“My mom taught me how to sew when I was 2 or 3, so I’ve been sewing for as long as I can remember.”
—Serena Williams
There was a time in my life when I sewed—a lot—and it was all I could think about for an extended period of time. I suppose it all started in that junior high school home economics class where I learned to sew a throw pillow that was shaped like a shark (it was the late 1970s and sharks seemed to influence everything from throw pillows to coffee mugs). My mom sewed all the time too, making shirts for my brother and me, dresses for my sister, and I think she might have even attempted a leisure suit for my dad, which captures that decade perfectly. By the time I was in high school I was an ace on the sewing machine, pegging my Levis 501s in that new wave style, and occasionally helping my friends peg their jeans as well.
I’m not making this up, I really did peg my friend’s jeans. It was the 1980s, what else were we to do besides listen to music?
But that’s not the kind of sewing I’m talking about in this story, although apparently it’s a good introduction to it. What I’m talking about is holy sewing, or rather, holy stitching of the highest order. It began when I moved to Hollywood, California, the least likely of places to find a spiritual practice—or perhaps it’s the best place.
I left Seattle in about 1997 to live part time in Hollywood, where I was looking for more experience as a session drummer and producer, working on other people’s albums, and generally playing as much music as possible. I was also trying to outrun a tragic history of bands that had a propensity for self-destruction. I was done with rock & roll, done with Seattle, and I was looking for a more authentic way of life, both in music and in my spiritual practice.
I ended up landing at my friend Mich Roger’s house because, although I had been to Hollywood many times to play shows, I had never spent much time in the city and I really had no idea where I wanted to live. Mich offered me a room at his house in Laurel Canyon until I could find my own home in that enormous city. Simultaneous to all of this, I started looking for a place to practice meditation, something I knew would be an important part of my life. I needed a great teacher, a Buddhist for sure, but I was not exactly sure which tradition to follow.
I had studied Kung Fu, Aikido, and various sword forms in Seattle, and I had tried a bit of Zen meditation at a nearby temple. I had also read several books by famous Tibetan teachers, or Lamas, as they are called. I poured through Sogyal Rinpoche’s “Tibetan Book Of Living and Dying,” Chogyam Trungpa’s “The Sacred Path Of The Shambhala Warrior,” something from the Dalai Lama, and a few other books with essays about The Way. I liked the Tibetan approach, as it appealed to both my intellectual and shamanic interests, but I also liked the direct fierceness of Zen, because like the Japanese sword, Zen trains the mind to be both steady and lightning fast, in a state of non-conceptual, absolute mind. These were terms I didn’t even understand at the time, until I started studying with her.
We found her on a single piece of paper, a small handbill that had been taped to the window of an Asian antique store in a neighborhood we occasionally walked through. Koan was its name (a Zen riddle), and it was the kind of place that sold beautiful wooden Buddhas, antique cabinets and coffee tables, and the exotic Asian decor that was highly popular at the time. The handbill said something to the effect of, “Learn Zen Meditation And The Way Of The Buddha Mind”—I was intrigued. This was what I was looking for and I knew it simply from touching the handbill – I could feel it in the paper.
The manager of the store, a wonderfully charming man named Ian Stuart, had put the handbill in the window because he had also provided the giant wooden Buddha for the Zendo where the mediations took place. Ian was brilliant and hilarious from the first moment we met, a generous human being who helped us find one of the greatest living teachers of Zen on the planet, the Reverend Dr. Yuko Conniff.
Yuko, as she preferred to be called, was a former emergency room doctor who had given up her medical practice to teach Zen after having a deeply enlightening experience. After spending 2 years visiting various Japanese monasteries, she returned to the United States to teach Zen, and Zen only. She made this decision because, as she described it, most of the sicknesses she saw as a doctor were the result of spiritual imbalances manifested in the body. Western medicine can’t treat those kinds of illnesses, they only treat the symptoms—if that. An authentic spiritual practice, however, can often heal the causes of many of these sicknesses, and Yuko believed that Zen was the fastest way to get there.
Zen is a very rigorous spiritual practice that goes straight to the Absolute Mind, and in doing so, you burn through a lot of unconscious habits, unhealthy thought patterns, and rigid belief systems that we have been conditioned to believe, regardless of the veracity of those beliefs. Zen is really just a way of understanding the spiritual technology of the mind as it functions in the Universe. This can create some turbulence at first, but once you burn through that, it’s absolutely transcendent what you come to realize. In other words, Zen cracks open the iron grid of our rigid, conceptual minds and allows the eternal, absolute Buddha Mind to flow. This is the Zen Mind we hear about, also known by its Japanese term, Mushin.
