First Published on the Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple website, April 2024.

What is human life if not hundreds and thousands of little cycles that repeat continuously? Our planet spins on its axis, one revolution of which we call a day, divided into the light half of daylight and the night half of darkness. Our planet also orbits its star, one revolution of which we call a year. Our moon makes one trip around the planet every 29.5 days, a month. It has been estimated that this has been going on for something like 3½ billion years, an almost unfathomable number. By comparison, a human life of 80 years is nothing.

Within our brief lives, if we did live for 80 years, that would amount to 29,220 cycles of light and darkness. We take a day and arbitrarily divide it up into 24 hours, and an hour into 60 minutes—1,440 minutes total. Most of those minutes are spent doing the same things, over and over, that we did in the previous several thousand. However much we may long for life to be novel and exciting, the fact is that it is composed almost entirely of cycles which we’ve experienced already thousands of times. If we are constantly wishing for something else to happen and are bored with the endless repetition of cycles, we will be deeply unhappy.

What this means is that in order not to feel suffocated and bored by the endless repetitions of our lives, we have to pay closer attention to our cycles and look for the subtle variations that exist within them. No two days are identical. They undoubtedly follow a predictable pattern, but within the pattern lots of different things can and do happen. I suspect that people who are bored, and find it necessary to do intensely entertaining things, are not really paying attention to life as it is without the externally induced excitement. Motorcyclists, for instance, often say that the sheer speed of riding, of being so close to the possibility of dying, makes them feel fully alive. But can we feel fully alive living an ordinary daily life?

Within a day of 1,440 minutes, we breathe approximately 20,000 times at an average of about 14 breaths per minute. The heart, meanwhile, is beating at about five times that rate, meaning that just to stay alive, the bare-boned irreducible cycles of our existence involve 20,000 breaths and 100,000 heart beats in a day. We may be only vaguely aware of any of them. Contemplating that this is what lies at the root of our existence ought to give us a renewed appreciation for the ongoing miracle of human life. We aren’t really in control of the natural functions of the human body, meaning that they are, in essence, a gift. What we do with this priceless gift, of course, determines whether we will live in gratitude for it, or be struggling against what we can’t control, always wanting more.

To one degree or another we all feel some level of alienation from the natural world. Most people live in cities and spend little if any time in natural surroundings or wilderness. There is a movement gaining traction right now called ‘forest bathing’, which is to spend a period of time in a forest environment, simply taking it in: the air, the birds, the tranquility. This is said to be an antidote for the stresses of modern life, including alienation from nature, from feeling that we are not a part of it or of an integrated whole of life forms. I would think that taking a nature break, or some form of being outdoors in trees, shrubs, grass and flowers, would be essential for basic human mental and emotional health.

But I also think that we can take it back one whole step from that, which is to just breathe. Mindful breathing is an important aspect of Buddhist meditation practice, and of Yogic disciplines because it is really the most basic cycle of our existence; without it we die in a matter of minutes. We cannot live without breathing: the wise human makes a virtue of necessity and uses breathing as the doorway into being in touch with yourself as you truly are. Given that we spend way too much time wrapped up in what is going on in our brains, we need to find a way out of this particular cyclical pattern, that of being lost in distracted thinking about one thing after another, one feeling, one mood, one memory, one annoyance, one fear after another. Are humans meant to be this way, lost in thought? I don’t think so.

One critical distinction to be made here regards whether feeling fully alive necessarily means feeling good or excited. If we make this assumption, then we have a problem because nobody feels good or excited all the time; at best those feelings happen on occasion. However, the other possibility to consider is that we might be able to feel fully alive no matter what we are feeling, which is to say that even if you are having a bad day—or perhaps even a bad week, a bad year or a bad life—you can still, within that, be fully alive with it. The challenge is to fully accept whatever we experience, and acceptance doesn’t seem to come naturally. It is something we have to practice, and for me the practice starts with just breathing.

Meditation isn’t any more complicated than just sitting and breathing in and out. We tend to make it much more complicated because we think meditation should be something in particular, such as peaceful or blissful. I used to have to remind myself over and over to “just sit with what is, right here and now.” So, I learned to just sit with breathing, and I learned to regard whatever else arose in my mind as just the background noise of being alive.

Sitting or lying down and just breathing is my go-to practice no matter what I happen to be feeling on any given day. We sit in meditation formally every morning; after that I usually sit in my reclining chair. If I am tired or working on letting go of some very deep-rooted fatigue, I breathe deeply using this mantra: “Pure energy of the universe I breathe in, fatigue and frustration I breathe out.” This is quite effective. It puts my body and mind together as a whole and directly heals what I typically experience as my core difficulty. If you are plagued by stress, which so many people are, you could think, “Pure energy I breathe in, stress I breathe out.”

