Does a Dog Have Buddha Nature?

I remember the soft breeze. 

We sat on soft cushions on the grass beside the pool, a clear blue rectangle. Pelicans and other Florida zoo-birds flew over, making their way from ocean to lagoon, swooshing over the impossibly thin strip of land called Casey Key.  

Our teacher guided us into meditation: I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember trying to keep my attention at the point in the center of my head. 

I felt light, calm. My body felt easy, soft. 

We followed the teacher’s instructions for how to breathe, her encouragement to relax, to just watch the breath, feel the breeze. 

I don’t know how long we sat, but the memory of being there is clear, bright. The joy, the novelty, the feeling of having arrived.

---

West Cornwall, Connecticut, years later: 
 
I walked out of the interview room boiling with rage, frustration, humiliation; stupid koan practice, stupid teacher!

I stomped back to the zendo: a beautifully renovated barn, all finely crafted wood and windows, light and space, a growling heater in the corner.  
 
I HATE KOANS.

Hot tears ran down my face as the meditation retreat continued: we sat, walked, sat and walked. Thirty minutes sitting, ten minutes walking, endless.

I had been so sure I had the answer!
 
A koan is a little like a writing prompt, to which I am supposed to offer a response, something that reveals I ‘get it.’ 
 
In a Zen interview (known as Dokusan) you enter a room where your teacher is sitting. Typically, you bow upon entering and leaving. My teachers are not monks. They don’t wear robes, though sometimes the more formally-trained one wears a special sort of outfit, a loose, comfortable-looking black shirt with a band collar and matching pants, maybe silk?

My other teacher favors jeans and a sweatshirt. They provide a gentle yet firm presence in the room. Often there is laughter, then tears, sometimes rage.

Each time I’d walk into one of the interview rooms with some dread. 

I started with “Mu.” 

Mu is often the first koan Zen students are given.

On my first week-long silent retreat with this Zen group, my teacher read me the koan: “‘Does a dog have Buddha-nature?’ ‘Mu!’”

It was just the two of us in the interview room, which is really just an office in the big retreat house. The walls were covered with bookshelves.
 
I sat blankly, dumbfounded, in the wooden chair across from my teacher.

What? I thought.
 
My teacher suggested that I just carry “Mu!” with me. Bring it swimming, keep it with me while cleaning toilets, canning the peaches, talking to my husband, just “Mu!” (which is sort of like “No!”)
 
It took me two years to understand it (I think I understand it now).

I spent much of those two years wrestling with myself, thinking I had the “answer,” feeling mortified in interview after interview.
 
How do you REALLY show up in these interviews; what does it really mean to be authentic, real, genuine?  
 
If you go in there thinking you know the answer, usually you don’t.
 
I wanted to perform, to be applauded, liked. Actually, I wanted to be LOVED, to be told (and maybe convinced?) that I really WAS good enough.  
 
I approached my teachers again and again in these interviews, nervously, and sat in the opposite chair.

I gave my answers.
 
“That’s not quite what I’m looking for…”
“Naahh…” 
A small shake of the head, no.
 
Smoke poured out of my ears. I couldn’t seem to figure it out.  
 
I’d return to the zendo full of meditators in deep silence, eyes closed, backs straight, infuriated.
 
Everyone else seemed to have figured it out, but not me. I wondered about each of my fellow students, had she figured it out? Had he? How long did it take them? Which koans were they on now? (There are hundreds). We were in silence so I had no idea.  
 
Even after the retreat, when we were allowed to talk again, there seemed to be an unwritten code that said you never actually revealed which koan you were working on. It was sort of like talking about how much money you made.  
 
They say in Zen that you will try to use all the strategies of your life – your intellect, analysis, reason, calculation, determination, stubbornness, competitiveness, you name it – to understand/solve koans.  
 
All the things that may (or may not) have helped you to succeed during your life (in school, at work, even at home),  but have mostly just gotten in the way.
 
Put simply, there’s nowhere to hide.
 
Koan study is designed to help you meet yourself and your usual strategies for “success,” your narratives about yourself and your life, in the interview room.  
 
