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SlightlyMad posted:Not relevant to anything and not a serious question, but what does a Buddhist say when he stubs his toe? "Jesus Christ" or various pagan gods/devils are mentioned in my language, but I have never heard the Buddhist version. They must be so mindful of their surroundings they never hit their toes on anything. Hey, welcome to the thread. I default to "goddammit" still as an English speaker who was raised Christian. But one thing that's universal in a lot of cultures is how to curse! In Tibetan the go-to is konchok sum! which means "three supreme precious" but refers to the triple gem (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha). You will hear this as a general explitive and also peppered throughout speech where we often drop "I mean, poo poo" and so on.
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Jun 19, 2019 17:30
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It's taken me a long time to read through this entire thread, but I'm glad I did. I'm very grateful to the posters who explained things, time and again. I particularly liked the metaphor of the relay race, where each runner is a rebirth and the race is progress to Enlightenment. I've been following the Eightfold Noble Path as best I can, and observing the five precepts this Saga Dawa. Holding all five is difficult for me in every day life, cause I still have lots of attachments and aversions, and I still like to drink now and then. Meditation's hard. I can barely last ten minutes before my noisy mind gets distracted. I've noticed I'm better able to deal with anger and frustration than I was before. Do you know the word, "jouska"? It means a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. By being mindful, I find I'm better at noticing when I'm having one of those, labeling it, then shutting it down. This is great, since I used to have a lot of imaginary arguments in my head that served no constructive purpose; they just made me angry. Mindfulness has helped a lot. Thinking about impermanence has been a great comfort as well. I was too afraid of death and decay before. I'm trying to be more accepting of the bad parts of life, seeing them as natural. I've noticed that this has greatly reduced the amount of distress they cause me. And lastly, the study of Buddhism has revealed to me something I never got before: Slimer is a Hungry Ghost! 
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Jun 19, 2019 23:45
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i’ve jus started “the mind illuminated” and it looks good as gently caress
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Jun 20, 2019 23:28
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Impermanent posted:Hi, thank you for answering my questions earlier, I have some more if that's ok: Hello, friend-in-the-dharma. I hope you stick around. Your story reminds me of a prince who encountered the realization that every living thing suffers and dies, and he was disturbed and moved by this. And you know that if you asked two Christians from different churches about the afterlife, you'd get at least two different answers. And if you asked two Christians of the same church or the same family or same marriage, you'll also get at least two answers, or else it'll be un-reassuringly rehearsed if they're identical. Just so with Buddhists. The lineage I'm most familiar with is Plum Village tradition, which is relatively young as an independent tradition, and it's a bit like a seed of Vietnamese Zen Buddhism planted and nurtured for European and American soil. One thing the Plum Village monastics will teach is that Buddhism is meant to be helpful to everyone in the places where it's practiced. And in the place and time where Siddhartha Gautama lived, reincarnation and retribution were already popular beliefs. These beliefs may be based on the wrong view of a separate self, but they may also be useful in teaching people a better way to live. That is why Buddhist teachings may seem to contradict one another as far as the form is concerned. If you continue to look into Buddhism's many schools, you will encounter the many ways in which Buddhists try to get across the insight of non-self/non-dualism/inter-being/etc. It's frequently not an easy insight to transmit, so there are 84,000 dharma doors. In the Plum Village tradition, rather than trying to educate you first on how the Buddha in his day-and-age used the notions of reincarnation in his teachings, they would rather try to get you to personally experience the insight of non-self, and then practice to incorporate that insight into your daily life and how you act. And since you didn't grow up already immersed in a cultural belief in reincarnation, explaining using reincarnation may not be the most useful path to helping you see non-dualistically. And I hope you will have that insight, because it has the power to be quite life-changing. It's not uncommon to search for this insight when dealing with things of enormous, unjust, and ongoing suffering, like climate change and abuse by authorities. To a practitioner, these things don't become less of a concern, but the practitioner is committed to transforming all their afflictions for the happiness of all beings, even if that means that humans self-annihilate and only leave behind a precautionary tale for others to learn about the dangers of unrestrained selfishness, like a really depressing parable or Jataka tale. And since you mentioned the Eucharist, there are Christian contemplatives like the ancient Desert Mothers and Fathers and the more modern Thomas Merton who also practice the insight of non-duality, and they are never in the mainstream or the hierarchies of Christianity. A ritual of holiness can be emotionally powerful, almost regardless of the denomination, but a non-dualistic view of the Eucharist is different from the popular view. Suppose that Christ has no body but yours today, in order to stand between the vulnerable and the stones. If that is the case, is there any food you digested that is not also the body of Christ, or does that name only refer to the wafer eaten on Sunday? Happy contemplating. Paramemetic posted:Hey, welcome to the thread. I default to "goddammit" still as an English speaker who was raised Christian. But one thing that's universal in a lot of cultures is how to curse! Brother Phap Dung from Plum Village grew up in Vietnamese-Buddhist house in Los Angeles. When he wants to express blasphemous exasperation in his dharma talks, he says "Jesus!" and "God!" He is my favorite Asian American dharma teacher and comedian. Caufman fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Jun 24, 2019 |
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Jun 24, 2019 04:46
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I know it will likely vary from traditions, but in your experiences, is it better to read sutras alone with the possibility of misinterpreting them, or to wait to read until one is in a community or with a teacher that can clarify the sutra in question?
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Jun 26, 2019 21:50
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I know it will likely vary from traditions, but in your experiences, is it better to read sutras alone with the possibility of misinterpreting them, or to wait to read until one is in a community or with a teacher that can clarify the sutra in question? I think it's okay to read and discuss with others and then also receive instruction. I mean Tibetan Buddhism doesn't deal much with the sutras. It's mostly commentaries on tantras. But you can read something and have your takes. If you're not clinging to your own interpretations dogmatically this can be a really good thing.
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Jun 26, 2019 23:07
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I know it will likely vary from traditions, but in your experiences, is it better to read sutras alone with the possibility of misinterpreting them, or to wait to read until one is in a community or with a teacher that can clarify the sutra in question?
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Jun 27, 2019 00:44
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Nessus posted:I think you should read that poo poo although it might also be good to ask questions in informed communities. But if you find yourself thinking 'wow, I've figured out what Buddha REALLY meant, and it's actually that I'm Maitreya' maybe slow your roll. Maybe he's an incarnation in the Karmic line of Budai.
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Jun 27, 2019 02:20
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Anyone read any of Brad Warner's stuff? I have a friend who is huge into Punk/Thrash/Metal/Whatever kind of music, and we had a long conversation about Buddhism and he recommended me to read his stuff.
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Jun 27, 2019 15:55
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:Anyone read any of Brad Warner's stuff? I have a friend who is huge into Punk/Thrash/Metal/Whatever kind of music, and we had a long conversation about Buddhism and he recommended me to read his stuff. He’s got a blog he regularly updates, if you wanted to get a taste of his writing style and approach to Buddhism. http://hardcorezen.info
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Jun 28, 2019 04:29
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I know it will likely vary from traditions, but in your experiences, is it better to read sutras alone with the possibility of misinterpreting them, or to wait to read until one is in a community or with a teacher that can clarify the sutra in question? Well, are you ever really reading the sutras alone? 
