2013-06-20T07:27:02-04:00 Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=colleen-morton-busch Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Colleen Morton Busch Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2871376 2013-03-18T11:01:58-04:00 2013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00

Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/
For most of my 20s and 30s, if I couldn't sleep, I could usually point to some anxiety as the cause -- a stimulating writing project, an important exam, a conflict with someone I loved. It's only now, in my early 40s, that I frequently experience sleeplessness for no apparent or obvious reason. I look back on that brief period of childhood insomnia over a friend's move to Texas with something like nostalgia. If only there were a single, clear and compelling (and likely temporary) reason for my current bouts of sleeplessness. I don't know what's keeping me awake, exactly. My doctor told me that she meets many patients like me -- female, in their 40s -- whose habitual sleep patterns are disrupted, likely by hormones. The changes vary from woman to woman, but usually, the new pattern is marked by less sleep, not more. Sometimes the changes are permanent.

I've always loved sleep. The biggest hurdle for me in committing to a three-month-long training period in a Zen monastery was the thinness of the time between the morning wakeup bell and the last evening period of meditation. I was seriously afraid of being really tired. How would I function on six hours of sleep each night when I typically bank eight or more?

I did go to the monastery, called Tassajara, and I did experience a state of extraordinary fatigue there. I was so sleepy I was dizzy. I asked one of the practice leaders what was the point of the sleep deprivation. What was the wisdom in not being able to keep my eyes open when Zen practice is about endeavoring to wake up? He said that tiredness can help us to soften and let go where we might harden and grip if we were well-rested and comfortable, and thus ready with our usual defenses. Instead of falling asleep, we fall awake -- opening to all that we experience because we're too crazy tired to fight for our preferences.

My doctor gave me a prescription for sleeping pills -- not because I plan to take them every night or even most nights, but to have as a backup for when I must sleep and the more natural approaches I'm trying don't work: the herbal teas and nightly bedtime routines. But she also said something I didn't expect to hear from a doctor of Western medicine, even in California. "The next time you can't sleep, just see if you can be curious about it. What is this not sleeping?"

For a moment, I might have been back in the monastery, being reminded in a Dharma talk that what happens in this life is not as meaningful as how we respond to what happens. The problem isn't so much not sleeping as it is having a problem with not sleeping. According to Elizabeth Kolbert's recent article in the New Yorker on the science of sleeplessness, sleep may in fact be less critical than we've been trained to think.

Until the proof is in, I'll still take my eight hours, but I'm trying not to harden around my desire for sleep when it doesn't readily come, especially the kind of sleep I often had in earlier years -- long and uninterrupted. Accepting how little we control in life is so hard, but it can also be deeply freeing, the way it's liberating at the monastery to just get up when the wakeup bell rings, even when you don't want to.

I was tired at Tassajara, to be sure, but I was also very happy. And I slept like a baby.

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Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/
The poem is called "The Summer Day," but its message belongs equally to January, the official month of resolutions. January is traditionally a time for making commitments to beneficial habits and dropping less-wholesome ones. It's a time of stepping up and beginning again. For me, January is time to get out on my skate skis.

If you haven't seen skate skiing in action or tried it yourself, you may be confused. Well, is it skating or skiing? Skate skiing is where ice-skating and cross-country skiing meet. It's like dancing on snow. Instead of an ice rink, you have a groomed trail through the woods. Instead of skates you wear stiff, skinny skis and use tall poles. Good skate skiers are strong and graceful and make it look easy, though it's not easy, not in the least.

Skate skiing is one of the most demanding winter workouts you can find, but this isn't the source of my devotion. I'm a distinctly non-competitive athlete, motivated more by pleasure than by performance or fitness metrics. My husband wears a heart monitor and tracks his distance; I don't even wear a watch.

I love skate skiing because of how I feel when I'm doing it. Right now, that's not so great, actually. I'm breaking in my muscles, finding my winter groove, and it's painful, sometimes nauseatingly so.

But it's also exhilarating.

