Zen Celery

By Kate Savage

The majority of my meditation practice has been in the insight tradition. I have a beloved mentor now, (Ava Louise Stanton) who is a Soto Zen lay entrusted teacher, and so I've joined her sangha for a three-month practice period. The Soto Zen lineage is unfamiliar to me and the different form has been uncomfortable at times. This has forced the issue of the "don't-know mind," not just as a concept, but as a lived experience. I'm aware that Zen form is just a form, and it exists independent of me and my reactions to it, and so there is much to learn. It has also allowed me the opportunity to examine some of my fixed views around meditation practice, how compassion is expressed in different traditions, and what refuge feels like to different folks. I've had moments of intense aversion, and also I've also had some interesting revelations around my biases about formal and informal practice. 

During this practice period, we practitioners have been encouraged to choose a mundane life task to practice as a daily ritual. As I already make fresh celery juice to drink every day, I chose the multi-step process of washing and cutting celery, juicing the celery, and then cleaning the juicer.

In our small sangha, we've discussed pace and persistence - slowing down and staying with the chosen daily task in order to learn about ritual, habit, the speedy mind and missed opportunities. I was grateful to connect with the confidence my long-time meditation practice has given me to hang with whatever arises. I've started bowing to the celery and to the juicer each day, sometimes with a little smile or chuckle. It brings gravitas and joy to the task.

I've been pondering: what is the balance between contrivance and what comes naturally? Although bowing and chanting may feel like a contrivance to me right now, I imagine after time it becomes natural. Is it possible to move from awkward contrivance to natural state without the ritual then becoming a mindless habit? This is where Right Intention and Right Action come into play with Right Mindfulness.

I slowly started seeing how my celery practice spilled over into other areas of daily life. How obvious! How beautifully simple! It's not a new concept, continuity of practice, and I've experienced it often on retreat, but I've noticed more fully how this intentional, body-based practice is making a more seamless bridge to daily life. For instance, I seem to take more pauses throughout my day to connect with my breath. Without consciously trying, I realize that I've "formalized" the practice of lying in bed after first waking in the morning with my hands resting on my body for several minutes before I arise. Or driving, I'll suddenly notice my hands gripping the steering wheel and then allow them to soften. All of this IS practice.

I'm aware that I have still have a bias for formal sitting practice as "real" practice, and while it's still my main and most valuable practice (I definitely drop into deeper states of relaxed concentration), it's certainly not the only way.

Spring Practice Period, 2021: Yasodhara's Path

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.   

Yasodhara's Path, The One Who Stayed

By Ava Stanton

Amid losses that bewilder our counting and our hearts, and without an end date certain, we know that the pandemic will end, and we hope the institutions of democracy hold.  Yet for now, we are in a moment of deep uncertainty.

Like you, I am constrained by quarantine.  In our own ways, each of us is constrained, tripped up by conditions we assumed and used to count on. I wonder, what is sacred in my forced retreat from the world?  What practice offers itself to me? How from my position of privilege (I can work at home) do I support the world?

While the Buddha has been my source of inspiration for many years, it’s now his wife, Yasodhara, with whom I feel a deep kinship.

 She was a single mother left with her in-laws after the Buddha departed on his quest, and other than that, we know nothing. There is no sutra, not a word.  This is a first way I feel invited into her mystery.   What word actually captures your experience, or mine?  Isn’t the utter silence of Yasodhara the perfect complement to the thousands of pages of words the Buddha is reported to have spoken?

 I can guess: She parented, most likely failing and succeeding in meeting her young son’s need for reassurance.  She sorted her possessions.  She managed her relations with her in-laws. She looked in a mirror. Perhaps she lived through a plague. She has been called “The One Who Stayed.”  These private moments – we have them too. Can we stay with them?  How can these be our field of practice?

 How about the practice of looking in the mirror?  Here’s another way I look for Yasodhara.  What courage does it take to stay with the moment, not excluding or being controlled by our memories and embodied reactions to our face in the mirror? What is alive and unknowable about this moment?  How do we find our footing when we lose the moment to shame, to pride, to fear?  Didn’t she do this too?

 Making my bed, pulling on clothes, pulling myself from my computer, moments that feel private and unseen – can I be “The One Who Stays”?   These practices feel the most real to me as I face an unknowable future. 

 I know I need a spiritual community, as well as guidance and encouragement from teachers on the path. Then there are the ways to know my own private moments through an unfolding present. In this effort that I make on my own, I feel the mystery of Yasodhara’s silence, her breathing in and out.  Without words, with the pain or lack of resolution of the moment.  This is the unrecorded path of the house-holder. 

 May we join her in this ever-present.  May we stay with the tasks at hand:  our democracy, the end of white violence, taking action for the climate, or those whose lives are destroyed by COVID and it’s consequences, our in-breath and out-breath.  Let’s stay without a sutra, in the privacy of this moment.

Ava