If You're Going To Try Meditation, Listen To This First - Zen Talk With Daizan Roshi

When we start off in our meditation practice, it's good to have an adequate road-map for the journey. This means the process can unfold in the most beneficial and smooth way. However, sometimes when we "turn the lamp around," we end up in territory we're not prepared for. Drawing on his 20+ years of teaching meditation and Zen, Daizan Roshi talks about some of the things to expect along the way and what to do when we end up in unexpected territory.

Transcript

So,

My first Zen teacher gave me permission to teach back in the 90s and between then and now there's probably been,

I don't know,

Possibly even thousands of people I've introduced to meditation.

One of the things that I've come to notice as a kind of a recurring pattern is when I show somebody how to meditate and they go ahead and get on with it and I check back in maybe two or three weeks later,

It's quite often they'll say to me,

You know what,

I reckon I feel worse now than I did before I started.

And nearly always I'll say,

Congratulations,

You're doing it right.

Now I think it's,

Well we're living in a time in which vast numbers of people are practicing meditation and mindfulness now.

That's becoming widely,

Widely accepted as incredibly beneficial for body and mind.

And that's true,

It really is.

So we live in this new situation now where meditation and mindfulness is a mass movement really and people of many different kinds are beginning to make this a part of their lives.

Now we've seen something very similar in the yoga world.

You know years ago yoga was thought of as a pretty eccentric kind of spiritual practice really.

Now yoga's in many gyms,

Maybe even multiple times a day,

Primarily as a health and wellbeing exercise modality.

The major impetus in meditation and mindfulness practice also is health and wellbeing and it seems that there's an avalanche of scientific evidence to back that up.

However,

The people who have been introducing it with solely the health and wellbeing motivation,

Particularly in the sort of medical world,

Have run trials on meditation and mindfulness,

Essentially comparing it to drugs.

We've seen studies comparing the effects of meditation and mindfulness practice and Prozac and other antidepressants for example.

There's been a lot of work around stress reduction as well.

And the idea here is you do your meditation rather than pop your pill and you get better results,

Less side effects.

Now that all works,

That's all fine,

Except that there's more to the picture in these practices of meditation and mindfulness than simply stress relief,

Greater health,

Greater wellbeing.

So I think it's very useful,

Whatever your motivation for doing this work might be,

It's very helpful to have at least something of a roadmap so that you can kind of make sense of the unfolding processes that go on.

We have people wondering about the world today who don't have a roadmap,

Many,

Many thousands.

And I think it's a little bit like,

Or I've heard it compared,

A little bit like the situation of a young woman who's never been told about pregnancy and suddenly all these changes are happening to her body,

Her mind,

How she feels,

Her hormone levels,

Her diet.

Nobody's given her any indication of what to expect and the whole process becomes absolutely terrifying when it's actually very,

Of course,

Very beneficial and beautiful.

Similarly,

If we have a sense of what to expect and how to handle things in this field that we're in,

The process,

I believe,

Can unfold in the most beneficial and the most smooth way.

So by and large,

People get what they go for.

If you're practicing your meditation and mindfulness work with a motivation of improving your health,

Your wellbeing,

This kind of thing,

By and large,

That's what you'll get.

If you're looking for deeper insights about life,

If you're looking for a new basis to live from,

By and large,

You'll get that too.

But there is a certain measure of crossover and sometimes people end up a little bit in territory that they're not prepared for.

So this is kind of like the survival kit for that kind of situation.

So people come along and say,

You know,

I've been doing this kind of thing three weeks a month.

I feel worse than when I started.

Why would that be?

And what's happening now?

Well there are a few dimensions.

One of them is that most people are very unconscious of the amount of stress,

Tension,

Stuff from the past that they're carrying around.

People by and large are even very surprised at the chaos in their own minds when they come to actually,

As it were,

Make friends with themselves in a meditation practice.

So it can be a bit of a surprise,

A bit of a shock,

Quite how much stuff is floating around.

When we start this practice,

What we're doing is,

To use the old Zen phrase,

We're turning the light around.

We're turning our attention within.

