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- Author: The Empty Cup
- Full Title: Pastures of the Mind
- Category: #articles
- Naturally, there were moments when the conversations in my head began again, and I asked my horses why they wanted to go to the edge of the pasture where there were wolves just beyond the fence. Reminded of their sense of possibility, the horses naturally moved back towards the copse of trees and the deep grass. They settled again.
- I feel there’s a good reason that attention and the experience of zazen are not much spoken of in Zen circles. Any description of one person’s experience is likely to seem as if it’s meant to be a model, a way for others to go forward, a kind of prescription.
- rarely try to control my mind during zazen, but in this case, I wanted to do something. A passage from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind came to me. He says, “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” Give your animal, your mind, more space, not less.
He goes on to say, “to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense.”
In that moment on sesshin, I remembered his image not as a cow or sheep, but as a horse in a paddock. I pictured restive horses in a small fenced corral, unhappy at their confinement. I opened the gate and offered these horses a huge area, an expansive pasture, and they moved easily away from the troubling imagined conversations.