Zen pilgrimage walk: Meditation on pain

I recently got back from a 4-week pilgrimage walk through the country, which I did as a Zen monk – carrying no money, just living from my alms bowl. In last week's article I talked about why I would even do such a thing. This week I'd like to talk a little about one of the most intense aspects of the walk - the pain in my feet.

Before I get onto that though, I should say a few words about the route I took and my unusual footwear.

The route

My meandering path was defined by the people I wanted to visit along the way: there was the Dorset contingent of our sangha based in Bournemouth, my partner's mum who lives in Salisbury, some other sangha members in Whitchurch near Andover and in Oxford, the Amara Vati monastery near Hemel Hempstead, the Nipponzan Myohoji temple at the peace pagoda in Milton Keynes, another sangha member in Northampton, the Tariki Trust house in Leicester, and some another sangha members in Nottingham, Sheffield, and Hebden Bridge.

The total distance was about 380 miles (see the full map here).

Footwear

The traditional footwear for a Zen monk on the road would have been a pair of white socks with a separated big toe, called tabi, worn together with a pair of straw sandals, called waraji, which are held on with laces around your ankle and lower-leg. In more modern times, a rubber sole has been added to the tabi socks to make them more robust and more like canvas boots (called jika-tabi). The sole is very thin and flexible (similar to bare-foot running shoes), so the waraji add a nice layer of padding underneath.

Under normal circumstances, the waraji wear out after about 3 days of walking, so I knew I was going to need a good stock of them for the whole journey. I got 10 pairs kindly brought over from Japan.

But while I was on our Zen sesshin retreat, a friend gave me a big rubber sheet, together with some glue and a needle and thread, and showed me how to sew a rubber sole onto the bottom of the waraji sandals. We had enough to rubberise two pairs, which in the end was actually all I needed. The rubber bore the brunt of the tarmac abrasion and the second pair fell apart literally on the last day of my walk! Thanks so much to Gensho for showing me this technique. I now have 8 spare pairs of waraji for sale...

Since the jika-tabi are essentially the socks and fit very snugly, I wore nothing inside them. This was to the consternation of all my acquaintances who had ever done any hiking...

Developing sensations

I'd had a couple of longer practice-walks in the tabi boots and waraji before I started the pilgrimage. After each of these I carefully noted where the blisters had begun to develop. People had recommended zinc-oxide plaster tape (easily available at Boots) as a way of avoiding blisters, so on day 1 I taped up my feet in all the places I knew blisters were likely, and happily walked off into the Dorset countryside.

Little did I know that zinc-oxide tape is no match for the tabi boots... Over the first few days of walking I developed some fairly substantial blisters (under the tape), accompanied by some fairly substantial pain. In Salisbury, my partner's mum very kindly did some internet research and bought me some adhesive cotton padding to put on my feet. One of her friends also extremely kindly donated me a few packets of Compeed (blister plasters) which were very helpful.

I hadn't at all anticipated the level of pain I experienced in my feet over that first week. Every step became excruciating, often to the point of tears... The strongest sensations came when I started off again after a break (I'm going to guess here that after walking for some time, the reason I feel less sensation is that the pain gates in my nervous system began to close – see my blog article about pain gates here).

An important turning point in those first few days was when I realised that I was doing no long-term damage by continuing to walk on the blisters. Knowing that the pain wasn't carrying any serious messages, I knew that it was simply a sensation and I just had to get on with it.

[Health warning: Most of the time pain is a very important signal saying that damage to the body is occurring and something needs to be done about it! If, for example, you've got your finger in the gas flame, just allowing and accepting the sensations isn't going to do you much good.]

Wanting the pain to stop

I quickly realised that tensing up against the pain made things worse. Wanting it to go away also just made things worse. Wanting (or 'craving' in Buddhist terminology) stems from the wish for things to be different to what they are right now. And of course, in this moment, right now, how can things be different? Maybe in a future moment things will be different, but right now it's utterly futile to want things to be anything but what they are. This wanting (whether that's in the sense of pulling towards or pushing away) is what causes suffering – not accepting that things are as they are right now.

