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| photo courtesy of Shimelle Laine on Flickr |
Our tale opens on Thursday morning with me finishing my usual morning sit. As I come up the stairs from my basement zendo I am met by my son Alex who tells me that the TV isn’t working. A few button presses later and indeed the TV isn’t working. Further investigation shows me that is in fact my internet connection as a whole that has decided to take the day off. A call to tech support and several reboots later and I hear the phrase that no Internet customer wants to hear “We’re going to have to schedule a technician to come out.” Great, when can this hero in khakis come and save me from the demons of No Internet? “The earliest appointment we have is Saturday...between 4 and 8 PM.” For those of you who might not be aware, the zazenkai was scheduled for Saturday from 7 AM to 1 PM so not only was I not going to be able to binge Netflix for the next couple of days, but I also wouldn’t be able to connect to the event that I was supposed to be leading to say nothing of how I was going to do my actual paycheck job. To further drive the point home, as I’m relaying this story to my wife Jamie, Alex takes a break from his oatmeal to say, “Daddy you’re going to lose your job. You have no internet so you lose your job.” Fortunately, his sharp five-year old intellect was a little off base on this point. So what the heck was I going to do next?
The story goes that Bodhidharma came before Emperor Wu and was asked what he brought to China. His first reply was nothing and when pressed he replied “a soft and flexible mind”. As we practice, we begin to see that the mind has amazing power and also an amazing ability to follow habitual patterns. We react to similar situations in time tested ways almost without thinking. This isn’t altogether a bad thing. These mental shortcuts allow us to react much more quickly to something rather than having to spend precious moments coming up with entirely new strategies for every situation. However, we over use these shortcuts to the point that we will respond to something in a way that may have worked for one instance but is completely wrong for another. Add to that how often these responses don’t actually address the matter at hand (does getting angry really help a situation?) and we have a bit of a mess. The good news is that through practice, we can work to regain that soft and flexible mind that Bodhidharma mentioned. And note that I said regain, not obtain. We had this at one point. We just buried under piles of conditioning.
Someone, I don’t remember who, described Zen practice as working to smooth out the ruts in our brains. The more we practice and the more we see that our thoughts are not really us, the more we can react to a given set of circumstances in the most appropriate way and as an added benefit, we can avoid wasting energy becoming upset when that won’t really do any good. Just to clarify a bit, I’m not saying that becoming upset is always a bad thing, I know a few people who like to find exceptions to everything, I’m saying that in a lot of cases we add energy and emotion to a situation that really does nothing other than cause us to needlessly suffer. As the coffee mugs say “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”.
So back to my little tale of woe. Because of my practice, I was able to face the situation of my internet crashing with the mental resources to address the issue rather than falling into a cycle of anger, frustration, self-pity, and other ultimately unhelpful positions. When I got through being angry, my internet would still be broken. Instead, I handled what needed to be handled. Did what needed doing.
Sometimes people will ask what you get out of Zen or zazen practice. This is always a tricky question to answer for so many wild and wonderful reasons, however, I can say that a side effect of spending a lot of time staring at walls is a softer, more flexible mind.
As for how the zazenkai turned out, if you were there then you know.
Gassho,
Daishin
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