Some new and well-done research is out showing the impact of meditation on dedicated practitioners in the Buddhist tradition. You can see the whole study here.
This study interviewed 60 practitioners in Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada traditions over time. (Note: this isn't about "mindfulness" or occasional meditators.) Part of what's interesting about this research is that it focuses not only on benefits but also on challenges for those of us on the Way. For example, many people at some point in their practice experience MORE anxiety, shame, self-doubt, fatigue, and apathy. People with a history of trauma often found themselves having a trauma response, especially in retreats. Sound familiar? This is where many people lose their wish to keep practicing. It's also where the help of a teacher and a supportive community are critical However, these dedicated practitioners also reported greater focus, clarity, joy, motivation, and care for others over the longer term. They also spoke of a shift in their sense of self as being more connected to others and the universe, and less focused on personal shortcomings. Many reported an overall sense of well-being that they attributed to their practice, and an ability to respond skillfully in the midst of difficult situations. That sounds pretty good, eh? Now, I'm glad this research is being done. I suppose it's important to "prove" this stuff scientifically. Though I have to say I have some resentment that science is the most privileged way of knowing in our culture. These are things dharma teachers and practitioners have known for centuries! Not exactly "breaking news" for many of us. If you'd like to do your own "research" on the impacts of meditation, we have a day-long retreat coming up on September 17 in Oakland, please join us! And of course, there is always our super sweet Sunday evening sangha. It's two periods of meditation, plus a community conversation. All health care practitioners are welcome! We need all the steadiness, focus, and compassion we can get to live in these difficult times.
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I'm thinking a lot about suffering today. As a nation, we are suffering as much as we have in my memory, with our racist, hateful bully of a president. The combination of hatred and ignorance we have seen this week in Charlottesville and Washington are staggering. And I notice my own fear and hate in response, which is another layer of personal suffering. However I need to stay in contact with that pain in order to speak, act, and resist. In my psychotherapy work, watching the news, in personal conversations, at moments of 2 am angst, the Buddha's words echo in my mind... There are three causes of suffering. 1. Aversion (hate, fear, dislike, division). 2. Clinging (greed, insatiability, narcissism). 3. Ignorance (avoiding reality, checking out, "phone time," dissociation, not seeing truth) And what I'm thinking is, this is Truth. We see it all around us. We are all suffering, as citizens, as members of marginalized communities, as families, as individuals. We seem to get stuck in patterns of suffering. Our current national version is a toxic stew of hate, fear, and deliberate ignorance. Of course, there is greed in there too. Gotta protect my piece of the pie! And, the kicker is, we've seen it all before. What I notice is that personal AND political patterns of suffering get stuck and repeat, like a skip on a record (remember those?) It takes a lot of attention, skillful action, love, curiosity, intentionality, and clarity to start to make changes. This is where practice comes in for me (and many others). When we sit quietly together, we find a still point in this whirling world. We find that there could be a moment not totally dominated by "the three poisons" (aversion, greed, ignorance). And in that moment there is hope. And compassion! It is from that moment that we can set an intention to nurture truth and love in ourselves and, as best we can, with those we come into contact with. In that moment we gather strength to speak the Truth and to stand up to lies. We have a strong center from which to speak and act. As psychotherapists, we are healers, protectors, lovers of truth, lovers of love. But damn, this is hard work, especially these days! We talk a lot about "self-care" but how? When? I want Crimson Gate to be a place where healers can come to heal. To find that quiet place that nurtures us so much. To be together in our rawness and suffering and joy and questions in a way that feeds us. I'm working on ways to offer this more. More meditation, sitting, community, teaching. Whatever we need to hang in there and show up for all this suffering. What do you need? Meditation practice eventually brings us face to face with a profound question about our own identity. As we practice, we notice more and more the repeating loops of habit that form our lives. But is that who we really are? Buddhism teaches us over and over we are not who we think we are. But does that mean there is no self? What about all that work we have done to get to know ourselves? What about ego strength, the true self, individuation? It's confusing! Traditional Buddhist texts describe how consciousness itself creates the world like a dream: something comes into existence that doesn't have inherent form. Contemporary psychology sometimes describes the self as a "soft assembly" or as "multiple self-states." At the same time, we know that it is indeed important to be "born" as a self, to gain self-knowledge, and to