Delays...

  Tough typing news. Turns out I have a severed tendon in my left hand. Typing is tough with the splint, and it will be a little bit before I am able to figure out the way around the keyboard. But I will be posting next week, Monday and Thursday, to start the new school year.

Just in time for the school year, a journalist from the Doylestown, Pa, paper will be interviewing us this afternoon. When I left for vacation two weeks ago, the garden was weak and dry. Apparently it rained, and now the weeds are towering, flourishing. 

  Well, not anymore. But there went the morning.

The Outer Banks treated me well. I will begin posting for the new school year tomorrow.

 Finally some rain. It has, as local readers know, been unusually hot and dry. Oddly, the streams aren't all that low, perhaps a consequence of last year being so wet. The cornfields behind my neighborhood were flowing with two feet of water at one point. Walking through thigh deep running water amidst seven foot cornstalks was a little eerie. Felt a bit like 'Nam. Except for the corn being much taller than rice and no one hiding out trying to kill me and my home being 1500 yards away.

  Over the weekend I spent a bit more time reading news and trolling the internet than I often do. There can be so much to take in... at first it is enjoyable, then revs up into info-greed, and soon the swirl of emotions (provoked by politics, advertising, and general weirdness) mutates into compulsion. For me, it is a tense and de-centered feeling, which once I become aware of it, becomes a physical restlessness. It become more difficult for me to concentrate as a result.

   So I pull back. Of course, at this moment I am blogging, but it is number 7 on the list of things to get down this morning bracketed by photographing parts of the garden and a trip to the post office and guitar store (my favorite makers and repairers: those two angels at The Guitar Parlor). My internet misadventures did turn up a few items I would like to share: the truly awesome, but non-consequential fact that space indeed has a smell, and a sharp little taste of a new edition of William James' work on religious experience (e.g. James "constantly worried that we’re being encouraged by a certain type of scientific analysis to put our faith in abstracted explanations, often at the expense of our own experiences — the only things that we can truly know anyway. In the Varieties James is examining the emotional fundamentals not only of religious belief, but of all belief.")

   Per James, it isn't just scientific analysis that leads us to "put faith in abstracted explanations". This has always been a problem within religious practice. It is so easy, for people of particular temperaments, to simply enjoy and take comfort in the formal practices, the robes, the incense, the schedule, the liturgies, and so on. It is equally easy to completely reject these as superficial and distracting. And it is not a matter of simply splitting the difference. It is the essential task of living my own life and responding to what is around me genuinely and with deep engagement. Ritual and the rejection of ritual can be equally abstracted from direct experience.

   For some, ritual can be a dynamic mix of challenge (hearing what you don't want to hear, sitting zazen for an hour, etc) and comfort (co-religionists, inspiring words, sights, and sounds, escape from daily pressures). Taken together, it can be pretty strong stuff. If we pick and choose, however, we run the risk of merely creating a rather monochromatic expression of ourselves to gaze at, rather than the direct experience of the inner and outer life.

  Picking and choosing is what we do naturally, isn't it? For the most part we move away from discomfort and toward pleasure or relief. And as we deepen our sense of self, we radically broaden what we experience as pleasure, folding into this many experiences that our younger selves might have really run away from. In Zen practice, sitting might be one of these. Or training martial arts. But for some of us, being radically open and connected to others is the great challenge, the one most riven with doubt.

   The primary delusion is that we are fundamentally separate from others. I would like to discuss this further a little later...

  As a Buddhist practitioner and a therapist (for lack of a better term), the word "attachment" is packed with irony. Attachment, in the Buddhist sense, is clinging to thoughts, feelings, people, objects, anything that for the moment we invest with a sense of permanence. Suffering arises because nothing is permanent, so we experience loss when we come to depend on something always being a certain way. Non-attachment frees us from how we want the world to be, and allows us to be in the world that actually is.
  In psychology, or at least how I approach it, 'attachment' is the basis for emotional and relational health. The safety and reliability of our earliest caregivers become the foundation for later development. Our inner world of expectations and trust shape subsequent relations with the self, others, and the world.
   One could state that non-attachment in the Buddhist sense is not possible without attachment being achieved in the psychological sense. We need a profound and preverbal confidence in ourselves and the world (and our teacher, I might add) to make that vast leap of letting go.
    The really painful and disorienting miles on the spiritual path can also be seen as a letting go of the failed relationships that betrayed us, and turning our focus to whole of reality, including our experience, and allowing that to be the basis of our (psychological) attachment. From that newfound confidence, we can let go, knowing that letting go is not an abandonment but an acceptance. As Dogen put it, "to carry yourself forward and illuminate the myriad things... is delusion...that the myriad things come forth and illuminate themselves is awakening..." (see this for a helpful discussion of this aspect of Dogen's thought).
  
