275 - Ten Fields of Zen, Field Five – Precepts: Transcending Self-Attachment (3 of 3)
277 - My Sesshin (2 of 2)

In this episode I’m going to do something radical and share with you my experience of the sesshin I attended last week, describing it day by day. There are many reasons not to do this, which I will go into. I certainly don’t intend to do it again. Still, despite my misgivings I thought it might be helpful for you to get an insight into what a sesshin is like for another person. In this episode I get through the first couple days of the retreat, and I will finish my story in the next episode.

Read/listen to Part 2

 

Quicklinks to Article Content:
Why We Don’t Usually Keep or Share Journals of Sesshin
Reasons to Share My Story
My Sesshin: First Full Day
My Sesshin: Second Full Day

 

 

Why We Don’t Usually Keep or Share Journals of Sesshin

I described sesshin – a multi-day residential, silent Zen retreat – in general terms in Episode 21 – Sesshin: 24-7 Silent Meditation Retreats. I discussed why I think sesshin is an essential component of Zen practice in Episode 189 – Collecting the Heart-Mind: A Celebration of Sesshin. Both of those episodes make clear, I hope, that sesshin is a complex experience. It can be quite arduous, even grueling at times, with around 8 hours of zazen each day. Sesshin challenges your comfort zones and takes away your usual coping mechanisms and distractions. Every sesshin you attend is different and going in with expectations – positive or negative – is bound to be disappointing. The point is to let go, as much as possible, of your usual way of operating and viewing the world. Ideally, you surrender to the practice and give up trying to attain any particular experience, even as you make a heroic effort to show up, hour after hour.

I’m a strong believer in setting aside all reading and – especially – writing during sesshin, unless the retreat teacher has asked you study a text (and if they do, this is usually not a very long text, and you are not studying it academically but allowing it to shape your experience of the Dharma). Reading and writing activate parts of your mind which want to comprehend, to contemplate abstract concepts, or to create a narrative of your experience. It can be tempting to want to jot down little insights you get so you can remember them later, and I confess to occasionally making a few notes about a meaningful interaction with a teacher. However, almost inevitably, after doing this, part of you starts keeping track of insights like they are treasures to attain during sesshin and then take home with you like souvenirs. Almost inevitably, marking an “insight” sets you up to wonder where the next one is, and feeling disappointed when nothing appears. Sesshin can easily become another project of the small self, separating us from the essential matter.

In order to produce this episode, I made about two small pages of notes during sesshin – tiny scribbles, just enough to recall how each day progressed. Doing so imposed just enough of a narrative force on my sesshin that I am renewed in my desire to set aside writing entirely during retreat. Hopefully, my sacrifice will benefit someone out there.

Another reason we don’t journal our sesshin experience is because it opens up the possibility of comparing our notes with those of others. This is a terrible dead-end, as our primary responsibility during retreat is to fully inhabit our own direct experience. We might imagine that other people are more or less enlightened or adept than we are, but such contemplation is deluded, pointless, and counterproductive. Our way is not the way of another. No one can walk our path.

As a Zen teacher, it might be especially reckless for me to share my personal experience of sesshin. It’s bad enough that you might compare notes about your experience of sesshin with a relative peer, but when you read about the experience of someone who has been sitting sesshin for 30 years, who has attended around 75 sesshin, and who is a Zen priest and transmitted Soto Zen teacher, you’re bound to have some expectations. Let’s say you see my sesshin experience was blissful and crammed with deep insights. You may compare it with your own and feel discouraged. Or you may feel affirmed in your determination to try harder to attain the same thing, expecting your sesshin experience to “improve” over the years. Alternatively, you may think my experience of sesshin sounds pretty pathetic and dismal, falling far short of what you expected. This may cause you to lose faith in sesshin, or in Zen practice in general, or may lead you to discount me as a Zen teacher. None of these conclusions are helpful to your practice.

 

 

Reasons to Share My Story

So, why would I want to share my sesshin story with you, despite these misgivings? Basically, because it seems to me that human beings love to hear one another’s stories. It helps us to open up to new experiences and ways of perceiving when someone shares their personal narrative about something we think we might experience some day, or something we already experience but find ourselves full of doubts about. My hope is that you might be encouraged to participate in sesshin if you haven’t already, and that you will go into it with reasonable expectations and not a promise of spiritual goodies easily attained. If you already do sesshin practice, I hope you will be encouraged in it, recognizing it is not a straightforward spiritual project where you put in certain kinds of effort in order to attain a desired result.