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Jun 28, 2019 04:40
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:Anyone read any of Brad Warner's stuff? I have a friend who is huge into Punk/Thrash/Metal/Whatever kind of music, and we had a long conversation about Buddhism and he recommended me to read his stuff. he’s probably best if you want to read dogen but you need a more colloquial version if you want to read dogen and think you can possibly stomach it without his often poetic composition being framed in terms of, e.g., Cheetos, then compare translations of shobogenzo (samples are online and for reasons i won’t bore you with there’s not a definitive best answer) and buy one or more if you don’t know who dogen is, then what you need to know about brad is that he’s from two strains of the soto zen tradition (nishijima and chino), soto being one of two primary flavors of zen, and zen being a form of Mahayana Buddhism. soto zen is an amazing tradition, but if you’re interested and just getting started I’d suggest you start with opening the hand of thought and tenzo kyokun, after which you might try realizing genjokoan
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Jun 28, 2019 04:45
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Caufman posted:Well, are you ever really reading the sutras alone?
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Jun 29, 2019 06:41
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Regarding Dogenchat, my teacher suggested and loaned me this book, containing 9 of the 95 fascicles of Shobogenzo, some time ago and I spent the last month or so jumping headlong into it while on vacation, which was a profound experience. I found this volume to be a phenomenal delivery of the fascicles it includes, especially with regards to how Dogen so excellently defuses and subverts dualistic wording and framing. The annotation was extremely helpful and clear, as well. It's slim, but incredibly dense. Dogen's approach to teaching the dharma really resonates with me. I had a pretty major epiphany about rebirth while reading the Uji (Being-Time) fascicle of Shobogenzo recently; it has had a profound impact, since. Rebirth, as a concept and component of buddhadharma, has been an obstacle for me since I discovered Buddhism five years ago; I couldn't reconcile it and, for the most part, just dodged it and worked around it. I can see now, though, that what I had thought was rebirth was really more of a western view of reincarnation I had carried into Buddhism with me, disguised. I am by no means enlightened and very likely I will misrepresent myself and the dharma, but I thought I'd share my recent discoveries with the hope that maybe they will be of help to someone. The heart of what I discovered is the utter immediacy of rebirth. There was an assumption before, subconsciously, that rebirth is a thing which happens between lives, isolated off in the past and future belonging to a "me" living now. Seeing things from a more non-dualistic perspective though, that can't be the case. The reincarnation-as-rebirth assumption I'd carried was necessarily fixed inside of a narrow and ultimately arbitrary frame of reference, which isolated rebirth into just the times and circumstances of "the moment of the end of my lifespan" and "the moment of the beginning of my lifespan." But trying to see rebirth through the narrow lens of what I imagined was "my life and death" — no matter how much I attempted to consider their connected nature — was to be deluded by putting special value on what are, actually, totally arbitrary points in time/being. Besides, the points in time to which I was looking, and trying to put rebirth inside, are just ideas; they have no discrete existence. The key thing about rebirth, it seems to me, is that it is right in this moment. How could it be something which only appears at the end of what I imagine to be "my lifespan?" And how could that moment be any different whatsoever from this function going on right now? If this moment's rebirth seems different, somehow, from the capital-R Rebirth I imagine to come later, I think that's only because I still have discriminating views and think in terms of an isolated self and lifespan, rather than the kind of being which is beyond selves and others (and time, for that matter). It seems to me now that all of karmic existence is, to its core, rebirth. It's not even that rebirth happens to karmic existence, it's that they are one and the same. As such, the dharmic "me" is entirely rebirth — if my "self" manifests as a dharma out of ignorance and discrimination, that very manifestation is already fully the cycle of birth and death, "passing on" the conditions the next dharma-moment relies on. I think that is perhaps what is meant by being trapped in the round of birth and death; not only in the sense of beings being born and dying in our conventional way of seeing it, but also immediately, now, happening to the fullest extent in every moment and completely filling the spaces in between the conventional ideas of birth and death, not waiting to appear at the dharma-moment I imagine the "death" of "my body" to be. Plus, if true reality — or whole-being — is totally complete, without any divisions, then there is no space for any self that possesses a lifespan or continuation anyway. I think that is why it's possible to say that buddhas and bodhisattvas manifest for a time in the world, and perhaps what Dogen is getting at when he says that whenever there is sitting in zazen, Buddha encounters Buddha. Anyway, all of that verbosity aside, the hardest part of all of this is remembering. I keep having this series of cascading moments in which there is a strong sense of "getting" it; there are small glimpses under the hood, so to speak — or so it seems — where being feels whole and undivided, and I realize how immaterial what I assume to be the world is. I attended a 3-day camping sesshin recently during which for the first time in sitting I really had a feeling of what it might mean for body and mind to be cast off. These are really profound moments, but then conditions change, and habits and anxiety and distractions rush back in and there are waves of forgetting. Being back in the city, and back at work, is especially counterproductive in this regard, being so chaotic and full of the negative associations that have been built up over time. It really shows how much everything is a result of habituated action and response, and how people and their environment are born out of each other every day. Becoming a monk makes a lot of sense in this light.
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Jun 30, 2019 01:43
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Keret posted:Regarding Dogenchat, my teacher suggested and loaned me this book, containing 9 of the 95 fascicles of Shobogenzo, some time ago and I spent the last month or so jumping headlong into it while on vacation, which was a profound experience. I found this volume to be a phenomenal delivery of the fascicles it includes, especially with regards to how Dogen so excellently defuses and subverts dualistic wording and framing. The annotation was extremely helpful and clear, as well. It's slim, but incredibly dense. Dogen's approach to teaching the dharma really resonates with me. that was one of the first books on dogen i read, and i had more or less the same reaction. especially if you got a lot out of uji, i would definitely suggest reading the entire shobogenzo, for which you might consider the nishijima and cross volumes, since they are annotated in a similar way. I might also suggest realizing genjokoan, or, for that matter, anything else by okumura; and from the mahayana background there are obviously many sources but this volume on hua yen may build helpfully on the insights you mention: https://www.amazon.com/Hua-Yen-Budd...ks%2C138&sr=1-2
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Jun 30, 2019 04:09
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Nude Hoxha Cameo posted:that was one of the first books on dogen i read, and i had more or less the same reaction. especially if you got a lot out of uji, i would definitely suggest reading the entire shobogenzo, for which you might consider the nishijima and cross volumes, since they are annotated in a similar way. I might also suggest realizing genjokoan, or, for that matter, anything else by okumura; and from the mahayana background there are obviously many sources but this volume on hua yen may build helpfully on the insights you mention: https://www.amazon.com/Hua-Yen-Budd...ks%2C138&sr=1-2 Thank you very much for this! I have been considering where to go from here with regards to books that are done in a similar way to the one I posted, because I found it revelatory. I'll look into those after I finish a small volume I borrowed containing lectures on Bendowa from Okamura-roshi.
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Jun 30, 2019 19:49
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From a Buddhist perspective how does a person with a mental illness come to experience the true nature of mind? I’m assuming we can KNOW the true nature of mind in an academic/philosophical way, but how do we trust in the experience when we have an illness that directly interferes with the mind and clouds experience and perspective. For example, from my Catholic perspective, how does someone with a disorder that can manifest as hallucinations know that their experience of extraordinary grace (visions, locutions, etc.) are valid? In essence: from a Buddhist standpoint, when can we trust that our experience is valid and/or true despite our illness?
