Not a Bad Starting Point!

The WZR was my first retreat with the WCF. Before that I had been practicing Zen in the Soto tradition for about eight years. I participated in about half a dozen sesshins with Roshis from Japan, and sitting one period of forty minutes daily at home.

What brought me to the WCF were two things: firstly at his age Roshi had became too fragile to come to Europe to hold sesshins; secondly and more importantly during most of my eight years of practice I felt very disoriented and lacked practical and concrete guidance in my practice. The personal interviews I had mostly left me confused. Confusion, I guess, in a way is not a bad starting point for practice. But the insecurity, about whether I was doing it “right”, made me constantly change my method from counting breath to following breath to shikantaza (similar to silent illumination, I suppose). I lacked a minimum of practical advice on how to go about sitting, working with the body and the mind. For a long time I thought, there probably was no way to give such advice in a clear and understandable way – until by chance I got hold of one of Master Sheng Yen’s books. And there it was, in clear words and altogether practical: how you go about it when you sit on the cushion, be it silent illumination, koan practice or any other method.

Internet research led me to the WCF website and what I found there, seemed to be what I was looking for. And quite close too, just across the channel. But it took me another three years before I decided to give it a try.

The Retreat: Circumstances

When I arrived for the retreat, I was a little reserved at first, because of the psychological aspect of the retreat. I have gone through some psychotherapeutic processes, considered this kind of work successfully finished, and didn’t want to misuse Chan/Zen for therapy. But the idea of “emptying the bucket” nevertheless made a lot of sense to me. So my reservation wasn’t very strong and I was willing to leave it behind easily.

What I loved immediately was the remoteness of the place, the nature surrounding it, the simplicity, not having electricity etc. – and the delicious food the cook prepared for us! She increased my love for vegetables at least 300 percent!

What I did not expect and had to realize during the first couple of days was something else: how much I was attached to the outward form of Japanese Zen practice, it’s style, aesthetics, “purity“ etc. Initially, the eclectic mixture of imagery in the retreat hall including Chinese, Tibetan and other symbols; nobody sitting even in half-lotus fashion etc. made me sceptical towards the retreat – but only until I realized how many preconceptions I had about what Zen/Chan practice, a Zen teacher, a retreat etc. had to be and look like. And all the time I had considered myself to be so open-minded. A very good lesson. Today I can only laugh at myself. The practice of the retreat and my interviews with Simon were so effective, that all these preconceptions evaporated in less than 72 hours.

The Retreat: Practice

The retreat opened more than one door to practice for me, and finally set me on the right track, for which I am very thankful.

“Emptying the bucket” was a practice, that took me through a couple of deep-seated conceptions I had about myself, the “stories” I have been telling myself about myself, which had not been approached in psychotherapy: how I was such a “good” and peaceful person; how I was too “good” to be successful this world; how I was somehow “special”. They all turned out to be nothing but myths I had learnt to tell myself during my childhood.

I was particularly confronted with my self-image as a basically non-aggressive person. I never wanted to be as irascible as my father, because it scared me. When during sitting I was confronted with a co-practitioner who was especially noisy and – as I conceived it – not considerate of disturbing the others, an immense anger built up inside of me. I realised that I could be as irascible as my father, only I had never dared to let it out, because of fear of the destructive consequence. When the retreat ended I had developed a deep sympathy for the person who had almost driven me crazy, and felt thankful towards him for having given me the opportunity to learn.

The retreat also took me beyond psychology, to a deeper level of realisation. This was triggered by Simon’s advice to look out for the mental processes or mechanisms that take us away from the present moment. This started a period of observation that continued when after the retreat I spent two more days hiking on the Welsh coast. By observing my mind, I ended up with an exhaustive collection of thirty-eight mental mechanisms that usually take me out of the present. They seem to work independently of will and quite autonomously. (Examples: worrying what others think of me; expecting/foreseeing something good or bad to happen to me; involuntarily producing judgements about people; internally commenting on what I am doing at the moment.)

At first, I thought of them as a kind of zoo of strange creatures, living a life of their own, beyond my will. Then something Simon said made me think of them as “ghosts” living and cavorting in a house. The next thing I realised, I myself was that house. Shortly after that, there was moment of inner silence and the thought “the ghosts have left the house”. This was followed by the realisation that those ghosts were nothing to be rejected, because they were “me”. And I even felt affection towards them. Later, that night, a poem appeared in my mind – in English and not very good, but I shall include it here anyway:

What takes me from this moment
Are other moments
Long turned into dust
Which should be thrust
Upon the dark and fading
Ships of time
Instead they cling
To where they were conceived
Like ghosts that do not know
That they are long since dead
And dance and play
As if alive
Obstructing clearer views
Like cobwebs or grey dust
Like good old friends
Who’ve overstayed and missed
The time to say goodbye

On the day before last something Simon said while we were on our cushions triggered an experience that is hard to describe: it was a fundamental realisation – as much bodily as mental, as if the blinds I had been wearing all my life had been ripped from my eyes. Simon had described how we never see the world “directly” but filtered through our unconscious preconception, ideas etc. I had heard and read this before and always could easily agree intellectually. But only at that moment I really “understood” what this actually meant: the tragedy of lives being wasted, if experienced through all those filters, and being caught in a spiders web of opinions, concepts, judgements etc. It left me deeply shaken, in tears and the sentence “what a waste!” echoing in my mind for hours. When the sitting ended and I stepped outside, I really “saw” the valley, trees, pebbles, clouds – as if for the first time, unfiltered, and even to call them “beautiful” would have added something superfluous. This way of seeing the world stayed with me for some days until it got lost in everyday life back home.