Recently I spent four days on a Zen* retreat at the wonderful Southern Dharma Center (SDC). Pretty serious. Four-plus hours a day of zazen; silence for three-and-a-half of those days; and hour of silent work practice every day. Gong at six am! Yikes.
I did the retreat as a kind of spring cleaning for my practice, which had shrunk to between 5 and 15 minutes a day, sometimes at my desk. Maybe I got in one or two 20-minute sessions a week. Or every two weeks. The week preceding the retreat, the words “I really need to sit more to get ready for the retreat!” continually formed and reformed in my brain and mouth but never, well, actually actualized. Technically, that is called the “hot-air” method of practice, also known as “talking out your a**.” In fact, I didn’t sit at all for three days before I took off for Zenvile.
Unsurprisingly, sitting was same as it ever was. Boring, uncomfortable after a while, comfortable some of the while. The lectures were really good; the people, wonderful; the food, excellent. Brad Warner, who spoke at the IDP in April, led the retreat. (Read more here.) Practice-wise, sitting for 30 or 40-minute periods with 10 minutes for walking is pretty standard. Even for four-plus hours a day. It wasn’t the sitting that was the jolt, even after my bout of nonpractice.
Work practice was the jolt.
I HATE cleaning at home. I NEVER clean. I am content to live peacefully amid dust bunnies the size of tumbleweeds. My most loathed job is cleaning the bathroom. HOW do people get clean bathrooms? I don’t get it. I scrub and scrub and the grout ain’t ever white. And who, really, cares? I gaze apathetically at eons of nameless grime in the corners and think, “That’s good to have around. The immune system; use it or lose it!”
But on retreat, I always volunteer for the worst job. Always the bathrooms. I do the dishwashing cuz I love it; I do the bathrooms cuz I hate ’em. It’s like I have to get the most for my buck, like I have to face down my most hated activity. Never take the easy way out! Yet, I never feel very much about it one way or the other. I just shut down and do it.
This time, it was cold out, I didn’t have the right clothing, and I didn’t volunteer for the outdoor latrine cleaning. Or the indoor bathrooms. I signed up for “inside housekeeping.” What a copout, I thought. Useless.
Well, the interior housekeeping was surprisingly rigorous, involving dusting, washing, and polishing every inch of a set of wooden stairs; washing all the lamps in the dining room; polishing all of the wooden slat-back dining room chairs; and thoroughly cleaning, sweeping, and mopping the mudroom and the dining room floor.
And I really got into it. With a full hour, I found I could actually pay attention to what I was doing. I enjoyed being careful. I was frustrated when some piece of gunk wouldn’t come off, but I got it off anyway.
What is the difference between Ms Wax On Wax Off at retreat and Ms Typhoid Grout at home?
I pondered. It was the uninterrupted time. Although I could rush thru tasks at my usual “get it done NOW!” speed, there was nothing else to do that whole hour. That had to be my focus. Like the focus on my breath or my mind when sitting, there was nothing else around.
At home, a million tasks vie for my ADD attention. There are emails to read – hundreds! – the gym I need to go to, yoga practice, phone calls to friends and family, volunteer work to do, hardcore dharma reading to catch up on. There is always something “better” to do than clean. But when there is nothing else to do, it seems there is nothing better to do than clean.
As I finished the last work period, I damp mopped the kitchen floor. The groundskeeper walked over it, swiped his finger on the floor, and winked at me. The house manager took me aside at the end and said, “You seem to really understand what work practice is about. Thanks.”
I replied, “Yeah, well, it kinda took a long time.”
I still haven’t mopped the floors at home. But the place sure looks a heckuva lot better.
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*My usual practice is what I learned in Shambhala training. Nevertheless, I have been to zendos in the city and sat zazen; I enjoy reading Zen books; I am fascinated by the friendship between and dual missions of Chogyam Trungpa and Suzuki Roshi, who both struggled to bring buddhist practice to U.S. students in the early 1970s. Shambhala practice shares a lot with Zen – oryoki at retreats; kyudo, calligraphy, and ikebana as forms of dharma art or body practice; the bodhisattva path – but of course it is not exactly the same.
Not only do I like the stricter form of Zen retreats, some very good ex-New Yorker friends of mine live near the SDC.
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