The Way of the Birds
There can be great freedom in just being stiff. And there can be great stiffness in trying to be free.
To paraphrase the words of a great and compassionate old Buddha, Marjory Barlow, "The pursuit of individual freedom is the most serious thing in the world, but you mustn't take it seriously."
I remember sitting on the number 90 bus as, one afternoon in autumn of 1977, it rolled down the hill of Wake Green Rd in Hall Green, Birmingham. I had just finished my last school exam and was filled with an enormous sense of liberation. I resolved not to lose this sense of liberation. For the next five years my life was often too free -- there was too much allowing, not enough self-restraint. Karate-do found me, but I still allowed my deluded self to descend into drunken brawls and mindless acts of vandalism. Love found me, but I still allowed myself to stray onto the dismal path of one-night stands.
Then when I met Gudo Nishijima in 1982 I became convinced that the supreme enlightenment of Gautama Buddha was a genuine historical truth, not only a legend, and so I determined to pursue that truth, following Gudo's teaching. To what extent my own reaction was responsible, and to what extent the misguided instruction of Gudo was responsible, I do not know. Rather than apportion blame, it is probably truer to see it as a mutual effort: we were a mirror for each other's rigidity. Anyway, the way I sat in Zazen was very stiff. In my effort to "keep the spine straight vertically" I stiffened my joints to a degree which, from an Alexander viewpoint, was not good for my health. I was so stiff that I could hardly breathe without deliberately using my abdominal muscles to do so. And yet, the funny thing is that in this rigidity, in this extreme form of self-restraint, there was also a certain freedom. To the extent that I knew no other way of sitting, I was not inclined to worry too much about how I sat. I just got on with sitting stiffly. However much it restricted the process of natural breathing, I still enjoyed it.
From 1994 when I dived into Alexander work, I realized that there was indeed another way of sitting. A totally different way of sitting. A way of sitting guided not by instinct but by conscious direction. So I brought myself and my family back to England in order that I could enter Alexander teacher training. I wanted my sitting no longer to be stiff but to be free as possible. The funny thing that I see more and more clearly, however, in myself and in many other Alexander trainees and teachers who are going around trying to be free, is that there can be a tremendous amount of subtle stiffening in this trying to be free.
It is as if some higher power, with a lively sense of humour, has given us an inherent tendency to wish to pursue liberation, and is looking down and laughing at our efforts to do so. We can never be truly free through trying to be free. Because tree freedom includes freedom from trying. But we can never be free by sitting stiffly upright either.
So here I sit, making friends with the stiffness that I create in my joints, knowing that a freer way of being exists, but also knowing that if I try to reach out and grab it, it will elude me.
I will end this post by cutting and pasting a comment left by Ordinary Bloke on my blog of February 17th.
During zazen this morning what did I hear? A car starting up in the street outside, the rumble of some heavy machinery in the distance, the central heating boiler in the kitchen, an early morning train on the railway, the old guy next door coughing, his grandchildren running up and down the stairs laughing, and, oh yes, a bird singing in the garden. After morning zazen I usually find myself getting on with doing stuff. Gardening, cooking, cleaning, shopping, diy, whatever, but strangely this morning I found myself reading the WILD NOTEBOOK column in the Times, a column I generally never even look at. In the last paragraph Simon Barnes writes "In stillness, the natural world can come to you. Move towards a bird, and it goes: stay where you are and it comes to you. Sometimes.”
To paraphrase the words of a great and compassionate old Buddha, Marjory Barlow, "The pursuit of individual freedom is the most serious thing in the world, but you mustn't take it seriously."
I remember sitting on the number 90 bus as, one afternoon in autumn of 1977, it rolled down the hill of Wake Green Rd in Hall Green, Birmingham. I had just finished my last school exam and was filled with an enormous sense of liberation. I resolved not to lose this sense of liberation. For the next five years my life was often too free -- there was too much allowing, not enough self-restraint. Karate-do found me, but I still allowed my deluded self to descend into drunken brawls and mindless acts of vandalism. Love found me, but I still allowed myself to stray onto the dismal path of one-night stands.
