Michael Stroud's Articles on Lions Roar

Varieties of meditational experiences by Don Morreale, Michael Stroud, Sandy Boucher, Roger Guest, Joel Weishaus and Erik Storlie. No Adult Supervision. By Don Morreale "For the next three months,” teacher Joseph Goldstein says at the onset of the annual fall retreat in Barre, Massachusetts, “the Insight Meditation Society becomes one of the great meditation centers of the world.” What makes it so for me, first and foremost, is the complete absence of adult supervision. You won’t find a lot of hierarchy here, no senior disciples taking the neophytes in hand, nor much in the way of religious rules and regulations. You’re free to sit in the dharma hall or the library or your room—or if you feel like it, chuck it all and go for a walk in the woods. Bowing is not compulsory; some do, some don’t. There’s no meal chant either, but if you want, you can recite “the Buddha’s Reflection on Eating” to yourself before tucking into the best vegetarian food you’re likely to taste in this incarnation or the next. In the absence of ritualized behavior, a natural dharma etiquette arises out of the ringing silence. If at first everybody just stands up and walks out at the end of the evening dharma talk, after a couple of weeks, without anybody saying anything about it, the assembled company finds itself sitting in respectful silence while the teacher bows to the Buddha and makes her exit. “We’re not here to enforce a bunch of rules,” explains teacher Steve Armstrong. “That’s why it’s called insight meditation. Changes in behavior have to grow out of deep inner realization. Otherwise what’s the point?” If there are any rules, they are the five basic precepts all Buddhist retreatants hold to: don’t kill anything; take only what is offered; avoid sexual activity; practice right speech, which in this context means, “honor the silence”; and steer clear of drugs and alcohol. Governed by this simple code of ethics, IMS remains one of the few places in America where you can set aside the street wariness you’ve learned to carry with you like a bulletproof vest. There’s something profoundly reassuring about finding your expensive thermos sitting undisturbed right where you left it last night in the dining hall. Morality, one finds, isn’t oppressive and stultifying; it’s relaxing and liberating. In such an environment, you can learn to let go. If you’re expecting twelve weeks of untrammeled bliss, better reconsider. I have spent more than one three-month course whirling in typhoons of rage and resentment, still others dragging myself through inner landscapes as flat and arid as the Atacama Desert. “The practice,” says Steve Armstrong, “takes you out to the extreme edge of what you are able to bear, and then asks two simple questions: 'What is this?’ and ‘Can I be with it?’” When you are able to clearly identify your experience and accept it for what it is, it’s like a heavy curtain going up. Your anguish lifts in an instant. Just like that. Beware! Sitting a three-month retreat can rearrange your whole view of practice. In my case, I no longer see it as a means of getting from here to there or from this to that. Nor is it a spiritual martial art, in which all of the forces of mind are brought to bear on a single thrusting point. These days it’s more like settling back in a giant hot tub, arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome and surrender. Don Morreale is the author of The Complete Guide to Buddhist America. He lives in Denver. Insight Meditation Society, 1230 Pleasant Street, Barre, MA 01005; (978) 355-4378; www.dharma.org/ims.htm Zafu with a Star of David. By Michael Stroud This fall I went on what many would regard as a classic Buddhist group retreat. It included periods of mindful sitting and walking meditation, gongs to signal the beginning and end of practice sessions, a vow of silence shared with about fifty other retreatants. But these retreatants were Jews, and the object of the three days at La Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Santa Barbara, California was to prepare for the High Holy Days, the time when Jews are expected to review their lives and make amends to those we’ve harmed. We followed our meditations with t’fillot, or prayers, and our “dharma talks’’ were delivered by a rabbi steeped in Torah and Jewish custom. The retreat was sponsored by Metivta, a contemplative Jewish practice center in Los Angeles. This retreat was a chance to let my Buddhist and Jewish halves cross-fertilize each other. My sitting practice has been nurtured by years of studying Zen in Berkeley, Ch’an in Taiwan, and Vipassana at Spirit Rock in Marin County. My connection to Judaism grew out of a conservative Jewish upbringing in Palo Alto and was strengthened as I raised a family. As I’ve discovered, these two “selves” aren’t separate at all, just different ways of accessing spiritual truth, call it buddhanature or the divine. Enough Jews bounce back and forth between the two traditions that we’ve taken to calling each other “JuBus.” Retreat leader Rabbi Rami Shapiro himself delved deeply into Buddhism before settling on a Jewish practice that incorporates much of what he learned from Buddhism. But Jews do have their own meditative tradition: eighteenth-century Hassidic master Rabbi Nachman of Breslav spent hours meditating in the fields, and Talmudic rabbis as long as 2,500 years ago spent six hours a day in meditation, one hour before and one after each prayer period. But we Jews have forgotten much of that contemplative path, and so many of us borrow from Buddhism to supplement the noisy, joyous community tradition we still cherish. At La Casa de Maria, a third of us sit on zafus, including Rabbi Shapiro. Mine has a centerpiece with the Star of David on it. Some silently recite Hebrew mantras such as Sh’ma Yisroel, the proclamation of God’s oneness; I prefer to sit with my breath and watch my thoughts, emotions and sensations as they came up. Our prayer services are boiled down to nine central chants from the liturgy. "How can we gauge if our meditation practice is working?" one of us wanted to know toward the end of the retreat. “It’s supposed to make you a kinder, more compassionate, more loving person,’’ Rabbi Shapiro said. “The practice begins with you, but ultimately you use it to heal your relationships with family and friends—for tikkun olam, the healing of the world.’’ In my mind’s eye, I can see the Buddha nodding in approval. Michael Stroud is a freelance writer in southern California. Metivta, 2001 South Barrington Ave., #106, Los Angeles, CA 90025-5363; (310) 477-5370; www.metivta.org/home.htm To Bow or Not to Bow. By Sandy Boucher I was not new to Buddhism, having been meditating for about five years, when I came to visit the Providence Zen Center in Rhode Island to interview the priests and other Zen students. But I had been mainly in Vipassana settings, not Zen, and I was unsure about what practices might be followed in the Korean Zen observed at PZC. The Providence students kindly welcomed me to stay in the center and scheduled an appointment with guiding teacher Bobby Rhodes for the following day. I spent the evening visiting with a friend and went to sleep planning to perform the daily practice along with the other residents. In the early morning, I joined a line of gray-robed students in the spacious, dark-beamed meditation hall with its large, gold Buddha statue and gleaming wood floor. The voice of a giant bell rang out into the silence. My friend had explained to me that each morning’s service began with 108 bows. “You might want to just stand and bow from the waist,” she advised. Ha! Not me! The bowing began. We all dropped to our knees, bent forward, and touched our foreheads to the floor. Then we rose up again, all the way to standing position. A brief pause, and down we went again. This felt easy enough. I kept count. From the line of students came the swoosh of robes folding around the steadfastly bowing bodies. Already I had bowed ten times and I noticed the beginning of tightness in my thighs. An atmosphere of concentration and reverence filled the hall. At twenty bows I broke a sweat, and my legs trembled. Doubt crept in. I glanced for a read of the other students, but saw only serene faces, steady movements. At thirty bows my thigh muscles had clamped like fists. I struggled to control my body, while perspiration trickled down my sides. As I went on folding down to the floor, my mind began to flutter anxiously. At forty bows I knew the game was up. My thighs were completely cramped, preventing any further downward motion. I surrendered: while the others performed the next 68 full bows, I stood upright and bowed from the waist, as my friend had recommended. Later that day I interviewed Bobby Rhodes and other PZC students, but secretly I was preoccupied with my condition. I was virtually incapable of going down stairs. I could walk normally in the halls and could climb the steps, but the first time I had to descend I was amazed to find that my thigh muscles had become burning steel bands that would not flex. Luckily no one was there to hear my anguished gasp or to see me grab the railing to keep from pitching forward. Finally I found a way to get down, step by step, bracing against the banister, swinging my whole leg out and scissoring, splay-legged to the step below, groaning discreetly. During my stay at PZC, the students were too generous to comment on my predicament. As for myself, inwardly I bowed, recognizing once again how practice can sabotage our aspirations, how it humbles us and leads us to a tenderness for this mind/body that is our actual living reality. Sandy Boucher is the author of Hidden Spring: A Buddhist Woman Confronts Cancer. Providence Zen Center, 99 Pound Road, Cumberland, RI 02864; (401) 658-1464; www.kwanumzen.com/pzc/ Sitting in a Winter Wonderland. By Roger Guest In the cold dawns of January and early February in Vermont, a semi-permanent thin white crust is stretched over the frozen...

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