is some resistance to this shift to joy as the guide itself. There is a giving up of control. There is a guilty feeling: "I should be working harder." Before, I was doing something, now, following joy, I am not.
But I have found that following joy is a deeper level of sitting, and that it is the gateway into myself.
Sam Gabriel, San Diego, CA
http://home.roadrunner.com/~clothespin
sam_gabriel@yahoo.com