Short rantless version:

Practicing zazen is a powerful way for us to strengthen our systems to deal with the realities of our lives. HOWever, lots of people use it as a way to block out pain… which just causes pain to persist, both personally and within the larger community.

Longer, impassioned version:

After months of simply BEing, and not spending a whole lot of time mulling the meaning of zen, zazen… disentangling myself from the words of others by simply getting on with my life, I’m back to extending my thoughts to what others have to say.

I spent some time yesterday over at Hardcore Zen, reading what Brad Warner and others have to say.

I spent some time yesterday reading the Mumonkan, and also skimming around for zen quotes to pick up my day and get me thinking.

I also dug out my copy of Katsuki Sekida’s Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy and remembered yet again why I like that book so much.

Maybe that wasn’t such a great idea.

By the end of the day, I was back to remembering why I don’t spend a lot of time in the “zen establishment”.

People talk too much. It gets my head going in ways that are massive time-sinks. And I end up spending way too much time counteracting the effects of “others’ ideas” which are really nothing more than my reactions to others’ ideas. I basically lost a day to that shit, and I’m a little pissed off about it. Over a long weekend, too.

I don’t know why I bother. Maybe I’m looking for an echo of my own experience? Maybe I just got bored and needed a little cognitive pick-me-up. Despite all my reading and noodling, I can honestly say I really don’t know what others’ ideas are all about — because I am not in their shoes, and all our ideas and perceptions and beliefs arise from individual experience. So, no matter how clearly a person tries to express themself, because their ideas are coming from their own individual contact with life, no one else can truly know exactly what they mean. It’s just not possible, in my estimation.

Which makes all the arguing and debates and wrangling entirely pointless, in my own experience. Unless you need to fight, to keep yourself alert and feeling like you have a purpose in life. I used to without realizing I was doing it. And I still do it, to this day, though I actually realize why.

Move along, people – nothing here to see.

Of course, being human and all, as I read the words, words, and more words, yesterday, about what people think zen is and how zazen should be done and sitting groups and communities and sangha and roshis groping students and what-not… I got pretty agitated. I felt connected, yet alienated. Welcome, yet pushed away. All the talking, all the arguing… I didn’t want that, even though I wanted to find a group for community and possibly support.

Part of me would like to find a community I can sit with. You know… People who know what zazen is, and who do it, too. The thing is, I would rather not deal with people’s crazy stuff — of which there seems to be a lot in certain communities. All the public squabbling over who’s right and who’s wrong. All the bickering and recrimination over who’s doing what to whom. Seems like a lot of trouble and uproar for a zen-oriented community.

And it occurred to me that zen can be especially attractive to highly dysfunctional people who have endured some serious trauma in their lives. It creates this alternate space (via zazen*), where you can step away from it all to go deep — and far, far away from your everyday life, which can be so terribly hurtful and wracked with pain. And all the while you’re distancing yourself from it, you’re telling yourself you’re “going deep” and finding the answers you need to go on.

But you’re actually in a parallel universe, which runs alongside the everyday life you lead. Parallels by definition never intersect with each other, and if you want to, you never actually have to let the sacred and the mundane muddle together at all. Because it’s all part of your spiritual path.

That’s what I’ve witnessed, anyway. And I used to do it, myself, too. So I’m not just diagnosing from my arm chair. Been there, done that, and I know how much trouble it creates.

When I think of these things, I often think back to the time when I joined a sitting group not far from my workplace, which met on Monday nights. That was a good time of the week for me, because I had no other standing commitments, and what better way to spend the evening after the first day of work, than sitting zazen and connecting with like-minded people?

Sounds great, right?

Well, I got there and we went through their routine with reading scriptures and walking… then sitting for a while. The sitting was fine. I got a chair, since my back was acting up, and it was fine. I was more focused than usual — perhaps because I felt a real tension in the group, much of it emanating from that evening’s leader, who was visiting and was supposedly some famous teacher with a handful of books to his name. Then people got to talking, and a lot of them wanted to check in about the upcoming multi-day sesshin. How they were looking forward to it, how they were sad they couldn’t make it, how they couldn’t wait to get into that alternate reality space and really “do the work”.

