Meditation Stages  

There have been two major stages in my own zazen practice. These were doing and watching.



A room with a painting of a man sitting in a lotus position on a bridge.

I use the word “doing” for the first stage because of the effort I expended simply to breathe, as it seemed to me that I needed to deliberately draw in my breath and release it. 

 

I made a transition from doing to watching when I saw that my breathing took place of itself and did not require my intervention.  I don’t remember when this insight occurred, but I do recall that at some point during practice, I saw that a breath came in and went out entirely on its own.  After all, in daily life, breathing does take place in exactly this way, so I was just seeing the truth. 

 

When I ceased to “do” my breathing, the energy I was expending to do it was freed.  Not only could I now just “watch” my breathing, but I could watch a good deal more. 

 

There were flows of energy taking place in my body and heading mostly to my chest or  heart area.  When I followed Sufism (the mysticism of Islam), the ideal of spiritual development was to drop ego and open the heart.  True heart opening in Sufism is very pronounced physically and enables a dervish (Sufi follower) to project love from his or her heart to another person, who can palpably feel it.  The energy flows that I was now watching seemed to be opening my heart, and I was very grateful to be starting into this heart-opening process. 

 

I could also observe that the activity that was going on in me during zazen was taking place entirely of itself.  This was true not only of breathing and heart opening, but also of a lowering into a sense of oneness with everything.  A Japanese priest, Gudo Nishijima Roshi, says about this sense of oneness, “We call the state ‘ineffable,’ or ‘dharma,’ or ‘truth,’ or ‘reality.’  But even these words are inadequate to describe the simple and original state that we return to in zazen.”[1] 

 

I believe that persisting in zazen will take any person to these places. 


Footnotes

  1. Gudo Nishijima Roshe, Introduction to Buddhism and the Practice of Zazen, Windbell Publications, 2022, p. 13. 
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