“The place where the chaos is going on,” he says, “is also the place where the remedy is.””

Each year during the holiday, The River Reporter runs a series of stories under the general theme of "celebrations," taking time to highlight all that which warms our hearts during this festive time. This year, each of the stories featured here will focus on gathering together. Writers will join groups of people all over the region, seeking out what it is that brings people together─the beginning of deer season, for example, or a gift exchange at a nursing home. Shared passions, special places and common causes tend to unite us, now and throughout the year. This week, Annemarie Schuetz sat in on a Zen meditation in Narrowsburg, where silence and introspection becomes a group activity.

NARROWSBURG, NY ─ The silence is tangible.

It fills the zendo at Two Rivers Zen, one floor up from the One Grand bookstore on Main Street in Narrowsburg. Sounds from a busy Sunday morning drift in, but they slide off the bubble of stillness. Five people are attending the service today, although this is not “attending” as one attends a Western religious service. Everyone participates, by ringing the bell, discussing the dharma talk or just being present. Everyone who is present is integral.

The room is simple, all distractions kept to a minimum. A candle burns─you can just catch the scent. The altar, crowned by a statue of the Buddha, is the most ornate object in the room. Otherwise, the bare wood floor is dotted with black cushions for the participants plus a couple of chairs and benches. The robes of priest Sensei Seiso-Paul Cooper swirl as he moves around the space, then he too settles onto his cushion.

This is zazen, or shikantaza. “It means sitting, or nothing but sitting,” Seiso says. “Mantras or prayer are a distraction.”

To learn more about zazen, click here.

It fills the zendo at Two Rivers Zen, which was founded in Honesdale about 10 years ago and has since moved to Narrowsburg.  Two Rivers Zen offers classes and regular services─like this one, held on November 18 at the studio─as well as retreats, supporting the practitioners in their search for the real.

Zen Buddhism itself began in India, and was brought to China in the sixth century CE and Japan in the 12th century, according to the BBC. To practice zen is to see the way things really are. Attaining this can be the work of a lifetime, and meditation is key.

 “We bring the meditative state of mind into the world,” said Cooper.

The bell rings and meditation begins.  Nobody leads. Everyone falls into the silence, including Sensei Seiso. The cabinet-style Japanese altar and the chanting in Japanese are not the only reminder that this is an Eastern practice and that Western ideas of religious life are very different.

The point isn’t to hold to an echoing silence in your mind. The mind is like Main Street and the thoughts like sounds will drift in and out. “You change your relationship to thoughts, not get rid of the thoughts. Notice it, and continue sitting.”

A service consists of two 25-minute sessions of sitting meditation, with a walking meditation in between, punctuated by the bells and the chanting of the Heart Sutra. Surprisingly flat and emotionless, the chant is the condensed version of a long teaching on the meaning of emptiness, Seiso says.  It shakes you out of the silence.

Meanwhile the sitter pays some attention to how to sit, how to hold the hands, how to take the small steps of the walking meditation. There’s nuance here─one doesn’t obsess about it, because that too is a distraction. The overall sense is that you do the best you can, and the others are doing the best they can. Their path is not yours, they are elsewhere on the way.

“The longer I sit, the more compassion I have for myself and others,” said participant Kyoshin Lohr. “I can forgive myself for aggression, and I can be aware of others feeling exactly the way I am.”

“The longer I sit, the more compassion I have for myself and others.”

A thought, drifting. What do silence in community or the practice of zazen offer someone troubled by the world? The internet tells us that it reduces stress and brings joy. But there’s more, which becomes clear during the dharma talk on Buddhist teachings, after the meditation. 

“There’s the openness of mind,” Lohr said. “There’s an openness to whatever’s going to come up… there’s that true rest in being so open.”

There’s time, participants say, to think about the stories we tell ourselves about people, about situations. Are they real? Or are they just perception and projections?

“We’re always projecting, making someone else the Buddha,” Karen Morris says. “We’re making a whole narrative about it.”

“We tend to think that what we think is real,” Myoki Marcia Nehemiah adds. The way we see others can shift rapidly when we sit and talk, when something changes. Zen practice guides you to an answer about what is real.

Behind so much anger in the world is suffering. Buddhism does not shy away from pain. The group picks at the problem, tries to untangle it. Take the Wheel of Life and Death, says Morris, “it’s a reminder of our freedom, but how are we free when we’re so bound by suffering?”

“The suffering is real, but so is the space,” adds Nehemiah. “[Zen master] Dogen said that space is not empty, space is alive.”

Three hours spent in the group, in the stillness, lets you forget the confusion of the world outside. But Seiso offers a reason to head back into it: “The place where the chaos is going on,” he says, “is also the place where the remedy is.”

Two Rivers Zen, 76 Main St. #4 in Narrowsburg or online at tworiverszen.org. Shikantaza classes are limited to eight participants