77 Leg

In the spring of 2001 a colleague at work gave me a copy of Flat Land, the quarterly newsletter of the Iowa Zen Center. Its lead article was "Finding a Teacher." From the newsletter I learned that the Reverend Kudo Fulaney, Heartmind Temple Abbot and Zen Master and author of "Finding a Teacher," had been the resident priest at the IZC since 1991.

I'd had no idea.

The last I had heard the local Zen center was no more than a place to drop in, sit, and discuss matters of the psyche, mind, and spirit. That I did every day in class so I had never investigated the local center. Now I learned that the master—my colleague said that he preferred to be addressed simply as Kudo—periodically offered to beginners classes in sitting and walking meditation.

I made up my mind to enroll at the earliest opportunity. If sitting meant so much to both Billy and John, then I, too, was going to sit. Perhaps it would ease the anxiety I had begun to experience as a result of my inquiry into the relationship between teacher and student. But I did not want to look like a dimwit when I did attend. After all, for twenty-five years I thought I had been practicing Zen—Stephen Gaskin's brand of it at least. Before I enrolled in the course offered at Heartmind, I practiced for three months and never missed a day.

I began in June of 2001.

I found a space on my bedroom floor, laid down a thick throw rug, rolled up a big pillow, and secured it with two lengths of twine to make a cushion. I reread Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and I got started. I felt competitive at first even though knew how wrong that was. But I felt so far behind! If I'd had any kind of instruction in getting started on the 100000 prostrations required by Tibetan ngöndro, I would have definitely begun them, too.

I experimented with my posture.

In 1975 I had been young enough, slender enough, and athletic enough that I could sit for several minutes in the full lotus posture and perhaps I could have sat that way even for an hour—I never found out because I never tried. Now I was too old, too stiff, and too fat. The half lotus posture, though, I could easily assume. John had informed me that he sat forty minutes every morning—although later he admitted he was not nearly so regular—and I wanted to sit at least as much as John and more if I could. I bought a small electronic egg timer at Walgreens, crawled onto my homemade cushion, pulled my left heel into my crotch, lifted my right foot onto my left thigh in the half lotus, and set my timer for fifty minutes. I laid my hands in my lap and closed my eyes—I learned later from Billy and from John to leave them open—and I sat and followed my breath in and out. It was not so different really from what I had done on my back every night for nine years in the late seventies and early eighties.

No problem.

For two weeks I sat for fifty minutes every day. That summer, like this one, I was not teaching at the college and my days were free so I had no fixed time to sit and I did so each day whenever the opportunity arose. Usually I sat in the middle of the morning at ten or so or at two or three in the afternoon. I had read a lot of books from many different traditions on the subject so I was full of contradictory ideas about sitting and meditation. Indeed, of the many different thoughts that arose in my mind, stayed, reproduced, faded, and disappeared during those three months of practice, the majority by far were about meditation.

Where did my tongue belong? Did it matter if I sat with my hands and fingers in different mudras? My breathing was deep and quite audible—almost like smoking. Did that matter? It was very difficult for me, nearly impossible, to feel my breath at my nostrils as Trungpa suggested. Was it okay, I wondered, if I followed my breath in the movement of my abdomen instead?

Billy had once mentioned just in passing that he was sitting for meditation periods of four hours and at that time I did not know enough about the subject to ask the questions that might have let him clarify what he meant by that. I simply assumed that he sat in lotus or half lotus posture motionless on his cushion continuously for a full four hours so I upped my own sitting to an hour. At an hour I was on the verge of pain in my ankles, knees, hips, back, and neck but it wasn't bad and some of the books I had read said that with practice the pain passed or that one got used to it or—and this was what I hoped for of course—that when the pain was recognized as mind one might transcend it.

I got used to it.

But might I injure myself?

One of the books I read said no, absolutely not. I believed the authors who agreed with what I had already decided I wanted to do and I disbelieved and ignored the authors who opposed my desires and intentions. "Every religion and philosophy," John told me when we were both college sophomores, "is a rationalization of one's own needs and desires."

With my right leg down and my left leg up I could sit only an hour before the pain in my left knee became too sharp to bear and I worried, but in the opposite posture—left leg down and right leg up—I could sit for ninety minutes without serious discomfort so I just always sat that way and not the other. This, too, was a mistake the master later corrected, but at the time I felt I was doing fine and, though I had learned enough from my instruction books not to expect progress exactly, I did feel I was making progress.

Later from the master I learned also that both of my knees should have been touching my mat or rug and that I should have been sitting and resting on three points, my two knees and my butt. But when I first began on my own I did not know this. My right knee, my top leg, was always elevated above the rug a good inch or more and I was in fact sitting basically right on top of my left leg. I didn't notice and it did not seem to matter.

Neither leg even fell asleep.

Twice in the last week of August I sat without moving for a full two hours. It hurt like hell for the last twenty minutes or so but by then I was relying on anything I could think of—even on slogans I remembered from my high school football coaches—to motivate myself and to continue.

Sissy—

No pain no gain.

At two hours, however, my boredom became just as great a problem as my pain—I waited and waited and waited and waited for the time to pass and for my timer to beep—so from the end of August until my first evening class with the master I sat each day for a period of only ninety minutes.

Hey—

This I could do.