Love and Zen

Our story began in the Brooklyn Public Library’s old A/V room. It was an obscure darkroom, off to the side, at the top of the stairs, unlike the ambitious beaux arts design that characterized the rest of the branch. Today, with the most recent library renovations, the contrast would be greater still. The A/V room has now been replaced by more modern performance spaces, including a cultural center with shiny, tricked-out tech, wide glass doors, and bouncy, crystal-clear acoustics. But back then, the small, make-do film room struck me as cozy and felt right for the occasion. 

My boyfriend and I saw the old Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. The movie was my idea. Everything felt romantic. I soaked up Harpo’s harp solo, which went on forever. I was wrapped up in my lover’s arms, I had his attention, and I felt loved-up and adored. The mood was accentuated by Harpo’s playing, which I experienced as pure, timeless, and true. This was my idea of what love could feel like, and I wanted that feeling to last.

Years later, my boyfriend and I broke up. Looking back now, our split seems so obviously inevitable. Our bases for being together were physical attraction, sexual desire, and fear of being alone. In our time together, my ex had cut me off from my friends and family (I was too naive to understand why), and it took some effort and time to reconnect with all those who were a big part of my life before I disappeared into my doomed romance. In the aftermath, I needed time and space for finding myself, as I’d quite literally forgotten who I was.

The way things would come together and fall apart in my romantic life was not an isolated process. My romantic relationships mirrored other areas of my life. As a child, I was the responsible daughter who took care of an anxious mom. At work, that same anxious relationship pattern had set me up for burnout. I didn’t yet understand the role of unconscious habit patterns in relationships, or, as I came to know it later, karma. All I knew was that something had to change. I’d start by going somewhere quiet to find myself.

Memory

Looking for seclusion, I fled to a remote area of France where I knew no one and where no one could find me. There was little to do but go for long walks up the mountains. I’d followed the voice that had been with me since childhood—the voice that kept me company when I was a little girl, playing alone. Although I had been conditioned to dismiss this voice and not to trust it, this inner voice has guided me all my life. I followed it all the way to these quiet woods in this foreign place.

Wandering amid the forest, I felt a desire to get to the root of my troubles. I craved clarity. The mountain stillness helped. My romance gone bad was part of a familiar cycle that played out in other areas of my life as well: I gave selflessly, expected little from others, and had trouble protecting my boundaries. As for this thing called love, I think I confused it with meeting someone else’s conditions and making myself into someone who was needed.

When I returned stateside, I knew I was done with shrinking myself and all the love I had for the world in order to fit into some prescribed space. I could see now how the familial and societal voices of Black girl respectability had reached a clear expiration date: Do this and the world will treat you better. Do that and you can avoid pain, loneliness, and abandonment. My daily forest bathing, which felt more like full body immersions (a baptism), helped me reclaim some of this lost ground. These walks around the mountaintop evoked memories of Jamaica, the country where I was born and raised, and of how good it felt to simply stop and listen. My formative experiences with nature lay in my body as an easeful reminder of unconditional affirmation and true belonging. As a child, I was a privileged first-hand witness to the dazzling diversity that existed within nature and to the fact that every living thing had its own rightful place. My natural curiosity and need for belonging were rewarded by the things I found in nature, and this was both grounding and reassuring.

I was still a little shaky, but I was starting to remember who I was and where I came from. I knew this wasn’t the first time I’d become alienated from myself. It had happened before and would likely happen again. (This is a common feature in codependency, I later learned.) Lucky for me, I had an almost primordial awareness of that constant ancestral voice. Even when I acted from confusion, I knew deep down inside what was true. I wanted to drop my fears and insecurities and live from that place where I could be fearless and fully me. I wasn’t sure how that would happen, but I knew it was time and that it meant undertaking a spiritual journey.

Luck

Two years after my breakup, I took a leave of absence to care for myself. My workplace situation had gotten worse at a time when I least needed the hassle. A workplace mobbing campaign had intensified around me and was taking a physical toll. Therapy and HIIT workouts were helpful for short-term relief, but I understood my underlying problem as a spiritual one. My gentleness and sensitivity in a world that doesn’t fully value these traits didn’t make me bad.

