So I was talking with a good friend the other day, and explaining to them that my injury* had prevented me from keeping up a dedicated zazen schedule, but that weirdly, I was beginning to see that zazen could be done outside of sitting on a cushion, to which she replied "How clever of your body to teach you that!" The more I thought about it, the more I realised how right she was. How many injuries can prevent you from sitting meditation? Not many. It has to be something extremely localised, and persistent. So the abscess was a very particular condition, perhaps the only thing that could have prevented me from sitting zazen and therefore granting me a chance to see practice without my normal practice. There is a certain bloody-mindedness to the Way, which goes along the lines of you will wake up no matter what. So then it just becomes an issue of how much you want to resist or go along with that movement. There is something irritating about insisting that the world and the universe is beneficent, something rather of the Californian Optimist about saying that things are meant to be just as they are...but that's what I'm saying. I've always struggled with the reasons for zazen, and Zen practice in general. Recently I had the idea that zazen makes things easier. But now I'm not so sure. Zazen, I now see, is utterly useless, and I mean really useless in all ways spiritual, emotional, and developmental. It only expresses leaving things exactly as they are. It took not doing it to see that. Which I can't recommend exactly. So now, when I get back to doing zazen, I can do so knowing that it doesn't rely on anything apart from my desire to express that. There's no duty, no "ought to", no club to join or thing to prove. Only sitting. Now if I could just convince my posterior...
* a euphemism for an abscess in my butt....
