Breathing and Birthing on the Living Room Floor

A Guest Post by Shozan Jack Haubner, Zen Priest and Author

Photo by Alex Hockett on Unsplash

This is a guest post by a new acquaintance of mine, Shozan Jack Haubner. Shozan is an ordained Rinzai Zen priest who spent more than a decade living at a Rinzai Zen Monastery in Southern California. His essays have won a Pushcart Prize, and he has been published in the New York Times, The Sun, Lion’s Roar, and the Best Buddhist Writing series. His first book, Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk, was chosen as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2013 and won an Independent Publisher Book Award. His latest book is Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex.

Below is a chapter from a new book that Shozan is writing. His humor, honesty, self-reflection (and deprecation!), and keen observation are necessary attributes of talented writers and compassionate priests. Thank you Shozan for sharing this excerpt with SparkZen readers. Enjoy!

---

Two years ago Karl messaged me on Twitter. He had read my books. He too lived in Vienna. He wanted to buy me a beer at a famous socialist pub. He seemed odd and grumpy, like I owed him money, even though we’d never met. I’ve since discovered that saying someone is odd and grumpy is just another way of saying they’re Austrian. We’ve become good friends.

I recently learned that his daughter was born on his living room rug. Not by choice. It was a quick birth. When the thing began to happen, Karl bolted out the front door and scoured his apartment complex looking for a doctor. He found a veterinarian instead. I have an image in my head of these two men peering between Karl’s wife’s knees, Karl frowning and the veterinarian coaxing the child forth with a doggy biscuit.

I guess Karl needed to let off some steam after his firstborn splashed out right there on the Ikea rug. However, he did not drink a glass of wine, play Minecraft, or smoke a clove cigarette. He waited for his wife and their new baby to fall asleep. Then he buzzed his in-laws into the apartment building and headed straight to Thalia bookstore.

A man after my own heart!

“I believe that books find you, you don’t find them. Your book Zen Confidential was sitting right there on the shelf. The spine was staring at me. Just a few hours after my daughter was born. Isn’t that strange? Don’t you think that means something?” he told me.

I’d set up two chairs in my hallway. There was a glass bedside table between us. We were sitting in front of a bottle of wine in my Spartanly furnished apartment.

I’m not sure what Karl’s relationship with alcohol is, but the two of them seem close. I prepared for his visit by buying a bottle of chardonnay and securing a decanter of my girlfriend’s father’s homemade plum schnapps. Karl brought a bottle of burgundy. Within the hour the first bottle of wine was in my recycling bag, the second bottle was half empty, and our tongues were loose and tingling.

He got to the point.

“You studied with a great Zen master from Japan. You spent thirteen years as a monk. Now look at you! What are you doing with yourself? Writing a novel?”

He made an Austrian noise, something like a snort and a snarl that signaled disappointment. “I feel like you could write the book.”

This got my attention. “What book?”

“The book I’ve been waiting for my whole life,” he shouted as though this settled it.

His eyes were sparkling but they were also a little angry. He sat there beaming foully at me and I took the opportunity to admire his wardrobe. A stylish tweed flat cap and a dark blue sport coat. European men really know how to stick their sartorial landings. They even iron their shirts before going to the grocery store. American men, on the other hand, can barely be bothered to tuck their balls back into their Dad jeans after urinating.

“I read everything,” Karl said. “I’ve always felt I will read my way to the truth.”

I offered him some Zen babble about how the truth can’t be contained in words. “I know this,” he growled. “But still. I’ve always felt you would write that book. Now you’re working on a novel you don’t even like.” He wiped his hand across his face to get rid of his ornery smile.

Silver lining in an overall dark cloud—that’s the basic Austrian temperament. I spent 22 years in California. The basic temperament there is—Eternal Sunshine of the Idiotic Mind. A Californian and a Viennese meet. Sparks will fly!

He went to take a leak.

I tried to process the evening so far.

I had written my two books for precisely this kind of person. Someone spiritually thirsty yet suspicious of religion. Someone whose intelligence manifests as greater and greater curiosity instead of greater and greater knowingness. Someone who is, like me, intellectually plain—or as we like to think of ourselves intuitive.

Now here he was, hopelessly disappointed in what I had become. I kind of liked it. I wasn’t pretending to be the witty wise monk anymore. I was just a guy in the world with his head up his ass like everyone else.

The lighting is weird in my hallway. A single bulb hangs from the spacious altbau ceiling. Granted, it’s a hip light bulb, big as a softball, connected to a fancy blue cord. But still. It felt like we were in an interrogation room.