I met them all: rage, humiliation, frustration, “I’m a failure,” “I’m not good enough,” as I tried to “figure it out.” 
 
I pulled into the driveway after yet another week-long silent retreat, irritable, disappointed. “I hate koans!” I said to my husband as I walked in the door. 
 
“Then why do you do them?” He began to hate koans too. It wasn’t helpful.
 
Finally, after years of sitting and grudgingly letting this first koan soak its way into me, understanding began to creep in, like the light at dawn when you think “Is that the sun? Or does the room just seem a little less dark?”
 
Many, if not most, Zen students have a love-hate relationship with koans. 

Some koans are easy to love, others easy to hate, especially at first. 
 
Mostly now, when I make a koan presentation that my teacher doesn’t accept, I don’t mind staying with a koan for a while – though I still get dunked in humiliation and hear that persistent voice whispering, “You know, you’re really not good enough/loveable/worth anything.” 
 
Koans can keep you company as you sit in meditation, but I find that even more importantly, they keep me company in my life. “Aha!” happens at weird times, but usually not when you expect it or want it.
 
So I return to “Just this.” 
 
This moment, this breath… and this one, and this one…as I try to stay awake to my life as it is happening. The parts I like and those I don’t. To sit still in meditation and welcome everything.  
 
That’s the real challenge, welcoming everything! 
 

Sitting on the Edge of What I Don’t Know (My Yoga Teaching Journey)

We used paper cards to track the student’s classes; I don’t think there was a computer, in any case we didn’t use it.
 
“We will need two blankets, two blocks, a strap and a bolster, oh yes, and a chair.”
 
I had to deconstruct the complicated backroom Jenga to get the chairs out of the cramped space behind the door.

The floor back there was damp cement, dusty, seemed spidery.

But in the practice room the floor was gorgeous, smooth maple. The postage-stamp-sized lobby seemed always sunny. 
 
The terrain was new; new words, new phrases, new cues, most of which I’d learned from my teachers, either in my first teacher training or from Karin (my new teacher here in Cambridge).

I tried to attribute everything I borrowed: “As my teacher Karin Stephan says….”

Mostly I experimented with language and demonstration, then more and more what I hoped were gentle, calibrated physical adjustments: 

A hand on a tight, raised shoulder. 

A light pull on fingertips or wrist. 

Righting a tilting torso.

Some people were all in, wanting the physical cues and experiences to teach them where to be, how to move. Like rare cats who actually like to be petted, they’d stay close and breathe deeper during an adjustment, enjoying the experience of being cared for, seen, and the healing that can bring.
 
Others did not want to be touched (and that’s ok too).

I’d say “May I?” as I moved toward a student I did not already know, trying so hard to be calibrated, to get it right with everyone.

Impossible.

I could usually tell right away if a student was not going to like my class, even before we started. 

The runners, former gymnasts and Power Yogis were usually agitated, miserable and dying to move, sweat, and put their bodies to the test.

They were sorely disappointed.

One woman walked out after about twenty minutes. Another time, when I subbed for an Ashtanga teacher, a few people peaked into the studio, saw it was me and turned around and walked out.

Ugh.
 
The feeling of performing, of being “on” was intense, as I tried to bring something of myself into the studio, to add something of my own to the mix of learned verbiage and borrowed inspiration.

Not knowing if you really had to line up “The five fingers of the knee over the five toes of the foot,” in Warrior II, as Iyengar said.

Initially, faithfully, I gave the same cues as my teachers, not knowing when and exactly how they could or should be modified.

I am always sitting on the edge of what I don’t know, even now.

But then, in the early years of teaching I had none of my own experience to fall back on.

The only thing to do was to keep collecting moments of understanding as they arose.

To slow down, to observe my students, to feel what was happening in my body during the pose and conjure what might be happening in theirs.
 
Finally, 20 years in, I’m still sitting there next to the vast ocean of all I don’t know, but the years of earnestly trying and failing and trying again to meet each student where they are gets a little easier.

