Zen and pleasure
Philippe Jôryû Rome – Dojo Sei Wa Zendo of Liège
Is it indecent to “feel good” in the zazen posture?
I’ve often wondered.
One zazen is not similar to the other and sometimes I feel uneasy, going out of the zendo, for complimenting somebody for the choice of a kusen or somebody else for the rhythm of the Heart Sutra.
Or for grumbling, because somebody couldn’t help coughing or somebody else for having mispronounced a word.
There are days when I come out of the meditation as coming out of a good bath or a refreshing jogging, and days when I think that working instead to progress in a professional or domestic task would have been more profitable than wasting my time sitting in front of a wall.
I know that there is no good or bad zazen.
Firstly, no one “do” zazen. Zazen does not need anyone to unfurl between being and non-being and beyond, beyond this apparent contradiction.
But he needs a support to incarnate itself, to manifest itself.
A provisional dwelling, a bag of guts, a parking space of 1 square meter in a way, to revive what an Indian yogi, fleeing mundanities and the promises of a safe world and a comfortable future, understood 2,000 years ago, at the foot of a tree.
And I humbly confess that, yes, at times, in this posture transmitted by generations of meditation practitioners, I “feel good”.
And this “good feeling” may come from an integral leap, from a confident leap into the senseless sitting, selfless in the letting go of everything, the letting go where the consciousness no longer even feels the urge, the need to qualify anything.
Not even the posture.
So where there is Zen, there is pleasure, but not the one we could imagine.
Tags: NL26