Hey Everyone,
After three years of just sitting, I've learned that just sitting can be used effectively for spiritually bypassing personal problems. In the art of letting go, it's easy (in my experience anyway) to let go too quickly too often that we don't learn some important and helpful lessons from ourselves. "It's all just delusion anyway, so why investigate it?" This ended up with me carrying around a few well-rooted problems for silly amounts of time - I did plenty of letting go but the loops continued. I've taken up journaling as taught by Natalie Goldberg (a Soto practitioner and writer) as a complementary practice to sitting and it has really helped in this tricky territory. Goldberg instructs that in writing practice we should time ourselves, write out whatever comes to mind and keep writing until the timer goes off. It acts as another practice of letting go, but in the process of writing out my thoughts I can usually see the ins and outs of my problems more clearly and often come up with a way to address them.
I thought I'd share this and recommend the practice of journaling to anyone who suspects they may be spiritually bypassing. If you find that there is something that continually bothers you but you don't think through very much, you might be engaging in this form of resistance to awakening. I think that counselling/psychotherapy works in a similar way, that we explore our problems before letting them go. There is a common misconception that Zen isn't concerned with cultivating the knowledge-kind of insight - it does seem to happen naturally with regular sitting, but sometimes we also have to work through something cognitively before letting it go.
Gassho.
Sat today.
After three years of just sitting, I've learned that just sitting can be used effectively for spiritually bypassing personal problems. In the art of letting go, it's easy (in my experience anyway) to let go too quickly too often that we don't learn some important and helpful lessons from ourselves. "It's all just delusion anyway, so why investigate it?" This ended up with me carrying around a few well-rooted problems for silly amounts of time - I did plenty of letting go but the loops continued. I've taken up journaling as taught by Natalie Goldberg (a Soto practitioner and writer) as a complementary practice to sitting and it has really helped in this tricky territory. Goldberg instructs that in writing practice we should time ourselves, write out whatever comes to mind and keep writing until the timer goes off. It acts as another practice of letting go, but in the process of writing out my thoughts I can usually see the ins and outs of my problems more clearly and often come up with a way to address them.
I thought I'd share this and recommend the practice of journaling to anyone who suspects they may be spiritually bypassing. If you find that there is something that continually bothers you but you don't think through very much, you might be engaging in this form of resistance to awakening. I think that counselling/psychotherapy works in a similar way, that we explore our problems before letting them go. There is a common misconception that Zen isn't concerned with cultivating the knowledge-kind of insight - it does seem to happen naturally with regular sitting, but sometimes we also have to work through something cognitively before letting it go.
Gassho.
Sat today.
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