When I began training in Zen, the prime motivation of most of us was existential. We wanted to resolve burning questions such as Who am I? What is the mind? What is my essential nature? What is the true nature of reality? Fair enough, these remain key questions, and Zen practice, perhaps koan practice in particular, provides a good vehicle.
But meditation can also help bear with (stand, in contradistinction to understand) and make use of, even transform, what Buddhists call afflictive experience, what we know as emotional pain. How? By learning to attend mindfully, in real time, to the spinning flux of bodily, emotional and mental experience as it arises, coalesces, and as we get bogged down in (or "attached to") it. By way of personal example, during a painful period I once found myself with profound feelings of sadness and loss. In one sense, I knew that they were part and parcel of grieving, a normal human process. I tried to be gentle with myself, allow it time, and engage it fully. As time went on, motivated by the desire to be fully alive and fully functioning, and the continuing flurries of affect, I began to observe closely just how the pain constituted and unfolded, how I participated in it, and how my attentiveness and lack of it affected things. When I was aware and mindful, I could notice proto-feelings, not fully developed, and how these would be elaborated in a associative series that came through and coalesced rapidly into a story line which would draw almost automatically to itself supporting memories, songs and so on such that before long a concerto in the key of sadness and loss was playing. I would be feeling fine and then, within moments, find myself in a funk. When I was able to both engage and observe -- not a given during such emotionally charged times, even for a Zen teacher -- I could begin to see that this experience began as a kind of a spasm, a contraction; it was not born fully developed. I could notice, however arduous it was to stay present, how my manner of paying attention, what I attended to and how, could either accelerate or decelerate or transform the direction of the process. Now of course mourning is part of living and psychotherapy allows us to safely and deeply explore the dynamic content of these experiences and can be crucial during the really tough times. But attention to the process is what meditation brings to the table, especially when the dynamic themes and affective accompaniments become like a broken record.