   The unexpected is the great teacher. When we seek to tighten control over much of our lives, the effort casts a shadow. That shadow is our inability to accept, or even see (!), what we don't expect. The pile of un-lived, unacknowledged life piles up in our darkness, and one day, topples over us.
   In this respect, we deny certain parts of reality because we can't deal with it, because we haven't the confidence (based on prior experience) that we can accept it without being overwhelmed. So it piles up and up, until it can't be denied any longer. But that can go on a long time.
 
 

Blue Mountain Zendo

    Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting the Blue Mountain Zendo. It is a tiny place, tucked in a quirky little village on the edge of Allentown, PA, astride the 6oo acre Lehigh University forest preserve. Instead of going through west part of town to get there I drove the two or three miles on the edge of the preserve along the Lehigh River and the freight rail. The big river appeared in flashes through the dense trees, and after a while, the asphalt gives way to gravel and the road drops down to the railroad bed. Then the road rises again for awhile, all wooded, until I popped out into an uphill, winding street dense with older, narrow houses. The zendo is the best kept house on the block.
    Joriki Dat Baker greeted me, and we sat down for tea. One of his most senior students joined us, and we shared our stories: mine of the school and my practice, his of the zendo and his practice. Joriki is a perceptive, inviting man, easy to laugh and wears his deep study lightly. None of that "stink of Zen" here.
   They used to be in Bethlehem; I had gone to a few meditation sessions there. But this modest little place had the feel of community rooted in Zen practice... it felt right.

   Over the next few weeks I hope we can a establish a bond between TAS and Blue Mountain. They offer sesshin, weekly services, a small residential training, and face to face teaching. Any of you, dear readers, who wish to know more can contact me or drop in at their website.

Mind Training

  We train our mind constantly. Actually, we train our brain, in that the brain continually adapts to the environment it seeks to influence. This loop is permanent; there is no getting out of it. Good friends, good nutrition, awareness of our own intent, speaking kindly, all these can be represented as some point on the great circuit that loops out of our deepest being, through our world, and back again. To varying degrees any point on this loop can be altered, affecting the whole system over time.
   Generally speaking, when we decide to "consciously" change something, this is a function of the pre-frontal cortex, that tip of the iceberg that seems (to the self) to be whole of one's being. This is an illusion. For instance, we generally aren't all that aware of our body language, but body language effects how others experience us and react to us, phenomena which loops back into our inner world, creating a vibrant mix of conflict and harmony.
    Often our body language expresses our mixed feelings and outright conflict: imagine being polite to someone who has hurt you deeply. You are in conflict. They may or may not be aware of even hurting you, but may be reacting- even unawares- to the signals you broadcast via body language. These splits, so often within both parties in a conflict, have huge consequences.
     It is not unusual for there to be no clue to the existence of the conflict within ourselves. We must learn to look outward, to external indicators: how those we trust react, how those we don't trust react, and so on.
     There are other ways as well. For instance, in Shim Gum Do, the martial art I study, there are hundreds of forms. Each form is a beautifully composed sequence of sword techniques involving all parts of the body, that extend or work variations on previous techniques and anticipate later ones. It requires a lot of concentration to execute them competently. Eventually, as the cognitive and physical demands increase, the art requires long daily practice, as well as meditation and other modes of study to support it. But if I notice the quality of my experience while training- my focus, intensity, energy, pre-occupations, pain- this can point to something like a core experience that I can continually cultivate.
   I was in class with my teacher in Boston last week. It was the third evening in a row of hard training, and I spent the broiling hot day working in the gardens around the temple. The class was all fellow black belts, and requires endurance and total focus. "Peter! Mind train when you do it!", he shouts in his heavy Korean accent.
  What he meant was completely clear to me, but something else presented itself as well: if I am not totally focused, then I am practicing "not being totally focused". If while leaping through a form,  I am considering how vulnerable the injured tendon in my ankle will be upon landing, I have a split consciousness.
   At that moment, I am reinforcing the pattern of a split consciousness and will thereby maintain it under certain conditions. When those conditions arise, my consciousness will split.
   When I sit meditation, I generally begin by imagining and sensing myself executing the sword forms. What my teacher was insisting on- in response to my not being totally focused- was that I keep the meditation of the form I was practicing just a touch ahead of its physical execution.
    When carrying groceries, meditate on the act of carrying the grocery bags. When pumping gas, meditate on the act of pumping gas. So many of us can create that sort of non-split awareness only in times of high intensity, and often with a loss of other types of awareness along the way.
   Every moment is the practice of wholeness or fragmentation. Choose.

