Beginner's Mind, Explained

The phrase isn’t mine. It comes from Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen teacher whose collected talks became the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — and from one line in particular, the one I put on this site’s homepage: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” I’d read it a dozen times before it actually landed.

It doesn’t mean naivety, or not knowing things, which was my first and wrong assumption. It means meeting each sit — each breath, honestly — without deciding in advance what it’s going to be like based on the last one. An expert’s mind, in Suzuki’s sense, has already filed today’s meditation under “the kind where I get restless” or “the kind that goes well,” and stops actually paying attention to what’s happening, because it already thinks it knows.

This turns out to be the single hardest part of practice for me, and I say that having also cried unexpectedly on a retreat floor and lost two months to a shame spiral, so it’s a competitive field. The more sits I accumulate, the more I catch myself walking to the cushion with expectations — today will finally be a good one, or today will definitely be a bad one because I’m tired — and either way, that’s the expert mind quietly closing the door before I’ve even sat down.

The goal was never to get good at meditating. It was to stay bad at expecting anything from it.

I named this whole project after the phrase partly as a trap for myself. It’s much harder to write from a place of having arrived somewhere when the site is literally called Beginner’s Mind — the name is a standing reminder not to publish anything here as though I’ve graduated out of needing it.

I fail at this weekly, probably more often than that. I’ll notice, mid-sit, that I’ve already decided what kind of session it’s going to be, and have to gently start over. As far as I can tell, that noticing and restarting isn’t a sign I’m bad at this. It’s the entire practice, just wearing a different outfit than usual.