When we began practicing in our little Zendo, there were only seven of us in the original sangha (group), which consisted of Yuko, Ian Stuart, myself, Mich Rogers, the actor Rodney Rowland, and 2 other students whose names I cannot recall. It was truly a magnificent seven, and we practiced with a fierce determination that I have rarely felt since.
The months went by, the months became years, and I continued to do my work as a session musician in Hollywood with the occasional music tour. When I wasn’t on tour, my mornings and evenings were usually spent meditating in central Hollywood at the Detroit Street Zen Center, as Yuko had named it. I was becoming more and more rooted in Zen, to the degree that I moved out of Mich’s house and into the apartment building where our Zendo was located. Ian was already living there as the building manager, and eventually Mich and Rod moved in and got their own apartments too. We sort of took over the building and turned it into our own mini-monastery, a mixture of musicians, surfers, actors, and shop owners by day, and hard-core Zen meditators by night.
I would start my day with an early morning Zazen practice, then go do my studio work for the day, and usually be back home in time to do the late evening Zazen, around 9 pm. I did the occasional 2-3 day weekend meditation retreats as well, where we wouldn’t speak and we meditated for several hours each day. It was amazing to see the personal transformation in each of our lives and the way Zen manifested differently for each of us. Ian became rather psychic, one of the phenomena of Zen, but nothing to be distracted by; Rod became a much in demand actor and eventually started a family; Mich went from being a great surfer to becoming an even greater businessman; and for me it simply manifested as a deepening sense of understanding around my musical work—and I became totally sober.
There had been years of my life where drinking alcohol had prevented me from realizing my dream of becoming a great musician. That is, until one day when I got up from a deep Zen meditation and realized that I was done drinking alcohol, forever. It was absolutely the greatest single decision of my life and it just happened naturally, without any drama or fanfare. In fact, I kept it quietly to myself for months and I just started living sober, as I still do to this day.
After about 3 years of this very regular Zen practice, Yuko offered us an invitation to become ordained as Lay Zen Buddhists (lay meaning, secular people who practice Zen). I immediately accepted the offer without realizing what it would entail, or maybe I already understood in my Buddha Mind what my hard-wired conceptual mind couldn’t yet comprehend. Either way, I was committed to it.
Going through Lay Ordination is not hard in and of itself—it only takes a day of ceremony to be officially ordained. However it’s the rest of the work you have to do building up to that single day that requires an incredible amount of focus, discipline—and a lot of sewing. Let me explain this through a brief history of Zen Buddhism.
Buddhism started in India around 400 BC, right after the first Buddha, a former prince named Siddhartha Gautama, began formally teaching. The meditational aspects of Buddhism are far more ancient, likely thousands of years old, and Zen Buddhism is a cross between the original, ancient teachings of Gautama Buddha, filtered through the ancient Taoist philosophy of China. Taoism put an earthy, elemental twist on it, which became Chan Buddhism in China, before it was refined in Japan through the precise and exacting discipline that Japanese culture is famous for.
Zen Buddhism took root in Japan around 500 AD, but it didn’t become the fierce, enlightened Zen we know today until about the 13th century, when the great Japanese Zen master-reformist Ehei Dogen clarified its tenants and created a new practice known as Soto Zen. Dogen is the patriarch of the lineage I come from, and he was a literal genius of spiritual understanding, and a writer with great insight and humor. He is still widely published today and I highly recommend his essays, especially the ones translated by Thomas Cleary. Dogen’s writing is astounding in its ability to convey great spiritual truths, using simple stories and metaphors that anyone can understand. His essay, “Tenzo Kyokun” (Instructions For The Cook) is one of my favorites, and is considered one of the greatest treatises on cooking as a form of spiritual practice (for all you cooks out there).
As we studied Zen philosophy and its spiritual tenants, Yuko had us reading Dogen, as well as the classic sutras, which come from the original teachings of Gautama Buddha. There were always discussions around these readings, and we were required to explain and sometimes debate our understanding of them. There were also lectures we had to attend, which we willingly did, because when Yuko spoke, you really didn’t want to miss any of it.