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Jul 7, 2019 01:22
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Thirteen Orphans posted:From a Buddhist perspective how does a person with a mental illness come to experience the true nature of mind? I’m assuming we can KNOW the true nature of mind in an academic/philosophical way, but how do we trust in the experience when we have an illness that directly interferes with the mind and clouds experience and perspective. For example, from my Catholic perspective, how does someone with a disorder that can manifest as hallucinations know that their experience of extraordinary grace (visions, locutions, etc.) are valid? In essence: from a Buddhist standpoint, when can we trust that our experience is valid and/or true despite our illness? A great question! I can't provide a perfect answer here, but I can give a humble attempt. I am gonna kinda wear both my hats and answer somewhat informed by Tibetan Buddhism and somewhat informed by transpersonal psychology. The question sort of depends on a lot of definitions and relies on fundamental problems of consciousness, perception, and experience itself. To start, we can talk about the nature of mind. The nature of mind is something we can all generally understand academically but can only actually truly understand through experience. We know some things about its qualities (non-dual, non-conceptual, limitless, luminous, unclouded, expansive and vast, etc. etc.) but those are just provisional statements that, without actual understanding, don't give us any real insight ("non-dual, non-conceptual, limitless..." are all just conceptual labels, after all). But a person with mental illness, even major mental illness, can still experience this, because mental illness afflicts our conceptual mind, not the nature of our mind. But that isn't the question, of course. The question is about how we can verify the experience is authentic, and the answer is a little complicated, because only a person can know a person's own experience. A mentally ill person may well have gnosis, or apotheosis, or the "glimpse," or recognition or even realization of the nature of mind - but they may have a hard time convincing others of it. They may also delude themselves into thinking they have had it when they have not. This is the most difficult thing to assess, because they may have impairments to the tools they'd need. Generally, the tools used to determine if someone has attained are seen in their happiness and in their way of behaving. Enlightened minds are undisturbed by events, generally happy or at least having emotions consistent with the nature of things, and their behavior is non-violent and compassionate. So we can assess from outside using those tools. The mentally ill person might not be able to assess using those tools. This is okay. I know that my Lama has instructed some people not to meditate, because mental illness gives them a habitual tendency to ruminate or to have flights of fancy. In that case, Tibetans like to have such a person focus on performing purifying rites and practices to train the mind to be more stable first, and maybe for the entire lifetime. Because Tibetan Buddhists believe that you need both wisdom and method to attain enlightenment, in cases where a person may be unable to attain wisdom, they would be guided towards practicing "method," and those who can't do method would focus on wisdom. This isn't exclusionary or even prohibitive in a lifetime; someone who attains perfect method gets perfect wisdom and vice versa automatically, as the two go together. It's important to also recognize that while the mystic experience has been around for as long as people have, the concept of mental illness is much newer. I'm reluctant to make broad statements about both and their relationship, but it's naturally important to note that a mystic experience may very well resemble mental illness and vice versa. There is a good test for mental illness versus spiritual crisis in Grof and Grof's The Stormy Search for Self, and it factors in this discussion. In that case, there was an overlap of mental illness and Kundalini syndrome. My advice would vary from person to person, basically. For example, there are existential schools of psychology that would advise a person having hallucinations to just go with that - that's their experience and their experience is as real (to them) as anyone else's experience is (to them). There's some merit in that concept. If an experience has a positive effect on a person's life leading to a wellspring of happiness and contentedness and compassion and benefit to others, then it doesn't matter much whether it's "actual" - after all, all experience is phenomenal and illusory by nature. All things are devoid of inherent existence, and all conditions phenomena are impermanent. So truth is a mentally imputed quality (one we arrive at through various philosophical conventions, such as truth by correspondence or so on), and the condition of the mind doing the imputation matters somewhat. Fundamentally, the question reduces to the same as with anything: how can we trust that our experience is valid or true? And I wonder, can experience even have a truth value? A hallucinated experience has as real an impact on the mind of the person as a non-hallucinated experience, so it's certainly real, and whether it's true or not can only really be determined by correspondence - but the mystical experience exists entirely in the mind, so how can we test its correspondence at all? Some of the things I offered earlier can help, anyhow, but maybe aren't entirely sufficient. That may have been a confusing answer or maybe it just was a kind of ramble about things and doesn't get us anywhere, but maybe it's some food for thought. When I'm home tomorrow afternoon I might have more to add as I think about it, it's an incredibly important question in transpersonal psychology and somewhat important within Buddhism.
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Jul 7, 2019 01:47
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Thanks, Paramemetic! You have the blessed trait of being both informative and insightful. Zen posters, what would someone who wants to practice do if they are unable to meditate?
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Jul 7, 2019 07:03
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Thanks, Paramemetic! You have the blessed trait of being both informative and insightful. Zen posters, what would someone who wants to practice do if they are unable to meditate? Could you elaborate somewhat on this? What do you think of as meditation (the technique and goal) and what is inhibiting it (in either or both respects)?
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Jul 7, 2019 15:00
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Thanks, Paramemetic! You have the blessed trait of being both informative and insightful. Zen posters, what would someone who wants to practice do if they are unable to meditate? nembutsu
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Jul 7, 2019 16:35
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Nude Hoxha Cameo posted:Could you elaborate somewhat on this? What do you think of as meditation (the technique and goal) and what is inhibiting it (in either or both respects)? I was thinking of, say, meditation where you "watch" the breath, and other such techniques taught in your standard meditation classes derived from Zen. By inhibiting, and I should have been specific, I mean mental disorders that make the act of following the technique of meditation untenable. The situation that immediately comes to mind are those who suffer from mania. Meditation can trigger mania or make a manic episode much worse. What does the person do in a Zen perspective if they cannot practice this kind of meditation? My only other knowledge of Zen practice is Koan practice, and I don't know if you can divorce meditation from koan training.
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Jul 7, 2019 22:33
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Thirteen Orphans posted:I was thinking of, say, meditation where you "watch" the breath, and other such techniques taught in your standard meditation classes derived from Zen. By inhibiting, and I should have been specific, I mean mental disorders that make the act of following the technique of meditation untenable. The situation that immediately comes to mind are those who suffer from mania. Meditation can trigger mania or make a manic episode much worse. What does the person do in a Zen perspective if they cannot practice this kind of meditation? My only other knowledge of Zen practice is Koan practice, and I don't know if you can divorce meditation from koan training.