I love being in the brisk outdoor air -- just me and the low sun angling through the conifers. Sometimes a fox or a coyote trots across the trail. Sometimes I have music in my ears, but often not. I love being my own engine on the uphills and surrendering to gravity on descents. When I'm skate skiing, I'm both intensely in my body and intensely in a landscape. This makes me happy.
Even if I'm skiing without a partner, as I often do, I'm not alone in my bliss. Everyone at the cross-country center where I ski, near Lake Tahoe's north shore -- with a few rare exceptions -- is happy too. The ones who glide expertly across the snow and those who tightly grip their poles and wedge down every moderate slope. There is something about snow that invites delight. Maybe it dates back to making snow angels and sledding. Snow makes the inner child want to cavort and frolic.

It doesn't matter that I know the groomed trails by heart and ski them over and over in the course of a season. Snow transforms a familiar landscape into a clean slate, and this transformation gladdens the heart. I think that's what we love about snow, those of us who do love it: its very transience. We know it won't stay, and thus we adore it. The same goes for skate skiing. That I can't do it all year long only makes my appreciation keener. Right now, what I want to do with my one wild and precious life is to give all my weight to a pair of skis and glide through the forest.
But before every glide, there's usually a grunt. I don't want to say "No pain, No gain." There isn't really gain from a Zen perspective -- even if I get in good enough shape to make it to the top of the hill without my legs turning to mush and my lungs seizing up. That's just me skiing in January and me skiing in March. Zen practice has taught me that it's possible to embrace pain -- or at least to open to it -- and not just to want the glide without the grunt. The trick is to enjoy January for January and March for March, not expecting one to be the other.

Tomorrow, despite stiff legs and sore feet, I'll be out there skate skiing again. Maybe I'll feel a tad stronger and smoother than I did today, or yesterday. Maybe not. But I'll be smiling, grateful for January's particular gifts. Whatever it is you have resolved to do in the new year, I hope you find not only challenge but also ease and happiness in your effort!

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Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/
Often, my spring-cleaning list becomes my fall list and then my winter list. Sometimes an item stays on my list for years, recurring like a garden perennial, only less lovely, its blooms scented with failure. See, it's already mid-May, more than halfway through spring, and I'm only just getting around to writing about this.

Where does this human passion for the list come from? And why isn't it accompanied by a passion for execution? Is it simply that we have much to do and not enough time to do it in, or is the cause more psychologically and spiritually complex?

Likely it's both. Since I'm not a psychologist or a priest, I won't theorize. But I'd like to share how I'm approaching spring cleaning this year with the hope that you might find it helpful -- and that declaring this approach publicly will help me keep my word. This year, my list looks similar to prior year's lists, but keeping in mind the words of a wise man who said, "I don't just listen to the words you say. I listen to why you speak, and why I listen," I'm resolving to see the reason I make my list in the first place.

I'm a natural list-maker. Lists help me manage time. They provide a structure, a reference point, each item a bell sounding my priorities. But like anything, lists can be taken too far. Certain things are not so conducive to being enumerated. Love, for example, despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous poetic counting of its ways.

It would be useful to order my bookshelves -- poetry with poetry, novels with novels -- so that when I go looking for something, I have a chance of finding it. My neighbors would probably appreciate if I tamed my backyard. But this year, instead of just getting right down to these tasks, or putting them off, I'm going to pause as I put each job on the list, note why I'm putting it there, and -- this is important -- let go of my attachment to seeing it done.

What's the point of making the list, you might ask, if you don't plan to follow through? It's not that I don't hope to follow through, or plan to. I love that cleared-out, fresh-cut-grass feeling that comes from completion, from putting things in their proper places and liberating forgotten, unused objects to a new life. I'm the one who purges in our house -- ask my husband, who believes that the minute we give something away, we're going to need it. Sometimes he's right. But I still believe in the ultimate value of getting rid of stuff we could do without.

This year, the backyard is on my list, as it usually is, a perennial item for various reasons, one of them being that it is hidden from view. The grass is long and weedy. Ivy and blackberries encroach. Mint has taken over along the fence. Plans for new landscaping, a writing shed, and a wood-burning sauna remain just plans, something my husband and I talk about from time to time, like we talk about riding bikes in Asia.

