Two Years and Thirteen Silent Retreats Later: A Zen Retrospective

“The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” – Luke 17:21

It was Halloween 2022 when my girlfriend and I left our two-acre property in Upstate New York, where we were building a cabin, and arrived at the Rochester Zen Center for our first week-long silent meditation retreat, known in Zen as “sesshin.”

Over the next two years, I would participate in thirteen week-long “sesshins” and many other shorter, two-day retreats. Meditation practice, broadly speaking, and Zen practice in particular became the primary focus of my life. There were times, particularly during a six-month, full-time residential training period in 2023, when I reached states of such ecstatic bliss and non-separateness that I felt as if I had laid my small self down and picked up eternity. I was convinced, for a period of a few magical days, that I would never suffer again in this life. Alas, these states did not last and, in a short time, became only dead memories.

Nonetheless, something has irrevocably changed. The practice of Zazen (the form of meditation practiced in Zen) has given me my life back. At twenty-six, when I started Zen practice, my sobriety was fragile, less than a year old, and rage and depression were common. Zen helped me to discover that this life, just as it is, possesses everything I need. At the highest level, there are no problems, even as the relative, physical, and psychological world is filled with torrents of pain and lack. Of course, I do not live in a war zone. I have, in large measure, been spared from the worst life has to offer. I have never gone hungry from lack of money or famine. I have never been left out in the cold with no possibility of shelter. I have not gotten cancer, I have not even lost a member of my immediate family. So I do not think the solution to all life’s problems is simply to “meditate more.” And I, as well as anyone else who sincerely practices Zen, would never say that the problems of the world should simply be accepted with a kind of blase “nothing matters” spiritual indifference.

Rather, Zen says fundamentally that you have to begin, as Descartes did, with complete doubt about everything. With a total “not knowing,” only then can you find the real answer. But then Zen goes deeper than Descartes ever did. It goes below the thinking mind, and asks the essential question of ‘what is really alive?’ When you look, when you really look, you find an answer that rends the bonds of the conceptual world and throws the fixed models of our lives on their heads.

It’s important to note that, in the end, Zen does not change a person. It helps them discover who they really are. There is an old Zen saying describing the evolution of a practice life that goes like this: “At first, mountains are mountains and streams are streams. Then mountains are not mountains and streams and are not streams. In the end, mountains are once again mountains, and streams once more streams.” At first, I found this inscrutable. But now I don’t. When we start see past our conceptual models of reality (I am “me” and everything else is “other”), the world looks radically different. But as practice develops you begin to realize that it was always this way, you just didn’t see it before.

The faith of the Buddhists is fundamentally the faith of no separation. The fact that the separate self is utterly illusory, and it’s not even a mystical idea, or a dogma, but one that you can touch through your own direct experience so that the truth is revealed to you in its sweeping whole. When the self diminishes, the world opens up unendingly.

I am not here to say that Zen is THE path. It is rife with its own scandals, and I have heard from many people who have been burned or seriously traumatized by sexual assaults, physical abuse, and the like. The practice of Zen does not make one “perfect,” and its hierarchal DNA is sometimes painfully rigid and distasteful. I do not even say that Zen will always be my path. I only want to say that it has given me more than I even knew it was possible to have, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

“Gate Gate Para Gate Para Samgate Bodhi Svaha!” (Gone, gone to the other shore, completely gone, awakening, amen!)