Then when I met Gudo Nishijima in 1982 I became convinced that the supreme enlightenment of Gautama Buddha was a genuine historical truth, not only a legend, and so I determined to pursue that truth, following Gudo's teaching. To what extent my own reaction was responsible, and to what extent the misguided instruction of Gudo was responsible, I do not know. Rather than apportion blame, it is probably truer to see it as a mutual effort: we were a mirror for each other's rigidity. Anyway, the way I sat in Zazen was very stiff. In my effort to "keep the spine straight vertically" I stiffened my joints to a degree which, from an Alexander viewpoint, was not good for my health. I was so stiff that I could hardly breathe without deliberately using my abdominal muscles to do so. And yet, the funny thing is that in this rigidity, in this extreme form of self-restraint, there was also a certain freedom. To the extent that I knew no other way of sitting, I was not inclined to worry too much about how I sat. I just got on with sitting stiffly. However much it restricted the process of natural breathing, I still enjoyed it.
From 1994 when I dived into Alexander work, I realized that there was indeed another way of sitting. A totally different way of sitting. A way of sitting guided not by instinct but by conscious direction. So I brought myself and my family back to England in order that I could enter Alexander teacher training. I wanted my sitting no longer to be stiff but to be free as possible. The funny thing that I see more and more clearly, however, in myself and in many other Alexander trainees and teachers who are going around trying to be free, is that there can be a tremendous amount of subtle stiffening in this trying to be free.
It is as if some higher power, with a lively sense of humour, has given us an inherent tendency to wish to pursue liberation, and is looking down and laughing at our efforts to do so. We can never be truly free through trying to be free. Because tree freedom includes freedom from trying. But we can never be free by sitting stiffly upright either.
So here I sit, making friends with the stiffness that I create in my joints, knowing that a freer way of being exists, but also knowing that if I try to reach out and grab it, it will elude me.
I will end this post by cutting and pasting a comment left by Ordinary Bloke on my blog of February 17th.
During zazen this morning what did I hear? A car starting up in the street outside, the rumble of some heavy machinery in the distance, the central heating boiler in the kitchen, an early morning train on the railway, the old guy next door coughing, his grandchildren running up and down the stairs laughing, and, oh yes, a bird singing in the garden. After morning zazen I usually find myself getting on with doing stuff. Gardening, cooking, cleaning, shopping, diy, whatever, but strangely this morning I found myself reading the WILD NOTEBOOK column in the Times, a column I generally never even look at. In the last paragraph Simon Barnes writes "In stillness, the natural world can come to you. Move towards a bird, and it goes: stay where you are and it comes to you. Sometimes.”
posted by Mike Cross at 9:48 AM
16 Comments:
Even when we say "I've no idea," usually we do in fact have some unconscious idea that is still sabotaging our freedom.
Truly having no idea might be true freedom.
What might that be like?
I have no idea.
(Except that I know myself well enough by now to suspect that I probably do).
Thank you cowgoesmu, it is good to know that you are still there, silently bearing witness.
I have been spending a lot of time at the computer, writing this blog, hoping that it might be part of something pointing at something. Your comment is very encouraging.
Just before writing this I was looking at a pair of robins in the apple tree in our back garden.
Our house here near Aylesbury is nothing special -- it an ex-council house on old council estate. Just like Wake Green Road is nothing special. But it is just in such ordinary circumstances, isn't it?, that a pair of robins, or sunlight filtering through the leaves, can somehow touch us deeply. Hall Green was a great place to grow up. Whenever I go back there to visit my parents, I always feel that the suburbs of Brum, with their big back gardens, are as good a place as anywhere to sit in Zazen.
Having spent many years translating Master Dogen's teaching, I am unimpressed when non-Japanese use spurious Japanese terms like "sesshin," "mondo," "koan study," "kyosaku," et cetera, et cetera. But I really appreciate your words.
Wonderful!
The only words that spring to mind are:
Brummies here, Brummies there,
Brummies every-gassho-where,
La la la la, la la la, la la.
Thank you, sonni.
But on reflection I have to confess that I have just been blatantly culpable of failing to transcend the herd instinct.
This is how my life is, constantly revealing me to be a great big fraud, preaching one thing and practising another!
