Ezra Bayda (Author) - Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life

Bayda writes with exceptional clarity and simplicity about the awakened life. He has a gift for describing ordinary mind, or the customary thoughts, feelings, and experiences of everyday life. His style is as plainspoken as Pema Chdrns. He deserves membership in the ranks of respected meditation teacher-authors.

Publishers Weekly

With clarity and compassion, Bayda applies Zen Buddhist principles to everyday life. He explains how all experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, help us to discover our path to wisdom and an open heart. Presented here are realistic suggestions to help us survive the journey.

Library Journal

Ezra Bayda wisely translates the Eastern spiritual belief into an extremely useful handbook for practice. Being Zen is humble and direct, which reminds me most of Shunryu Suzukis Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. It is what its title statesnot an explanation of Buddhism or Zen, but an essential guide to its daily practice. Baydas is a gentle, sharing voice that evenly embraces humor and sincerity, bringing reason and heart-sense to our most irrational behaviors.

Parabola

A skillful wedding of mindfulness and Zenstraightforward, simple, and wise.

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

ABOUT THE BOOK

We can use whatever life presents, Ezra Bayda teaches, to strengthen our spiritual practiceincluding the turmoil of daily life. What we need is the willingness to just be with our experienceswhether they are painful or pleasingopening ourselves to the reality of our lives without trying to fix or change anything. But doing this requires that we confront our most deeply rooted fears and assumptions in order to gradually become free of the constrictions and suffering they create. Then we can awaken to the loving-kindness that is at the heart of our being.

While many books aspire to bring meditation into everyday experience, Being Zen gives us practical ways to actually do it, introducing techniques that enable the reader to foster qualities essential to continued spiritual awakening. Topics include how to cultivate:

• Perseverance : staying with anger, fear, and other distressing emotions.
• Stillness : abiding with chaotic experiences without becoming overwhelmed.
• Clarity : seeing through the conditioned beliefs and fears that run us.
• Direct experience : encountering the physical reality of the present momenteven when that moment is exactly where we dont want to be.

Like Pema Chdrn, the best-selling author of When Things Fall Apart, Ezra Bayda writes with clear, heartfelt simplicity, using his own life stories to illustrate the teachings in an immediate and accessible way that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.

EZRA BAYDA teaches at Zen Center San Diego. He is also the author of Being Zen, At Home in the Muddy Water, Saying Yes to Life (Even the Hard Parts), and Zen Heart . For more information, visit www.zencentersandiego.org.

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being zen

Bringing Meditation to Life

Ezra Bayda

SHAMBHALA

B OSTON & L ONDON

2012

S HAMBHALA P UBLICATIONS , I NC .

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2002 by Ezra Bayda

Cover art and design: Jonathan Sainsbury

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUES THE HARDCOVER EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS:

Bayda, Ezra.

Being zen: bringing meditation to life/Ezra Bayda.

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2340-2

ISBN 978-1-57062-856-6

ISBN 978-1-59030-013-8 (paperback)

1. Zen meditations. I. Title.

BQ9289.5.B39 2002

294.3927dc21 2001044166

To the memory of Susan Loda, who lived the practice life with courage, kindness, and grace

Contents

L IVING IN OUR ADVANCED culture, its increasing unease becomes obvious: the faster we race toward our many goals, the less we know of serenity and satisfaction. Life, for most of us, remains a wearying puzzle. Although we may try to be indifferent to our predicament, this evasion is again unsatisfactory.

Until we realize that we are truly nothing but life itself, we will keep trying to change and manipulate life in hopes of solving the terrifying puzzle it presents. We may even stumble toward the real teachings that exist in the great religions and also outside of them. But it is difficult to understand them as more than concepts (which may assist us to a degree but falls short of the mature, integrated understanding we long for). So what do we do?

A big, big question! Many excellent books describe very well the human predicament, its elements and structure. Very few of them are helpful in making clear what is involved in developing a genuinely useful practice. To say Just let it go is like telling an exhausted drowning person to Just swim to shore.

If you want to wake up, not just talk about it, this book will give you practical guidancethe kind of guidance that you need. Not simplistic, formulaic Just do it this way guidance, but words that give you practical help, combined with encouragementeven inspirationfor your efforts. And even though all reading is preliminary, it is often a crucial first step. Both for beginning students and for longtime practitioners, this book will clarify the muddy waters.

And Ezra, the guide? Although I have known him for years as a student, a friend, and now a fellow teacher, I hesitate to string a lot of nice adjectives with his namethese are never the exact truth of a person. But I do live with Ezras kindness, his steadiness and keen perceptivenessand most of all, his unceasing practice. And I am confident in recommending his book to you. Enjoy it and benefit.

Charlotte Joko Beck

I WISH TO EXPRESS MY DEEP GRATITUDE to Charlotte Joko Beck, my teacher and friend. Much of what I have learned, and much of what appears in this book, comes directly from my work with her. Id also like to thank Stephen Levine and Pema Chdrn, both of whom have strongly influenced my path, especially helping to temper the precision and discipline of my Zen training with the more heartfelt quality of loving-kindness.

Many thanks to Carolyn Miller, who voluntarily typed the entire text without complaint, making many valuable suggestions along the way. Im also grateful to my daughter, Jenessa, for her thorough and merciless editing. Just knowing I would be subject to her scrutiny inspired me to be clearer.

When I submitted my manuscript to the publisher, I thought it was complete and ready to go. Little did I know! It was my good fortune to work with Emily Hilburn Sell, who shaped and edited my words, cutting out the deadwood while skillfully highlighting the unifying themes. I am indebted to her for bringing this book into its present form. In the process we became good friends.

I would also like to thank Elizabeth Hamilton, my wife, friend, and teacherbut not just for her invaluable suggestions on the text. I consider her unwavering support, as well as the strength of her own practice, to be instrumental in helping me to learn what I have learned these last yearsthe learning out of which this book developed.

T HE READER WILL NOTICE that throughout this book I rarely use Zen or Buddhist terminology, such as emptiness or nonduality . In language and in content, I have tried to avoid the esoteric and philosophical. This aversion to the philosophical has been a consistent theme in my life; in fact, I left graduate school in philosophy because it was too philosophical!