feel good about ourselves. When we look into the question of self and identity in contemporary psychology and in spiritual practice, we find it requires us to understand two distinct dimensions of self and no-self. Here at Crimson Gate, we will be taking this up in more detail in our upcoming class, "True Self, False Self, No-Self" starting in September--if you are intrigued, join us! When the Buddha looked into the question of human identity on the night of his awakening, he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as separate beings. He saw that the human tendency to identify with a separate sense of existence is a root illusion. It causes suffering and removes us from the freedom and mystery of life. In the Buddhist view, we are not separate and fixed beings, but rather a collection of five ever-changing processes: the experience of the physical body, of feelings of like and dislike, of perceptions, of responses, and of the flow of consciousness that experiences them all. Our sense of self arises when we grasp onto or identify with these patterns. The process of identification, of selecting patterns to call “I,” “me,” “myself,” is subtle and usually hidden from our awareness. Thus, in our culture, we might fixate on and identify with the role of being a woman or a man, a good person or a bad person. We might take our childhood history, our narrative of our lives, our heritage as determining who we are. As mental health professionals, we are in an interesting place with these identifications. On the one hand, we know how important it is, for ourselves and for our clients to know "who we are." On the other hand, we see how rigidly people can see themselves, and how limiting this can be. How can we think and experience something fresh about the experience of the self? How can we conceive of a freedom beyond the limitations of the small self while still honoring the importance of identity? We will take up these questions starting in September in our class especially for mental health practitioners on issues related to the self. Join us! In honor of the millions of women and men who marched this weekend in support of equality, truth and compassion, I offer a subversive koan. One of our female ancestors addressed issues of gender, the body, taboo, power and patriarchy--issues with which we are grappling today.
Yoshihime was a very strong nun; her nickname was "Demon-girl." She wanted to meet with the teacher at the (all-male) monastary, but the gatekeeper was skeptical of a woman, and challenged her with a question: "What is it, the gate through which all Buddhas enter the world?" Demon-girl grabbed his head and forced it between her legs, saying "Look! Look!" The monk said, "In the middle there is a fragrance of wind and dew." (He's stuck in emptiness, he can't handle the Real.) Demon -girl said, "This monk! He's not fit to keep the gate." The gatekeeper ran into the temple and reported this to the teacher's attendand (a high position) who said, let me test her. The attendant went to the gate and again asked her, What is it, the gate through which all Buddhas enter the world?" Demon-girl grabbed his head and forced it between her legs, saying "Look! Look!" The attendant said, "The Buddhas of the three worlds come, giving light." Demon-girl said, "This monk is the one with the eye, he saw the eighty-four thousand gates all thrown open." What a delightful and powerful koan! We are fortunate to have Demon-girl as an ancestor who can point the way to claim our bodies and our power in the face of attempts by a patriarchal regime to shut us down. Following the inauguration of the Pussy Grabber-in-Chief, we are coming together in the spirit of Demon-Girl. Our Zen women ancestors fought with fierce wisdom and compassion for our place in Dharma practice. We are fortunate to live in a time and place where there are more and more women's voices heard as teachers of the Way. We can let the ancestors know how grateful we are by continuing the fight to protect safety and equality for the next generation of women, and for those yet to come. When we march with our pussy hats, we let Trump know that we have not forgotten his violent and demeaning words and actions. When we knit pussy hats with our own hands we remind ourselves that with our own two hands, we can change the world. We contact Demon-girl, and she marches with us, in solidarity. My teacher, Joan Sutherland Roshi, sent out some important words in the wake of our recent election. I'm offering them here to get them out more widely. November 9, 2016 Dear Ones, this is the first in a series of responses to the election on November 8. It begins with a quote from Adam Zagajewski, a Polish poet who lived under Soviet occupation : Above all though, I detect the exceptionally patient and persistent work of goodness, which could not be completely extinguished, even in this rather cruel century. Goodness does exist, not just evil, stupidity, Satan. Evil has more energy and can act with the speed of lightning like a blitzkrieg, whereas goodness likes to dawdle in a most peculiar fashion. This fatal disproportion leads to irreparable losses in many cases. ... But goodness returns, calm, unhurried, like those phlegmatic, elegantly dressed, pipe smoking gentlemen detectives in old fashioned mysteries, who appear upon the scene of the crime the day after it has been committed. It comes back slowly as if it alone had no access to modern modes of transportation, no train, car, plane, rocket, or even bicycle at its disposal. It returns though, deliberately as