One Time, One Meeting

Twelve years ago, some friends and I formed a sitting group in the community of Alfred, New York. Our intent was to provide a place of stillness and silence and  to cultivate the practices of sitting and walking meditation, as taught by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of us brought prior experience in Eastern meditation. All of us brought our Western conditioning.

So it was with one of our number, an anxious former New Yorker, who arrived one Sunday evening looking unusually impatient, even for him.

“Well,” said he, rubbing his hands and bouncing from one foot to the other, “let’s get meditating.”

As we later learned, Barbara Walters was interviewing Monica Lewinsky at nine o’clock that evening, and he didn’t want to miss a word.

In his general outlook if not his specific motive, our friend was not alone. On the contrary, American culture has been described as always en route to somewhere else, always busy and always in a hurry. And with the advent of e-mail, Twitter, and other forms of advanced technology, our habitual rush into the future has grown more furious than ever. Meditation is supposed to be about “stopping and looking”—or at least about slowing down. But to those attached to ceaseless forward movement, even an hour devoted to stopping and looking can become one more step on the way to somewhere else.

The desire to be in some other place, and to get there as soon as possible, is both a symptom and a cause of a general anxiety, driving us into the future even as we fear it. Over the past decade a wide variety of people, including students, faculty, social workers, police, and clergy, have attended our Sunday-evening sessions. Some have come out of boredom, curiosity, loneliness, or a desire to find a deeper meaning in their lives.  But the root motive is often anxiety, which Thich Nhat Hanh has called the endemic illness of Western culture. Better get moving, its voices tell us. Better get meditating.

Zen meditation is not a panacea for anxiety, as sometimes thought, nor is it a drug-free cure. But the practice can provide an antidote, a countervailing force in our busy-busy lives. In the simplest form of Zen meditation, we sit as still and upright as we can manage, doing nothing but following the flow of our breath and paying attention to whatever is occurring, within us and around us. We note the tensions in our bodies, the eruption of a voice down the hall. We note a passing thought—where are my car keys?—or a remembered image. And we observe those impulses that urge us to keep moving—to get meditating—and hurl us into the future. When we have sat for awhile, our bodies begin to settle, and our thoughts arrive at a slower pace. And as we stop trying to control our environment, our immediate surroundings present themselves with greater clarity and vivacity. We feel more alive as well as more relaxed.

Such are the immediate benefits of Zen meditation, which may be felt in a matter of weeks. But it would be a mistake to think of Zen practice as merely a stress-reduction technique, or a mode of self-improvement, or a way of escaping from the world. The reduction of stress might better be viewed as a point of entry–a portal into an ancient contemplative practice. Over time, that practice teaches us to appreciate our lives, however hurried or fragmented their present state, and to align our anxious minds with things as they are, not as we would have them be. And rather than isolate us, the practice deepens our connection with other people.

I intend to say more about these matters in future essays. In the meantime, let’s get meditating.