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Jul 7, 2019 22:37
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Thanks, Paramemetic! You have the blessed trait of being both informative and insightful. Zen posters, what would someone who wants to practice do if they are unable to meditate? Follow the precepts, practice the eightfold path, and if interested specifically in Zen practice, contact a zen center and explain the situation. You'd probably specifically want to contact a larger one because they're more likely to have experience with people with the conditions for which meditation can be dangerous. Tbh they'll probably suggest an altruistic livelihood, though that's also the general Zen suggestion even for people who can meditate There's a fairly well known Zen anecdote about a surgeon in the early 20th century who tried to join a monastery over and over and they kept turning him away because they told him he'd do more good as a surgeon than as a monk Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jul 8, 2019 |
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Jul 8, 2019 15:17
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Thirteen Orphans posted:I was thinking of, say, meditation where you "watch" the breath, and other such techniques taught in your standard meditation classes derived from Zen. By inhibiting, and I should have been specific, I mean mental disorders that make the act of following the technique of meditation untenable. The situation that immediately comes to mind are those who suffer from mania. Meditation can trigger mania or make a manic episode much worse. What does the person do in a Zen perspective if they cannot practice this kind of meditation? My only other knowledge of Zen practice is Koan practice, and I don't know if you can divorce meditation from koan training. Find and read Fukanzazenji, which will begin to give you a sense of Shikantaza. It isn’t the type of meditation you’re describing. This won’t be complete by itself and you may also want to read Bendowa for more background. Mania may or may not inhibit Shikantaza, and obviously that isn’t a substitute for therapy or medical intervention so those may be needed first. Phone posting now, but I’ll try to come back and add more detail later. And as others have said, the paramitas etc are still essential parts of the path. Not sure whether koan practice would help but can’t get into detail until later. All of this is from a Soto perspective. e: Some additional notes: - There are a variety of Zen traditions and they approach practice differently. There are for example Vietnamese and Korean traditions that are widely practiced, chinese Chan and three primary traditions within Japanese Zen: Soto, Rinzai and Obaku. Within the Japanese schools, the differences are complex and depending on the zendo or lienage may be more formal or nominal than substantive. - Rinzai and Rinzai influenced lineages of Japanese Zen May use a form of breath based meditation, and may tend to promote a kind of absorption in koan practice, and satori / kensho orientation; these are very different from my own experience within Soto, though, again, it is going to vary depending on the lineage / zendo. Fukanzazengi and Bendowa (both available online) will begin to give you a sense of the Soto view and practice. - Soto koan practice has tended, in my experience, to be about meeting the minds of the koan writers and integrating what comes out of Zazen. So difficult perhaps with a rapid stream of thought but not necessarily impossible in and of itself. Shikantaza is not about stopping thought, but if there can be no settling in, the unmediated experience of the present in its fullness that is part of the practice may not be possible. You wouldn’t know for sure unless you tried, though, and what I’ve written absolutely will not give you a sense of what “just sitting” really means. Apart from the two essays I’ve mentioned, Opening the Hand of Thought is often mentioned as a good guide to understanding what it’s all about. And as noted above, talking to a teacher is probably your best bet. - Given the number of schools and the variation between and within them, others may have very different perspectives. Red Dad Redemption fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jul 8, 2019 |
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Jul 8, 2019 15:48
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I might as well link the version of Fukanzazengi that we use in our chants; I think it's a good one and maybe it will be of help. I realized that the lectures I picked up on Bendōwa were from a sesshin using The Wholehearted Way as a resource, so I borrowed that as well and I'm reading through it. I liked reading Okamura's preface, it provided nice insight into both his and Dōgen's situations at time of writing and gives me a little peek into how Okamura discusses things. I'm reading it side by side with my copy of The Heart of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō which is cool, some paragraphs/annotations make more sense in one, some make more sense in the other. Nude Hoxha Cameo (or other Zen folks), have you read Eihei Shingi? Honestly, the more I practice Zen, the more useful it seems to shape my home life after that of monastic life (within what is reasonable). Is Eihei Shingi relevant to lay life, given that it is intended for the monastic community he was building? I noticed that Taigen worked with Okamura to translate it, so we have several copies lying around at the temple. In unrelated news, I'm having a hell of a time with posture lately. After reading about what proper posture is supposed to be in zazen, my obsessive anxious brain has turned to analyzing how I'm sitting while sitting and it's making zazen a frustrating experience. I'll sit, lift the back of my head, and try to make sure my back is straight, and things will be groovy for a few moments, then I'll realize that I am slouching, so I'll raise my back again. But then I'll notice that my body is tense from lifting up, so I'll relax my muscles and abdomen. But, that causes me to crumple a bit again and now I'm slouching. Then, my chin is too far forward, so I'll pull it back in, but then my shoulders are tense and feel sore. All the while, my leg starts to fall asleep. It's maddening. I know it's totally unnecessary to obsess over this stuff and "Zen should not be made into hard work," but I also know that proper posture when sitting is important, ironically, to allow one to sit in a secure and concentrated way and thus be at peace. I'm not sure what to do about it.
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Jul 8, 2019 21:18
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Thanks, guys! Lots of great information.
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Jul 8, 2019 21:23
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re posture: mine is terrible so I generally stay in supine with a pillow behind my head. but I also find it very useful if I'm sitting to do a few minutes of supine (something like shavasana*) with straight back emphasising physical relaxation (could be full body, scanning or whatever floats your boat), then move into sitting keeping the relaxation trying to only tense muscles necessary to sit. ymmv but hopefully at that point if nothing else you will be relaxed enough not to worry about it too much. more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUuKOqmY7NU&t=272s
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Jul 9, 2019 00:04
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Nude Hoxha Cameo posted:Find and read Fukanzazenji, which will begin to give you a sense of Shikantaza. It isn’t the type of meditation you’re describing. This won’t be complete by itself and you may also want to read Bendowa for more background. Mania may or may not inhibit Shikantaza, and obviously that isn’t a substitute for therapy or medical intervention so those may be needed first. Phone posting now, but I’ll try to come back and add more detail later. I was trying to put it in a milder way up above, but: Certain types of bipolar and meditation, be they shikantaza or guided or vipassana, 100% do not mix and are actively dangerous and counterproductive and should not be recommended full stop. What you say otherwise is absolutely good, that first bit is just really important to get out there in a stronger way than your third sentence suggests. Keret posted:Nude Hoxha Cameo (or other Zen folks), have you read Eihei Shingi? Honestly, the more I practice Zen, the more useful it seems to shape my home life after that of monastic life (within what is reasonable). Is Eihei Shingi relevant to lay life, given that it is intended for the monastic community he was building? I noticed that Taigen worked with Okamura to translate it, so we have several copies lying around at the temple. Strictly speaking? I think applying monastic rulesets to 21st century life without tailoring them for personal circumstances is kind of pointless, but at the same time, if bowing with deep reverence to poo poo helps someone live with the right outlook then hey more power to them. It's certainly humbling. I'm not actually being facetious in saying that, but to sound even less facetious: I think that question very much comes down to whether or not you live alone. Trying to live an extremely ascetic life with a partner in all likelihood will torture your partner more than it will help you. If you don't have a partner and you want to experience extremely ascetic life in accordance with monastic rules, is there some way you can live in a practice place? There's more that can be said about this, as ascetic practices can pretty easily stray into the realm of spiritual materialism, but in my experience, if you pick some qualities that you feel it would be beneficial to cultivate and then find some of the rules intended to help you appreciate the depth of those qualities, it'll be hard to go too wrong and you'll likely gain an appreciation of the rules in a gradual way. quote:In unrelated news, I'm having a hell of a time with posture lately. After reading about what proper posture is supposed to be in zazen, my obsessive anxious brain has turned to analyzing how I'm sitting while sitting and it's making zazen a frustrating experience. I'll sit, lift the back of my head, and try to make sure my back is straight, and things will be groovy for a few moments, then I'll realize that I am slouching, so I'll raise my back again. But then I'll notice that my body is tense from lifting up, so I'll relax my muscles and abdomen. But, that causes me to crumple a bit again and now I'm slouching. Then, my chin is too far forward, so I'll pull it back in, but then my shoulders are tense and feel sore. All the while, my leg starts to fall asleep. It's maddening. I know it's totally unnecessary to obsess over this stuff and "Zen should not be made into hard work," but I also know that proper posture when sitting is important, ironically, to allow one to sit in a secure and concentrated way and thus be at peace. I'm not sure what to do about it. Weird response, I know, but how much exercise do you get? IDK if zazen ever exactly becomes comfortable, much less not somewhat uncomfortable (I personally hate the sensation of my legs falling asleep, even after they are numb it still doesn't feel right), but being more fit and having a stronger back and core really makes it vastly less insufferable. Also try stacking more cushions, a lot of people think that they only need an inch or two of elevation under the tailbone when 4-8" would be better depending on hip flexibility and other things. At least wrt the back, zazen as a posture functions when you have a lumbar arch and then the top two thirds of your spinal column essentially resting on top of that strong base. If that's unclear I can draw something or try to find you a diagram, a lot of people hear 'straight back' and misinterpret to mean that the entire spinal column should be forced into some perfectly straight line. It only should be straight if viewed directly from in front or behind Seriously, I can not emphasize enough how much elevating your tailbone so it angles your hips forward and down is vital to getting the posture to lock you in place more effortlessly Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Jul 9, 2019 |
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Jul 9, 2019 03:39
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Seriously, I can not emphasize enough how much elevating your tailbone so it angles your hips forward and down is vital to getting the posture to lock you in place more effortlessly This hip pivot is so critical I feel a need to signal boost it. If you're sitting in the lotus / vajra / meditative posture, whether it's "full" or "half," your knees should be lower than your tailbone. When you've gotten very very flexible like a yogi, you can do this without sitting on a cushion or a rock or whatever, but until that point you should sit on a cushion or a rock or whatever. The point is stability, and if your knees are up in the air at all while your tailbone is down, you're not accomplishing that stability. If your legs are completely flat, you might be accomplishing it, but if you're pinching your sciatic nerve you're going to cause other problems. Tibetans habitually sit straight on the floor and don't use a cushion, and this is bad practice. The meditative posture is not sitting crosslegged, that raised rear end is extremely crucial both on a physiological/structural level as well as on a yogic / "energetic" level and it's the single most common mistake people make.
