30 December, 2022.

Expect nothing.  That is what I said to myself as I sat down to zazen yesterday morning.  I repeated it to myself a few times in a random, unstructured way, as if I wanted it to be a mantra.  Expect nothing: it did have an immediate effect on my breathing and the focus of my mind in meditation.  I intended it to mean, and it went on to mean, expect no particular outcome or passing effects from this sitting; don’t expect the passing thoughts to be stilled, or to arise; expect no visions of the Tao, no particular moments of stillness.  The result was one of the finest sittings I have had in these many recent months of concentrated effort.  The breathing remained free and deep and activated a sense of peace.  After a while I had that sense of being unanchored in time that I have often enjoyed, perhaps no more than the release of memories that the brain normally suppresses, but memories that arise and are vivid and enable a sense of spatial embodiment in the past that the normal experience of memory does not.  In the pleasure of these sensations and forms of rest—and interspersed among them, a few moments of utter stillness, between the breaths—I did for the most part expect nothing, but received much.  While there is a danger in letting any phrase become a strategy, an instrument, I will try to seize this phrase as a kind of koan for my further study and scrutiny instead.