Ango Days 12-18

The past week has yielded a sudden, inexplicable drop in my energy and motivation levels.

As last week wore on through to the weekend, my time for zazen kept getting pushed later and later into the night, resulting in shortened sitting periods of 25 minutes on Friday and Saturday and culminating Sunday in the first day of this Ango when I failed to sit zazen at all. I got back on track the next day, and today during my sit, noticed cracks opening up in the carapace of numbness that my body had hardened into. I felt myself softening and opening up, blooming into the moment. It was clear how much my subjective numbness has been a defensive reaction to an underlying tender sadness I cannot explain, as that sadness welled up, seemingly from every pore, throughout the sit. It is interesting how similar the feelings of tiredness and sadness are.

I am drawing ever closer to my final day at my job and my arrival back home in Virginia. This arrival will begin a 2-3 month "sabbatical" period in which my family has been gracious enough to offer to support me financially until I get a new job at the beginning of the coming year. I feel out of touch with myself and exhausted, and need time to reflect before returning to the workforce to be able to do so with any clarity and focus. A season of rest and reflection is an unimaginable boon.

With such a wonderful vista ahead of me--the prospect of recuperating and spending time with my dearest loved ones--I would expect myself to be energetic and motivated, optimistic and practically dancing for joy with each sunrise. And yet the opposite has been happening. Days 15 - 17 of the Ango constituted a long weekend in which I had three days free of any obligations. Not only did I not leave the apartment, I avoided human contact in just about every form. Nor did I set myself to any number of tasks that need doing, such as posting sale notices for my furniture on Craigslist or cleaning my apartment. Also, in a coup de grace of Ango mismanagement, not only did I not sit on Sunday, I also failed to do the weekly 90 minute zazenkai on any of the three free days I had. Nor have I yet to make up the four hour zazenkai I missed the previous weekend because I did not know it was a four hour zazenkai, having done the 90 minute version instead.

In the substance abuse program in which I work as a counselor, we refer clients who cannot maintain the discipline and effort required to navigate the stressors and triggers of their daily lives without reverting to substance abuse to a "higher level of care," such as a 28 day inpatient program. In that spirit, as a Zen practitioner committed to re-establishing a sober life of practice and aware living, I could not disagree with a "Zen counselor" who referred me to a monastic sitting where the group spirit and structure of the program would carry me through and sustain this practice, supporting me where my current motivation and energy levels cannot.

But all I can do now, faced with the realistic limitations of my situation, is to recommit myself every day to living life not as it is lived by default, but with awareness and intention. By "intention" I do not mean direction toward a particular goal, but rather an attitude of attentive care to every task. What I am finding in my uneasy relationship with the commitment of Ango is that the discipline I resist is not draining once done instead of thought about. Zazen is an oasis and home care tasks performed with attention become delights in themselves. It is amazing how quickly I forget this, and how pleasant the surprise when I yet again experience the deep release of zazen or the joy and love of a simple task engaged fully.

I have found in myself a fatigue and a melancholy that surprise me. But it seems so obvious now from the midst of it that it is hard to imagine ever expecting otherwise. Even when we leave some place for what looks like a much better one, there is a sadness in the leaving, in all of the goodbyes that must be said, the loved rituals and places of pilgrimage that will fade from life's rhythm, and the acceptance of failures and unrealized dreams.

The New York and North New Jersey metro has been hostile and alien since I set foot here, and leaving feels like an admission of failure. This city bested me, and the life I dreamed for myself here never blossomed. A first flush of color and fruit that burst into life quickly after my arrival dropped to the ground mere months later, leaving a withered tree that continues to struggle to come to leaf again. I am confident that my home soil will nourish and heal, and perhaps it is less that I am not enthusiastic about the seeming brightness of my near future, and more that it is so long overdue that the joy can only come when the relief is actually here.

It is easy for me to turn the commitment and discipline of Ango into another whip with which to scourge myself. And I am seeing clearly that this is not the Way. My exhausted mind and body need gentle tending. This Ango discipline, firm but flexible, supportive at the same time it is accommodating, is not like a grinding stone. Just like forgetting the instructions and coming back from distraction again and again when sitting, I forget repeatedly that the gentle efforts of Zen practice open life up and make it gentler, not harsher and more unforgiving. And each time I come back, and remember, it is like a revelation.