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Jul 9, 2019 04:25
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I have in the past, but I would more often read them for classes. Now I find myself with the books, but no class or teacher to supplement them. That was meant to be a a joke about non-self, but it ended up being a non-joke  I don't think it's discouraged to read the sutras when the opportunity and interest allow it. And I wonder if you've jumped back into the sutras since last you posted. If you have not encountered someone who can teach you the sutras in person, there are commentaries and discourses on the sutras that are available, too. Speaking just from my experience, some of these freely-available dharma talks have been able to help precipitate a breakthrough in my understanding. I'm also not familiar with a lot of sutras. I'm only well familiar with the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra (to a much smaller extent). Speaking again from personal experience, my own long-held misunderstanding about Buddhism came a lot from not understanding that emptiness is not the same as non-being or nothingness. And I had this misunderstanding from my earliest encounters with Buddhism through pop culture and uninformed conversation. In the prajnaparamita sutras, emptiness is emptiness of a separable self existence. The sutras say that all phenomena are empty of a separate self existence; they do not say that all phenomena have no existence whatsoever. Why is this a critical understanding or misunderstanding? I think it's because I find that Buddhist teachers often have to explain that a right Buddhist practice is not a practice of denying the realities of self, body, suffering, attainment, etc. It's much more about the practice of understanding the inter-relationship between all these things and making this insight helpful in our daily lives. I find it helpful to imagine a cup. It's because the cup is full of empty space that we can put water in it. If the cup were full of nothingness, then we could not put anything in it, because we cannot move something into nothingness. And this is corroborated by what we understand about the Big Bang and the expansion of space. Emptiness is not a non-being. It's much more like the tissue which connects the whole cosmos, where the relationships of all things to all other things exist. Paramemetic posted:Tibetans habitually sit straight on the floor and don't use a cushion, and this is bad practice. The meditative posture is not sitting crosslegged, that raised rear end is extremely crucial both on a physiological/structural level as well as on a yogic / "energetic" level and it's the single most common mistake people make. Roughly 91% of all the questions that I'm too embarrassed to ask about Buddhism involve how to sit. Bless you all for breaking that ice.
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Jul 9, 2019 09:10
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Weird response, I know, but how much exercise do you get? IDK if zazen ever exactly becomes comfortable, much less not somewhat uncomfortable (I personally hate the sensation of my legs falling asleep, even after they are numb it still doesn't feel right), but being more fit and having a stronger back and core really makes it vastly less insufferable. Also try stacking more cushions, a lot of people think that they only need an inch or two of elevation under the tailbone when 4-8" would be better depending on hip flexibility and other things. At least wrt the back, zazen as a posture functions when you have a lumbar arch and then the top two thirds of your spinal column essentially resting on top of that strong base. If that's unclear I can draw something or try to find you a diagram, a lot of people hear 'straight back' and misinterpret to mean that the entire spinal column should be forced into some perfectly straight line. It only should be straight if viewed directly from in front or behind This is great info (as was the following post by Paramemetic), thanks! As for exercise, I don't get nearly enough, really — especially core work. I move quite a bit during the day; I commute by foot/train and walk a lot generally, I move around a lot for work, and take stairs rather than elevator throughout the day. But I don't do any real exercise, and that's all simple cardio. I used to do yoga a lot before I moved here, but I haven't since; it would be a good idea, probably, to start that up again since it focuses on core work so much and both the yogic and Buddhist traditions share postures. If you don't mind drawing what it looks like I would appreciate it; I'm a pretty visual person so I tend to need to see things to understand. Maybe I can find a book or online resource as well to look into. For now, I'll try more cushions. Right now I'm using a single barley zafu, next time I'm in the zendo I'll add a support cushion or two and see how that goes. Is it normal for my legs to go to sleep? It seems like I'm the only person in the zendo with an asleep leg when we stand to do our prostrations and all that, and it's kind of annoying because I really can't stand on it at first. Caufman posted:Roughly 91% of all the questions that I'm too embarrassed to ask about Buddhism involve how to sit. Bless you all for breaking that ice. Seriously, nobody really talks much about it aside from "don't lean back or forward, sit up straight." And it's really hard for me to tell if my back is straight or not when I'm sitting, especially over time during zazen. I guess back in the day, a teacher would point these things out to a monk and correct bad posture as they observed them sitting through the day. I get confused by wording, as well: for a while, I was rotating my hips so my abdomen bent forward and my glutes backward, but then at a sesshin they were talking about rolling our hips forward under us, which sounded like (and I took to mean) the opposite — that my abdomen should move back and my thighs forward. But I guess I was actually doing it right the first time? Another confusing thing is if I should be rigid or not. On the one hand, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about how we should relax all of our muscles and be loose, like leaves hanging from a tree trunk. But, then Dogen and others talk about how we need to raise our spine and head, tuck the chin in, and keep the mudra close to the body. So what do I keep tense, and what do I relax? It seems that when I relax, I slouch, but when I focus on raising the tailbone and head, my whole body is really tense and my shoulders get sore, and I can't settle at all. Herstory Begins Now posted:Strictly speaking? I think applying monastic rulesets to 21st century life without tailoring them for personal circumstances is kind of pointless, but at the same time, if bowing with deep reverence to poo poo helps someone live with the right outlook then hey more power to them. It's certainly humbling. I'm not actually being facetious in saying that, but to sound even less facetious: I think that question very much comes down to whether or not you live alone. Trying to live an extremely ascetic life with a partner in all likelihood will torture your partner more than it will help you. If you don't have a partner and you want to experience extremely ascetic life in accordance with monastic rules, is there some way you can live in a practice place? I overstated things, I think — my mistake! I don't intend to fully live as a monk at home, I just find certain basic aspects of monastic life to be very helpful and wanted to integrate them into daily life. Things like sitting in the morning, doing kinhin, practicing soji (i.e. cleaning my home in the mindful way that we do temple cleaning), maybe integrating some aspects of oryoki and Tenzo-related practices into my kitchen tasks and meals. Stuff like that. I do have a partner, which complicates things a lot of course, but basic things like the above I could do/add on my own without disrupting her, I think. I'm also looking into doing longer stuff at Green Gulch/Tassajara or Upaya someday, but I don't know yet what circumstances will allow. Mostly, I just want to make my home a place of peace and stillness, that will be as helpful for settling and navigating the Way as is possible for me. The ideal for that, it seems to me, is something resembling a monastery. I've discovered over the last several years of practice that I am an incredibly high-strung and tense/anxious person, which was sort of invisible to me before. I've become aware that whenever I am out and about, or doing any active physical task, my body is taut like a piano wire — my hands shake, I hold things tightly, my fists and teeth clench, etc etc. It's like my body is always in fight-or-flight mode. Living in a major city has made all of this more severe, and it's exhausting, so I want to make my home a place of respite in any way I can, so I can hopefully work towards getting my body to chill the gently caress out.
