http://wwzc.webfactional.com/book/dharma-assembly-too-intimate-be-personal
Intimacy is simply being open to the intimacy of experiencing
which is already present and always available. This is what Zen
practice actually is: opening to this openness, being a
bodhisattva.
Intimacy is the recognition that everything within your life is
alive AS your life. Every moment of experiencing, regardless of how
you feel about it, regardless of what you think of it, is this
intimacy, and everything you experience points to this intimacy
whether you recognize it or not. Zen practice is seeing how we turn
away from this intimacy and releasing this contraction.
On your way into the monastery this morning, you walked through
the Sanmon, the Mountain Gate, and up the stone path. On either
side of the stones of the path, an array of colours met your eyes
as the many different greens of ferns and moss, the small flowering
plants and ground cover. The air in the monastery grounds,
cooled by the water in the ponds, is cooler than the air down the
street. Did you feel how it was soft on your skin? And as you
walked on the path, step after step, you were being observed by
countless birds from overhead branches or from inside the thick
hedge, calling from all directions. Perhaps you noticed some of
these details. Perhaps you were so caught up in just ‘getting into
the building on time’ that you missed most of this.Perhaps you were
even thinking about what you would do after you left or what was
happening before you came or even last week or something that has
never happened and never will. In any case, whether you were
allowing attention to open to those details or not, there was
intimacy with your life. The question is, how intimate were you
with your life? How responsive were you? If your attention was
folded down into contraction, you will have noticed very little
about that walk up the pathway. So you see, this intimacy we are
speaking of is not something you are ever denied, it is something
you can choose to open to.
You don’t have to wait for experiencing to be arranged in a
certain way or for you to be interested in how experiencing is to
open to this intimacy. Even when you are not feeling well, when
you’re tired or grumpy, you can still be intimate with
experiencing. You can have a pounding headache and still open
attention to the context in which you and the pounding of your head
are taking place because you are aware of the headache. The
question is - what is it that is aware? How is it that you are
aware of anything at all? If you have a headache, trying to
manipulate it with your practice isn’t going to cure it. Take an
aspirin if you want to change it. But while it’s going on, practise
with it. Practice isn’t about manipulating experiencing so that you
can limit and contain it and only experience what you want to
experience. You can’t control reality. You can influence it, but if
your attention is contracted, you will inevitably influence it in
ways that will deepen contraction.
Wanting to manipulate experience by turning practice into a
strategy or a formula is a misunderstanding that beginning students
in particular fall into. This strategizing comes up while sitting
zazen, but also when you’re not sitting. It comes up concerning
work issues such as dissatisfaction with a job or a career, or a
living situation, but also with more personal issues such as
relationships. This is why you spend so much of your sitting time
pondering these issues - you think that if you just spend enough
time thinking about them, you’ll reach some state of perfect mental
clarity and you’ll know exactly what to do; you’ll have the formula
for it, the cure. And of course, the fact that all of this is only
going on inside your head and reality is not inside your head is
something that you will tend to overlook when you’re really caught
up in it.
Because you spend so much time thinking about strategies and
designing formulas for yourselves, topics of this sort will also
come up from time to time in practice interviews and daisan. It’s
not that this is a problem - far from it, students are welcome to
bring up any topic they wish to discuss in interviews and daisan.
But I think it’s important to understand how limiting this can
be.
If you ask a practice advisor to tell you how you should respond
to your boss or your significant other when they say or do this or
that, yes, the practice advisor could probably put together a
response that would be very clever. But the problem is that if they
were to do that, all they would be giving you is one of many
possible solutions to this particular problem and it’s not YOUR
solution. You won’t have learned anything from that. Why? Because
what you’ve asked for is a formula that will only work in a very
specific set of conditions. The next time an issue comes up, that
formula won’t work because the circumstances will be different. And
there’s no guarantee that it will work anyway, because the practice
advisor or Dharma Teacher is not IN that situation and does not
know all of the details of it.
What we can do, however, is talk about the habitual patterns
that people tend to fall into so that they can recognize them and
avoid certain pitfalls.
Everyone wants intimacy but there are many things people call
‘intimacy’ and most are not intimate at all. Many are what
you settle for when you are not really being intimate with your
life - the touchy-feelly kind of intimacy people try to share that
comes and goes and goes and is gone more often than it is present.
There are many patterns people engage in around this, so I will
bring up a few of them.
