Meditation: cultivating the mind

The main practice on which Zen relies to help all beings is meditation , which in Zen is called Zazen . It is a meditation to awaken to True Life, to help us overcome our conditioning and attachments that veil the reality of human existence.

The word Zazen , “simply sitting,” means that we sit in meditation simply, without aims or expectations, without wanting or thinking anything, even without the idea of ​​sitting without wanting or thinking anything.

The secret and the difficulty lie precisely in this word: simply . When we sit in Zazen , in fact, we abandon knowledge and understanding and enter naked into the practice of not-knowing.

Different Zen Masters have emphasized the "Practice of Silent Illumination," which in the Japanese Zen tradition is called Shikantaza , meaning witnessing the reality of one's being. In Zen, in fact, it is said, "You enter Zazen and never leave." This means that when you sit in meditation, you do so with your baggage of illusions and to practice something. Then your illusion of being a small, separate self vanishes, and there is no one sitting in Zazen anymore ; you are no longer there as you thought of yourself before. And when we reintroduce our knowledge and common human faculties into daily life, we know how to live them, bringing with us the adherence to reality as it is, developed in Zazen , and not just our own dualistic and discriminating vision.

Zazen understood as Shikantaza, “Practice of Silent Enlightenment”, is not to be confused with the mind fixed in Samadhi, that is, in that non-thinking state of absolute estrangement from reality.
Thus zazen it is not practicing something, but it is the manifestation of what we really are, it is the rediscovery of what we have always been. This is the realization.