CHAPTER
4

Zazen: Seated Meditation

In This Chapter

While there are countless techniques and methods people will recommend to you that are supposed to improve your life, meditation is one that has withstood the test of time. Humans have been practicing meditation for thousands of years, and probably will always do so. There are images of people seated cross-legged in meditation, carved in stone, that predate recorded history, so you’re pretty safe in assuming there’s something useful about the practice.

The central Zen method is zazen, or seated meditation. It’s a relatively simple kind of meditation that in its pure form doesn’t involve visualizations, chanting, special breathing techniques, or attempts to work yourself into an altered state. In fact, zazen is so simple it can be very difficult! Many people find that the first several years of meditation practice involve just figuring out, through personal experience, what it even means to do zazen. The basic instruction is “just sit,” but when you try to do that you will probably find yourself wondering what that really means. Does it mean to be without thoughts? Does it mean to feel calm? Does it involve a profound experience, or is it inherently boring? If you think you’re just sitting, you might wonder, is this it?

Zazen is a multifaceted practice and experience. There’s no perfect description of the method or final way to judge whether it’s being done “correctly.” This is because it’s about attentively being, and your attentively being is going to keep changing depending on how long you’ve been practicing zazen, your conditions, your life experience, and your understanding.

In one sense your zazen is exactly the same the first time you sit and when you sit after 30 years of daily practice. In another sense it’s different every time. So if you feel a little overwhelmed by trying to wrap your mind around zazen, don’t be surprised or discouraged. This chapter will be a good introduction to the practice itself, techniques you can use, some potential pitfalls, and some of the reasons zazen is beneficial. It will be enough to get you started on your own exploration of this simple but elusive practice.

Physical Instructions for Zazen

The practice of zazen has physical and mental aspects. I’ll first describe the physical process. Once you’re in the right position, I’ll tell you how to get started with the mental part.

The bottom line for zazen is that you want to be seated in a position in which you are both comfortable and alert, in a setting that is not too distracting. Our goal in zazen is simply to be here now, so it doesn’t require a special posture, special equipment, or a special setting. In fact, if you think zazen requires such things, you may have a ready excuse not to do it very often.

A Straight, Upright Spine

In terms of posture, the most important thing is to have an erect spine. This allows you to maintain the spirit of zazen: alert, dignified, and collected. If you slouch or lean against something, you’ll become drowsy or your mind will become dull or lazy. Try it! There really is no separation between mind and body; it’s very difficult to keep the spirit of zazen if you’re slouching.

When your spine is in the correct alignment for zazen, there is a slight concave curve in your lower back. You shouldn’t be stiff, and your stomach muscles shouldn’t be overly tight. At the same time, there should be energy in your spine; it should feel like there’s space between each vertebra. Try taking a full breath of air and then letting the air out without allowing your body to shrink. That’s the kind of erectness you want!

Proper alignment of the spine in zazen

Positioning the Rest of Your Body

There are many different ways to position the rest of your body in order to get this nice, erect spine. Choose a posture that’s right for your body. Whether seated on the floor, on a chair, or on a kneeling bench (more on those later), your knees should ideally be below your hips. This causes your hips to rotate forward a bit, which in turn encourages that natural curve in your lower back.

If you can’t get your knees lower than your hips, they at least shouldn’t be any higher! I’ve seen lots of people with limited hip flexibility determined to sit down on the floor; their knees end up in the air and their back ends up convex and slouched. In this case they would do better to sit on a bench or a chair.

Burmese cross-legged position from front

If you have the flexibility to sit cross-legged on the floor, sit on the front edge of a substantial cushion or pillow. This tilts your body forward so your knees end up lower than your hips. Don’t sit on the floor without a pillow, because you will either slouch or end up with a sore back from all the effort you’re making to stay upright.

You can tuck your legs together in front of you in whatever way is comfortable as long as your spine remains in alignment and your legs and feet don’t fall asleep. It helps to avoid tucking your feet under your legs. A popular position for crossed legs is called Burmese, where the calves are pulled in close to the body, but one is in front of the other (as opposed to one being on top of the other).