a pilgrim, inevitably as the dawn. Unfortunately it comes back too slowly, as if it doesn't want to recall that we are tragically caught up in time, we have so little time. Goodness treats us as though we were immortal. It is itself immortal. In a certain light, dry way, and it apparently ascribes the same quality to us, dismissing time and the body, our aging, our extinction. Goodness is better than we are. While we wait for goodness to wend its way back towards us, we cannot ignore time and the body, our aging, our extinction -- or the effects this election might have on the bodies and extinctions of our fellow humans, animals, plants, air, and oceans. But since many of us are feeling stunned and ripped apart right now, and since we've been presented with something of a black box -- no one really knows what's about to occur - it's important to pause a moment. We've just seen what happens when passions take over, and the antidote is probably not going to be more of the same, even if we think our passions are different. So for right now : A man will become president who thrives on chaos and so creates it all around him. He also craves attention so that, moment by moment, he can find out who he is. My advice to myself : Don't give him the attention. Don't get sucked into the chaos. Take a little time to get unstunned, to grieve, to start to stitch up the rips. Mr. Obama is president for two more months. Take the time to sink roots, deeply, into what sustains : love, the natural world, art -- whatever it is for you. Let us begin to protect everything that's been put in harm's way by healing back to each other. Let us refuse to bring chaos into our homes and our hearts. Let us turn our gaze, these days and nights, to what we care for, not what we dread. If we do that, as the lineaments of our catastrophe become clearer we'll be ready to lay the groundwork for the return of goodness, deliberate as a pilgrim. With my love, Joan Sutherland November 10, 2016 Dear Ones, many of us feel that we've entered a new dream we don't yet understand. Yesterday I spoke of the first task at such a time, calling yr soul back and providing it a good home. Today we turn to sending out filaments of soul stuff to others. After a campaign and an election that were themselves traumatizing (not a word I use lightly), there are so many people in our country, in the world, who are terrified at what might happen - in fact is already happening - to them and those they love. These days, please, every chance you get, send a simple message : We're in this together. If it's a conversation, a meditation, a donation, bearing public witness - let the frightened know, let the frightened parts of yrself know - that kindness can be stubborn, and brave. When I was old enough to vote, I vowed that I would always cast my ballot on behalf of those who had no vote : the trees and rocks, hummingbirds and killer whales. Tuesday's election has passed, but every day we have a new choice about what ballot we cast, upon the waters, into the air, to wrap around the shoulders of our sisters and brothers. On election night some of those likely to be part of the new administration were saying that they had long memories and were going to take revenge on those who opposed them. It got me wondering, what is the revenge of kindness? Would it rise from an ancient steadiness, be made of standing with and sheltering, of refusing to go along with what is cruel and declining to be divided one from another? Kindness too has a long memory, and it lives in us. With my love, Joan November 11, 2016 Dear Ones, Leonard Cohen died. A true person of Zen, wild and wry and honest about the things it's hardest to be honest about. He was the Bodhisattva of That Voice, and he's the one who said that in times like these, we ought to be balancing monsters of love. Thank you so very much, Jikan of the roaring silence, please travel well. The ground is going to be unsteady for awhile now. There will be comings and goings, things that slam shut and some that break open. Ghosts and tremors and tears that surprise. Strange dreams and unexpected resolve. Know this and take good care of yrselves. It will not serve to claw for certainty, because certainty is not of this time. But uncertainty can be balanced with love, which holds steady on unsteady ground, remains loyal to the vulnerable, and remembers the through-line beneath any upheaval. And uncertainty is balanced by courage, which moves step by step in the dark, slipping between the sentries of the heart. At the winter solstice we always did a meditation in which you let the winds of the vastness strip you clean, taking skin and flesh and muscle and sinew, until only yr skeleton remains. Then, after awhile of resting in that state, a radiant jewel appears in yr ribcage, out of which grows a new, softly glowing body around the bones of the old. Perhaps this is a meditation you'd like to take up between now and the solstice. Perhaps it feels like a pretty good fit for the time. Just be sure to inhabit each part of the journey - being stripped, being empty and resting there, being home to a new jewel giving birth to a new life. And always, always, offer up the new life's glow to all our companions making their own way across unsteady ground. Here it is. With my love, Joan November 14, 2016 Dear Ones, When the initial numbness starts to wear off, it's so very human to cast about for ways to cope. As understandable as that is, here's a counter-suggestion : Don't cope. Don't try to normalize the dangerous or manage the inherently