Buddhist mind training often goes against our instinctive, spontaneous behavior patterns. This is in line with the struggle of those who have undergone longer therapies. We practice, learn, with benevolent guidance, to get closer to ourselves, to become more authentic, more alive, more courageous and thus also to be more open to other people and to recognize where and when boundaries are appropriate. Such processes go never without pain. These painful „underserved places in ourselves“ have brought us into therapy, or we were numb, alienated for whatever reason, and suffered from this emotional state, which we experienced as inanimate. Grief and shocks can make us feel numb and we got eventually used to it. We also become accustomed to the unwholesome, which has become familiar and therefore dear to us.

It is not always the case that as a Soto Zen practitioner I crave the long periods of sitting that we practitioners find especially during week-long, so-called sesshins (retreat days). I found that the price of such self-imposed time-outs is always high, not just the financial one, regardless of whether I am practicing at home or a few hundred or thousand kilometers away in a sangha (Buddhist community).

Staying at home means being exposed to strong tensions under certain circumstances. Let me give you an example: I recently sat with my everydayzen sangha in a way that is called ‚hybrid‘. So while we remote dwellers sat at the screen and stood up for a long walking meditation, the friends in the seminar house on the Pacific ran out of the building to the beach, and we „zoomies“, unless we have a garden, walked on the small patch of ground in our apartments or on the street. I would have loved to have been on the beach and then just as much to have eaten prepared, delicious food with accompanying prayers.

I have realized that even with good preparation, I can hardly achieve rest, or at most ‚rest in motion‘, which we also practice, because I have to look after myself. This means more time spent shopping, preparing and eating quietly, is not so easy to do alone. As I couldn’t and didn’t want to ignore certain electronic messages this time, I also had a lot of trouble accepting myself in this area. During a sesshin, such a situation is impossible, which has great advantages.

In addition, because I didn’t want to be „busy“ all the time, there was the mess in the too small apartment. The pain of broken promises – I realized the effect of past careless behaviour – was much to bear. I would have preferred to pay the financial price in some respects.

The „underserved place“ was/is my home, the wider environment, the balance between ‚inside‘ and ‚outside‘. The ‚pain body‘ was activated, Eckart Tolle would say.

However, if I go on a sesshin, for example to Haus Felsentor in Switzerland, I count at least two extra days to the seven-day retreat, which used to mean two plus seven days of lost earnings when I was still working full-time. I was aware of what had to be done beforehand and what I knew be waiting for me on my return. Several hundred Euros, plus the travel costs, plus a much too low fee for the teachers, then flow into this precious time out from everyday life. The prices are really justified, I feel that more intensely every time, but with the falling income plus rising energy costs, they represent a Dharma gate that has particularly heavy doors – and not just for me.

The benefit of being away from the mundane and immersed in majestic nature is of course priceless and helps us to embrace the sublime and dwell in its vibration.

Although … hasn’t the balance also become easier? Don’t I have much more confidence in life, in myself, in the Dharma, the Buddha’s wisdom teachings? I can only say yes.

The „underserved place“: a term coined by Roshi Bernie Glassman, co-founder of Zen Peacemaker, was thus, during the everydayzen spring sesshin 2025, ‚my home‘ on the screen: Myself. My apartment. I wouldn’t want to miss these insights and, above all, these experiences. I have come to the conclusion that there will only be one underserved place ‚in the world‘ this year, which I, together with others, will commit to together with a small group of interested people: First to Krakow and then, above all, to Auschwitz-Birkenau (25.4.- 3.5.2025).

However, it is not the huge Birkenau cemetery itself that indicates the lack of care. Cemeteries or cemetery forests that are well integrated into the common good, imbued with heart and spirit, touch us humans deeply and inspire peace. In Auschwitz, it is the genocide beneath the earth’s borders and behind all the facades and the seeming nothingness that is deeply disturbing and hardly allowed the dead to find their final resting place.

