|
Shambhala Sun Include Everything
A teaching by ROSHI PAT ENKYO O'HARA.
A
group of twelve of us lived on the streets in Lower Manhattan for four
days, practicing meditation and experiencing how it is to survive
without money or cellphones. It was a renunciation and a pilgrimage, a
way to give up all our habitual comforts and resources and to open up to
reality, to the conditions of the world of which we are a part. What’s
it like to live in the city without anything? What’s it like to find
that you need to use a phone for some information when you don’t have a
quarter? The
week before the retreat, I attended a Soto Zen conference in San
Francisco. While there, I met with my beloved dharma sister, Egyoku
Roshi, and she told me something that struck me powerfully. Roshi’s
community, Los Angeles Zen center, is spending a year studying “What is
vow?” One of Roshi’s students had decided that for the whole year, her
practice would be to investigate the vow “Include everything.” Just
imagine what it would be like if you were to include everything that
arises. Usually, all of us only include a certain amount: what we like,
what we are willing to see about ourselves and others. We don’t include
the things we don’t like about ourselves or about conditions and
situations. We push them away. denial. To constantly include everything
that is arising—I was so struck by that—perhaps that was the teaching I
needed right then. So,
I took this idea of “include everything” onto the street retreat. To
deny nothing, not my disgust: “Something is touching me—a rat? A
bedbug?” (The worst fear of a New Yorker.) Or at the soup kitchen: “Is
this man going to throw up on me?” These were some of the thoughts that
came to me. One
of the points of the street retreat is that things are right in your
face and so there is no way to exclude anything. I would say that every
one of us discovered things that we were forced to include. Every one of
us had issues come up: “Begging shows me what it’s like to be rejected
or given something.” Or, “Living on the street shows me I need to be
seen” or “I have my anger.” Fear
was a huge thing. Living on the street is scary. But the minute we
include the fear, it’s much less scary because it’s there. You can touch
it, you can feel it, and it’s not this black cloud following you
around.
|
