Now that there are a couple other answers, I’ll talk about one of my own, keeping in mind I now think of the kind of thing I’m going to describe as a part of my typical field of awareness that I can choose to pay attention to or not.
Once during sesshin (an multi-day period of dedicated practice in zen focused on meditation, literally a gathering of mind), after a particular rough morning where I was very restless and was expending a lot of effort just to stay on the cushion, my teacher gave a talk on the teaching poem “Trust In Mind”. We had lunch, a one hour break period, then returned for afternoon meditation period around 1500. My body hurt, so I swallowed my pride and sat in a chair rather than on a cushion on the floor, the first time I had ever done that in the zendo.
Between surrendering to the pain in my body, my pride, and my teacher’s encouragement to trust, I suddenly found myself giving everything over. My big notion of self fell away and my awareness opened in a deep way that is hard to put in words. This had happened to me before, but only in little flashes. This time it persisted, lasting for hours, giving me the opportunity to be with and explore my experience.
Eventually I “forgot” how to remain in that state and my big sense of self returned a few days later after the sesshin ended and I got tangled up in my “regular” life, but I was transformed in some subtle ways by the experience such that I now had a trust in the world to be just as it is in a way I didn’t before.
Now that there are a couple other answers, I’ll talk about one of my own, keeping in mind I now think of the kind of thing I’m going to describe as a part of my typical field of awareness that I can choose to pay attention to or not.
Once during sesshin (an multi-day period of dedicated practice in zen focused on meditation, literally a gathering of mind), after a particular rough morning where I was very restless and was expending a lot of effort just to stay on the cushion, my teacher gave a talk on the teaching poem “Trust In Mind”. We had lunch, a one hour break period, then returned for afternoon meditation period around 1500. My body hurt, so I swallowed my pride and sat in a chair rather than on a cushion on the floor, the first time I had ever done that in the zendo.
Between surrendering to the pain in my body, my pride, and my teacher’s encouragement to trust, I suddenly found myself giving everything over. My big notion of self fell away and my awareness opened in a deep way that is hard to put in words. This had happened to me before, but only in little flashes. This time it persisted, lasting for hours, giving me the opportunity to be with and explore my experience.
Eventually I “forgot” how to remain in that state and my big sense of self returned a few days later after the sesshin ended and I got tangled up in my “regular” life, but I was transformed in some subtle ways by the experience such that I now had a trust in the world to be just as it is in a way I didn’t before.