Every Moment is Fresh

Jose Shinzan Palma, Zen priest and Dharma successor to Roshi Joan Halifax, gave a teaching the other night to a group of us at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care in New York. He offered lots of good ideas—he is also an inspiring practitioner.

Two have stuck with me particularly. The first was refreshing your meditation or Zazen practice by remembering back to the first time you sat and trying to begin again now from there. Begin with the confusion, the doubt, the resistance—whatever you can conjure up from thirty years ago or last week. Let it be fresh. Don’t compare, just do it not as if it’s your first time, but as you felt your first time.

It’s true—any practice, anything at all for that matter, becomes routine quite quickly. I think that is how we are built. In evolutionary terms, our mind and body must like to routinize what we do as quickly as possible so they don’t have to think about it and can focus on what might be dangerous just up ahead. Whatever we are doing that was once exciting or even terrible is soon what we do. Think of the first days of romance and then settling into a different set of emotions altogether. Think of being sick or caring for someone who is ill or living in a war zone: it is horrible, but we somehow keep going, and usually with some stoicism and determination. In those cases if we didn’t, we wouldn’t survive. We have to focus on the present then—the past and future hurt and are irrelevant anyway.

Sitting there and remembering where I was my first time meditating, I felt happy again. I had arrived at a Zen monastery in the Catskills—neither of which I had never seen—after a ten-hour drive. I knew no one, and had no idea what we would be doing, but was committed to remain for three days. I arrived with an hour to spare. I am a person who doesn’t like sudden change. But I remembered sitting at a long table scarfing down the dregs of dinner as it was cleared away, and saying to myself, “This is home. Here I am.”

Shinzan Palma took us on a scary but strangely heart-opening exercise. As we sat last night in recall, that intense emotion, the elation, the scariness of being yelled at in the Zendo for inattention or wiggling, the strictness of the practice and indeed of every moment in the place, came back and—can you believe it—revivified me. It was surprisingly easy to revisit the beginning of my long and messy walk alongside Buddhism and watch how everything again played out before me and then become now. There really are no memories, no going “back;” there is just living the moment “again,” now. I could feel that happening. Was it the same moment exactly? Of course not. It was mixed with all the emotional material that has been laid down on those same neural tracks since then. But in effect, the memory/present was rich and redolent, like the essence of a stew that had cooked on low for a long time.

For the last few days I have been conjuring up first or stand-out moments so I can feel that—it is very strange but a very Buddhist discovery. The moment as it comes now isn’t really memory! It is in some perpetual now. It is alive again now. I find that thinking back to a few quiet events in my childhood work wonderfully this way; I look for the good ones. The day we come back from abroad, it must have been. I am on my grandmother’s walk. The sun is making its way over the mountain. The colors are vivid and luminous. I smell the cut grass, I see the bright yellow of the dandelions, and I see myself there looking up at the zinnias taller than I am. I am alone, but my mother is inside. I am safe. Happy. This is still what happiness is for me--give me a warm day and zinnias, and I am like a kid again.

That night in the Zendo long ago, with the lights down and complete silence around me, I had been afraid and not afraid; everything had been completely new, and fresh. There was no old memory dross here. But I was safe if I just sat very still. The other night that time was both then and enriched in the now, like my first driving lesson and my first touch of love.

Uh oh, here is a rabbit hole, hang on: I was there again in all those cases, but with a strange difference: I watched myself from now at a distance, watching that woman I was then, from now. Not as I was watching from inside myself. I watched a movie. I felt and saw myself as a new meditator and a little girl from the perspective of an observer.

Who is doing that? If it is a memory, why do I watch it now from here and feel as if it were then?