After a Google search for retreats near me, I found myself at Blue Cliff Monastery, near the foot of the Catskill Mountains. I knew nothing of Buddhism or meditation, but once again I followed that ancestral voice. It was a weeklong retreat for people of color. Everything I learned about the dharma and ritual in those few days felt very natural. It all made sense. My roommates were longtime practitioners from Brooklyn. At the end of the retreat, I told them I wanted to continue practicing, so they recommended the Brooklyn Zen Center, which eventually became my spiritual home.

With the encouragement of my meditation teachers, I sat daily at home, weekly at the center, and monthly on longer silent retreats. Sitting became my refuge and my joy. It replicated some of the natural stillness of my younger years when I’d spend lots of unscheduled time playing outside. Somehow this newbie practitioner part of me connected to that little girl running around everywhere in bare feet. Maybe it was as simple as that: Prostrations, sitting in lotus position on the ground, and going everywhere barefoot physically connected me back to childhood. With my ass and feet in touch with the earth, it’s understandable that I found my way back to a time and place where life was simpler and ancestral voices more clear.

My curiosity about the natural world extended to curiosity about my own mind. Sitting meditation was a welcome opportunity for seeing all the ways I habitually responded to whatever came up. Around this time, I remembered a friend asking about boredom during sitting meditation. For me, it was a nice change of pace to set aside time for doing nothing. What a luxury. In practice discussions with my teachers, they encouraged my curiosity about what was showing up and taking care of myself. Return to the body, they’d say. I’d feel where the emotions were showing up and how—not so much the why, as I’d learned how to adapt to the trials of life by getting lost in my head. For me, mulling over the why, why, why of my particular suffering meant getting lost down unhelpful rabbit holes. The practice of being in the present moment became a refuge. It was a lot like being a kid again.

Like many, I came to practice with much pain. Sitting in the care of a sincere, nonjudgmental, and loving community, one that was deeply committed to my wholeness, was a great stroke of luck. In addition, the community’s devotion to careful study of karma (unconscious habit patterns) and the dharma (the way things are) proved to be the perfect container. My tending to my pain went hand in hand with my study of the bodhisattva precepts, and I was encouraged to be still and heal, to take my time, and to be myself. This was a great blessing for which I am ever thankful.

My tending to my pain went hand in hand with my study of the bodhisattva precepts, and I was encouraged to be still and heal, to take my time, and to be myself.

Much of my pain was rooted in social conditioning around race and gender. I was fortunate to have teachers willing and able to meet me on that particular dharmic path. Through raw and painful one-on-one meetings, I learned to look deeply at the roots of my suffering and meet that suffering with kindness. My teachers encouraged me to be vulnerable as a practice in honesty and humility. I looked pride and shame in the face and survived. My teachers wanted me to live out my true potential and to be happy, no strings attached. Together, we’d investigate all the smashed-up pieces of our lives and make peace with all of the causes and conditions that shape us. We can do this when we’re committed to doing no harm—starting with ourselves.

This was the first time I’d ever been shown such unconditional love. Usually, people wanted something from me or needed me to think or act in a particular way. My teachers were willing to get into the muck of America’s racial karma so we (everybody) could be free. I feel deep gratitude for these gifts of unflinching honesty, respect, patience, and trust. I feel gratitude for relationship, also, because this work could only be done together. I needed to meet face-to-face, at eye level with a fellow human committed to ending suffering.

Relationship

Sitting and attending to whatever came up, moment by moment, helped connect me to the relationship I had with my body before I became estranged from it. In some ways, meditation evoked my simpler childhood self when I was mostly a body experiencing life as it unfolded in real time, before all the social conditioning and well-intentioned bad advice by confused authority figures. A life of Zen practice meant I could simply be and not make anything more of my situation than whatever was happening then and there. 

Working with teachers helped keep me accountable to my practice of attending to whatever feeling, thought, or emotion was asking for my attention in any moment. They encouraged me to investigate my more challenging and persistent emotions. That meant ruthless, honest looking and a willingness to sit lovingly with the difficult and painful. One of the potential fruits of this practice is self-compassion. Compassion, as my teachers reminded me, literally means being with suffering. Could I try that and see what happens? They would be there for me.

