Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There. That is a great title. And good advice. It is the title of a non-fiction book about conducting your own mindfulness retreat.

It is difficult to define a mindfulness retreat because different people and groups define it differently. You’ll see the term meditation retreat or even yoga retreat used interchangeably.

A search online will turn up retreats at various centers that are very different from what Sylvia Boorstein’s book is suggesting. One web post on the “best retreats” at well-known retreat centers offers mindfulness retreats where you can experience anything from Pranayama breathing lessons along with stress-management classes, facials, massages, and private yoga sessions. The center nearest to me offers two-night single cabin room accommodation packages with three meals a day, an arctic plunge pool, mud lounge, Scotch hoses (huh?), infinity pool, and services such as acupuncture and life coaching. The menu is not Spartan and includes fresh, raw, organic foods, juices, and smoothies as well as Mediterranean cuisine but also hamburgers and tater tots. Most of these “best” retreats are around $1000 for a weekend. That alone would cause me stress.

Sylvia Boorstein’s approach is a much more down-to-earth guide. The book guides you through a three-day retreat plan and also includes lessons on how to achieve through meditation practices some serenity and focus.

An important caveat is that you need a 3-5 day stretch where it will be possible to step away from your life. You need the time and a place, but the time is more important and possibly harder to obtain.

This rainy Memorial Day 3-day time would have been a good choice for some people, but it takes planning. For me, I had a variety of things on the calendar. None of those things were recreational or meditative. There were scheduled good things (meeting friends; an art gallery talk), obligations (dealing with my older sister in a nursing home), and the unexpected (a burned-out condensate pump on our air conditioner that flooded the basement). Life intrudes on Life.

Boorstein says that any place will do, but I think most of us would like something out in nature – the mountain cabin or the ocean beach – but a backyard works too. Solitude is important. Being distracted by people, including a partner who is not retreating or kids, will not work.

Other than that, you don’t need much besides the book. Maybe a mat or blanket and a chair or bench. Even those are optional if you’re good with sitting on the ground. You need to eat and drink but maybe this is the time to go with water and wise, minimal, healthy food too.

I was attracted to Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There by that unexpected title. It also reminded me of the first time I did some serious meditation days. My wife asked me what I was supposed to do. I said, “Just sit and empty my mind.” She replied, sarcastically, “You should be great at that.”

Of course, it is not easy. What seems to most people to be “not doing anything” is actually doing something quite difficult. Try to stop thinking. It is probably impossible, but you can get closer with practice.

This kind of practice and retreat doesn’t have to be attached to philosophy or programs, though it often is associated with one. I began my mediation practices in college because I met a girl who said she was a “Zen Buddhist” and I wanted to get closer to her. I became more attached to the practice than her. I drifted away from regular practice and being in a group after college. I reentered it in a more serious way when I met a man who is an American Jesuit priest, professor of theology, psychoanalyst, and Zen rōshi in the White Plum lineage.

Retreats, even if labeled Buddhist, are usually open to persons of all religious and non-religious affiliations. Weejend or weeklong retreats I have attended usually mix zazen (seated meditation in half-hour plus periods), kinhin (walking meditation, my favorite), chanting, dharma talks, and daisan (one on one interviews with a teacher), and beginners instruction. Sometimes they are silent. Sometimes they involve work at the center.

Though religion and philosophy do not have to be part of the retreat or your intention, my second serious reentry into meditation and mindfulness came when I went to talk by Robert Kennedy. His talk was, and his book Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit is, about the intersection of Zen Buddhism and Christianity.  Kennedy says that “What I looked for in Zen was not a new faith, but a new way of being Catholic that grew out of my own lived experience and would not be blown away by authority or by changing theological fashion.” He would say that God is in the Zendo.

For a time I attended his zendo sessions as they were not far from my home. But I have never been a good group member and organizations, membership, facilities, and fees all feel wrong to me.

And so, Sylvia Boorstein‘s book seemed right for me. In some ways, she is like Roshi Kennedy. Boorstein is a respected teacher of Buddhist Insight Meditation and has also remained an observant Jew.  One of her other books is That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist where she writes about how she resolved these two aspects of her life in a complementary way.

The lesson from both of these teachers is that mindfulness and even Buddhism do not replace your religious beliefs or is it a way to convert you. I haven’t come across any atheist retreat centers but they probably exist. Certainly, completely non-denominational retreats are available.

In Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There, she writes:

"I've noticed license plate frames that say "I'd rather be sailing" or "I'd rather be bowling." Sometimes I think it's fun to see the rather-be-doing frames because they are a hint about the driver. Other times I start reflecting about the fact that preferring to be doing something else always diminishes the present moment. I imagine starting a business that produces license plate frames that read "I'm totally content right now."

I attempted Boorstein’s retreat once before when my wife was away for a few days. I did it at home and I was too distracted. If I do it again, I really do need to “get away.” The basic schedule is to arrive, sit, walk, sit, tea, sleep, etc.

The book is intended to be read in sections with some time taken to reflect. My first reading of it was a sit-down-in-a-chair with my tea reading, not a retreat. Of course, armchair mindfulness is not the intention., but you could also do that.

Mindfulness cultivates the habit of being able to deal with life when things aren’t happening in the way we’d like. Mindfulness instruction is deceptively simple: pay attention. That is attentive sitting and alert walking. You can be in the moment when you’re weeding the garden or shoveling the snow. The practice becomes a part of your everyday life – not unconsciously, but consciously.

I doubt that he was a Buddhist or meditator, but Paul Revere had the words “Live Contented” inscribed on the wedding ring he gave to his spouse.

I took some ideas from the book that seem like little lessons, aphorisms, or koans.

Feel all of your body.
Slow is not better than fast, it’s just different.
Nothing is worth thinking about does not mean that Nothing is worth thinking about
There are no in-between times. 
Eat slowly. Taste it fully
Consider the interconnectedness of all things.
Discomfort comes from clinging to an experience that can’t continue. Discomfort also comes from wanting an experience to end before it is over. When clinging and aversion are absent, you experience freedom.

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sylviaboorstein.com
Morning Star Zendo (Robert Kennedy)

American Buddhist

I’m not a Buddhist. At least, I don’t think I follow Buddhism closely enough these days to qualify for the title. I have studied the religion which is now represented by the many groups (especially in Asia) that profess various forms of the Buddhist doctrine and that venerate Buddha  as a religion and also use it as a philosophy.

A very simplified description of the teaching of Buddha is that life is permeated with suffering which is caused by desire. Suffering ceases when desire ceases. Enlightenment is obtained through right conduct. Wisdom and meditation releases one from desire and therefore, suffering.

I would contend that the path I followed through reading, meditation and even formal study at a Zen monastery was a path of philosophy rather than religion. I never accepted things like reincarnation. I like desire too much.  I consider my path to be a kind of American Buddhism. Some might say it is Western Buddhism.

I don’t use American Buddhism as a negative term, though some genuine Buddhists might see it as such. There are many uses of the word “Zen” attached to everything from playing tennis to the “Zen” of dogs and cats – that seem very wrong applications of Buddhism.  If you were really critical of American Buddhism, it would probably be because you consider it just a kind of self-help program to reduce stress.

It is difficult to define these things. What is Zen Buddhism? On zen-buddhism.net they say that “Trying to explain or define Zen Buddhism, by reducing it to a book, to a few definitions, or to a website is impossible. Instead, it freezes Zen in time and space, thereby weakening its meaning.”

Nevertheless, I will say that Zen Buddhism was an outgrowth of Mahayana, the “meditation” sect of Buddhism. It developed in Japan from its earlier Chinese counterpart. It also divided into two branches.

Binzai is the more austere and aristocratie monasticism that emphasizes meditation on the paradoxes that people may know as koans. (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?)

The other branch is Sōtō which is probably the more popular following. It emphasizes ethical actions and charity, tenderness, benevolence and sympathy, as well as meditation on whatever occurs as illumination.

The Buddhism that seemed to appeal to the American mind offered escape and engagement – two things that may seem to be in opposition. The idea of “10 minute mindfulness” should seem impossibly simplistic and unrealistic to anyone, but the concept sells books and fills workshops.

The latest book I have read related to Buddhism is by Robert Wright. In Why Buddhism is True, Wright uses biology, psychology and philosophy to show how meditation can lead to a spiritual life in a secular age.

You might not know that evolutionary psychology is a field of study. Wright combines it with neuroscience to show why he believes Buddhism is true, and how it can free us of delusions and save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species.

In a earlier book, The Moral Animal, he wrote about how evolution shaped the human brain. Our mind is designed to sometimes delude us about ourselves and about the world in order to survive. Unfortunately, this leads to much unhappiness.