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Many people think meditation requires you to sit cross-legged on the floor, but that’s not the case. If you are capable of such a posture, you may appreciate the sense of stability you get from being down on the floor. If you cannot sit cross-legged on the floor without pain, or without compromising the erectness of your spine, please don’t do it! Almost all Western Zen centers provide benches and chairs for zazen in addition to the traditional floor cushions.

You can also maintain the proper erect spine while sitting in a chair or on a kneeling bench. If you sit in a chair, make sure you aren’t leaning backward. Use a folding chair rather than a stuffed one, or put a pillow behind your back so you sit upright, or sit forward on the edge of the chair. Kneeling (or seiza) benches are specially made meditation benches about 6 to 8 inches high that you place over your calves while you’re in a kneeling position. Then you sit down on the bench, and your knees end up lower than your hips and your spine lines right up.

Zazen while sitting on a chair

Physical discomfort during zazen is not unusual. Some discomfort is your body getting used to the posture, and will go away over time. However, if the pain doesn’t go away, pay attention. Try a different posture, or get some advice on your posture from a meditation or yoga teacher. Zazen is not meant to be painful.

Sitting on a kneeling, or seiza, bench

I strongly recommend that you keep your eyes open. Many people like meditating with their eyes closed because it feels less distracting, but this usually leads to drowsiness or daydreaming (there are plenty of distractions inside your own head). It also helps to support your effort to meditate if you fold your hands neatly in your lap.

Where and When to Do Zazen

You can “do” zazen anywhere: indoors, outdoors, in a formal meditation hall, or in your bedroom. I’ve done zazen on the floor of a bathroom because it was the only truly private place in my house! What’s important is that there are minimal distractions. Noise or clutter might be fine; the question is, what’s a distraction for you? What’s going to pull you away from just being there? For most of us such things include television, music, computers, cell phones, and nearby conversations. Traditionally we do zazen facing a wall so we can’t even distract ourselves with the scenery.

Sit zazen regularly, even daily, if you can. The classic zazen period is 30 to 40 minutes, but it’s fine if you can’t sit that long (or don’t have time to do so). The longer you sit the more likely your mind will settle, but it’s better to sit regularly for 10 or 15 minutes at a time than to sit for 40 minutes only once a month, because sitting that long feels burdensome.

CONSIDER THIS

It can be very helpful to talk to a Zen teacher or long-term practitioner about your experience of meditation. He or she can give you advice about posture and mental techniques that is specifically tailored to your physique, personality, history, and circumstances.

Mental Instructions for Zazen

This brings us to the mental aspects of zazen: how do you just sit? The next section goes into greater detail about what we are trying to do with our minds (or, more appropriately, what we are trying not to do with our minds). This section gives the basic instructions for what to do once you’ve taken your zazen posture.

First, notice where you are and what you are experiencing. Try to do this with a minimum of commentary or analysis. Just notice: it’s afternoon … it’s warm … there’s some traffic noise …there’s an itch on my leg …. Just be where you are, when you are, how you are.

Most things that attract your attention also inspire some commentary or analysis, so it can be helpful to rest your attention on some simple, relatively constant sensory input from the present. One of the best sources of such input is your own breath. When you find your mind wandering, you can just return your attention to your breath. There’s nothing magical about concentrating on the breath or other physical sensations, but at least it brings you back to the present.

Don’t forget that your thoughts are also just part of what’s happening. According to Buddhist teachings, the mind is the sixth sense organ, and what it senses is thoughts. Thoughts are not a problem, nor are the emotions associated with them. Unless you either get caught up in them or try to push them away, they just arise and pass away. The thought may occur to you, “I’ve got to get groceries.” No big deal. Just try not to let the thought lead to an elaborate supper plan.

And that’s it. Except that you will return to the present over and over and over. Zazen can be frustrating or boring at times, but you need to keep working on your ability to return to the present, to what’s really in front of you, instead of continually mulling over what only exists in the abstract in your mind. This ability can be extremely useful when you’re faced with challenges or traumatic experiences.

