Notes from a Studio

Introducing my new bi-monthly online journal, Notes from a Studio, inspired by the monthly Studio Notes published by fellow artist (and cousin) Ann Yakimowicz.

You can visit her website here!

September 2025

Welcome to my new online journal, Notes from a Studio (NFAS). I intend to publish it on a bi-monthly basis, i.e. every other month, sharing insights about the art of music and the piano as they come up in my work in the studio.

In this inaugural edition I want to share an extended essay written this past summer titled Ten Years of Zazen. It documents my decade of practicing Zen meditation. What does Zen meditation have to do with playing the piano? This is an interesting question that can best be answered by clarifying what Zen meditation (known as zazen) is not. Contrary to common belief, Zen is not the art of being calm all the time! Zen practitioners do get mad, get frustrated, fall in love, fall out of love, live the lives of ordinary people. What distinguishes Zen practitioners (or at least this is a goal of Zen practice as I see it) is the fact that they strive not to get stuck in any one state of mind, emotional reaction or place of being. The goal is to always move, never staying glued to any one position.

Making music is essentially creating the organized movement of sound waves travelling through the air. In this way, Zen is Music and Music is Zen. They are both the practice of conscious movement. In future NFAS entries I’ll explain how my practice of Zen has enriched my understanding of music and deepened my artistry at the piano. The essay is below and please contact me at peter@petergach.com if you have any comments or questions. I’d love to hear from you!

Reflections on Ten Years of Zazen

Note: What follows is an account of my personal experience of Zen. It is by no means a guidebook to how you, the reader, should do Zen practice. Rather it is just a finger pointing to the moon.

The wise man points to the moon: The fool looks at the finger.

Beginning

Ten years ago, I began practicing zazen. I had always collected and read books about Zen, as well as other books dealing with Buddhism and Asian philosophy. I frequently noticed that when I read books on Zen, I felt both happy and puzzled. There seemed no logical reason to feel happiness reading descriptions of an approach to life whose origins stretched back to the Buddha in the 6th century. After years of filling bookshelves with the topic, I decided that it was better to “plunge into the water, rather than read books about swimming.” I searched on the internet for the nearest Zen center to my home, and the Hidden Valley Zen Center came up. I made an appointment for an introductory lesson, and at the appointment time went to the center. Sozui Roshi (roshi is an honorific title for a zen teacher) greeted me at the door of the zendo. As we went inside, I noticed the tranquility and simplicity of the space. She explained how to sit, the susok’kan breathing technique and the various protocols of the zendo. She also recommended the two meditation postures of lotus and seiza (knees folded back). I was 64 at the time and found it painful to sit in either position for very long. But I persisted in trying to sit this way for longer and longer periods. After about a year I was able to sit in either seiza or lotus for a full 25-minute meditation period. Ten years ago, I was not flexible and sitting in these positions was a real challenge. But it is not impossible. It only takes patience and determination. I must admit that I sit only in half-lotus, not the full-lotus position. I am happy with that. (And yes, from time to time I do sit upright on a chair or bench.)

I first began attending the scheduled daily sittings. These consisted of two sets of 25-minute sittings. After the first 25 minutes Sozui Roshi would ring a bell, and one could change sitting posture while remaining in the same place in the zendo. After two 25-minute periods, there was a break of about ten minutes for kinhin, walking around the zendo single file with a chance to drink some water or use the restroom. Then the next set of 25-minute periods would begin, for a total of two hours for a meditation session.

Zazen

What exactly happens during zazen? Many people have the mistaken belief that zazen is the process of attempting to stop thinking. Here’s the truth as I see it: it is impossible to force yourself to stop thinking! The skin feels, the nose smells, the eyes see, the ears hear, and the brain thinks. These are the natural functions of a living human being. In zazen we are not anesthetizing ourselves, or attempting to ‘space out’, in order not to think. On the contrary, thoughts occur naturally. They are, to quote Joseph Nguyen “The energetic, mental raw material our minds use to understand and navigate the world.” Thinking can here be understood as the rumination, judgement and opinions that may be generated by and follow upon a simple thought. What might start out as a simple, fleeting thought grows a layer of Velcro, sticking to our consciousness and distracting us from our present experience. However, it is possible to remove the stickiness, neutralize away the Velcro so that a thought simply pops up and disappears, like you were blowing soap bubbles into the air and they just floated up and popped, disappearing into the sky.