unmanageable. What if, instead, we let our tactics and strategies fall away and take place, as much as we are able to, with what is actually happening? And so sorrow, rage, hope, fear, empathy, and the rest will rise and fall with each new development. Let them be part of each new development. In a time when so much and so many are being rejected before our eyes, what if we attend to our emotions rather than turn them away? What if we offer, in our own heart-minds, the very welcome under threat in our country? Instead of searching for the perfect response or the perfect defense, we're choosing the humble work of remaining aware as we move from state to state. And emotions that are attended to are more likely to rise and fall rather than rise and stay, sometimes transforming in surprising ways when given the chance to have a life cycle. This is delicate work in an undelicate time. How does the balance between engagement and self-protection shift from day to day? Where's the frontier between engagement and obsession, or self-protection and denial? Is there ever really a balance, or is it about momentary returns through center, on the way to off-balance in some other direction? Can we welcome those off-balance but potentially creative states? How much will we let ourselves be pierced, by the suffering of others and by sunlight glinting on leaves? Above all, are we willing to carry these questions around, so they can hold us in their reverie? Each of us has the capacity to hold the through-line that runs from before this time to after it. To sink deep enough to pick that thread up, we have to let go of strategies like coping, which keep us bobbing at the surface. We travel through the zones of our distress to the still place at the bottom. And then we feel how ancient and fierce and unconditioned that thread is, and how we are made of it - in our own deep minds ancient and fierce and unconditioned, too. With my love, Joan The news is not good. The national discourse is primitive and insane. People are speaking to me about feeling weary in their souls from the hatred, lies, and violence finding voice in our culture. And yet, it can be hard to look away from the awful spectacle. I want to urge you to take time away from watching or talking or obsessing about the news every day. I'm finding it to be a powerful time for meditation, as so many of us need to touch into the strength and comfort of true nature. Try taking 30 minutes, or even 10, to just sit, breathe, and be with things as they are with an attitude of kindness and curiosity. No electronic devices, unless you have a timer app. If your thoughts feel crazy and you want to settle your mind, try stabilizing your attention by counting your exhales from one to ten, then starting again. This is a simple practice to cultivate settling and focusing the mind. If you feel enraged, heartbroken, terrified, or any other strong emotion, meet it in a big, generous field of compassion for yourself. And, know that many, many people are feeling it too. We can press our broken hearts together, and that will help. If you'd like to take up a point of koan introspection, here's one to try on. Master Ma advised, “Benefit what cannot be benefited; do what cannot be done." Here's what to do with it. Start by settling your mind by counting your breath for a few rounds. Then drop the koan in, and allow yourself to develop a relationship to it. Let it bring any feeling, image, memory, sensory quality, emotion, or expansion. There's no right answer, just let it in. Right now, our practice of sanity and compassion are essential. We can't lose contact with them. Your personal practice, your nourishment with experiences of connection and sorrow and joy, gives you the strength to keep on doing your bodhisattva work. Let's hold our practice, whatever it is, toward the center of things for the next few weeks. Spend time every day meditating, doing yoga or dance, being in nature, being creative, and cultivating compassion for this awful mess. In doing this, we water the seeds of wisdom and compassionate action, and we need as much of that as we can get. We've started to sit on Sunday evenings in our new home on Grand Avenue, in the midst of the dust and debris of ongoing renovation. Last week we sat with this koan. The Buddha was out walking with his sangha. He pointed to the ground and said, "This spot is good to build a temple." Indra, the emperor of the gods, took a blade of grass, stuck it in the ground, and said, "The temple is built." The Buddha smiled. A blade of grass is so transient, it will only last a brief time. This temple we sit in together with tarps on the floor and construction equipment in the next room is just as transient; next week it will look different. Each time we come together, to meditate, to learn, we construct a temple. Right now, that construction is vivid to us as it is mirrored by the construction outside. In a few weeks, the temple will be complete. It will look like a solid, whole, reliable space for us to use for our practice. That can make it harder to remember it's blade of grass nature, the transience that is inherent in everything. So, for now, we celebrate this time of flux. Crimson Gate is very excited to be moving into our new, spacious home in the heart of Oakland! Our dharma center will occupy the ground floor of this lovely old building in the Grand Lake district. We will have a beautiful zendo, community gathering space, and places for learning, practicing, and simply taking refuge in the midst of our hectic lives. We value