The genocide, long concealed, kept secret, still by some, that had turned Birkenau into a deep, festering wound that could hardly close. If it is exposed at all to enough air and consignment at all, along with wholehearted recognition and a profound diagnosis along with an elaborate healing plan.

Can this wound actually close? I have the impression that it was closed too quickly, too makeshift and hastily, for fear of exposure. Some people sense this precisely and do a patient, painful job of opening and cleaning it: To be able to make a precondition for a precise and soulful description of the state of health of the patient Birkenau.

This visitation of a wound must be approached very carefully: It needs the practice of connecting with the stillness, the silence, the peace of the Great Whole, so that a healing encounter can occur. We need strength and steadfastness in order to overcome our supposedly innate instincts that tell us to distract ourselves, to close ourselves off from the inside of the wound.

An open wound or one with a thin skin. Or a makeshift wound of such magnitude, such injustice and such will to destroy cries out for the empathy that was lacking at the time or was systematically killed off by the use and administration of drugs and terror.

Above I spoke of „supposed innate instincts“. I no longer believe this biologistic truth. Just as Marshall Rosenberg no longer believed in it. We long for undisturbed mourning and public witnessing of the truth in rituals. This „apparent truth“ is an assertion meant to justify the most brutal behavior while looking backward and hopelessness while looking forward. In truth, we are capable of a purity of heart, a degree compassion, an instinctive longing, a call for unity,

Forgiveness and the stilling of all needs, so that the supposed giving unfolds like flowing: the „underserved place“ takes what it needs as soon as we unselfishly make ourselves open to it.

 

PS: dedicated to a friend

I couldn’t imagine organizing a spring sesshin in Birkenau, in the „Center for Dialogue and Prayer“, without having been there. Or a sesshin, as the friend had suggested to me in a good conversation: half in the „Center for Dialogue and Prayer“ and half on the Birkenau site. He does not yet know, cannot yet know, that places can speak. You have to go with the places, with what they demand, with what interaction is possible and necessary. This ability can be learned, but it also means that you have to familiarize yourself with the place over years, as Bernie and many of his friends have shown us.

Shamans, nature healers, flexible, interreligiously gifted clerics all over the world had trained their wisdom behind walls, but even more so outside the dwellings. We find out, sense where the greatest energy robbery has taken place. If we put love and light there, something will change for the better, as if it were our own body.

Auschwitz-Birkenau becomes our body. I remember clearly in 2010, during my first Bearing-Witness-Retreat with Bernie Glassman, the hungry ghosts approaching me, in the barracks where we were sitting,  They ended up covering my whole body. While I was horrified at first and hardly dared to breathe, I slowly relaxed and practiced „tonglen „* – instinctively. THAT is the image for ‚underserved places‘: so much that is unredeemed, split off – buzzing around, searching, unable to find peace. And we meet these needs with our healing energy.

All three ways of Zen: On retreat days in monasteries, in your home or in an ‚underserved place‘ outdoors are, if we allow it, part of our fields of practice.

I would not want to have done without any of them and would not want to do without them in the future. The repetitive monotony, simplicity, form and formality of the sesshin provided and continue to provide me in my depths with structure and regularity, rhythm, community standards of beauty and harmony,  thus ego reduction and devotion, both of which I need when sitting at home and sitting in the ‚underserved‘. In this strong ‚container‘ an amazing blossoming can be experienced.

But the vibrating, intuitive, dancing and flexible aspects of working in the field, which challenge you differently than during the sesshin, may be called more „feminine“, more „nurturing“ and more unpredictable. This is what collective healing and nurturing are like, as all mothers, healers and shamanesses on this earth knew and know.

Zen practice at home is simply the daily bread – nothing more, nothing less. Just as our heart the innermost chapel, the home is the temple, community center and mini-abbey all in one. Here, in our home, we are abbess and abbot. In the sesshin, the leading elder/monk presides, and in the field (‚underserved place‘), the field itself is the teacher.

