Tag: sea

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.

Cyprus most northern spot, a wonderful beach, friends, my first Zazenkai and the earthquake (January, February 2023)

After getting off the ferry, I headed straight to the center of Girne to get a SIM card. “To the left, to the left, always driving on the left side” I was repeating in my head. From there, I continued my journey to the most natural area of “North Cyprus” that I could identify on Google Maps.

I found a wonderful, spacious sandy beach and ended up staying there for a week, or perhaps even a bit longer. What I enjoyed the most was the solitude, which gave me the chance to experience my first Zazenkai – a full day of meditation, mindfulness, and no communication. On the magnificent beach in Turkey, I had done my own three-day-long fasting and meditation retreat, but back then, I meditated only when and for as long as I felt like it. The Zazenkai with the Bright Way Zen Sangha, I had become a member of in the meantime, was different. There was an exact schedule that I decided to follow. Due to the time difference between the US West Coast and Cyprus, I started the day in solitude with meditation, and later I joined the others in an online meeting.

Before that day, I had not meditated for about eight hours a day, and I was curious about how it would turn out. I felt confident, and honestly, I think I was pretty arrogant at that point. After six hours of meditation, I felt an unbearable sensation of pain and somehow managed to let it go. However, in the next session, the pain was even stronger, and I did shift my sitting position, but it didn’t help much. In the following session, I tried sitting in a chair instead of the quarter-lotus posture, but the pain was only different but still there, and it was hardly bearable for me. Nevertheless, I kept going. During these painful episodes, all kinds of thoughts and feelings were arising inside of me, and it was more an act of willpower-based endurance than letting go and accepting.

Now, as I write this about three months later, I feel that my ego was pretty hurt and suppressed and rejected a lot of what was coming up inside me. I realize that a part of me did not want to accept what was happening within me – the pain, the struggle, the impermanence. Looking back, it seems like I went into that Zazenkai with a strong ego that wanted to prove it was capable of enduring that day, but I came out of it feeling insecure and disappointed.

A couple of weeks later, I participated in a five-day Sesshin (essentially, five days of Zazenkai), and in my post about that experience, I’ll describe a very different encounter with pain, letting go and other sensations.

During my stay at the beautiful beach, I also went on some long walks along the beach and through the sand dunes. While hiking along the beach, I found an incredible spot for tent living right next to the beach with a sun chair in between beautiful bushes and trees. I also found very accurately “cut” stone formations that looked very out of place. On one occasion, I came across a group of soldiers who were clearly searching for something. After they checked my ID, I asked them what they were doing, but all they said was “nothing.” It’s always the same when I ask these guys – they’re always “doing nothing.” It’s a crazy job they have.

From that beach, it wasn’t a long hike to reach the most northern point of the entire Island. I began my hike, and shortly after that, a friendly guy with a pickup truck offered me a ride for a few kilometers. Just when I started hiking again, another car stopped, and it’s super friendly passengers took me all the way to the most northern spot. That’s how I met Tarzan, a funny and warm-hearted guy from Turkey who had been to some rainbow gatherings. At the northernmost point, it felt like the end of the world, and that end was guarded by a herd of cute and funny roaming mules. I found myself thinking about traveling with a mule again and had a beautiful hike back to my home.

After a few more days, Isa and Arne (who I had met earlier in Turkey) wrote to me that they were tired of the cold weather in Cappadocia and had the idea to take the ferry to Cyprus. Just a few days later, they arrived at the beach, and we had another super nice time together. Sihong and Thomas also joined our little camp, and we had a wonderful evening playing an absolutely crazy version of “Mensch, ärgere dich nicht” (aka Ludo).

The night after the others had left, I woke up in the middle of the night to find Rosinante shaking in a way she had never shaken before. It felt like being in a storm, but there was no storm and the shaking was like a strong nodding. I didn’t think too much about it and fell back to sleep again. The next day, I realized that it was the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, about a hundred kilometers away, that had caused Rosinante to shake in the night and made the sea flood the beach.