A Future Classic — A Review of Zen Heart by Ezra Bayda

What a pleasant surprise! A dharma book that’s insightful, well-written, practical, and inspiring. When I picked up Zen Heart: Living with Mindfulness and Compassion, I wasn’t expecting much. I’d read Ezra Bayda’s other two books, worked with him in San Diego from 2001 – 2003, and thought I pretty much knew what he had to say.

I was wrong. Ezra has much to say, all of it insightful and useful in the midst of our everyday lives. The book maps out the spiritual life in a new way and offers a plethora of practice ideas, pointers, and analysis. I feel like someone’s handed me a treasure of useful tips that I can use for a lifetime or more. This is a book to come back to again in one or five or twenty years.

He breaks up the path into three stages: the Me-Phase, Being Awareness, and Being Kindness. Briefly, the Me-Phase is about becoming aware of our conditioned patterns of thought and action. Being Awareness is expanding our perspective in the wider container of awareness, the one mind, you could say, which is where Zen is normally concerned. Finally, Being Kindness is connecting with our true compassionate nature. All three are indispensable phases of the path.

In each phase, Ezra offers practical tips and advice to help us gain more understanding and awareness and urges us to remember that the point of all this is not to change ourselves, but rather to become aware of the manifold ways we cut ourselves off from this life.  It’s not as simple as just “being here now” as Eckhart Tolle might maintain. The ego is tricky, and a lot of the work to be done is psychological in nature.

This is where this book excels — in giving us tools with which we can clue into the ego’s antics, our own particular conditioning. In one chapter he provides three crucial questions to bring us out our own heads and into our bodies: Can I welcome this as my path? What is my most believed thought right now? What is this? He details the ways we can use these questions and why they’re of value.

His primary teaching, if I can sum it up in a nutshell (I can’t), is to reside in the physical experience of this moment, right now, as it is. Much of our suffering comes from being up in our heads where we spin our me-stories and create more tension and suffering for ourselves and others. The more we can be with life as it is, the more clear our lives will be, and we’ll be able to connect to our true heart-mind, that which is known as “our true nature.”

There wasn’t a chapter I didn’t like. In each chapter I felt like I gained something, a new insight, a new way to notice my conditioning, and inspiration. There’s a great meditation in the book too. It’s a structured way to do shikan-taza, which is a kind of nondual awareness meditation popular in Zen and Dzogchen but very difficult to do. I found his instructions helpful and wondered: why didn’t I think of that? The appendices are also excellent, detailing basic meditation instructions, essential reminders (think “slogans” of the Seven Point Mind Training), and Three Vows.

I hope you enjoy and benefit from this book as much as I did.