 Work practice. A key aspect to Zen training. But outside of a Zen context, what could it mean? Do young people need practice working? Well, sure. Especially with unemployment being so high among the young, figuring out the way in which strong effort relates to both one's own and others' well being and must be a good thing. There is some evidence that young people who work while in school, at the high school and undergraduate level, are at something of a disadvantage grade wise, but perhaps something equally valuable is gained.

  I am continually surprised at how little so many of our students have done over the course of their lives... no chores, no jobs... this can really create a strange mix of entitlement and disenfranchisement. Now that, friends, is a disadvantage.

  So when a TAS student learns how to clean a bathroom, a whole lot more than a fundamental part of a sanitary lifestyle is gained. One has to figure out why it is important, why we put such emphasis on it, why other students seem to enjoy working, and sometimes, one gets a sharply formed sense of conflict, between the complacent self and the self that wants to be part of things.

  "No work, no food". A fifteen hundred years ago, a cot and a couple of meals were ample compensation for a young man who merely had to fake meditating innumerable hours a day. The central government was collapsing and warlordism was rising. There was famine, bandits, and firm grip of poverty. How could a weary abbot ensure that his or her monks and nuns were on the path? 

  Work. Work shows what a person is made of. True, the Taoist ideal of wandering the world accepting only what comes and reaching for nothing else- very much like St. Francis- is quite different than working the monastic garden and charcoaling in the monastic woods. Yet it is its own sort of intense commitment, and we modern Americans, a little sloppy, confused, and resentful, need a chance to show others what we are made of. Ultimately, the purpose of work practice is just to work. But kids and beginners often need reasons beyond simply getting behind the toilet as clean as a fresh napkin. 

  There is a powerful connection to martial arts here as well: in a period of chaos and worry, a mountain redoubt crammed with easy going, yet deadly monks gives a little band of bandits pause. Zen has within it a powerful theme of self-reliance- so American, so Ralph Waldo Emerson- and an equally compelling theme of grace, in the sense that the world, if you are open to it, will provide all and only what you need. More than this is distraction and delusion.

   

Since Nikos Kazantzakis' sequel to the Odyssey is not available on kindle, and it is a huge book, I can't lug it with me. So it will be an Italian reader (my reading ability is in serious disrepair!), an italian dictionary, a monograph on Cecco Angiolieri (a sonnet writer who goaded and annoyed Dante), and whatever is on the kindle. One of the problems with martial arts is the outfit is so bulky...were it not for that, Kazantzakis would be all I would need.

Training and Meditation

 Last week, my sword practice was strong and focused, but the last few days have seen an interesting decline in my concentration. Is it important to understand the factors that contribute to shakier meditation? In some respects, certainly it is. For each of us there probably are optimum conditions for any activity, yet as most of know, there are inexplicable ups and downs that must be ridden out, accepted with generosity and used for deeper insight.
   Fortunately, I am headed up to Boston for evening classes at the Shim Gum Do temple this week. A teacher is important: he or she has vastly more experience in those ups and downs, and in the teaching itself. I feel enormously lucky to have such a masterful teacher in Chang Sik Kim, and want to spend as much time as I can in the presence of his teaching. My own teaching is grounded in my experience as a student, without it, my own students suffer.
   It is hard to believe that the school year ended only a week or so ago, it seems so irrevocably far away. It was a year where so many important elements seemed to come together, whether it be graduates who have spent 3 or 4 years at TAS and thus were essential in bringing the culture and folkways of the school to a new peak, or the steady commitment to the structure of the school day, or Stephanie's work in bringing the teacher evaluation and support system into being, or my finishing grad school...it was a big year.
   I will try to post from Boston on Thursday, but I tend to stay away from computers while up there. If I don't post, I will do so on Monday the 2nd.
   

