Becca Faith Yoga

A few months ago I started sitting with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care on Monday nights at OM. The sangha that gathers there each week is largely comprised of chaplaincy students and social workers, doctors and caregivers. The group is led by Koshin and Chodo, Soto Zen Buddhist Priests whose unflappability is at once comforting and terrifying. The session opens with 20 minutes of sitting, followed by a dharma talk and an open-forum discussion, then more sitting and a chant and it’s practically over before its begun.

Zazen sitting is rather different from the samatha-vipassana style I usually practice at OM, and at first this was enough to keep me away from the group entirely (umm yeah, new things are bad — didn’t you know?). But the truth is, sitting in a group for a half-hour once a week just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’m hungry for sangha, a community of meditators who share the underpinning sameness of dharma. So I plunked myself down on a makeshift zafu (cushion) and sat.

Unlike samatha-vipassana, there’s no wiggle in zazen. People sit like pebbles at the bottom of a river, breath flowing in and around them, each inhale filling the rough pores of stone, each exhale smoothing edges to an undefinable finish. At first, I was less like a pebble and more like a leaf surfing the rapids; I relied on samatha‘s flexibility to relieve excruciating sleepiness in my left foot or replenish my posture when it inevitably slumped. But over time (and a good deal of experimentation with blanket-folding & pillow placement) I found a seat that keeps both feet awake, my back straight, and my body still. Like all the best cookie recipes, my seat’s success is in the tweaks and details: a four-part accordion-folded blanket and a thin square cushion, a slightly more prominent tilt of my pelvis, the opposite crossing of my ankles.

Even though the first rule of samatha is to find a good seat, I never really bothered until I sat zazen.  If a practice has wiggle room built in, I thought, who am I to scoff at tradition? But I’m starting to see the truth of it, which is that I abused the wiggle. I’m not saying I sat with it at lunch and played with it at recess just so it would let me copy its science homework, but there was a certain questionable genuineness to our friendship. And of course, because I’m me and this blog is this blog, I started to wonder: where else am I abusing the wiggle?

In yoga, we talk about satya, “truthfulness.” It’s an honesty that goes deeper than speaking the truth or dealing fairly in business, though naturally it includes both of those things. Rather, it’s a kind of authenticity and integrity that permeates every thought and action, every moment. Like a laugh or a scream, satya originates from some interior, invisible place and radiates outward; it simultaneously encompasses and eradicates all other things. And for the first time in almost four years of sitting, I feel like my posture is imbued with that unspeakable, wonderful quality.

What would it mean to start incorporating more satya in our lives? What if we took the time to examine our everyday habits — how we sit, how we take coffee or tea, what we eat or even how we walk — and chose one to douse in a healthy wash of truthfulness? I wonder what we’d find…or what we wouldn’t.