By: Bob Zeglovitch
At a recent session of Just Show Up (October 11—dharma talk posted on the website), we dipped our toes briefly into the vast topic of samadhi (concentration, collectedness and unification of mind/body). While samadhi is not the goal of Zen practice, it is not unrelated to it. One can find various references to samadhi in the Zen literature of our tradition (for examples, see the quotes from Dogen and John Daido Loori on our Readings page). Samadhi can arise organically as we practice “just sitting” zazen, but it can also be intentionally cultivated and appreciated as a resource—allowing us to navigate challenging mind and body states, opening up possibilities for us to see more deeply into our moment-to-moment experience, and providing a “platform” for letting go. Samadhi most commonly arises during a retreat, but its qualities can be recognized in less extended meditation practice as well as in daily life.
There are various “entry points” to samadhi, including practices like following or counting the breath that are sometimes suggested to beginning Zen students. At our recent session we touched on some other modes of attention that can be useful, and I thought it might be helpful to set down some brief reminders. I’m drawing here from Rob Burbea’s book, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. He helpfully characterizes samadhi as, among other things, a caring for heart and mind and a condition of harmonization and well-being.
While concentration can arise from narrowing the focus of attention to a specific area of sensation in the body (e.g., the breath as felt at the upper lip of the nostrils or somewhere in the abdomen), a contrasting approach is to allow the awareness to take in the wider field of the whole body. In doing so, you can orient the awareness to the “felt sense”, which you may experience as texture, vibration, energy, or tone. Burbea encourages filling that space with an “aliveness of awareness, of presence, that permeates the entire body.” Invariably, there will be a tendency for the awareness to shrink to a smaller area in the body—perhaps to a place of contraction, tenseness, or pain/discomfort. The suggestion at this point is to notice the narrowing and then to “stretch” the awareness back to the whole field of the body. This “stretching out” of the awareness is something that you might wind up doing a number of times during a meditation session.
A variant of the above approach is to mix the awareness of the whole body with another object of mind, such as the breath or mettā (in Early Buddhism, mettā practice is understood as functioning to develop concentration). If you choose this mode, you can play with attending to how the changing characteristics of breath or mettā impact the felt sense in the body. You might find yourself moving back and forth between breath/mettā and the whole body.
Burbea encourages opening to and being sensitive to any areas of pleasantness within the body. This may be quite subtle or modest—just work with whatever is present. It can be helpful to “tune into” this sense, to enjoy it, and to see if it can expand further in the body. There is no rule that you cannot enjoy your meditation! The overall sense here is to gently encourage feelings of well-being and harmonization/unification, without making a big effort or feeling like you need to create some experience or hang on to pleasant feelings, which may of course come and go during your meditation. If you discover pleasant sensations, you can lightly take that bodily feeling of well-being as an object of attention. You don’t have to bear down and use willpower, but instead can proceed with an open and receptive awareness.
When you notice areas of contraction or discomfort, one way to respond is to breathe in and out of the area, or to breathe through the area, seeing if the energetic motion of the breath gracefully brings any change to the area of difficulty. Don’t worry if thoughts come—just see if you can allow them to come and go without giving them much attention.
There are many other modes of awareness that can foster the arising of samadhi. I hope these couple of examples will give you some possibilities for practice and play that are alternatives to simply following the breath. Whether you are new to Zen meditation or an old hand, it can be helpful to deliberately practice the cultivation of samadhi/concentration, so that it may be more available to you. You might “cross train” by setting aside particular sitting sessions devoted to this cultivation. Or you could practice the gentle cultivation of samadhi more consistently, for a number of weeks or months, making sure to be kind to yourself so as not to measure some sense of progress. If you are practicing the more subtle “just sitting”/shikantaza that is characteristic of Soto Zen (another big topic!), you could play with “establishing your seat” for a portion of your sit through some cultivation of samadhi, and then open up to shikantaza.
Samadhi is a tricky area, because we can easily become confused and think that it is the end goal of practice, or become entranced by the pleasure that can accompany a relatively concentrated mind/body and develop unhelpful cravings for something we think is special. Or, we can get lost in a kind of fuzzy trance-like state that we take to be samadhi. We can also wind up solidifying a sense of self, either because we believe that there is some “I” that is responsible for creating samadhi and that we are either “good at it” or “bad at it”—or that we “have it” or “don’t have it”. It is probably most helpful to think of samadhi as being on a continuum rather than an “on/off” switch or a succession of levels. On some occasions there will be more collectedness and on other occasions there will be less. Many factors are at play. We have an opportunity to develop a wise relationship with samadhi, seeing that it is accessible, that it comes and goes with various causes and conditions and is not our personal possession, and that its characteristics of collectedness and well-being can assist us in our practice.