A Personal Statement about Zazen (dealing with negative feelings)

I would like to express my gratitude to zazen for being such a good companion to me over the years. I am 82 now. I’ll start with a little history.

I began the practice in 1972 when Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was first published. There is a short description there of how to do zazen. I was 34 and living in California at the time. It was easy for me to start the practice, as I had already resolved, through psychotherapy, some of the childhood issues that can trouble a beginning meditator.

For thirteen years after starting zazen, sensing a tremendous significance in the practice, I regularly followed a morning and evening sitting schedule. Toward the end of that span of time, I had come to a juncture where I felt quite blocked in going further. I think I was pushing too hard for an imagined enlightenment goal and had come to the “thick wall” that Suzuki Roshi warned about in the above book.

I was fortunate at that point to be introduced to a traditional (Muslim) Sufi order that followed non-meditation practices. Sufism is the mysticism of Islam. It focuses on opening the heart, which I felt much in need of. I followed the practices of Sufism solely for fifteen years, with great inward benefit, I felt.  

I left the Sufi order for economic reasons, moved to Texas, and resumed zazen practice. This was in 2000. Starting zazen again, I was freed of the blocked feeling I spoke of, which has never returned. Instead zazen began to be a very valuable resource in handling my sometimes troubled daily life. It has seen me through the suicide of a loved twin brother, divorce, an unmerited firing by a shady company, the death of a loved wife after three years of cancer treatment, and other trials.  

During these years of sitting, I found ways to use zazen to reduce or eliminate strong negative emotions. I found that feelings of fear, anger, worry, insecurity, and so on yield to a method that I may have learned from the writings of Charlotte Joko Beck. While concentrating on breathing as usual, the meditator tries to call up the negative feeling into his mind as precisely as possible, focus on the location in his body that seems mostly to hold the feeling, and sit in that mindful condition for a while. In some unexplained way, as meditators know, mindfulness of negative feeling reduces the feeling. Moreover, sitting in this way usually reveals the part that ego has played in giving rise to the negative feeling. Seeing that the phantasm of ego is at the root of the upset assists the meditator in dropping the upset.

Fortunately my life does not now have the sturm und drang that it used to have. Since the death from cancer of my previous wife eleven years ago, I have moved from Texas to Kailua-Kona, Hawaii and remarried. Presently I am leading a productive and peaceful life. Rather than relief from strife, zazen sessions now have more the character of a kind of dip into a pool of energy, expansion, and renewal.