Exercise for Your Attention

Unless you pay attention to something, you can’t fully perceive, understand, or remember it. It’s incredibly useful to have the ability to put your attention on something and hold it there for as long as you need to. Fortunately, attention can be strengthened like a muscle, and zazen practice is partly about exercising your attention muscle. Not only does this improve your daily life, it’s also important for the cultivation of Zen insight. Once you have some ability to put your attention where you want it to be, you can focus on deeper questions that take some time to unlock.

Habitual Mind Is Monkey Mind

Most people, without some conscious attention training, suffer from what Zen calls monkey mind. This is a mind that leaps from object to object with a curious, greedy energy, but without an overall purpose. It’s a short-term thinking mind that will let go of the banana it has in hand as soon as it spots a riper-looking piece of fruit. It gets so caught up in seizing on newly arising thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences that it rarely stays still long enough to thoroughly perceive or understand something.

Another aspect of habitual mind is your inability to control it. It may sound harsh to want to “control” your mind, but the reality of the situation is more like you are usually controlled by monkey mind and don’t have any choice about it. Monkey mind is set on fantasizing about your vacation rather than focusing on the work you have to finish before you go. You struggle to concentrate but end up taking much longer to get your work done than you ordinarily would. Monkey mind might be obsessed with a mistake you made last week, so your mind is repeatedly filled with images of your humiliation. A friend tells you to let it go, but you can’t.

It’s possible, through regular meditation practice, to tame your monkey mind, at least a little. (And a little can make a big difference.) By making the effort to bring your mind back to the present over and over, you learn more about how to relate to your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences in a new way. You figure out how to choose to be present, instead of struggling with your own mind. You notice how thoughts and feelings are not you, they are just experiences that come and go, so you are less identified with them—and therefore less concerned about them.

Three Levels of Mind

As you navigate your mind during zazen, it’s useful to think about how there are three different levels of mind (referred to as the three nen in Japanese). The first level of mind is pure perception. A sound composed of vibrating air registers on the hearing apparatus in your ear, which then sends a signal to your brain. You become conscious of sound, and it has a particular quality—loudness, pitch, duration.

The second level of mind is naming and categorizing. You identify and name what the sound is most likely coming from. A whole host of knowledge, generalizations, and memories come along as a package with the act of naming.

The third level of mind is commentary, where your mind becomes active deciding whether the sound is pleasant or not, what the sound might mean to you and what you might need to do about it, and then on and on, making plans and arguments. Usually you start commenting on comments and most of your mind spins around at this third level indefinitely.

For example, you hear a dog barking during meditation. With the first level of mind you simply perceive the sound. You engage the second level of mind when you label the sound “dog barking,” or perhaps go further and identify that it’s your neighbor’s dog that’s barking. The third level of mind gets involved when you decide the barking is annoying, and wonder how your neighbor can be so insensitive about leaving his dog out in the yard, and then think about how you should join the neighborhood association and do something about it, except you’re too busy with your job to do that, and come to think of it maybe you should get a new job ….

It’s not that the third level of mind, commentary, is inherently bad or harmful. In fact, it’s very useful. The problem is that you probably spend too much time spinning around in the third level of mind, rarely checking back into the first level of perception so you can get some new data on your life. Also, your mind gets overwhelmed and confused by too much commentary—judgments, plans, worries, analysis.

When you dip back into the first or second level of mind, your brain can relax a little because all you’re trying to do is deal with what’s in front of you, not analyze all your various problems and come up with solutions. In zazen you work on the ability to pull your mind out of its third-level obsessing and put your attention on first- and second-level input.

Staying present in the first or second level of mind doesn’t require an absence of thinking. In the Buddhist view the mind is like another sense organ, and its object is thoughts. Whether or not this is a physiologically accurate description, it reflects a true aspect of your subjective experience. It’s possible for a thought or feeling to arise more or less spontaneously, and then for you to refrain from commentary on it. You treat the perception of the thought or feeling as you would treat a perception of sound or warmth.