Ango Days 8 - 11

Today was the first day of the Ango that sitting felt natural, like a normal part of the day's flow instead of a strange feat of discipline. Time felt fluid, I had no clue how much time had passed, and even the thought seemed strange. For the first time since the beginning I did not compulsively check the time at any point while sitting to see how much time was left. There are thoughts that I was happy to let go of on the cushion instead of nurture and coddle as is my natural tendency.

I do not believe this means I have hit some sort of point in some sort of linear progression where sitting will be easy and resistance-free from here on out. But it is nice to experience and remember what it was like for this practice of intimacy with the Silence, as Dave (Praxis Dave, not Daibh Dave ;) puts it, to be a normal and welcomed part of the day.

So far I have not missed a day's sit yet and do not intend to. I do not know when I will add a morning sit, but know that is something I would like to try at some point in the Ango.

I did the normal 1.5 hour "zazenkai" this Saturday, not realizing this Saturday was the 4 hour zazenkai, as I am not at this point following along with the live stream or recording. I will have to do the four hour schedule some time in the next three weeks. There will be plenty of good opportunities for it as this time of transition is full of emotional hooks and distractions.

I've all but abandoned mindful eating and any other practices besides zazen and right speech. I want to come back to these, and maintain my full commitment.

Ango Days 5 - 7

I kept my commitment to sit every day for the past three days, and I am certain that it is only that commitment that got me to sit on the fifth and sixth days of Ango. I could tell that those were days I regularly would have forgone sitting. The sits themselves were difficult, with a racing and uneasy mind and uncomfortable body. I even cut those days back to what has been my usual sitting time during the last year, 25 minutes (I made a commitment for the Ango that I would increase my sitting time by 5 minutes). Today was much easier, though with a mind still awhirl.

I noticed today near the end of the sit the posture of expectation I bring to sitting, as I also bring to much of my daily activity. It feels like the posture of a baby bird, sitting there with its beak open, waiting. I've noticed the expectation I've had that after resuming daily sitting, my average mindstate would become smoother, and I've seen that expectation dashed. This week my mindfulness and state of mind at work progressively regressed, and mindfulness dwindled to a bare minimum. This was initially a source of frustration and aggression toward myself--how can I discipline myself more?--but today I saw the hungry attitude behind this thinking. This hungry attitude is more interesting, and more problematic, to me, than the quality of mindfulness it is hungry to establish.

"Hungry" is an apt term, as I've noticed too in this first week of Ango how much I resist mindful eating. My eating became less and less mindful over the course of the week. I think part of this may be not wanting to look at the precious and neurotic attitude I bring to the table. I take great pleasure in food and expect it to deliver that pleasure. Many of my favorite indulgences revolve around food, and are very ritualistic. I like to pair certain foods with one another, pair certain foods with certain beverages, and pair certain meals with certain activities. I like eating sushi and drinking Torrontes while watching a nature documentary. I like drinking a musky red wine and eating chocolate by candlelight. I like to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with my morning Sugar Free Red Bull, or sometimes pancakes. I have a hard time enjoying most meals without a Diet Coke, which I especially like with chips and salsa or with a Lean Cuisine pasta meal.

I realize that there is nothing necessarily wrong with finding pleasure with food in the idiosyncratic way that I do. But I find the attitude of expectation underneath this behavior problematic, and a source of an endless cycle of craving and disappointment. Every once in a while I have that perfect moment--with food or otherwise--but most of the time, I am chasing it and not attaining it. Do the perfect moments justify all the time spent chasing them? I truly do not know, though I know the "good Buddhist" answer would be no.

I have noticed too that I am often in a fighting posture. I catch myself many times on the cushion and off fighting with myself, trying to make whatever my mind and body is doing into something different. There is a constant background of self-criticism. This is something I am relieved to drop when I can, but I also have an underlying fear that to drop the fight is to sink into complacency, to surrender to entropy and sloth. But perhaps it is the tension of the constant fight posture that drains my energy and makes me sloppy with things.

I am not sure I will be able to do it, but I think I would benefit from establishing both a morning sit and an evening sit every day. I am instinctively a night sitter, which means the whole momentum of the day has set my mind achurn before sitting. It might be interesting and worthwhile to commit to sitting with morning mind also, though I may find out it is not any different.