In my view, all three ways of practicing and serving belong together. I would like seeing retreats (sesshins), even if they involve an effort that I admire and that is difficult to grasp, become less expensive or have sliding scales (prices according to income and background) that are realistic even for those on low incomes. I also think that meals can be simple and still be of good quality. I sometimes, not everywhere, see too much luxury. I don’t mean that there should be a lack of love, even for small comforts, not at all. By ‚luxury‘ I mean: hotel standard. Abundance.

We Buddhists learn and practise, for example, how to deal with cold and heat and other difficulties creatively and acceptingly, stoically and elegantly. So why aren’t two soups with bread enough in the evening, just to give an example? Given the hunger in the world, certainly in the same city in which we ourselves live, we should be concerned to „take what is given“ here too. (Vow of ethical living)

Why are overnight stays not also permitted in the meditation halls (zendos)? If sitting in the hall at night, as in Rinzai Zen, is hardly practiced or not practiced at all, I would like this cheap solution. In the three or four zendos that made this possible and that I got to know, the „problems“ with luggage and reaching the sanitary facilities of those who stayed in common rooms, were solved satisfactorily.

If we were to start allowing such play and free spaces, younger people, students would (more easily) find access to contemplation, which our society, our parents, educators, children and all kinds of workers urgently need in order to be able to counter the coldness and withdrawal of vitality caused by advancing digitalization. I suspect that people with a migrant background and single parents could also feel more realistically addressed, the more undogmatically the meditation offers present themselves.

At regular intervals, during vacation times, I wish families WITH their children a place to practice and play. The children in the children’s circles, in which I myself have sat as a leader, had such a joy in the bells, in small „jobs“ and responsibilities, in silence, with guided meditation, and sharing in the circle, that hard to integrate souls would find a carefully preserved place in such environment, full of harmony, beauty, lightness and freedom from fear.

Everyone can find his or her place in well-guided sanghas. Strict (which I would not like to miss) and relaxed sesshins could be alternated.

With our intensive deliberations above, we would actively care for some of the ‚underserved groups‘ in our society. Perhaps we have so far paid too little attention to the point „finding“, which appears in the title.

For me, Buddhism and Zen are not only mystery and ‚family‘, but also medicine. And this should be more accessible to all beings.

*tong-len: a Tibetan breathing exercise in which one consciously breathes in one’s own or another’s suffering (which cannot actually separated), transforms it in our hearts into joy, into light and sends it back just as consciously.

TAKUHATSU: Religious begging practice – Allow me some words, please

The last six months, with a broken shoulder and other health restrictions, have caused me practice ‚takuhatsu‘ again and even more intimately than before. This means that, as a lay ordained person in Rinzai and Soto Zen (Zen Peacemaker Order), I humbly and trustingly place my begging bowl in front of me and ask for your donation, your gift of money to support my LIFE WITH GRACE:

– PayPal under my name

– Sparkasse Köln/Bonn
IBAN DE55 3705 0198 0032 9013 40
BIC: COLSDE33XXX

From January until now, I have earned far too little income and have had little energy and inspiration to streamline my offers and put them on the market. The pilgrimage to Auschwitz is also more expensive than estimated, which means that I have already lived off the expected fee in advance.

I am writing more and longer, which I see as part of my vocation.

I paid off a heating bill of €1,300 in January and the tenants‘ association tried to stop it at €800. A tooth root treatment was complicated, so an expert was called in, whose specialized knowledge cost me €400 and so it goes on, as I get older, with more and more challenges, but also more and better fear management=Trust in the Dharma..

I will very joyfully and openly accept every space in Bonn for myself and my vocation that presents itself under my feet. My wonderful Sangha supports me lovingly, as does my dear sister. I am full of wonder and great gratitude.

Please help to deepen and share my work with heart and mind, compassion and wisdom: To embody the Dharma that I love.

Thank you. May all beings feel touched by our active, heartfelt love. May they find what their deepest and best longs for. May all merits of this text go to the hungry hosts in Auschwitz and where I am meeting them. And may relief, comfort and hope for those suffering always be within reach.

Your’s
Monika