Why you'd want to live a long life

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed a workshop I went to on the Energetic Basis of Zen Yoga where we were introduced to a book written in 1211 called Kissayojoki or "Drink Tea and Prolong Life" by Zen master Eisai. Eisai wrote it to help convince the Japanese shogun at the time to give up being an alcoholic and drink tea instead - essentially to live a better and healthier life. However, in writing the book he set out a great deal of knowledge and many practices he'd learnt in China for boosting health and vitality, and the keys to living not just an average length of life, but a very long life.

So the question is why would you want to live a long life?

Why wouldn't you...?! In the west we seem to have a preoccupation with finding the elixir of life, the secret of immortality, sometimes called the philosopher's stone - a mythical potion that supposedly grants the drinker eternal life and/or eternal youth. Just google for "secret of eternal youth"! But as far as I see it, this preoccupation or desire to live forever is really driven by fear. Fear of change, fear of getting older, fear of loss, and ultimately a fear of death. Death is one of the great unknowns that we will never know about. Just pause for a moment and think of what might happen to you when you die - it's scary!

Why is it scary? I think it all stems from that little word "you" (or actually "me"). What will happen to me? What is 'me'? Who am I? What is self?

When it comes down to it, aren't we just scared of finding out that we're not who we think we are? We have these ideas like "I have good skin", "I have a healthy body","I have a good memory", "I have many friends", then as we get older we find our skin wrinkles, our hair falls out, we lose our memory, and this is scary.

But if we can learn to let go of this precious 'self' we care so deeply about, then change, getting older, and even death suddenly seem much less terrifying. We just need to stop making those "I am..." identifications.

Of course it's not quite that easy! If you spend some concentrated time looking at that question of "who am I?" you might get a genuine direct experience of no-self - when the self dissolves and you realise that 'I' doesn't really exist in the way you thought.

But it's one thing having this realisation, and another thing altogether living fully and completely from this realisation: seeing through all those old habits driven by thinking of yourself as separate, and fully integrating this realisation into your life.

So that's why I think one might want to live a long life. Because it takes time and a lot of effort to see through the strong and habitual delusions of the self built up over the decades since you realised you had a self. And it takes time to work out how to truly live from this place. Developing wise or skilful intentions, making wholesome and compassionate actions, speaking wisely and kindly, finding the right kind of livelihood, putting your efforts and energy in the right kind of directions, paying attention skilfully, and practising the things that cultivate all these qualities. That's the Buddha's 8-fold path, that is! And it's a life-long practice.

Available here

Is a daily practice important?

I guess it all depends on what you’re doing it for. And what the “it” is.

Going to a weekly physical yoga class is a great way to keep up your bodily health and fitness, flexibility and strength. If you’re looking to improve any of these things, then maybe going to a class twice a week is a good idea – or combining the yoga with another physical training activity.

But when you’re wanting to develop a deeper understanding of yoga, and particularly when it comes to meditation, having a daily practice is very important. But why?

Did you ever learn to play a musical instrument when you were at school? Learn how to do keepie-ups with a football? Learn how to touch-type? Like learning any difficult skill, practising a little every day gets you a lot further than doing a big blast of it once in a while. If your hamstrings are tight, a daily physical yoga practice with lots of forward bends will work wonders to loosen them up and help your posture. If your concentration skills are poor, then a daily meditation practice of counting the breath will gradually enable you to hold your mind still on something for longer and longer periods.

So a little every day improves our skill, but is that the only reason?

Why of course not! How about patience? A whole day of hamstring stretching might really loosen up your legs - but it won't be lasting, and you might end up very sore. It takes time, gentleness, and patience to let those tight areas open up.

Committing to a daily practice brings also us up against all those times when we don’t feel like it, don’t feel well enough, or we’re so busy that there’s no time.