I wrote this on day 6:

"Walking is very simple - just put one foot in front of the other. After 6 days of it though, the pain is intense and the mind constantly seeks ways to escape, for relief. There is no escape though - only through softening and acceptance does the suffering end, and a constant re-realisation that there is only now."

So my walking became a practice of softening my feet, every step – softening and allowing the sensations. Not trying to make them go away or make them change in any way. In that first week, after feeling quite nauseous at the end of a few of the days, and I realised I'd also been tightening my belly against the pain. So my walking became a practice of softening my feet and my belly, every step, every breath. I found my footsteps and breath often came into sync (two steps in, three steps out), and on each out-breath I concentrated on totally relaxing my belly (or hara). This helped a lot.

Later I realised that in my softening there was still a whiff of wanting – because I wanted to make the pain feel less. Fair enough you might say – but this was still a craving for something other than the reality of that moment. It was subtle and much more difficult to let go of.

So like this – focussing on relaxing my feet and belly, and letting go as much as I could of the wish for the pain to go away – the miles fell away. There was the rhythm of the breath, and the rhythm of the walking – step after step. Not wanting anything to be any different – enjoying the sunshine on my back and the smell of the hedgerow flowers as they wafted by, and simply allowing the pain sensations to be there (whether they were strong, sharp, dull, or throbbing).

Audio diary entry from 5th August where I talk about the pain in my feet:

Night time

After some weeks of walking the blisters all but cleared up. But you know that feeling of ache you get in your feet after standing up for a long time? – that took over! And you know the feeling of relief you get when you do finally sit (or lie) down? – kind of like a feeling of expansion? – that became the dominant feeling during the night. It was like a feeling of relief that became so intense that it was painful in of itself!

But I kept on reminding myself of this famous adage which couldn't be more true:

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional" - Buddhist proverb

By the morning though, my feet always felt ready to face another day of walking. It's amazing what a night's sleep can heal.

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

Ever had a similar experience? Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear your thoughts on meditating on pain.

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The origins of modern-day secular mindfulness

Origins of mindfulness

Mindfulness as a word first entered the English lexicon as "myndfulness" in 1530 (John Palsgrave translating the French pensée), as "mindfulnesse" in 1561, and finally as "mindfulness" in 1817. The first use of the word from a Buddhist perspective was in 1921 when Thomas Rhys Davids (then Prof of Comparative Religion at Manchester University) used the word to translate the ancient Indian-Pali word "sati". Before this "sati" was translated as meaning recollection, recall, or remembrance.

Sati is an essential element of Buddhism. It appears in the Buddha's noble eightfold path as the seventh element ("correct" or "right" mindfulness), and is part of the practices of ānāpānasati, satipaṭṭhāna and vipassana. Anāpānasati means mindfulness of breathing ("ānāpāna" is a Sanskrit word relating to inhalation and exhalation). (See here for a simple Zen mindfulness of breath meditation spoken in most of the world's main languages). Satipaṭṭhāna is the practice of applying mindfulness in everyday life, maintaining as much as possible a calm awareness of our body, feelings, mind state. This practice is emphasised in Buddhist practice in order to cultivate an understanding of the constantly changing nature of all things. The word vipassanā means insight into the true nature of reality, but Vipassana as a style of meditation (emphasising the practice of ānāpānasati) was popularised in the West in the 20th Century by Burmese meditation masters Mahasi Sayadaw and S. N. Goenka.

Zen Buddhism also began to find its way into the West in the 20th Century through the writings of D.T. Suzuki and his teacher Soyen Shaku (who spoke at the now infamous 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago). Zen practice contains a strong thread of mindfulness, famously emphasised by Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Anāpānasati (or susokukan in Japanese) is also one of the first meditation practices you will be given when you start out in Zen.

