Saying that Zen meditation saved my life reaches just a little into the realm of overstatement. Had I not first started zen practice - sitting zazen (zen meditation), facing the wall so to speak, almost 13 years ago at an introductory weekend retreat at a monastery, I would probably still be alive today. Nevertheless, it was the simple transformative potential that I felt when I planted myself on a zafu for the very first time that hooked me, being confronted by the vexing barriers in my life that I faced that the time. And so it began – dozens of intensive retreats over the year, becoming a formal student with access to a zen teacher, a month long monastery residency, and most importantly, one to two hours of zazen each and every day. For the first three years or so, my zazen was fueled by sheer desperation for transformation and barrier amelioration (which briefly are best characterized as byproducts of hard-wired extreme introversion amidst an extorverted and individualistic culture, but that's material for another post). I saw Zen practice as a vehicle to get off of SSRI anti-depressants, which I ahd been on and had pulled me out of an abyss of sorts a year or so before. This early period of my practice consisted of an infallible 2-hour/day routine, rising early, planting myself on the cushion for two straight hours, broken only by 5 minutes of sun salutations. It worked in a way - I completely ditched the zoloft, and my life started to work for me in ways that it had not before.
My expectations started to go awry three years into my 2-hour/day meditation regime. Over the course of a month, the constipated energies that I felt circulating in my body - near constant companions since I started sitting, began to be physically manifested in a way that nearly eliminated my body’s ability to fall asleep. My world subsequently all but collapsed into an insomniac’s hell. Doctors, acupuncturists, sleep therapists, and zen teachers failed to offer any insights or useful suggestions. I tried body practice – yoga, but that seemed to make things worse. Tai Chi and quigong as well offered little respite. Help from a shaman did eventually steer me away from the worst of it, but that is another story……in the end I backed off my sitting practice abit,and still struggled with sleep loss from time to time, but at a much less severe manifestation.
But this story is not about the life-destabilizing, sanity threatening hell of insomnia. It is about instead, about how, when, and whether one should let go of a way of spiritual practice that in one sense had been, as I had initially sensed, immeasurably transformative, but also in my case had a dark, mal-adaptive side. Today, I still do zazen, and still study with the same set of teachers as I have over the past 13 years or so. But other than my daily now 1-2 hour regime of sitting, I've reached a point where where I can no longer attend intensive retreats (sesshins, which are a critical part of zen practice), where recently I've had to drug myself to sleep to get through.
My personal meditation-insomnia dynamic, over the past 9 years or so, now has a "J" – shaped relationship curve. Specifiically, one to two hours of zazen helps me sleep, more than three hours sends my qui/prana/energy (whatever the heck you want to call it) into the red zone, rendering it difficult to fall/stay asleep, even with modern prescription sleep meds. Yet in the depths of zazen, I still sense that transformative potential still working away. I can no sooner stop sitting zazen than I could stop eating desptie these difficulties. So thhe question emerges of whether to move on from my zen based practice to something else that embraces meditation, but to what? Considering that no teacher in or outside of the zen tradition has been able to assess or help this energetic issue that I have (is that even a realistic expectation?), I am at a complete loss.
My personal meditation-insomnia dynamic, over the past 9 years or so, now has a "J" – shaped relationship curve. Specifiically, one to two hours of zazen helps me sleep, more than three hours sends my qui/prana/energy (whatever the heck you want to call it) into the red zone, rendering it difficult to fall/stay asleep, even with modern prescription sleep meds. Yet in the depths of zazen, I still sense that transformative potential still working away. I can no sooner stop sitting zazen than I could stop eating desptie these difficulties. So thhe question emerges of whether to move on from my zen based practice to something else that embraces meditation, but to what? Considering that no teacher in or outside of the zen tradition has been able to assess or help this energetic issue that I have (is that even a realistic expectation?), I am at a complete loss.
And after maybe 9 years since the sleep-disturbing energies started, I still don’t even know what to call it. I’ve read about kundalini – maybe it’s a version of that, but I don’t have many of the bizarre symptoms. The only other physical symptom that points towards kundalini is a still occasional but very painful burning sensation that appears at the base of my spine – it maybe lasts 5 minutes and then goes away, and is very sporadic and unpredictable.
After doing this practice for 13 years, I have no idea how anyone can possibly maintain their sense of sanity, no less equanimity without it. Sleep deprivation notwhithstanding, it has saved me (if not commpletely) from: social isolation (of the self-imposed introvert brand), alienation, depression, and misanthropy, though those still remain as dim threads in the background of my day to day experience of life.
I promised myself long ago that I would not be a spiritual dilettante - flitting from practice to practice every two years or so after the novelty wore off and only the difficulty remained. I was determined to choose a practice that worked for me and to stick with it. And in a way, zen has worked in some of the ways that I had hoped - I like to thinnk that a little of its transformative potential has been realized. But I have a long way to go yet, and it appears time for me to decide to renege on my anti-dilettante pledge and move on. I have no idea to what/where.
I promised myself long ago that I would not be a spiritual dilettante - flitting from practice to practice every two years or so after the novelty wore off and only the difficulty remained. I was determined to choose a practice that worked for me and to stick with it. And in a way, zen has worked in some of the ways that I had hoped - I like to thinnk that a little of its transformative potential has been realized. But I have a long way to go yet, and it appears time for me to decide to renege on my anti-dilettante pledge and move on. I have no idea to what/where.