    Today is the anniversary of our getting married in Kaifeng, China, after a number of months trekking around. A few months later, John and I were getting his property ready for his new life and as the site of the school. So in many respects, the solstice represents for me the apex of my distance from Boston, music, and counseling, and a turning back towards the states, and a new family, a giant new project, and my formal practice of Buddhism.
    Yesterday, before heading out with my son and a dear friend of ours to Rockaway Beach and Coney Island,  I met with a dharma cousin in the West Village, Lawrence Grecco. I hope he enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed his... we hadn't met but I had taken an interest in his public struggle with  some of the more regressive and anti-gay ordination policies in the Korean Sangha and he seemed like an appealing person to meet. It is important that TAS starts to reach out to the larger Buddhist community and that we start to gather perspectives on zen education from other practitioners.

   We had a wide ranging conversation about our individual paths, about teaching, and about creating and maintaining a community. If you wish to check out some of Lawrence's work, here is his blog, http://openskyzen.blogspot.com/.

   I will be writing more tomorrow, Thursday being a blog day, and will hopefully be able to post an excerpt from the talk I gave at graduation.

I've taken a few days off to unwind from the school year. Back on Thursday for posting. See you then.

  Today is the last day of school, and it is pouring rain. The BBQ plans are altered. Several students are using the morning to finish last bits of work, and the mood is peaceful, a little subdued.
  We had an overnight last night, 10 students stayed: movies, hula hooping, eating, playing music. There were a few students who were able to put aside their mutual conflicts and fling themselves into the evening. That's community for you.
   But I am tired. A fun evening, and a quiet end to the long and satisfying school year.

 Sometimes the subject of teaching is really boring to me. There is a jargon that comes with education, but that comes with any field. Certainly psychology has plenty of it. Words and phrases like "scaffolding" or "ready to learn" seem like they mean something, and they kind of do mean something. It just isn't the sort of something that I am interested in. It is the technocratic language that creates distance between the supposed professional and the client or student or patient. 

  In contrast, any person who has had a good teacher will use words like "warm", "enthusiastic",  

"knowledgeable", and so on. It seems that a good teacher knows the subject well and has it close to the heart. The good teacher is also good at relationships.

   Most students, however, rarely experience the one on one intensity that comes with Zen teaching. That intimacy- and it is a form of intimacy- is still alive in the arts. Music teachers, dance teachers, painting teachers all routinely cultivate this. But why have we lost this in the liberal arts? There are some elite-ish private schools that have this quality, and of course in any school there are gifted students who are cared for like hothouse flowers. But what a shame, what a loss for so many. 

   The technocratic language obscures an awareness of the relationship, and instead focuses on methods of knowledge delivery, rather like a better hypodermic or trans-dermal patch. It also prevents an acknowledgement of how much the student brings to the relationship: her experiences, her perspectives, her abilities. What I find so compelling about Zen practice is its absolute insistence that everything important and essential is already known by the student. Obviously, my students may not know a given martial arts move or be able to follow a snaking and omnivorous Miltonic Simile. 

   I believe, however, that a dynamic teacher creates an experience in the classroom- a performance, an experiment, a conversation- that the student than makes his own. There is no reason to separate the subject being considered from the "techniques" being deployed in the classroom. These are unitary from a student's perspective, and the student's perspective must always be foremost in a teacher's mind. Much like the performer must at once be the character and intuit the viewer's sensibility. In a poor teacher, these things are considered serially, if at all.

   We do teach, and do impart important knowledge. But none of it matters unless the student is fully present.

Posting Schedule

I will be posting at least twice a week for much of the summer.  It seems to make sense that I do so on Mondays and Thursdays, and if more material begs for your attention, I will slap it up here.

  I wonder: do teachers in high school ever talk about life and death? Today, my students were an abstracted bunch during the final meditation. Most of them tried to maintain their posture and keep focused, but I could feel their struggle.
  They sit on cushions pushed a bit from the walls, facing inward. We end, they stand, hands in gassho. I make a parting statement. "You may not realize this, but right now you are practicing life and death. Don't take this practice for granted."

School begins at 9, still early for teenagers, but at least they are getting two extra hours of sleep. Early arrivals make bagels or eat fried eggs one of the teachers cooks up each morning. The building is small, and it takes perhaps a minute to go from the kitchen to the rectangular dojang where they sit meditation.
  Two tall, deep windows illuminate the altar along the wall opposite. Meditation cushions line the other walls. I sit just to the left of the altar and instruct the students to write their intentions on the slip of paper provided. It is meant to awaken a connection to the previous week and to underline the practical nature of their efforts in school.  It should create a little tension and hover a little while they sit. Over the course of the semester, most students have begun to use the exercise and write down intentions that are modest and concrete. One student still refuses to do it at all, but he refuses to meditate as well.
   But then, this is something the student and I occasionally talk about, and when we do, I try to make sure that the conversation is one where his experience and reasoning is paramount. This may be a very small step towards mindfulness, but a consequential one. Some students need to assert themselves, and this is where they are at. I think, at bottom, the quiet start to the day still makes a difference.

