Voices: Mind Wide Open

My head was a mess, muddled by a lack of sleep and the awkward pang
of pressure in my ears.

My tired eyes gazed out the window to witness Arizona’s miniature
splendor unfurl. The plane’s engine grumbled along, and the soft sounds
of 100 sleepy strangers hung loosely in the packaged air of the plane;
the intimate whispers of families and couples coalesced into a sea of
snores and yawns.

The beauty of this moment was lost on me. My head, limp against the
stiff seatback, was too consumed with itself to pay attention to
anything else.

I thought about the discomfort of the chair, of the despondent haze
of my thoughts, of this pale and tired body that fits so awkwardly into
its own skin. I wanted to be warm and asleep in my bed. I wanted to be
talking to my friends. This desire to be somewhere else permeated the
air of the plane.

Gradually, the dim corridor of the plane sprang to life as the sun
curved its way around the Earth and sent rosy rays crashing off the
clouds and into my window. It was as if the sun’s rays had dissolved
that cage of discomfort I’d created for myself and left my vision
unobscured. That moment, that fraction of a fraction of an inhale of
breath, stood in a brilliant unadorned clarity. The painfully awkward
sensation of being 30,000 feet in the sky in a tiny chair with no sleep
took on a new quality. It was no longer problematic. It just
was.

I was flying from Tucson to Santa Fe, N.M., on my way to a Zen
meditation retreat, on the recommendation of my mentor, Mae Lee, who
has been guiding my philosophical inquiry into Zen Buddhism. At the
retreat, I would sit on a round, black cushion on the floor for five
hours with my eyes open to a room full of people silently doing the
same, observing the mind and the thing called “Me.”

Local poet and meditator Matthew Rotando describes meditation as
“the practice of cultivating a mind of calm, a mind of equanimity, a
mind that is open to joy in the everyday and, in some ways, less
filtered with all the hang-ups and issues of the scattered mind.”

The zendo (a Zen Buddhist term for “meditation hall”) is situated in
the hills outside of Santa Fe and is led by Zen master Sydney Walter.
Walter describes Zen practice as “being aware of what is happening, but
just being aware of it, without judgments and opinions about it. Just
noticing.”

He says, “Zen practice offers us a state of mind, an awareness, a
realization that whether one is discontent or content doesn’t make all
that much difference, because on one level, you realize that everything
is just as it needs to be; everything is perfect the way it is.”

This was my epiphany on the plane: I had shifted my mind’s focus to
the present moment. I wasn’t comparing it to the events, feelings and
thoughts that had occurred before it. I wasn’t imagining what was going
to happen next. I was simply aware of it as an indefinable experience,
as a mystery.

The intrinsically mysterious nature of the “present” is something I
have lost touch with for a large period of my 17-year-old life. I
really never knew what the present moment was—can
anyone?—but the mathematics, science and language I was taught in
school made me think I did. These ways of thinking were so forcefully
insisted upon that I mistook them for reality. They were like the
guidebook on a trip to the Taj Mahal: Not paying attention to the
present moment was like looking at a picture of the Taj Mahal in the
guidebook when I was actually there and could appreciate the enormous
intricacy of its existence in person.

Regardless of the insistent societal encouragement to deconstruct my
experience, there have always been moments when the lines between the
categories of my mind blur into oblivion, like that moment of brilliant
clarity on the plane. Experiences like these have intrigued me to no
end, because they rid my mind of anxiety and leave me completely
fulfilled in a lasting way that nothing else ever has. These moments
and the ideas surrounding them are the reason I was on my way to the
Zen meditation retreat, to practice finding comfort in situations that
would typically be considered uncomfortable.

In total, the one-day retreat was about five hours of sitting
meditation interspersed with walking meditation and a silent tea break.
During those five hours, there’s no talking or socializing. The
meditation hall was a long room with big windows facing New Mexico’s
expansive scenery. It took up the entire second floor of the house of
David Brighton, a metal engraver who hosts the retreats and assists
with the teaching at the zendo.

When I sat down for meditation, my mind drifted between several
states. At times, I was able to immerse myself in the present moment.
It was during those moments that I felt as if I had been given the
antidote to my discomfort, to my desire to be somewhere else and
feeling something different. In those instants, my attention was
finally focused on the only thing I could be sure of: the soft
breathing of eight straight-backed bodies sitting cross-legged on the
floor; the sun coming through the clouds and into the room through the
windows, bouncing off white walls and into my eyeballs; the warmth it
presented my skin; the dead tingling sensation crawling up and down my
legs; the dull ache of my knees; the nerves in my back ablaze with
sensation.

Sitting in the zendo, I had no compulsion to remove myself from that
experience, because I’d slowly realized, through study and meditation,
that I was that experience. There was no self that could be
removed from it, that could escape it. My mind was just a reflection of
everything around it, all of the sights, sounds, sensations, tastes,
smells, thoughts and feelings. To want to escape the present experience
just because it’s not pleasurable is the same as wanting to escape the
self, and the experience of wanting to escape the self is an
aggravating and painful one.

Rotando describes this compulsion to escape the present experience
while meditating: “I have this leg pain from sitting in my meditation
posture for half an hour, and this leg pain—I don’t like it, I
don’t like it, I don’t like it. I wish it would go away, I wish it
would go away. You may not be repeating those words to yourself, but
you may be thinking that while you try to meditate, and all of that is
binding you up; it’s making the whole experience crappy.”

The other obstacle to paying attention to the present moment during
meditation is the tendency of the mind to not sit still.

“It’s a monkey. It grabs from branch to branch; it never wants to
just sit in the tree and relax and breathe,” says Rotando. “(The mind)
immediately wants to think about what I’m going to have for dinner, or
about a conversation I had earlier that day with somebody that really
pissed me off, and I should have said this to them, and I didn’t. It is
very hard to just say to yourself, ‘OK, I’m going to bring myself back
to my breathing. I’m going to bring myself into the awareness of this
present moment,’ because we are so tuned up with these practices of
thinking about the future, of the past, about what’s coming next at the
end of this half-hour meditation.”

It wasn’t until I got home from the retreat that I fully realized
that the real practice of Zen takes place not only during meditation,
but also in our daily lives. It is simply putting forth the constant
effort to be aware of the present experience, to not get lost in the
haze of our judgments and opinions about the experience, but to just
experience it all, unobstructed by name and form.

At 5 in the morning, I boarded a shuttle bus to catch my flight back
to Tucson. The world was covered in frost and full of fog. The
shuttle’s headlights burned brightly in an effort to make the road
visible and definite, but only succeeded in illuminating the mysterious
and languid clouds of fog that wrapped the city in an ethereal
embrace.

The headlights shining on the fog reminded me of Zen practice, of
spending so much time pondering these ideas just to illuminate the
beauty of not knowing. I stared out the window at the foggy
street lights rushing by. Each one passed in front of my eyes in an
instant and then disappeared, only to be replaced by another. It made
it clear to me that every moment is completely new, freshly
birthed.

This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.