Zazen – Our Total Response to Life

Zazen is our total response to life.
It’s not for gaining more control over your unruly mind, body, and emotions.
Set aside self-centre-ing and separating-self-ing and be intimate with life as it is.
- When you feel discomfort with something, including your zazen, expand your awareness and notice how the feeling is part of a larger whole, is less central than it seems.
- Give up the struggle. Stop limiting, denying, avoiding your experience. Stop discriminating against what belongs in awareness and what doesn’t.
- Open to whatever is happening, inside you and around you, including your zazen.
Keep coming back, over and over, without keeping track or score.
You can only awaken to Reality because you are not separate from it.

We even call Zazen “meditation” sometimes, for convenience. However, Zazen is not meditation in the sense of a mental exercise aimed at a particular result. Zazen is our total response to life.

Zazen as Becoming Intimate with Life

While our Zazen may sometimes bring about clear, spacious, non-dual states of mind that are pleasant and beneficial, we do not reach them by aiming to attain them.
Zazen is simply setting aside all self-centered activities in order to be intimate with Life.
expand our awareness as wide as we can, so our mental activities become one small part of the wider landscape of the present moment
Anything you can sense, perceive, think, or experience is part of Life in this broad sense.
Whatever you can sense, perceive, or act upon becomes separate from you, lumped into the infinitely large category “not you,” or “Life.” Whatever you can’t control gets categorized as “not you,” even if it is your own body, mind, or heart.

Zazen as Building Tolerance for Life

Sitting Still with Our Discomfort
- we can radically change our relationship to whatever causes us discomfort, such that the discomfort can be recognized and endured without it overwhelming or destroying us.
- The first step to building tolerance for Life is physical and mental stillness.
- Expanding your awareness as much as possible, so that whatever is upsetting you becomes one part of the larger landscape of the present moment. By doing this, discomfort is acknowledged and included but it becomes less central to your experience. You are less likely to be overwhelmed by it, and less likely to perseverate on it.
Tolerance for Our Own Zazen
- It is crucial to build tolerance for any aspects of your Zazen you don’t like, or that you don’t perceive as being the way things should be.

Zazen as Making Peace with Life

It is no simple matter to be at peace with Life.
Including in Our Zazen Where We Are Not Yet at Peace
- In Zazen, we do not discriminate what belongs in our awareness and what does not. We do not set a boundary for our awareness at the furthest reaches of our senses.
- All we have to do is notice and let go of the many ways we are limiting our own experience, or subtly trying to deny, avoid, or exclude certain things.
- You have to be willing to see more, to learn more, even if it challenges your ideas about yourself or the world.
What It Means to “Make Peace” with Something
- When you make peace with something in a practice sense, you give up your struggle against the fact that things have turned out this way.

Zazen as Seeing the True Nature of Life

Self and all things exist, but – contrary to our assumptions – they are empty of any inherent, enduring, autonomous self-nature.

Investigating the True Nature of Life in Zazen Without Adopting an Agenda

Our habitual attachment to our mental map is so strong, it is difficult for us to let go of it for even a moment unless we step out of our everyday life for an extended period of time.
Wholehearted Zazen is energetic, engaged, and full of purpose, but this purpose transcends self-interest and remains unattached to any particular outcome.

Zazen as Being One with Life

If “being one with Life” appeals to you, it’s important to understand what this really means. It doesn’t mean the obliteration of self in any way.
Your thoughts about what it might be like to be “one with Life” are just that: Thoughts. Such thoughts are based in assumptions which simply don’t apply to Reality-with-a-Capital-R.
The only reason you can awaken to Reality-with-a-Capital-R is because you are inseparable from it.

Practical Instructions for Zazen

Dedicate time and space for Zazen.
Position your body so you can remain perfectly still but also maintain alertness.
- Sitting motionless in Zazen, we learn to show up for Life without expecting it to be pleasurable or entertaining, and without covertly trying to … achieve something useful while we sit.
Set your intention.
Open your awareness and sit, receptive and alert, like an infant experiencing everything for the first time.
When you become aware that you have become lost in thoughts, sensations, or dullness, recognize this as a precious moment of choice. You are no longer lost but have remembered your intention. Expand your awareness as you did before, taking care to include everything that just happened and is happening. Do this over and over again, letting go of any concern about how well or how poorly you are doing.
Surrender as completely as you can to the simple process of Zazen while you are sitting, judging the quality of your Zazen solely on the sincerity of your effort and not on the character of your experience while sitting. Evaluate whether the practice of Zazen is beneficial only after making it a regular part of your life for some time.

Zazen is Messy

Zazen is not a practice you do to gain more control over your unruly mind, body, and emotions.

Deepening Your Zazen

Zazen is the practice of opening to whatever is happening, inside us and around us, including our experience in Zazen. We’re not aiming to fix or figure out anything, not even how to make our Zazen more quiet, spacious, insightful, intimate, or nondual.
When you notice your Zazen feels “off the mark,” take this as a sign that you are not wholeheartedly choosing to do Zazen.
The most common reason we are halfhearted or unfocused in our Zazen is a subtle but compelling belief that we have plenty of time left in this life and will apply ourselves energetically to practice at some point in the future.

Notes from

Added 2024-05-11.