Gasshō,
Recently, I was talking about practice with a long-time Zen student. It was different from my usual conversations about practice because it wasn’t “how do I get myself to do this thing that I don’t want to do but know I should do?”

Not that the “how do I get myself to…” conversation isn’t a fine one and interesting. I was having a variation on that one with an editor/producer friend just last week. It seems there is a concern in the world of spiritual publishing that it will not be possible to go on indefinitely selling “how to” information. An awful lot of people have bought an awful lot of books detailing what’s what and what the answers are—and now, the secret is out! What the publishing world is currently seeking is a way to get people to apply all the information they’ve purchased. Yes, indeed!

Alas, what it all comes down to is practice, and if practice were an agreeable answer all those books wouldn’t have had a market in the first place. It’s a variation on the Christmas Humphrey’s quote: “We all know we have to sell what we have and give to the poor, but nobody wants that answer so we keep asking questions.” Or the one about W.C. Fields, a famously non-religious man, who, when found near the end of his life reading the Bible, explained he was “just looking for loop-holes.”

Oh, the resistance conditioned mind has to practice! This is simultaneously humorous and distressing. We can’t blame conditioning for digging in its heels given that practice is the process of conditioning’s demise. The thing that’s so amazing is the hold conditioning has on us and our willingness to give it our full support, even when we know it is up to no good.

We all know practice works. Everything that exists in our lives is there as a result of what we’ve practiced.

Kind of a sobering thought, isn’t it? The Buddha said, “All that is is the result of what we have thought.” Thinking is a practice. We practice thinking the same things over and over all day long, and that’s what we have as a result. As Ralph Waldo Emerson phrased it, “You become what you think about all day long.”

But rather than hit people over the head with this information one more time, I decided to take advantage of an opportunity and ask the folks at Sunday morning group discussion at the Monastery about their experience of practice. Following are some of the comments.

“It seems like a huge step in practice is, for the first time, suddenly seeing through the voices of conditioning in an area of life that you’ve always struggled with. The voices are saying something about you that you’ve always believed was true, and suddenly you get it that it’s not true. You wonder, ‘What else might those voices be lying about?’”

“It’s helpful to me to see practice as a path. A path exists because a lot of people have made the same journey across the same ground. A path is an opening, a lack of obstructions. It’s a ‘way.’ If you lose your attention and wander off the path, if you get lost, you can retrace your steps and find the path again, and away you go!”

“I feel so grateful that for whatever combinations of blessings and great good fortune I have stayed with practice long enough to want practice more than anything. I get how big it is, that my life is at stake, and I want to give my life to what gives me life. There is such peace past the resistance, and all I want is more of that peace, more of what I have.”

“Practice actually is fun and games—and it’s REALLY SERIOUS fun and games.”

“As soon as I got it that I’m not in charge of life, everything got really easy. Turning life over to life is where the peace and joy come from.”

“It amazes me that I stayed with practice because I never thought I suffered. But what kept drawing me is that here was a place where people told the truth. And it seemed to me that people were able to tell the truth because the people facilitating the discussions were not afraid.”

“It took me years to have a sense of what practice is. I was drawn to all the tools—workshops and retreats and books and tapes—and I think without them, and without my making constant use of them, I would have fallen away long before I experienced the benefit of practice. It’s critical to stay close to where practice is. I actually moved here (to Murphys) to be near the practice, it was that essential to me.”

“I think it’s that piece of getting it that my life is at stake. We often talk about it as ‘having suffered enough.’ One day I realized my life would never be different until I stopped letting conditioned mind call the shots.”

“My big hurdle was getting past the confusion of ‘who am I?’ Am I the personality that I always thought I was, or am I the ‘still small voice’ I can barely recognize? I had to get past the ‘I want a different life but I don’t want to change’ confusion before I could choose practice.”

“Fortunately, in the beginning, practice—especially the tools and awareness itself—is fun and interesting. By the time resistance kicks in, if we’re lucky, we’re hooked!”

“What motivated me was the ‘now you’re here, now you’re not’ aspect of practice. Whether a person has been practicing for five minutes or fifty years, when you’re present, you’re present, and when you’re not, you’re not. Conscious/ unconscious; centered/ suffering; clear/ confused. It’s a practice, it’s a process. Do it and it works, don’t do it and it doesn’t. It’s an equal opportunity kind of thing. It’s not personal. It’s not reward and punishment.”

“What made me choose practice was realizing that resistance to being present, following the voices of ego, didn’t give me what I wanted. Conditioning couldn’t deliver the goods. Ego promised satisfaction and delivered dissatisfaction. Being present promised nothing and gave me everything.”

“As soon as I proved to myself for the first time that I could go up against the fears and threats of conditioning to be there for myself, the struggle was over. Did conditioning give up? Heck no. Still hasn’t. But no matter what’s going on, I know what to do to take care of the person who is suffering.”

“For me, the tricky part was learning to hear the whisper of center as the voices of ego were screaming their messages of fear, deprivation and something wrong. So many addictions are easy to identify. If I’m smoking, I know it. If I’m over-drinking or over-eating, I know it. If I’m listening to and believing the voices of conditioning, it’s often harder to recognize.”

“I practice because of those moments of ‘ah ha!’” That sudden shift from being one person seeing life one way to being a completely different person living in a different world because a moment of clarity, a moment of insight, has changed me in a way that conditioning cannot undo. Practice sustains me as I continue to be that new person.”

“When I first started practicing all I wanted was to make it easier for ‘me.’ Now, after continuing to practice, all I want is to make it easier for ‘ME.’”

“I have continued with practice because I finally found a practice that speaks to my heart. There are lots of practices, lots of options, lots of different perspectives for lots of different folks, but this one spoke to me. My heart heard the call and here I am.”

“When I encountered practice I knew immediately that it offered what I wanted for my life—clarity, freedom, peace, an end to suffering. I knew that my life depended on it. And ego also knew that its life depended on the outcome of practicing. So that’s what gets played out. Who gets this life? LIFE or ego? I am happy to report that LIFE is winning!”

“What kept me going is two metaphors: being in love and having a baby. Those are lifetime commitments that require giving and sacrifice and struggle and letting go. But in neither case do we say, ‘Oh, no, how long am I going to have to do this?’ Because what we’re doing, what we’re involved with and experiencing is the best life offers—love. For me, that’s what practice is. It’s love. It’s how to love, how to be in love, and how to live in love. I hope it never ends.”

Over the years I’ve encouraged people to, “just sit down on the cushion and let the magic happen.” Everything else we do is designed to assist people through the obstacle course that egocentric, karmic conditioning builds up to keep us from getting to the cushion. The Buddha first told us, and we’ve heard it over and over again, practice and Sangha are the winning combination for ending suffering.

Commercial announcements:
Sangha: Tune in to (attend if you can) our Annual Celebration on May 17 at the Women Center in Palo Alto (one block from the Zen Center).
Visit our schedule for a workshop or retreat near you. (Or plan that trip to the Zen Monastery Peace Center.)

May the joy of presence fill your heart in this moment and every moment of your life.

 

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