Coaching practices for Susokukan Meditation

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Susokukan Meditation, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Sitting alone, every single day becomes a negotiation over whether to skip it, and my practice keeps collapsing
• When I just sit in silence I drift off into daydreams, but when I only chew on the koan I never actually settle
• Even in meditation I’m secretly grading myself, chasing some better state, treating sitting as a means to an end
• I sit faithfully but the rest of my life is a mess of small dishonesties and unresolved conflicts I keep ignoring, and I’m starting to suspect that noise in how I’m living is exactly what’s clouding the practice and keeping me stuck.
• A feeling shows up and I’m instantly grabbing at it or shoving it away

Practices that may help

1. Practicing with a sangha (community sitting)
   Sit with others regularly — group practice stabilizes individual practice in ways solitude cannot.
   Shikantaza: Just Sitting
2. Integrating the koan with seated meditation
   Bring the koan into the stillness of zazen so the sit and the inquiry reinforce each other.
   Zen Koans: Inquiry Beyond Reason
3. Breath Counting Meditation
   Breath counting (susokukan in Japanese Zen) is a focused-attention practice in which you silently count each exhale from one to ten, then restart, using the count to anchor attention and quickly detect when the mind has wandered. It is one of the oldest formalized attention-training methods; its mechanism aligns well with focused-attention research, though breath counting as an isolated practice has rarely been trialed separately.
4. Shikantaza — "just sitting" in the Soto Zen tradition
   Sit with complete presence and nothing to achieve — no goal, no technique, no observer separate from sitting.
   Open Monitoring Meditation, Made Practical
5. Shikantaza: Just Sitting
   Shikantaza ("just this sitting") is the central meditation practice of Soto Zen, formulated by Dogen Zenji (1200–1253). It is objectless, open-awareness meditation: you sit with alert presence, not focusing on any particular object and not trying to achieve any state. Dogen taught that shikantaza is not a means to enlightenment but the expression of it — sitting is itself the practice. Benefits overlap with studied open-monitoring meditation, though shikantaza’s specific claims are experiential rather than clinically validated.
6. Koan practice and daily ethical conduct (sila)
   Ground koan inquiry in the ethical precepts — insight without conduct is unstable.
   Zen Koans: Inquiry Beyond Reason
7. Non-grasping awareness: letting arise and pass
   Watch thoughts, sensations, and emotions arise and dissolve without grabbing or pushing.
   Shikantaza: Just Sitting
8. Zen Koans: Inquiry Beyond Reason
   A koan is a paradoxical question or vignette — "What is the sound of one hand?" — used in Rinzai Zen to exhaust discursive thinking and provoke a non-conceptual insight called kensho. Koan practice is a centuries-old experiential tradition; benefits are reported within the lineage but have not been validated by controlled research, and authentic koan work is traditionally done under a qualified teacher.
9. Releasing the object: sitting without a focal point
   Let go of fixing attention on the breath, a mantra, or any other anchor — simply be present.
   Shikantaza: Just Sitting
10. Dropping the koan into the body
    Sense the koan as a felt question in the belly and chest, not only as a thought in the head.
    Zen Koans: Inquiry Beyond Reason

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