Beginning With Beginner’s Mind

I feel like I spend a lot of time – too much time – 
thinking I understand.
Maybe we all do, even when we know 
everyone’s understandings are different.

At the same time I think most of us know
there’s a lot we can’t see. 
It feels helpful to keep that in mind,
and to keep an open, “don’t know” mind,
and be learning and surprised by each moment.

Because even when the surprises aren’t good,
at least we know that any moment now, 
there’ll be a new moment,
or a new perspective, or a new way of seeing, 
or a new message, or even a new messenger.

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 473. Last week I thought I might be away today but I’m here. My partner went to LA but with the fires, but with all the chaos down there, we decided I’d stay. 

Today I want to talk about something I want to practice more myself, Beginner’s Mind. As I understand it, Beginner’s Mind is a Zen concept, but it seems applicable to Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, which is my general practice, and it seems very much applicable to mindful lawyering. 

In the very first chapter of his pretty famous book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki Roshi, who was the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.” What is that all about?

In my experience of sitting with the phrase, I notice two things: the way it’s possible to have beginner’s versus expert’s mind day-to-day, in portable practice, and the way the phrase feels like an instruction for formal practice. I’m guessing that’s the reverse order to understand beginner’s mind, but I’ll share my experience in that order because it feels relatable.  

On a day-to-day level it’s amusing how often I’m sure I’m right or I “know” what’s happening in a conversation or what someone’s going to say (often my partner). None of which is true and all of which more often than not actually puts me at a disadvantage.

When I say “none of which is true,” I don’t understand or I’m not paying attention or don’t have the knowledge, but that I’m taking a kind of hard-minded approach. My thoughts have coalesced around an idea about a person or situation – or maybe I should say they’ve coagulated – and there’s not much softness or flexibility or porosity. Not much else is getting in. 

It's a sensation as well as a state of mind. My mind feels sharp and bright, but tight, as in steel trap-sharp, and brittle, as in cut glass-bright. In our family it’s what we jokingly call, “often wrong but never in doubt.”

It’s what I strove for as a lawyer: to know it all, get everything down perfectly, cover every angles, so that when I walked into a courtroom or conference room, I would win. Or at least outmaneuver, or at least impress the hell out of my client. It’s pound-the-table syndrome. It can feel like the smartest, most advantageous state of mind because it feels unbeatable, and powerful. It’s “expert mind.” It’s why they pay us the big bucks.

But it’s also often not true. Even when I’m sure and all the research and facts and even the judge or jury agrees, nothing is static. Everything is changing. Even people – especially people – are not static. They’re always changing. The whole situation is a movable feast – the whole world is a moveable feast. There are dimensions I’m not considering, or maybe that no one is considering, like moral or ethical dimensions, and there are dimensions I can’t even see, that no one can see. But that maybe we could see and consider, if only we weren’t trying to be such experts. Which is why being an expert is not only often not true, but also so often disadvantageous. 

Being a beginner, having beginner’s mind in the day-to-day, for me is about remembering that there are all these different dimensions, to situations and to people, and then staying open, moment to moment and also in the larger sense, to whatever might be available to learn. Keeping my senses open: the mind, but also the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and the sense of the body, that spidey sense of something being just right or not right at all, or of something new that wants to be learned or heard or said. When I can remember to do that, I can sometimes see, or at least catch glimpses of, things I hadn’t considered. The mind of someone who greets each moment, and each client and each twist and turn of a case or matter, and also each thing that feels like a “fact,” with openness, with “don’t know-ness,” is the mind of a beginner. 

Beginner’s mind in the day-to-day feels like my mind and body are open, curious, relaxed - loose. Available to learn; to be proved wrong and glad for it; available to see a different truth. Even available to not know, to have no idea what’s true. This is almost anathema to being a lawyer, I know, but it feels great. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it. 

As an instruction for formal practice, beginner’s mind feels like observing each moment as it arises, moment by moment, with courage, with grace, and without wanting it to be anything more than it is but also without getting swept away by it. When a smell arises, noticing a smell…without appending a story to it like, “oh, are they making oatmeal, I love oatmeal, or, we just made oatmeal yesterday.” When a thought arises, “oh, thinking is happening,” or, “I’m having a thought that it’s supposed to be windy again today, which means fire danger,” and simply knowing that as a thought. 

Being an expert, having “expert’s mind,” on the cushion, for me is about thinking I have any idea what I’m doing on that cushion. Thinking, “oh, I’m doing well, I’m following my thoughts.” Or, “oh, I understand this,” or, “I can explain this.” (Which raises the question of what I’m even doing here, explaining this. ☺) Suzuki Roshi says, “[i]n the beginner’s mind there is no thought, ‘I have attained something.’” He says, “when we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something.” 

I feel like if there were ever a good suggestion for our times, for the way the world feels right now, for how to be with so much disinformation and misinformation and so many alarming messages and events, it’s that one: to have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, and to be beginners. And also to work as hard as we can for justice and equity and compassion and love – for sure – but to do that as beginners.

So let’s sit, and maybe we can see these two ways of being, maybe they’ll both arise, all in our one brief sit.