Today, as I write down "backyard cleanup," I pause. I remember how last month my sweet orange tabby Jai lay in the grass, scooping up the scents in the air with his nose and purring, the week he died. I remember the beautiful, twisted-bark juniper tree that used to shade a section of the yard before a fungus killed it and we had to cut it down. I picture the mother deer and her two fawns who made their beds in the long grass and stared solemnly at us as we peered back at them from the bedroom window. I think of planting lettuce seedlings in the bed now occupied by the mint, pulling off a few tender leaves for a dinner salad.

The words themselves, "backyard cleanup," don't evoke the feelings these memories and images do -- and thus, it's easy to forget why I really do want to spend a day or two in the yard as the season tilts into summer. This is the list behind the list: mourning my cat, connecting with the natural world, tasting its gifts. These are good reasons to get out in the yard and work, reasons my body can get behind. And if my body gets behind it, my heart and mind are also behind it, and I can do what I actually want to do.

It's not about crossing "backyard cleanup" off the list, though there is satisfaction in that. It's not what I do -- the item on the list -- that ultimately matters. What matters is why I put the task on the list in the first place. That's the energy that drives intention. Once I find that, I'm in my work clothes, pulling on a sun hat and gloves.

That said, if the job doesn't get done -- if life has other plans and I'm diverted from my backyard cleanup project, that's all right too. Jai was as content in the long grass as a lion on the African savannah. The deer will enjoy the blackberries. And in the meantime, I won't indulge guilt or feel deficient. Those are things I can definitely do without.

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Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/ Tassajara, the head cook carried the mice she caught daily in Havahart live traps to a trailhead far from the kitchen to release them. This was how she met her responsibility to keep the kitchen clean and honored her Buddhist vow not to kill.

While I was at Tassajara, I found out later, mice were getting comfortable in my house many miles away. When I came home, I found droppings in the utensil drawer and in the cupboard where I keep pots and pans. After my mother and I cleaned up the mouse poop she hadn't seen, her vision dimmed by age like her hearing, I found more droppings in the laundry room. The mice were eating kitty litter, the expensive, clumping kind made from wheat that one of my cats prefers. I bought a plastic bin for the litter. I sealed off the entry point to the kitchen cupboard. But a month later, the mice are still living in the crawl space. I regularly catch them in my own Havahart trap.

You may wonder why I don't simply release my cats into the crawl space to deal with my mouse problem. My cats are pampered indoor cats, 14 and 16 years old, who think food comes from a can at regularly spaced intervals.

And this blog isn't really about my mouse problem. Or rather, it's about how having mice in the house makes me think about the problem of being human. It's about mind mice: the "pests" that reside in the dark corners of my consciousness -- difficult emotions, unchecked opinions, beliefs and judgments -- that can do a lot of damage if left to their own devices.

Like your common brown house mouse, mind mice can enter through the tiniest hole -- ¼ inch! Behind the walls, under cover of darkness, whether or not I'm aware of their presence, they are always gnawing on something.

So, what can be done?

First, I can't know I have a mind mouse problem (and we all do) until I make an effort to see them. Some signs are hard to ignore -- like a flash of anger. Sometimes the evidence is not so obvious -- like a vaguely critical thought. With real mice, the search for entry points can be elusive, and the same goes for mind mice. I may not be able to determine exactly why I'm afraid. But I can know that I am afraid, and that's a start.

Removing the sources of food and sealing off entry points comes next. This is a painstaking process. With actual mice, I can pay a pest guy to crawl around in the dark and seal up holes. With mind mice, I have to do it myself because I'm the only one who can shine the light on the possible holes, who knows where my fear might want to make a nest.

Then comes catching the mind mice that remain inside. There are several options, including poison and trapping to kill, but I don't recommend either of these approaches. Given poison, real mice often die where they live. The same would probably happen with my anger, were I to try to poison it. It would only rot between the walls. Whether using glue traps or the more humane guillotine kind, traps leave a corpse behind, and the question of where to properly dispose of it. With mind mice, it's the same: How do I dispose of a feeling once I've lopped its head off? Where do the corpses of thoughts go? And what about when the trap only almost kills?

