Sit On It

A few months ago I attended a daylong meditation retreat at the Zen center a few blocks from my house. The schedule consisted of sitting meditation (zazen), alternated with walking meditation (kinhin), chores (samu), and meals. I showed up with marginal experience in meditation but maximum ambition: I wanted to develop a sitting practice to help me be more present to motherhood, to help me become less judgmental of my wonderfully spirited, sometimes maddening two-year-old daughter, P, and to cultivate a sense of calm and acceptance in my everyday life. 

At the start of the first zazen period, the Buddhist teacher, or sensei, suggested we ponder how we became who we are and what shaped us in our life. I was so shocked I practically fell off my beanbag: She’d just given us permission to think! How radical! And here I’d thought zazen was all about emptying your brain of thoughts, or at the very least, watching them drift by like clouds in the sky without giving them the time of day. I spent the entire 40 minutes in a kind of lazy contemplation, my brain flashing on random images from my life—blowing up giant red weather balloons at 5, going barefoot to my own wedding, my father, who was now sick and failing fast. Before I knew it, the gong had rung and it was time to get up. I was amazed at how effortless it had felt to sit cross-legged, staring at a blank wall for 40 minutes without being attached to my thoughts. This definitely qualified a major personal breakthrough. 

I was so jazzed I couldn’t wait for next zazen. Except it was nothing like the first. This time, the sensei said nothing. Within a minute, my butt went numb and I began fidgeting relentlessly, uncrossing and re-crossing my legs. I thought about my four-month old baby, and how I was going to have to race home afterwards to nurse her. I decided that I hated the sensei for not giving us an assignment, something to work on, Important Things to Mull Over. Then, just as my resentment was reaching fever pitch, I fell asleep. My head was a 1,000-pound pumpkin propped by a piece of dental floss. It lolled this way and that, and each time I jerked awake, limbs flailing, simultaneously startled and mortified. Where was I, and who had seen me? Was I drooling? It was just like being back at the 8 A.M. History 101 lecture in college. Sleep had me by its claws. 

Throughout the day, I kept falling asleep during zazen—once so soundly I nearly toppled head first onto the floor. There is nothing quite so demoralizing and uncomfortable as trying to stay awake in a dimly-lit room surrounded by virtuous people with perfect posture. The harder I tried, the more determined I was to stay awake, the faster and harder I’d nod off. 

Later I talked to my friend Natalie, who has meditated a lot in her day and has what you’d call a “Zen practice.” That’s what I wanted. She told me that falling asleep was my body’s way of resisting the meditation, of what it knows is good for me, of making a leap into an unknown land. I liked the sound of that. I liked that it gave something so mundane a grander purpose, loftier intentions. I liked it so much I forgot to ask her what I was supposed to do about falling asleep during zazen. I suspect she would say something appropriately Zen-like and deep, like “keep practicing, that is your practice.” Which of course I haven’t done. I’m so terrified of conking out in front of total strangers that I haven’t been back since. 

Now I’m in the throes of another resistance. This time it’s to writing. I know I need to pitch stories, to reach out to my editors, and wrangle some magazine assignments, but I am procrastinating like mad. I already have a writing practice—I’m just avoiding it right now. I’m resisting pitching stories so that I can guilt-trip myself for writing this blog, for taking a leap that I know will lead me into the thrilling, wide-open unknown. It feels a little like falling asleep during zazen. 

So what to do? Keep writing this blog. Keep writing, period. Be gentle with myself and sit with the resistance. Examine it, make friends with it. Then set an intention and push through: three pitches this month; three pitches of any kind in 13 days. That’s my practice. Please hold me to it.