This doesn’t mean that you hold yourself back from your experience with some kind of dissociation. What it means is that you include your thoughts and feelings in the wider landscape of your experience; you don’t give thoughts or feelings any more weight than anything else. When you refrain from commentary on a thought or feeling, you’re succeeding in your effort to remain present in the first or second level of mind, despite the arising of thoughts.

Attention Exercise Techniques

Zazen is not just attention exercise—it’s much more profound than that—but daily practice does indeed involve working with your attention. There are various techniques to help you focus your attention, gain some independence from monkey mind, and let go of your mental commentary. All of them involve ways to bring your attention back to perceptions at the first or second levels of mind—pure perception, or simple naming.

The classic technique for bringing your attention back to the present is to pay attention to your breath. Your breath is always happening in the present, and there is a motion to it that provides something dynamic for you to pay attention to. You don’t alter your breath in any way, you just try to remain aware of it. You can notice the rising and falling of your chest or abdomen, the feeling of coolness spreading from your throat into your lungs as you breathe in, or the sensation of air passing into your nose or mouth. Any aspect of the breath can be the object of your attention if it allows you to maintain your awareness of the breath.

Another method is to think to yourself, “breathing in I breathe a long breath … breathing out I breathe a short breath,” with these being observations of what is naturally occurring (not an effort to change the length of the breath). A more general, all-over body awareness of the breath may work better for you. Finally, you can count your breaths if that helps you stay focused or gives you useful feedback about whether you are remaining focused. The typical recommendation is to count exhalations 1 to 10, and then start over at 1.

When your attention has wandered from the breath, you simply notice that and turn your attention back to it. You may have to do this a hundred times in a 30-minute sitting. In fact, even if you can maintain a constant awareness of the breath, there are always subtle ways you can deepen your awareness (it’s possible to more or less keep count of your breaths while the mind wanders in between the numbers). The more calmly you can do this, the better. Any frustration or agitation that arises when you realize your mind has wandered again only draws you up into the mind level of commentary and distracts you from your purpose.

Other techniques for returning your attention to the direct input from reality are paying attention to your general body sensations, what’s in your visual field, or the sounds you can hear around you. In all these cases your attention should end up steady, as if you’re paying attention to one thing, rather than jumping around.

For example, if you’re paying attention to bodily sensations, don’t let the attention wander around the body randomly: my toe hurts, there’s a breeze on my cheek, my arm itches. Try to keep a sense of the body as a whole, or, if your attention is drawn to one area like your toe, then try to keep your attention there as long as you can. If you get too distracted naming all the different sensations or perceptions that are occurring, it defeats the purpose of zazen. You can just let input wash over you, without worrying about registering all of it.

Concentration and Expansion

There are two different ways to deepen or intensify your attentiveness in zazen: concentration and expansion. The word classically used to describe the state of deep meditation in Zen is samadhi, which is often translated as “one-pointed concentration.” In ideal samadhi, your mind is completely alert, aware, and collected. Samadhi is the opposite of having a scattered mind, where you mentally grasp after, or push away, all the various thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise in your experience. Although samadhi is often translated as concentration, this state can also be achieved through a diligent expansion of your awareness.

DEFINITION

Samadhi is an ancient Pali and Sanskrit term for the experience of one-pointed concentration, alternatively translated as absorption or collectedness.

When you aim for concentration in your meditation, you focus your attention more and more sharply, until the object of your awareness fills up your experience. For example, if you’re concentrating on the breath, you follow it more and more closely—noticing the beginning of the inhalation, the flow of air in the middle of the inhalation, the end of the inhalation, the pause before the exhalation, the beginning of the exhalation, and so on. You try very hard to keep the attention on the breath for longer and longer periods of time, and diligently return the attention to the breath whenever it has wandered.

It helps to think of this as an effort to become completely absorbed in or fascinated by the breath, rather than a struggle to subdue the active part of your mind. There’s no limit to how absorbed you can become in your full experience, whether you are concentrating on the breath, on sound, or on a koan.