Relationships aren’t all they’re made out to be. As Anzan roshi
has often pointed out, ninety-five percent of the time you’re
trying not to get in trouble with the other person. Another five
percent can be nice or kind of nice, or just slightly better than
not being in trouble. And for the last five percent, which is
spread throughout, you’re in trouble. This is not intimacy, it’s
the result of following habitual patterns that involve a lot of
‘leaning’. People who are in intimate relationships do tend
to lean on each other a great deal and I don’t mean the kind of
leaning one does with an injured hip. No, the other kind of leaning
- wanting someone to prop you up, jolly you out of your states or
distract you from them. When people are sad or angry or confused,
there is the expectation that the other person will be available to
hear their stories, sympathize with them and try to make them feel
better and this can become more than a full-time job, it can become
a life-long job. Even if there is something really serious going
on, your first obligation as concerns your states, is to work with
them yourself. Looking to another person to do this for you is
sheer laziness. When both parties do this to excess, their time
together is spent primarily looking at each other, continuously
trying to gauge the kind of states that are present, day after day
after day.
If I were to use a metaphor for good and bad relationships, it
would be this: There are two people walking down the street
together and as they walk, they are looking at the sky, the ground,
the trees, the buildings and perhaps commenting on those. Or they
might talk to one another about possibilities that may unfold for
them or they may just walk together in silence. But they are
attentive to the details of the walking, of their surroundings, and
that of course includes each other, but without an enormous sense
of problem. A bad relationship is like two people walking down the
street but they are seeing nothing but each other. They watch each
other, continually worrying about what the other is thinking, what
facial expressions might mean, wondering what is going on in the
other person’s mind, wondering about their relationship, wondering
“do you love me?” which is stifling and claustrophobic.
Relationships with other people, be it with a significant other
or family members or friends, provide us with countless
opportunities to notice how the three klesas determine for us the
criteria by which someone is worthwhile or not. If your attention
is bound up by habitual patterns of contraction, then these will
dictate how you view other people. Again, first and foremost, it is
your responsibility to work with your own states and habitual
patterns. Because these are so habitual and you feel so justified
in propagating them, your attention becomes consumed by them and it
is very difficult to for you to recognize that they are even
present unless you make the effort to open attention. And I mean as
much of the time as is possible. Any state you experience has one
agenda and that is to continue itself. Practice is about
interrupting states. It’s not convenient and it is never habitual.
It requires an effort to open to reality in the midst of your life.
But there is time to do this and there is space in your life to
practice. If you can find the time to spend as much time as you do
lost in habitual thoughts and feelings, you can find the time to
practice.
The intimacy people wish to find in their relationships does not
begin as romantic engagement. It doesn’t start with becoming
personal with another person. Real intimacy is intimacy with your
whole life and it is only to the extent that you can be intimate
with your own life that you can be intimate with the life of
another. I think this is really quite obvious. If your attention is
so folded down that you are spending a good portion of your time
lost in storylines and feelingtones and strategies, you make
yourself unavailable and unresponsive to reality. Other people are
not your thoughts and feelings about them.
If you are in a relationship that was formed on a weak
foundation and you practice, it may fall apart. And that won’t be
because practising will make you cold or indifferent. It will be
because you will begin to understand what intimacy really is. If
you are in a relationship that was built on a strong foundation and
practise it will become even stronger, even more intimate. The
reason for this is that intimacy is too intimate to be personal.
The intimacy of the bodhisattva, of one who is opening to openness
is not just intimacy with another person, it is intimacy with the
whole of one’s experiencing. It includes other people but is not
dependent on other people. And this intimacy is something you can
practise right now.
When you are sitting and choose to open past your storylines to
feel the actual contact of thumb against thumb, you are practising
intimacy. A step in kinhin is intimacy with the sensations of the
foot, the texture of the floor beneath the foot and the coolness of
the air that passes beneath the foot as it is lifted to take the
next step. And further, opening attention to the whole bodymind,
balanced and at ease, intimate with the sensations of the warmth
and weight of the hands held in shashu resting against the
diaphragm, feeling the breath come and go; moving through the space
of the room; opening to the seeing as you move through the space
and the space moves past you and intimate with the space of
experiencing in which all of this is occurring, When you pay
attention to the sensations of the bodymind, the sounds you are
hearing and the colours and forms you are seeing, you are opening
past self-absorption - this same self-absorption that limits and
constricts the relationships you have with other people. This
intimate practice of zazen shows you how your attention abstracts
and recoils from present experiencing so that you can release
contraction and become intimate with the life that lives as all
lives, as your life.
There is much more to look into concerning these topics and we
shall continue to do so in the next Dharma Talk.