For the actual mice in my crawl space, I use live traps. I drive to the nearby regional park to release them. Some zoom across the grass, trying to get as far away from their confinement as quickly as possible. Some of them move slowly, afraid to leave the cage -- a cautious animal of prey in a big, grassy world.

Even if I'm annoyed I had to leave my warm house and delay my arrival at my writing desk to make the trip, I feel happy when the mouse hops off to the rest of his life. I'm glad for its freedom, as its freedom is emblematic and connected to my own. The mouse may be scooped up by a hawk before day is done. But that's between the mouse and the hawk. I've done my part, which is to be a human being living by a vow: Transmit the life of Buddha and do not kill.

The Buddha didn't have to worry about mice in his crawl space. But he did concern himself deeply with the mice of the mind. I think his message was clear and applies to both: We can be strict, with ourselves and others, and benevolent. We can invite what we do not want into the contained space of the heart, hold it there a while, and ultimately, release it -- all without killing. To rid a space of any kind of mouse requires discipline, persistence, and, most importantly, kindness.

I don't have to hate or shove away what I want to remove from the premises. In fact, I can even love it and wish it well while letting it go.

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Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/ lowers your blood pressure, primes your parasympathetic nervous system, influences brain waves associated with a relaxed and wakeful state, helps you kick addictions, find inner peace and in general be a better human being. Sounds good, right? But none of these reasons ultimately describe why I practice meditation, or why I've signed up to spend three months in what's called a "practice period" at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, starting at the end of this month.

I'm going to practice -- full stop -- period.

I just wrote a book about a 2008 wildfire at Tassajara, so my decision to go there may look like embedded journalism in reverse. But I've always wanted to do a practice period at Tassajara, sort of like a Zen immersion program, only there's no language you need to learn since much of it is in silence.

Zen, actually Buddhism in general, is sometimes accused of detachment from the goings on of the real world. This notion -- that a monastery in the wilderness is by definition disconnected from the everyday suffering and messiness of human habitation -- is part of why I wanted to write the book about the fire.

Here was a group of people who'd unplugged from the world of cell phones and 24-hour news presumably to live more contemplative, kinder and less chaotic lives than the rest of us. Suddenly, flames ripped down from the mountaintops around them. What did they do?

What the monks practiced when there wasn't fire, I found, wasn't much different from what they practiced with fire. The heat and urgency and danger made for some exciting moments, just as an illness or accident can pierce a long marriage with a wakeful attention, but the practice was the same, flame or no flame: staying present and open, acknowledging and tolerating uncertainty, taking care of the place and each other.

There's a reason Tassajara is situated where it is, at the end of a winding dirt road in the wilderness. There is something supportive about settling in to practice far from ubiquitous distraction. A monastery is deliberately a fishbowl, a place of no exit, where it's possible to be uncomfortable and not be able to get comfortable. A practice period is a chance to go deep, both inside and outside. You walk around in your familiar skin, but also in the skin of the schedule, the demands of being in a community, the natural rhythms of the land.

But you don't do this primarily for your own sake, for self-improvement or direct benefit.

"I don't want my practice to just be in there," said one of the monks who stayed for the fire at Tassajara, gesturing to the zendo, the meditation hall. I knew what he meant. The point of zazen (Zen meditation) is not to get really good at zazen. The point of doing a practice period is not to crystallize some perfect practice -- to leave after three months with low blood pressure and a serene Buddha grin.

The training at Tassajara can be grueling, both physically and mentally. But what reward lies at the end of it is not what motivates me. That would be getting something in exchange for my efforts; and that's not how I understand meditation practice to work. Meditation does not promise a benefit package in exchange for hours clocked. It's more like packing for a long journey, repeatedly asking yourself what you don't need to carry along.

Meditation teaches me to let go. That includes letting go of expectations for my practice. Benefits may flow, but really, the practice itself is beneficial. And it's harder to show what I've let go of than what I've taken on.