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Jul 9, 2019 21:05
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Keret posted:This is great info (as was the following post by Paramemetic), thanks! As for exercise, I don't get nearly enough, really — especially core work. I move quite a bit during the day; I commute by foot/train and walk a lot generally, I move around a lot for work, and take stairs rather than elevator throughout the day. But I don't do any real exercise, and that's all simple cardio. I used to do yoga a lot before I moved here, but I haven't since; it would be a good idea, probably, to start that up again since it focuses on core work so much and both the yogic and Buddhist traditions share postures. If you don't mind drawing what it looks like I would appreciate it; I'm a pretty visual person so I tend to need to see things to understand. Maybe I can find a book or online resource as well to look into. I’ll draw something up for you later, this comes up every couple years and I can never find a good diagram for what I’m talking about because the back is never clearly depicted. Yeah it’s completely normal to have your legs fall asleep, over time it becomes a bit less severe, but also when you get the mechanics of posture and cushion down, your circulation will be a bit better so it might be a bit less extreme. Generally, the more your weight is on your tailbone/hip blades, the less the blood flow to your legs will be restricted. Sitting on 2 or 3 zafus is not uncommon, some people need a lot of elevation. quote:Seriously, nobody really talks much about it aside from "don't lean back or forward, sit up straight." And it's really hard for me to tell if my back is straight or not when I'm sitting, especially over time during zazen. I guess back in the day, a teacher would point these things out to a monk and correct bad posture as they observed them sitting through the day. As an extremely important aside here: I don’t consider my time around Zen practice to have been enough to give me the position to make authoritative statements about Zen generally, but there is one thing I can say authoritatively: Asking lots of questions is absolutely the heart and soul of practicing Zen. Always try to have some relevant questions, it doesn’t really matter if they’re basic beginner questions or advanced, relatively obscure questions just ask away and cultivate curiosity. Besides, if you’re wondering something, then it probably wasn’t clearly communicated and someone else is likely wondering it, too. Most people you’ll ask questions of do enjoy talking about Zen, but it’s considered kind of poor form to go on rambling un-solicited expositions of zen minutiae or even worse evangelizing. For all the Zen legacy of masters giving eachother cryptic answers in encounters, any Zen teacher should be able to give you clear, concrete responses to questions. Like that’s a very core part of skillful communication, to the extent that a teacher not giving understandable, basic guidance would be a huge red flag. quote:I get confused by wording, as well: for a while, I was rotating my hips so my abdomen bent forward and my glutes backward, but then at a sesshin they were talking about rolling our hips forward under us, which sounded like (and I took to mean) the opposite — that my abdomen should move back and my thighs forward. But I guess I was actually doing it right the first time? Yeah I believe you took the instruction backwards, your stomach will end up a little forward and the natural/neutral curve of your lower back is preserved. With a lot of these sitting questions, I suggest experimenting with different things, one of the interesting aspects of sitting for a set period of time is it makes postural variations extremely apparent in their difference. As a posture zazen is somewhat internally supported: your knees and butt form a stable, interlocking triangle that becomes sturdier the deeper you relax into it, then your spinal column and upper body just kind of sits naturally on top of it. Experiment a bit with leaning forward or back a bit until you find a position that feels balanced that also does not restrict your ability to breathe fully. You want to be sitting upright, but it also isn’t a competition to be the most upright sitter either. At least in a zazen context, your hands should be touching very gently. It’s contradictory, but hold the posture in a gentle but firm way, doing things gently and with a light touch is good practice for most people. This has a good description https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/posture-zazen quote:I overstated things, I think — my mistake! I don't intend to fully live as a monk at home, I just find certain basic aspects of monastic life to be very helpful and wanted to integrate them into daily life. Things like sitting in the morning, doing kinhin, practicing soji (i.e. cleaning my home in the mindful way that we do temple cleaning), maybe integrating some aspects of oryoki and Tenzo-related practices into my kitchen tasks and meals. Stuff like that. I do have a partner, which complicates things a lot of course, but basic things like the above I could do/add on my own without disrupting her, I think. I'm also looking into doing longer stuff at Green Gulch/Tassajara or Upaya someday, but I don't know yet what circumstances will allow. IMO there’s definitely nothing wrong with settings things up at home in such a way assuming you make sure it isn’t going to be a hardship for your partner. It’s also fine if you just want a peaceful, serene place just as a matter of personal preference. Hell, it’s probably better that it be a preference than something you force. Personally I like to live quite simply and only care about a couple of luxuries because I grew up poor and spent a bunch of time in places with zero luxuries so it’s just what I’m used to and it accords with my values. Probably start small, maybe put out some bowls of water, make a small shrine, be mindful of your eating etc. Not every practice is for everyone, though. It’s hard to go wrong with trying to make your home a place where you can relax and let go of some stress, but avoid forcing anything on your wife. Personally I tend to agree with the line of thought that practice should be largely inconspicuous and something that most people would not notice unless they knew where and when to look. If you want all the bells and whistles of fully practicing in a monastic setting, Green Gulch or Tassajara would both be very good places. The Suzuki Roshi lineage has done, from my conversations with them, a respectable job of incorporating a lot of lessons that they learned and instituted a lot of better oversight in response to their early scandals to make sure that poo poo doesn’t happen again. Plus my cousin went through his priest training at Tassajara and he didn’t turn out all bad so they must still be doing something right Hopefully other Zen folks can correct anything I put poorly or butchered the description of To reiterate also: ask lots of questions. Find a good teacher and pepper them with questions, good questions are gifts to a teacher.
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Jul 9, 2019 22:41
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Can you elaborate on the interaction of bipolar and meditation?