Some of this comes from natural selection which he says makes animals in general “recurrently dissatisfied.” It leads us to anxiety, depression, anger, and greed. Wright believes Buddhism was a kind of answer to natural selection.

If human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly, meditation can clarify that seeing and so will make us better, happier people.

I was first introduced to his new book through an interview with him on Fresh Air. Host Terry Gross asked Wright about how natural selection is at odds with the Buddhist notion that pleasure is fleeting:

“This was in the Buddha’s first sermon after his enlightenment is that a big source of our suffering is that we crave things, we want things, but then the gratification tends not to last. So we find ourselves in a state of almost perennial dissatisfaction. And, in fact, people may have heard that Buddhism says that life is full of suffering, and it’s true that suffering is the translation of the word dukkha. It’s a respectable translation, but a lot of people think that that word would be just as well translated as “unsatisfactoryness.”

Certainly when you think about the logic of natural selection, it makes sense that we would be like this. Natural selection built us to do some things, a series of things that help us get genes into the next generation. Those include eating food so we stay alive, having sex — things like that.

If it were the case that any of these things brought permanent gratification, then we would quit doing them, right? I mean, you would eat, you’d feel blissed out, you’d never eat again. You’d have sex, you’d, like, lie there basking in the afterglow, never have sex again. Well, obviously that’s not a prescription for getting genes into the next generation. So natural selection seems to have built animals in general to be recurrently dissatisfied. And this seems to be a central feature of life — and it’s central to the Buddhist diagnosis of what the problem is.”

An earlier book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher, was what get me thinking a lot more about mindfulness.  He worked to bring mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society and was the founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

The practice of “mindfulness” is a more than 2000-year-old Buddhist method of living fully in the present, observing ourselves, our feeling, others and our surroundings without judging them.

I read his book Wherever You Go There You Are when it wa first published during a time when I was more into formal study of Zen and meditation.

I liked that it treated meditation as a natural activity that can be practiced anytime and anywhere. No joining a group, no props or special cushions.

Mindfulness and living in the moment can be improved with techniques such as “non-doing” and concentration.

Like defining Buddhism, these terms are simple but complex. Non-doing is very different from doing nothing. We live very much in a “doer” culture, and in such a place non-doing is a big change. Sitting down to meditate, even for a short time, is a time for non-doing, but it means you will be “working” at consciousness and intention. Anyone who has ever tried to “empty their mind” knows how very difficult that can be.

There are several chapters in the book on parenting as a form of meditation – and children as “live-in Zen masters.”

I think Kabat-Zinn would agree with Wright on how Buddhist meditation can counteract the biological pull we have toward dissatisfaction:

What I can say about meditation is that it attacks the levers that natural selection kind of uses to control us, at a very fundamental level. … By our nature we just seek good feelings and avoid bad feelings, that’s just our nature. Buddhism diagnosed this as kind of a problem and remarkably came up with a technique that allows you to actually disempower those levers, to no longer respond to the fundamental incentive structure of trying to avoid painful feelings and try to always seek the thing that promises to be gratifying. That’s an amazing thing — that it can work.

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Listen to the interview with Wright on npr.org

Read “What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t” by Adam Gopnik – The New Yorker

Einstein and Mindfulness

A little post from the Huffington Post’s GPS for the Soul blog has a number of quotes by Albert Einstein that the author feels connect Albert with mindfulness.

Einstein quotes are very popular online. People love to pass on little gems of wisdom.

One that is very popular is “Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” I always connected that quote to my life in education and especially in the ways that we grade and (and label) students.  But the blog author connects that quote to the idea the “billions of fish try to climb trees every day. Just look around the office, or at those poor souls who so valiantly strive their entire lives in going-absolutely-nowhere work mode.”

I’m not sure that’s what Albert meant, but we filter quotes through our own lenses.

Here are the quotes referenced. Are they about mindfulness? Maybe they are more American koans.

• I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
• Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
• Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.
• The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious — the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
• Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
• In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
• Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
• The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
• The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
• I believe in intuitions and inspirations.
• Imagination is the highest form of research.
• The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.

Align with Einstein

The Koan Project

I realize that the study of koans is correctly connected to the study of Buddhism and is serious study. I have been posting some of these small stories and aphorisms that are used to teach and explicate. I never meant them to be an introduction to the study of Buddhism or even meditation. But they might be the introduction to that study for some people.

