| | I am not a native speaker of English. So please excuse clumsiness and mistakes.
Here is my weird story (to borrow a nice expression from Jenny, with gratitude): I stumbled into Zen in the dark later nineties, when I was doing a therapy that was supposed to remove my suicidal tendencies (which it did, actually).
No real internet around then, no printed readings on practice available in the bookstores, so I trusted completely into what the next corner dojo Zen monk told me. Which was close to nothing.
At that time I supposed that it needed to be this way. Zen monks were supposed not to talk, so I did not ask either. I went to his dojo once a week to sit for an hour. He was an nice and scruffy old man, in an scruffy old dojo. I liked him because he was totally unesoteric and did not threaten to hug me, nor demand any kind of false harmony. During the sitting, I made up colorful stories, to get around the pain, while he read to us small stories about Zen monks, which I did not understand.
Half a year later I went to a 9 day Soto retreat, totally unprepared in terms of technique, and since I thought that enlightenment was somehow to do with severe pain, I sat through, always on the brink of screaming, tears and total desperation. That was one of the worst experiences in my entire life.
The master who lead the retreat, was surrounded by 200 practitioners. His entourage made clear that he was not available to beginners. So I remained silent.
On the last day, however, I decided to quit this shit. Before the monks in charge could pick me up in the dorm and drag me to the dojo (absence from sitting was not allowed), I went off and took a long, silent walk in the woods, watching the sunrise and listening to the awakening birds. Which, after this week of torment and pain, was heartbreakingly beautiful.
And this was the point when I had a kind of - I would have said experience, why not. A very profound experience. I understood completely how beautiful the world was, and that I was totally free, had always been. That was one of the best experiences in my entire life.
The best about it was that my body TOTALLY relaxed. For the first time in my life, I was physically free, and this made me emotionally and mentally free. I went home and thought “wow, now you´re enlightened!”. Obviously it had worked out: pain -> enlightenment. I no longer needed this shitty sitting practice, did I? So I dropped it.
I was free for six weeks in total, in which I put my life upside down, or better downside up. I started doing whatever was needed, no procrastination or depression any more, no more suicidal tendencies, no more social phobia. The positive consequences from these six weeks bear fruit until the present day.
And then the cob webs of angst came back into my life.
I went back to the cushion, but did not talk about this, neither about my sudden freedom nor about my going back to body-and-mind-jail, neither to my Zen friends nor to the teacher. I sat once a week at the dojo, and went to more retreats to bring back “the experience”. The main difference was that I now KNEW for sure that there was something in Zen that I could not get otherwise.
After four years of waiting and spinning away on the cushion, I gave up and stopped sitting.
I went about my life, depressed as ever, and spent the next six years getting into a job (which was, at that time with mass unemployment, not easy), and after a near physical breakdown, went to AA to get rid of my inclination with alcohol (and luckily, was able to get rid of it).
But still my life remained to be a mess, and in the back of my head, there was always this longing, for this experience I could not forget about. So one day in 2006, in a book store, I picked up a book by a Theravada nun about meditation techniques. And that was it. Finally I understood that there was something to be done on the cushion.
I walked straight to the next Soto Zen dojo, enrolled as a member and plunged into the practice. Which at that time meant 30 minutes sitting at home every day, three times a week sit one hour in the dojo, and three retreats per year, one of them for nine days, two for three days.
This time I made sure to ask whoever I met what exactly he was doing while sitting on the cushion. The answers remained very vague. The teachers I met were equally elusive. I could not make out if I was on the right trip. Now, having read my way through MCTB, I think they did not know what they were doing.
Still, I carried on and in 2008, had another experience which reminded me of what I was looking for: everything lightened up, the body relaxed, and a great joy welled up, and turned into love and compassion with everything and everybody. It lasted for two days, and then quickly faded. I went to a Soto master and he asked if I knew how I had gotten there, and if I was able to reproduce this experience. I did not know, except that there had been – again – a period of severe pain before the opening. So he told me to go home and practice until I knew. That was the teaching. At least I gained from it that there obviously was a systematic way of achieving this state.
Well I tried to find out how to do this, but shortly after my talk to this teacher, my job life turned into a horror movie, and my focus went onto daily survival rather than onto the exploration of meditative techniques. At that time I came across the Soto precepts, and because it appealed to me intuitively, I started practicing very seriously to put a focus on “not criticize”.
At that time, my mind was deeply inhabited by criticizing – myself and others. Looking back, I must have started doing an intuitive kind of noting technique on “criticizing thought”, combined with the practice of equanimity towards results, and a practice of consciously detecting and dissolving all negative somatic feelings that arose in combination with my numerous communicative failures.
The sitting faded at that time, I was not able at that time to maintain a daily sitting schedule. But the practice of “not criticize” changed my communicative behavior very deeply. On this basis, after four years or so, I managed to unravel my job difficulties, and my life settled a bit. Still, my depressive tendencies continued.
I started peeking around for teachers outside the Soto tradition I had been stuck with for all these years. I found a teacher who did secular Rinzai style retreats with a demanding amount of sitting hours, and went there.
After the second retreat with him, I knew that my previous style of practice was not going to work with this. I had to do much more sitting at home. Which I did. I turned to volume up to two hours per day. And something started changing, while I did not know exactly what. In October 2013, I lost my depression, and my panic attacks. They disappeared and never came back.
A few months after the depression went away, my body – which had always been very stiff – began to shake during sitting. This lead to a gradual relaxation of the body and to profound changes in posture, which at times were very painful, but in the end lead to a much better physical and emotional balance. I was able to drop the “not-criticize”-practice.
I also started experiencing strong kundalini symptoms, first trembling, then shaking, and after a few months, spasms. A few times I even woke up at nights and found my body shaking, literally jumping about in the bed. I was not frightened, because it was so relaxing. But I had no idea what this was. The Rinzai teacher was either unable or unwilling to help me with this, and so I searched the internet. During this search, I came across various kundalini theorists and practitioners, and also across Shinzen Young and the dharmaoverground platform.
I am very glad to FINALLY have found a place where somebody is actually talking about meditation and what is happening in it, in plain language and not in a mystic tone. So I am now here, trying to figure out where I am, what is going on, and how to proceed.
The kundalini symptoms have faded, only during sitting I still experience a continual and regular shaking. However, while it used to be relaxing before, it has now become simply annoying. Suppressing it does not work, either. That results in periodic and painful spasms which just shatter my awareness, but do not change anything. I must practice in some other way, but I do not know exactly how.
The body has settled into a posture and pattern of muscle tension that is not bad, but also not totally satisfying, not totally grounded. There is still a lot of unnecessary tension around, which I cannot get rid of. Also there remain some very annoying habits in daily life, especially a procrastination that drives me crazy.
Currently, I am trying to settle with a conscious technique. I tried Mahasi style noting, but for me it seems to lead only to confusion. I have no idea what these vibrations might be Daniel is talking about. It seems better to me to stick with a simple focus out, and especially with somatic experience at a wide focus.
On the other hand, after the spectacular changes which have taken place during the past months, it is hard for me to stay with the subtler physical phenomena. I find it simply boring.
So at the moment, I feel a bit stuck, and maybe need some reflection.
Sorry for this long piece, there is one more newbie splashing her lengthy story out above the board, but I felt I needed this in order to explain it to myself, and to give me a foundation.
I will continue in much shorter pieces. Any comments and thoughts are very welcome. |