RIDING BETWEEN THE WORLDS
Expanding Our Potential through the Way of the Horse
Linda Kohanov

Shortly after completing the final draft of my first book, I retreated to the comfort of my herd. Dazed by the barrage of words that had long been circulating through my mind, I was incapable of training or even saddling a horse to ride. Instead, I walked down the line of corrals and flung open the gates. The impulse to run free was overwhelming. Cooped up for too long themselves while I was writing, my horses raced across the property, bucking chaotically through the dust, dodging hitching posts, wheelbarrows, and each other, finally settling around the hay stacked at the edge of a bone-colored wash that hadn’t flowed in six weeks. With no fresh grass to nibble, they haphazardly removed the thick blue tarp protecting bales of alfalfa more from sun than from rain. I sat under a gnarled tree and watched them graze Arizona-style, heat waves rising around me even in the shade, blurring the landscape, baking away the chatter in my brain.

A half hour later, when I was as calm inside as I appeared to be outside, my old sage of a mustang Noche turned and stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time. Leaving his celebratory feast, he wandered over and stood next to me, lowering his head, matching his nostrils to the level of my own, transmitting secrets stored in the breath.
Between us, a feeling of ecstasy began to rise. This horse, who had been beaten into submission by his first trainers, had not so long ago found his way back from the dissociative trance that robs trauma victims of their souls. As a part of my equine-facilitated therapy practice, he had gone on to single out, of his own free will, human beings possessing hidden wells of sadness. Time and time again, he would stand beside them, unrestrained, as their hearts melted in his presence, and they finally sobbed out memories they could never speak aloud. Now, this horse, who knew so much about pain, was teaching me something about its opposite.

Though to anyone passing by we appeared to be relaxing in the sketchy shade of a mesquite, Noche and I were ascending. The warmth between us was gathering force, escalating into the rarefied experience of a love I can’t adequately describe — a radiant, pulsating combination of gratitude, empowerment, and unconditional regard for all we were and all we had healed in each other over the years. The sensation was feeding back with increasing ferocity. I fought the sudden urge to run away, surprised that something so exquisite could simultaneously seem so threatening. Just when I thought I couldn’t bear another minute of it, the feeling began to subside. Noche stayed with me until it dissipated completely. Then he sputtered, shook his head, and walked over to the herd. I started after him, my body contorting in clumsy attempts to regain what I was hoping to escape moments before. “But, but how could you just...leave,” I said. “Can’t we hang onto that feeling a
little longer?”

Noche glanced back, his eyes piercing my heart with an insight that circulated through my bloodstream and flooded my brain with words so clear I could have sworn he spoke them out loud: “Joy is. Sadness is. You try to lasso one and chase away the other. Yet in finally meeting what you’ve been craving all along, you’re not sure whether to capture it or flee from it, because even great beauty is too wild for you. This is a suffering my kind has never known.”
Without the slightest hint of pity or judgment, Noche elucidated the restlessness humans feel. Like every other two-legged creature I knew, I was constantly chasing after so-called positive emotions and running away from the negative. Yet by example, Noche gave me a kinesthetic sense of how to live the Buddhist ideals of nonattachment and nonaversion. He easily saw through the social masks people wear, drawing attention to the truth of what was, while trusting in the wisdom of impermanence. If he felt sadness lurking behind the smiles of my clients, he would step forward and not only dislodge the emotion, but create a safe space where the tears could finally be released. I still don’t fully understand how or why he does this, but in his strong, compassionate presence, people are able to mine the depths of despair and come out the other side, finally realizing that, like the thick black clouds of a summer thunderstorm, tempestuous feelings run their course and evaporate, leaving behind a clarity impossible to achieve through suppression.

With a heart open enough to embrace the sorrows of strangers, Noche could also handle a level of ecstasy intimidating to me. As I struggled to contain this overwhelming sense of joy, he flowed into it. As I tried desperately to call it back, he ambled over to the hay pile with the same casual enthusiasm he often exhibited waiting for a carrot after one of our clients made a major breakthrough.

I have seen this horse stand in the rain, the snow, the sun at 110 degrees, with the patience and equanimity he carries in the face of emotions that send most people running for cover. Does Noche have a Buddha nature? Most definitely. But can a horse become a practicing Buddhist? I would have to say no. In Noche’s case at least, he doesn’t seem to need the practice.

the courage to thrive
Passing a group of horses huddled together in pasture, I’m often privy to a secret bliss. Sometimes, they’re resting peacefully in the shade. Other times, they only seem to be dozing. If I stand with them long enough, I begin to sense waves of feeling moving through the herd, generating a collective subsonic reverie so deep it vibrates through the bones and expands the heart, leaving the ears untouched.