Instead, sesshin is an existential reckoning. For the duration of the retreat, you are more or less left alone with yourself. Whatever hopes, fears, delusions, ambitions, conclusions, preoccupations, neuroses, fantasies, narratives, and habits you have going on in your body, heart, and mind will form the substance of your days… except when you are able to attend to the Reality of this very moment, when all of that – at least momentarily – seems like a dream. Just a split second of such clarity can keep you coming back to many, many sesshin, even if you feel like your previous insight continues to evade you. Such evasion is only due to our own delusions about the nature of such insight, and Reality-with-a-Capital-R continues to beckon to us.

Unless we are a completely awakened Buddha, which I assure you I am not, sesshin will dredge up whatever sludge remains in us. This may sound dreadful – and frankly, the vast majority of human beings would only come to sesshin kicking and screaming – but what is the alternative? Leaving the sludge where it is, and merrily going along as if all is well?

I don’t want to make it seem like the experience of sesshin is all negative, of course. Some sesshin end up being quite delightful – easy, bright, calm, and sweet. Many times, partway through sesshin, it seems to me like this is the ideal way to live. Other sesshin are hard – full of struggle, confusion, doubt, discomfort, grief, even fear. Like everything in our Zen practice – zazen, mindfulness, precept practice – we should evaluate sesshin based on the wholeheartedness and sincerity of our effort, not on the result. At least, not on short-term, obvious results. Instead, we can evaluate whether a practice is worthwhile based on longer-term results: Over the course of years, over the course of many sesshin, what happens to your life?

It’s funny how people who don’t do silent meditation retreats assume that they are a blissful escape from reality, like going on a weeklong spa vacation. They hope we enjoy our sesshin, or marvel about how many of them we insist on attending. (You’re going on retreat again?) Of course, it’s no use telling them it’s an often-grueling existential reckoning you’re going to spend good money and vacation time on – they’ll just think you’re crazy.

So, on to my story of sesshin, which lasted five full days.

 

 

My Sesshin: First Full Day

I became aware on my first full day of sesshin that I was in a melancholy mood. There are many reasons we suppress or deny our less-than-positive feelings, and not all of them are bad, at least in the short term. We recognize moods change, often inexplicably, and refuse to give them more significance than they deserve. We may feel the need to remain strong and upbeat for practical reasons. We may fear getting pulled into a cycle of anxiety, depression, or rumination. We may tell ourselves it’s no use exploring our negative thoughts and feelings when they are focused on situations that we can do nothing about. On a more self-deluded side, we may see a persistent negative mind state as a sign of weakness, or of the inadequacy of our spiritual practice, and try to deny or overcome it as soon as possible. As a Zen teacher, I have the added temptation of thinking, “I want to encourage people in the practice of Zen; if I’m feeling discouraged, fearful, depressed, or pessimistic, it will cause people to lose faith in the practice.” It’s tempting to push away negative feelings.

Fortunately, in the midst of sesshin, you can explore the mind states and feelings that arise for you without too much concern for practical repercussions, and you won’t be talking to anyone so you don’t have to worry about how your mood will affect others. At some point during this first full day, on a break, I jotted down this little poem describing how I was feeling:

Melancholy

Disillusioned.
No project of mine, however ambitious,
is consequential in the Grand Scheme of Things.
All I love is in the process of dissolution.
It is not so easy to look down at these wrinkled, age-spotted hands,
with their bulging veins and spots of eczema,
and think “not me.”
The world as we know it is headed toward unimaginable
pain, destruction, tragedy, death, chaos, terror, and fear –
merely through the unfolding of business as usual.

Have I been consoling myself
with thoughts of Emptiness and Suchness?
Is my peace of mind based on unreliable and arbitrary concepts?

I sat in the Zendo, allowing my fear, aversion, horror, and doubt to simply be present. I was uninterested in adopting some practice to vanquish them, as they are authentic responses to direct contemplation of the impermanence and insubstantiality of the world I love, and of my very body. I had no interest whatsoever in all the arguments we can make for why life is great even in the face of our own brutal aging, illness, and mortality, and the eventual loss of all we love. I saw how easy it is to start putting one’s faith in past insights, consoling oneself – and others – in a superficial way, saying, “Don’t worry, actually everything is fine.” Face to face with the reality of impermanence and suffering, all consolations sound like shallow attempts at denial.

