People think that this practice is about learning how to always feel "serenity and equanimity" here in Samsara (the Buddhist term for this messed up world). It is not so simple. I do not want to feel "serenity and equanimity" when my kid is seriously sick, the cat dies, my spouse leaves me, the house is on fire.
Better said, I can learn to feel a "serenity and equanimity" so profound that I will feel a "serenity and equanimity" about the fact that I will be worried out of my mind when my kid is in the ER, I will cry when the cat dies, feel a broken heart sometimes, and I will be running on adrenaline in a fire, anything but feeling "serenity and equanimity" in that moment. We come to feel a certain "serenity and equanimity" with the fact that our heart mourns and screams because there are hungry children in the world who we must feed ... a "serenity and equanimity" with the mourning, screaming and feeding. Of course, I also feel "serenity and equanimity" about sometimes laughing with friends, celebrating my kids graduation, appreciating the beauty of this moment.
Our Zazen is to sit with "serenity" about the happy and sad and in between. We know "equanimity" about the times when life really lacks and when it is plentiful, right in a world of sometimes lack and sometimes plenty.
Alas, people run around to be happy all the time, rather than a wise "happy to be happy, and happy to be sad sometimes with tears rolling down my cheeks." A lot of these mindfulness and other meditation programs are promising people spiritual valium ... something that feels good for some minutes, but fails to get at the real existential "peace" that is at peace with how this life is not always peaceful! That is why we call it "Samsara" and not "the Pure Land/Heaven on Earth" all the time ... unless a wise eye can see that these are "not two."
I wrote this elsewhere today, on Facebook, about some meditation program promising to help people "feel good, more confident, productive, creative."
The whole idea of meditation to "feel good, more confident, productive, creative" is the same "give me, make me, I want, more more more" mentality of desire and selfish Buddha-consumer spiritual materialism that Zazen is --NOT-- about. Pitiful. Another self-help book to put on the shelf.
People will always be attracted to meditation, or some self-help book or guru course or nightly informercial, that promises "feel good, more confident, productive, creative." I have no power to prevent that. My words are a feather in a hurricane. However, it is precisely my intention to remind them that there is something more, something more profound in all this, and that once they come in the door to "relax, be more time efficient, get that promotion at work" or whatever their intent is, they might consider that Zazen is actually about humanity's existential freedom from desire (how we want the world to be vs. its otherwise state), Non-Self, Emptiness, Illumination and Liberation in Samsara as the ending of Dukkha/Suffering.
Zazen offers a peace so much more profound. Thus, in Zazen, one sits as what is, letting what is be what is ... neither running away nor letting things imprison us.
Gassho, J
ST+lah