We're doing our very best to relax,

Relaxing the mind,

Relaxing the body,

And yet at the same time maintaining a quality of presence and awareness.

And in many ways,

This is the magic formula for any meditation practice.

On the one hand,

We have this quality of relaxation,

This quality of letting go,

This quality of ease.

And on the other hand,

We have this quality of poise,

Balance,

Uprightness,

Awareness.

Normally when we have,

For example,

Uprightness,

We have a measure of rigidity,

Tightness,

Hyper arousal.

Normally when we have a quality of relaxation,

We're kind of losing our sharpness,

We're kind of moving towards sleep or at least dozing or daydreaming.

But with meditation,

We're bringing these two qualities together.

Relaxation,

Body and mind,

Together with presence or poise of body and mind.

Now when we do this,

Things start to open up by the very nature of things.

Relation,

Tightness,

Whether it's mental or physical,

Closes things down.

So when we start to let go,

When we start to relax,

When we start to be present with how we are in this kind of relaxed,

Aware way,

Lo and behold,

All this stuff that's been,

As it were,

Locked away in our tension,

In our holding on,

In our tightness,

Starts to release,

Starts to come free.

Now often the stuff that we tend to lock away is almost inevitably the more unpleasant bits of life,

The things that we weren't able to handle,

The griefs that we didn't want to face,

The frustration or anger around the way people treated us,

All this kind of stuff.

Now if we're willing to just let these,

Whatever it is,

These feelings come and go,

Come and go and just stay in this presence,

This relaxed presence,

Without pushing anything away,

Without grabbing onto anything,

If we're willing to do that,

A kind of a great clearing process can happen.

It's a little bit like a spiritual detox.

So if you've ever had like three days on just lemon juice or something,

You'll be very aware how during the process it's very normal to feel very ropey,

To feel very sort of even,

To feel even not very well sometimes,

But if you kind of persist,

If you let that sort of work its way through,

There's kind of a clearing and you feel absolutely amazing afterwards.

Well this is the same kind of process but on a deeper level.

Gradually,

Progressively,

Stuff arises,

Releases,

Arises,

Releases,

Bits of,

If you like,

Unlived life become able to come free and release.

And as they do,

All of that life energy of yours that's been locked into holding this stuff down and out of awareness becomes free,

Becomes available for you to use in your life in an active way.

Your whole being moves from tightness to release,

From closure to freedom.

And this is a massively worthwhile process.

More than that,

As things kind of open up on these physical levels,

These detox levels,

These emotional mental levels as well,

Our awareness begins to deepen,

Begins to expand.

We begin to know ourselves more and more fully.

Now the big turning point,

The big shift happens when we start to see actually directly,

Or know directly that the unexamined sense of me as a solid object,

Me as a billion ball rolling across the table of life becomes absolutely laughable,

Completely obviously not how we are.

We start to see that we are a process rather than a thing.

If you like a dance,

Our life is actually a dance,

An ongoing shifting,

Moving pattern of flow.

The more we let go,

The more this dance becomes vivid,

Alive,

Free.

The more our life becomes full and free and if you like able to respond moment to moment to the ongoing dance of reality outside ourselves.

So everything goes from a sense of lock,

Tight,

Closed,

Finito if you like,

To open freedom.

Now this shift that we get at a certain point is revolutionary in our life.

Once we've seen how we really are,

That we're not this sort of lump of meanness that's fixed and closed and needs defending against a hostile outside world,

Once we've seen that,

We can't unsee it again.

It's a little bit like once,

As I often say,

Once you've been to Paris,

You can never again be somebody who hasn't been to Paris.

Now this shift,

This revolutionary shift that happens through persisting through your meditation,

Making it a daily practice,

20 minutes a day,

25 minutes a day,

Day after day,

Just making it a habit,

Allowing whatever needs to arise to do so,

Allowing this detox process to go on.

Now if we do that,

We get this shift,

That's a beginning,

Not an end.

This shift the Buddha himself calls entering the stream.

When we enter the stream,

I think it's a very graphic way of expressing it.

