Archive | Reflections on Practice

What we’ve really come to see is that healing is not limited to the body. The body may live or die, but the healing we took birth for occurs in the heart; if that quality of heart is not there, no matter what happens to the body, healing is absent…

…If we’re speaking of healing as being able to love wholeheartedly that which we think we love, I don’t know what would be a greater aid than a spiritual practice which would encourage seeing the whole and not being limited to the tiny increments of mind that arise and often block the heart. Nothing will do for us what a daily meditation practice will do. It’s not the only way in, but it is a profound access that allows us to go beyond the mind to our true nature. It could simply be said that meditation is just an intensification of awareness. And when there is awareness, there is healing. Awareness of anger heals anger in the sense that it gives anger an opportunity to float, and then we are better able to respond to it instead of having to react automatically to it.

In that sense, a meditation practice is invaluable for deepening the quality of awareness that allows the healing in. But meditation isn’t easy. As one teacher said, meditation is just one insult after another. This also speaks to your earlier question about how the first stages of healing are disorienting. As you go in, you see you aren’t who you think you are; often, we’re confronted with the truth of our grasping, greediness, lustfulness, self-interest, and general ignorance of ourselves and the world. But meditation allows truth to arise, and even if the truth is an unpleasant one for a moment, it is the truth. It is beautiful and feeds us, energizes us, heals us. Meditation takes us beyond the mind to who we really are, the shared heart of being.

Excerpted from an interview with Stephen by Ralph Earle in the October 1989 issue of The Sun

On working for The Mountain Hermitage & Following The Way of Tea…

TMH: We’re speaking today with Kathy Lyons, administrative person for The Mountain Hermitage, and we’re asking her about her work for the Hermitage and about her involvement with the Japanese Way of Tea. What exactly do you do for the Hermitage?
Kathy: As the admin person, I do things like work on the financial end of things, register students, help with scheduling retreats, maintain mailing lists, take minutes during board meetings, work with guiding teacher Marcia Rose on creating magazine ads, flyers, fundraising letters,…

TMH: Wow. That’s a lot. So you really hold together the logistics for the Hermitage. How did you come to the Dharma?
K: My mother is Japanese and so Buddhism was a part of our lives growing up. Just simple things like having a family altar, observing certain Buddhist ceremonies. Because my mother was studying the Japanese Way of Tea or Chado, she introduced me to her teacher at New Years in my senior year in college… and I fell in love with the Way of Tea. That took me into Zen Buddhism because “Tea and Zen are One Flavor (Cha Zen Ichi Mi)“, as they say. I started on that path in 1990 and went to Kyoto on a scholarship to study Chado for a year in the Midorikai program of Urasenke Foundation. I ended up staying for 6 years, studying at a kind of university of Tea and then for a graduate program after that.

TMH: What was it about Chado that drew you?
K: It was a good fit for me at that particular time. I had studied various martial art forms which always seemed to have a strong focus on Zen practice. Tea seemed to be a natural progression in deepening my studies of mindfulness… not just how to sit and meditate, but also to be active and be in a state of mindfulness. Also the Tea sweets were delicious! What else was there? I think because Chado encapsulates almost all Japanese traditional arts and crafts as well as history, architecture, poetry… boy, you name it! I knew this was a path that would continue far into my older age.

TMH: So the essence of Chado is meditation in action. Is that what you would say?
K: In a way it can be called a “soft” martial art. The focus for the first 10 years is on learning and strictly adhering to the forms, and then for the next 10 years or so, you break from the forms, and then for the next 10 years you return to the forms but with a different, deeper understanding. By sticking to the form you lose your sense of individuality, but then you find the freedom within that.

They used to do so-called Tea Ceremonies in China over a 1000 years ago as Tea offerings to the Buddha. About 500 years ago, a Japanese Tea master decided that instead of offering Tea to the Buddha in a Buddhist temple, he would offer Tea to the Buddha nature in his colleagues, to bring it more to a personal level. Chado, which I study, has the element of offering Tea to another person. So we don’t call it Tea ceremony, it’s the Way of Tea or Chado… you know, like Judo or Aikido… Cha is Tea, Do is Dao or The Way.

TMH: And how is it different from Vipassana practice?
K: When we studied Zen, we had to sit a lot and do sesshin, or silent retreats, in Zen temples. Our school of Tea is associated with the Rinzai sect of Zen and our main temple is Daitokuji which is a Zen temple in Kyoto. When we would practice, it was sitting, sitting… sometimes 3 hours, sometimes 1 hour… sitting in silence. Once a week, we’d be able to meet with the roshi or teacher who would sometimes give us a koan, sometimes not. The focus is on the form of sitting and breaking through attachments, working with the pain, working with the sweat dripping down my face… I can’t move… so a lot of working with that edge.

I find Vipassana has more interaction with the teacher than my experience with Zen in Japan, where the focus was on sit sit sit! In Vipassana, there’s sitting, there’s walking, there’s Dhamma talks, meetings with the teacher… it feels different.

