Sesshin is an opportunity to cultivate a profound stillness, an awarenes, that’s much deeper than what we normally have. It’s an intensive, and it’s not intended to be the usual way of being. At the monastery they do it one week a month. To use an exercise analogy, it’s like lifting weights at max effort; it’s important for getting stronger, but it can’t be done all the time. It wouldn’t help and would probably be harmful.

The system of sesshin, the structure by which the intensity is created, is around 500 years old. It’s been modified to suit various situations, but the basic concept of it is to remove, for the period of the sesshin, as much as possible the myriad ways in which we normal get distracted. In other words, to limit the inputs we get. The bird is not going to stay on the wire if people are throwing rocks at it, if other birds are fighting for territory, and if the electrical company comes and starts doing repair work.

So, for a week, there’s a retreat; the curtains come down. No TV. No music. No Internet. No reading. No writing. No talking. No eye contact. Hands in a particular place when walking (no fidgeting). These rules, called precautions, are designed to cut off the various ways we communicate with the world.

This might sound terrifying. It is terrifying. But the more terrifying part, if you think about it, isn’t that we’re not getting any inputs, it’s that we’re left with very few escapes. All our cultural ideas of entertainment are no longer available to us, and the one thing we desperately try to avoid in life is now upon on us – we’re stuck with ourselves. The structure of sesshin continually drives us back to ourselves, and it does it relentlessly.

This is a good thing, because combined with the awareness cultivated by zazen, it gives us an opportunity to observe ourselves as we live. I was surprised at how hard my mind fought to keep my attention off whatever was in front of me. In zazen, it would look forward to the next meal. At the next meal, it would long for the next period of zazen. Anything, it says, is better than what’s going on right now, no matter what is going on. My mind was seeking escape, it didn’t have many options, and sesshin kept bringing me back to myself.

But, eventually, the mind stops struggling so hard. Like a baby who’s cried itself out, the convulsions get weaker, the excuses become more half-hearted. And then, somehow, the mind stops trying to be somewhere else.

The mind, at the very least the part of the mind that I wrestle with here, doesn’t know itself very well. It’s very afraid of the bird staying on the wire. If there are no people throwing rocks at it, no gusts of wind, it will knock it off itself.

On the third day of sesshin, as the resistance wears down, I start to experience things in a way that I have a hard time expressing in words. It feels as if I’m seeing things, really seeing things for the first time. When the mind stops telling you you’ll be happier in a minute – there is a joy in everything. Brushing my teeth becomes an incredibly joyous experience, and I marvel as the brush moves in my mouth. The very act of holding a tea cup is a great moment. And while chanting, the sound of the chant, the feel of the sound as my lips move from one syllable to the next, is so very beautiful.

The bird is you. The wire is you. The vast, boundless sky is you. These are not words; this is reality, stark and wild and gorgeous.

And then my leg twitches, or I wonder if the guy next to you in the robe is thinking bad thoughts about you, or I think about what you’re going to buy at the rest stop when you’re driving back from sesshin and I’m back in it again. And all I can do – all I need to do – is see it, let it go, and return your awareness to the present.