Thinking During Zazen
Continuing to read Chogyam Trungpa’s talks in Smile at Fear(Boston and London, 2009), I was struck by this remark about meditation: “All kinds of thoughts arise naturally. If you have lots of time to sit, endless thoughts happen constantly.” (p. 15)
When I was a member of the Houston Zen Center, I assisted the head teacher in a weekly introductory class in Buddhist principles and zazen. The attendees were asked to meditate daily for at least ten minutes and discuss their experience during the next class. Many of these people expressed frustration about the continuing persistence of thinking when they were trying to keep their focus on breathing.
In my longtime practice of zazen, I have not noticed any diminishment of thinking. What I have noticed is that underneath my focus on breathing, thinking still goes on. It goes on in a kind of subterraneus fashion so that I cannot tell what any of the thinking is about. Also, when I end my zazen session, I cannot tell what the thinking has been about either.
In my experience, as long as I have a sense of myself at all as I practice, I am going to be thinking. That’s just the way the mind works, constantly spinning out thoughts. There is no point to being bothered by it.