TMH: You teach the Way of Tea to people. Would you talk a little bit about that, please?
K: After receiving training, my husband and I were posted to Washington DC for 6 years as official representatives… to run the mid Atlantic branch of Urasenke Foundation. We taught pretty much 6 days a week, from 9 in the morning to 9 at night. On the 7th day, because Washington DC is such a multicultural area, we were often called upon to do Tea presentations. My husband would give a mini lecture with slides, I would make Tea while he explained what I was doing, and then we would serve everybody Tea.

TMH: So like at embassies?
K: Yes, embassies, Smithsonian Freer Gallery, schools, government agencies, women’s groups, men’s groups… we were fully immersed in the dissemination of Tea and the Way of Tea. And that continues today. Obviously, I’m not teaching full time any more, but I teach maybe once a month here in northern New Mexico. We have a Tea association called Chado New Mexico or Urasenke New Mexico, and we are one of 88 Urasenke Tea associations spread over 34 countries around the world.

TMH: Is there anything else that you want to say?
K: Yes! I often tell people that my job with the Hermitage is my sanity. I’m so grateful. Being in this job requires me to work with my own issues… there are constant opportunities to practice. It’s great to have a guiding teacher like Marcia Rose who is very kind and generous and patient.

TMH: Well, that’s all so interesting! Thank you so much for sharing this.

In Buddhism, people do a lot of bowing at various times. Students often ask, “Why do we bow? What or who are we bowing to?” In this moving excerpt from his classic book “Arctic Dreams,” author and naturalist, Barry Lopez writes about bowing in a very essential way directly from his own experience.

Glaucous gulls fly over. In the shore lead are phalaropes, with their twig like legs. In the distance I can see flocks of oldsquaw against the sky, and a few cormorants. A patch of shadow that could be several thousand crested auklets too far away to know. Out there are whales I have seen … six or eight gray whales as I walked this evening. And the ice, pale as the dove colored sky. The wind raises the surface of the water. Wake of a seal in the shore lead, gone now. I bowed. I bowed to what knows no deliberating legislature or parliament, no religion, no competing theories of economics, an expression of allegiance with the mystery of life.

I looked out over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed from the waist deeply toward the north, that great strait filled with life, the ice and the water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful.

When I stood I thought I glimpsed my own desire. The landscape and the animals were like something found at the end of a dream. The edges of the real landscape became one with the edges of something I had dreamed. But what I had dreamed was only a pattern, some beautiful pattern of light. The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution. The conscious desire is to achieve a state, even momentarily, that like light is unbounded, nurturing, suffused with wisdom and creation, a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat.

Whatever world that is, it lies far ahead. But its outline, its adumbration (intimation, ed.), is clear in the landscape, and upon this, one can actually hope we will find our way.

I bowed again, deeply, toward the north, and turned south to retrace my steps over the dark cobbles to the home where I was staying. I was full of appreciation for all that I had seen.

Vimala Thakar (1921-2009) was one of the great Indian teacher J. Krishnamurti’s closest & most spiritually evolved students… and a favorite of Hermitage Guiding Teacher Marcia Rose. Vimala Thakar became a powerful and very much sought after spiritual teacher in her own right during her lifetime, and is considered to be a teacher who expressed the understanding and perfect balance between the enlightened heart/mind and social consciousness.

We must become deeply aware of our bondage if we value freedom. We begin to watch our behavior throughout the day; we notice the fear, the anxieties, how much behavior is controlled by acquisitiveness, how we compare ourselves with others and want to become something that we are not. When we watch our own lives, then there is the pain and agony that the awareness of the bondage creates. If we don’t observe this in ourselves, we are only theorizing about freedom. […]

As long as we cling to the idea that this is “my mind, my own personal mind,” we’ll have a strong tendency to want to look as good as possible. But if we observe the mind, from a non-personal viewpoint, from the perspective of non-ownership, simply observe our minds and how they function, we’ll be less trapped by judgments.

To be attentive to the psychological structure doesn’t mean we must disappear somewhere and give up all relationships, responsibilities. The aim is to stay within the movement of relationships, to continue with work, to be a responsible citizen and to be attentive to the play of the mind. But we’ll have to be very alert, for the mind is subtle, wily, full of tricks.

It’s a tremendous thrill to see the beginnings of anger or jealousy or greed, not simply to be caught unawares when the emotion is full-blown and has us in its grasp, but to see the first tiny movements of emotion. Where does it spread, what does it do to our behavior? Just as there is joy in exploring the unknown wildness, there is a delight in exploring the inner territory, in watching the volcanoes explode without any movement of defense, judgment, sense of ownership.

If we have never observed anger in ourselves from subtle beginnings to full explosion, we will always be caught in its force. We may try to suppress the behavior of anger, but still it will do its damage and we will not be free from it.

Attentiveness without any movement of the defense structure has its own intelligence. But the automatic tendency is to bring in defenses, judgments and to move from observation to justification, evaluation. We may say to ourselves, “My mother or my father was an angry person. I can’t help it; I’ve had an unhappy childhood, I am an angry person because of that.” […] All the explanations, justifications may be true, but they prevent direct perception of what it is that anger does to our bodies, to relationships, to the work we do.

— from ‘Ego: Emergence and Merging Back of the “I” Process‘ For an interesting article on Vimala’s life & work, read: Vimala Thakar: Liberation Beyond Gender by Elizabeth Debold