(I gave this talk on Jan. 13, 2026 in Manhattan at Still Mind Zendo, where I am a senior student.)

Good evening. We’ve been sitting still for most of the past hour, directing attention to our bodies and our breath.

Zazen is demanding, both physically and mentally. This is a good moment to check in with how you feel. Relax a little. Breathe.

These bodies are magnificent organisms, aren’t they? Muscles, bones, and joints, veins and arteries, lungs and a beating heart, digestive organs, layers of skin, …a sensory system that receives and perceives, that feels, sees, hears, smells and tastes… and thinks (the sixth sense).

When we sit, our bodies may feel cold or too hot.

Maybe we’re hungry or sleepy. Maybe we have strong emotions, or obsessive thoughts.

Maybe we have discomfort. Sometimes there is even physical pain.

When we sit as a group, as a sangha, our sensory awareness extends beyond these bags of flesh to the great body of reality.

We may not be conscious of every signal, every stimulus. But our bodies sense the connection.

“Sounds distinguish comfort and discomfort.” That’s from the Sandokai.

These bodies are resilient. We can handle a little discomfort. Chronic pain is another matter. Serious pain is a signal that something is wrong. Regular Zazen should not be painful.

Which brings me to my topic tonight. For the past 8 or 9 months I have had serious, chronic back pain that has interfered with my daily life, including my meditation.

The pain began arising on walks around New York City lasting more than 20 minutes. Then I noticed it when I was writing at my computer for more than an hour. Then it began to disrupt zazen.

I thought it might be helpful for others if used this talk to describe how I approached this problem and its effect on my practice.

I remembered guidance that the Buddha had given his disciples on pain. He used a metaphor called “the second arrow.” This is in the Sallatha sutra, part of the Pali canon.

The second arrow is a a metaphor for dukkah, suffering. Getting struck with an arrow was a relatable experience in his time, I guess.

Nowadays he would have talked about bullets.

In the sutra, the Buddha describes the experience of pain by the average person – what he calls an “uninstructed, run of the mill person.” Here’s the passage.

When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed, run of the mill person sorrows, grieves and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run of the mill person sorrows, grieves and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught…

So he feels two pains, physical and mental.

I find this to be a profound distinction. The first arrow, pain. The second arrow, suffering. What do you think?

Our relationship with pain goes back to childhood. One of my clearest early memories is from age 4. I fell outside and skinned my knee. I brushed dirt off the scrape and looked around. I remember having a vivid awareness of myself as a being, in a specific place and time. I felt a sense of wonder. I was alive.

When I was 8 or 9, I had an interest in fishing. One day I was organizing lures in my tackle box, and one got tangled up in my sweater.

5 I tugged at it, and then suddenly the hook was embedded in the meat of my hand below my thumb. I was caught like a fish. It didn’t start to hurt until my parents were driving me to the ER. I remember staring at this piece of metal stuck in my hand. No blood. The skin was sealed around it. I remember being scared, miserable, upset.

The second hook.

To remove it, the ER doctor explained that he would have to push the point all the way through my hand so they could clip off the barb. Then he could slide it back out. They must have numbed my hand, but the anticipation made the procedure seem worse.

Thankfully it was over quickly.

When it comes to pain, I’ve been lucky. No major broken bones. I’ve been spared serious back pain, something that affects a lot of people I know. I feel whiny talking about it.

The problem crept up on me. I figured I was just getting old. It started out once a month, then it was once a week, then it was every day in the mid-afternoon.

Then I noticed that the slightest twinge of threatened back pain was enough to unleash negative thoughts and emotions. Annoyance. Anger. Dread. Fear.

Here I was, finally retired, with time for long walks, travel, writing, more time at the zendo, and this was happening. It seemed cruel, unfair. Why now?

The second arrow.

It was particularly intense in June, during the weeklong sesshin. I had been going on these retreats for years. Some fatigue and discomfort was to be expected.

But I had experienced nothing like this before. I had to skip some afternoon sittings and apply a heating pad.

I felt weak. Demoralized.

It was my dharma gate for that retreat. Thinking about pain began to consume my sittings. I had trouble keeping still. It was distracting other sitters. The monitor passed me a note.

Mortifying.

But I got through it, and at home I felt a little better. I let myself think I was on the mend.

Over the summer and early fall, it started to creep back.

I tried an approach to pain that I had learned many years ago at another zendo. At the time, I had intense leg cramps from trying to sit in a full lotus on a zafu.

An instructor advised me not to turn away from the sensation, but to focus on it. Reject the duality of “this is me” and “this is the pain.”

I tried this the next time my leg was burning. I was the pain. Nothing but the pain. Something did happen. It was more profound than I have ever been able to convey in words.

The bell rang, sooner than I expected, and I realized my leg no longer hurt. It was a mysterious experience. It was one of the things that kept me coming back to zen over the years.

Eventually, as I built stamina, pain became rare in my zazen. When it happened, I chalked it up to discomfort being just another part of practice.