It feels more intuitive as I attempt to bring the yoga pose to the student in the way that honors and nurtures them, rather than trying to force the student into the “right” way of doing the pose.
 
And so now, as I continue to try, to fall down and get up, there is so much more joy, so much less angst. 
 
I hope that you, whether student or teacher-and-student, can drop into the joy and beauty, as well as the messiness and the pain, of doing/living yoga, the hope and disappointment of being human, but above all, the love.

love,

Anne

Into the Wind: Insights from a Week in Canada’s Wilderness

We loaded the boats with "dry" bags: a red one, several oranges, many blue. Fishing rods, water bottles, cook kits.

The boats were light, 43 pounds, the kayak heavy, God knows how much it weighed!

We started paddling through the calm inlet in the rain, turned left and began paddling into the wind. The next day we set off optimistically thinking we knew where the portage was, only to find that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

We hoped the water would be high enough for us to paddle through the next lake, but the map said: “Ce n’est pas canotable…”

The day before, my nephews, 13 and 15, arrived with my brother-in-law in the late afternoon.  My husband Dan and I showed them all of the food we had packed, the dinners I had dehydrated in the basement (thank you, dehydrator!), the amount of hot chocolate (mini marshmallows added separately), the jars of peanut butter, tubes of jelly, a mountain of beef jerky from Trader Joe’s, crackers, oatmeal and much, much more. 

We drove ~10 hours and ended up at Le Domaine, our canoe and kayak rental site, about 2.5 hours northeast of Montreal at 8:00pm. The next day we were given two canoes and a kayak, paddles, life-vests, rescue ropes, all the trimmings. To check the integrity of the canoes the stringy young guy poked, prodded and pulled on the sliding wooden seats, the thwarts and the yoke.  He pressed into suspected weak spots in the fiberglass and pronounced our boats “beautiful.”  I was a tiny bit skeptical.  They looked just slightly worse-for-wear.

We hoisted the boats on top of the van – at one point I climbed over the windshield, spider-like (or so I thought) and perched, curled up on my knees on top of the van, just behind the windshield. 

I was proud, this was going to be easy! Look how agile and capable I am!  Unfortunately my boney knees were digging into the domed top of the van, just enough to leave two little round knee-dents, ugh. Deflating.

 We drove northwest for about two hours to La Verendrye, a wildlife preserve. Wilderness.

La Verendrye Wilderness Preserve in Quebec

I followed our progress on the map, watching as lake after lake flew by.

This region of Quebec is like Swiss Cheese, where the holes are all lakes.  It’s riddled!    

When we launched in a light rain, we pushed off from the muddy, reedy shore, into a winding channel that opened into a small bay of a large lake.

The waves seemed to grow as we paddled southwest, our arms and bodies not yet used to the movements, we strained to keep the boats from turning sideways, swamping.

We'd stop in the lee of an island, check our course, and then off again into the wind. This would be the first of many times the map didn’t exactly seem to match what we were seeing. 

A little worried about the boys: could they do this? Could we?

Then, the weather might change, the wind would die, the rain would stop and the water would turn glassy, silky, easy to paddle, we'd glide.  

We’d come face to face with what it is to be alive on this planet. With what it means to feel and live every moment. 

When it’s raining, you’re wet. 

When it’s sunny, you dry out. 

When there’s mud you sink in deep  – and you may not get your shoe back.

You’re not in your head out there.

You’re in a canoe, searching for a portage, trying to match the map to what you see as you paddle (which doesn’t always go as planned).

And then all of a sudden you see the yellow portage sign and a sigh of relief washes over you. You’re more in touch with your animal nature out there. Moment to moment.

To portage, with the amount of stuff we had, meant two trips to get all our gear to the next lake.

The canoes were exquisitely well-balanced, easy for one (larger) person to carry, but treacherous on slippery paths, with the occasional fallen log and overhanging tree branch, making the path tricky; the kayak was worse. 

And so it went, six days and six nights out, paddling lakes, unpacking the boats to carry everything overland to the next lake, re-packing, paddling again. Some days we had no portages; one day we had four.

