At long last, I can now finally get around to describing the sesshin at Sanshin (Bloomington, Indiana). The actual event was last month (February 10 through 12), but due to a variety of circumstances, this tale waited until now to be told.

Not that any of it seems relevant anymore, at least in a narrative sense. But on Thursday, Feb. 9, I flew from Atlanta to Indianapolis, rented a car, and drove the 45 miles or so to Bloomington, a college town, home of Indiana University (and also, incidentally, Sanshin Zen Community).

Auspicious beginnings: pulling in to the parking deck at Hartsfield-Atlanta Airport, my odometer rolled over to the 2,000th mile. And the first morning in Bloomington, after getting up at the ghastly hour of 3:15 am for the first sitting period of 4:00, I saw a family of deer in the road just before the zendo. A buck, doe and about four fawns, standing in the road looking at me like, well, like deer in headlights. I killed the lights (it was a residential side-street), and they wandered off - I can still hear the sounds of their hoofs on the asphalt.

Now, I'm not such an urbanite that seeing something as common as deer is a big event. It's just that I was in a state of mind to appreciate the magic of these large, gentle creatures roaming the backyards of suburban Indiana in the dead of night while the good Bloomingtonians slept.

Walking in the zendo door, I was greeted by Rev. Okumura himself, who was heading down to the basement zendo (the center is a large house, with the Okumura family living in the top two floors and the basement converted to a zendo). Observing silence, he indicated to me where to leave my shoes and where to hang my coat, and entering the zendo (there were already about a dozen people sitting in meditation), where to sit.

The schedule was pretty rigorous by my standards - 14 50-minute periods of zazen (sitting meditation) each day, with 10-minute periods of kinhin (walking meditation) in between. There were three one-hour breaks for meals at 6 am, noon and 6 pm, leaving a total of 14 periods of meditation between 4 am and 9 pm.

The zafus (sitting cushions) at Sanshin were a little softer than I was used to, and did not give me quite as much lift off the ground as I like, and I had trouble finding a comfortable position. This problem only compounded itself through each sitting period, and by lunch of the first day, after 7 periods, I was experiencing significant pain in my legs, feet and lower back. I tried sitting in different positions - cross-legged and kneeling, zafu laying flat and on its side, etc - but the pain continued. I even resorted to using a kneeling bench - something I never do back in Atlanta (not that there's anything wrong with it).

Now this may sound counterintuitive or even masochistic, but the pain was actually a great teacher. We spend much of our life trying to avoid, or at least minimize, discomfort, yet in zazen, we learn to accept whatever sensation arises and not discriminate between "good" and "bad." At times, the pain was so intense that it actually had the benefit of uncluttering my mind of all the random thoughts usually running rampant (the so-called "monkey mind") as I focused only on the pain. It took great effort to sit still, and even greater effort to sit back down again, after the too-brief kinhin, back into the painful posture. But I did, and completed all 14 of the first-day periods.

On Day Two (same 14-period schedule), I skipped the first two periods (4 and 5 am), and joined the sesshin at 7 am after the 6:00 o'clock breakfast break. Frankly, my body needed sleep and rest more than it needed those two periods of zazen. But despite this later start, the sitting was still as intense and uncomfortable as the first day.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who was suffering, and occasionally I would hear one or two of the others fidgeting or changing posture. However, I came to greatly admire the sangha there for their great effort, and the way they enthusiastically sat right back down at the beginning of each period to dive into another 50 minutes of practice.

Sunday started at the luxuriously late hour of 9 am (for me at least, there were two early-morning, pre-breakfast periods of zazen, which I chose to skip). At 10 am, Rev. Okumura gave a fine dharma talk on the Eightfold Path and following a short service, we were done for the day. There was a small reception with tea and snacks ( I brought a box of Godiva chocolates as a gift for the sangha, which was enthusiastically received), and finally the opportunity to break the silence and talk to some of the members, including Rev. Okumura.

The Buddha sat in meditation before and up to his great enlightenment, and prescribed meditation for his followers as part of the path to enlightenment. However, after his awakening, he continued the practice, as have all enlightened beings. So, the great effort that we had made, our practice, is both to path to, and the path of, enlightenment. For this reason, Dogen said that practice and enlightenment are one and the same thing.

After the reception, I had allowed myself time to tour Bloomington for a while, driving around the university. I stopped at the Geology Department to see if they had a museum, but the building was locked on Sunday. I returned to Indianapolis and drove around Indy for a while before finally going to the airport and catching my flight home.

The sesshin took great effort on my part, but that's exactly why I had gone - to push myself and my practice a little bit, to set higher goals, and to seek a little harder. As for the pain I experienced, I don't feel it now - all phenomena are temporary, everything passes.

I look forward to my next visit, although with upcoming trips to New York and Phoenix, I'm not sure when that next opportunity will be.