Our Baseline Experience

 

We are in week 4 of our Immersion!  The theme for this week is: Our Baseline Experience.  

 

After struggling for a couple of years in the monastery, trying so hard, really efforting in my practice, I started to get the sense that in some ways I was going in the wrong direction.  I started to see that my practice could not really be about how talented or intelligent or holy or brilliant or how hard I was working in my training. I knew that there were plenty of more talented monks than me, and I saw that they were not making any more progress than me. I saw that I was somehow looking in the wrong direction. 

 

In the evenings after a long day of Osesshin, sitting 18 hours a day, I would be on my futon doing the last bit of yaza (night sitting) before bed, and it would occur to me that the point of this practice could not be about my efforts or talent. I had tried so hard. I had broken my bones with my effort. It had to be something innate, something of the baseline of my experience, something everyone had, or it could not be my true nature. It could not be because of my superhuman effort, but the closest thing to me.  It could not be about going somewhere else, but right under my feet at all times. And I knew this in my guts. It was something visceral and necessarily true.

 

So something in me got really curious. Something in me started to turn around and look at my experience.  Where was there contradiction in my experience?  Where did it feel like I was fighting the most basic reality of my experience?  Was there something there all of the time?  Was there a fullness, a completeness, an energy there no matter what I did?  And when I began to let go into that truth at my feet, the big energy started to show up.  It was as if my experience regrouped and sealed. I was no longer scattered in my awareness, but oneness was just innately there. Oneness was trying to happen.  

 

But then I saw that when I moved, when I felt I needed to do something, I would accidentally step out of this oneness.  My old patterns were patterns of breaking out of oneness. Like, I did not know how to function or exist, especially with others when I was not separate from everything. My very existence in the world was a way of reinforcing separateness. And that now felt wrong. So that felt sense became my compass. I either felt good, or I felt disconnected, I lost brightness, I felt this unexplainable joy dissipate.  And so I made it my job to embody this unity.  To learn, like a little baby learning to crawl, I learned to stay with it little by little.  And the best part, really, is that it is at all times trying to happen.  I just have to feel and be sincere and let it happen. And honest, this is a loooooong process!  

 

So, what is your baseline experience?  What is under your feet?  There is no need to go get it anywhere else to find it! As my Roshi used to say, “Don’t chase shadows!”

 

Let’s explore this for week four of this Immersion. 

 

Thank you all so much! What a great group and what a special Immersion! I have seen some beautiful shifts thus far.

 

Core