community, diversity, social relevance, modernity as well as tradition, transparency, creativity, and individual empowerment. We hope to offer a place to refuel, transform, and awaken for therapists and allied healing professionals. Our vision is to offer authentic Zen practice and training to mental health professionals in the Bay Area. In our new home, we will be able to offer more opportunities for meditation. In addition to our weekly Sunday night sangha, we will offer at least one morning meditation period per week, and perhaps another evening meditation group. We will continue to offer Introduction to Meditation classes each spring and fall, followed by a 40-day practice period for those who are interested, all geared to mental health professionals who are interested in taking up the way of regular meditation practice in a supportive environment. We also plan to offer more classes on the intersection of Buddhist practice and psychology. First up will be a free evening seminar on Koans 101. I'm also planning a class on Foundations of Buddhist Psychology for early fall; stay tuned for more information! There will also be ways to take up more focused and intensive meditation practices from the Zen tradition, as well as some other Buddhist traditions. We have a primary focus on building community. We welcome healing professionals of all ages, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and backgrounds. No experience necessary, but engagement, willingness and curiosity are helpful. Ah yes, the nitty gritty. There is usually plenty of street parking on Grand, as well as on nearby side streets. The building is wheelchair accessible. We will be moving over the course of the next few weeks, and hope to fling open our doors by the first week in August. We will be having a couple of work days in July, if you'd like to pitch in! In this special guest blog post, Crimson Gate sangha member Ana N. offers an account of her first long retreat (sesshin). Enjoy! These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them. Rumi On a recent Sunday afternoon I drove out to St. Dot's, the beautiful wooded retreat in the Sonoma hills near Occidental where our Santa Rosa sister sangha, CityZen, has been having retreats for many, many years. I was coming from Petaluma where I had been spending the weekend with my husband celebrating our anniversary. The solo country drive was sweet and quiet and beautiful. It gave me time to slow down and notice everything that I was feeling about the fact that I was headed to my first sesshin. Until recently I hadn't felt ready to go to sesshin. It had been very obvious to me when I wasn't ready, but becoming aware that I was open to it was more subtle. I remember realizing one day that I no longer felt much resistance or fear or anxiety about it, but rather felt a growing excitement and anticipation. When I arrived at St. Dot's I settled into my room in a shared cabin and walked down the shady hill to the zendo. It had been set up in one of the main buildings, a gorgeous Arts-and- Crafts lodge named Lydia House constructed with exquisite care and detail about a 100 years ago. The zendo itself was in a covered porch with huge windows overlooking the hills, the towering sequoias, and passing butterflies and birds. I was so struck by the beauty of the setting, the building itself, and the beautiful alter and flowers that CityZen had arranged. This was a silent retreat, and one of the most interesting experiences was of spending a week of deep, quiet intimacy with 16 other people and realizing that I didn't know the names of several of them when we said goodbye! And yet, I felt so close to each of them by the end of the week. We all engaged in “work practice” that contributed to the smooth functioning of the little world that we created together that week. I and a partner were in charge of the twice daily tea ceremony, and I also worked in the kitchen in the mornings with 3 others to prepare ingredients for the day's meals. I loved the ritual of the tea ceremony in the pre-dawn zendo lit by flickering candles, and I had the chance to experience sinking into my tasks in a kitchen in a way that I never had before. I could pay attention to the beautiful green of the jalapeno as I diced it into tiny little bits, and revel in the crisp freshness of the many colorful greens that I tore up for our salads. And believe it or not, cleaning a kitchen was never so enjoyable! I think it had to do with having it be the only thing that I was doing - the only thing that I was concentrating on - and the knowledge that it was part of a collective effort to provide a wonderful experience for all of us. It wasn't all easy, however! After a while of sitting I began to have a lot of pain in my upper back. Over the course of the week I often suffered from this pain quite a bit. At first I wondered what would happen if I got up screaming, fled up the hill, jumped in my car and took off! After talking to our teacher, Megan, I tried to stay with the pain and learn as much about it as I could, and eventually I began to notice some patterns. I realized that I was constantly rating my meditation, and myself, based on how much pain I was having. “If I weren't having this pain, I could meditate better,” or, “It must be that I'm not sitting correctly or I wouldn't be so painfully uncomfortable.” Fundamentally, I just didn't want to have the experience that I was actually having. Eventually, as I stopped resisting it and instead tried to pay attention to my pain, I began to be able to describe its