While allowing my mood to be what it was, I fortunately was not caught up in mental elaborations about the sources of my melancholy, or catastrophizing about the terrible things that might happen in the future. I just showed up and did the practice as best I could, hour after hour.

 

 

My Sesshin: Second Full Day

Despite all the sesshin I have done, it’s still difficult not to approach it as if I can achieve the results I want if only I try really hard to apply myself to zazen (on the meditation seat) and mindfulness (the rest of the time). Naturally, I wanted to attain some insight or mind state which would relieve my melancholy and reaffirm the wondrous nature of the Dharma. How could I not wish for that at some level?

In addition, the structure of sesshin itself can whip you into a state of striving and expectation. After all, why on earth would you be sitting hour after hour, long past the point where it is easy, comfortable, or pleasant, if you aren’t trying to achieve some effect? When all you want to do is hide out in your bed, or go for a walk, or do something fun, you have to summon the energy and determination to continue sitting zazen anyway – hour after hour. What are you going to use to motivate yourself if not some kind of goal, or the determination to fulfill some kind of intention? Even the profoundly vague goal of shikantaza, just to sit with awareness and alertness, can become a goal you feel like you’re failing to achieve over and over and over.

Many days of this sesshin were very hot and sitting in an 80 to 85-degree Zendo in priest’s robes sent me into a state of torpor much of the time. I got very intimate with torpor during this sesshin – a groggy state where you aren’t sleeping and you aren’t awake, but the body remains motionless in a slack, heavy, low-energy lump. I showed up and did my best, of course, and felt profoundly grateful that I long ago pledged to forgo the illusion of control. I used to make myself quite miserable when my sesshin experience was sleepy, dull, or full of thinking, despite my best efforts.

Still, even though I don’t beat myself up about it, it’s not necessarily easy to accept my experience when it… frankly… sucks. I reminded myself over and over of the zazen instructions I give others: Just expand your awareness to include whatever arises. When I’m reasonably alert and things are fairly pleasant, when I only need to expand my awareness to include five minutes of mind wandering, or the sound of a neighbor’s leaf blower, zazen is quite nice. There’s a sense of spacious appreciation and acceptance as I expand my awareness. When I’m in pain and groggy, such that my very awareness feels like a heavy, wet blanket, expanding my awareness requires considerable effort. Having pushed it just a little wider, acceptance of my present experience is far from blissful. The moment I let go of the effort, my awareness sinks back down and the practice becomes little more than endurance.

When sesshin is difficult, doubts about its efficacy will creep into my mind. Occasionally I wonder whether it is nothing more than an incredibly uncomfortable experience we put ourselves through and then have to convince ourselves it was worth it afterwards, like soldiers who have fought in a war feel a psychological need to believe the war was just and worthwhile. I don’t take my doubts very seriously (if I did, I never would have attended 75 sesshin!) but they reveal my mind state at certain points in sesshin.

I marvel that, even after all my experience, the precise mechanisms and benefits of sesshin defy any simple definitions or predictions. The best way to describe sesshin is as a practice of the whole person. We are immersed body, mind, and heart in a practice matrix and every last thing that happens is part of the experience. It isn’t just about lots of meditation so you can get better at meditating and achieve insights. Every part of you is thrown in the sesshin soup and simmered. The teacher at this sesshin made a wonderful observation on this second full day, saying it was a misunderstanding to view sleepy, dull, or distracted zazen as a sign that you aren’t doing sesshin right. Instead, such experiences simply test your resolve. How much do you want to awaken? Are you only willing to make an effort if it’s easy and pleasant? If you get obvious rewards out of it?

On this second full day my melancholy lifted somewhat – not for any reason, just like clouds lifting. The koan underneath my melancholy remained, however, and the only insight I remember from this day was just turning toward a question: “Do not reach back in memory for solace, nor anticipate answers… then what?”

 

That’s it for this episode, but I will be back in a few days with part 2, sharing the rest of the story of my sesshin. I hope you’ll tune in, thanks for listening!

 

Read/listen to Part 2

 


Picture Credit

Zendo at Great Vow Zen Monastery

 

275 - Ten Fields of Zen, Field Five – Precepts: Transcending Self-Attachment (3 of 3)
277 - My Sesshin (2 of 2)
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