Down Shift

Summer is just about upon us, and in my world that usually has a very specific shape. My students are spent, as are my collegues. The classroom isn't a mess, but there are a lot of things that aren't where they need to be and will fall to ruin in September if not set right. My own Children and my wife (also a teacher) are in the final stretch, looking forward to putting time into all the things in our house and family that get neglected throughout the school year. It's been weeks since Ango ended, but it feels like it was just yesterday.

There have been summers when I have walked away from school and not given it another thought until September. I dive into summer, driving my kids where they need to go and taking interest in everything that they do until they start getting irritated with my presence (teenage girls). When I walk back into the school at the end of August, my shoulders slump as I preapre to pay the price for my inattention to that environment over the last 7 weeks.

Similarly, there have been years where I could not say much about my practice in the months between two Angos.

This year I have been examining a few concepts in my practice that I hope will shift things a bit. These two concepts are ceaseless practice and subtle presence.

Ceaseless Practice, or Gyoji is the longest vasicle of Dogen's Shobogenzo. The way I encounter it is as a reminder that there is nothing outside of practice. Everything we do can be approached as an expression of the Buddhadharma. While the teachings of the Way tell us that we are perfect and complete, lacking nothing, it is also true that we can use some work. From the perspective of ceaseless practice, it means encountering and engaging whatever you have to do today through the lens of the precepts, seeking to manifest compassion and wisdom as it best appears in the moment that is arising.

Don't try to turn your day into a holy exercise. Just encounter the day. Nothing needs to be added to it to make it perfect. When it is time to do the laundry, do the laundry. When it is time to make sure the kids have finished their homework, do that. When it is time to be done with the task at hand, be done with the task at hand.

As simple as that sounds, we often don't do that. We carry in out own drama. We colour the scene unnecessarily with our own likes and dislikes and then put our focus on those attachments and aversions, as though they we the true focus of the moment.

What is the thread that runs through your entire life? It is not a a collection of threads, or a bunch of strings tied together. It is one continuous thread. What is that thread?

When we make a big thing, it has a beginning, it has its life and it has its end. Pick a thing. Your degree, an earache, a phase your kid is going through, or that difficult person at work who will be there until you quit or retire. All of them: beginning, existence, end.

See those things and encoutner them as needed, but is that the thread? Is that what is going on in your life? Is life those things? It seems so, but maybe not.

Subtle presence is how I describe the practice of not adding extra. When we add extra, we spend a great deal of our physical and spiritual energy. It is a spending that can be exhausted. There are expressions that describe different aspects of adding extra:

-Not adding flowers to broccade.

-Not piling shit on manure

-Not putting a head on top of your head

For me, it is exactly the times that I add extra that I loose sight of this moment as a perfect expression of the Great Way. When I add extra, I turn the moment into something that needs to be fixed. This is not the same as seeing that something in the moment needs to be fixed. When I add extra, everything becomes a problem.

Subtle presence is simply being there, being open, being ready and willing to engage this life.

Today, this looks like feeding my kids, doing laundry, printing pictures for work, going to a pool party, playing cards and cleaning the house. Unless of course, it looks some other way.

I set out into this summer with the intention to examine this continuous thread. What does it look like on a warm day when there is nothing to do? What does it look like in the middle of the summer when I am alone at school preparing for the fall? What does it look like on a rainy day when my kids are bored? What does it look like in the middle of a Jukai Sesshin? Does it look any different than it does at the end of the retreat?

Let's find out.

I vow take up the way of keeping my eyes and heart open to see exactly how it is.