I miss being with all my beloved Synthesis Center co-travelllers of life… COVID has kept us apart for too long, and sitting in practice for retreats has been impossible. We did manage to squeeze one last 3-day Zen Retreat in with our beloved Hyon Gak Sunim in October of 2020. Here’s a small talk he gave at that retreat, with Greek subtitles (also include at the bottom here).
At the end of the second day of our retreat, one of our most sincere practitioners told me that this little video came to her mind during the last sitting meditation… how beautiful! And since then I’ve come across a beautiful expression of the free-fall that we often experience in meditation from author and Zen inspiration Roshi Joan Halifax (below the video).
Watching the video, I still laugh out loud with the very first scene, where I imagine saying ‘I hate you!’ to all my incredible teachers – and especially to Sunim – who have, and continue, to push me over the edge into more and more clarity and depth!
This immersion in realizing our true nature through meditation is a dive into ‘not-knowing’, or ‘no-mind’, the quiet of non-attached moment-to-moment being. But it’s unsettling, this moment-to-moment awareness, unsettling to our conditioned need to control and understand… Joan Halifax, in her wonderful book “Standing at the Edge”, this immersion through meditative practices beautifully:
We also put Not-Knowing into practice by recognizing that really, we are always in free fall. It’s not like we will find some moral high ground where we are finally stable and can catch all those falling around us. It’s more like we are falling above the infinite groundlessness of life, and we learn to become stable in flight, and to support others to become free of the fear that arises from feeling unmoored.
Standing at the Edge, Joan Halifax, pg 45
So no wonder, as we laugh at the video, and tell our teachers “I hate you!”, with time, patience and trust, we finally collapse our control into “bring it on!”. The result is a marvelous release into the big open space of this existence and into our quiet and vast interconnectedness.
Here’s the talk. I can’t WAIT to have in-person retreats at our sweet corner sanctuary!