Ending Well

  There is a tendency in workplaces and schools to see Friday as an unfortunate hurdle between Thursday and the weekend. If the teachers feel this, then most assuredly they are teaching this to the students. Here at TAS, Friday is something else altogether.

   For years now I noticed how joyful and lingering the students would be at the end of the day. Often it seems the bus is impatient, not the student. Some of our students seemed to regret heading home... we always have a large fraction of kids for whom home is little comfort at all. Yet there is always a powerful, conditioned force that countervails our efforts towards keeping the community focused and easy. Out of these observations arose the firm structure of the last day of the week.

  It  has taken me a while to grow into giving dharma talks. I felt unqualified, and was concerned that my classroom persona would blur the important differences between my role as a lecturer/facilitator and that of holding the center throughout the school day. I often reflect upon my one dokusan with Daido Roshi.

I was on retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery and struggling with my inconsistent practice, my shoulder problems which was pushing me away from Sword, and the endless pressures of work and family. I had resolved to talk to Daido, and I was nervous. It was distracting me from my sitting. Dokusan was called, I raced over. The bell rang. I walked in and bowed, and kneeled or sat, I don't recall which.

  I told him a run a school based on zen. He looked like an old dragon, and rumbled quietly, "Really?" I was flooded with doubt and insincerity.

  "And I don't know what to do..."

  "Keep your practice." 

  "That's all?"

  "Yes, keep your practice." 

   But what was my practice? Sword? Sitting meditation? Running the school? I had gone to the Monastery a number of times for retreats, and was drifting far from Shim Gum Do. Sword practice was still very painful, and I felt totally alone in it. I began to deepen my meditation practice. Later, I began practicing gentleness towards myself while training sword without a sword. Everything was becoming more centered, and it was time to train hard and clearly and completely commit to my original teacher. Without realizing it, I was living a koan: "What is my practice?' I was totally devoted to finding this out, every day. 

   Fridays reflect this experience: when you begin to drift, intensify your practice, be gentle, and be firm.

The last day of the week was riddled with ambivalence; by firming up the structure and making the student's obligations clear, and providing all the support to meet those obligations, Friday becomes the peak day, and a day of marking achievement and passage.

  It begins with a dharma talk. Midday brings lunch and work practice. It ends with a meditation and an expression of gratefulness. 

What is it with Americans? Such black and white thinking! Freedom means no expectations. The school day ends, and you are free. Unless you have to go to work. Then, later, you are free. Unless someone tells you what to do. Or you can't find somebody to do something with and find a way to get there. Thankfully, there is always the internet, a vastland of miniatures, where you can choose endlessly between things to do and things to want.
Obviously, this is a pretty limited notion of freedom. What if a young person could be trained in directing her focus to whatever she wants, for as long as she wants? What if she could become fully independent and fully part of a community? That is the paradox every young person must resolve. It cannot be provided by words, or by a medication, or by punishment. It must come from within, from long experience. Structure compasses freedom, much like a range of hills define a valley.
The school day at TAS is structured to that end. On the top of the right hand margin is a link to the daily and weekly training schedule. The intent is to gently guide the student in and out of the stress of becoming fully a person.

  Over the last two years I have struggled to bring together, in a practical and personal way, zen practice and the developmental education we seek to provide at TAS. Zen training is very demanding and true masters are few and far between. I have the great fortune to study under one, and to have experienced the teaching of another directly and profoundly.
  But one thing about any all consuming study is that one looks back and sees numerous times at which everything seemed clear and wide open, and that very moment now seems a modest, blinkered resting place, severely limited and self-satisfied.
  A strict daily practice has, for me, grounded my often diffuse efforts. I hope to use this blog to illustrate how powerful the school day can be when viewed as a daily practice for the young people who come to it  every day.

Dear Readers,

    There are a lot of blogs out there, and a lot of dead blogs. There are a log of blogs on mindfulness, and a lot of dead blogs on mindfulness. This has been a zombie blog since graduate school took over my extra time. But my degree is done and the school year is racing towards its conclusion.
    Thus, we begin again. News on the school year and on the way that this community develops its educational and mindfulness practices will be front and center.
   Please write me if you wish, or just offer comment. It is encouraging to receive feedback of any sort.