Karl returned from the bathroom and wiped his wet hands on his jeans. “Get a towel, man.”

His phone rang. He looked at it and put it face down on the table. It rang and rang.

“You want to get that?” I asked.

“Not a chance. It’s my father.”

We drank some more, working our way into my girlfriend’s dad’s high-powered homemade schnapps. There was a long stretch of silence which I spent trying to taste the inside of my mouth, an old nervous habit. I could smell my deodorant working.

“I haven’t smoked in five years,” Karl said. “God I love smoking,” he said. “We should go out and get some cigarettes,” he said. “You like cigarettes, don’t you?” he asked.

“You know I do,” I said.

By this point—the lighting, the booze, the disappointment—I’d come to feel like this guy was some kind of flesh-and-blood specter summoned by my dead Zen teacher to give me a post-monastery status report. He was challenging me, but in an Austro-friendly way.

Photo by Dylan de Jonge on Unsplash

The backstory here is that three months earlier he’d texted me from the freezing bowels of our European Pandemic Winter and asked me to be his Zen teacher. I could tell his texts were written with a drink in one hand.

“You didn’t blow me off,” he told me as we sat in my hallway. “You really took time to answer each question I had about Zen. But why won’t you be my teacher?”

He looked away, as though it were painful to behold me in my current form. He stared at the wall and shook his head. “Writing a Zen sci-fi novel, let me get this right, where the hero loses his virginity to a bioengineered version of himself? What are you doing?”

With the option of being my student off the table, he went out and got a shrink instead. Someone a decade younger than him, a recent graduate who used regression therapy to help him get through the dark winter months. Apparently they spent a lot of time surveying his current life from the perspective of his twelve-year-old self.

I felt a little jealous. “Was she helpful?” I asked.

“Oh, very,” he said.

I wanted to cry.

But I cannot bear the thought of being anybody’s dharma teacher. It’s a thankless job and students have too many expectations. You put on the robes, and forget it. They want to screw you or fight you or spiritually outfox you or gossip their little punk asses off about you, and through it all not a day passes where they’re not projecting their parents and spouse and God and the Devil onto you.

Worse, though, is what the robes do to you.

Forget about cigarettes. The true addiction is to what my mentor calls “monk junk.” The heroin of spiritual pride that sooner or later afflicts every professional cleric; the fantasy that you have special access to a universal truth, and therefore it is your guidance that stands between your student and the Goods.

“Therapy is important,” Karl said, letting me off the hook, “but it’s not the whole ball of wax.”

“Really?” I said.

By now I’d begun to suspect that we both had something to offer each other. A teacher-student relationship was out of the question. But what if we could ride side-by-side into the Satori sunset, more Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid than Lone Ranger and Tonto?

“Okay. Let’s Zoom later this week. We’ll sit together. I’ll show you how I meditate,” I told him. “That’s the best I can do.”

“Well, okay, if you insist,” he grumbled.

He stood up and put on his raincoat. He kicked his big feet into his patent leather shoes. He held my gaze in the doorway and said “Thanks. I need it.”

Well guess what, I realized, closing the door after him. Standing there. Listening to him clomp down the spiral stairwell. Who’d have thought.

I need it too.

He’s my sitting buddy now. He’s just begun his Zazen practice, and I feel like I’m starting mine all over again. I’ve learned some interesting things, too. I’ve learned that I know how to sit, I have the knowledge, I spent thirteen years at a Zen monastery, after all—but I don’t always put that knowledge into practice. And so when Karl asks me about meditation, I really listen—both to his questions and my own answers.

Yesterday he texted me “Breathing into/with the Hara is quite difficult for me and doesn’t come naturally. I don’t know why.”

I sat down to see if breathing through the hara came naturally to me. I found that it both felt right and took some effort to do. I tried to think of similar situations in life where doing something felt both natural and tricky at the same time. Karl was helping me to think about Zen practice the only way one should ever think about it—from the perspective of a beginner.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said that rather than a teacher, one should look for a spiritual friend. Someone to be with you as you practice. No one can teach you how to experience a sunset or fall in love. And no one can teach you how to meditate. You have to do it. The breath will show you the way.

Maybe it’s a bit like giving birth. Karl’s wife, God bless her, delivered their firstborn on the living room floor. She didn’t have a hospital. She didn’t have a doctor. She had a veterinarian and a bibliophile husband.

Just because something is natural, doesn’t mean it’s easy.

But she did it. Right there.

Right where Karl now sits, learning how to breathe.

---