In my 8-week courses in mindfulness we make a commitment at the beginning to practice every day for the whole 8 weeks. In our 3-year sadhana course with Jonathan Monks, we also made that commitment. One of the most common questions I get is: if one day I really don’t want to or just don’t find the right time, is it ok to miss that day? Of course you can miss a day – I’m not going to chase you up and make you do your practice! But what an incredible missed opportunity it would be.

Why don’t you want to? What are you finding hard? Where are the resistances? Instead of finding every excuse not to practice, why not practice with a spirit of compassion, patience, inquisitiveness, curiosity? Face those resistances head on and you might find they start to dissolve – or perhaps aren’t as powerful as you thought they were.

Another question that comes up: if I force myself to do my practice when I really don’t want to, won’t I start building up an unhealthy association with it?

True, if you’re forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to, then you'll end up resenting it, resenting your teacher, or hating the practice. But the question to ask is if it’s really something you don’t want to do. Hopefully you can see the benefits of doing the practice (or I guess you wouldn’t be doing it) – so why do you think it wouldn’t benefit you today?

A sustained daily practice also makes you aware of the cycles of ups and downs in your life – day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month. Your practice is like a constant light, illuminating your mood, feelings, body and mind state. Without this, these very normal fluctuations can easily go unnoticed. One day you might wake up bright and full of energy, confident you can run 10 miles; other days you might feel sore, down in your mood, not wanting to get out of bed.

And why is it important to become more aware of these up and down changes? Because then we can start making that connection between our yoga/meditation practice and our everyday lives (see my blog article on that). Developing that awareness of how we feel right now can help a great deal in our relationships, and knowing how best to manage our lives, what we eat, etc.

Another aspect of life that daily practice helps us to cultivate is that of acknowledging change. Every day when you come to your yoga mat or meditation cushion, you are different. Life is a flow, everything changes all the time – moment-to-moment. Just because I can't sit cross-legged today doesn't mean it'll always be like this. Just because I have a good range of movement in all my limbs now doesn't mean I'll always have this. Yes I can remember what I did yesterday, but one day I may not. Nothing remains the same. Practise every day and you'll see how obvious this is, but also how the subtle strands of our disbelief of this fact take years of practice to break down.

"Practice once a week, and you’ll get sore. Practice three times a week, and you’ll get fit. Practice every day and you will transform your life."

The Energetic Basis of Zen Yoga

This week I'd like to review a workshop I went to last weekend (12th Oct) led by our Zen master, Daizan on "The Energetic Basis of Zen Yoga". The workshop was designed to look a little below the surface of our Zen yoga and meditation practice - to look, as it were, at the underlying operating system, what the practice is built on.

This workshop formed part of the continuing professional development (CPD) days Daizan runs for his yoga and meditation teachers.

We started off looking at the Japanese word for yoga: do-in - literally translated as guiding and pulling! Sounds strange until you think of it in terms of energy. We guide and direct our energy around the body using movements and stretches in order to unblock or work on certain channels. That really set the scene for what this day was about. (For the energy sceptics out there, see this article.)

The workshop was centred around the teachings of the first monk to bring Zen to Japan, Myōan Eisai (b. 1141). After originally studying Tendai Buddhism, he spent 4 years in China learning Zen (or Chan), before coming back to Japan and establishing the first zen temple in remote Kyūshū (the third largest island of Japan to the southwest). Among his notable disciples was Dōgen, founder of the famous Sōtō Zen school. Eisai is also credited as the first person to bring green tea into Japan from China.

It seemed Eisai was pretty successful (read politically skilled) at bringing Zen into the Japanese mainstream, and in 1202 he founded the famous Kennin-ji temple in Kyoto (still very beautiful and worth a visit today). The Shogun (military governor) at this time, Minmoto no Sanetomo, was a complete alcoholic, and Eisai took on the responsibility of trying to get him to sober up an live a more healthy life. Eisai thought that he could get him to drink tea instead of alcohol... Jolly good plan I say ;-)

Drink Tea and Prolong Life

In the process of trying to convince the shogun it's not all about going out on continuous benders, and that being an alcoholic is actually very bad for the body, he wrote in 1211 a book called the Kissayojoki - literally translated as "Drink Tea and Prolong Life". In it he says "tea is the most wonderful medicine for nourishing one’s health; it is the secret of long life." More on that later.