characteristics. I began to notice how clenched and tense my body became when I was in pain – how much I resisted the reality of that pain and how much I was trying to make my experience something other than what it was. I began to loosen my shoulders and relax. I began to pay attention to the nuances of my pain, the way it was so localized and easy to point to, and the way that it came and went, often appearing when I'd thought or spoken about something painful! I got to know it in a much more nuanced way, and I became a little more willing to accept it instead of fighting it. Another interesting experience was a certain quality that time came to have for me during this sesshin that I don't often experience. The days felt very long, sometimes disorientingly so, but not in the sense of time dragging on. Instead, I've come to think about it as the day opening up to me moment by moment in a way that it seldom does. I was so much more aware of my day and of myself in my day, and so the day seemed long - at times difficult and at other times luscious. A related experience was that I'd find myself having a question and by the time I got to a dokusan with a teacher I couldn't remember the question any longer. Nonetheless, I found that I had plenty to talk about with the teacher. I think that I wasn't anxiously hanging on to questions quite as much as I so often do, and instead allowing different questions or thoughts or feelings to come and go as they did, naturally. Of course, this wasn't always the case. At one point we were in walking meditation after a dharma talk and I realized suddenly that I was very nearly bumping into furniture because I was so preoccupied with trying to remember what it was about this dharma talk that had coincided with a question I'd had earlier. When I realized this, I wondered to myself if it was really so necessary to try to force the memory, and instead decided to trust that whatever connection I'd made was already taking root inside me, whether I remembered it precisely or not. Maybe, instead, I could concentrate on what was happening in that moment. How hard I was grasping to know something concrete, and subsequently how disconnected I'd become from my surroundings. It was hard to take the leap of faith that a seed was planted that I didn't need to understand (or watch over) entirely, but I think it was the key to the opening up of my days in a new way. I found myself noticing how my mind tends to work, began hearing the sounds of the birds, the distant passing cars, and the wind in the trees that were there all along, and feeling sensations that I normally don't even notice. Re-entry the weekend following the retreat was strange.... I don't think that I really let myself be aware that I was in a different state of mind than the world around me when I left St. Dot's on Friday, even though we were warned of this! It took me some time to realize that I'd overbooked my weekend and that I was feeling tired and overstimulated. Perhaps there was a part of me that was afraid to acknowledge the powerful impact of this sesshin on my state of mind. I found myself resisting meditation in the following days, and its been hard once again to not judge myself for that. Yesterday I went to a one-day retreat. It gave me time to settle in and pay closer attention to whats been happening since my first sesshin. More than anything yesterday, I became so much more aware of the many obvious, but also the much more subtle ways that I constantly wish for things to be other than they are and how quickly and powerfully it takes me away from the life I actually have! Lately its been discouraging to face the extensiveness of this tendency. But I'm also curious to see how recognizing it will unfold for me. And I look forward to my next sesshin! My son and I spent some time in the garden this weekend. It's just so lovely to get down on the earth and dig your fingers in. It's literally getting grounded, just being a creature of the world. There is an old story that, at the time of his awakening, the Buddha had to face Mara, the embodiment of greed and delusion. Mara used all his tricks to lure the Buddha off his path. Finally Mara asked Buddha what right he had to the seat of enlightenment. The story says that the earth shook, and blossoms rained down from the heavens. The earth goddess herself came in support of Buddha. Shakyamuni touched a hand to the ground, and said, "I call the earth as my witness." Then there was no room for delusion, and Mara fled. Every time we pull a weed or plant a seed or just lie back in the grass, we call the earth as our witness. It's so simple and so available to us. One thing I love about the tradition of Zen poetry and koans is the intimacy and enjoyment of the natural world. I'll share a few. Happy spring! Coolness of the melons flecked with mud in the morning dew. -Basho How reluctuantly the bee emerges from deep within the peony. -Busson One day Ch'ang Sha went wandering in the mountains. When he returned and came to the gate, the head of the temple asked, "Where have you been, teacher?" He said, "I've been wandering in the mountains." The head of the temple asked, "Where did you go?" He said, "I went out following the scent of grasses and came back following the falling flowers." The head of the temple said, "That's the spring mood itself." |
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AuthorMegan Rundel is the resident teacher at the Crimson Gate Meditation Community in Oakland, CA.. Archives
April 2020
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