To be honest, I came away from that evening with a really bad taste in my mouth, and feeling more unsettled than when I showed up. So, everything I remember from there is colored by my unflattering sense of the event. So, maybe they actually talked about a lot of other things I found more positive and useful — I just don’t remember them.

But ill feelings and delusions aside, what occurred to me then — and occurs to me still — is that zen and zazen in particular*, make really handy ways to dissociate from our lives and avoid dealing with them. Dissociation is a psychological phenomenon, where you mentally “go somewhere else” when someone is doing something really awful to you. It’s handy when you’re in the midst of a traumatic violation, but it’s also a significant precursor for post-traumatic stress. The degree to which you dissociate during a trauma actually correlates with how extreme post-traumatic stress disorder turns out to be.

Getting your head away from your problems while they’re happening, is handy in the moment.

But later, it comes back to bite you in the ass, and it traps the actual trauma in your body. The body remembers what happened, but the brain doesn’t, so the brain can’t process the awfulness and let it the f*ck go.

Which isn’t so handy, over the long run.

And it occurs to me that one of the reasons American-style zen appeals to me so little, and frustrates me so much, is that it’s populated by a ton of folks with histories of traumatic dissociation, who appear to bring that same habit into their spiritual practices. Zazen can be rejuvenating. Freeing. Evolutionary. It has direct positive and restorative impact on the autonomic nervous system, and to me it is one of the most important exercises a person can do, to deal effectively with their daily lives. Even without koans and special instructions. You sit and breathe a certain way, and your physical system gets stronger. It’s a simple thing made complicated because people have been sitting for aeons with great revelations dawning on them, and the revelation becomes the thing, not the sitting.

Yet a lot of people (including a number of folks I’ve known) seem to use zen and zazen* to avoid and dissociate from the manifest difficulties of their daily lives. They’re not simply sitting to find a happy place, but to find a separate place, which is all about them and their “process”, and has nothing to do with coming to terms with the situations of their everyday existence, which they’ve actually helped to create.

Sitting silently, uninvolved in your usual daily life, focused on the inner world… all for the sake of “spiritual development”… is a fantastic way to continue patterns of dissociation which solve nothing, but actually make things worse. I’m not saying everyone does it. I’m saying a lot of folks do it — enough to spoil the proverbial barrel of apples. And as their dissociative dysfunction deepens their issues, it tangles up their communities in further knots of drama and shitty choices, all the while placing blame on roshis and other things outside themselves.

I know it’s bad form to blame the victim. The thing is, if a victim’s adult behavior and choices are screwing things up for others, it’s generally good form to take some sort of responsibility and see things for how they are. We tip-toe around apparently fragile people who flip out, thanks to past traumas, bending over backwards to make them feel safe and secure, thinking that’s going to help them. Maybe it will. Maybe it will make the rest of us more nuts than need be.

I personally believe people are far less fragile than we think they are, and a lot of folks who have experienced trauma actually use their experience to create and sustain unhealthy power dynamics centered on manipulation, guilt, passive-aggressive bullshit, and refusal to take responsibility. I’ve come across more than a few in my life, and I’m not a fan of that particular way of “coping”.

All of which is a really long way of saying… while some people find solace in zazen* as a way to deepen their understanding of life, a whole lot of folks (especially Americans) use it as a handy refuge where they can separate from life and avoid confronting the actual situations that are making them — and everyone around them — deeply unhappy. They find teachers who make them feel safe and secure (how many licensed therapists are also zen/mindfulness community leaders?) and give them the impression that they’re learning and growing, when all that’s really happening is they’re taking a break from feeling shitty, and having someone else fill their heads with “answers”. And all the while, their habits of refusing to actually deal with the reality of their situation (let’s get our heads out of the clouds and just call a real thing what it is — more on that later), and they just fuck up the dynamics of the rest of the community… all the while masquerading as spiritual seekers “on the path”.

So, once again, I come around to this irritated, passionate, resolute devotion to a solitary practice, avoiding organized American-style zen* like the plague. It may seem like it helps, but it really doesn’t. Not the way I see it being practiced by a whole lot of people.

And that’s what I think of that.

Now, it’s time for a walk in the woods.

* and meditation and other spiritual sorts of retreats