Too Sick to Take Medicine
A friend of mine complained that meditation didn't work for her. She said that her mind was too flighty and filled with thoughts to meditate. This is like saying that you're too sick to take medicine. Americans are not noted for patience.
Yet that is not entirely true. Large numbers of Americans go to the gym and work out, go jogging, and do all kinds of strenuous exercises for fitness and weight-loss. So why is it so hard for some Americans to pick up a meditation habit?
For whatever reason, many people do not see that learning the meditation practiced in Zen is not so different from learning how to lift weights properly. Weird ideas about what meditation is distort their expectation of what they can get out of it, and how soon. When it doesn’t quickly happen the way they expect, they figure it’s not working, they can’t do it, and they lose interest.
You can establish a well-founded meditative discipline without too much strain simply by keeping two major principles in mind:
Zen meditation is training. It requires consistent, reasonable application.
Expectations influence your training. You have to look at, understand, and manage your expectations.
When I was a boy in junior high school, I tried out for football — however, I could barely run just one lap around the field. No one explained conditioning to me then, so I just assumed that I was naturally unable to run as far as my classmate, and I quickly gave up. Observing my body and mind over the years, I learned on my own that Capacity can be developed. It is not an innate and unchangeable quality. With consistent training, one’s personal limits constantly expand to potentially amazing degrees. Of course, people vary according to their genetics and personal histories, but ability can always be increased with training.
Insofar as Zen meditation (or zazen) is a conditioning of body and mind, it functions like any other biological conditioning. Every time you repeat an action, it gets easier. If you want to run a mile, you start by running as far as you can, even if it’s as little as a hundred feet. Every day, you run a little further. It won’t take more than a few weeks for most normal, healthy people to get up to running a whole mile.
Put another way: Levels of difficulty and limitations are only of the moment. The experience of difficulty in zazen is within this moment, and not for all moments. Very few people find zazen easy from the start, but its difficulty is as subject to impermanence as anything else. You may find zazen difficult now, in this moment, but the moment changes. In the next moment, with training, it will be easier. You can count on it.
But what is it for, anyway? Training is an effort. People do not make efforts without some motivation. What do you think zazen will do for you? Will it make you smarter, healthier, fitter, richer, cooler, or even, maybe, happier? Seems to have worked for some people. Unfortunately, for most people Zazen reveals its effects with glacial slowness. People drop practice before any noticeable return on their expectations. Yet expectations can be changed to more modest and more rapidly realized goals.
Beginners not used to stillness usually experience boredom of an intensity approaching agony — ironic, isn’t it? If boredom isn’t enough, there’s pain in the legs, back, shoulders, and neck from sitting a long time in a posture unfamiliar to a generation of slackers, slouchers, and couch potatoes. Many a jogger or weight-lifter is willing to exert themselves despite pain and boredom under the principle of “No pain, no gain,” but positive reinforcement comes much quicker in physical activity than in Zen meditation. Minor passions will not generate the attitude necessary to sustain the heroic efforts you may have read about in spiritual literature. The experience of millennia of Buddhism is that the heroes of that literature make such great efforts because of severe shock, or extreme loss, or great suffering, which generated a great determination and drive to resolve their psychis agony. Lucky for most of us, we can start small.
Don’t overwhelm yourself with unrealistic expectations. You may know someone who can sit for over an hour without twitching a muscle, but you can’t sit for 45 seconds without having to scratch an unbearable itch. You can always discourage yourself by making such a pathetic comparison, but you can also notice that you can sit for 40 seconds without moving. You may feel that you don’t have the patience, determination, and faith necessary to do Zen practice, but your practice need start with nothing more than the intention to develop these qualities.
Instead of setting a goal of, say, sitting for at least 40 minutes with an unwavering mind, concentrate on training your body. Keep your goal simply to sit still and quiet for short lengths of time. An unwavering mind is an abstraction suitable for the abstraction we call tomorrow — invite your body to stillness right now! What does stillness feel like?
Overdoing it by prolonged and tense sitting wastes your energy and determination by giving you punishment instead of reward. Excessive effort can be harmful. Trying too much too soon actually diminishes your capacity for a while. Appreciate your achievements though they seem small.
More important than an unwavering mind or being able to sit in meditation for hours, Sit every day! Even if you can only handle five minutes of counting breaths. Even if all you can do is be mindful of three breaths! If you establish a daily practice, and turn your mind to it every day without fail, your practice will grow practically by itself.
You can’t deal with your life if you don’t know its basics. Fortunately, the laboratory in which you can learn these basics is always present and available to you: your own mind and your life. You engage in zazen and other spiritual practice to learn what it is that you do and how you do it, in zazen or outside of it. This is your life and your practice. There is no need for anyone, including yourself, to judge it at all. Failure is not a relevant or useful evaluation. To sit in meditation is to discover the landscape of your own mind. With that in mind, how can you ever fail to learn something, whatever you do, whatever may happen? No need whatsoever to worry about doing zazen right, if you just keep paying attention.
With all this in mind, how would you work out a program to establish a daily practice without engendering the negative forces of disappointment? As a suggested example, suppose you find that you can sit comfortably for ten minutes, but more makes you antsy. Use a kitchen timer, or something that doesn’t require any attention until the time is up, and set it for ten minutes. Sit for ten minutes every day for a week. After a week, increase the time to eleven minutes. Add a minute every week. After ten weeks, make the increase five minutes. Sit as many days and weeks as you need until you can sit still and quiet for as long as you think is long enough. Vary this formula however you think best, but keep at it every day.
By concerning yourself only with small concrete goals, you will easily develop the skills necessary to engage in the deeper work of Zen. Before you know it, you will not be sit ting like a Buddha, you will sit as a Buddha!