Colleen Morton Busch's nonfiction, poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide range of publications, from literary magazines to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tricycle, and Yoga Journal, where she was a senior editor. A Zen student since 2000, she is the author of Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara. For more information, visit http://fire-monks.com.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.958528 2011-09-14T08:31:00-04:00 2011-11-14T05:12:01-05:00

Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/
But seriously, though I don't really know why the first meditator sat down before daylight, I do know from experience why it's a desirable time for practice. At that hour, there's a distinct lack of buzz, of rushing to and fro, of noise of any color. Not that meditation is about creating ideal conditions -- Suzuki Roshi, author of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", said the screech of the blue jay outside the window is only a problem if you separate yourself from the sound. But meditation is hard enough. It helps to start with supportive conditions -- like improving the soil before you plant a seedling.

Morning meditation at the zendo ends around 7 a.m. I have my whole day ahead, and much of the world around me hasn't had coffee. I love this feeling, this perception of a vast space full of daylight and potential. It's not just that I'm getting a jump on things -- though I admit that's part of it. It's more about having an experience of time that isn't so much an arrow between birth and death as it is all existence unfolding in each moment -- if I pay attention.

Time can feel like a burden, an obstacle or a runaway train. Sometimes I push against it, shrug it off, stretch its seams. But time can't be bossed around. As 13th century Zen ancestor Eihei Dogen pointed out, "Time itself is being, and all being is time." Discord with time creates discord with life itself.

Meditation corrects this discord by training a practitioner to sit completely inside time, not ahead of it or behind it. The ticking of the clock, the wind-blown loops of the mind, the corridors of breath and flickers of birdsong: The moment contains all of it and is all of it. In meditation, there's expansion and dropping away, a recalibration of the self's relationship to the self, and thus, to time. For 40 minutes -- the length of the periods where I sit -- I am no one. I have no name or responsibilities except to maintain an upright posture, breathe and let go.

Meditation practice centers are time-conscious places. Someone rings the bell when it's time to sit down for meditation, to get up, work, eat or sleep. Students are supposed to follow the schedule completely, taking off their watches and listening instead for the timekeeper's cues. Ironically, the tight schedule doesn't feel tight. Following the schedule frees up energy that would normally go into entertaining preferences and exercising choice. The schedule becomes a strict but empathic teacher, revealing time's flowing and easy nature when we harmonize with it.

I once heard someone ask my teacher, a student of Suzuki Roshi's, "Can a Buddha be in a hurry?" He paused briefly, then answered: "Be in time. Not in front of it or behind it." I've experienced meditation periods where I couldn't rest, when I wanted the bell to ring, signaling the period's end. And I've experienced periods where I felt something like sadness when the bell sounded -- I wanted the pleasant state of settled stillness to continue. In both cases, meditation shows me that even if time does not appear to be on my side, it is inside me. And I am inside of it.

Now, when I feel myself push against time or pull it toward me, I stop what I am doing and imagine not the small, strict circles of a watch dial, but the enormous, planetary circling of the earth around the sun.

Anyone can do this.

You don't have to call it meditation. You don't have to go somewhere special or sit down on a cushion cross-legged. It doesn't have to be 5 a.m. At any moment, wherever you are, if you feel like time is a barking dog nipping at your heels, just pause, close your eyes if it helps and breathe.

Let time find you, like an ocean finds a shore, washing up treasures at your feet.

Colleen Morton Busch's nonfiction, poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide range of publications, from literary magazines to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tricycle, and Yoga Journal, where she was a senior editor. A Zen student since 2000, she is the author of "Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara." For more information, visit http://fire-monks.com.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.929222 2011-08-18T08:29:00-04:00 2011-10-18T05:12:01-04:00

Colleen Morton Busch http://www.huffingtonpost.com/colleen-morton-busch/
Like me, you have probably been each type of decider at some point in your life -- even if the last time you felt certain was when you were a toddler, and pursued desires and exerted your will without hesitation or remorse.

