Hallelujah: A Zen Story with Leonard Cohen
By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+
***
The word hallelujah is a Hebrew word that essentially means praise to the Lord. It’s an invitation to rejoice, to recognize the brilliance and beauty of divinity.
Why am I starting this post by defining the word hallelujah? Zoom back to Fall 2011. I had been in China for years, and I decided after my sister's wedding that I was going to stick around stateside and clear some skeletons out of the closet. But before I took my traumatic childhood head on, I stopped off at a monastery for a little while.
I was at Bodhi Manda Zen Center in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, and I entered into an intense training period known as kessei. I'm just doing the schedule of sitting long hours every day chanting, marching, and doing work practice — chores to keep the tempo up and keep the grounds clean.
On different days there'd be different tasks, and one day I found myself in a patch of weeds. Literally I was weeding on my hands and knees. It was tiring, dirty work. My mind would wander, and I'd call it back to the weeds. Then my mind would wander, and I'd call it back to the weeds. And I was doing that whole Zen practice where I was practicing just weeding, and all of a sudden I heard a haunting baritone voice just up the way.
It turned out at that particular retreat Leonard Cohen had come out of hiding. He'd gone away for years. But all of a sudden he was back on the scene, not only offering concerts again, but showing up for training with his teacher, Sasaki Roshi, who was my teacher. And there I was at the Zen center pulling weeds, making my way through another mundane moment in life. And all of a sudden I was totally exalted.
Everything was the same and nothing was the same one. Leonard started singing, and everything changed. It wasn't just me tripping over my clumsy robes and enduring the New Mexico heat. I was enjoying a private concert with Leonard Cohen, and I became aware of the quality of cool silvery autumn sunshine in New Mexico. And I felt the lusciousness of having a human body and having a human life. It's like the singing punched a hole in the sky and I could feel Leonard's heart and I was connected to it and I was connected to everything. And all of a sudden I felt this overwhelming outpouring of gratitude that I could just be alive in this moment. I couldn't believe I was experiencing what I was experiencing.
As I call up the story now, it strikes me what a classical Buddhist experience it was. Now granted, I haven't since had that experience of a rock star serenading me at a Zen center. That was just kind of lucky. But the metaphor holds that our life is full of ordinary moments. This one right now, and this one right now, and this one right now — endless moments in flux, sweeping through the space of awareness. And when we're collapsed, when we're lost in everyday mind, wandering and mind saying, “Oh, been here, done that. I'm just weeding, trying to stay cool. Everything seems quiet, boring and unremarkable.” And yet our awareness has this capacity to relax and open up and wake up. And when our awareness opens up and wakes up, all of a sudden more light filters through and more intelligence animates our being. And we get glimpses of how incredibly remarkable creation is itself and of the way creation goes on creating this moment and this moment and this moment.
One of the fundamental tenets of Buddhist practice is that life is not about how pleasurable the experiences we can have are. It's not about trying to chase after a more pleasurable experience, but really looking at how we're relating to every experience. What is our relationship to this moment? In that moment it was just some young man at a Zen center who had his heart blown open by Leonard Cohen and his beautiful baritone serenades. And so in that spirit I would like to invoke hallelujah. Let's do it.
*Start Meditation*
Go ahead and find a comfortable position so you can meditate — that you can relax and open your mind, your heart, your body. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, whatever you're feeling, whatever the content of your life circumstances of this moment, just give yourself some space to soften, to rest, and to just feel the fullness of life. It might not be a fullness full of everything you love and wish for and might be fullness mixed with the good and the bad. That's often what it is. But take a moment to just settle in here. Notice that even as life calls you to put forth great effort, you can be relaxed with it. You don't have to struggle with the struggle. You can just struggle.
And on a more subtle level, you can relax with the content of your emotions of your mind, letting go of the fight, letting go of the resistance, the reactivity to the truth of what's arising right now in this moment.
And in every moment the thinking mind will have a tendency to run a commentary. You know, just mapping things out: “I know what's going on. Here's what I need to do.” Reflecting on the past, “I wish I'd said this or done this. I wish things were like they used to be.” And so on and so on. We know what it feels like to hang out in the head — the thinking mind.
See what it feels like to relax and allow awareness, to allow your center of gravity to just drop down into the chest, into the heart. Then just feel how exquisitely alive you are, the way of the sharp edges of the world tend to melt. When you start to see through the eye of the heart, while the thinking mind analyzes and dissects, the intelligence of the heart unites and integrates like streams and rivers flowing into a single ocean. Fill the way your the different strands of sensory experience flow into and through the heart, linking you to everything, connecting you to everything and everyone.
Rather than evaluating this moment with your mind and deciding if you like it or not — if it's useful or not — feel what it is to just take a posture of wakefulness through the heart and just feel, feel everything you feel, feel how much you care about your life, how precious it is, and by extension maybe you can sense into how much you care about life itself, the movement of life across this planet and far beyond. Notice that as the heart wakes up, as you feel into the subtle currents of what the heart knows. The heart knows realities that the thinking mind simply can't know. Just feel what it is to know this moment.
It's said in the Hindu tradition that one of the basic qualities of reality is bliss. My intuition tells me that day at the Zen center in the gardens, hearing the hallelujah echo through the canyon that my friend was intuiting and plugging into, giving himself to and invoking a bliss, an ecstasy, a joy. Not that results from the personality, getting everything it wants all the time, but rather from relaxing into the simple feeling of being, feeling the energy, feeling the wakefulness of creation itself course through us, calling us to be alive, calling us to rejoice.
***
Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.