Every morning and evening we’d unpack the stove from the “Yucca pack,” boil water, make a meal, eat from our plastic bowls with our lightweight spoons, wash the dishes and put everything away again.

Occasionally we’d have fresh fish for dinner, caught with triumph and competitiveness, weighed and measured with the “De-liar (really, there is such a thing!),” dredged in cornmeal, fried in oil and eaten with delight. Trying for precision, accuracy, organization to make it easier to find everything every time…

”Where are the matches?” 

“They’re in the blue breakfast bag…”

The first campsite was on a point marked by the bright yellow sign with a black canoe and a tent, infinitely reassuring.  

The site was thick with pine needles, soft and deep, padding our steps.  The canoes went upside down on the beach and the tents went up, just in case of rain.

Such joy as the tent found its shape under our hands.

We worked quickly, and as the days went by, with more and more speed and ease.  Our refuge established, we stowed our sleeping bags and pads in the warm, dry tents and the guys all headed out to fish.  

For me, a little quiet time, a swim, some reading, then preparing dinner on the fierce little stove. Boil water, add the dehydrated dinner to the pot and let it sit for 15 minutes in its homemade “Cozy,” just like for a tea pot, only created from this puffy, silvery insulation stuff, Reflectix® and duct tape.

Everything tastes good when you are in the wilderness.

After dinner, fighting swarms of mosquitoes we'd brush our teeth and spit into the fire ring.  If you were brave and didn't mind a few more bites, you might splash your face in the cool lake before bed.  Otherwise, you'd keep your bug net over your head and slip into the tent as fast as possible, zipping up quickly to keep the number of mosquitos you let in to a minimum.  Then you'd spend the next 10 minutes or so trying to find and squish the ones who’d gotten in, and who would otherwise surely munch on you that night.

It was an arduous trek. 

The days were long, paddling and hauling our gear overland between lakes, and the only thing that made this possible for me and my husband and brother-in-law was yoga. We did it almost every day — one day it was raining so hard we just had to scramble for our boats and go!

Without the yoga, the "grown ups" on the trip, all three of us over 57, would have had a MUCH harder time paddling and portaging almost 80 kilometers over 6 days, and likely would have returned MUCH the worse for wear.

My 13 and 15 year-old nephews even found it helpful (okay, maybe just the 15 year-old).

I was amazed by how much fun it was to paddle against the wind and waves, sink into the squishy mud, to bang my head (hard) against a tree, twice (!), fall into the lake and carry endless loads over tricky paths with bugs biting every inch of our skin. 

And then there were the Bald Eagles, the Loons, the tiny dime-sized frogs and the dollar-sized toads, the blue of lake and sky, the sky full of puffy clouds from end to end, the wind at our backs, surfing the waves.  The no other people.  The no cell phone coverage.  The stars.

Travel is one of the most fulfilling, thrilling, and exuberant ways we can access the present moment.

When we extricate ourselves from our daily lives, we brush up against the aliveness and freshness of the moment: then, we can return to our daily lives more refreshed, more alive.

In April 2023 I’m heading back to beautiful Tuscany for a week of yoga amidst the rolling hills, delicious food, and a chance to explore the rich local culture — and I would love for you to join me.

The Tuscany Yoga Retreat is nothing like my recent Canoe-Camping trip in La Verendrye (in case you were concerned about that!) so if you’d much prefer to sip organic local wine and stroll through medieval hill towns, then this Italian adventure is for you!

Zen on Zoom: A Silent Meditation Retreat in a Pandemic

Have you ever been curious about a silent Zen meditation retreat? How about attending a meditation retreat online?

---

In the blackness my alarm jangles. Fumbling, I silence it, trying not to wake my husband.

Shivering as I slip out of the warm blankets, I pull on sweatpants, a sweater, a warm fleece hat.

I tiptoe into my daughter Grace's room (empty -- she now lives in Vermont) and pull up the shades to let in the darkness, the moon.

I open the lid of my computer and it glows to life. Password. Email. Zoom link. I'm in.

