Wearing Patched Trousers

I’m on retreat this week at Sharpham - teaching on Buddhism and psychotherapy. It’s a wonderful space - tiny bit funky but in a wonderful position looking from high up down the estuary of the Dart, very comfortable and with several lovely co-ordinators who look after us all with great care. For me it is not only an opportunity to hear what comes out of my mouth when I teach my pet subject - always a surprise - but also to deepen my own meditation practice. Along with set periods for meditation throughout the day, intermixed with more community centred activities such as cooking and gardening, there is also loads of time to just sit. And that brings me to this blog.

Sitting just a bit more in a special place in the garden where very generously someone has left several folding chairs, I started thinking about the ‘doing nothing’ meditation that I introduced to the group yesterday evening during the talk. This is always a place of excitement and anxiety for me. On one hand it is something I absolutely love and am devoted to, but on the other it is almost impossibly difficult to teach. This came home to me during a conversation with two of the retreatants during which I asked them the classic question, ‘When you look for the source of your thoughts what do you notice?’. I should not have been surprised, since both of them were psychotherapists, to receive answers that drew on psychotherapeutic ideas about the unconscious and psychopathology. However, what I had hoped for - nothing, there is nothing there - was not immediately forthcoming. Ah …

Perhaps almost as difficult as glimpsing the minds essentially empty nature is the means to do so which is - as the name of the practice suggests - doing nothing! But the problem is already apparent in the name. Doing and nothing are more or less a contradiction in terms. I spent the week leading up to this. A simple calm abiding meditation with a huge emphasis on not being a war with ourselves or the practice, relax, relax, relax. Same with being present with our emotions felt in the body - what Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls ‘beautiful monsters’. The instruction being try meditating as if you are almost not meditating. And I really do understand just how hard this is. I have spent a great many years trying very hard not to try very hard. Intentionality is difficult to shake off.

And this neatly brings me to an image from a book that has stayed with me for years. One of those arresting images that I mentioned in the last blog. Sadly I cannot recall the books title but the image is of a little and quite elderly Chinese man who lives next door to the author amongst the woods of New England. As I write it now I can see him pottering around his small clapperboard house wearing patched blue trousers and an old shirt. There is just something right and at ease with him. To say he is like a Zen or Taoist hermit is in fact correct in that he simply ‘cuts wood and draws water’ but this also misses the essence by making the ordinary special again. It’s difficult to quite pin it down. However the connection is very clear.

  Back in my garden chair amongst the vegetables and looking down the Dart, it suddenly occurred to me to ask what would it be like to simply let the Dharma go. Just stop trying. The whole striving learning thing no longer part of my life. After all, this is the instruction for the doing nothing meditation. When we notice we are trying to do something to improve the practice, just drop it. In Tibetan non-modification, ma chöpa. In a way the whole Dharma thing is just an attempt to change the experience I am actually having in the moment. It’s one big improvement program so … let it go. This started me on a roll. What if I also gave up on meditation as well? I’ve been plugging away at it my whole life - it’s been an awful lot of trying. What would it be like to say to myself I don’t have to do this anymore? As things are now is absolutely fine, there is nothing else to gain, nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. This is it and it’s alright. The thought was a bit shocking but actually the felt-sense that went with it was surprisingly freeing. It felt like a weight being lifted from my shoulders and a big space opening. If nothing else it alerted me to just how deep and pervasive are the roots of my trying and what a burden they are without me really realising it. Remembering the little man in his patched trousers now I understand why he through the pages of the book so affected me. He had reached that place where he no longer practices meditation nor is he a Buddhist. He just pottered and mended things. I think he may have reached the other shore.

NW. 11 September 2025. With huge thanks to the wonderful Barn sangha who have enabled the insight for this blog.