Repose and Bliss My Ass

Sesshin Strikes Again

“The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. . . . Traps and snares can never reach it.” Fukanzazengi , Eihei Dogen.

I am often struck, let’s make that always struck, by the sick feeling of dread I have every year as our winter sesshin approaches. Dark nights. Cold days. Unpredictable weather. Mild irregularity. Aching muscles. A foggy, sleepy brain. Hours of sitting and staring at the wall. What the hell am I doing this for?

On the other hand, I’ve been doing it for 25 years! I’m 71 years old! This feeling of dread is very much like—no, exactly like—what I experienced as a ten-year-old boy when I first encountered insomnia, heading up to my bedroom every night as if I were facing a firing squad, thinking hopelessly of the anxiety I was about to face. Or, for that matter, like the heart-pounding anxiety I faced every day as a fourteen-year-old, sitting in study hall waiting for football practice to begin. Why can’t I get over this? Why do I do it in the first place?

I do it because, even after my first retreat, in 1994, which was traumatic to the point of insanity, I noticed that I experienced much less dread and anxiety in my daily life. I have also, of course, had occasional experiences of clarity and oneness, which apparently arise out of nowhere, but which seem to represent our native state, our birthright. They do not, as I often wish they would, last forever. They don’t last more than an afternoon. But they are moments of paradise. Are they worth all the other crap I go through?

Actually, they are.

I was talking with a friend a few weeks before sesshin began; he has experienced retreats but no longer does them because of physical problems that prohibit him from sitting for long periods. He got started in spiritual practice—like many Westerners—by his experience of psychedelic drugs. Yet in even the best of his drug experiences, the most exalted, there was always another side to it, a traumatic side, to the point where, if he had a chance to do psychedelics again, at the age of 70, he’d probably say no, despite the fact that he had many deep religious experiences. The downside is too difficult. He can’t take it.

He was commiserating about my approaching sesshin.

This year I had a position of extreme responsibility, which added to the stress. There was a lot to think about, during this week when I was hoping not to think. But I’d held that position a number of times in the past, and the fact is that by the third day sesshin runs itself. Even if everyone forgets everything they’re supposed to do, or does everything wrong, people are still going to stumble into the zendo to sit and stare foggily at the wall for hours at a time. Sesshin does itself.

Things went well the first couple of days. I’m at a point now where sittings are rarely difficult physically, it’s only the mind that I have to worry about (I say only), but on Sunday afternoon I had a couple of periods of unusual, semi-orgasmic bliss. Naturally (even though I’ve been doing this for years and know that nothing lasts) I thought, Maybe every sitting for the rest of sesshin will be like this. So just as naturally, the last sitting of the afternoon—which lasts an hour[2]—turned out to be hell. It was actually hell from the moment I sat down. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong: was it that my body was tired? My mind? It was as if my energy were blocked. But I had the distinct feeling that something was working its way through me, I was getting rid of something I needed to, so I just let it happen. I sat the whole time. The evening sittings after dinner were ordinary and uneventful, and the next day went well.

Then on Monday night—which had been an energetic day physically, though my mind was full of endless repetitive thinking, combined with a soundtrack from the music I’d been listening to recently[3]—I lay down in bed and conked out almost immediately, only to wake up a few minutes later with my mind racing with thought, multiple pieces of music playing at once, all kinds of strange visions of grotesque people running through my head[4], many of them maimed and writhing in pain, and feelings of real horror. I felt that my mind—which I’d barely kept under control all day—had flipped a switch, or gone over the edge. I thought I was losing it. For real.

After a period of time I was able to say to myself, while it was still going on, this is bad, but it won’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Then my body began to undulate in bed. I was lying first on my side, then I lay on my back, and the undulations continued. It was as if I were getting shock therapy. It was also very much like what Wilhelm Reich called the orgasm response, an S-shaped movement of the body, though these orgasms didn’t feel pleasant. There was a feeling that energy was pouring out of me, just beneath my breastbone, that this writhing was shucking something off. But I absolutely could not stop it. My body was flopping like a fish. I was out of control.