I click "Join without video" so I can shuffle around, gather myself and finally settle on my roost, comfy and quiet.

Then I lean forward to click the red line away from the video icon and there I am, one square among 9, 12, now 14. Darkness still pervades as the bell rings and we settle in. 6AM.

Each day of the silent retreat starts this way, followed by walking meditation and a break for breakfast. The mornings are my favorite times, apart from dragging myself out of bed, that part I don't really like. But as we sit, the light slowly rises, even as we settle deeper.

The silence is profound, just this breath...then this one...then this one.

What I realized, though, on this retreat, is that when we practice from home, on Zoom, I'm missing the joy of stepping out of my life, my milieu, the day to day. I’m missing the escape to the meditation retreat.

Before the pandemic, these meditation retreats were held in western Connecticut. We stay in a lovely old farmhouse amidst a gorgeous rolling countryside. We eat delicious food. And yes, we sit and walk and sit and walk for long hours, but also we watch for beavers in the river. Listen to the birds and walk among the trees.

Here at home it's "Here is your life. How do you live? How will you meet it today?" No escape!

Sitting the retreat here (as is the common Zen phrasing), at home, I was forced to sit with myself, my life, with the way things truly are, not distracted by a beautiful landscape, adventure, a harmonious Zendo for sitting...

Sitting closer to the truth of my daily life, with things as they actually are and not how I'd like them to be.

In the end, after three and a half days my nervous system had dropped a few notches, as it usually does on long (ish) retreats.

It felt easy to drop right into my body, the breath, and there were times of pure relaxation and joy, just as there are on "Real" retreats. The beauty was that afterward I had no long drive and no bumpy transition back into my life. I was already here, real, in it. What a surprising gift!

Are you a a meditation practitioner, or curious about meditating? I offer a Free Monday Meditations on Zoom.

They’re low-key, relaxing, lightly guided 30-minute sessions, perfect for beginners or seasoned meditators.

All are welcome — and the beauty of Zoom is that we can practice together from anywhere in the world! To get on the email list and receive the weekly Zoom link, please fill out this quick contact form.

A Yoga Pose Is Not an Achievement

“So how did it happen? Your hip replacement, I mean?” 

My friend cradled her tea cup in her palms and sat back in her chair.

“Well,” I began, “the first diagnosis was that fourteen years of ballet was the likely culprit, which caused so much wear and tear on the joint that the joint space had shrunk and that is why I was having hip pain.  

During that time, I was immersed in the yoga ethos of the era, which was ‘Deeper is better.’ The implication was that you couldn’t hurt yourself with yoga, because it was inherently healing.” 

She nodded gently.  

“That isn’t to say that during my teacher trainings there weren’t discussions about the potential for injury and how to avoid it, but the advanced classes I was taking were altogether different:. 

The idea was that if you could get into Ekapadarajakapotasana (King Pigeon pose), there was something inherently meaningful and valuable about it.  

It was not just a pose, it was an achievement on many levels, rarified, admirable, even enviable, though we weren’t supposed to admit to envy. So I overdid the stretching repeatedly.  

I probably only did King Pigeon pose about five or six times over the years, but each time I did the full pose (pulling my back foot in pigeon over the top of my head to touch my forehead from behind), two to three days later I would throw out my back.  And yet I kept doing it.   

In those days we did a lot of very deep stretching and “Yoga” was largely thought of as being about to bend yourself into a pretzel. That’s why people still say I can’t do yoga, I’m just not flexible.”

My student was nodding more vigorously now: it seemed I wasn’t the only one who falsely thought the deeper you pushed into a pose, the more effective it would be.

I continued: “What I did not understand at the time is that I needed to do strengthening and integration work to stabilize my joints and balance out all the stretching I was doing.  

Now, when I practice and teach I am constantly trying to create that balance between building strength in all the muscles surrounding the joints as well as stretching in a calibrated way to allow for both strength and length in the body as much as possible.  

Anne Teaching Yoga at her annual Tuscany Yoga Retreat

This work hinges on building a sense of where your muscles are in space and what they are doing, so that you can feel and modulate your intensity as you do yoga.”