Two years after my mind-expanding encounter with Noche, I have a higher tolerance for the wildness of great beauty, but I’m still haunted by my initial impulse to squelch the joy that rose between us. Since then, I’ve observed how authentic experiences of love, wonder, and connection can send people into a tailspin just as easily as any negative emotion. Fear — and its accompanying urge to fight, flee, or freeze — has long been known to arise when abuse survivors finally start to feel good. The traumatized nervous system interprets any elevation in arousal, including life-force fluctuations associated with intense well-being, as cause for alarm. Therapeutic techniques involve slowly and carefully separating anxiety from the feeling of being alive. Yet I’ve also seen successful entrepreneurs, counselors, artists, and educators panic in the face of positive emotions. While this initially seems paradoxical, and even a bit sad, there are numerous reasons for it, some quite logical, others more adventurous. Together they create a picture of the strange position we find ourselves in as our species turns ever so slowly from surviving to thriving.

The U.S. Constitution promises citizens the right to the pursuit of happiness, an ambitious pledge to make, especially in the 1700s. The vast majority of the world’s population at that time toiled for the benefit of royalty. Noblemen didn’t particularly care if their subjects were happy, or even healthy, for that matter. The ruling class expected people to serve and conform. Religious institutions reinforced this attitude by suppressing all kinds of simple pleasures. Adventurous souls wanting to explore the creative, emotional, sexual, and intuitive dimensions of life were condemned to hell, and sometimes to death. To this day, many people experience repeated surges of fear when they follow their dreams, and feel good as a result of their accomplishments, because the collective memory of humanity reverberates with the dire consequences that so often followed such efforts.

Rigid, narcissistic parents still inflict untold suffering on family members who assert their own needs and desires. Those growing up in abusive environments can feel downright terrified by success. Since the brain creates circuitry patterns in response to experience, physically and sexually abused children develop neural pathways associating stress and pleasure with negative, even life-threatening outcomes. Attempts to set boundaries and move toward self-empowerment are met with more violence. These people are wired to expect any rise in self-esteem, personal expression, sexual excitement, love, joy, or connection to end in tragedy or shame. They often pass these debilitating behavioral and emotional patterns onto their children, even if, as adults, they manage to break the cycle of overt physical abuse.

The right to seek personal fulfillment, an incredible breakthrough in 1776, remains an unrealized ideal for many people. Over the last two hundred years, men and women of the free world may have grown a bit more comfortable pursuing happiness. Most of us, however, aren’t sure what to do when we find it, and some are so conditioned to receive punishment for it we barely enjoy it while it lasts. This is perhaps the most frustrating dilemma we face in changing the unconscious patterns handed down by our ancestors.

Serfs, slaves, concubines, soldiers, refugees, and later, factory workers were routinely prevented from experiencing even the most fleeting sense of elation. How could they possibly teach their children to manage the curious power unleashed by emotions like joy, ecstasy, and bliss? The same wisdom eluded their leaders, who were so busy managing and defending territory they had little time to think of anything else. Survival of the fittest was the rule, no matter what socioeconomic class a person belonged to. This mentality affected the so-called objective sciences long after technology offered a sense of physical security unknown to previous generations. In the mid-twentieth century, psychology absorbed the Darwinian tendency to interpret emotion and behavior in terms of survival value. Researchers tried to explain everything from creativity and consciousness to a mother’s love and a child’s smile as an evolutionary innovation brought about through natural selection.

As society became more industrialized and computerized, so did its metaphors for sentient life. One of our culture’s most powerful and damaging myths insists that the universe and everything in it must work according to predictable, mechanical laws. This leads to a marked ineptitude in the more ephemeral realms of feeling, imagination, and intuition. Social institutions deny the wisdom of the body and the senses, deifying the mind in a vacuum, training people to stand in production lines or sit in cubicles at computers, sublimating their physical and emotional needs to the cold, objective logic of consumerism and competition. Many endure the drudgery of meaningless employment, or unemployment, by self-medicating. Recreational drugs, from alcohol to marijuana to television, lull the disillusioned into a comfortable stupor, providing just enough of a high to make a stilted life bearable. Those difficult souls who object through the inconveniences of depression, chronic dissatisfaction, and the proverbial “nervous breakdown” can be fixed with more sophisticated prescriptions and sent back to work. There’s no need to pursue happiness with this approach. It comes in bottles marked “Valium,” and more recently, “Prozac.” With the right dosage, there’s no danger of feeling too good. Staying at a nice, complacent, even keel is just what the doctor ordered.

