Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Editor’s Note: Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is a Zen priest in Oakland, California. In her teaching she draws on her experience as a black woman and dharma student to look honestly and deeply at many aspects of life, society, and practice. Here she writes about facing powerful emotions and traumatic memories in meditation practice.
We enter the Buddha’s path as human beings, and we walk on it as human beings. We are guaranteed to feel, fully, all of the emotions of a human being. What the path assists us in doing is seeing the root of an emotion in the midst of its occurrence, so that the response is not more pain and suffering. We learn to question, “What is going on here?”
During one of my stays in a monastery, I experienced great pain when I felt that my fellow practitioners could not accept my invisible physical disability as the reason I could not kneel to serve the meals or stand in the kitchen for very long. The frustration of others and the isolation I felt fueled my sense of rejection and not belonging.
After weeks of this, I began to suffer. During the oryoki meals (a ceremonial way of eating in the zendo), I could hardly swallow my food because of the need to burst into tears. Soon, the wailing inside me broke down to small weepings every time we had a forty-minute sitting session.
Finally, I requested guidance from the lead teacher. I explained to him what was happening. He listened without ever taking his eyes off of me. After I was done speaking, he said, “All emotions are from the past.” I blinked once, then twice. How could that be? I thought to myself. He asked me to return to the zendo and to let those feelings come forward until I could see with my heart what was going on with me and not the others.
I returned and continued to weep in my seat until one day during lunch, I put down my utensils and allowed the tears to gush forward. While they were coming, a vision of myself emerged in one of my dresses I wore at the age of eight. It was plaid with puffed sleeves, starched stiff, the way my mother ironed our dresses. I had white anklet socks and black patent leather shoes. My hair was pressed straight and pulled tight in two ponytails, one on each side of my head, with bangs that rolled under. Suddenly, in the zendo, I was little Earthlyn who had been forced to attend a predominantly white Jewish elementary school in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. I was there, right at the desk of my elementary school instead of in my seat in the zendo. I felt the old anger of being called names, being pushed, being different. I felt the jealousy I had for my best friend, Roslyn, who belonged at the school because she was Jewish. I felt all the emotion possible while sitting in meditation.
Although the incidents that occurred at the monastery were new events in my life, the emotions were clearly from events long gone. I understood those events of the past to be what shaped the suffering for me in the zendo. I allowed the tears to continue for days.
For three months, we sat anywhere from five to six hours a day, every day. I had plenty of time to look into the infinite mirror of zazen (sitting meditation). Once the emotions rode themselves out, I was able to deal with the situation at hand. I could address the present day problem in the zendo without getting back at the boy in my elementary school who stole my berettes, or the boy who spit in my face in junior high school. I was more effective in practicing complete and loving speech at the Zen Center–not because I had any technique for wise speech, but because I had completely surrendered to my heart.
The pain of present-day events at the monastery did not go away because healing is a work in progress. I continued such healing, weeping day by day. If I had turned my attention away from the purification occurring within me and toward others, I would have missed a powerful chance for transforming suffering in my life. I did not become a stoic practitioner, a powerful mountain sitting atop my meditation cushion. I was a tearful Zen student who saw clearly that my journey on the path required feeling and seeing every step of the way, without the stories. We are to be full human beings on the path of the Buddha, with all of the emotions of a human being. We cannot fully practice without our lives being fully exposed. There is no hiding.