It's like we move into this world of flow rather than a world of block,

A world of tightness.

But then there's still more unfolding.

There are powerful forces within us that,

As it were,

Tend towards our unhappiness,

Towards our suffering.

And they're traditionally classified as three types,

The forces of greed,

The forces of hatred and the forces of delusion.

The forces of greed are probably for us in our society and culture,

The most powerful ones.

And within that sphere is the sense that I'm not good enough.

I need,

I need,

I need.

And this can be the endless propaganda of advertising telling you that you'll be all right if you have this motorboat or this Greek holiday or this face cream or whatever it is.

The message,

The underlying message is always the same.

You're not all right.

You're not all right.

And so we have a society that is driven primarily by this feeling of lack.

So in going deeper in this work,

These forces within ourselves have to come into focus and be actually seen through so that we gain our freedom.

Reviews

Quite simple yet profound information about one’s journey of self discovery and what to expect along the way

A must for anyone starting out on their mediation journey - or for those who think it’s going’wrong’.

Very well said. Great for beginners.

Sound advice and guidance from Daizen on meditation.

This podcast is extremely useful. The background noises were a bit off-putting at first, but as I drew my focus in, the noises became inconsequential. Thank you 🙏🏽

Very enlightening- thank you.

Clear and interesting explanation

This was great thank you Namaste 🙏🏻

I've been practicing daily (most days, 2-3 times daily) for approaching two years, and I found this extremely helpful. My reasons for starting to practice initially were much as those of many - relax, destress, carve out some time for myself.

As I practiced though, I found other reasons slipping in - my sleep was improving with my greater sense of calmness, I was better able to observe and release my chronic pain, and I found that if I set an intention, I was better able to manifest it in my daily journey.

Relaxation led to health which led to curiosity about how and why it works (my educational background is highly psychologically-based at a graduate school level, so wondering about these things is almost like breathing to me).

At some point, all these areas converged upon me all at once in my practice. This is where I am now. I feel these are all part of a larger truth, yet at the moment they continue to present themselves as separate areas of concentration. I feel like I am at a buffet table, picking and choosing the focus I need for the situation at hand, but I sense that this is more like putting out fires rather than simply removing the lighter in the first place.

I wonder if I focused on a single area, would that improve my response there as well as flow into the other areas? If I concentrated on lovingkindness, would the spillover help me manage my difficulty in maintaining the exercise program I need to retain muscle tone? I think it would. I simply have yet to find a way to "settle down" and give it a try, ignoring the temptations of new practices I see here on Insight Timer and maybe commit to a week (to start) of nothing but the timer function and a couple of non-spiritual affirmation and musical sound energy practices which help me to sleep better.

I do not have a specific tradition, which may also be a challenge in my progress. I do have many practices borrowed from China and Japan, utilizing a daily Tai chi practice plus Gua Sha and also shinrin yoku (forest bathing). My heritage calls too, though, and traditional Nordic/Scandinavian, Germanic, and Jewish concepts resonate deeply, as do elements of various cultures I have visited and/or have a deep connection to (Australian native peoples, the Maori of New Zealand, certain parts of the Native American and Native Alaskan belief systems here in the USA, for example). I am quite a hybrid, yet there are so many commonalities among them. It just becomes more difficult without a single lineage practice with the resulting syllabus. 😆

I look forward to the rest of the talks you have uploaded thus far. This one was very reassuring to me, and helped me feel a little less concerned about the inner changes (generally beneficial, with time if not immediately) and situations I have been experiencing as my practice has progressed. Thank you for taking the time and effort to share the gift of your experience and insights with us here. I see the light in you. 🤲🏻❤️🤲🏻

Highly recommended! And your delivery and content are so excellent that I didn’t get annoyed by all that’s going on in the background! 🦋🙏

An excellent lecture that gives a clear, explanation of good meditation practice.

Very interesting talk😊

This is one of the best talks I've been listening to for quite a while.
Wow. Thank you.
This is so beautifully straightforward and utterly helpful. I've just recently started to meditate on a regular basis and I feel really blessed to come across this.
I'll definitely recommend this.