Traveling Nowhere

The ‘transformation of view’, which represents a long-term goal of MBSR training, is a process of replacing various unexamined preconceptions and misperceptions with more accurate or functional understandings of reality and oneself. As Kabat-Zinn describes it: ‘We can say the goal would be to see things as they actually are, not how we would like them to be or fear them to be, or only what we are socially conditioned to see or feel’   Ville Husgafvel  

Melissa and I will be leading a retreat in Belgium beginning this afternoon. Over the past ten years, we have often been invited to lead many retreats in Europe – from Italy to Denmark and Finland and from Wales and Ireland to Austria. We have loved the opportunity to see beautiful places and to meet people who want to learn and practice the Dharma.

All of these retreats have been organized by Universities and organizations that are training people to become Mindfulness teachers. We have led retreats and workshops for the faculty and students of these centers as well as for people who have taken mindfulness classes and are interested in more. Almost all the organizers themselves are former students of Melissa’s when she was one of the lead trainers for Jon Kabat-Zinn and the UMass Center for Mindfulness for twenty years. When she retired from those positions ten years ago to teach Zen full-time, the individual invitations to teach began coming in.

The relationship between Buddhism and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is often debated. One of the brilliant things Jon Kabat-Zinn did when he created MBSR in the late 80’s was to make the insights of Buddhist teaching available to people with no interest or openness to Buddhism or religion. Jon himself trained for a short period of time with the Korean Zen Master Seungsahn (who was also my teacher’s teacher) but centered his MBSR classes at UMass Medical Center where he was on the faculty.

Jon began in the basement of the building, working with a few patients dealing with chronic pain, the ones that the doctors had no more solutions for. After being featured on Bill Moyer’s special on the mind and the body, and the success of his book Full Catastrophe Living in the early nineties, his idea gained popularity and has now spread around the world. This is a wonderful thing that has changed the lives of many individuals who never would have stepped foot in a Zen Temple or even tried Buddhist meditation.

But anything that becomes successful is in danger of failing itself. The original mission gets watered down and people forget the deepest teachings in favor surface outcomes. In MBSR, the struggle has been to affirm that people’s physical health does often improve with these practices, but that this change is a byproduct of the transformation of view mentioned above by Villa Husgafvel, an MBSR teacher and researcher.

Zen Buddhism is not nearly as popular as mindfulness, though the roots, and I would even say the essence of mindfulness and MBSR are grounded in the insights and practices of Zen. Transformation of view is another way of talking about what we call in Zen awakening—seeing through our human delusions (various unexamined preconceptions and misperceptions) to the ground of reality (a more accurate or functional understandings of reality and oneself).

This waking up is the freedom and liberation we all seek. Free to be who we already are. Free to appreciate our lives in all their dimensions without being stuck by the incessant demands of our social conditioning and our small sense of self. It does lead to increased well-being on many dimensions, but ultimately it is freedom from being trapped in our parochial notions of how things should be so that we can fully participate in how things actually are.

This year, thanks to the world pandemic, we won’t be traveling anywhere. But we begin teaching a retreat in Belgium via Zoom this afternoon. Some students will be there in person and some will be joining from other points of the world via Zoom like us. It won’t be the same as being nestled in a small village outside of Brussells amidst the fertile rolling hills of Belgium. And I don’t suppose there will be wild poppies lining the narrow road, nor will I be exchanging lilting ‘Bonjour’ with anyone on my bike ride this afternoon either.

But we are happy to be leading and teaching and learning as best we are able—practicing what we preach by appreciating whatever conditions we encounter as the fullness of life itself.