Practicing with the Body You Have

Alive for It All: Wisdom for Everyday Life: The Teachings of Darlene Cohen by Cynthia Kear.  Zoshin Publishing.  176 pp.  $24.95.  *****

The Dharma Gate of Ease and Joy: Zazen for Every Body by Darlene Cohen and Beata Chapman.  Russian River Zendo.  62pp.  *****

If anyone was qualified to write a book about suffering, it was Darlene Cohen.  She arrived at the San Francisco Zen Center as a beautiful, vivacious, vigorously healthy woman in her twenties, iconoclastic but also dedicated to practice.  My teacher once told us that Darlene was the woman all the men at the Zen Center had the hots for (I don’t think she put it that way, but that’s what she meant).  At the age of 35 Darlene was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that had also afflicted her mother, and became someone for whom every physical action was difficult.

She describes at one point walking from her apartment to the Zen Center and not having the strength to climb the three or four steps to the entrance.  This from a woman who had taken long runs while living at Tassajara.  It would have been easy for her to abandon Zen altogether, to say that she couldn’t do so vigorous a physical practice, but after a period of transition (I can imagine it took a while) she decided it must be possible to practice with the body she had.  And she became a spokeswoman for people with bodies that were limited in some way.  That includes all of us sooner or later.

The medication that she was taking for her arthritis compromised her immune system, so after a period of time she was stricken with ovarian cancer, which was another severe physical limitation.  But she continued to find ways to practice, and to work as a body worker, also to teach at various places (I was stunned when I read how many sanghas she associated with, three or four).  So she was a dharma teacher, body worker, and prolific writer, not apparently limited by her illnesses and worked at all those things until the cancer took her life in 2011.

Darlene in her lifetime published four books, Arthritis: Stop Suffering, Start Moving; Finding a Joyful Life in the Heart of Pain, which she later revised and published as Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain; and The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way.  She and Beata Chapman also created a booklet with illustrations by Chuck Overly about how to practice with physical limitations.  It is the booklet I recommend to anyone who is having difficulty with the traditional zazen postures, even to people who aren’t.  The five or six pages about zazen in this booklet are some of the most incisive words I’ve ever read on the subject.

Now one of Darlene’s dharma heirs, Cynthia Kear, has published a new book of Darlene’s teaching, including dharma talks and articles from magazines.  Kear includes her own commentary on some of the work, and remembrances by a number of Darlene’s students.  It may be self-published (I can’t find anything on the internet about Zoshin Publishing), but it is beautifully done, and includes some great photographs.  It’s a little pricey but worth every penny.

While she was alive, Darlene maintained a website, and she wrote a passage there that struck me when I first read it, and became a lodestar I kept returning to.  She included it also in Turning Suffering Inside Out.  I’m not sure why certain phrasings strike us more than others (she was really just saying what other people had said in other ways), but these words always brought me back on track.

“When Chogyam Trungpa wrote in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior that ‘the human potential for intelligence and dignity is attuned to experiencing the objects around us, the brilliance of the blue sky, the freshness of green fields, and the beauty of the trees and mountains,’ I think he was suggesting that our intelligence and dignity themselves are developed by our being alive for the mundane chaos of our lives.  If we cultivate awareness of our actual experience, without reference to any preconceived idea, then we don’t prefer any state of mind.  Intimacy with our activity and the objects around us connects us deeply to our lives.  This connection—to the earth, our bodies, our sense impressions, our creative energies, our feelings, other people—is the only way I know of to alleviate suffering.  To me awareness of these things without preference is a meditation that synchronizes body and mind.  This synchronization, the experience of deep integrity, of being all of a piece, is a very deep healing.  It is unconventional to value such a subtle experience.  It is not encouraged in our culture.  We’re much more apt to strive to feel special, uniquely talented, particularly loved.  It’s extraordinary to be willing to live an ordinary life, to be fully alive for the laundry, to be present for the dishes.  We overlook these everyday connections to our lives, waiting for The Event.”

There is also a passage in The Dharma Gate of Ease and Joy, one that I sometimes turn to when I’m confused about what I’m doing in zazen (that happens more than I’d like to admit, after thirty years of practice).  She’s speaking of what some teachers call Choiceless Awareness, or The Method of No Method; she used the words simultaneous inclusion, and explained how it is based in the body.

“Simultaneous inclusion is much more challenging [than just following the breathing].  It boggles the mind.  Because it boggles the mind, the body provides the stability to enable [it].  That is why it was necessary for Dogen to set out the essentials of zazen.  Zazen is a tantric practice, requiring the full synergy of body and mind.  This is why posture is so emphasized in zazen and Zen practice.  Certain bodily factors must be in place before the mind is able to simultaneously include the totality of experience as the object of focus.”

The one thing many of her students said in their memories of their teacher is that she encouraged body to body practice.  She felt that the physical presence of the teacher was important (something that we can lose sight of in these days of online teaching).  People seemed to learn the most from just hanging around with her, spending a day together, having meals.  One woman said it was a major teaching for her to see the way Darlene savored her breakfast tea (the hot cup, which she held with both hands, helped with her arthritis).

This is a woman who, in dealing with an overbearing teacher, once took her through the car wash and lowered the window on that woman’s side (her teacher, remarkably, seemed to recognize and accept the criticism); who insisted on wearing makeup and earrings in the zendo; who sewed a purple okesa (I believe the more accurate word is fuchsia; there are several photos of this striking garment in the book); who gave a lecture in which, disagreeing with Thich Nhat Hanh on the precept about sexuality, she said it might be important for young women to have a variety of sexual experiences, not just with people they “loved”; who, when she was the bath attendant at Tassajara, called out, “Cover your eyes, boys, I’m comin’ in”; who said, in the midst of a group of women who surrounded her within days of her death, “I don’t believe in karma or any of that shit” (I found that anecdote in The Hidden Lamp.  She left us ten guidelines for practice, beginning with, “Always assume these are the perfect conditions under which to practice” and ending with “Don’t be cool, detached, sophisticated.  Be alive to it all,” followed by one last guideline.  “Eat chocolate.”

This is a delightful and inspiring book, unlike any other dharma book you’ve read.  You’ll want to own it.