How to do this? Simply by feeling the thought completely in our body, allowing our mind and body to join in a total but simple experience of the thought without judgement, resistance or hope that it will go away. Sometimes this is described as becoming aware of the ‘felt sense’ of thought. It is subtle practice, does not happen overnight. But over the years it felt as if a layer of grey thought-clouds slowly lifted, revealing the sky above.

After attending these shorter meditation sessions in the zendo for a few months, I was ready for an all-day sitting. This was followed by a weekend and finally the challenge of a seven-day sitting, known as a sesshin. This consisted of seven days of zazen for approximately 9 hours a day. Of course, the 9 hours were broken up by time for meals, a work period, a rest period after lunch and an exercise period. There were also morning and evening seizan sessions (individual conferences with the Roshi) as well as a teisho (a discourse on Zen thought delivered by the Roshi) in the afternoon. I discovered that the sesshin schedule with its restrictions (no cell phones, no internet, minimal talking, no shaving or makeup) was ideal for setting the stage for self-inquiry, looking deeply within. The sesshin, with its daily schedule, largely removed all distractions that normally pull us away from deep exploration into the nature of our own minds.

Herbert Simon says that “information consumes attention, and a wealth of information means a poverty of attention.” In the 21st century, with all our various devices/screens/opportunities for distraction, our attention is in inverse proportion to the amount of information bombarding us. Sesshin, by removing these distractions, allows us to refocus our attention, creating the conditions for a deeper and more fundamental reality to be discovered.

During the first sesshin, on the third day, I discovered that I had reached a kind of bottom in my meditation, and despite the admonition to ‘go deeper’ I was unable to break through this bottom. When I went into the morning seizan, I shared this with the Roshi. She said, simply, “Show me.” Suddenly I found myself making a gesture of stabbing my stomach with a knife and rolling on the floor sobbing. When I left the conference, I returned to the cushion and continued to cry through the rest of the day. It seemed as if every painful experience I had ever had, every sorrow, every loss, every betrayal had returned and brought with it wave after wave of pain.

I wanted badly to leave the sesshin, but I knew that if I left early - ‘chickened out’ - I would be unable to return. I stuck it out, hoping that things would get better. On the fourth day, I again wept through most of the morning. In the afternoon sitting it was as if the storm clouds raging in me were lifted, and a sense of tranquility emerged, like the appearance of a clear sky after a storm. I heard the sound of a bird flying near an open window of the zendo, and the sound was exquisite. The bark of a tree I walked by during a break was indescribably beautiful. The feel of the breeze touching my cheek was a feather-light caress of warmth. It felt as if I were wiping away years of accumulated grime from the window of my awareness, and was able to see, hear and feel with a new-found clarity.

Since that first sesshin, I have attended many others. Each of them has had a different tone and experiential feel. Each of them has brought new insights into the nature of my own mind, my conditioning and the concepts that I had unconsciously allowed to cloud my vision. Sometimes, the insights were immediate. At other times they came gradually, while engaged in my everyday activities. Sometimes I was only aware of the changes in my consciousness in retrospect.

In those first sesshins I would sometimes go into seizan with a fresh insight, and I would enthusiastically share it with the Roshi. On one occasion, Mitra Roshi said “Don’t make a rule of it.” As I reflected on this, I discovered that one of the tricks of the mind is to seek a solution and say “OK, you’ve found the answer, so now you can stop making all the effort.” Rules are a way of simplifying/streamlining the complexities of human existence. The brain is the laziest organ of the human body. It wants to always find an ‘answer’ so it can go on to the next thing and be distracted by the next problem. Making a rule is an efficient, but artificial way to simplify life’s experiences, allowing us to avoid going deeper into the paradoxes, complexities and ambiguities of real life. True simplicity lies deep under all of this; it is not found by making up rules that limit our curiosity and narrow our experience of life.

Conditioning and Concepts

There are two ideas I discovered in Zen training that became fundamental to my approach to zazen and to life in general. The first was the idea of ‘concepts.’ Webster’s Dictionary calls a concept ‘An abstract idea generalized from a series of particular instances.’ Concepts are like mental containers into which we dump an experience. I began to discover that frequently, I was not actually experiencing something happening to me in the present: I was dumping it into a concept-bucket!

