11 Jun Like a long-held breath

When I turn on my laptop and activate Zoom, I’m immediately in a different Zen dojo, with other practitioners, all in kinhin, as the walking meditation is called. It’s as if I’m stepping into silence. Then the woman from the other dojo bows to me through the screen, and I bow back. I turn on my microphone, and she turns hers off. From now on, the silence is broadcast from our dojo. There’s no ceremony, no teachings, just sitting in silence. We listen intently to the silence.

Tukdam
Coincidentally or not, during one of my weekend workshops a few weeks ago, someone had mentioned Tukdam to other participants. I just caught a glimpse of the conversation, just enough to absorb that intriguing word I hadn’t heard before: Tukdam.

My wife is out to dinner with friends, and I’m looking up Tukdam, a documentary on the NPO. It, too, takes your breath away, right from the start. With dark sounds in the background, monks appear on screen, in meditation poses. They sit motionless. The fourth monk looks straight into the camera. He looks a bit like Master Yoda, or Master Yoda looks a bit like him. His upper body is half naked. He has a yellow cloth draped loosely over his other shoulder and body. His left eye is wide open, staring at you. He looks friendly, like a friendly old man. He’s in Tukdam. Just like the other three monks. 

The Subtle Mind
Tibetans say: he’s not dead yet, he’s in a dying phase. Clinically, the monks are dead: the heart has stopped, there’s no lung movement, and no brain activity. But it doesn’t look that way. It looks as if he’s holding still; there’s no movement, no activity, no thought, and yet he’s present.

The monks explain it to the scientists with their measuring equipment. There’s a coarse mind and a fine, subtle mind. The coarse mind has departed, but the fine mind remains. To the scientists’ amazement, the Tibetans can feel warmth around the heart of the person in Tukdam. The skin also still looks good and hasn’t lost its color.

The subtle mind. What could that be? Science stands there empty-handed, because you can’t measure or observe the subtle mind. And yet you see it, right before your eyes. The subtle mind is silent and still. It no longer reacts, but it still exists. You can feel it. It’s like a very long, held breath, in the sense of intensely and uninterruptedly listening to the silence.

We’re doing the same thing in our dojo, with our 49 days of meditation somewhere. We’re all in a breathless pause. We’re simultaneously with and without our teacher. We’re in Tukdam.

Zen in Daily Life
The workshop “Stress-free Working with Time Surfing” could also be called “Zen in Daily Life.” The result of this workshop is that you become present in what you do, with an open and free mind. You pay attention naturally without completely closing yourself off from everything else. Everything you plan to do in the future doesn’t swirl around in your head but rests calmly in your gut. There’s an alert radar within you that gauges what’s best for this moment. From moment to moment, you intuitively choose the right action, the most appropriate action. It doesn’t matter whether the action itself is grand or insignificant; you experience both equally fully. And each time, you briefly return to the zero point, from which you experience an overview. Sometimes you pause a little longer because your eye has fallen on one of the many pearls that lie all around us, waiting to be discovered.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch