Virtual Practice Meetings Update

“I’m curious, I said, “about how this technology might be used to support home practice and I’m willing to give it a try. I may find that it doesn’t work, that our physical presence is so important that this mode of communication creates more confusion and misunderstanding than clarity and openness.”

So here’s a brief update: so far, so good. This mode seems especially well suited for people who practicing far from a teacher and are feeling that distance.

For me, it’s been a lot of fun, including meeting with practitioners in Ireland, England and Sweden – a tour of my biological homeland. 

Especially when the video is working well, I am often surprised at the sense of presence from sitting with people this way.

Let me be clear. I don’t see Virtual Meetings as a replacement for an old-fashioned teacher-student relationship. There are many dimensions of practicing together that are not accessible in Virtual Meetings.

However, it beats no teacher-student relationship at all and for people who are sincere about practice but who can’t get to a teacher it might save wandering along fruitlessly in ways that simple guidance could correct. 

Here’s a couple things that I’ve learned that seem to help make Virtual Meetings “practice” meetings.

First a little background. The style of Zen is to pay careful attention to details and to carefully create an environment in which something can bloom. 

In dokusan, for example, the teacher usually sits in front of an altar with a flower, a candle, and incense and then rings a bell for the next student in line to enter the room. The student enters in a prescribed manner, bowing, and sitting down. Often a set phrase is used to being the interview. 

The context can be very powerful in creating a container for Zen practice. 

In Virtual Practice Meetings, I find that they are most like nonvirtual meetings when we apply the same spirit. When we are two people just kicking back at our desks chatting in front of our computers, that framing impacts the spirit of the conversation – it is the spirit of the conversation.

So I’ve begun pulling my table over so that the computer faces me – quite close to where students sit here in dokusan. And I sit where I normally do when I meet people here.

I suggest that the person on the other end of cyberspace sit in their zazen place and in their zazen pose.

We begin by a minute or so of zazen before we begin to talk. We bow before and after the verbal interaction.

If you’d like more information, see the August 4^th post, including about making a donations via PayPal if you are so moved.

If you’d like to try this form of meeting, write me at [email protected].

Comments and questions are welcome here too, of course.