BoomerGirl Diary

This summer, not for the first time in my life, I sat a Zen retreat. Unlike all the other retreats I’ve sat — and in 31 years of Zen practice I’ve sat quite a few — this one was in Japan, at a Rinzai temple whose forms were much stricter than the forms I’m used to.

But in essence it was the same.

Only a few hours of sleep a night. Sitting still for a total of 8 to 12 hours a day, with short breaks about every 30 minutes so your legs and back don’t seize up. Brief periods of walking in unison. Chanting. Prostrations. Sitting still during long talks (at this retreat, in Japanese, which I don’t understand, summarized by the translator every 15 minutes or so). Interviews with the teacher. Silence otherwise. A daily work period (yes, we really did rake sand for an hour a day — this was a Japanese temple, after all). Forms for sitting, forms for walking, forms for entering and leaving the ceremony hall and sitting hall, and complex forms for how we unwrapped our bowls, served ourselves food, cleaned our bowls, and wrapped them up again. And, oh yes, almost no individual time away from the group.

As my husband asked our teacher decades ago when we were both young Zen students: how is Zen different from the Marines?

So there I was, at the end of the retreat, tired and sweaty (no air conditioning), wearing the same temple jacket I’d worn all week, when a friend pulled out her camera and took a picture of me in the kitchen. I look radiant, or at least as radiant as I ever look.

This is a phenomenon everyone who has sat a retreat notices: as a retreat goes on, everyone looks more and more radiant. It’s not because we’re relaxed and pampered. Zen retreats are hard work — it’s more like St. George facing down dragons than someone getting a massage after the hot tub and before the walk in the garden. But my experience in decades of practice is that ultimately it is this kind of hard work that brings real healing, real relief.

A long time ago, in my mid-30s, I had terrible back problems. I ran from one acupuncturist to another chiropractor to yet another rolfer. I popped prescription strength anti-inflammatories so that I could at least shuffle around after my husband literally pulled me out of bed (because I could not get out of bed on my own, in fact I couldn’t even roll over). I searched for relief, and sometimes I found it, but the pain always came back, and with it the inability to function. One evening it was so bad that I called my acupuncturist to beg for an emergency appointment. She got very angry with me.

“I can’t fix this! I can only stop the pain for a little while. You can’t call me every time it hurts. You have to take care of it yourself.”

I felt hopeless and abandoned. But yelling at me like that was the best thing she could have done. A few days later I started to do back exercises. It wasn’t easy. My muscles seized up and didn’t want to move. Even the slightest movement caused pain. But I kept on doing them. Slowly the functioning came back. Slowly the pain receded. It’s been decades since I’ve been crippled by back pain. And I still do my back exercises nearly every day.

Spiritual practice is like that. We look for healing and relief in many places, and sometimes we find it, but usually it is temporary, because it relies on external circumstance — the hot tub, the garden, the massage therapist. Which is not putting down hot tubs, gardens, and massage therapists — they’re great, and I’m grateful they exist. But real relief, the kind that’s hard to shatter, can only come from the hard spiritual work of finding out who we really are. Nobody can do that for us. We have to face down our dragons ourselves.