My first Sesshin (Zen meditation retreat) and the strongest pain (March 2023)

After the hike with Cindy I went straight to this wonderful spot I had found weeks ago when Serpentine and I were exploring Akamas.

My first Sesshin was about to start in the early evening. For a couple of months I had participated regularly in online meetings of Bright Way Zen. BWZ is an offline and online Zen Sangha (a group of Zen practitioners). If you are curious about it, just give it a try. You can just join the online meetings scheduled in their online calendar or join offline in their rooms in Portland, USA.

With BWZ I had done my first Zazenkai which is basically a one-day-Sesshin. And that had given me a taste of what to come.

In preparation for the Sesshin, I set up everything I would need so that I would not be faced with more decisions than necessary in that time and could just follow the schedule. The schedule was mainly eight hours of sitting and walking meditation with breaks for food, sleeping and some activity that can be done more easily in a “mindful way”. Things like cooking and cleaning.

The first day went along and I was sitting and following the schedule and had not too many expectations. But I enjoyed what I was “doing”. It felt like the setting of being in the Sesshin for a fixed amount of days lowered the potential for sensations like impatience, doubt etc. But of course it was a coming and going of everything there was.

On the third day my experience changed drastically when I felt the strongest pain of my life. My knees and back just hurt like crazy. I was immediately reminded of my Zazenkai when I had quite a similar experience. But this time the pain was all consuming. After a couple of hours of suffering I gave up on “trying to let go of the pain” and tried to change my sitting position while sitting Zazen. The pain changed but was just different and still all consuming. I was shivering in pain while sitting but during the walking meditations the pain dissolved. After that observation I became absolutely clear that the intensity and the suffering I was experiencing, were mostly a very convincing story my mind had come up with.

The next sitting meditation started, I sat down in my usual posture, felt pain but immediately it was not all consuming like before. And after a while even this sensation of pain dissolved. Just like that. Like the pain was a story I had believed in and now I had stopped.

This was the most profound experience I made during meditation until now. It helped me shift  my perspective on so many things.  And from that Sesshin on it feels like a companion to me.

And for some days I was really thinking if that kind of realization is what sitting is really all about.

Akamas love and one real hike (March 2023)

I committed myself to do my first Sesshin (meditation retreat in the tradition of Zen Buddhism) starting on March 20th which was my birthday. I felt that it would be nice to start “my new year” with a Sesshin. Because of the time shift between Portland and Cyprus, the Sesshin was about to start at 7 pm.

When I was writing with Cindy she told me that she wanted to do a hike in Akamas. It was a perfect match because I was just about to return to Akamas to do my online Sesshin with Bright Way Zen at a super nice spot I had found weeks before. And I felt like it would be perfect to spend some time in good company, getting to know Cindy and doing a physical activity before I would start five days of meditation.

Cindy and I met and did a nearly 30km hike in beautiful Akamas (see it on Komoot). Although it was my third time there, I still loved this hike and I enjoyed doing it with Cindy a lot. For the first time in my life I did a hike with someone else in my natural speed of hiking. It’s not that I was feeling bad when hiking at a slower pace in the company of someone else but still I found it interesting how powerful Cindy seemed to be. And for the first time Cindy and I spent some time together alone and got to know each other a lot. I got super curious about what else there was to get to know about her.

And we did visit the astonishing massive sea grass hill. Make sure you give it a like on Google Maps. Thanks.

During the hike I was thinking about what else Cindy and I could do but found it to be too pushy to ask her what she was feeling about it. And there was the Sesshin to start later that day and Cindy had a guest from coachsurfing.com… So I guess it was just not the right time…

Inviting people to your mobile home via couchsurfing.com sounded like an awesome idea to me and I was thinking that maybe that could be an easy way to travel with someone else for a longer time.