BUDDHIST BOOT CAMP

Don’t ask me why every major religion thinks they have to celebrate in December but there you have it: Christmas, Ramadan, Rohatsu, Kwanza, Chanukah – all crammed into the twelfth month. I suspect Christ may not actually have been born on December 25 any more than Buddha awakened on the eighth day of December. We make up a lot of shit here on this planet, trying to hang on, muddle through, and explain why on many days it’s so hard to be a human.


Lots of folks celebrate in December by eating rich foods, getting really drunk, and trying to cop a feel at the office Christmas party. Zen Buddhists have a slightly different approach that involves seven days of silent meditation, filled with excruciating hours of sitting absolutely still. Yahoo! Chances are you won’t see a reality TV show called Buddhists Gone Wild but I just returned from my first Rohatsu sesshin (long period of silent meditation) and I survived 15 hour days at the monastery, in total silence and it was, well, pretty glorious.


When my son Billy was in the Marines he had a T-shirt that said: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. This is what Rohatsu is like at first. Participants wear dark clothing, no make up or jewelry, we don’t speak or make eye contact and we sit, walk, and eat in total silence. The idea is to strip away that pesky “personality” of ours and not to invoke anyone else’s. We are just left alone, to our plain old selves, to find out what Buddha discovered after sitting under a tree for six years pondering that age old question: why does it hurt so much to be a human?


But Zen, like Seinfeld, is about Nothing. No answer, no God to lay some mysterious trip on, no relatives of God to take the heat for our “sins.” Buddhists believe only in one thing: the present moment, which – oops! – has already passed. Nothing else. Left foot, right foot, breathe. And if on any given day you suffer while you put one foot in front of the other, know that this too shall pass. Meantime, develop compassion, clarity, wisdom and life can be pretty darn sweet. That’s it.


Upaya monastery (http://www.upaya.org/) is where I’ll start my lay chaplaincy program in March and it’s where I go on retreat with my homies, in this case about 60 other people from all over who think it’s a really good use of time to do nothing much, in silence, together, for 15 hours a day. There were grandparents, young people, black, Asian, white, hefty, small – the normal array of Earthsuits. We didn’t speak at all, but I fell in love with most all of them. How does that happen? The short answer is that people generally are a lot more attractive when they shut up. But on a deeper level, your hearts just connect when you walk this way together, like the one root of an aspen grove that connects all the trees above ground.


Buddhists focus on two main tools for developing compassion, awareness, and wisdom: meditation and mindfulness. The first is a very formalized way of sitting in silence and the second is a simple matter of paying attention to what’s directly in front of you right now. The point is to tame what Buddhists call your “monkey mind” – that shrieking, aimless, noisy monkey that throws its own shit around as it swings wildly in your head. Try right now to close your eyes and sit quietly for 30 seconds. You’ll meet your monkey mind, trust me.


My mind is more like a Chihuahua dog on crack cocaine. I’ve been meditating about 10 years now and spent half that time trying to get the damn dog to stop peeing on the rug and tearing up the furniture. In Rohatsu, left alone with my crazy dog mind, I started to teach her to sit, and stay. It’s really nice.


There wasn’t enough room to stay at the monastery so I had a motel room nearby which was great because after 15 hours in deep silence I could go back and eat cheese doodles and snuggle with my comforting bad habits like e-mail and Reese’s Pieces. I’m just not that hard core yet, maybe never will be, but we chant a beautiful meditation phrase that says “May I happily take care of myself” and sometimes chocolate is just part of that. I also spent my free “rest” hour each day by running or power walking around the neighborhood. I’m addicted to my own endorphins and get pretty cranky when deprived of that particular drug.


On the last morning of sesshin we celebrated Buddha’s awakening with a ceremony under the Morning Star at 6am. Now Zen Buddhists don’t have elaborate “ceremonies” because we’re into Nothing so it’s not exactly the Macy’s Day Parade when 60 of us walk out into a field in silence and stare at the sky. After about 15 minutes, a bell rings. That’s it. The fat lady has sung, and we go back inside to sit some more. At the very end of our last hour of sitting zazen in the Zendo (temple), our teachers did something shocking and compelling: they rather blasted into the room Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. It was overwhelming, to feel that abject joy in all that silent sitting but that’s what it’s all about. As one teacher said, quoting Duke Ellington, It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. If there’s not joy in your life, every day, every minute, you’re missing the boat.


I’d like to quote another famous Zen master, Dr. Seuss, in noting that we started Rohatsu like the kids in Cat in the Hat – “all we could do was just sit, sit, sit, sit, and we did not like it not one little bit.” But then, of course, something when THUMP, and how that thump makes us jump.


Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza, Chanukah, Ramadan, Rohatsu and whatever else is out there celebrating any and all kinds of awakening of our good selves. Egg nog and fruit cake are pretty awful separately, but lethal put together. Take care of yourself, happily, one foot in front of the other.