For some people the effort to concentrate the mind becomes a fruitless struggle, as if the decision to concentrate is itself agitating. If you try concentration but feel like there’s a force field around your mental busyness that you can’t pierce no matter how hard you work at it, you might try expansion instead. It requires a similar diligence of mind, but has a different flavor. The effort to expand your awareness rather than concentrate it can feel more like not doing than doing, and therefore can be a more conducive approach for people with very active or noncompliant minds.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Deep meditative states are not the point of zazen, but they are also not to be avoided. They are the natural result of intense zazen practice and can be very instructive. When you have experienced a new level of stillness, your appreciation of what is possible expands, and you have a new understanding of how to work with your mind. On the other hand, deep meditative states are generally very elusive, especially if you enjoy them and seek to attain them again. It’s really best to forget about them, get back to your basic meditation practice, and let the states happen again at some point in the future.

In expansion meditation, you constantly make the effort to expand the edges of your awareness, without letting it shrink down and seize on any one sound, sensation, thought, etc. You become like a video camera, just receiving all the input in front of you without trying to do anything about it, and keeping the widest possible visual field rather than focusing close up on any particular. If you concentrate on any aspect of your experience, you compromise your awareness of everything else, so by trying to remain as open and receptive as possible you actually end up decreasing your mental activity.

There’s no room for commentary, because that shuts down some of your perceptive channels. Still, it can be helpful to allow the breath to be at the center of your awareness, just to give you a reference point. If you do this, you don’t allow your awareness to be pulled into the breath, you simply let the breath be a companion in your meditation.

Effort Versus Non-effort

Now you know how to do zazen. Or do you? This apparently simple practice can be very difficult. Or, even if you don’t perceive it as difficult, you may not have a good sense of whether your zazen is as good as it could be, or how to improve it, or whether you should bother to improve it.

While on the one hand you’re seeking absolutely nothing in zazen, it still requires great effort to fully understand how to take the physical and mental posture of Zen meditation. In particular you need to continually recognize and let go of your expectations about how meditation is going to be, refrain from judgments that may seem very justified and rational, and turn toward a mental spaciousness that may appear from afar to be too passive or even frighteningly empty.

Expectations About Meditation

You probably can’t help having some ideas and hopes about how your meditation should be. After all, it’s perfectly natural to prefer clarity over confusion, peacefulness over anxiety, and ease over pain. You probably wouldn’t be practicing meditation at all if you didn’t have some hope that it would provide some relief from stress, confusion, and suffering. It may not help that descriptions of the potential results of meditation—like the ones in the previous section—include lots of words like stillness and clarity.

Ideas and hopes about what “good” meditation feels like are not in themselves a problem, as long as you recognize them as simply ideas and hopes. They are not necessarily right or true. In zazen you make the effort to allow your expectations about your meditation to be, just as you allow everything else in your experience to arise and pass away, without being triggered into a volitional response. You don’t believe your expectations, and you don’t try to get rid of them.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you notice during meditation that your mind is very full of worries and plans. You try to let them go and return to the present, because when you experience some mental quiet in zazen it’s very renewing and helps reduce your stress levels. And after all, zazen is about simply being present, and your thoughts are about things that are elsewhere in space and time. However, trying to let go of the thoughts doesn’t seem to help—they just keep coming back! How annoying. Clearly you’re too stressed to meditate, right?

Now consider this: your busy mind is part of your experience, as is your reaction to it and your disappointment about the state of your zazen. You may prefer mentally and emotionally quiet zazen, but that’s not what’s going on. You’re annoyed by all the busyness in your mind and wish it would go away so you can have the zazen experience you want.

If you really want to do good zazen, you remain fully present with your experience exactly as it is. That’s it. If you manage to stay present with zazen you don’t like, you’ll actually be strengthening your zazen. Ironically, you may also find a subtle relief from stress even though you were apparently unable to calm your mind during meditation—because, after all, you were doing zazen.

