By Ava Stanton
I’m excited to announce our upcoming Practice Period, which we are calling Yasodhara’s Path. Among other things, we will be talking about form and ritual in our daily lives, and about creating space to bring body and mind together in practice. Above is a picture of my home altar. Here is a more detailed description of the plan for the Practice Period:
Just Show Up Zen Sangha’s Spring 2021 Practice Period: Yasodhara’s Path
Just Show Up Zen Sangha will be holding a Practice Period from February 5 to May 1, 2021. In our Soto Zen tradition, a practice period is a time that a sangha dedicates to deepen its practice. This period is approximately three months long, in remembrance of the rainy season retreats that the Buddha held with his sangha.
The title of the practice period, Yasodhara’s Path, is a reference to the path of the Buddha’s wife. She is often referred to as “The One Who Stayed” because she was left behind after the Prince Siddhartha went on his quest for enlightenment. While volumes of sutras were written about the Buddha’s path, we know nothing about Yasodhara’s life. Her path, like ours, is the unrecorded path of the householder. We can imagine what challenges she faced under the circumstances of her life, but they remain a mystery. We also have these private moments, these moments of mystery. Can we stay with them? How do we relate to those seemingly mundane moments—making our bed, pulling on clothes, washing the dishes, grooming ourselves – can we be “The One Who Stays”?
The focus of this practice period will be practicing Zen at home during the pandemic in the intimate and mundane moments of our lives. How can we use the relative isolation caused by the pandemic to look more deeply at bringing our practice home?
The First Month
The first month of the practice period will be an open exploration of bringing practice home through the rituals of your everyday life. We will ask you to explore having a space that is your formal practice space. It can be a place you use for other things; the essential quality is that it has this sacred purpose noted as well.
Forms and rituals make a container for the emptiness, the non-dual aspect of practice. We will focus on the meaning and place of ritual in our lives. What is meant by ritual and what are the purposes of ritual? Do we have existing rituals? Can we bring new meaning to them? Can we develop new rituals, either by incorporating or adapting existing Zen forms or by creating our own? Are there other ways that we can realize the home as a sacred space of practice? We will take this time to encourage you to explore a ritual (or rituals) you choose, or an area of your life you choose that you’d like to bring awareness to.
We hope this will lead to uncovering the challenges and opportunities that are manifesting with kindness, curiosity, experimentation. This inquiry and learning are essential to making a practice your own. Throughout the practice period, we will try to stay attentive to our experience in relationships with others in our household, or with ourselves if we are alone. If you live with other people, Is there an activity you might like to invite your partner or family to engage in with you, like the ritual of setting the table for dinner?
The Second Month
In the second month, we will invite you to experience your rituals as practice over time. What do you learn as they become habitual? How do we stick with a ritual we are irritated about, or when we are overcome by feeling? Can we challenge ourselves not to comply but to come fully in to the moment? Simple ritual can be the container for transformation, for healing. As a sangha, we will continue practicing together the rituals of bowing, walking, chanting and sitting together.
The Third Month
The third month will focus on the body. As lay people, we interact with the world in complex ways involving our bodies. We are gendered, perhaps sexually active or sexually aroused or aware. We make efforts to look a certain way, or appear in different roles (like working at home). We consume and make choices about what we buy, what we eat, how we use vehicles, heat and water. We notice changes in our bodies as we are confined by COVID or as we are sick or aging. Focusing our practice in this very body, we can ground our practice and take it out of theory and talk. As the Buddha said, "within this fathom-long body and mind is found all of the teachings."
Structure
The practice period will begin with our regular Friday morning session on February 5th at 7:30 am to 8:45 am (Pacific Time). We’ll then have a half day retreat on February 6 from 8 am to 1:00 pm. The core of the practice period will be our Friday morning sessions, although participants are encouraged to also attend our regular Monday morning sits from 7:30 am to 8:00 am. We will conclude with a full day retreat on May 1. There will be sitting and walking, dharma talks, individual meetings with the teacher, Ava Stanton and with the teacher’s assistant, Bob Zeglovitch, as well as dyads and group discussion. We’ll each make our own commitments for practice during the period, taking into account both our aspirations for deepening our practice and our recognition of the limits and responsibilities of our lives.
Contact me at ava@insightla.org if you would like the Zoom link or if you have questions about the practice period. Also, please drop me a line if you plan to participate, so we can plan accordingly.