Don’t Suffer Motherfu…..!

“Good friggin’ morning!” I thought, as I woke up to the news that today was the highest single day of new Coronavirus cases in America. This was followed by an email from my niece saying that she wants to leave America and possibly move abroad because the political/cultural scene is peak toxic.

“Everything is so divided and everyone HATES each other and it’s really draining to live here right now.”

Meanwhile fears of a much deeper recession are rising. People must stay home to keep from spreading and contracting the virus, and they must go to work to pay the bills. Sheltering in place feels like a death sentence.

I lived at a Zen Buddhist monastery for ten years, followed by three more years at a city Zen temple. I did a lot of sitting still on a black cushion during that time — at least five hours a day, and sometimes for up to 18 hours a day.

Did I learn anything during my time as a monk that might be helpful during this weird and troubling moment in human history?

My first summer at the monastery I discovered how painful it is to not be able to pee when you have to. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with my prostate, but the internet tells me that it’s too big. Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, an enlarged prostate that compresses the urethra and impedes the flow of urine. The result is that you never get all the pee out and you always have to go.

Our monastery was the very definition of strict. Bathroom breaks were tightly scheduled. My teacher told me that at Myoshin-ji in Kyoto, where he trained as a youth in the early 20th century, they were even stricter. He would slowly, over the course of a long meditation day, let a little bit of urine leak out into his under-robes.

“Drip, drip, drip,” he said.

Basically he pissed himself.

I never quite went that far, but at one point I did buy a pack of adult diapers and wear one to the Zendo/meditation hall. I didn’t use it, and during a bathroom break I forgot it was there and lifted my robes at the urinal. An old priest was behind me. I fumbled with the diaper and then tore it off, peed, and threw it in the trash.

While I was washing my hands the old priest put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t become a victim of Zen practice.”

The problem worsened as the summer training season went on. One day I had to leave the Zendo in the middle of a sit to use the bathroom. In Rinzai Zen terms, this was akin to the President walking out of his State of the Union address for a potty break. I returned to the Zendo, but half an hour later I had to pee again. Bad. Like, nails-scraping-against-the-sides-of-the-bladder bad.

When I tried to leave the Zendo a second time, the Shoji, or monk in charge of students, whispered “You need to go to the second Zendo.”

Being put in the second Zendo felt like the end of the world. It was for infirm, injured, and otherwise incapacitated students. The ceiling leaked. There was mouse shit everywhere. As I sat on my threadbare, deflated cushion (the second Zendo was filled with shoddy equipment) next to a gassy old plumber with terrible knees, I realized I had a choice. If I wanted to be a monk, I would have to sit in the main Zendo regardless of how bad the pain got. Otherwise it was time to leave the monastery. There were no other options.

The problem seemed insurmountable, but it wasn’t complicated. I just had to sit through the horrible ache of having to pee. When I accepted this challenge, something changed in me, all by itself. A decade-old problem began to shift. It was as though my body realized that I meant business and it had to get on board. Soon I could hold out until the bathroom breaks. Eventually the issue disappeared. (It helped that I was taking Zinc and Saw Palmetto men’s health supplements, which had the side effect of making me really horny, but that’s another story.)

Let me be clear: it felt like something of a small miracle to watch a physical problem that had plagued me for ten years disappear in a matter of weeks simply because I had made the decision to not let it derail me from pursuing my higher purpose.

During times of crisis fear, shame, confusion, blame, and anger work to make us forget our higher purpose. Or perhaps they make us question whether or not we even have a higher purpose. We feel frayed at the edges, depressed, tired, anxious. We can’t sleep. We can’t wake up. We eat too much or we can’t eat at all. We live in a permanent state of feeling both guilty and helpless.

But strong as they are, there is no truth in these feelings. We were not put on this earth to cower inside our skulls and live with cramped stomachs, to pre-subordinate ourselves to anticipated disasters or mentally punish ourselves for not knowing what the blazes to do during the disaster at hand.

You do have a higher purpose, and it’s an important one.

During my difficult first summer at the monastery, a monk friend was listening to me complain about my albatross of a prostate and he said, “There’s an ancient Sanskrit mantra. I want you to repeat it really fast over and over on the cushion. The translation roughly goes, Don’t suffer motherfucker, Don’t suffer motherfucker, Don’t suffer motherfucker. . . .”

Meditation was born from the human need to stop suffering. It teaches us that suffering comes from the mind, and so too does the solution to suffering. There’s not much you can do on a personal level to heal the world economy or stop a powerful virus from spreading across the country. But you can acknowledge your terror, take a deep breath, note the stormy state of your internal weather, and then remember your higher purpose. Your body and mind will listen if you are determined to not obey your own suffering, no matter what the cost. Stop fighting yourself. Get the whole of you on your side with a firm intention and just watch what happens.

Don’t become a victim of the coronavirus.

Don’t suffer motherfucker.