What is required to practice an emotional koan

The heart of Mondo Facilitation is the emotional koan.  Given that the entire process is leading up to this emotional koan, it’s easy to forget the requirements for emotional koan work to be truly effective. This short blog will review the necessary requirements for successfully working with an emotional koan.  Let’s start at the beginning. 

Emotional koans are indeed koans.  What that means is that one has to have some successful experience of Clear Deep Heart/Mind. How does one know that one is having this experience?  How about “Can you listen without an opinion?” Hopefully by now, you experience this deep heart felt listening.  AND, in order for this experience to really inform your emotional koan work, you’ll need to have a regular zazen practice.  When I say you’ll need to, I don’t mean counting your breaths. I mean you have worked with your meditation practice to the point that you are familiar with the experience of the narrative self quieting and the boundless experience of pure awareness arising.  This is not just a random experience, rather, this is an experience that over time, you can get back to on the cushion.  For many, this will involve a committed meditation practice and, a good meditation teacher.

Assuming that you have noticed Clear Deep Heart/Mind enough, and you can get back to it in a reasonable manner, you will also need to able to notice the contraction of emotional reactivity in your body-mind.  Hopefully you know what I mean, but, in the Second Koan of Jun Po Roshi’s Mondo Facilitation, he discusses how we learn to recognize the feeling of emotional reactivity in our body.  This can also be practiced through somatic therapy and other somatic practices.  The bottom line here is that you are able to track your inner experiences enough such that you can recognize your own ego’s reactivity in your body.  This is not so much an on the cushion practice, rather, it’s a reflective practice in which you stop long enough, when emotionally triggered to really allow yourself to have the experience of the contraction without all the expressive emoting.  This is best done with someone guiding you, but it can be done through a mindfulness practice, when you allow yourself to really be mindful of what’s going on inside, particularly with stronger feelings.  

You will also need to be able to release this contraction, which too is often the realm of somatic psychology.  Or, for many of use, these contractions are expressions of old trauma, and to really be able to release these experiences, you’ll need to slow down enough to be with the pain of the trauma response.  It is particularly healing to do this with a trained therapist who can attune to your experience allowing for deep healing and the opportunity to better witness the contraction without the reactivity.

So, when you can remember and choose Clear Deep Heart/Mind with some ease, when you can recognize and release emotional and physical contractions when triggered, you are now well on the way to being able to work with an emotional koan.  What next?

From here, one has to learn how to go from feeling into the contraction, releasing the contraction to dropping into Clear Deep Heart/Mind.  We often use the word dropping to mean that we allow the clouds of emotional reactivity to clear such that we can truly remember and recognize the ever present pure awareness of Clear Deep Heart/Mind.  If one can get to this peaceful, open, vast, awareness space, feeling and seeing into the opportunity for a compassionate caring response is the next step of emotional koan work.  What this means is that one notices the deep caring that is informing the emotional reactivity and listening for a more embodied compassionate response. From this place we recognize that we are not really separate from one another.  From here, we can now consider a response.

For Jun Po Roshi, and for koan work, it’s not enough to notice the contraction, release the contraction, to drop into Clear Deep Heart/Mind. One must respond to the circumstances.  That completes the koan, embodied expression of the heart felt deep caring that naturally arises when one is able to respond from Pure Awareness.  Pure Awareness is embodied.

Swaha!