Zazen (or Why I Stare At A Blank Wall Every Day)

Two places that I look for some peace and quiet are zazen and the weightlifting platform. For me, those are the two main places where I can get some peace and quiet. There's no Facebook statuses, Twitters, text messages, emails, friends, girlfriends, telemarketers, overpriced gas, etc; it's just me and a wall or me and a barbell.

Something that is tough for people to wrap their mind around is the idea that successful zazen IS zazen. By that, I mean that there isn't some sort of end goal. The point of the journey IS the journey. The whole point to doing zazen is to do zazen.

I will make this point: when I first started doing zazen, it was the exact opposite of what I expected. I pictured this tranquil, quiet time to not think. What I got was the exact polar opposite. My mind ran a million miles an hour and it felt like Heathrow with thoughts taking off and landing constantly. I learned how to calm things down a bit after a couple weeks of consistent practice, but this is a constant battle for me in zazen. This also illustrated a great lesson for me: if you want the fire to go out, stop fanning the flames.

When I'm doing zazen, thoughts bounce in and out of my head pretty much constantly. But they aren't really coherent thoughts; more like thought fragments or a half-molded piece of clay. When I latch on to one, it starts molding into something coherent. Once I figured out to stop giving these thoughts energy, they just fell away. Rinse, repeat and apply everywhere. Those little thoughts can be death by a thousand cuts and leave you exhausted when important, real life shit comes along. I think we tend to self-destruct by giving additional energy and stoking the flames on some things when we could simply let them go. To borrow an over-used and under-appreciated quote from Chuck Palahniuk (via Tyler Durden in Fight Club) that I'm still trying to really figure out:

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

In short: for me, zazen is like training my ability to distinguish between important and unnecessary and let the unnecessary go. So try it: sit down, shut up and see what happens.

Zazen: Burn Out or Fade Away?

"...the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide" - Tyler Durden from Fight Club

The are few real "goals" to zazen; the doing is the goal. You sit, stare at a wall and get yourself some peace and quiet from a loud and ever-changing world. You also get some coveted alone time with the universe, which is fairly tough to come by these days. Not that I blame the universe; it has an infinite number of constituents and a secretary who still schedules appointments on a Palm Pilot.

One of the main ideas of zazen is the concept of "falling off of body and mind". Brad Warner refers to it as "thinking not thinking", and I like that description very much. You just kind of think nothing and, when thoughts DO come up, you just sort of let them fly off. What happens to a small, smoldering ember when you don't blow on it or give it any kindling? It dies out. The same goes for thoughts: without actively giving them energy and cultivating them, thoughts fall away. 

Thoughts can be quicksand. The more you struggle against them and try to get away, the further down you get pulled. One of the biggest lessons of zazen practice is being able to actively control which thoughts are cultivated and which thoughts are allowed to burn out and fade away. Learning how to not energize undesirable thoughts and how to cultivate desirable ones is easily one of the most tangible and applicable lessons of Zen. 

Gym Zen: The Prequel

Shelby Starnes over at EliteFTS posted some quotes from an author, punk rock bassist and Zen Buddhist named Brad Warner. Brad has written a few books on Zen, his most notable are Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up. I've always gravitated towards Buddhism but I don't know much about Zen, so I picked up Sit Down and managed to blow through it. Twice. I'm currently going through it with a highlighter in a vain attempt to retain all the good things in that book. It also inspired me to pick up the translation of Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye (Shobogenzo), in order to find a different perspective and start to reach my own conclusions.

I tend to relate things through training and competition, since that's one of the things that has been a constant in my life for the past 12-14 years (give or take a couple injury years). So, with any luck, this will be the first part of a series relating some aspects of Zen to training and competing in sport. My intention is to focus on each of Dogen's main themes of Buddhist study and (try to) draw some parallels and applications to them in the athletic world.

I do my best to write things in the "this is me" tense, rather than the "Here's what I do/did, why you should do it and why everything I do is awesome" tense. One of the bigger concepts I've found in Zen is that we all experience the world uniquely. This seems like a fairly obvious point but it's something that we forget in our day to day lives. My experiences (in training and competing, in relationships, in professional endeavors, etc) are unique from yours and I try to keep that in mind.
So, Dogen. Dogen basically summarized Buddhist study into four basic principles:

1. Establishing the Will to Truth: You have to regard the truth, in all its black and white glory, as your ultimate goal. You also have to be willing to accept what is true, regardless of how you feel about the matter.

2. Deep Belief in Cause and Effect: Dogen believed that the entire universe follows the rule of cause and effect without exception. This is the toughest one for me to wrap my head around, because we as humans live to create exceptions to any rule. "This isn't right, but...".

3. Life as Present Action: Love this from Sit Down, "At best, past and future are reference material for the eternal now. You can dream about the future, but no matter how well you construct that dream, your future will not be precisely as you envisioned it. The world where we live is existence at the present moment." Self-explanatory, no?

4. Zazen: Zazen is the form of meditation in Zen. Dogen thought that zazen was a vital part of experiencing the world as it truly is. Whether or not you care to dabble in meditating or not, the root idea is getting some quiet time to not think (read that again: NOT think) about anything at all. I think we all agree that a little more quiet time would hardly be a bad thing, right?

So there's the primer. Fire away with questions, comments and concerns and thanks very much for taking the time. Now your daily affirmation:

Gratitudes of the Day

1. Immensly grateful for this steaming hot cup of Novo Coffee that I'm currently slurping down as I type this. My sleep patterns got all screwed up over the weekend so I've been waking up between 3-4am the past few days instead of my usual 4:50. Easy to do on off days from the gym, but coming off of workout days makes that a bit more of a challenge. On the plus side, it allowed me to get these written down before I hit the office, so I'm grateful for that!

2. I'm grateful for a couple emails yesterday with Steve Pulcinella. Steve's one of the US's best ever Highland Games athletes and strongman competitors and I reached out to him looking for some training info for the upcoming Highland games season, as well as Olympic lifting. I've always prided myself on programming my own training, but I'm really getting hooked by the idea of being able to get programs written specifically for me by great coaches and then being able to rotate through them.

If you're frustrated by lack of progress in the gym, I encourage you to hire an online coach and have something written for you. Almost everyone out there who writes articles on any of the popular training websites (T-Nation, EliteFTS, etc) does online coaching (nutrition, training or both), and the pricing is very reasonable.

3. I'm very grateful to Shelby Starnes for introducing me to the books Sit Down and Shut Up and Hardcore Zen, both written by Brad Warner. I've always gravitated towards Buddhism but I've found it difficult to really digest many of the writings of Buddhism outside of the Dalai Lama. Brad's writing and breaking down of some of the Zen Buddhism concepts has made for excellent reading and I'm gravitating towards a lot of these ideas and teachings.