When a small group of Zen monks in California chose to stay and defend their monastery during a wildfire in 2008 -- and then decided again, midway into a final evacuation, by turning around -- I was enthralled. How had they made such a choice, in the heat and tumult of the moment? Did their Zen practice help? As a longtime Zen student, and as someone who has struggled with indecision, I wanted to know. "The great way is not difficult," goes one of my favorite teachings, "just avoid picking and choosing." And yet, who can avoid it? Each of us makes dozens of decisions each day, most so small we're hardly aware of them. The big ones come less frequently, but they can freeze us in our tracks.

"Sometimes we need to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities," writes Jonah Lehrer in "How We Decide." "And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions. The secret is knowing when to use these different styles of thought. We always need to be thinking about how we think."

In research for my book "Fire Monks," which describes how residents of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center decided to stay and meet the fire, I discovered that the science of decision making mirrors some core principles of Zen practice. The aim of zazen, or meditation -- if meditation can be said to have a goal -- is to let go, which turns out to be key to decision making, too.

Let me explain.

Eight centuries ago, Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen told his students in Japan to "think non-thinking" as an instruction for meditation. In zazen, don't try to blot out thoughts or corral them. Rather, allow them to rise up and float away. Watch how the mind flows, chases its own tail, eddies here and there. Gently guide your awareness back to the present moment by paying attention to your breath, to sensations and sounds. This isn't quite thinking or not thinking -- it's a process of cultivating a field of awareness that is not tied to particular thoughts.

We tend to think decisions are made in our heads, but we can get stuck when we try to come at a decision from a purely intellectual, abstract or individual stance. The decision of Tassajara residents to stay during the fire didn't stem from a thinking place. (Actually, this is always true, for everyone. Even as we mentally weigh a decision, stored emotions work behind the scenes, providing advice in what we experience as intuition.) They made the decision to stay holistically, with their bodies, their hearts, their intelligence about the place's defensibility and their preparations. They decided as individuals with unique histories and also as a community with the shared experience of Zen practice. For me, it's helpful to remember that any decision is actually a web of choices like this -- even if it feels more like a tangled rope -- a complex interplay of interdependent circumstances in which I play one part.

I get hung up making decisions when I fear I'll screw up. But mistakes, it turns out, are inevitable, even necessary. Every time we stumble or miss the mark, Lehrer says, our emotions keep pristine archives. Mistakes are, literally, teachers, both in the neuroscience behind decisions and in Zen practice. Decisions are just decisions, particular actions with unpredictable outcomes. Strange as it may sound, it's good to let go of hanging a choice's worth on whether or not it brings you what you want. Measured by that standard, a life can only amount to a grand failure. I try to regard my own bumbles with tenderness, even gratitude and affection, knowing that my mistakes are the stagehands for the moments in which I make what feels like the "right" call. "Awkward in a hundred ways, clumsy in a thousand, still I go on," goes another Zen saying.

In Zen, the mind that doesn't know -- and admits this freely -- is held in higher regard than the mind that thinks it has it all figured out. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Tassajara, famously stated it this way: "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." This is contrary to what most of us have been taught. We like being "in the know." We have little tolerance for uncertainty, which makes us feel small and vulnerable. But the evidence is in: A mind that won't tolerate uncertainty -- "that can't stand the argument," in Lehrer's words -- is a mind easily misled. Zazen fosters a willingness to be with the unknown, an opening of the gates of perception, a posture that is firm and alert but not stiff or closed off. From this flexible place, it's possible to chart a wise course, moment by moment. You can't bully your way to enlightenment or decisiveness. You have to let go of wanting anything at all, and then a world of options opens up.

A lot rides on how we decide. Decisions are the junctures where our lives meet the world. They define the trail we leave behind. But we make good decisions, ironically, when we let go of trying to make good decisions or to leave a mark at all. The best decisions I've made didn't have much "me" in them at all. They simply arrived. My job was just to recognize them and take the next step.

Colleen Morton Busch is the author of "Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara." For more information, visit http://fire-monks.com. ]]>