Tag Archives: book review

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the heart of mindfulness practice – walking the mountain closer

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DSC_0153I’ve been journeying. Nowhere special. Just these inner paths of tangled neural wiring, trying to unravel a few connections, solder others and snip out the truly fried ones. This work of un-self-making is a tough one. If I’m not careful, I end up more tangled and frazzled than I started. More often than not, I forget the intention (to drain the swamp) and resort to playing whack-a-mole (or alligator) in futile attempts to resist assimilation into unwholesomeness.

The great thing about having kalyanamitras is that one can spend a morning whacking moles and the afternoon having an hour of gentle guidance about how to cultivate compassion for the critters. After all, even moles suffer. If you’re looking for some of that gentle guidance, by the way, I do suggest you access my dear spiritual pal Maia Duerr who has a terrific new venture called Guidance & Encouragement Sessions.

The conversation with Maia folded neatly into a book I was reading, Walk Like a Mountain by Innen Ray Parchelo (published by Sumeru Books).  As much as I avoid my tangled mess of neural circuitry, I avoid walking meditation. However, Parchelo makes it very compelling from the start of the book where he lays out the framework of a journey (who doesn’t love a road trip) to the end where he brings us home to ourselves with a caveat of the necessity for humility. Walk Like a Mountain packs a wickedly dense amount of information into 204 pages. Not only does Parchelo draw together the threads of Buddhist teachings on walking meditation, he takes us down side roads and up mountain paths of archetypes and ecological history of landscapes he has walked. Furthermore, the chapters on preparation and adaptations to walking (disabilities) are seductive in convincing me that this might just be something I could do. The “Journey” chapters are really practice sessions; you could almost make them into a walk-focused sesshin.

As I read through the carefully structured instructions to cultivate wholesome movement through space, it became clear that a practice that contains even a smidgen of reluctance (i.e., my resistance to kinhin, indoors and out) is really a resistance to the totality of practice. More than that, it is a reluctance to enter the deeper aspects of practice. Parchelo writes frequently in the book of Jizo Bodhisattva who walks into the hottest of hells to save sentient beings. And it struck me that relegating walking meditation to the status of “grit your teeth and get it over with” misses the heart of practice.

To doubt the walking of the mountain means that one does not yet know one’s own walking. It is not that one does not walk but that one does not yet know, has not made clear, this walking.

Dogen, Mountains and Waters Sutra

The heart of mindfulness practice is to connect with our life just as it is. Sitting, standing, walking, talking, writing, eating, sleeping, defecating, urinating. It’s all movement – some large, some micro – that bring us into intimate connection with the emerging self. There can be, as Parchelo makes clear with respect to the “Zen of running/biking/tennis etc”, no substitutions.

Life. Just this.

The guidance conversation with Maia complemented Parchelo’s work on the power of navigating true to one’s intentions. In the case of entering the heart of mindfulness practice, it is dwelling in the space of our life that is vibrant and life-giving. It is a coming alive and bringing the mountain closer to our center.

Tomorrow, Frank and I lead our very first residential retreat in secular mindfulness practice. I may wear my rakusu anyway. Just because. It’s a frightening and exciting prospect of watching forty mountains walk six steps closer to the heart of an intimate life. I’m hoping Dogen will say a few words of self-making and that the labyrinth walking at nightfall will bring me in the knowing of the walking mountain.

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the endless training of zen: book review of A Guide to Zen

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Zen training is without beginning and without end.  Some days, when the petty ego takes over and the arbitrary lines are drawn between past and future or gain and failure, that’s a bitter pill to swallow.  On those days, it’s helpful to have a guide that takes the sting out of whatever thought may drift by about gaining and failing.

Katsuki Sekida, author of Zen Training and Two Zen Classics, a translation of the Mumokan and Blue Cliff Records, was a teacher of English and trained in monasteries in Japan.  Editor of this condensation of Sekida’s earlier work, Marc Allen was one of his students at the Maui Zendo and has distilled Sekida’s teachings in a compact, helpful book for beginner and more advanced students of Zen.

Sekida starts with practice.  Acknowledging that Zen is “concerned with the problem of the nature of mind,” he makes it clear from the outset that the workings of mind (speculation and reason) are not separate from personal practice which arise from our body and mind.  Unlike most books on Zen practice which give slight service to posture and breathing, Sekida begins with two chapters detailing posture and breath work.  It’s not just about sitting and different poses; he digs deep into the experience of the breath and unravels the questions we have about the relationship between sitting immobile and the nature of mind.  More than any other book I’ve read, he digs deeply into the physiology of breath and there are some useful practices that surface from this part of the book.

I particularly liked the chapter on Samadhi,

the cleansing of consciousness,
and when consciousness is purified,
emancipation is, in fact, already accomplished.

Complicated words.  Sekida slowly and deliciously unpacks them through his definitions of absolute and positive samadhi and the phases of each. Using Linji’s categorization of the conditions of mind, Sekida describes the permutations and combinations of inner and outer focus (concerns) in clear and easily comprehensible terms.  He also makes an important point of self-mastery as the difference between true samadhi and false samadhi.   This, of course, is my hobby-horse – that litmus test between mindfulness based in ethics and mindfulness as a utilitarian strategy for the petty ego.

Sekida also clarifies the experience of kensho in one simple sentence (underlined below):

It may be, therefore, that the sound of a stone striking a bamboo trunk, or the sight of blossoms, makes a vivid impression, and you experience the wonderful moment of realization we call kensho. In this moment, you seem to see and hear beautiful things, but the truth is that you yourself have become beautiful and exalted.  Kensho is the recognition of your own purified mind.

It doesn’t get more transparent than that.

The book ends with a chapter on the Ox Herding Series.  I found it lovely but too much of a shift away from the dropping deep process of practice and realization of mind that marked the previous chapters.  Nevertheless, Sekida does offer some interesting links of his concepts of the physiology of practice and the spiritual metaphor of herding the Ox as steps in cultivating samadhi.  At times it seems prescriptive or predictive of what might happen as practice progresses.  At times it is reassuring that even on the journey of finding and mastering the Ox, there are ebbs and flows of gaining and failing.  I appreciated this the most in Sekida’s teaching: the Ox Herder is not simply a master of the capture and taming but truly the Everyman, vulnerable yet full of potential.

Finally, kudos to Marc Allen for putting together a very portable book packed full of generous teachings.  It’s one I will certainly stick in my pack and pull out often.