"In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality."
–  Thich Nhat Hanh in "The Miracle of Mindfulness"

Sitting by lake Walden

As a reaction to the "predominantly reductionist and materialistic" culture that began to dominate the West in the 19th Century, Henry Thoreau wrote his famous book Walden – a reflection on simple living in the natural surroundings of the American north-east near Boston. Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that, in many ways, the ideas discussed by Thoreau could really be seen as a predecessor to the current interest in mindfulness.

Mindfulness moves into the clinical setting

In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme at the University of Massachusetts, heralding the first move of mindfulness into the clinical setting.

Jon Kabat-Zinn got his PhD in molecular biology in 1971 from MIT, and was first introduced to meditation by Zen teacher Philip Kapleau Roshi (author of the "Three Pillars of Zen"). He went on to study at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, founded in 1975 by Vipassana teachers Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein.

His genius was to realise that the Buddhist practice of mindfulness could be adapted and applied in the secular world to help chronically ill patients cope with stress and pain. His initial programme sparked the now enormously successful application of mindfulness ideas and practices all across the clinical (and non-clinical) world for the treatment of a variety of conditions in both healthy and unhealthy people.

His MBSR programme was inspired mainly by teachings from Buddhism. Kabat-Zinn's body scan, for example, was derived from a meditation practice called "sweeping" taught by the Burmese master U Ba Khin and his student S. N. Goenka. Incidentally, the body scan practice can also be traced back into the Zen tradition (in turn probably influenced by Taoism), where it was taught by Zen master Hakuin in the 1700s as the soft-ointment meditation (Nanso No Ho in Japanese).

Kabat-Zinn's 8-week MBSR began to get increasing notice with the publication of his first book "Full Catastrophe Living" in 1991, and his second book "Wherever You Go, There You Are" in 1994. By 2000 many MBSR clinics had opened across the US, and interest started spreading abroad.

Mindfulness in the UK

Based on the pioneering work of Philip Barnard and John Teasdale at Oxford University in the early 1990s (who were rooted in the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) tradition), Zindel Segal (University of Toronto), Mark Williams (Oxford University) and John Teasdale created the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) programme in 2002. Inspired by the structure and content of the MBSR course, the MBCT course is an 8-week therapeutic intervention designed specifically to prevent relapse in depression.

Barnard and Teasdale’s (1991) theory associates an individual’s vulnerability to depression with the degree to which he/she relies on only one of the modes of mind. According to the theory, the two main modes of mind are the “doing” mode and “being” mode, and a healthy mind is one that is able to move easily between the two as circumstances change. The being mode is not focused on achieving specific goals, but is more concerned with accepting and allowing what is happening in the moment without any feeling of wanting to change it. The idea is that by emphasising the "being mode" MBCT brings about lasting positive emotional change, and is therefore ideally suited for the treatment of depression.

The MBCT course has been highly successful and in 2004 it was recommended by the National Institute for Clinical and Health Excellence (NICE) as "an effective treatment for people who suffer from recurrent episodes of depression". As a result it is now available on the NHS. However, the uptake of MBCT in the UK health service has been quite variable.

Despite its original purpose, MBCT has now been scientifically proven to help people not only with depression, but also with a whole range of mental health problems such as anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, and insomnia.

And it has spurned a whole host of exciting related programmes – like the Mindfulness in Schools Project, which offers a 9-week course in mindfulness for secondary-school children.

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

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The Buddha on Breathing

Meditating with or on the breath has a very distinguished history! Working with the breath to develop concentration, awareness, and insight dates back to well before the Buddha, into the earliest practices of the sages, mystics, and yogis of the Indian sub-continent.

The Buddha found meditating on the breath incredibly powerful, so placed a very strong emphasis on it in his teaching. On Saturday I went to a mindfulness teachers workshop at the ZenYoga studio on the subject of what the Buddha taught about breathing, run by my Zen teacher Daizan Skinner. 

When he was just 7 years old, sat under a tree while his father (the King of the local province) was presiding over the annual ploughing ceremony, the little Gautama Buddha entered into a spontaneous state of meditation. Tradition says he entered this first state of meditation by means of the breath.

