A bell rings three times and participants sit, marking the beginning of zazen.
Every Wednesday, a handful of Zen students gather on the bottom level of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington to practice sitting meditation, or zazen, under the guidance of Frank Diaz, assistant teacher of the new Open Mind Zen Bloomington.
From 6 to 7:30 p.m., the meetings involve 45 minutes of sitting meditation interspersed with 10 to 15 minutes of kinhin, or walking meditation. After meditating, Diaz leads participants in a discussion over meditation, which he said encompasses a process rather than an effort to reach a fixed state.
“It’s not a goal-oriented process,” Diaz said. “Basically in zen, when you take a seat you allow yourself to just sit and be. You give yourself permission to let everything in. At first, you are hanging onto the surface of your mind, but then you start to see deeper things.”
Al Rapaport, director and founder of Open Mind Zen Meditation Center, said meditation is the process of becoming more open in awareness.
“Over time as you allow yourself to be open, there’s change,” he said. “You become mindful and eventually it carries over to your everyday disposition, which changes the way you interact with the world.”
Diaz said this change is due to the understanding of interconnectedness that is discovered during meditation and leads to the realization of the world’s impermanence.
“You don’t feel like you’re as fixed as a human being,” Diaz said. “You get the sense that you are more embedded in the world, so it heightens your feeling of interconnectivity, which changes the way you start seeing events and people. You realize everything is impermanent. All good things come to an end, but all bad things come to an end. Things happen, and they dissipate. People live, and people die. Worlds come to be, and they dissipate.”
This idea of interconnectedness also leads to new wisdom and compassion, Diaz said.
“Wisdom doesn’t come through studying or books,” he said. “It comes through experience and how your mind changes during meditation. I think compassion also arises from that. If everything is interconnected, you come to the conclusion that you don’t want to hurt anybody, and you try not to do harm.”
Rapaport also said the effect of meditation is dependent on the individual because people approach meditation for different reasons. However, meditation typically forms better listeners and reduces suffering.
“There’s no way to avoid pain in life, but how much we suffer depends on how we perceive that pain,” Rapaport said. “One thing you discover through meditation is how much of our suffering we create ourselves. Similarly, you learn to be less reactive so that you do not create needless suffering.”
While these effects are often universal, not all zen communities operate in the same way. One way Open Mind Zen works differently from other, namely monastic, communities, is in its relationship with religion. Diaz said he tries to teach Zen in a more secularized setting while including its ethical aspects. Zen, Diaz said, may have been a development of Buddhism, but it does not necessarily appeal to metaphysical concepts.
“To be mindful is a human capacity, not a religious capacity,” Diaz said. “So don’t be worried if it may be incompatible with your religion. The reality is that zen is a practice and while the religious lens you bring to it definitely changes what you get out of it, you can meditate regardless of religion.”
In addition to breaking down religious barriers, Open Mind Zen also works to reduce the barriers that ritualization may create. Traditional zen communities, Diaz said, involve intricate etiquette that dictates how robes are worn, how to enter temples, how to sit and bow and even how to use the bathroom. Open Mind Zen, in contrast, limits this etiquette to the basics.
“I know when I first started meditating, I was a little intimidated by all the rituals, so I became over-fixated on that rather than the practice itself,” Diaz said. “Also, I want to create a really non-judgmental space for people to just come and meditate, rather than worry about the rituals.”
Rapaport said even with the reduction of rituals, Zen still requires great discipline and perseverance.
“It’s hard to sit quietly without moving and to become more aware of yourself,” Rapaport said. “It takes practice. You have to devote time to it and have patience because it doesn’t always go the way you want.”
However, Diaz said this should not prevent people from getting involved.
“Try it — don’t just read about it,” Diaz said. “We’re used to the idea that if we read about something and conceptualize it, we understand, but you cannot come to any understanding about Zen without actually practicing.”