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Jul 9, 2019 22:44
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Keret posted:Seriously, nobody really talks much about it aside from "don't lean back or forward, sit up straight." And it's really hard for me to tell if my back is straight or not when I'm sitting, especially over time during zazen. I guess back in the day, a teacher would point these things out to a monk and correct bad posture as they observed them sitting through the day. I get confused by wording, as well: for a while, I was rotating my hips so my abdomen bent forward and my glutes backward, but then at a sesshin they were talking about rolling our hips forward under us, which sounded like (and I took to mean) the opposite — that my abdomen should move back and my thighs forward. But I guess I was actually doing it right the first time? It's 2019 and Marianne Williamson is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, so I'm gonna :justorb: and run with this: The basic meditative posture, what we call in Tibetan Buddhism the "sevenfold posture of Vairocana" but which is more commonly known as the "vajra posture" or "lotus posture," is as follows: legs crossed hands resting at navel back "straight" shoulders back "like a vulture" head forward slightly tongue touching roof of mouth just behind the upper teeth eyes resting on an object about 3 feet in front So, the exoteric and esoteric reasons for these: Legs crossed with knees down provides a stable platform. The crossed legs block the descending winds to help bring them into the central channel. Hands folded at the navel directs the energies of the ascending winds that travel through the hands back to the "secret place" which in most of the tantras is a combination of the functions of the "root chakra" and "sacral chakra," being the base of the central channels. Also, it's something to do with them because otherwise they're just hangin' out. Back straight orients the energy channels. When your back isn't straight, the channels are angled, which speeds up the flow of energy within. Faster energy and more active channels leads to more distraction, agitation, and discursive thought. When the back is straight, the energy flows slower, reducing those things. So, importantly, this is not talking about the spine, but the channels. The spine can't be straight when you're sitting neutrally. Instead, imagine a line between the ear-holes and another line straight back from the nose. The intersection of these lines is the "brahma aperture." From that point, imagine a straight line down to the tip of your tailbone (where 1/3rd of the weight should be if you're sitting correctly, with the other 2/3rds distributed between your knees). This is your central channel. It should be perpendicular to the ground. The practical test for if your "back is straight" sufficient to answer the question of "is my back straight enough" is "imagine you suddenly had no muscle tension at all, what direction would you fall?" The answer should be "straight down in a slouch." If it's anything else, you're leaning, don't do that. If you're doing part 1 correctly, and your rear end is elevated sufficiently, this posture should happen automatically. Shoulders are back to allow full breath. They don't need to be jammed back, but they should be back and out of the way. You don't want your shoulders slouching forward into your lap, basically. This is necessary for breathing, there's probably some energetic reason too idk Tongue touches the roof of the mouth to create a channel and to block certain channels for purification and so on. Head is slightly forward to allow for the alignment discussed. If your head is up, your channel won't be straight, it'll be all crooked. If your head is down, same thing. You need your head to be resting neutrally. We say "slightly forward" because that's the best way to get someone to put their head in a neutral position, is to have them push it forward slightly. Don't look up or down basically, because you need that channel straight. Eyes rest on the ground in front of you because you want to limit the field of phenomena arising during the meditation to reduce agitation and distraction. You're trying to focus all your energies into your central channel, esoterically speaking, so having your eyes wide open and looking forward a mile is gonna introduce a lot of stimulation you don't need. Half open, half shut, focused no further than 2-3 feet away. Okay so that's the long form on the "reasons we sit like we sit." You can compromise on as many or as few as you want to basically. Most common is instead of blocking the descending winds people will sit in a chair and ground both their feet on the floor firmly. That's fine so long as they get the other points right. The chair is also often an impediment because a lot of people don't sit in chairs right - they rotate the hips rather than keeping the hips in line with the back, which throws the tailbone off into a weird rotation and in theory is gonna gently caress up your energy channels but, worse, is just gonna basically cause you low back problems. Taking a brief detour into the Yiggy zone and out of my lane to talk about what I've heard about history; one reason I've heard that people believe tantric Buddhism is "more original" is that Buddha didn't teach everything he learned in the sutras. He was a traditionally trained meditator before he attained enlightenment. My understanding is that during his era, this would've meant specific guru-disciple relationships within a tantric format following various shastras and sadhanas. The basic ideas of tantra were ubiquitous and Buddha would have learned them. They're absent in the sutras, but undoubtedly Buddha would have taught those meditative methods to his students as well. The Tibetan Buddhist tantras just marry tantras into Buddhism (and then gently caress it all up with weird monasticism rather than direct yogic practice), so the meditation instruction through tantra (with the benefits of prostration, purification, merit accumulation, deity yoga, and so on) is important. Zen goes about it a different way. All the Buddhisms get there, but all this woo is important for Tibetan practice. Bellum posted:Can you elaborate on the interaction of bipolar and meditation? Meditation induces altered states of consciousness. ASCs can catalyze mania. If people with bipolar disorder meditate it is not unheard of to trigger manic states. This does not apply to bipolar disorder that is properly controlled, but because of the difficulty of controlling bipolar disorder properly, you have to be extremely cautious. Additionally, a lot of the ASCs that can arise during meditation practice can be pretty intense and if someone has a history of psychosis or delusion in mania, it could cause problems. Additionally, when you're learning to meditate you are wrestling with your own thoughts. You're taming the mind, but that means you're exposing yourself to a lot. Thoughts will arise that you definitely didn't think you had in you, because the ego doesn't want to be tamed. Even "healthy" people can be unsettled by experiences encountered in meditation. For people with mental disease or disorders, including bipolar disorder, it's not uncommon to encounter things that are extremely unpleasant. Intrusive thoughts in the form of suicidal ideation or depressive thoughts are very common. Again, if the person is stable and treated, this is less a problem, but it has to be observed very carefully. Paramemetic fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jul 9, 2019 |
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Jul 9, 2019 23:36
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Bellum posted:Can you elaborate on the interaction of bipolar and meditation? I’ll let posters with education in the field talk about the mechanics, but I can describe my situation. I have Bipolar 1 Mixed. I have very few instances of mania but before a recent treatment change had plenty of hypomania. Trying to meditate when you have hypo/mania wrecks your system and cognition, for want of a better word. It intensifies every symptom you are experiencing: inability to concentrate, racing thoughts, other people have different symptoms. Sometimes trying to meditate can trigger an episode too, though for me I’ve gotten better at knowing when I’m safe to practice. To give an example, it’s been very difficult to maintain a practice in the classical sense of the Jesus Prayer, which does affect one the same as forms of Buddhist meditation would, but fortunately one can practice it without utilizing the breath, so to speak, so it worked out for me in my spiritual journey. I have no idea why my brain loses it when I try to meditate, I just know that there are times I can and times I probably shouldn’t try to “meditate.” I can answer specific questions, too, post or PM me. ^Paramemetic, as always, gives a much better post than I could. Hopefully mine is informative from a different perspective. Thirteen Orphans fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jul 10, 2019 |
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Jul 9, 2019 23:46
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The diagrams here are consistent with the instructions I’ve received at Soto zendos: https://www.rzc.org/get-started-zen/how-to-sit/ There is a lot to say about everything else. Busy now but I’ll add more later. In the meantime, thanks so much to Herstory for the clarification / amplification. Therapeutic interventions and needs absolutely come before everything else. * * * * This won’t add much to an already great discussion, but a few more thoughts: - Soto-shu zazen instructions: https://global.sotozen-net.or.jp/eng/practice/zazen/howto/index.html - With the caveat that I have no personal monastic experience, I’ve found the Soto teachers I’ve worked with to be very practical and concrete in their orientation. My first one memorably compared zazen to making GBS threads, for example. So I don’t think you need to feel that a more austere practice or lifestyle would contribute more to your experience of Zen. And as others have suggested, while it’s obviously fine to have a meditation room if you really have space for that, and to want to create a serene space, there are potential pitfalls to thinking about things in this way. It’s a huge temptation for many of us, and perfectly understandable for the reasons you mention, but it can tend to lead, in an imperceptible sort of way, toward escapism, unfair burdens in relationships and an ineffective practice. Really, to the extent there can be said to be a goal, you want to find peace in full engagement with and in life rather than to attempt to find a space of repose apart from it. I’ve seen all of this and more happen to people with the best intentions, and though this