Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, the pioneering Zen teacher from Japan who founded the Zen Center of San Francisco in 1969:
“Roshi, what’s the most important thing?” and he answered:
To find out what’s the most important thing.
Byron Katie, who teaches a practice called self-inquiry, says the world’s number one problem is confusion. As we hang in there with meditation practice, week after week, a little clarity starts to emerge.
The thing that brought us to the cushion is rarely the thing that keeps us there. We may have signed up to get an edge in academia or our social life, or maybe just to find a group to hang out with.
After a while, it sinks in: meditation is not self-improvement, it is self-discovery.
It is more about undoing and unlearning conditioned habits than collecting some special meditation goodies.
We all just want to be happy, to feel at home in our own lives, and to feel a connection with the world and other beings.
But we keep looking in all the wrong places.
By habitually looking outside our own skin for fulfillment, we struggle.
So many of the voices we listen to, both in our own head and out in the media, lead us on a long walk on the hedonic treadmill Buddhists call samsara.
Then one day comes the marvelous insight: we already have what we need.
As we uncover the treasure of our own being, we start to appreciate meditation as self-discovery rather than self-improvement. We lose interest in the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.
As one of my teachers, Sharon Salzberg, puts it: we learn not to get caught reaching out and grasping after things we never really needed to begin with.
Along these lines, the poet Rumi asks:
How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones?
Let the world go.
Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne. Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry so we can travel lightly through the world.
Letting go is not just letting go of something. It is also a letting go into something else.
This can be subtle, nuanced work. We usually think of letting go as releasing a grip on something. But the teacher Gil Fronsdal points out a complementary movement running alongside it. With enough practice, we notice the story does not end at the release: we let go of one thing, and a moment later we land in another.
Fronsdal’s own image is a diver: she lets go of the board, and a second later she meets the cool water of the pool. In the same way, we let go of impatience, and a moment later we relax into a feeling of ease.
If we find ourselves gripped by panic or fear, we can learn to let go into the felt safety of relaxation.
We start to see how much nicer it is to rest in that free and easy being-ness than to keep struggling with something.
But if we have not tasted that being-ness yet, it is a hard sell to the psyche. You come to know its sweet taste by stumbling on it in practice, by accident.
You cannot make it happen on purpose. You just meditate every day and hang in there.
Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough. Nothing missing, nothing lacking, as the old Zen teachers used to say.
Every moment, appreciated as it is.
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