As I developed a greater capacity for being with what was difficult and finding refuge in kindness (often with nowhere else to go), I took on practice roles at the Zen center. My roles as greeter, work leader, and head of the meditation hall put me in constant relationship with other beings. These other beings—like me—had their own histories, traumas, neuroses, and hangups. 

What does it mean to be present for others’ suffering? How do you care for the pain that can arise only in relationship? And how can you do this with the insight of nonseparation? Next to a vase of fresh flowers, my main teacher kept a rock in the practice discussion meeting room as a reminder. The rock was simultaneously split in two and singular: In the words of San Francisco Zen Center founder Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “not two, not one.”

In the role of head of the meditation hall (Ino), I was asked to practice with my ideas around power. The Ino occupies a highly visible position in the community. She helps arrange ceremonies and retreats and is considered a primary leader. In my brief stint as Ino, I held a position of authority where my job included telling people what to do and when and how. Very often, I was face-to-face with people who had mixed experiences with authority figures. What do you do when folks inevitably project their anxieties, resentments, or fears onto you? For each meeting, I had to be present—present for my own histories of pain and those of the person before me. 

It was through these roles that I gained further clarity into beliefs and habits that no longer served me, whatever their initial protective functions may have been. The roles threw me into relationship with all phenomena, whether I experienced those phenomena as internal or external, as self or other. I needed a spacious, flexible mind, one responsive to the present unfolding, to the reality of what is, versus whatever convenient truths my ego needed to live. I began to understand the wisdom of having and respecting boundaries. But, mostly, I learned that we are nothing but relationship. Being in relationship meant that I was present, listening, and honest. Self-delusionary acts like false words or hiding my real intention meant I valued performance over relationship, appearances over connection.

Love

Some of my insights into relationship came from practicing with Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on interbeing. Nhat Hanh’s famous example would be seeing the tree and sun and logger and a range of other relationships in a single sheet of paper. Early in practice, I realized how everything and everyone was connected and that love is why everything is. Shortly after, I gained insight into no birth, or how I was connected to my mom, ancestors, and descendants. While these greater insights into the dharma taught me something about the importance of right relationship with all beings, it was a later more ordinary and embodied experience that made me feel what love is.

Several years into practice, while on retreat, I began quietly shedding tears. I felt something that I struggled to describe. Looking into this feeling, I saw that what I was feeling was love. I wrote this note to my teachers and some friends who’d sat with me: Dear friend, I couldn’t name the feeling behind the tears. I usually associate tears with pain, but this wasn’t pain. It wasn’t necessarily joy either. Someone asked me if it could be love, and I had to think about it. Yes, they were tears of love. For friends, family, the community, and humanity in general. Because I couldn’t name this feeling, I’ve used the word sadness when trying to describe it. I now realize that’s not true. In trying to describe the feeling, I used sadness as an approximation, but it isn’t sadness at all. I guess the word I’ve heard used that comes closest to describing it is tenderness. 

My journey to this tenderness involved initially wanting to run away from pain and later becoming intimate with it. The process of becoming intimate with my pain helped me to see that relationship is all that we are. This insight into relationship led me to feeling tremendous gratitude for all the beings who quite literally make my existence. Trusting myself to the tenderizing nature of zazen meant opening, again and again, to all that was beautiful and sad about the world, and feeling gratitude for all of it.

Trusting myself to the tenderizing nature of zazen meant opening, again and again, to all that was beautiful and sad about the world, and feeling gratitude for all of it.

As I continue to walk this path, I acknowledge the role of luck in putting me in the right place at the right time. Becoming intimate with my own pain by sitting with it and by entering into right relationship with others set me up for having nowhere else to go but self-compassion. It is from that location of being willing to face my own pain that I can honestly enter into relationship with others, aware that underneath all our confused social conditioning lies a tender, beating heart. I’m grateful to my parents, teachers, friends, and the numerous beings who continue to meet me in right relationship, which is to say in truth and love—synonyms for an embodied dharma.