Sitting with Ruby

I remember reading an article a year or so into sitting about meditation with your kids.  The writer explained that she and her husband would sit down for a short session with their children scrambling about all around them.  Being a new father at the time, I thought it was total BS.  How could you sit with a kid?  As nice as it is to sit with someone, why didn't the couple take turns?  Anyway, a few months later I saw that she wrote that she was wrong to write the piece because it wasn't really great but more chaotic than she had painted it.

But now here I am sitting with my 6 year old daughter, Ruby.

Most mornings I drag myself out of bed before everyone else wakes up for some exercise and zazen.  Many days I sit alone.  But sometimes Ruby gets up before her alarm.  Armed with a flashlight, she comes down to the basement to where I am sitting facing the wall.  Sometimes we acknowledge each other with a nod which is our silent unspoken permission for her to come in.  Sometimes she just walks on by and sits in her child sized love seat grabbing a stack of books from our children's book library.  Then she just sits there quietly reading.  Occasionally I will hear a shuffle or a turn of a page, but she respects the silence of the space.  When I finish sitting and end with my chanting and prostrations, she just sits and either reads or watches what I am doing.  She knows once I am done that I will feed her breakfast and the two of us can go upstairs.  It has become a normal routine.

I find that sitting with Ruby is not to different than sitting with anyone else or anyplace else.  Some may think that her activity might be distracting. If you've ever been to a sesshin you know that there are many activities in the world that can seem distracting.  People fidget or maybe breathe in a way you find strange or can't help but scratch itches every few seconds.  Sometimes there are dogs, roosters, cows, and ice cream trucks that all pay no regard to the fact that you're trying to meditate here! So distractions abound and we still sit.  I can't close off the world.  And the worst distractor mind.  I can't close off mind.  I have to sit with it all.

So some mornings I sit with my daughter by my side.  I'm not telling this to you to humble brag or to give you some hope for your own practice with your own children because I don't know what your practice is like or what your children are like.  There are no steps for me to give for you to get the same results.  When you are on your path it just your path.  My path includes Ruby.