While human beings routinely suppress their emotional and spiritual needs to survive, the ability to thrive demands uncommon courage and awareness, a kind of compassionate, creative intelligence willing to take chances outside conventional thought and behavior. To successfully pursue happiness, one must also work up the nerve to feel it, knowing full well that to finally open the heart is to encounter the other outlawed emotions in all their terrible glory. The root of courage, after all, comes from the French word coeur, which literally means heart. Most of us have been taught to see this organ as a mechanical pump supporting the fleshy robot that carries a cool, calculating brain around. In this metaphor, strong emotion of any kind is perceived as malfunction. It simply does not compute. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, mainstream culture is no closer to understanding the dynamics of happiness than it was two centuries ago. It has only succeeded in treating people more like well-oiled machines.

Yet it is possible to come to terms with a violent past, reclaim the soul, form mutually supportive relationships, and move gracefully through the sorrows and joys of life. If an old mustang like Noche could make this seemingly complex transformation, why not the rest of us? What lost knowledge do horses express through their simple yet profound way of being, and how can we regain a bit of this wisdom for ourselves?

deep peace
Since Charles Darwin, the behavioral sciences have studied the “classic list” of human emotions: anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, happiness, and contentment. When social psychologist Dacher Keltner established the Berkeley Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being, he championed research moving beyond what he calls the “self-interested emotions.” Based at the University of California at Berkeley, Keltner’s brainchild explores “benevolent emotions” like hope, awe, love, compassion, and gratitude. Peace, he says, “is about social harmony in connection,” and is “based, therefore, on a different set of principles and practices than personal well-being.” In this sense, the individual’s ability to thrive cannot help but be influenced by his relationships — a colossal conundrum, considering that while modern civilization has successfully curtailed threats from the environment, it hasn’t begun to eradicate the pain and suffering that people, and the social institutions they create, inflict on members of their own species. The average human being is much less likely to be chased by wolves, hunted down by lions, and exposed to the elements than he is to be victimized by parents, lovers, bosses, coworkers, and, sometimes, his own children.

Yet, in my work with horses as co-therapists, I’ve repeatedly witnessed how the suppression of self-interested emotion actually inhibits true connection. Peace, love, and compassion can create social disharmony when worn like masks to cover unresolved anger, fear, sadness, and depression. No one has ever illuminated this paradox more clearly for me than my black Arabian mare Tabula Rasa. Her response to a woman with the best human and spiritual intentions illustrated that the art of creating peace and well-being requires much more than most people imagine. And yet the solution, like so many horse-inspired insights, is deceptively simple. It involves recognizing just how interconnected we already are.

The week before an extended equine-facilitated workshop called The Power of Authenticity, one of the participants, “Rhiannon,” phoned to inform me she’d shown up early to do some sightseeing.
“Do you mind if I stop by and meet the herd before I head off to California for a few days?” she asked. Her voice felt like cool velvet — the result, I learned, of a morning spent in meditation. In town for forty-eight hours, she’d already visited the local Buddhist center, the vegan restaurant across town, and a number of other alternative attractions most lifelong Tucson residents have yet to explore.
“I’ll be teaching until four,” I said. “Why don’t you come over after that, and I’ll show you around.”
When I noticed a slim, graceful woman with long, silver hair wandering around the property during my three o’clock riding lesson, I wasn’t sure if she was looking for me or someone else. At the large public stable where I based my practice for three years, people I barely knew would come and go at all hours. The stranger standing at the south fence was outside shouting range, yet even from a distance, something about her made the hair on the back of my neck rise. “I hope that’s not Rhiannon,” I thought.

Sure enough, she opened the gate and walked confidently toward me. “You’re Linda, right?” she said.
My gut recoiled in response. “Yes,” I mumbled. My throat was constricting, undermining my ability to talk and even breathe. The intervening silence felt unusually tense. I couldn’t imagine why my body was reacting so strongly to this gentle and obviously adventurous, intelligent woman.

