Dear Big Summer Sitters
As you meet together online in the final stages of the Big summer Sit, I’ll be in the air, on the way home from Melbourne. So I’ve asked Deborah to pass on just a few words from me.
If regular sitting has not been your experience up to now, the next inviting step is (just between you and yourself) to recommit, with no end point in sight.
What greater act of loving kindness – to yourself and to all the many beings in reach of your life – can you possibly offer. So simple, cost-free, and unremarkable-looking, and yet so transforming, over time. And by that I mean – over any five minutes of deep, steady zazen, and over 25 years of making this your habit… Stay ‘in practice’, and the subtle shifts in skill will begin to appear. Noticeable not only to yourself.
A great musician once said, ‘A day without practice, and you notice the difference. Two days without practice, and the ones who love you begin to notice. Three days -- and your critics are poised to notice.’
Practice becomes the habit that undoes ‘habitual mind’ and lets you see it more keenly for yourself. Much more, it undoes your self and let you see beyond that frame, again and again. In each case, always fresh, always ‘for the first time’.
I strongly recommend you choose to offer yourself to 30 minutes, first thing in the morning -- the time that lets you sets the day to the wisdom of your body.
But if your work life makes that time too difficult to land in, use the train, tram or bus, or the lunchtime break, or let it be the transition time from work-day mind (and all that the day has settled on your shoulders) back …just this breath. Just the ease of being that you wish for the entire world.
And remember, after your sit ‘ends’, to take a little more time to fully notice what is now flowing through body-and-mind, the natural loveliness of that fact.
You have accepted the offer of your life. Now – savour it!
Thank you Susan san for such wise words that so resonate with this being.
After 12-13 years of sitting intermittently in retreats, sesshin, group-sits and alone, with an indeterminate amount of frustration and fantasizing, teeth grinding and clock watching, pain and more pain and grim determination, interspersed with moments of joy and bliss, have ever so slowly brought fruition.
In the last 2 to 3 years all of the above has morphed into a regular early morning practice (30 -60 mins) that is always the highlight of my day. As you noted "the subtle shifts in skill will begin to appear...etc"
and this has so transformed my 'way of being' in the universe.
However subtle it is, after a sit, the day simply flows better or there is a flowing through of the day that enables and accepts whatever arises.
With gassho
Loris