A day is the basic cycle of living in which we need to attend to whatever makes it possible to live a sane and happy life. I don’t ever go a day without meditation or breathing practice. I don’t ever go a day without walking my dog, usually three times. Most days I spend at least a little bit of time in the garden. Every day we interact with other people, at work or at home with family members, almost anywhere we go. Once again acceptance is the primary challenge, just accepting people as they are, even if we find them annoying or abrasive. And if you have an unpleasant, stressful social interaction, probably the most helpful thing to do right in that moment is to take a deep breath. Breathing deeply is simply relaxing. A big sigh is probably our innate, automatic response to moments of anxiety or frustration—the body intuitively knows what to do. You are collecting up a bit of energy to face whatever the difficulty happens to be.

Most people have a good idea what things they really ought to be doing. It isn’t as if we are completely unaware that we really should get enough exercise; that it would be better if we ate less food which is really cholesterol-laden, sweet or full of strange-sounding chemical additives; that we should get a good amount of sleep at night, and so on. I have taught a lot of people how to meditate, or taught people who have some experience of it but say they can’t seem to stick with the practice. Usually because their minds are too unruly—it is too hard. The underlying issue here is that we need to put knowledge into practice, and it’s so easy to put it off. We’re too busy; we just don’t have enough time. But actually, from my own experience, I can say for certain that time is not the problem: the problem is with grasping the will. 1440 minutes is a lot of minutes, and if we are truly determined to set aside five or ten of them for sitting quietly, we can do it. And it doesn’t matter that the mind is unruly because no matter what the mind does, you can still sit down and breathe deeply and exhale. Having taken one breath you can easily do two. And three. Once you make a determined effort, grasping the will it takes to just sit there, pretty soon it becomes apparent that there is plenty of time for it, but we tend to create excuses for why it can’t be done. This seems to be a universal human problem.

There is an old saying in Zen Buddhism, going back at least to Great Master Dōgen: “The secret of life is will; words are its key.” First we need to be inspired by something. Interestingly, the word inspire literally means ‘to breathe in.’ On a spiritual level, we need to breathe, just as we need to breathe in air continuously. Often it is just the right combination of words which inspires us, but it can also be a good example on the part of a virtuous person; either way, we have a moment of realizing that “Oh, yes! This is a noble and worthy thing to do, and I’d like to give it my time and attention.” I believe it is a function of the universe—or perhaps you could say the Buddha Nature in all things—that it provides us with inspiration at times when we are in need of it. I couldn’t possibly count all the times in my life as a monk in which some little piece of teaching sparked off something in me, serving as motivation to undertake what I know in my heart I needed to do. Almost always, the undertaking is a big challenge. Cleaning up the mountain of my karma has always been the primary task: I’ve never been able to avoid or get around it somehow, I have to reassert my willingness, again and again, to face it, embrace it, and purify it.

This requires grasping the will—and willingness. On one level this isn’t any different from going to the gym and lifting weights. You set the machine for a weight that you can reasonably lift and then perform however many repetitions the training requires. On a deeper level, the spiritual level, it seems that we always need a measure of willingness just to get in there and take the next step. So often we think we can’t do something because it’s too daunting, or we have tried and failed already so many times. On the other hand, it is the willingness itself, the honest attempt, that makes all the difference. And if you persist, the weight seems to lighten more and more over time, same as in the gym. Success depends on not giving in to apathy or despair, but just taking one step—one repetition. The oft-repeated saying is true: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”. And, throughout those thousand miles, we keep propelling ourselves forward with one tiny bit of inspiration and will at a time.

Over time this process, which is by nature repetitive, becomes more ‘second nature’. You spend far less time thinking about it, or entertaining notions of giving up, or wondering why it doesn’t go any faster. Life is a stream which keeps changing, sometimes fast, sometimes slow; sometimes murky, sometimes clear. Feeling fully alive isn’t so much about going fast or being thrilled, which confines us to such a small part of the whole cycle. It is more about seeing all aspects of your life as intrinsically equal, all of it worthy of the same care and attention, all of it worthy of loving kindness.

I once asked my Zen teacher what was the relationship between love and will. The question arose because at that point, grasping the will was something I could do but, although people talked about love, I felt like I didn’t understand its role in training. I have no memory of what her answer was. But the mere fact of my searching for an answer, that I was looking for a deeper integration of two things that seemed distinct at the time, opened a door to realizing the answer for myself. Eventually it became clear that love, or loving kindness, was essential for practicing without selfishness. It was what made it possible to embrace things as they are as opposed to what I wanted them to be. It is so easy to go along with a very subtle agenda of what we want, almost always some kind of idealism about the best way for things to be, the best way for people to be. Just seeing that agenda isn’t easy, but we are sure to run up against it eventually and have to make a choice of whether we’re ready to let go of it or not.

When they are in harmony, love and will make a great combination. It is mostly a matter of having the key of life turned just enough that we see this is true and make the conscious choice to exercise them. After a while the very repetitiveness, the little bit of effort, becomes our friend, and “‘we’ve done this before—we know we can do it again.”