“Christie’s lesson is running a little late today,” I finally managed to say as my gray gelding Max began to jig and sidestep — despite his rider’s normally successful attempts to keep him calm. “We just need to practice a little cantering. In the meantime, why don’t you head over and meet the other horses.” I pointed to the corrals housing the rest of my herd and voiced the same recommendation I always make to new clients: “Don’t pet them right away. See what happens when you try to connect over the fence without touching them. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
I could barely concentrate on the task at hand. Something about Rhiannon made me feel unbalanced, anxious...angry. I silently chided myself for these irrational emotions as Christie and Max galloped circles around me. “What’s wrong with you?” my inner critic said. “This woman has traveled all the way from Boston to study with you. So what if she shows up a few days early. Can’t you give her a few extra minutes of your time? You better pull yourself together and be nice.”

As my student led her horse back to his stall, I reluctantly walked toward Rhiannon, agitation increasing with every step despite my conviction to act the perfect host.
“So,” I said, trying desperately not to grit my teeth, though I couldn’t seem to release the fists hidden in my coat pockets, “which horse are you most attracted to?”
“Well, attraction isn’t really the word I’d use,” she replied. “I had such a disturbing experience with that black horse over there that I felt too disoriented to look at anyone else.”
Rhiannon pointed at Tabula Rasa, the one member of my herd I could count on to welcome newcomers. This confident, gregarious mare had mothered so many people out of their fear of horses that I’d come to rely on her ability to stay calm in the midst of the strongest emotions. When I informed Rhiannon who had singled her out, she looked even more confused.
“Really?” she asked in obvious disbelief. “When I read about Rasa in your book, she sounded like the sweetest, smartest horse in the world.”
“What happened?”
“Well, she was standing at the back of her corral under that tree when I walked up. All of a sudden, she ran toward me, teeth bared, flames shooting out of her eyes. If there hadn’t been a fence between us, she might actually have attacked me.”

To say I was astonished would be an understatement. Rhiannon’s description of Rasa reflected how I had felt when this seemingly peaceful woman first greeted me — only, being human, I’d been taught to suppress such flamboyant outbursts and blame myself for the “inappropriate” feelings underneath. While I was certainly glad I hadn’t let my emotions run wild, I was comforted by Rasa’s reaction. My hands relaxed; my jaw released. The haughty critic in my head could only say, “Hmmmm....” I invited Rhiannon to sit with me on the straw bales next to Rasa’s paddock. Flashes of disappointment and sadness moved across her face as she told me how rejected she felt.
“Rasa doesn’t hate you,” I assured her, “but she was trying to tell you something. She was holding up a mirror for you. Imagine running toward her with the same expression, the same intensity she showed you. What would you be saying?”

Rhiannon took a deep breath and closed her eyes with such a studied sense of calmness I half expected her to adopt the lotus position, but she managed to get into the spirit of the exercise much quicker than I would have thought. Mouth gradually contorting, hands clenching into fists, her gentle demeanor evolved into a picture of absolute rage. “Now let’s finally have it out!” she shouted with a guttural force that actually made Rasa take a step back. The Power of Authenticity is an advanced workshop designed to boost creativity, intuition, sensory awareness, and nonverbal communication through reflective activities with horses, while giving participants the experience of building authentic community. People with serious psychological difficulties are not encouraged to attend. Even so, the horses effectively draw out issues of all kinds in even the most conscious, accomplished participants. It took Rasa a matter of minutes to unearth core feelings in Rhiannon that years of meditation and counseling had somehow left unresolved. No way was I going to make her wait until the official start of the workshop to explore the mare’s unusual response.

Over the next hour, I learned that Rhiannon had grown up in a repressive household with parents and siblings who repeatedly complained that she was “too sensitive.” Efforts to “toughen her up” seemed to backfire. She remained, in the eyes of her family, too fragile and irrational to ever amount to anything. Several ill-fated romances did little to boost Rhiannon’s faith in herself, or other people. Spending time alone, in nature or with her artwork, became her only solace, but the sense of isolation was at times overwhelming. Meditation class, which she originally attended in the hopes of quieting her chaotic emotions, was one of the few places where she could experience some semblance of peace in the presence of other human beings.

