When I started blogging in 2012, I was so excited by my zen practice that I wanted to let everybody know how to access a sense of inner peace. I started blogging on tumblr, which, if your not familiar with it, it is a social media platform, that lets people interact anonymously, through avatars, sharing personal experiences, inspirational quotes, and pictures of cats. Like other social media platforms, people interact by posting things, liking things, re-blogging things, and following each other. It is a very accepting platform where people tend to be caring, compassionate and open about their life struggles and mental health experiences. It is a place where people go to find community, understanding, and a way to escape from the oppressive suffering that comes with being human.
Telling people, in three paragraphs or so, ways to shut off their minds and experience the bliss of their True Nature didn’t work as well as I hoped. If you were given a choice between taking a unicorn ride or having an ice cream cone, you would take the ice cream cone because you know there is no such thing as unicorns. Imagining that you have a liberating True Nature is like imagining that unicorns are real. There I was, offering ice cream and unicorn rides. Everybody seemed to like the ice cream and the notion of unicorns, so they liked and re-blogged and followed me. Soon, they started asking for advice.
There is a difference between advice about how to mount a unicorn, and advice about how to deal with an eating disorder. Meditation is not always the right answer. I learned as I went, how much and how little could be communicated through words. I know that every reader is actually already riding a unicorn, so I can allude to it, and use zen shock conventions like encouraging them to experience it NOW! Mostly what people need though, is not to understand the wonder of existence, but how to get over a difficult feeling or troubled relationship. Mostly they need compassion, comfort and understanding. That is what I offered.
When my zen teacher, Sunim, read some of my posts, he recognized the compassion and attempt to use zen ideas and tools to ease suffering. It was around that time that he offered me transmission. Transmission is the zen tradition of acknowledging a connection between teacher and student, a tradition dating all the way back to the Buddha, 2500 years ago. Transmission represents the authority to teach the dharma and the responsibility to teach it well.
The transmission ceremony, which took place in Toronto, in December, 2013, was a birthday of sorts. The ceremony was for a group of us, my dharma siblings and I. Sunim gave each of us a certificate, a painting, a necklace, a robe, a lineage document (tracing the lineage back to Shakyamuni Buddha), and a new name. The name he gave me was Bub In, which means dharma seal. He told me it means that I have to tell the truth, no joking. On that day, although my blog remained Zen Mister, I became a real zen master. I was officially allowed and encouraged to keep doing what I was doing.
Over the years, I have sat for thousands of hours of meditation, trying to figure out what this unicorn we’re riding is. I have written thousands of posts, each connecting to the suffering of another human being and trying to say something that will make them feel a little better. All that mediation and compassion has helped me, a lot. That puts me in a much better position to help others. Right now, you are in the perfect position to take what you need from these words and apply them directly to your life.
The practice I advocate is a combination of relaxation and compassion. Meditation will support that practice, but in the absence of a regular meditation practice, you can still practice compassion. The cornerstone of the practice is compassionate breathing.
To breathe compassionately, bring your attention to your breath. As you breathe in, notice how an aware breath makes you feel. As you breathe out, release all of the tension that came in with the previous breath. As you breathe in again, consciously breath in some unease or worry that has been bothering you. Hold it for a moment, then breath out with a wish for you to be well and free of suffering. Take a few more breaths like that.
The recognition of suffering and the desire to be free of it is the essence of compassion. The process of compassion is looking into what is needed to help ease the suffering and then doing what you can. At anytime, anywhere, when you notice yourself suffering, you can engage compassion by taking a few compassionate breaths for yourself. If you notice somebody else suffering, you can take some compassionate breaths for them. As we notice the world suffering we can breathe compassionately for the whole world. Moments of focused awareness, a break from our normal thinking habits, the traditional running of the bull, feels good. It can also change the world. That is the magic of riding on unicorns, those fleeting tastes of ice cream can be liberating. YUM!!
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