I think the writhing went on for about an hour. Remarkably, it didn’t wake up my wife, who was sleeping beside me.

One thing that was running through my mind was, What if I can’t go in tomorrow? What if I really am nuts? What will they do without me? Another thought: I’ve been pushing too hard. I’ve been trying to be too good—and too strong—an example. I need to let up a little. Maybe I need to come home early tomorrow and unwind for a while, so I’ll have a better chance to sleep.

Or maybe I just can’t continue. Maybe this is the psychotic break I’ve been expecting for years. Maybe I’ve finally gone over the edge.

I had plenty of time to think of all that. Though the writhing eventually subsided, I didn’t get to sleep for the rest of the night.[5]

At about 4:00 AM my wife woke up and could tell I was lying awake. “How are you, Dave?” she said.

“Not too good,” I said. I told her what had happened.

She started to laugh. “This is just like what happened before.”

I had definitely gotten the shakes before, on the third or fourth night. It was what my wife called “discharging.”

“This was much worse,” I said.

“Who knows what your body-mind is doing this for,” she said. “It obviously has some purpose. It’s just lucky that it’s happening, and that you can have the container of the sesshin to go through it. It’s a safe place to do it.”

It didn’t feel safe to me.

The sesshin was safe. The dangerous place was my mind.

Among other things, this was what yogis of various stripes call a kundalini experience. I’d had them before, and I’d read the great and famous book on the subject, by a man who went through a kind of psychic hell. But I’d never expected such a thing to happen at this point. I’ve been practicing for 28 years, or whatever it is.

Despite my feeling in the middle of the night that I had to call out the National Guard, or perhaps be committed to an insane asylum, the next day, as I headed off to the zendo, I felt pretty good. I did dokusan[6] with my teacher, told her what had happened, and we both kind of shrugged. There was one time years ago when I did take a couple of hours off from sesshin (I went home and watched a basketball game, drank a beer), but I felt in this situation that I would be running away from what had happened, and that was never a good idea. I made the decision to stick it out, without her urging.

The rest of sesshin was, as the expression goes, uneventful. It had its ups and downs. No fireworks.

I sometimes think I am a physically tense person, that what happens during sesshin is that I get rid of some of that, the same way I used to get the shakes when I did Bioenergetic exercises, before I began Zen. I had a similar experience of discharge with a therapist once, the great Victor Zinn, who did various kinds of body therapy with me and once knelt beside me while I writhed on the ground for most of a session. Neither of us knew what the hell was going on. I sometimes think I get tense on sesshin because I’m pushing too hard, that I should learn not to do that, then my experience wouldn’t be so extreme. But I can’t seem to let up.

What I will say is that, from the time I was ten and had my first encounter with insomnia, my deepest spiritual insights have always been encounters with fear. It is fear that I need to collide with head on, and that also leads to my greatest insights.

The fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom. I feel that I’m still taking the first steps.

[2] Strictly speaking, it’s what we call Open Zazen. You can sit and walk as you like, for that entire hour. Yet as a senior student, and a person of high responsibility, I felt I had to sit the entire hour. I couldn’t be wimpy. I had to set an example.

[3] The famous 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert featuring Benny Goodman and a number of other greats. Imagine sitting zazen while listening to Sing, Sing, Sing.

[4] One odd feature of my retreats is that during long periods of meditation, if I close my eyes, I begin to see faces, often grotesque and distorted faces, like cartoon drawings. When I first saw them, I thought, my God, they’re monsters. They’re coming to get me. Years later I began to feel more settled. No, I thought to myself. They’re on my side. They’re my buddies. As I’ve begun to work at soup kitchens and food pantries in my retirement, they seem to resemble some of the people I see there. Suffering humanity.

[5] I’ve since come to wonder about that. The next day, when I spoke to my teacher, she said, “Do you think you were asleep while this was going on?” After all, what I was seeing seemed to be a bad bad dream, and how could I see it if my eyes weren’t closed. And the fact of the matter was that I felt fine the next day. I didn’t feel like a man who hadn’t slept. I felt better on Tuesday than I had on Monday.

[6] The individual meeting in which you meet with your teacher and tell her how nuts you are.