Practice

What zazen is

Zazen means “just sitting.” The instruction is both a description and the practice itself. You sit, in a stable posture, and attend to what is present. That is it.

This apparent simplicity is not a disguise for complexity. The simplicity is the point. Zazen is not a technique for achieving a special state. It is not a relaxation exercise. It is not 𠇌learning the mind” — which is neither the goal nor usually what happens. It is a practice of direct attention, repeated, returned to, and over time, allowed to reveal something about the nature of the attention itself.

In formal Zen training, zazen is practiced in a specific posture, for specific durations, in a community, with a teacher. What is described here is a starting point for someone without those conditions — not a substitute for them, but a beginning.

Dogen Zenji’s instruction �yond thinking” (hishiryo) does not mean suppressing thought. It means a quality of attention that includes thought but is not captured by it. This distinction matters in practice: you are not trying to silence the mind. You are noticing the mind’s activity from a slightly different angle — neither following thoughts nor fighting them.

Posture

Posture matters in zazen — not because a specific posture is spiritually required, but because the body and mind are not separate, and a stable, upright body tends to produce a stable, alert mind. The instruction is: sit upright, without stiffness.

• 1

  Choose a position

  Full lotus (both feet on opposite thighs), half lotus (one foot on the opposite thigh), Burmese position (both feet on the floor in front of you), or seiza (kneeling, with a cushion between your feet). If none of these are comfortable, sitting upright in a chair — feet flat, not leaning against the backrest — is fine.

• 2

  Ground the hips

  A firm cushion (zafu) tilted slightly forward helps the lower back find its natural curve. The hips should be higher than the knees. If using a chair, sit forward on the seat so your weight is not entirely on the backrest.

• 3

  Stack the spine

  Imagine a string pulling the crown of your head gently toward the ceiling. The spine lengthens; the chin tucks slightly. Not rigid — upright. There is a difference between a spine stacked like books and one braced like a board.

• 4

  Hands in mudra

  Rest the back of the right hand in the palm of the left (or the reverse). The tips of the thumbs touch lightly, forming an oval. This is the cosmic mudra (dhyana mudra). The oval should hold its shape; collapsing or tenting are both signs of mental drift.

• 5

  Eyes half-open

  Traditional Zen zazen is practiced with eyes half-open, gaze cast downward at a 45-degree angle, unfocused, resting on the floor two or three feet in front of you. Eyes closed tends toward drowsiness and internal cinema. Fully open tends toward distraction. Half-open is the middle ground.

Once in position, take three deep breaths to settle. Then let the breath return to its natural rhythm. You are ready.

Breath and mind

There are several breath practices in Zen. The most accessible for a beginning practitioner is counting the breath.

Breathe naturally. At the end of each exhale, count silently: one, two, three… up to ten. Then start again. If you lose count — if you find yourself at seventeen, or back at one without meaning to be, or in the middle of a thought with no idea where you are — start again at one. Without judgment. Without irritation. Just: one.

This is not a failure when it happens. The return is the practice. The moment of noticing “I was gone” and returning to one is exactly what you are here to do. In a thirty-minute sit, a practiced meditator may return dozens of times. A beginner may return hundreds. The number is not the measure.

A common mistake is to treat breath-counting as a task to be completed — a quiz you can pass by reaching ten without error. This treats zazen as a performance and the mind as an opponent. It is not. The counting is a thread, something to return to, not a goal to achieve.

After weeks or months of breath-counting, a teacher might remove the counting and simply instruct: attend to the breath. Or introduce a koan. For now, counting is enough.

Sit now

Set a timer, close this page, and sit. Return when the bell rings.

How long to sit

In formal Zen training, a period of zazen (tan) is typically thirty to fifty minutes, followed by walking meditation (kinhin), followed by another sitting period. A full day of practice (sesshin) consists of many such periods. This is not where most people begin.

Ten minutes is enough to begin. Not because ten minutes is optimal, but because ten minutes repeated daily is more valuable than forty-five minutes once a week. The tradition’s emphasis on return — showing up again, and again — is not a rhetorical flourish. It reflects something real about how practice works. The first five minutes of a sit are often taken up with settling. The last minutes are often the most interesting. Getting past the first five requires that you actually sit.

As a practical framework:

Week one: Ten minutes per day, same time, same place. The consistency of time and place reduces the friction of beginning. Don’t vary this yet.

After two to three weeks: If ten minutes is feeling too short — genuinely too short, not just more ambitious — extend to twenty. If it is still difficult to sit for ten minutes, do not extend. The question is not how long you can sit but whether you are actually sitting.

Eventually: Twenty to thirty minutes is the practical daily target for a practitioner without formal training. Longer than this, without a teacher to guide the practice, may produce diminishing returns or reinforce bad habits.

What to expect

Expect the mind to wander. This is not a problem with your mind; it is a characteristic of mind in general. The instruction is not to stop this from happening but to notice it when it does and return. The noticing is the practice.

Expect nothing dramatic. Zazen rarely produces sudden insights or profound experiences, especially in the beginning. What it tends to produce, over time, is a slight shift in the relationship between attention and thought — a small but real increase in the gap between a thought arising and being carried away by it. This is modest but not trivial.

Expect physical discomfort. Sitting in an unfamiliar posture will produce discomfort. This is normal and expected. The instruction is not to ignore it but to attend to it as you attend to breath — without immediately acting on it. A knee aching is data; an emergency is also data; the difference becomes clearer with practice.

Expect the mind to produce reasons not to sit. These are reliable and creative. “Today is too busy.” “I’m too tired.” “I should wait until I understand it better.” The tradition’s response to all of these is: sit anyway. The reasons are not wrong; they are simply not a sufficient reason not to sit.

Return

The daily quote on the homepage changes every day. This is not a feature. It is a small structural nudge: come back tomorrow. And the day after.

The Zen tradition has always been built on return, not on accumulation. You do not become better at zazen the way you become better at chess. Something different happens, more slowly, less linearly. What the tradition insists on, across schools and centuries and continents, is this: show up again.

If you miss a day, don’t compound the absence by missing another. The next sitting is the next beginning. There is no debt to the practice, no catching up required. The only question is whether you sit tomorrow.

If at some point the practice stabilizes — if you find yourself sitting regularly without the friction of the beginning — look for a teacher. The tradition was designed for transmission from person to person. Books and websites can point; they cannot do what a teacher does. Most Zen centers welcome newcomers to open sits without any formal commitment.