11 Jun Football emotions

I’m texting with Zen master Soko. We’ve known each other for a long time and I just call him Pierre. Pierre is going to lead a city retreat at our meditation center this coming weekend. Since I’m the cook for this retreat, I ask Pierre if he wants a meal in the dojo after the last meditation session on Saturday evening. ‘But Paul,’ he texts me, ‘then the Netherlands play Sweden at 7 PM.’ For a moment, nothing happens. Then follows: ‘Where is your concentration?’ I laugh. I really didn’t know the Dutch national team’s match schedule by heart. But Pierre did! A little later my phone starts writing again: ‘It’s impossible not to watch the match,’ Pierre writes, ‘I trust you to organize something!’ I laugh again.

I remember from Zen master Kosen, who recently passed away, all the soccer games we watched side by side. If an important match fell right in the middle of a sesshin, the meditation times would get shifted a bit.
I think to myself: you can’t explain that to other religious directions, not even to other Buddhist schools, and not even to other Zen traditions. I mean, you don’t really let something as earthly as soccer take priority over meditation, do you?

Holding Your Heart  
Well, we do! Between us, that’s what I love about our approach. There’s nothing wrong with diving fully into illusions in the way we practice, as you would call it in Zen terms.
It comes back in the workshops I give. In the workshops about emotions (The Inner Metamorphosis, in Dutch), I start by asking the following question: ‘We humans love to play with emotions. Can you come up with examples of this phenomenon?’ The answers turn out to cover a wide range of activities, like theater and film, making and listening to music, bungee jumping, and yes, also watching football. It’s so much fun to feel that tension, to express outrage at a failed tackle by the opponents, to hold your heart during a beautiful attack, and to go wild when a goal is scored.

Meditation is letting go of everything, or more precisely: letting everything pass without identifying with it. Apparently, that can go well with letting yourself go completely in the game and then fully surrendering to the meditation posture afterwards.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch