Cultivating Wisdom in the Bones
You believe that everyday life is abundant with opportunities to create meaningful rituals that offer us grounding and healing, could you elaborate?
I believe that rituals work through the senses to cultivate wisdom in the bones. They are an embodied experience and way of making meaning. Almost any daily activity can be infused with greater meaning, awareness, and intent. Thus becoming an everyday ritual that grounds and supports us as we move through our lives.
Holding rituals in this way shows the deeper potential and inherent value of existing rituals, as well as giving us the freedom to create our own rituals or ritualized activities that are already a part of our lives. The way we start our day and get out of bed, the way we prepare and drink a cup of tea or coffee, the way we start and enjoy a meal, or how we put our hands together and light a stick of incense in front of an image of someone we love.
You can know a lot of things, but knowledge alone does not often change your behavior.
It’s the experience of something that can be transformative and healing.
Bringing Zen Home
As a scholar and professor of Buddhist studies, I feel there is often a Western bias that focuses on texts and scriptures and understanding things with our mind. Often treating body and mind as completely independent and separate entities.
But my work and research have focused on what people do in their homes and the experience of body-mind as an inseparable whole. It’s a more rich, complicated, and messy version of the Buddhist tradition.
Though many of us think of zen meditation as the main practice of Zen, it’s actually rituals that are at the center of the ordinary Japanese experience of Zen. Zen Buddhist rituals offer ways to address emotional and psychological needs of people as they respond to the inevitable challenges of human existence – love, loss, birth and death, and the longing to belong.
I believe these rituals are behaviors where body and mind work together; it’s what you imbue the action with. It’s about your intention and how you feel at that moment in time.
The present moment is the only place you can heal, transform, or do anything. Having your senses attuned to sensory stimulation, sight, sound, touch, taste, is where you are interacting with all of reality. Ritualizing activities awakens all the senses in the service of experiencing presence, wholeness, and healing.
The Power of Ritual
What is a moment in your own life where you experienced the power of ritual to transform and heal us?
I was teaching at Vanderbilt, so I lived in Nashville. As I was about to finish my first book, my son was born prematurely. I was alone and had to submit the manuscript to the publisher.
My elderly mother, who is Japanese, came to help me.
I remember it was Tanabata, July 7th, the Japanese Star Festival. She had been preparing all the different origami and decorative ornaments when she suddenly felt ill. We went to the hospital, and half a year later she passed.
During this time I cared for her and my infant son. To see the beginning and end of life simultaneously was very clarifying. There was no confusion or doubt. It was obvious that I had to prioritize what truly mattered. You just take care of the immediate needs of these two beings that are vulnerable.
On the morning that she died, it was clear that it was going to happen. But still, there was nothing that could have prepared me for being right there on the threshold of life and death. And all the theory I’d studied about ritual was lost to me at that moment. But I called my Zen teacher, a nun in Nagoya. She told me to set up the altar around the bed, remove the liquid morphine, replace it with flowers, and light incense.
And I did. I performed this one simple act, to light incense at the moment when I felt so alone and as if I would tumble into despair. I realized the incalculable number of people who had lost loved ones and had done this in the past, and that will do this in the future. Suddenly, it was as if I became intimately connected with all these people. And I was no longer alone.
And my mom was with all of them, too.
Only later when I had a moment to breathe, I realized, oh my God, so many people in human history have figured out how to do things like this: to make sure you’re not left at a loss. You get embraced by a deeper world of connection that maybe isn’t as visible or palpable when you’re just trying to get through the day and figure out what’s for dinner.
That was when I knew I had to learn more about this world.
A Foundation of Trust
Your research approach was very unique and deep.
Could you share more about your experience amongst Japanese lay female Zen practitioners?
I had moved to Japan and met 12 women who took me under their wing and showed me how they get through life and its challenges. These women were the core of my research which lasted over 14 years. With healing you have to have deep relationships of trust for people to share the things that are below the surface. And to talk about healing means that you go to the places that were the most painful.
So it took time to build the foundation of trust that would facilitate authentic sharing. And unlike what was common in ethnographic methodology, I decided I would share my own stories, my own pain, to create real relationships with these women.
I kept a research journal as well as my notes and recordings of what happened. And it was like clockwork. My son is sick and the interviews involve things you can do with sick children. What I was going through personally totally affected the content of our interactions because they were very sensitive and responsive and cared. This is how I learned about their experiences. It was in the togetherness that the most valuable insights and experiences emerged.
The 10 Principles of Healing
From learning from these women over such a long period, as well as your own deep exploration of Buddhism, you distilled 10 essential principles or activities that you share with people through your books and teaching.
Would you be willing to share them with us and elaborate on one or two of them?
From my research and pilgrimage, I discovered 10 healing activities that anyone can do – even when you are busy or feeling stressed. They are:
- Experience interrelatedness
- Live body-mind-heart
- Orchestrate rituals
- Enjoy life
- Nurture self
- Create beauty
- Express gratitude
- Accept reality as it is
- Expand your perspective
- Embody compassion
Experiencing Interrelatedness
Let’s start with the first two combined; experiencing interrelatedness & living body-mind-heart. As I shared earlier, though cognitive knowledge can open up your world, it’s the experience of something that can be transformative. It involves more than thinking deeply and thoroughly analyzing. It requires you to engage with it with your full body, mind, and emotions.
Take the example of the story of lighting the incense for my mother when she just passed. I’d known about ritual theory and how it helps us feel like we belong. But I never felt connected to these people. I didn’t know it experientially in the most profound and intimate way.
I had no idea that just repeating a behavior that’s been repeated for a few thousand years, would change how I experience myself, the world. That it would change how I understood questions like, What is death? What is life?
So that’s an example of how I experienced interrelatedness through just this one simple ritualized gesture, where all my studying did not. Experiencing body-mind and heart then becomes part and parcel of how you experience interrelatedness.
In rationalism and the Western worldview there is this neat separation of body and mind, Like in Descartes famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ There’s not only a separation but even a privileging of the mind, as if the body is lesser or a distraction.
That’s not been an assumption in Asian civilizations, including in the Buddhist tradition. It assumes that you’re all connected and that we’re all connected. From that orientation any activity then becomes a way to engage the body-mind-heart as one.
The orienting principle of the Buddhist and Zen worldview is that everything is connected. You are an interconnected body-mind-heart and you are also interrelated with all of existence past, present, and future.
Accepting Reality As It Is
Another healing principle or activity is accepting reality as it is.
In non-Japanese Buddhist contexts, as well as in many other religious streams, the senses are often characterized as that which facilitates delusion and greed. Like your eyes see something shiny and you want it, or contrarily some smell you don’t like, you want to get away from it. They are seen as the sources of attachment and resistance. Or sin in a more Christian paradigm.
But Japanese Buddhism, especially Zen, approaches the senses as something to refine, seeing them instead as doorways to attune to reality as it is. It actually invites us to be more in tune with the senses; for example, being highly attuned to the changing of the seasons.
In Japan, cherry blossoms are the quintessential embodiment of beauty, which inherently involves impermanence or ephemerality. It is because these flowers have the courage to blossom even in the face of certain and swift demise. They come and go, some as short as a day, maybe if you’re lucky, if there wasn’t wind and rain, then perhaps a week. But they’re very short-lived. That attunement to ephemerality and seeing the beauty because of that morality, leads to a contentment, an acceptance of the impermanence of phenomenal reality. There isn’t a resistance or complaint about change.
This belief and the activities that stem from it has profoundly shaped Japanese culture and sensibility.
In the Japanese Buddhist context, our senses are the vehicle to experiencing impermanence in a way that is accepting of all of reality. If you don’t want things to happen the way they’re happening, they will generate suffering.
I understand that talking about reality might sound too vast for some, but simply allowing yourself to experience and accept that things change and that there is beauty in those changes is a healing act.
Seeing Where Your Heart Is
What rituals are an integral part of your own life and that nourish you?
I ritualize how I do almost everything, because it’s what my heart’s intention is. The way I touch something, pick up an object, set it down. It’s especially the setting down where you see where your heart is.
For example, could you set a ceramic cup down on hard granite without making any noise? That requires attention, activating all your senses. And by just ritualizing how to set my teacup back down, it keeps me embodied.
These simple acts, such as setting my teacup down, might not seem consequential, but if over the day, years, and eventually a lifetime you continue cultivating the body-mind connection it becomes integral to how you do everything.
Being aware of what your ears hear, how your hands feel means to respect the cup, to respect the surface, to respect the people who are in earshot, to respect your own ears. That respect becomes part of who you are.
Befriending Ourselves
Is there a final invitation or a final inquiry that you would like to offer to the Musubi audience?
What comes to mind is something that I’m writing right now for a book I am working on called, “Of Mud and Lotuses: Women Liberate Dharma.” It relates to one of the 10 principles above; to nurture self.
I would like to introduce the idea of, Kalyana Mitra, which basically means dharma friend. Dharma friends is a Buddhist word for ones who see your suffering and potential for liberation. Recently I’ve been looking at how we can be dharma friends to ourselves.
In the world today, there is so much lack of self compassion. This is also to do with the technological world generating a lot of self hate. So how can we befriend ourselves?
I invite you to take a moment everyday to pause, be aware that you are worthy, that you matter, and notice that what you do and think ripples out into the world.
When you look at someone, do you have an expression of welcome and warmth, or of fear and disdain? You can control those emotions, especially if you are in tune with yourself. And if we all focus on these positive little interactions in our daily lives it will continue to ripple out and they become waves.
I want people not to feel powerless and discouraged. To understand that yes, there is suffering out there and in here, but to not lose sight of the vision of love and healing. That healing occurs when suffering and compassion meet.
What you do each moment will create that more compassionate world or not.
It doesn’t take 10 years of studying, or 20 years of sitting zazen. You can simply look at someone and generate warmth in your heart, and this will characterize the quality of that moment for both of you. These little gestures are significant, and we all contribute to how things ripple out, what gets rippled out.
I hope you discover how the source of healing simply begins with the warmth in your heart.
