Live. Pants. Breathe.
Michele Keido Daniels, Sensei
What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.1
I came upon this quote in a film about Thomas Merton streamed by Tricycle in 2022. It is so simple yet so profound.
What I wear is pants. Such a basic and necessary piece of apparel. Who is this I who wears pants?
What I do is live. He doesn’t say he’s a theologian, a writer or poet, no. What’s important to him is that he’s alive. Who is it that lives?
How I pray is breathe. Who breathes? We don’t willfully breathe, and the body can’t breathe without the environment. And what is prayer?
I see this as a recognition of life breathing through us. Life experiencing itself as us. With every breath we realize that we are miraculously alive. We are life itself, and breathing is how we connect to everything else. It speaks to an awareness of life within life, and prayer as the communion of all there is.
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being out in nature, taking a deep breath and at once feeling a sense of liberation and being one with everything. We may have this experience in zazen.
But how easy it is for us to take the breath and life itself for granted, not even realizing they’re present right here, right now.
Even when we sit zazen, we can take the breath for granted. Sometimes it becomes academic. Sit this way, count the breaths, come back to the breath. It becomes rote; we’re not really there.
Soon enough we’re lost in a story or the counting somehow moves outside ourselves. We refocus on the breath to get somewhere, to achieve something, to do it right. Sometimes we see it as a means to an end. We add on to the breath. We add on to life. We move away from it with our thoughts.
But it’s really so simple. We need to stop the mind, and we stop the mind by asking, Where am I right now? Why am I sitting? This brings us back into the body, back into our pants, so to speak! Back down to Earth! Back to the present. We let everything else go.
Once we realize where we are and why we’re sitting, we don’t just focus on the breath as if it were separate from us. We experience the breath just as it is (fast, slow, deep, shallow). We’re just feeling the breath, following it, staying with it.
Feeling it move through the body, we come alive. We breathe life back into ourselves. We become our bodies, breathing, living, and praying, communing with the great mystery. …
We are whole again. We’re relieved, liberated, joyful and happy. We don’t have to wait a lifetime for liberation. We don’t need books, teachers or even nature for that matter to inspire us. It’s all right here with every breath, in every moment. Nothing special has to be happening.
Awareness of our breath brings us back into the moment and takes us out of our minds, and into our bodies and hearts. Staying with the breath gives us the capacity to stay with whatever situation we’re in. Awareness of the breath has the power to transform our thoughts, speech, and action. It helps us see our judgements, watch our language and act without prejudice. The breath unites and harmonizes us with everything else.
So we see zazen is not a means to an end; it’s life slowed down. When the conscious breathing we experience in zazen is integrated into daily life, the experiences of daily life become sacred.
We are the stillness; we are the dog barking; we are the cars passing. We are nothing at all. There’s just unbounded breathing. Life breathing itself.
The breath is our anchor. We need nothing but the breath, and each breath is a prayer revealing that we are indeed aliveness itself. We are the great mystery.
1 Hall, Cassidy, director (2021). Day of a Stranger. The Merton Legacy Trust.
https://www.dayofastranger.com
This is part of a talk in the book, Digging in the Earth to Find the Blue Sky.
Sensei Michele Keido Daniels is Roshi Ray Cicetti’s first dharma successor and is a resident lay teacher along with Roshi Ray at The Empty Bowl Zendo in Morristown, N.J. Currently she serves on the zendo board and organizes residential retreats. She is a former public school educator who supervised the district’s English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education Programs.
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