Manual Labor of the Mind

It's a Scary World out There by BGLewandowski

I wasn't sure whether to add a post before I depart for Sesshin -- this time it's Koans Sesshin! Big, bad, scary, super-Zen-y, Rinzai-style Koans Sesshin! Stirring up the hungry ghosts and scary thoughts in my mind just in time for Halloween.

How did I even end up on the path of Zen, anyway? I think in some alternate reality, I am really a Vipassana practitioner. I love colorful scarves and shawls, and would love to wear them while meditating with the community. Or maybe I'm a Shambhala practitioner at heart. There's a common stereotype about Zen that it's the most hard-core, and the Vipassana and the Shambhala practitioners are so much gentler. I have a very high tolerance for fidgeting in the Zendo, and can sometimes feel out of place with what seem to me like a bunch of stone Buddhas. But now I have more black shirts and pants than anyone I know. And I pack nearly every one of them in a big suitcase to stay one week at the monastery where nobody is looking at me.

It's all just pre-Sesshin jitters. Pre-Sesshin jitters are very interesting to watch. The small mind just knows the jig is up, and that it will not get to live in the manner to which it has become accustomed. It can get very energetic and create some mighty delectable and hard-to-resist trains of thought.

I am also noticing that the more I go, the less I understand why I do.

Anyway, I was inspired, as I usually am, by the Dalai Grandma. Today, she writes about that tender feeling of compassion for those who leave Sangha, or leave the practice of meditation because they think they can't meditate, or it has become too hard. Which it is. Hard. Which is why we need to be so compassionate to ourselves in practice. And yet disciplined. Sheesh. She explains it a lot better than I do! Give a bow to the Dalai Grandma.

I have kept the July issue of the Shambhala Sun right by my computer, because I have been meaning to turn a few sentences of an article from it into a blog entry. Again, this koan of Right Effort.

Here are a few snippets from "It's Not Us and Them" by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche:

Because as practitioners we are doing something that is good and wholesome, we too have difficulties. It’s important for us not to give up. We should not be foolishly seduced into fantasy, thinking that somehow something miraculous is going to happen. When it comes right down to it, the practice path is manual labor of the mind, and it’s hard work. But that doesn’t mean that there is no magic. When we pay attention to the details of our life, we do find magic. This particular magic is all-pervasive; it is something that is part of us all the time. Seeing it, we appreciate the honesty of this spiritual tradition that says we have to work to uncover it.

With gentleness and mindfulness, we can appreciate what we have....

...we all need to practice responsibility and discipline ourselves. We must look at our own habits and begin to alter them. We can’t hire out our practice and have somebody else do the work, but we can do the manual labor with delight and decency. True relief lies in finding what lies under the chaos and negativity—our inherent awakened nature. The notion of fearlessness is finding it now.

Manual labor of the mind.

I believe it was last year on Sesshin when I was assigned to groundskeeping, and was a crew leader for a team of us assigned to dig out blackberry crowns. Not cut them to the ground -- that had already been done. But digging them out, digging down to the root ball and removing the whole plant once and for all. That is the stated goal.

The reality is not even close. More often, the roots travel sideways in many directions, and wrap around and under big rocks the shovel clanks on. Then it's digging up a big rock. The roots also wrap around and hide under tree roots, so it is hard to know what to dig out and what continued digging might be harming a tree. More often than not the blackberry roots get cut by the shovel, and end up escaping and not found again, and then there's a huge series of holes that need to be filled back in. Factor in rain, or mud, or cold.

Workhorses, SoulCollage card by Laura

At one point, checking in with one of my workmates, who was not feeling well, we broke Noble Silence. She said, "It's no use. These are all just going to grow back."

I realized then one of the reasons for Noble Silence. Her words echoed in my head for days.

But sometimes, I could find the crown-- some people called it the heart, one person called it the brain -- the tangly ball that is the source of the lanky, leggy, stickery, pervasive blackberries. I started calling it the shin -- the heart /mind. Sometimes I would find it, and successfully dig it out. Only then could I know that at least this one blackberry plant would not return.

At the monastery, they say everyone who is assigned to the blackberries for work practice always returns saying "It was just like my mind!"

I enjoy this kind of manual labor. I know nature can and often will just grow right back without some regular maintenance. It's so obvious. So unarguable.

This practice keeps saying that the result is not what's important. Matching reality to a picture I have in my mind is not what this is about. It's the process, including the compassion I might bring to a wholesome day of work, whether that is shoveling around in the mud at the monastery, or just pinching the spent geranium blossoms, or lying down because I'm bone tired.

It's our intention --- to just be open to the experience of this life. Simple. Not easy.

Maybe there are ways to meditate lightly, to do what you can, still maintaining the essentials. What are those? The intention, I think. It has to move from being the hope to feel peaceful or to rest to being something more, like the hope to be fully human, to be entirely with it for this moment.
~The Dalai Grandma

Life Among the Brambles by bibliona