REsources for Living
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Have you recently started up something new? Even if you haven’t, you probably remember a time when you did. I certainly have very clear memories from several years ago when I decided for the first time to take an aerobics class. I’d joined a gym for the first time in my life, and it quickly became clear that running on a treadmill was way, way too boring to keep doing on a regular basis.
So I figured I’d try one of the classes that they offered at the gym. I snuck into a spot in the back of the room and did my best to follow what the toned and perky teacher was doing up front. To say this was not my strong suit would be like saying that the Amazon rain forest is large and green. I couldn’t tell my right from my left, headed forward when I was supposed to be going backward and was beet red and panting before 10 minutes were up. At 20 minutes I figured that was good enough and went home.
I might have given up that day at the end of the warm-up, confused and exhausted, but something in me declared that it was worth coming back. And coming back and coming back.
I know it sounds like my first try at aerobics was a pretty horrible experience, but really it wasn’t. I was just a beginner. I didn’t know the routines, or even how to learn the routines. I wasn’t in shape, and had never much had the experience of exercising for the sake of exercise. Some while later I realized that I didn’t even know what “exhausted” really felt like, as opposed to “hot and sweaty.” That’s how it is when you’re a complete beginner at something. You just don’t know.
And while most of us might think of being a complete beginner as something that we should try to get through as soon as possible, the Buddhist tradition has a very different take on the matter. In Buddhism, “Beginner’s Mind” is a goal, a blessed state that people, ironically, work hard to achieve. Beginner’s Mind, or shoshin, describes a state of being open, of being without assumptions or preconceptions, of eagerness to experience whatever is out there, of creativity and optimism. The Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, says: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
When we are experts at something we know how it is supposed to be done. We are ready to judge whether we, or anyone else, are doing it the “right way.” But with Beginner’s Mind there is the possibility that the “right way” could turn out to be entirely different than what the experts had imagined.
A few years ago I saw a video— I wish I could find my way back to the link—of a woman who had taught herself to play guitar. Just herself. No instructional videos or books, and no one else in her village who played. And so everything about the way she played, from the way she held the instrument to the parts of her hands she used to play, was totally different from anything I had ever seen before. It was totally different from anything anyone had seen before. Her sound and her style were utterly unique, because she had truly come to the guitar with Beginner’s Mind, and out of that complete openness she had come up with something beautiful that had never occurred to anyone else in the world.
It might seem like there could be nothing easier than practicing Beginner’s Mind. After all, how hard is it not to know things? But it isn’t easy at all. Whatever we might be doing, however inexperienced or expert we might be, we carry the weight of our worries about whether we are right, whether we look stupid, whether we are better or worse than other people in the room. We carry our arrogance about all we’ve learned and we carry our need to impress the people around us and our goals of being just like the people we admire. We carry the desire to show other people how to do it “right” and the fear that we will never be “right” ourselves.
Beginner’s Mind, the state of absolute simplicity, just isn’t that simple in real life. But it is, in fact, something that you can practice. Zen meditation is one way. Another way is to take up something new, just for the joy of trying it out. Taking up a musical instrument or learning a new language or throwing pottery or whittling or skiing or, yes, aerobics can be a way to embrace the experience of not knowing, with the pleasure of opening yourself to something new. It helps if it’s something that you don’t feel like you have to be good at, that nobody is giving you a grade or work review on. It’s easier if the people you feel competitive with—your siblings or your close friends or your spouse—are not all that interested in whatever you take up.
But whatever the circumstances, it’s all opportunity to practice letting go of the voices that will want to fill up your Beginner’s Mind with what you’re supposed to do, and how you’re supposed to be and just open yourself to the joy of stepping out onto a new path, whether you dance or stumble along your way.
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