After visiting a friend’s barn, Rhiannon also developed an interest in horses. She was immediately attracted to their purity of spirit. “You always know exactly where you stand with them,” she told me. “Even when Rasa lunged at me, I knew there was no hidden agenda. With most of the people in my life, I never really understand what’s going on. When I’m around them for any length of time, something inside me just wants to run screaming in the other direction.”
I proceeded to explain the concept of the “feeling bearer,” a term my frequent co-facilitator, counselor Kathleen Barry Ingram, had devised to characterize a natural empath who unconsciously acted out or compensated for emotions others refused to own. “You think all these feelings that have been driving you crazy are yours,” I emphasized, “but I guarantee you that most of them are not. Your parents, brothers, and husbands had all kinds of fears and frustrations they couldn’t face. Just because they put on stoic masks of self-control didn’t make it all go away. Those unspoken feelings gathered force and continued to subconsciously affect everyone in your household. You routinely released the pressure by crying or raging for no apparent reason. Then, of course, every-one berated you for showing them what they were ashamed to feel.” I imagined Rhiannon’s family sitting around the dinner table talking quietly about the weather as an arsenal of fireworks bounced off the walls and exploded all around them. “People aren’t the separate beings they think they are, but they can bolster this illusion by cutting themselves off from their own hearts. You were never quite able to make that break.”

Rhiannon hadn’t considered the possibility before. Though she breathed a sigh of relief, another part of her remained skeptical. She had been taught, after all, that feelings were inconvenient, irrational, self-contained sensations that needed to be controlled — and preferably hidden at all cost. The fact that she was incapable of doing this seemed to her a fatal weakness.
“How could I act out emotions that were never, ever discussed in my family?” she asked.
“Please explain to me,” I countered, “how Rasa could so effectively mirror the anger and frustration you’ve been carrying around since childhood seconds after meeting you.”
I told Rhiannon that her incongruent presence had affected me as powerfully as it had my mare. I also admitted that I didn’t fully understand what was happening until Rasa illustrated, with pure abandon, these feelings emanating from our guest. Before that realization, I thought my agitation arose from some selfish impulse, that I had become so spoiled by success that I didn’t want to share a few extra minutes with a woman who’d traveled across the country to attend an Epona workshop. But this assessment was totally off the mark. As my body registered anger, my mind desperately searched for internal reasons to explain it and shame myself for it, when in reality, it was like a blast of irritating smoke coming from someone else’s fire.

“It’s truly an art form to decipher the intertwining emotional messages circulating through even the most casual relationships,” I said. “Some of these feelings are personal, but if we suppress them long enough, they break through our façades of control and well-being, seeping out like stale air escaping a leaky tire and subtly choking those around us. Because our society hasn’t even acknowledged this possibility, it affects us unconsciously. But if we become aware of the dynamic, we can’t so easily be victimized by other people’s feelings — or our own.

“Once Rasa showed me the anger was coming from you, it dissipated in me completely. If it had lessened only slightly, I would have figured that your hidden anxiety was also triggering some neglected feeling that I needed to recognize and work on. But I’ve at least come far enough in this work to understand that my intense reaction had nothing to do with ‘not liking’ you or thinking there was something evil about you, which is the conclusion untrained empaths often come to when they feel surges of unspoken fear or anger coming from another person.”

Rhiannon’s eyes widened at this notion. She acknowledged that the peace she experienced through meditation was, on the whole, short-lived. Small talk with students right after class sometimes raised her anxiety — more evidence, she decided, that her continued turmoil reflected a lack of compassion and progress. She thought she needed to work harder to achieve the bliss she longed for through Buddhist practice. Yet if some of these errant emotions weren’t hers, maybe she wasn’t so maladjusted. Maybe this curse could be honed into a useful skill.
“It’s an interesting theory,” she said, “but how do I really know that Rasa wasn’t just telling me to get lost?”
“That’s a valid question,” I replied. “Let’s see how she responds if you approach her without trying to hide what you’ve been taught to reject in yourself. Earlier you gave words to Rasa’s threatening behavior: ‘Now let’s finally have it out.’ As you walk toward her corral again, tell her, out loud, everything that phrase brings up for you.”
Rhiannon hesitated, wary of exposing long forbidden thoughts and feelings. I obviously didn’t have time to establish the kind of relationship counselors build before encouraging intimate disclosure. But I did have secret weapon — a sensitive and expressive colleague who Rhiannon knew would never lie to her, categorize her, or, most importantly, betray her trust.
“Rasa’s a horse,” I emphasized. “She’s can’t tell anyone what you reveal, and I’m going to stay well out of hearing range. What do you have to lose? Her reaction couldn’t possibly be much worse than the first time you approached her, and you still have a fence between the two of you.”
From a distance, I watched this woman tentatively put one foot in front of the other as she spoke about things, she later told me, she had never fully admitted to herself, much less another living soul. Had her father beaten her? Did she hate her mother? Was her first husband unfaithful? These were questions I didn’t learn the answers to that day, but I could see that a soulful confession was taking place nonetheless.

