Are You Not Entertained?

You might be entertained by this post. It depends what you're after. If it's the latest and greatest zen master scandal then you'll surely be disappointed.

A guy I know who lives in San Diego and teaches Yoga has been doing zen meditation for probably twenty years, most of it with Charlotte Joko Beck. He's a pretty interesting guy and he's always been very adamant that sitting every single day come rain or come shine is important.

And yet just recently I heard that he no longer sits at all. Doesn't attend sessions at the zen center or with Joko or any of it. He claims that he just works on his awareness throughout his life at this point and no longer sees a reason to specifically set aside time for zazen each day.

My buddy Dylan was a little thrown when he spoke to this guy and heard those things. Like me, Dylan has been meditating for a long time, trying to deepen his practice and develop more of a routine and here this guy who has always been a mentor is giving up his practice entirely, it would seem.

Dylan's take on it was that it showed him that people's ideas change all the time and you can't really follow anyone else. You have to trust yourself, ultimately.

Of course! How many more times can this be pounded into my head before I get it? There really is no one to follow or depend on. I sometimes wonder what I would do if I found out that Steve (my teacher) never does the breathing practice anymore--or perhaps that he never did it in the first place.

Just how much of my practice is dependent upon things he told me, rather than my own experience? I mean, if tomorrow I found out that my mom no longer eats food and she is living off bourbon and cocaine, I wouldn't think, "damn, maybe food really isn't important after all!" I know from my own life experience that I need to eat, and that drinking bourbon and doing coke all day long isn't good for me.

But somehow with meditation it is different. I would argue it's much, much more subtle and therefore much more difficult to know what is working, what isn't, what feels right as opposed to what is right.

Yet however much more difficult it is to see the important or necessary aspects of my practice, only I can determine what I need to do in this arena. So why be disturbed if my teacher or a mentor stops doing any particular thing or starts doing something else? If I have learned anything, I should know that it's irrelevant what anybody else is doing.

As for me, I am still making sure to set aside 20 minutes every day to practice. I am still trying to bring that practice into my life on a moment to moment basis with varying degrees of success.