The boy Gautama at 7yrs old sitting under a tree in spontaneous meditation

Later, this experience proved crucial to his spiritual quest towards full liberation from the suffering caused by life. He remembers "I thought of a time when my father was working and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree: quite secluded from sensual desires, secluded from unwholesome things I had entered upon and abode in the first meditation."

Interestingly, the Buddha was very much against any practices that held or prolonged the breath – as is found in traditional Hatha Yoga (and was probably widely practised at the time of the Buddha) – he advocated relaxed, natural breathing. Through experience he found that "stopping the in-breaths and out-breaths in [his] mouth and nose... [creates] a loud sound of winds (energy) coming from my ear holes... violent winds in [his] head... and belly." He found "each time, though tireless energy was aroused in me and unremitting mindfulness established [his] body was over-wrought and uncalm because [he] was exhausted by the painful effort."

The sutras claim that "the Buddha himself declared that he realised perfect Self-Awakening through the practice of anapanasati (breath meditation)" and that "concentration by mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, leads to a pleasant dwelling in this very life and to mindfulness and clear comprehension." He even taught his son, Rahula, "if mindfulness of breath is cultivated with continuous practice, then there is a vast harvest, there is great richness."

After lunch we spent some time meditating on the breath, then looking at the development of breath meditation from the earliest Buddhist accounts, through the different schools that have arisen since, into China and Japan and Zen.

One of the key early Buddhist sutras dealing with the breath is the 'Satipatanna Sutra'. "Sati" has come to be translated as "mindfulness", so this is the 'Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness'. In it, the Buddha explains that the most direct, immediate (or in some translations, the only) way to reach enlightenment is through the four foundations of mindfulness.

These are "contemplating the body in the body", "contemplating the feelings in the feelings", "contemplating consciousness in consciousness", and "contemplating mental objects (i.e. thoughts, ideas, concepts) in mental objects."

He goes on to say "And how does a Bhikkhu [a monk] live contemplating the body in the body? ... [He] goes to an empty place, sits down, crosses his legs, straightens his body, and arouses mindfulness of the breath... Mindful, he breaths in, and mindful, he breaths out." Like this we can contemplate the body in the body via mindfulness of the breath.

Then he says "Let alone seven years, let alone half a month, if anyone would develop these four foundations of mindfulness... for seven days, one of two fruits can be expected for him: either liberating knowledge right here and now, or... non-return (i.e. nirvana)."

Wow, just seven days...!

So it's clear the Buddha held mindfulness of the breath in very high esteem! He says it really is the most direct way to fully wake up and realise the truth.

In the last part of the workshop, we each took on a question relating to what we'd learnt and came up with a little presentation on it. My question was: "How dows this practice relate to the four noble truths?"


The four noble truths were one of the first things the Buddha taught after his great enlightenment, and basically sum up the whole of Buddhist teaching. The four noble truths are:

1. Suffering exists as an inherent part of life
2. Suffering arises due to wanting things we don't have (craving, greed), not wanting things we do have (aversion, hate), and confusion or delusion as to the way things are now.
3. There is a way to end this suffering for good (liberation, enlightenment)
4. And that way is called the 8-fold path, and includes things like right livelihood, right speech, right mindfulness, etc.

By becoming aware of our breath, we automatically bring our attention to the present moment (we can't be breathing in the past or future!). With our attention on how things are right now, breathing and noticing the body in the body, we allow any thoughts, feelings or memories that arise to simply come and go. This presence and non-judgmental acceptance gives rise to an increasing sense of calm and clear understanding. With this clear, relaxed and open mind we begin to see where we are holding on to things (events, feelings, concepts, material objects), rejecting things, wanting things to be different, or being confused. Mindfulness of the breath is the vehicle we use to travel along the road towards the end of suffering.

If you'd like to explore the practice of mindfulness a little more, I run drop-in classes and 8-week courses at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See here for more info.