Buddhism: Practice as Tenderizer

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Practice as Tenderizer Jul 10th 2012, 19:55 I said in the last post that I was going to write about no escape. And I am, but a funny thing happened on the way to the "no escape" post. As I looked for teachings about "no escape" I kept running into teachings about being tender. Example: Awhile back Pema Chodron wrote a lovely little book called The Wisdom of No Escape.  Some of you have probably read it. Very simply, in this book she points out that people usually want to escape. They want to escape pain, their lives, even themselves.  She makes the interesting point that when people engage in spiritual practice to become "better," the practice can be "a kind of subtle aggression against who they really are." The antidote to this subtle aggression is loving kindness, including loving kindness to ourselves. We accept ourselves, and then we stop shielding ourselves from pain. We allow the tender parts of ourselves to be open and vulnerable. In the book I mentioned yesterday, The Third Turning of the Wheel, Reb Andersen makes a similar point. "Suzuki Roshi also said that zazen is a tenderizer," Reb Andersen writes. "I know from my own experience that if we sit still and quiet with other people for a while, we all become more and more tender." Andersen Roshi says that when he checks people's postures at the beginning of a retreat, their backs are hard and rigid. "I feel a kind of toughness at the beginning of the sittings. But after several days, I can feel the bodies of the meditators have become tender," he writes. I found a similar point in a dharma talk by Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, titled "The Freedom of No Escape." He said, "Zazen is to sit in the midst of the entire universe with every gate open. ... to see that there is no escape is the beginning of true liberation." The last post pointed to the misconception that Buddhism is about detaching from the world and numbing oneself from pain. But what these teachers are saying is just the opposite. You cannot detach, any more than you can detach a wave from the ocean. And instead of numbing oneself, the path requires us to be more tender, open, and vulnerable.

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