Thank you, sonni. It might seem obvious to you already, but it took a lot of Alexander work for me to be able to see that. As my Alexander teacher said to me a while back, "As long as you know you are a fraud, then you cannot be a complete fraud." I take heart from that.
Thank you, sonni.
The principle of allowing is expressed in the original post:
"In stillness, the natural world can come to you. Move towards a bird, and it goes: stay where you are and it comes to you. Sometimes.”
You might want the bird to come to you, but there's not a damn thing you can do to make the bird come to you. So you allow it to come, if it wants.
Allowing the spine to lengthen in Zazen is the same. Anything you do to make the spine lengthen causes a muscular contraction, which causes stiffening, holding, et cetera. So if you want lengthening without stiffening, or stillness without fixity, the secret is to
allow the spine to lengthen, if it wants.
Thank you, Gareth.
It seems this post has flushed out a great audience of Brummies, who have been watching silently like a massive flock of birdwatchers.
You are all very welcome. But any non-Brummies out there, you are equally welcome too!
Dear Zero,
Both.
Love.
Thank you, sonni. As a manifestation of the true intention to allow, and also of true willingness, I like the words "Thy will be done."
From work with a very experienced and skillful Alexander teacher, I can report that when I think I am allowing, she generally let's me know that I am not truly allowing. When I become exasperated and think "To hell with it. I know nothing," that is when she sometimes says, "Yes, that's it. Now you are out of the way."
It seems to me that we cannot know what it is truly to allow. But we can know, we can be quite definite about, what true allowing is not. Arranging oneself, albeit ever so subtly, in "the right posture" is not true allowing. Any kind of clever strategy like using bread is not true allowing.
Many people say "Thy will be done." But who really means it? Not many, I think. I say it: Thy will be done. But do I mean it? Very rarely, if at all.
Thank you, e.d. and welcome.
The title of the book you mentioned, 'towards a psychology of awakening,' puts me off the book.
Awakening, as I understand it, is a function of the whole self. Master Dogen described it as "getting the body out."
According to Master Dogen's teaching, as I understand it, when we notice we have some pyschological problem, we need not seek to "work through it," but should simply stop whatever we are doing to cause it and to keep it. In other words, we should just wake up to what we are doing, to what WE are doing. "WE" means our self, not our psyche.
Anyway, never mind about the book: what is your own first hand experience of the problem zero raised?
Thank you, mikedoe. It is good to know that you have had some face-to-face contact with a truly compassionate teacher.
Thank sonni. In the end, I don't know what allowing is. I only know what it isn't.
Thank you, e.d. You and zero have raised a very vital question.
I didn't mean to suggest that western psychology should be thrown out, or to deny its value, just as I don't mean to suggest that western physiology should be thrown out, or to deny the value of knowledge about the autonomic nervous system. As Marjory Barlow says, everything in the Universe has its place.
Let me try to explain where I am coming from, with regard to intellectual study and knowledge. I was always top of the class at primary school and passed an exam to go to King Edward's School, Edgbaston. All the brummies out there will know that this was generally regarded in the 1970s as the school for snobs in the Birmingham region. The ethos at King Edwards was one of supreme intellectual snobbery. Coming from a working class background, I didn't like to be seen as a snob, and in fact was one of a group of friends who called ourselves "the normals." We tried to prove our normality by swearing, cultivating false Birmingham accents, drinking, smoking, wearing outlandishly baggy trousers, et cetera, et cetera. But in fact we were all just part of the intellectual snobbery of KES, and have since all gone on to get professional jobs as teachers, accountants, surveyors, investment bankers, civil servants, et cetera.
Soon after I met Gudo when I was 22 he started to criticize me for what he saw as my intellectual pride. Although I though that his criticism must be true, I found it very hurtful. More hurtful actually than I am able to express here, but that is maybe for another post. It is only now that I realize Gudo was just criticizing himself. He, a brainy graduate of the Law Department of Tokyo University, was using me as a mirror.
Only now, 25 years later, as my understanding of Alexander's discoveries deepens, do I begin to get intellectual knowledge into a truer perspective. Only now do I begin to see the necessity neither to attach to it nor to detach from it. There is nothing wrong with studying psychology and physiology, but if we attach to that kind of knowledge, if we think and teach others that that kind of knowledge is necessary in order to understand Alexander's discoveries, or indeed to understand Zazen, then that, in my view now, is very seriously wrong. That is what I was trying to say in the post about How Not to Insult the Dharma.