As you might imagine, it actually contained more than just a plea to drink tea. It was a manual for healthy living, in fact describing very much what we would call Zen yoga. The Kissayojoki is part of the tradition of Yangsheng (Chinese) or Yojo (Japanese) referring to a broad array of practices aimed at nourishing and prolonging life through breathing exercises, dietetics (especially abstention from grains), sexual practices, meditation and visualization exercises, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and methods of "guiding and pulling" (Japanese: Do-in, Chinese: Dao yin). Why you'd want to prolong your life will be the subject of a future article.

One of the central ideas that's been around in traditional Chinese medicine for at least 4000 years is that of the energy meridians. These are energy pathways through the body that make up a circuit or web that delivers our life force, (Chinese: qi, Jap.: ki) to the organs and tissues of the body. There are 12 major meridian channels, each correlating to the organs in the body in a reciprocal relationship. For example a healthy liver allows energy to flow easily along the liver meridian, and unblocking the liver meridian can help the liver function better. The idea is that when meridians are blocked, or the flow is too great or too little, problems result.

Qi/ki is stored in three main centres in the body, known as Tan Tien (or Dan Tian; Chinese) or Tanden (Japanese) literally translated as 'field of elixir'. They are the East Asian equivalent to the Indian Chakras. The main tanden is in your belly, known in Japanese as your hara.

Japanese monks have been involved in accupuncture at least from 1227, which implies a good understanding of the energy meridians (Japanese: myaku). In the Kissayojoki, Eisai goes into some detail about the meridians and their relationship with the organs (see picture).

So why tea?

In the meridian system, each organ and organ meridian is associated with a different quality - season, colour, taste, element, direction, emotion. Here are the organ associations for the 5 tastes:

Heart – Bitter
Liver – Sour
Spleen – Sweet
Lung – Spicy
Kidney – Salty

The heart is seen as being the chief among the organs, but the problem was that at that time (and probably still nowadays) very few bitter foods were eaten - particularly by this drunken shogun. Nowadays those that are bitter, we tend to liberally sweeten.

So, as a way of balancing our diet and restoring health to our chief organ, the heart, Eisai suggested drinking tea. If you've ever had green tea, you'll know how bitter it is! These days other bitter foods include coffee, beer (bitter), cocoa/dark chocolate, olives, and citrus peel.

Prolonging life further

Of course, balancing the diet and promoting the health of our inner community of organs is just the start. We can't do anything if our physical body is out of whack, undernourished, weak, unbalanced. Once we've got that under control though, we can start working on boosting our health and wellbeing higher and higher - and this is how we really prolong our lives.

With this in mind, the physical yoga practice during the workshop focussed on stretching and opening up all our main meridians. Not only is it important to open/unblock these channels, but it's also important to get the energy flowing down them, and for that we did some practices using the sound 'mu'.

Mindfulness and meditation are also an essential part of this unblocking process. If you're interested I run regular courses in mindfulness in Camberwell, London.

What's in a front door? [a poem]

Delivering flyers. Delivering potential. Delivering junk to be recycled!
Lots of front doors, front gardens, front steps.
21A is up and 21B is down.
Letter boxes: flappy, tight, snappy, shite... vertical?
Behind their shiny exteriors, stiff draft excluders - not just drafts they keep out.
Lift the old chipped ones though and the opening is clear,
the leaflet glides with a cheer.

What's behind the door?
A pile of other unwanted junk mail?
An interested householder?
A single mum with no time to sleep, let alone yoga?
A hungry dog?
A keen yoga bean?
Only builders?