Rhiannon paused several times along the way, wringing her hands, rubbing her left temple. When her shoulders began to convulse, the tears must have been flowing, though her silver mane strategically obscured any glimpse of her face. The whole time, Rasa repeatedly licked and chewed, yawned and stretched her neck — equine signs of release. As Rhiannon approached the fence, the mare moved gently, almost reverently toward her and stood quietly, witnessing, supporting through presence, if not literal understanding. The woman’s voice eventually faded, and the two seemed, for a few moments, suspended in pure being. Rhiannon turned and nodded, inviting me to join them, her moist gray-blue eyes soft yet radiant. All the tension I had felt in my own body seemed a distant, incoherent memory as Rasa let out a colossal sigh. A subtle but palpable feeling surrounded the three of us, like the scent of creosote and cactus flowers hanging heavy in the air after a long-awaited desert shower. I took a deep breath, drawing it into my lungs, my heart, my soul.
“That,” I said, when I finally dared to break the silence, “is peace.”

riding the present moment
“Horses are such forgiving creatures,” Rhiannon marveled during the opening session of our workshop the following week. She hadn’t yet shared the details of her encounter with Rasa, but several of the participants nodded their heads in agreement, having no doubt experienced this equine capacity themselves.
“Why do you think that is?” she asked.
“It’s not forgiveness in the human sense,” I replied, “because there’s no judgment to begin with. It’s closer to the original meaning of the word forgiveness: to let go. Only it’s not the nature of horses to cling to anything, so there’s no need to let go. They simply respond authentically to what’s happening moment to moment.”
“Sounds like a Zen concept to me,” said another participant, who was, like Rhiannon, a serious student of martial arts and meditation.
“Well, it’s not a concept to horses,” I replied with a smile, knowing full well where the conversation was headed. “It’s a way of life beyond concepts, which I guess is very Zen in itself.”
In discussions about horse behavior, Zen terminology often comes up, particularly among people who engage in equestrian activities for personal development. A symbol of freedom in many cultures, the horse models, naturally and effortlessly, many of the qualities promoted by this Asian “way of liberation,” as philosopher Alan Watts characterized it. Zen values spontaneous experience as a vehicle for human transformation. Practitioners strive to reconnect with a universal source beyond language, mental constructs, methods, and judgment.
In his classic book The Way of Zen, Watts emphasized that this “view of life...does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not a religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science.” It is, however, an artful fusion of Chinese Taoism and Indian Buddhism that came into existence when the latter made its way to China around 520 c.e. Originally known as Ch’an, it spread throughout Asia, emerging in Japan in the twelfth century. Zen subsequently infused its adoptive culture with delicate styles of architecture, painting, poetry, and gardening that blurred distinctions between natural and man-made structures, outwardly reflecting the wide-open spaces of naked awareness cultivated through meditation.

In their original forms, Buddhism and Taoism both encourage moving beyond the conditioned persona by emptying the mind of desires, preconceived notions, obsessive preoccupations with the past, and fearful or fanciful projections into the future. Various meditation practices eventually free the individual to respond authentically with the purity and openness of a child tempered by the wisdom and equanimity of a sage. The two traditions, however, diverge on several important points. According to The Tao of Zen by Ray Grigg, “Buddhism separates from the world to transcend it; Taoism dissolves back into the world to become one with it.” Zen straddles a fine line between the two. “Any discipline in Taoism is used to reenter fully what is already present,” notes Grigg. “This is also the case in Zen.” Though it fully embraces Buddhism’s insights into human suffering, Zen also encompasses Taoism’s lightness, playfulness, and appreciative acceptance of earthly experience. Meditation in this tradition releases “the practitioner into the spontaneity and freedom of merely being. The end of all this searching and discipline is a full and balanced life lived gracefully and harmoniously in wonderful simplicity. The sitter returns to the village to become fully engaged in the profoundly ordinary business of day-to-day existence.”

Excerpted from RIDING BETWEEN THE WORLDS Copyright © 2003 by New World Library