‘You’ll feel better about it when you go there’
This brief reflection has a title. There is a bit of a story behind that, which will become clear as you read.
Last Saturday, I participated in a Zen Peacemaker training and listened to a teacher share her experience of travelling to Auschwitz to participate in a Bearing Witness retreat run by Zen Peacemakers. She described how, as someone of Jewish heritage, part of her was drawn to attend, but she was also naturally quite anxious and not sure whether she could participate. In discussing this with retreat leader Bernie Glassman, she remembered him saying,
“You’ll feel better about it when you go there.”
She did end up going and had a transformative, life‑giving experience, which has led to a practice of practical peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians. Her important work continues to this day.
I thought this commonplace statement, “you’ll feel better when you go there,” contains a valuable teaching. It applies not only to facing the fears and challenges I might experience in the so‑called external world, but equally to the inner aspect of practice. A large part of this ’inner work’ involves releasing the grip of my certainties, particularly ideas about what I think constitutes reality and the surety of my own identity, who this person called ‘Richard’ is, who I think I am.
Fears are a bit like a Chinese finger trap. When we pull away from them, their grip becomes tighter. We are trapped in the very act of recoiling and are only released by entering fully into them. This is not a natural response for me - nor I think for many of us. It has taken time, training, encouragement, and the support of a community to learn to trust the process of noticing, relaxing, and letting go. Sometimes it all seems to flow effortlessly, at other times the path is full of pitfalls as I confront old fears and my own stubborn headedness - either way I renew my vows and continue on.
Contemplative practice is not a path of avoidance nor escape into an empty equivalence. It is a practice of repeatedly befriending the places one does not want to go to and, perhaps paradoxically, as a result, finding deep freedom within them. We discover this only when we get up close and alongside out difficulties and realise that they are not as fixed, nor as fearful, as we thought they were. It is then that they can become a site of liberation.
Wise teachers tell us that our practice matures when we move from clutching, grasping, and holding on to fixed ideas to what Uchiyama Roshi poetically refers to as “opening the hand of thought.” Just like in the predicament of the finger trap, to open the hand of thought we need first to notice what is going on in our minds and then relax. As the three tenets tell us, fixed ideas about who we and others are, are a dead end. I have been there many times and will surely go there again - but thanks to this practice I also know a different way. Holding my agendas lightly, not tightly, and relaxing the grip of my certainties are central to this.
As alluded to, this alternative path can be challenging, and for me, much of this boils down to basic fears about the stability of my identity and my own and others’ well‑being if I let go. That is why I seek support from a tradition and teachings mapping out the contours of the path, which includes a set of ethical guidelines, a practice community, and a trusted friend or teacher who knows the territory and might be able to make stepping into the unknown a little safer by saying encouraging words to the effect,
“you’ll feel better about it when you go there.”
It can feel challenging to be in a place of not knowing, open and vulnerable and not holding all the answers. Yet I always find that when I go there, and to the degree in which I manage to, I feel free, alive, deeply connected, and qualitatively “better.”
Richard Warner (B.Soc.Wk)
Teacher at Sun Mountain Zen Community, Brisbane Australia.