Frustrating letter boxes.
Getting hot from all the stair climbing;
Come on you, stop whining!
This is part of my job now;
I'm a yoga teacher, web designer, leaflet dropper.
Leaning down to open the flap, like a bow.
Finding grace. Finding flow. The true nature of the universe.

250 down, more hundreds to go.
They say one hour of advertising for every hour of class.
Potential... who knows.
But I will see you again, street of many houses.
Street of potential. Connections, meetings.
Street full of real life. Suffering, laughing, living.

Yoga offers ways to heal.
Are you ready? Come join me.

Bridging the space between formal practice and everyday life

What situations do you find hardest to stay mindful, to keep the ego from rearing up, to remain true to yourself, to stay in the flow?

I'd guess it would be a situation involving a group of people. Maybe your family, maybe work colleagues, housemates... The closer they are, the better they know how to press your buttons!

So maybe we can do yoga or sit in meditation and observe our tendencies to judge ourselves, perhaps as someone who's easily distracted, or someone who always wants to make things ok, or worries about what others think of us doing yoga or meditation. Maybe we can even start letting go these "I am" identifications: "I am a person with tight hips", "I always get angry when I can't do something", etc. But how does this help at a family dinner when your adversarial uncle starts drawing you into a conversation on the rights and wrongs of intervening in Syria? It's not much use to pull out your best warrior II pose on him... (might make him shut up for 5 mins though!)

It's not easy to bring what you learn on the mat or on the cushion into everyday life. But isn't that why we call it a practice? We're practising for everyday life. And what use is a practice where you can achieve beautiful flowing, non-dual, ego-less, oneness for 30 mins a day but still bite your colleagues head off in your morning meeting?

That's why it's helpful to build a bridge into our practice. A bridge between formal on-the-mat/cushion time and normal life. We create time to do a reasonably unchallenging activity 100% mindfully, bringing our practice to bear on something that isn't on the mat/cushion.

For this reason, in Zen we practice working meditation, or Samu in Japanese. It's emphasised to such a degree that it's actually one of the four principal components of Zen practice (along with sitting meditation, private meetings with your teacher, and talks).

Working meditation includes the practice of mindfulness, giving or generosity, duty, and selfless service. In Zen monasteries every monk (or retreat participant) has a duty to do work for the maintenance and upkeep of the building and grounds, or help with the cooking, shopping, accounts, etc. But it's more than a duty - the task is performed with the same mind as sitting meditation. Doing the activity 100%, becoming the activity. An opportunity to put what you've learned on the mat/cushion into practice.

Me doing samu on retreat in Japan (weeding the gravel)

For inexperienced practitioners (like myself), the working meditation activity should be super-simple: something like cleaning, gardening, or chopping wood/vegetables. The repetitive simplicity of these kind of activities needs very little thinking power, leaving plenty of energy to devote to being 100% mindful. A favourite
in Japan is weeding the gravel in the monastery garden (see photo).

Can you see the true nature of the universe in every weed you pick? In every stone or piece of earth you move? Can you disappear into the flow of the cleaning cloth sliding over the kitchen floor?

Gradually as our practice develops and we're able to stay with it more and more doing simple tasks, we can introduce some harder things. Cooking, for example, requires much more cognitive input, but can you stay 100% mindful when the saucepan is boiling over but the recipe says "gently simmer"?

I remember my teacher Daizan saying that the monastery accountant is always one of the most senior monks because it takes a very developed practice to stay 100% with it when you're doing the books!

So you can see that letting go of our frustrations, our right/wrong judgements, our need to win the argument, remaining empathetic, compassionate, loving, and not letting the ego direct our actions is hard enough when we're just hoovering the living room. Doing all that whilst your uncle is banging on about how important it is for our economy to maintain a military presence around the world, including Syria, is advanced practice!

Start small, and build up. If we're patient, diligent, and compassionate, one day we might find ourselves flowing through every situation with ease, being 100% our true nature without a speck of self.