You were a drunk. You stopped drinking. When you decided to stop, you stopped. No amount of meditation or therapy could make the decision for you. The real thing was your decision, not the so-called meditation, or the therapy.
You write: "any good Buddhist teacher should be able to recognise psychologically damaged people and send them to therapy, rather than just teaching them to 'transcend' their problems."
How about Gautama Buddha? How about Nagarjuna? How about Dogen? Weren't they good Buddhist teachers?
If you wish to stop the discussion here, e.d., I can't force you to carry on. But thanks again for raising such a vitally important point.
Thank you, zero. Again, I feel that the point you are raising is a vital one.
Gautama, Nagarjuna, and Dogen all used words, knowing that those words were inadequate to convey the truth that they wished to convey. So blogging is in line with the ancient traditions.
But none of the three, as far as I know, ever said that Zazen, the dropping off of body and mind, might be well complemented by something addressed specifically at the psyche, at the mind.
I don't think that you have any intention to insult the Dharma, dear zero, but that is what you are doing in this commment, just as surely as Joko Beck is insulting the Dharma if she thinks that the kesa, the robe of liberation, is superfluous in the modern age.
Sitting in the full lotus posture wrapped in a kesa sewn by my friend Pierre Turlur, I am free.
I am free to have psychotherapy if I wish. If some so-called Zen master such as James Cohen who has never met me, recommends, on the basis of my internet communications, that I should seek help from a mental health professional, the charlatan's advice neither makes me more inclined to talk to a psychotherapist nor less inclined. As it happens, I have a student who is a psychotherapist, and I am very interested in his work. We have done some work together on what he calls "symbolic modelling," and I found it very revealing.
But I have never recommended psychotherapy to anybody, and I doubt I ever will. The principle I subscribe to is unity of the body-mind. And I am confident that Gautama, Nagarjuna, and Dogen were also like that.
Thank you, zero.
You make a good case, but it strikes me that if the good therapists emphasize unity of body and mind, they should maybe call themselves psycho-phsyical re-educators instead of psycho-therapists.
Not having any real experience of psycho-therapy to speak of, perhaps I am wrong to express any view (fixed prejudice?) about it.
But the standard in Master Dogen's teaching, as I understand it, is the samadhi of accepting and using THE SELF.
That's why the teaching of FM Alexander called me to dive into it, but I was never attracted in the same way to psycho-therapy, nor to any form of Western body work.
Master Dogen's teaching of true awakening, as I understood it from translating Shobogenzo, has to do with liberating the WHOLE SELF from unconsciousness. That kind of learning is not done by sitting in a chair or lying on a couch and conversing. It is done through re-education of the WHOLE SELF, in action. It requires devotion of one's WHOLE SELF to the practice of a way--a way like the way of karate, the way of Alexander, or the way of Buddha.
Having said that, I have to confess that I have my doubts about how fully I have devoted my own life to the way of Buddha. Yes, I shave my head, wear the kesa, and enjoy plentiful sitting in Zazen. But when I compare my daily life to that of Gudo, for example, I sometimes wonder if I am fit to call myself a monk. That man's devotion to his Buddhist work was something else.
The teaching of Freud, Jung et cetera, is not, as I understand it, a way in this sense.
Thank you, zero.
Good question. I think that most of the time I am lying to myself. I pay lip service to the principle of accepting and using the whole of myself, but (as I have seen with renewed clarity in discussions on the next post) my deepest wish is to be the guy who knows, Mike Cross the Supreme Buddha. This desire to get my dirty paws on ultimate knowledge, this desire for finality, this desire to Be Right, produces in me a kind of arrest, akin to a cardiac arrest, through the whole self. It prevents me from forgetting myself. It prevents body and mind from dropping off.
One or two Alexander teachers (nothing called AT) have helped me to see the above, by their teaching (certainly not by bodywork).
I don't know psychotherapy but I remain skeptical about whether it truly, as you say, engages the whole self. Anything that goes by the name psychotherapy, as far as I am concerned, is guilty till proven innocent!
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