Who was that person who acted as a turning point for you when you met them? - Discussion
I agree very much with the others that chance played a big role in meeting significant people.
First significant person for me was a therapist. I was about 32 years old and had suicidal tendencies. I had been working with my therapist for about one year. We had nice talks but that pretty much was it. I sought the fault in me at that time. One day I met another woman on the stairs to her practice. I felt immediately inclined to her; she had a strong physical presence and radiated a friendliness and empathy I had never met before. It turned out she was a fellow therapist. I decided to work with her and put in quite a bit of effort into switching over to her.
From that time my therapy took off and within a year I was done with it. My new therapist was a Sannyasin and she introduced me to meditation without me knowing it. Much of our sessions consisted of sitting together in silence, her holding up an atmosphere of friendliness and acceptance until I was ready to speak, and then she merely mirrored what I had said, with simple metta, no sugar coating, no judgments, no systems, no solutions. That was a real turning point in my life. She also suggested to take up some kind of formal meditation practice, but I wasn´t into that at that time. But she had planted the seed, so to say.
Second person was my second Zen teacher. I had read about a Soto Zen temple in France. They offered weeklong summer retreats for anyone, as a kind of "adventure holiday"
. This guy was the abbot over there and he happened to give a talk in our city. So I went there. He had very much the same strong physical presence and friendliness as my former therapist; and he was intellectually very clear, without the slightest "stink of enlightenment". So on my next holiday I attended one of those nine-day-retreats. After 8 days I had a very strong A & P experience, an experience of unbelievable physical and emotional freedom which lasted for about 6 weeks and turned my notion of myself and my life upside down. This has kept me going ever since. So this guy had put me firmly on the track.
Third person was Ayya Khema, via a book of hers. Four years after I had hit A & P, I dropped formal sitting practice because I did not see the point in it any more. Actually at that time I didn´t have a clue what to do on the cushion. Six years later I came across a Ayya Khema book in which she describes some basic meditation techniques. This opened my eyes and I went straight to the next corner Zendo to resume formal practice. So Ayya Khema brought me back to the practice, although it, in the following years, remained rather half-assed.
Fourth person was my current Zen teacher. Around two years ago, my job changed and I couldn´t follow my yearly retreat routine any more. A friend suggested I might attend his teacher´s retreat, a Rinzai guy who lives in Japan and comes over to Europe twice a year. So I did. And I entered a completely different world.
My Soto Zen sangha had become a nice foundation for my everyday life. I had worked mostly with the ethical part of the teachings, but on the enlightenment side, after my initial A & P experience, nothing much had happened. The Soto tradition explicitly discourages people from "seeking for enlightenment", and even from talking about it, and I had simply put up with this. Assumed this disappointment was part of the practice. Never once I had tried to seriously talk to the teacher about enlightenment and how to get there - for years on end.
Now, with this new teacher, I came across a bunch of people who were actually and actively heading for samadhi (deep concentration state), for kensho (I guess that is equivalent to A & P). They seemed to think that even enlightenment was possible, and they openly talked about this stuff. In addition, in the Rinzai Zen tradition you have regular talks to the teacher.
This guy now breaks my attraction pattern, so to say. He looks twenty years younger than he is, yes, but when you´d meet him on the streets you wouldn´t notice anything special about him. He looks entirely unremarkable, at first sight, no obvious radiance whatsoever. He even has one or two character flaws, and deals with that quite openly. And he isn´t really friendly, either. Obviously he has a thorough training in kindness and empathy and applies both in a somewhat technical way; but underneath this I sense a relentlessness in him that I didn´t see in my previous teachers.
He doesn´t want to hang out with his students, he doesn´t want to know about their psychological stuff, he wants them to get the point. When I first listened and talked to him I sensed that but didn´t know what it was. I thought well this is really serious here, so I want to stay with him, but I couldn´t have put my finger on it. What I understood however was: His retreats have a backbreaking number of sitting hours, and I understood that I could stay with him only if I increased the number of my daily training hours significantly. So this guy got me going concerning the extent of my everyday training.
The fifth one is Daniel Ingram and his focus on the fact that meditation practices have a technical side to them and can be described and trained systematically.
About the same time when I met my current teacher, I stumbled into DHO and read MCTB. This helped me to see eventually what my current teacher is actually doing: he is hammering away on the technical aspects of the matter. I might well have missed this and mistaken his talk for mystical if I hadn´t been on DHO trying to figure out what you guys are actually talking about, and what it is that I am DOING (or NOT doing) on and off cushion.
The funny thing is that now, when I see my previous Zen teacher, I start understanding him in a new way. He uses a metaphorical language which you can easily mistake for mysticism, but now I see that he certainly knows what he is talking about; he is just not as relentless and single-minded as my current teacher. I had spent years with him completely missing this.
So I agree with the others here that it was mainly chance that brought me into contact with significant people. I´d suggest to visit as many teachers´ talks and retreats as possible and follow your intuition, and never put up, for let´s say more than one year max, with a teacher-student relationship that seems unclear or unsatisfying to you. And please, do always talk openly to your teachers, challenge them and let them challenge you.
By the way, three days ago during retreat I hit a significant point; A & P again or maybe even SE. I didn´t figure out yet; my teacher doesn´t use this map system.