Similarly, I don’t think that when Gretchen Rubin wrote her book, The Happiness Project:, it was her intent to study koans.

I read online that Rubin was riding a city bus when she had an “epiphany.” “The days are long, but the years are short. Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.”

She decided to give a year to a happiness project. the subtitle of her book gives you an idea of her approach:  “Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.”

I first saw the book on the “New Books” shelf at my local library. I flipped through the book and then checked it out because I could tell that her project involved trying some of the wisdom from the past as well as current research, while not ignoring popular culture. It is not approach that will get you attention from “serious” seekers, but it is probably closer to where most people are in their lives.

Some of the things that she decides are worth pursuing are worth pursuing: a source of happiness can be the introducing more novelty and challenge into our lives. Some suggestions are already well know – money can help buy happiness – with a caveat, when that money is spent wisely.

I found ideas that I had already accepted myself. For example, the physical world and the peace and order of it contributes to your inner calm – or  lack thereof.

She also came to believe that small changes often make the biggest differences. Like a little koan.

Rubin posted online that she has looked at some classic koans and some non-Buddhist aphorisms that can be used in your own koan project as small teaching moments.

Two monks were arguing about a flag.
One said, “The flag is moving.”
The other said, “The wind is moving.”
The sixth patriarch happened to pass by. He said, “Not the wind, not the flag. Mind is moving.

That is a classic koan. I have observed the shimmer of trees and realized that it was not the trees and not the wind. It was my mind.

What do I mean by that? I am not able to tell you.

I have collected some aphorisms myself, including some I think of as “American koans.”  Here are some of the aphorisms Rubin found that might be part of your own happiness, or koan, project.

Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.”

Francis Bacon and Heraclitus: “Dry light is ever the best.”

T. S. Eliot: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”

Mark 4:25: “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

Diana Vreeland: “The eye has to travel.”

Gertrude Stein “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”

G. K. Chesterton. ‘It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.’”

Personal Koans

Koans are generally thought of as a traditional and fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. These brief teachable moments can be a story, dialogue, question, or statement. They intrigue and annoy equally as their “meaning” is usually not fully understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition.

A post I saw on Tricycle proposed that we might have personal koans – open-ended questions that guide us.

“How do we live a life we can’t hold on to?’ is one such question asked by Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel in her book The Power of an Open Question.

How do we live with the fact that the moment we’re born we move closer to death; when we fall in love we sign up for grief? How do we reconcile that gain always ends in loss; gathering, in separation? I don’t know if my question will ever find an answer. But I see it as a question to live by. I’ve always felt that if you have a genuine question you should explore it. All you have to do is continue to ask it and pay attention.

If you view a koan as a starting point for personal, meditative inquiry, then a question can serve that purpose.

Koans transcend ordinary questions and answers or solutions because though the mind is engaged, it does not search for security or conclusions.

The Power of an Open Question: The Buddha’s Path to Freedom

The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans

The Wisdom of the Yogi

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  – Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra (the nickname of “Yogi” is not be be ignored here) supposedly gave this Zen-like advice to a young second baseman being sent down to the minors after popping out too many times with the Yankees.

It caused the young man to stop and study the wall of the Yankee dugout for over an hour.

This “koan” has meaning for the rest of us. Even if we don’t get sent down to the minors, we will reach many forks in the road. And we will have to take them.

As we approach the start of another baseball season and enter a new spring, we need to reexamine the wisdom of the Yogi.

You can’t deny the koan quality of  some of Yogi Berra’s sayings. Is it a coincidence that Lawrence Peter Berra (born May 12, 1925) is better known as “Yogi?” A Yogi is a practitioner of Yoga and refers to ascetic practitioners of meditation in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Yogi in a classic meditation pose

When Yogi asks us “How can you think and hit at the same time?” and we meditate on that koan, we are brought to the realization that he is right. How can you? You can’t. You need to be totally into the moment to hit. Any thought occurred before that moment. You can over think hitting.

And so, Yogi continues: “I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?” A lesson in self-forgiveness, for sure. Sometimes you need to change bats.

In the book, When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom From One of Baseball’s Greatest Heroes, we get a good number of modern koans to study.

“Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical” is Yogi’s take on the mind-body connection.

“If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer” is a much more refreshing and honest philosophy than that of those people who answer even when they don’t know.

Let us sit in the grass of the outfield, listen for the crack of the bat and study his koans.