Prime Time - Jane Fonda [134]
By day two my back and knees were screaming in pain, and I moved from sitting in a partial lotus on the mat to a folding chair. I told myself that, after all, I was older than most of the others, and that the few who were older than I were also sitting in chairs. Although it never occurred to me to leave—I’m too proud—by day three I was asking myself why I’d come, why I was purposefully putting myself through this torture. What made it all possible—no, not possible; endlessly worth it—were the daily one-hour dharma talks given by Joan or one of the three other priests. “Dharma” refers to the teachings of the Buddha, and because this was a sesshin focusing on the enlightenment of the Buddha, the talks centered on enlightenment. We would carry our mats into a semicircle around the priests. They would sit on mats facing us as they talked, and it wasn’t just the breaking of the endless silence that made their words so precious. Sometimes Joan would choose a koan, a brief Zen story that can be understood only when you let go of the mind and allow the feeling of it to penetrate you. I was reminded of the twenty-one sayings or puzzles attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. He said that grasping their meaning would allow you entrance to the “Kingdom of Heaven”—which I take to mean achieving higher consciousness or wholeness.
Joan would help us understand the koan’s meaning by weaving a personal, often hysterically funny story around it. She told us about the time when she was to give a talk at a big temple in Japan and walked out of the Japanese bathroom, forgetting to take off the bright red toilet shoes (with the word “toilet” written in kanji on the tops of them), and strolled “mindfully” down the public hallway to the lecture hall; her soon-to-be Japanese audience subtly brought her attention to her egregious cultural faux pas. She related this story to illustrate a verse by an ancient Japanese Zen master: “A splendid branch issues from the old plum tree; in time, obstructing thorns flourish everywhere.”
This was a good talk for me, as my lessons in humility were advancing. It seemed like every insight I was having was accompanied by more stupidity and more “thorns.” I was being taught that these obstructing thorns were all part of the package of life.
Every talk Joan and the other priests gave, every story, felt as though it had been chosen especially to help me see why I was there, and what I should reach for within myself. It was comforting when she told us that even the Buddha had had a hard time quieting his “devilish thoughts.” “Whenever an unpleasant state of mind would arrive to the Buddha,” she said, “instead of rejecting it, or judging himself, he would say, ‘Hello, old friend. I know you,’ and that would dispel the state of mind itself. It’s an important strategy, the strategy of nondenial.”
On the sixth day, I noticed that I didn’t have to count my breaths anymore; I was being breathed, just as Joan had predicted. The nondenial strategy made my mind less “sticky” and helped me get to a new mind stillness and stay there for minutes at a time. I felt, then, suspended in what seemed like an intersection behind my forehead. Just floating. I was aware that my awareness of not thinking was different than thinking.
Joan describes this as the “nonadhesive mind”; like a mirror, it reflects what is, without judgment or attachment. It’s not something you can make happen. It arises spontaneously. Joan used the metaphor of the mirror and the red balloon: As the