In March 2021, Mindfulness Northwest Executive Director and Guiding Teacher Tim Burnett led a weekend retreat online focussed on the powerful teachings of beginner’s mind from Buddhism which also form a foundational part of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction as formulated by Jon Kabbat-Zinn.
This recording was misplaced for several years, we’re very happy to bring it to the website now!
Talk: Beginner’s Mind
Talk Notes
One of the aspects of our retreats at Mindfulness Northwest is touching into the Buddhist roots of contemporary mindfulness. It’s a real pleasure and a privilege for me to get to share a few thoughts with you at this retreats. Mindfulness has many roots to it from several cultures but Buddhist practices and the philosophy and orientation behind those practices is unarguably one of those roots.
And the cool thing is you don’t have to be a Buddhist or believe any particular thing or engage in this work, in this exploration we call mindfulness training. But as the same time I think it’s helpful to have some sense of where it all came from. What we’re doing wasn’t invented by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1970’s or anything like that. It has older and deeper roots even as we can deeply appreciate the genius and innovation of more recent teachers, researchers, innovators and practitioners in forming up this accessible way of exploring our human moments.
May Seton’s poem last night on this way of being, of weaving a nest for silence, that’s free of wishes made me thing of one important Buddhist root of mindfulness: the Japanese Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki as I thought of a quotation from him:
Our way is to practice one step at a time, one breath and a time, with no gaining idea.
The main book of his teachings, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, shows up on pretty much every mindfulness reading list I’ve ever seen. And the term “beginner’s mind” which he introduced into English in the 1960’s was adopted by Jon as the first of his 7 Attitudinal Foundations of Mindfulness.
In case you’re curious the other 6 are: 2. Patience · 3. Non-Judging · 4. Trust · 5. Non -Striving · 6. Acceptance · 7. Letting Go.
I myself stumbled into a Zen Center founded by a student of Shunryu Suzuki in 1983 and that was a key beginning moment of the long journey that led to Mindfulness Northwest as I went on to study Zen in that lineage and eventually, to my great surprise, I’ve ended up a priest, leader and teacher in that lineage here in Bellingham.
So I thought for the talk in this year’s Spring Weekend Retreat we’d appreciate a few passages from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. It’s a treasure of a book if you haven’t read it, but also it’s quite an odd little masterpiece. Suzuki Roshi as his students all called him, was expressing himself in a language he was comfortable enough with he has a quirky way of using it and he was usually speaking off the cuff in a casual and fluid way. His students soon started having a tape recorder handy whenever he spoke and his talks were transcribed and edited to make the book. You can actually read the original transcripts if you want at a website called the Suzuki Roshi Archive.
I used to carry this book with me everywhere in my backpack and whenever I felt moved I’d whip it out and read a random section. It was a different kind of reading than I’d ever done. I don’t know that I “understood” what he was saying particularly but I always felt something. A feeling that felt important, and one I don’t know if I could have explained or described. There was just something grounding and freeing that I felt in response to these words.
And now 35 years later I recognize a lot of his references and have much more of a sense of context so I read these words differently for sure, and yet I do recognize that same feeling.
Anyway here are a few passages and I’ll make a few remarks about each.
(references are all in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki)
BEGINNER’S MIND p. 21-22
• Like everything a practice: am I open? Am I remembering even as an expert in something I’m a beginner?
• Humility
• Norman’s be humble, see everyone as Buddha [whole], try to help.
TRANSIENCY p. 102-104
• “everything changes” – a great example of something we all know but act like we don’t – or is it a kind of knowing that hasn’t really settled into our bones yet – one day when we really know that everything changes, everything is transient, maybe it’ll be so much easier to accept how things go – even as we make effort towards a better world, we make effort but we can’t control outcomes in a transient world right?
QUALITY OF BEING p. 104-105 [stop before “A wonderful painting…”]
• If everything is truly transient and changing does our the idea we have of continuity really make sense? What would life be like if we perceived reality more like he’s saying here each thing flashing into existence? Everything arising independently according to conditions and yet everything interdependent in it’s nature. I am you, you are me.
CALMNESS p. 121-122 [skip the odd last-paragraph challenge about having a million dollars]
• to inhabit our bodies and this moment without leaning on something else, without relying on anything – a challenging way of talking because of course we rely on everything all the time and can’t exist a minute without the web of support that brings us into this moment – and yet you can feel what he’s getting at here right? Be upright, trust, let it be enough, can you we hit the pause button on running around seeking reassurance, can we sit in our enough-ness our full-ness and release from this deep habit of believing we aren’t enough?
• and from this place of trust, this place of it’s all enough, I’m enough, our efforts – including our efforts to change and grow will have a whole different quality to them
• and can we learn to see even our stress and suffering as our teacher? as a gift? as “enlightenment” using the Buddhist language he uses? that even our suffering doesn’t tell us we’re not enough or there’s anything wrong with us.