Zen Practice and Performance
I don’t consider what initially drew me to Zen practice to be very important, but what keeps me coming back to it is the opportunity it affords to see and examine what arises in the absence of any performance.
My received condition inclines me towards a lot of social awareness and concern about impressions — which I generally experience as an asset — but the expenditure of energy involved in all that is exhausting, and I’ve always naturally sought ways of recuperating.
The strategies I discovered throughout my life basically resolved in Zen practice. It’s a kind of resolution I first found within myself in Zen, but for which the only prior experience that prepared me, I’m pretty sure, was math class.
Not that I was a particularly good student — at math or anything else — but that was the place where I first saw how the essential expression of something was its simplest, most irreducible form.
Sitting in zazen was like factoring, canceling out. What was left was fundamental, and that’s it. Since there was nothing constructed that had to be sustained, it was a restful condition supported by a divine gift of free energy.
Over time, what this allowed for me was a more conservative, deliberate, efficient reconstruction of whatever constructs were needed, as needed. More and more performative elements could be chosen rather than conditioned reflexively, fewer of them were necessary to navigate a given situation, and they could more easily and immediately be dissolved and offered back to the universe when their task was complete.
Zen as a tradition provides many skillful and amusing examples to reach for in the field to support that process, but it is hardly my only source of inspiration.
Creativity in responding to situations is one of those natural conditions, one of those things that arises in zazen when artificial conditions are released. The drain of habitually sustaining those conditions taxes the spirit, reduces the resources available for creativity.
Hence the reflexive reliance on conditioning.
Creativity takes practice, of course, and this is where that “all of life is practice” mentality comes in. The trick is that the space must be made — and the energy made available — to exercise the benefits of practice.
I had a bass teacher once who demanded that every note of every exercise — like, even when running scales over and over again — be played as though I were on stage performing it solo before a rapt, silent audience.
This, I feel, is the Zen inflection on the word “practice.”
It’s actually a beautiful inversion of the received conditioning I described, where the imagined impressions of real people constrained my choices and actions.
Choices and actions are refined gifts, given lovingly, received lovingly by a living, receiving, universal room.
It doesn’t matter if someone in the back row fell asleep as soon as the lights came down. The show goes on without them.
