The Ideal American Zen Retreat
The typical American Zen retreat day should include qigong in the morning and vinyasa yoga in the afternoon.
Let the body do its work.
People have this roadblock belief that their mind is supposed to be the thing that does the thing. You don’t have to change your beliefs. Just do the thing with your body, and when you stop screwing around for a second, you’ll notice your mind has been doing the thing.
In Zen and other meditation-heavy scenes, there is a tendency toward sitting-supremacy, because mind is so noticeable in sitting. The reason I’m so intense about movement practice here is that a woken-up body is better able to NOTICE that the body is doing the thing in zazen.
Sitting is ultimate practice-realization. Believe me, I vote with my ass on that one. But it’s the SITTING PART — the stillness, the breathing, the posture, the low elevation, the self-sufficiency — that makes it what it is. If practice were led by the mind, why sit ever?
The way you can confirm this in practice is by noticing how linearly your ability to “drop back in” throughout the day scales with how much zazen you’re doing. “How much zazen” is not a matter of some abstract principle; it’s simple physical conditioning.
