Episode Details

Greetings Friends,

I have been reflecting on the art of living a life of attention and intention. This is an art form I have dedicated much of my life to, and one that continues to bear fruit as I continue to practice it.

What is the art of living?

How is attention an art?

Last night I was walking home with my partner from meditation, it was dusk. The fire flies had just started to flutter about, offering their pulsating flashes of illumination. The air was warm, a gentle breeze. We took the “longer” route, through residential roads where cone flowers, milk weed, bee balm, lilies and zinnia are brimming and blooming in hell strips and front yards. My body felt satisfied. My heart was full. Appreciation stirred in my cells. As the world darkened and the moon beamed brighter.

The art of attention opens us to the magic and mystery of this world we live in, this life that we inhabit. Without thinking about it, we experience a life-world-self that is interconnected, emergent, alive. The art of attention also allows us to actually experience our lives, to let things flow, change. To feel the processes that move through us, to notice when we are hooked into a limiting belief or narrative about ourselves and the world. To notice when we are shutting down a particular feeling or emotion.

the art of feeling our lives

This past Monday during our live online meditation group we read from the Hidden Lamp Case 23: Jiao-an’s Sand in the Eye. In it Jiao-an is told by her teacher Yuanwu, that she must, “erase all views” and then she “will finally be free.”

Jiao-an responds to this in a verse:

the pillar pulls out a bone sideways; the void shows its claws and fangs; even if one profoundly understands, there is still sand in the eye.

In her commentary to the koan, Zenki Mary Mocine Roshi writes:

When I began practice I struggled with what I took to be the instruction to suppress emotions. I heard that I would find equanimity by not having views, or emotions, and it seemed to me that I was being asked to give up my humanity and my personality. There may have been some such flavor to the teachings I heard, but I think I exaggerated it out of my own fear of the teaching of “no-self” and my own need to do it “right.”

I have found that my life works when I do not try to suppress emotions or deny that I have views. When I deny them, they just sneak up on me later and cause problems.

She goes on to share a memory about her early years of training at Tassajara where she did practice suppressing an emotion. She reflects:

Had I allowed myself to feel the pain, to really physically experience it, I would have been able to let it go rather quickly. This is the emptiness of emotions. They arise, abide and pass away, but only if we allow them to arise in the first place.

It is human to have emotions. However, it is our practice to not let them have us. In the years since that experience at Tassajara, I have learned to pay attention to my breath and my body. Then I’m suppressing something, my body feels heavy and my belly feels tense. Then I know to stop, breathe, and ask myself, “What is this?”

I really appreciate how Zenki describes the emptiness of emotion, the tendency to suppress and how a certain hearing of the teachings/or experiences of emptiness or equanimity may lead us down the road to suppression.

Part of the art of attention is the art of recognizing and then familiarizing ourselves with the empty yet apparent nature of experience.

Sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, physical discomforts arise through the various causes and conditions that make-up our human life. We, as practitioners, as artists of the Way—can notice the composition of these sensations, feelings, thoughts and emotions.

This is the courageous act of feeling our embodied experience, allowing emotions to arise and experiencing ou