And then came the sewing. It is said that Gautama Buddha and his first monks made their robes from the discarded rags and funeral wrappings of the dead, which the monks would wash, dye with saffron, and then sew together into a robe that resembled the patchwork of rice paddies that surround their school. In Zen, we wear a particular kind of robe, miniature in size, called a Rakusu, which has this patchwork design. It looks more like a breastplate than a robe, but it’s a symbol of the Zen tradition that came about during a cultural shift in the medieval Edo period.
Fortunately, I was able to forgo digging around in a Hollywood cemetery looking for funerary cloth, and I instead bought my fabric at the local Joann Fabric store.
I started by selecting a large, single piece of cloth, which could be black, blue, maroon, or saffron in color (I chose dark blue, the traditional Zen color). I then cut it into thin strips of the same width, but varying in length. This is because there is a very specific pattern in which they are reassembled, piece by tiny piece, stitch by tiny stitch, until the beautiful pattern of the Rakusu emerges from the chaos of cloth, thread, and several bent needles.
We would meet weekly in the Zendo, where I would bring my little box of sewing equipment, with my needles and thread, and the strips of cloth in various stages of assembly. I would work diligently, stitching together an entire line of cloth, my fingers occasionally bleeding from the pinpricks in my large, clumsy hands. The time and effort it takes to stitch a Rakusu together can only be understood by those who have made one, and it took me several weeks to assemble what amounted to a chest-sized square.
Yuko would periodically inspect my work and say, rather wryly, “Hmmm, isn’t that line of stitching a bit sloppy? Can you really live with that on your personal Rakusu?” Of course I couldn’t, because the stitching represented my mind in that moment of sewing, which was perhaps a bit distracted in the moment I stitched a particular line. I’d begrudgingly tear out all the stitches and start over again, stifling my impulse to scream in frustration. The funny thing is, I’d make the same stitch line again, and although it wouldn’t be perfect, it’d be much better than my first attempt. That’s because when you do something properly, and with the complete focus of your mind, it manifests in a very special way. Even though my Rakusu wasn’t absolutely perfect (nothing is ever perfect), the stitching ended up being very good and very steady, as my mind became steadier over the course of the training.
Through the meditative act of sewing, I was finally able to get to that place of serene mental focus, the Zen mind that I had read about in books and yearned to attain. Of course my grandmother, who grew up sewing in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, would have slapped me on the back of the head and said, “ Sonny, I learned that trick long before I was even married!” The real trick, however, is learning how to hold that Zen mind when the battles of life rage anew. Or as Yuko would often say, “It’s easy for us to sit in quiet meditation here in our peaceful Zendo. Now try to hold that mind as you go out and drive in Los Angeles rush hour traffic.”
You see, one of the biggest, if not the most important part of Zen training is the cultivation of this mindfulness. This means that you do not allow your mind go to sleep in the way we often do during our daily life. I’m not talking about sleeping at night or taking a nap, I’m talking about being asleep when we say things, do things, and generally behave in way that is lower than our highest, conscious self. I catch myself at this all the time, because Zen makes us wake up to a higher self and become very, very awake. This also means that when we do something, and I mean anything, from the way you clean your house, take a shower, the way you dress, speak to people, teach your children, and especially the way you work—whatever it is, you do it with a completely awakened mind. Zen is not about being all relaxed and chilled out, as it is often mischaracterized. It is about being wide-awake and functioning in your life with a crystal clear mind. Any kind of relaxation is simply a result of that awakened mind.
Although Mich, Rod, and Ian continued with their Zen practice, they decided not to sew a Rakusu, and thus “Bear’s sewing life” became an ongoing joke between us. Mich or Rod would invite me to some big party up in the Hollywood Hills and I’d have to say, “Sorry fellas, I have to sew tonight,” which would be followed by uproarious laughter between us all.
And sometimes that’s the way it goes when you take on an authentic spiritual practice—you have to say no to the frivolous things in life and get serious about your path while still maintaining a deep sense of humor. Zen is not for everyone, but it was perfect for me. This was the spiritual practice of the Samurai after all, and I gave up much to do it, but it was all the stuff I didn’t need anyway, like drinking, carrying around excess mental baggage, and a generally unhappy life. In the end I gained the Universe and you can too, whatever your spiritual practice may be. Just remember that each stitch of your life is a link in the great chain of being. Make sure that every stitch you make becomes a prayer, or a mantra, and you too will awaken the beautiful eternal mind that abides within each of us.