In koans, some teachers slap and clobber the monks to get their attention. There are extreme cases involving amputation.

A teacher once slammed a door so hard that he broke Yunmen’s foot, and at that moment he saw into the fundamental nature of reality.

And for the rest of his life he walked with a slight limp.

So, it was tempting to be a zen warrior and just suck up the pain.

I tried breathing at the pain. I tried to become one with it. When we chanted the heart sutra, I would lean into the part about how the prajna paramita mantra clears all pain.

The pain kept coming back.

So I finally listened to what my body -- and my wife -- had been telling me and went to a doctor. An MRI showed nothing seriously wrong with my spine, discs or joints.

Just arthritis and inflammation that was “typical for someone my age.” Great, thanks.

I was referred to physical therapy and found a therapist. He understood that zazen was an important daily activity for me. He determined that my back pain in sitting and walking had to do with fatigue from weak muscles in my glutes, hips and abdomen.

My back and shoulder muscles were overcompensating. I also needed to work on my posture.

Now, for an hour a day, I attend to my physical body. I flex my hips with a band, do marches on my back with ankle weights, and expand my chest with open book exercises. I have stretches for my thoracic and pectorals muscles.

The good news: it seems to be working.

The pain has settled into occasional discomfort. I wish I could say it’s entirely gone.

One definition of suffering is wishing things to be other than they are.

There’s that second arrow again.

The therapist also suggested that I try different zazen postures, mix it up. I was OK with returning to using a seiza bench, but I didn’t like the idea of sitting in a chair. I would use one sometimes when my knees or legs were cramping.

What if I had to switch permanently to a chair? The idea made me feel old, weak.

The iconic image of a Zen meditator is someone sitting on the ground, legs folded, hands in a mudra.

There aren’t any pictures of the Buddha in a chair, as far as I know.

My mind was letting the arrows fly.

But I got over it. Back to the bench. And when I felt the slightest twinge, I switched to a chair.

I also researched posture. Back pain experts talk about “finding your neutral spine.”

A neutral spine is not the same as a straight spine. A natural, healthy spine has slight curves, at the neck and the lower back.

I tend to lose my neutral spine and start slouching or slumping when my mind wanders. So I have been trying to build a habit of returning to it again when I am walking or engaged in other daily activities. It reminds me of zazen.

Everyone’s neutral spine is a little different, and you can google techniques for finding yours. It involves lying flat and performing pelvic tilts to find a comfortable middle position, a slight curve. Emphasis on slight. It turns out I had been overdoing it on the zafu.

I realized I had been straining to arch my back, which pushed my stomach forward and increased tension in my lower abdomen. Not relaxed. Not good.

I found that one technique for maintaining a neutral spine without too much of an arch is to let my pelvis drop with gravity. This relaxation frees the diaphragm to breathe.

All of this made me realize I hadn’t reviewed the instructions for proper zazen posture in a long time. I cracked my introductory zen books and watched some teachers on YouTube.

It never hurts to review the fundamentals.

Beginner’s mind, right?

I was reminded that all zazen positions, regardless of what you sit on, create a strong, stable base for the lower body, so that the upper body relaxes. This allows for free and easy diaphragmatic breathing.

That’s sometimes called the belly breath. It is how children breathe.

The diaphragm, right below the rib cage should extend out slightly when we inhale, and contract gently when we exhale. This allows us to use our full lung capacity.

Often when my back is hurting, on or off the mat, I realize I have been breathing shallowly from my upper chest.

One tell is that my shoulder muscles are moving. They should be still.

All the instructions are aimed at relaxing the diaphragm to allow for this belly breath.

On a cushion, our knees touch the ground and our legs are arranged in a way to create a stable triangle, using one of the main positions – in order of comfort for westerners, the Burmese, the half lotus or the full lotus.

For more support, you can kneel with a cushion between your legs or on a seiza bench. On a chair, the feet should be flat on the ground. Keep the spine neutral. Ideally, don’t touch the back of the chair.

However we sit, the upper body should be relaxed and straight, with hips, shoulders and ears in alignment.

The chin should be level. When I am monitoring during zazen, a common mistake I see, even with experienced sitters, is tilting the head down or back. I do this myself when I’m tired. I also lean a little to the right.

It helps me to visualize a string coming down from the ceiling to my head. Or, if I am facing the wall, I look at my shadow. I have also practiced at home facing a mirror.

While I’m giving away tricks, here’s another one that many of you probably know: if you rest the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, saliva will flow down the back of your throat. This also presses on the vagus nerve in the palate, which relaxes the entire body.

If you are experiencing pain, or have concerns about your posture, please talk to a teacher. I also encourage you to use the monitors as a resource. If you don’t mind being adjusted while you sit, let the monitor know. They can also give you feedback after a sitting.

I am always grateful if the monitor notices I am leaning during zazen and makes an adjustment.

That is the compassionate power of the sangha in action.

Now we have a few more moments to sit together as a sangha. Check in on your posture, and watch out for that second arrow.