Beginner's Mind

This is a famous book by Shunryu Suzuki called "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." It's one of the first Buddhist books I owned in the early 1970s. One of Suzuki's first topics is posture. I bet I rolled my eyes back then at his incredibly detailed description of how to sit, and tilt, and hold our hands -- not to mention his paradoxical references. In my impatient youthful years, no wonder I could never truly get into Zen. All that sitting, which I found unbearably boring, and the incomprehensible koans. But I liked the idea of it enough to continue reading over the years, even when I wasn't sitting. Liked it enough to call myself ZenWoman when I needed a "handle" for Compuserve in 1979. (I discovered Compuserve while working at a TV station back then. First for research and later as a fun diversion.)

Anyway, now I find myself endlessly fascinated by the subtle nuances of how to sit for meditation or stand for yoga. I just posted a note about this on Facebook. I feel compelled to try and explain some of these aspects of Buddhism in hopes of demystifying it. I really hate to see beautiful, helpful practices like meditation and hatha yoga (the physical part of yoga) and T'ai Chi all lumped into some "woo woo" category or to go the way of Islam, where people actually begin to hate it.

I hope with President Obama's call for civility and for us to tone down the vitriolic rheteroic, we can all try. I know it's hard. Even in the midst of writing these pieces I felt the old urge to start name calling and blaming the fundamentalist factions for our problems. But I am part of the problem unless I try to shed light on my own practice, walk my own walk, and make some of my tools accessible to others. You never know when someone is ready and you know what "they" say: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. We are all each others gurus.