No Goal

We all spend the majority of our lives trying to accomplish something. When we are little, we are learning many new skills walking and talking, skills that we can then build upon to set higher goals like bicycle riding and sharing and math and friendship and group dynamics and success or failure. We build skill upon skill to try to get somewhere or get something or get some experience. Our parents and our family and our teachers and our friends all encourage and reinforce this need to get better, be different, do something so that you are accomplishing something in your life! Mothers and Fathers are proud when you achieve something. So, we’ve spent years being goal-oriented, wanting to change in some way, and now we come to this point in our lives when we’re sensing that we’re missing something. There is a piece of the puzzle that hasn’t yet been found. All this striving and trying sometimes leaves us exhausted and worried. We keep trying and trying and then find that we’re not where we want to be.

We hear about this practice called mindfulness and meditation, and legions of people swear to its ability to calm us, to make us more grateful, to take away our stress. We read some books about it, we give it a little try. Sometimes it seems to work a little and sometimes it seems to not work at all. Some people get discouraged and give up completely and go on to some other form of potential relief.

No wonder that by the time we get to this point and start to commit ourselves to this practice, most of us are really wound up with lots of goals and objectives about what meditation is going to do for us. Hoping for that zen bliss that everyone has spent some much dang time writing about that first encouraged us then only frustrated us when faced with the reality of the sitting.

It’s a wonder anyone keeps trying this practice at all! Why, why why keep trying to do something that doesn’t produce immediate results? Well, as the masters that went before us point out, because it does work, just not in the way we have been taught.

It works as a process, not as a goal. A sitting practice is about just being with whatever is in each moment, not culling out the moments that feel good and throwing away the moments that don’t feel so good. Each moment becomes precious, not because something special is happening, because the moment itself is special. Without adornments, without anything added.

Most of us, we have constant stimulation from external sources, trying to entertain us from the bare, raw essence of this moment. Having time in meditation allows us time with nothing added, including no goal. The goal is not to experience bliss or eliminate all pain. We can sit and practice just being, in all it's raw-ness and nakedness of awareness.

We just sit with whatever is happening, whether we label it good or bad, happy or sad. Just sit. No goal.

This Zen teaching may be disappointing to some who are new to the practice and were looking for some stress reduction. I should give a little encouragement that relaxation can be a side effect of this wonderful practice, BUT if you sit with the goal of being relaxed, your mind will most likely make the sitting harder. Your mind will begin then to point out all the ways that you are not relaxed, might even escalate the mind chatter and the feeling of stress. If you’ve been trying to distract yourself from your exhaustion and fear, meditation will first bring the experience into crystal clarity. And once we can sit, unflinchingly looking at our stuff, it can slowly become less sticky, less scary, less a part of who we experience as who we think we are.

We are encouraged to sit every day to ride the wave of awareness as it is, then whether we’re happy or sad, perky or tired, calm or stressed, we begin to see that those wild and varied up and down experiences are just noise, arising and falling away of their own accord. Stay present with anything that comes up, just staying present, not clinging to or pushing away. In a while, the stranglehold with which we have hung on to these moods starts to loosen a little. We just sit, no goal, just sit, nothing added.

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a book by Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the famous San Francisco Zen Center, he says, “In zazen sitting practice, what you are doing is not for the sake of anything. You may feel like you are doing something special, but actually it is only the expression of your true nature; it is the activity which appeases your inmost desire. But as long as you think you are practicing zazaen for the sake of something, this is not true practice.” Page 47

We sit and let go of any goals, even some need to have words to describe it. We don’t need to to define God or Nirvana or Buddha nature or the soul or whatever we might be grasping to understand. We just sit and in the sitting, everything and nothing will ultimately be revealed. Just sit with no goal. Just sit with highs and lows. Just sit.