First significant person for me was a therapist. I was about 32 years old and had suicidal tendencies. I had been working with my therapist for about one year. We had nice talks but that pretty much was it. I sought the fault in me at that time. One day I met another woman on the stairs to her practice. I felt immediately inclined to her; she had a strong physical presence and radiated a friendliness and empathy I had never met before. It turned out she was a fellow therapist. I decided to work with her and put in quite a bit of effort into switching over to her.
From that time my therapy took off and within a year I was done with it. My new therapist was a Sannyasin and she introduced me to meditation without me knowing it. Much of our sessions consisted of sitting together in silence, her holding up an atmosphere of friendliness and acceptance until I was ready to speak, and then she merely mirrored what I had said, with simple metta, no sugar coating, no judgments, no systems, no solutions. That was a real turning point in my life. She also suggested to take up some kind of formal meditation practice, but I wasn´t into that at that time. But she had planted the seed, so to say.
Second person was my second Zen teacher. I had read about a Soto Zen temple in France. They offered weeklong summer retreats for anyone, as a kind of "adventure holiday"
. This guy was the abbot over there and he happened to give a talk in our city. So I went there. He had very much the same strong physical presence and friendliness as my former therapist; and he was intellectually very clear, without the slightest "stink of enlightenment". So on my next holiday I attended one of those nine-day-retreats. After 8 days I had a very strong A & P experience, an experience of unbelievable physical and emotional freedom which lasted for about 6 weeks and turned my notion of myself and my life upside down. This has kept me going ever since. So this guy had put me firmly on the track.Third person was Ayya Khema, via a book of hers. Four years after I had hit A & P, I dropped formal sitting practice because I did not see the point in it any more. Actually at that time I didn´t have a clue what to do on the cushion. Six years later I came across a Ayya Khema book in which she describes some basic meditation techniques. This opened my eyes and I went straight to the next corner Zendo to resume formal practice. So Ayya Khema brought me back to the practice, although it, in the following years, remained rather half-assed.
Fourth person was my current Zen teacher. Around two years ago, my job changed and I couldn´t follow my yearly retreat routine any more. A friend suggested I might attend his teacher´s retreat, a Rinzai guy who lives in Japan and comes over to Europe twice a year. So I did. And I entered a completely different world.
My Soto Zen sangha had become a nice foundation for my everyday life. I had worked mostly with the ethical part of the teachings, but on the enlightenment side, after my initial A & P experience, nothing much had happened. The Soto tradition explicitly discourages people from "seeking for enlightenment", and even from talking about it, and I had simply put up with this. Assumed this disappointment was part of the practice. Never once I had tried to seriously talk to the teacher about enlightenment and how to get there - for years on end.
Now, with this new teacher, I came across a bunch of people who were actually and actively heading for samadhi (deep concentration state), for kensho (I guess that is equivalent to A & P). They seemed to think that even enlightenment was possible, and they openly talked about this stuff. In addition, in the Rinzai Zen tradition you have regular talks to the teacher.
This guy now breaks my attraction pattern, so to say. He looks twenty years younger than he is, yes, but when you´d meet him on the streets you wouldn´t notice anything special about him. He looks entirely unremarkable, at first sight, no obvious radiance whatsoever. He even has one or two character flaws, and deals with that quite openly. And he isn´t really friendly, either. Obviously he has a thorough training in kindness and empathy and applies both in a somewhat technical way; but underneath this I sense a relentlessness in him that I didn´t see in my previous teachers.
He doesn´t want to hang out with his students, he doesn´t want to know about their psychological stuff, he wants them to get the point. When I first listened and talked to him I sensed that but didn´t know what it was. I thought well this is really serious here, so I want to stay with him, but I couldn´t have put my finger on it. What I understood however was: His retreats have a backbreaking number of sitting hours, and I understood that I could stay with him only if I increased the number of my daily training hours significantly. So this guy got me going concerning the extent of my everyday training.
The fifth one is Daniel Ingram and his focus on the fact that meditation practices have a technical side to them and can be described and trained systematically.
About the same time when I met my current teacher, I stumbled into DHO and read MCTB. This helped me to see eventually what my current teacher is actually doing: he is hammering away on the technical aspects of the matter. I might well have missed this and mistaken his talk for mystical if I hadn´t been on DHO trying to figure out what you guys are actually talking about, and what it is that I am DOING (or NOT doing) on and off cushion.
The funny thing is that now, when I see my previous Zen teacher, I start understanding him in a new way. He uses a metaphorical language which you can easily mistake for mysticism, but now I see that he certainly knows what he is talking about; he is just not as relentless and single-minded as my current teacher. I had spent years with him completely missing this.
So I agree with the others here that it was mainly chance that brought me into contact with significant people. I´d suggest to visit as many teachers´ talks and retreats as possible and follow your intuition, and never put up, for let´s say more than one year max, with a teacher-student relationship that seems unclear or unsatisfying to you. And please, do always talk openly to your teachers, challenge them and let them challenge you.
By the way, three days ago during retreat I hit a significant point; A & P again or maybe even SE. I didn´t figure out yet; my teacher doesn´t use this map system.