CONSIDER THIS

Some benefits of meditation are surprising, and suggest that the practice affects you at a subconscious, unconscious, or physical level. For example, I bit my nails from childhood onward, but when I started sitting zazen I stopped. You can’t count on such results, but you might find that zazen practice ends up liberating you from some stubborn habits.

Resistance to Just Being

All kinds of resistance can come up when you try to just be present and let go of all volitional actions of body, speech, and mind other than your meditation itself. The resistance doesn’t have to be based on a rational fear. You may find yourself concerned, at some subconscious level, about becoming stupid, vapid, passive, lazy, out of touch, vulnerable, or even so enlightened that your current life will lose all its meaning for you.

You may not think you have these kinds of fears, but if you experience some resistance to settling into very still meditation, you might look deeper and surprise yourself. I confess to having had, early in my meditation practice, a subtle but pervasive fear that if all of my volitional activity stopped, I would cease to exist. I wasn’t sure whether I would just go unconscious and fall over, or whether I would blink out of existence entirely. Such a fear may seem far-fetched, but it doesn’t have to make sense to impede your zazen practice.

ZEN WISDOM

“Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undefiled practice-enlightenment.”

—Zen Master Dogen (1200–1253), from “Rules for Zazen,” translated by Dan Welch and Kaz Tanahashi in Moon in a Dewdrop

The beautiful thing is that your very resistance can be an extremely fruitful thing to investigate, because it reveals your deeper fears and assumptions about life. There’s a reason why so many people can’t stand silence and solitude, or have to distract themselves constantly with music, reading, work, or entertainment. If they sat very still, what would happen? What would they see? Investigating your fears can be scary and needs to be done carefully and gently, but ultimately it’s very liberating.

Instead of consciously investigating and facing the fears and assumptions behind your resistance, you can also simply work on gradually overcoming your resistance in meditation. Each time you’re able to become a bit more still than you have before, you build up your trust in the process. You prove to yourself that the world doesn’t fall apart, that your mind doesn’t permanently turn to jelly, and that you don’t cease to exist.

When you get up from your meditation seat, the world is waiting for you, and you’re fully capable of engaging it. You gain the confidence to let go a little more, until you realize that your volitional activity does not keep the universe running. You can set aside volitional activity at will and pick it back up when it’s appropriate. You become more able to just be.

Sitting When Things Aren’t Okay

Finally, something needs to be said about sitting zazen when you feel terrible physically or emotionally, or when you’re in the middle of some difficulty. These are the times when you’re probably most likely to decide not to meditate, but they are also the times when zazen is most important. There are several reasons for this.

First, if you sit when you’re upset or experiencing difficulty, you have a chance to notice how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. Just acknowledging these things can help. Through zazen you also check back into those first and second levels of mind discussed earlier, and this relieves some stress. Your mind is better equipped to deal with what’s right here, right now, so when you turn your attention to the present your mind can relax a little bit.

CONSIDER THIS

Sometimes you don’t even know how you’re feeling until you sit down to meditate. Your daily responsibilities and activities can be so demanding that you rarely get a chance to check in with yourself. When you finally take a few moments to simply be present in your life, you may find yourself realizing things like, “Oh! I’m really worried about ….” Whatever you realize, you’ll be able to go about the rest of your life with more awareness and care.

Sitting when you’re uncomfortable also cultivates your ability to endure discomfort without having to run away from it or distract yourself. When your preferences are no longer such imperatives, you have much more freedom of choice. At some point you’ll need to stay present with a painful or difficult experience—like an illness, or an interaction with someone that’s full of conflict—and any ability you’ve built up to stay present anyway will be extremely valuable.

Last but not least, sitting when things aren’t okay strengthens your habit of zazen. You just do it, regardless of how you’re feeling or how it makes you feel, because zazen is not about how you feel. It’s about being present for your life, which is going to contain a whole range of feelings and experiences. Many Zen practitioners find zazen to be a touchstone that helps carry them through all kinds of difficulties and transitions, so establishing a steady zazen practice can serve you well.

The Least You Need to Know