This is why I’m so passionate about helping others calibrate the balance between strength and flexibility. 

The Yoga Within Tier II Membership offers a personalized route to your new yoga landscape: whether you’re recovering from an injury, heading toward surgery, or simply wanting to re-learn how to practice yoga in healthier ways, I love helping students find their way back into their bodies.

With the Yoga Within Tier II Membership you receive:

• One Private Yoga Class per month (1 hour) which can be either in person or via Zoom

• Plus the full library of classes to fit your schedule

• You save $30 every month with this option!

Want to check out the entire online library of yoga and meditation classes for free?

Join the Yoga Within Tier 1 Membership: you can try it completely free for 30 days.

After that it’s only $15/month — less than the cost of a single Yoga Class!

Breakfast & Your Daily Yoga

Mundane Joy

The smooth green tiles feel good under my feet. The kitchen is quiet. I heft the filter pitcher and pour, filling the kettle. It's electric blue knob glows.

The mugs are beautiful, with a blue owl, a red and white bird-fox, tree-ish things with curving branches, budding flowers... Chagal-esque. These mugs are always handled with care.

Half of a lemon, squeezed into hot water – I sip slowly, moving from cupboard to dish rack to counter, collecting plates, eggs from the fridge, jam.

I toast the bread, spread the ghee, slice the egg, let its velvety yolk melt softly, sprinkle with salt, not too much.

Then comes the tea: joyful swirl of white milk in brown, like roiling clouds.

My new strategy for healing anxiety is exquisite self care. Caring for others is easy. For myself, not a given.

My new strategy for holding my habit of worry is to try to look behind the worry, see what's there. 

A belief? A story? A lie?

My new strategy for healing is to feel it in this body, notice clenching, grip. 

Observe it, explore it, but not try to ignore or banish it. 

To stay with it and watch it change. 

Healing the body

Daily yoga can feel mundane too, or not.  

Some days it's magic, like hot tea, joy, or warm toast, the movement creates a sensation of freedom. 

Other days it feels like a chore, and sometimes it feels like the body betrays us.  

Snatches away what we thought was our practice and brings in pain, limitation, fear.

I remember so vividly the humiliation when I realized that I, a yoga teacher, was going to need a hip replacement. It took seven years to process.

Along the way I learned so much about making peace with my body and making space in my joints, building strength to ease pain.   

It was a surprisingly rich experience. Not that I would wish it on anyone. I'd rather wish for you to continue in your body just as it always has been: strong, familiar, easy.  

The upside is that now the work I do in private sessions has become an even more exciting place for me to help others. I am thrilled to be able to support students in finding practical tools to enable mobility, enhance strength and feel better in their bodies.  

We start by finding where you are comfortable, where your body can rest, and then move from there, along the lines of ease, intuition and healing.  

I can work with you to find a way back from discouragement to movement, while holding the fear and grief that can come with our ever-evolving bodies. 

If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of alignment, work on specific postures, or build greater strength, I’m here for you.  

Tier I: First Month Free 

The Tier I membership video library gives you on-demand classes: practice any time, any where. With over 70 Yoga & Meditation classes there’s something for everyone, from beginners and those recovering from injury to core-strengthening and more advanced techniques.

You receive unlimited access to all yoga classes. New classes added regularly, so check back regularly to enjoy the new content.

Cost: Only $15/month & your first month is FREE!

Tier II: Monthly Private Yoga Session with Anne, ERYT500

(either online or in-person for those in the Boston area)

If you’d like a more personalized experience, the Tier II Membership may be for you:

With Tier II you receive access to the rich collection of video classes, PLUS a monthly private session with me (at a discounted rate):

The monthly private yoga classes in the Tier II membership allow me to support you as you manage joint pain, back pain, scoliosis, injury and the myriad other challenges that appear in our bodies.

My regular rate for private sessions is $150/hour (via Zoom or in person for those in the Boston area), but with the Tier II Yoga Membership you receive a your monthly private class in addition to the video library.