The term conditioning refers to all the many influences that create a lens through which we view the world. Those influences are multiple: the language we learned as a child, our gender, our sexuality, our education, the country we grew up in, our socio-economic background. The list is endless. It’s as if we sit in the center of a transparent globe. The globe is made up of thousands of colored glass windows, each one representing an aspect of our conditioning. At any given moment, based on our situation, we may be looking through a particular window with a particular color. What we see takes on the color of that window. Zazen is a way of ‘shattering the globe’ - beginning to see clearly and directly, bypassing our conditioning. There is less and less preconditioned coloring in how we respond to a situation. There is a greater clarity in responding to a circumstance. This can also be described as not adding but subtracting. Zen practice is not about accumulating new knowledge, reaching an ‘increased awareness goal’, or acquiring a new bag of concepts. It is about taking away, not adding on. In every situation the question is “What am I adding here that could be let go of?” Subtracting in this way leads to simplicity and clarity, bringing a natural sense of freedom and ease to everyday life.

“Name the colors, blind the eye” is an old Zen saying illustrating that the intellect’s habitual ways of branding and labeling create a terrible experiential loss by displacing the vibrant, living reality with a steady stream of labels.

-Robert Lanza

Zen study is like washing a dirty garment. The garment is originally there: the dirt comes from outside. - Pai-Chang (720-814)

Radical Acceptance

Key to this growing awareness of our concepts and conditioning is an embrace of ‘Radical Acceptance’ – this is the steady, unflinching look at ourselves, our behavior and our actions without judgement, but with increasing clarity. The ancient Roman playwright Terence, c. 190-158 BC, wrote the following:

Homo sum: Humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.

This is Radical Acceptance – to see ourselves as we are, not as we would want to be, not at we should be, but just as we are. Sometimes this is painful. As Roshi once said “If I had a penny for every regret of a thing I had done, I’d have more than a million dollars.”

As I began to practice Radical Acceptance I noticed that while I was more self-aware, I was also less self-conscious. Self-awareness can be defined as a deepening clarity into the nature of our own being. Self-consciousness is a habitual concern about how I believe others are perceiving me. Self-consciousness is deeply rooted in the belief that I’m not enough, that I need to be someone else, that I need to meet the expectations of others, to look good, to play a role. Zazen can abolish self-consciousness – not necessarily instantaneously, but gradually, allowing me to just be, and to know that I am perfect whole and complete - just as I am.

It is important to note that Radical Acceptance does not mean acquiescence. If I have a thorn in my foot, I pull it out! I don’t say “Oh because I’m practicing Radical Acceptance, I’m going to just let the thorn be.” That would be both unwise and impractical. But in this context Radical Acceptance may be looking carefully at the distracting thoughts that carried me away from attention to where I was walking and allowed me to overlook the cactus in my path. It is this looking at the totality of my experience, accepting all of it – 360-degree awareness – that brings us closer to truly being in the present.

Fear and Anger

Over the years of deepening Zen practice, I noticed that the fraternal twins of fear and anger were gradually relinquishing their presence in my experience. I don’t mean that I was fearful and angry all the time. I mean that I noticed that a substrate of these two was operating in the background of my consciousness. Imagine the effect you feel when the power goes down in your home. Suddenly, you notice a level of quiet you weren’t previously aware of. And when the power goes back on, you notice the very subtle hum that seems to inhabit the walls of your home. It's like that with this awareness of fear and anger. Something I hadn’t perceived before, because it was so subtle, as well as so habitual, stopped – at first intermittently and then more and more. Experiencing this subsiding of the fraternal twins of fear and anger was a new taste of freedom. My body felt more spacious, lighter, more at ease.

The Necessity of Intellect

There is, as I discussed earlier, the mistaken perception that Zen is the practice of stopping thinking, that somehow the goal is to give up thinking. On the contrary, the goal is to enable us to think more clearly, to respond with more clarity, not to react due to prior conditioning. To attempt to stop our thinking entirely would be like trying not to hear, or not to see. Although both seeing and hearing might be human faculties that we may be deprived of and can learn to live without, living without a brain – the most miraculous of the human organs – is impossible. Zazen is a way of clearing away the fog of conditioned thought, of pulling out the mental weeds from the brain-garden, so that the truth can emerge.

Both the Hidden Valley Zen Center and Mountain Gate-Sanmonji contain extensive libraries of books about Zen. Like this essay, all this voluminous writing is an attempt, by means of the intellect, to point toward something that is deeper than intellect. In my own Zen practice, constant reading and studying of Zen texts and commentaries about them has become an essential part of my path. I can go back to a classic Zen text that I had read previously (Dogen’s “Shobogenzo Uji, Being Time” is a good example) and things that seemed to be nonsense then are now clearer. The reading has taken me deeper into my practice.