may be far from your intent or situation, care is warranted. A video showing Brad Warner’s home zazen space, fwiw: https://youtu.be/e9RzOFY9cuc - I haven’t read the Eihei Shingi but that volume (or at least the Okumura / Leighton translation) includes the Tenzo Kyokun, which you absolutely should read in the form of the book How to Cook Your Life, with commentary by Uchiyama. That will help to flesh out the point above I think, and is a classic. (I’ve recommended it a few times upthread, apologies if this is redundant.) - Taigen Dan Leighton also worked with Okumura to translate the Eihei Koroku. If there are copies of that available at ADZG I’d grab one, though maybe sandwich the key Mahayana sutras between Shobogenzo and that volume. - I’d draw a distinction between garden variety Q&A and turning words. Trying to convey the ineffable strikes me as an extremely difficult endeavor, and I personally wouldn’t fault someone for having a greater facility with the former than the latter, though maybe it’s fair to say that the best teachers are strong in both areas. - I’ve had on and off problems with feet falling asleep. What I found helped were two things: elevating the knee of the foot falling asleep, which resulted in an unstable posture, and sitting on the forward edge of the zafu, which made for a firm foundation. Elevation and sitting full in the middle of the zafu didn’t work in my case. I use half lotus. Full lotus is an excellent meditation posture if you can manage it, but even after many years, I don’t find it comfortable for long sits. Obviously your experience may be very different, so experiment and find out what works for you. Red Dad Redemption fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Jul 11, 2019 |
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Jul 10, 2019 00:38
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Thank you all very much for the detailed responses regarding posture, they've been extremely helpful. I used a support cushion underneath the barley zafu yesterday morning at our AM zazen and tried out the recommendations, and the pose felt a lot more secure. One thing I'm still unsure about though is the interplay between being rigid and being relaxed when sitting. When I raise my tailbone and head to sit up as straight as I can, my body becomes rigid, but when I then relax my shoulders and my abdomen so I can breathe from my lower belly, I inevitably slouch a bit and my head lowers again. Since we are supposed to be sitting up straight to be aware, the first seems to be the right thing to do, but since we are supposed to be relaxed in order to settle, the second seems correct. But it can't be both at once, it seems like? I know I need to just chill the gently caress out about it, but my mind is habituated towards obsessing over minutiae like this. Regarding the home life, I appreciate your responses, Herstory and Nude. They reminded me of the dangers of running after things, and help keep me grounded. Living simply and deliberately really appeals to me for a variety of reasons. Because I move around the world in a state of anxious restlessness most of the time and am often overwhelmed by so much sensory and mental chatter, the spaciousness of simplicity is a huge relief. But even more than that, lately, I've been grappling with what I see as very entrenched habits of selfishness and greed in me, which I obviously see as very unskillful and counterproductive to real freedom. The anxious state I am often in is like running with blinders on the sides of my head — I obsess over my personal plans, habitually act in self-serving ways, and give rise to long, meandering chains of thought, all of which completely block out the external world. It's impossible to be happy and liberated this way. So, I guess I'm hoping that by stripping away from my home distractions and other things which trigger this race into blind anxiousness, I can work at rewiring my mind to not be caught so easily in these endless, terrifying and exhausting mazes, which I hope will allow me to exist in a more spacious, calm, and compassionate state of being. However, your posts remind me of the dangers and drawbacks to focusing on creating more "perfect" conditions in samsara. I don't want to retreat from the world and give rise to aversion, or attachment to particular states — that's just reifying the self in a different way. I guess I will have to find a Middle Way, as it were. The recommendation of How to Cook Your Life is especially helpful at the moment — thanks for that, Nude Hoxha Cameo. I have rediscovered a deep passion for cooking lately, and it gives rise to conflicting feelings. On the one side, in cooking I can really commune with the food that I eat and have more respect for the process and the food on my plate, but on the other side, I notice the pull of greed and ego in shopping around for various new ingredients and replacing/acquiring new equipment. As I said, I feel confident in the importance of living quite simply, but am all the same caught by a mutually exclusive drive to stock my kitchen with various things, not all of which are really helpful. In any case, that book seems like it would be of a lot of help to me, I'll seek it out.
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Jul 12, 2019 02:25
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Keret posted:The recommendation of How to Cook Your Life is especially helpful at the moment It’s a quick read; be sure to review all the footnotes and especially the commentary by Uchiyama.
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Jul 13, 2019 03:04
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Thirteen Orphans posted:From a Buddhist perspective how does a person with a mental illness come to experience the true nature of mind? I’m assuming we can KNOW the true nature of mind in an academic/philosophical way, but how do we trust in the experience when we have an illness that directly interferes with the mind and clouds experience and perspective. For example, from my Catholic perspective, how does someone with a disorder that can manifest as hallucinations know that their experience of extraordinary grace (visions, locutions, etc.) are valid? In essence: from a Buddhist standpoint, when can we trust that our experience is valid and/or true despite our illness? Hello, I'm a person with some heavy duty mental illness issues that is also a Buddhist. I can probably shed some light on this one. For me there's a lot of "this feeling is my brain being stupid." It also helps to know why my brain is being stupid. I've been reading heavily about mental illness, seeing a therapist off and on, and just in general learning to sort my thoughts from things that are a valid reaction to something from my brain being a dummy. A lot of mental illness comes from actual, physical mechanical and/or chemical things going on in the brain. Other parts of it come down to maladaptive learning. I had a horrible childhood which led to learning a lot of destructive defense mechanisms. This comes down to the right view stuff; it's extremely important to see things as they are. I have issues; why do I have issues? Where do they come from and how do they affect my behavior? There are a lot of things, at least in my case, that come down to stupid lizard brain stuff. Your lizard brain is great at surviving but is loving stupid at basically everything else. This is why there is also that focus on right action. You can't help but feel anger but what you can do is refuse to act on it. My condition led to an unpredictable temper that could end up on a hairline trigger. Buddhism was a massive help in getting that under control because instead of acting impulsively on raw emotion I learned to step back and say "is that the right thing to do here? You're angry but why are you angry? Is acting out of anger truly the best option here?" The mind is a very complex thing that can't be entirely divorced from the hardware that it lives in. Understanding the hardware helped understanding such things massively. Same with how the conditions develop and what the end results are. Hallucination generally has some kind of actual mechanical cause. I've never dealt with that but I've read about things like a schizophrenic who had auditory hallucinations getting a dog and watching the dog when he heard something. If the dog didn't react to the noise he was hearing at all then it was highly likely a hallucination. That's another "your brain is being dumb" case. His hardware makes him hear stuff that isn't there. That's the truth of the situation; his brain doesn't function quite right. He can't control it obviously but he can do something like the dog thing so he can sort out what's a real noise and what isn't. Right view is "the reality of the situation is that I have this condition and it causes *thing.*" Once you understand that then you can respond to the thing that it causes. The true nature of the mind is that physical hardware affects how it behaves. This is why there can be an importance placed on a certain level of detachment being possible; instead of immediately acting when you feel a certain way you ask why you're feeling that way. In the case of mental illness that's often just a case of faulty hardware being faulty. Then you learn to work around it. Thirteen Orphans posted:Thanks, Paramemetic! You have the blessed trait of being both informative and insightful. Zen posters, what would someone who wants to practice do if they are unable to meditate? Nobody is entirely unable to meditate. That being said Zen heavily focuses on experience being a good teacher. This is why things like Zen calligraphy exist or why Zen practitioners will study something like Kyudo. You're supposed to focus on emptying yourself, discarding your preconceptions, and focus exclusively on getting better at that thing. Programmers who talk about achieving the elusive state of "flow" are achieving that mental state. It's actually a very meditative mental state in that you've basically lost yourself entirely in what you're doing. There comes a certain point where you can kill your ego entirely and focus on the task at hand. This is the "empty self" that gets talked about. The thing you're doing and the mechanical skill you are learning both don't give a poo poo about you or what you believed coming in to things. The goal is not mastery of the skill; the goal is to see the skill and whatever the results are with total purity. The goal is to learn to give yourself entirely to what you're doing in that moment. If you can do that with one action then you can do it with any action. I'm largely a non-denominational, primarily solitary Buddhist with some Zen leanings, for what that's worth.
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Jul 14, 2019 10:06
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