Life as Zen Practice

Ultimately, the value of zazen lies not in whatever insights might be gained on the cushion. It lies not in the pursuit or attainment of a goal called Awakening or Enlightenment. Either of these attained while sitting in meditation are in the end without meaning unless they are taken out into our everyday lives.

As I moved through these ten years of Zen, I noticed some profound, but subtle changes in the way I related to the world. There was less and less ‘stickiness.’ When encountering a situation, say a driver who cut me off in traffic, I found myself feeling a moment of anger, for sure, and using my horn if I needed to warn the driver. But I also noticed that these sensations and actions passed more quickly, and I was able to return to a ‘steady state’ more and easily. There was less internal monologue about ‘crazy drivers these days’ less rumination. There was less reaction to situations and more responding to them in a way that was appropriate. Here is an example from my own life which happened recently:

Practice is intimately reacting with life. – Shinshu Roberts

Practice is much more than when we do zazen. Practice includes all activities. It begins when we open our eyes in the morning and ends when we close our eyes at night. Everything in between is practice. - Kapleau Roshi

I was visiting my son and his family in their apartment on a Sunday morning. As I approached the passageway leading to their apartment, I received a phone call from my granddaughter. She was in tears, and she said breathlessly “There’s a man knocking on the door, and he wants to get in, and my Daddy keeps shouting at him to go away and he won’t go away, and the dog keeps barking and my Daddy keeps shouting and I’m scared!” As I got nearer, I noticed a man standing in the passageway leading to their apartment with a briefcase and a computer. I went up to him, introduced myself and told him I that I had just received a call from my granddaughter and that she was very upset, saying that someone was trying to get into the apartment, and that her Daddy was shouting and the dog was barking. He said he was working for the Census Bureau, showed me his badge, and said that my son’s address had been randomly chosen by the Bureau to complete a survey, and that my son was obliged to open the door.

I explained to him that he had just returned from a business trip, was probably jet-lagged and that lots of knocking started the dog barking, which could bring complaints from the apartment management if it continued. I asked if he could come back later or possibly mail them the survey. I also noticed that he was an older gentleman, who was most likely doing this work part-time to earn some extra money, and that quite possibly his income depended on how many surveys he successfully completed.

He reluctantly agreed to try again another time. I thanked him for understanding, and just as we were completing our conversation, I noticed that he was standing perilously close to a heavy iron support for the stairway leading to the apartments above. I told him to please be careful, and step away from the staircase as he risked a nasty bump on the head if he turned around to leave from where he was standing. I noticed that his whole attitude toward me physically changed. He seemed softer and more open. He seemed to get that I was looking out for him as well as my family. He pleasantly told me to have a good day and left.

This was being fully present in a situation that began with the possibility of escalating into an angry confrontation to no one’s benefit. Instead, it ended with a calm resolution for all concerned. This is a small example of Zen practice in the world: learning to be present whatever the circumstances and responding appropriately.

Is Zen the Answer?

I came to the practice of Zen with the idea that it might be the answer to many of life’s problems. Instead of getting an answer, I found a question. Who am I? Who is this “I” who is asking the question? Can I go deeper in my zazen? It has taught me to question every aspect of my existence, to question who I am in ever more profound ways. I have learned that it is impossible to ‘finish’ Zen practice. Regardless of the circumstances, Zen brings me to the edge of my experience not with an answer, but with a sense of inquiry.

I want to conclude by expressing my deep gratitude to Sozui Roshi and the sangha of the Hidden Valley Zen Center, and to Mitra Roshi and the sangha of Mountaingate Sanmonji. They have shown me the way, traveled with me on the path and assisted me in a deep and ongoing transformation of my life. My time on the cushion doing zazen is not over. The practice of bringing the awareness of Zen into the world will be part of my life while I am on the planet. One does not ‘finish Zen’ – there is nothing to finish, nothing to gain, and ultimately nothing to learn. It is always already here, waiting for us to wake up.

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margins fade for ever and ever as I move… - Tennyson

The study of Zen has no beginning, middle or end. It is about waking up, seeing for yourself, and standing on your own two feet. Start anywhere: eventually you’ll come full circle. - Thomas Cleary