I trained online with the Chosei Zen for about two years before nervously showing up for the in-person Summer Sesshin. It was certainly different than I expected, although to be perfectly honest I’m not entirely sure what I did expect. On paper it seemed that sesshin would be set up to poke all of the buttons that tend to make me have an unpleasant time: the sleep schedule would be quite a bit less than my usual eight hours, which I would normally abhor and avoid at all costs; the dojo would be achingly close to my parents home in northern Illinois, but I’d only get to visit my family for about a day and a half before leaving for sesshin, which would likely tailspin my emotional state; and I’d be away from my phone and computer, which I tend to rely upon for daily dopamine hits. On top of all this, I’ve historically had a rough time with online kesshin, which tend to make me somewhat morose and sad. 

However, despite all this, I overall would say I had a fantastic time at Summer Sesshin, not to say there weren’t a few bumps in the road. I didn’t particularly mind the lack of sleep (at least not outside the first few moments after my alarm went off); I didn’t experience any significant homesickness over the course of the week; and I can’t say I particularly missed using my cell phone or laptop. I’ll admit there was a chunk of time around the second or third day where some sadness did come up and some tears were shed during zazen, but none of the isolated feelings I had experienced during previous kesshin came up. I think the big difference was community. Training in person with others definitely feels different. At least for me, I think this “different feeling” came down to two main things. 

The first is that, at least for me, the feeling of endeavoring to support the sangha (community) with my training was a lot more palpable while training in person. I had pretty vague goals coming into sesshin, mainly I wanted to find some more stability inside myself when weathering the storms of emotion that seem to be inherent to the experience of being a sentient sack of meat. Not only was this goal pretty vague and lofty, I’ve never been particularly good at motivating myself to do things for my own benefit. However, as the week progressed, the sincerity of those around me, who were training to overcome the issues that they were wrestling with, had a very profound impact on me. My goal shifted from training because I wanted something in particular out of the week to wanting to train strong so that I could help those around me train strong and have the sesshin they needed to have. Waking up at 4 am was surprisingly easy not because I love getting four hours of sleep, but because I knew I was waking up to do my part to help the sangha train hard. 

The second difference was that there were more chances to interact with the folks with whom I was training. I knew many of them from training online, but in training online, you miss a lot of the bonding and forming of friendships that occur while living with a group of people for days at a time. By the end of the week, it felt like I had not only had a second family, but a second family that were all going through, or had gone through, the same type of existential questioning that I was going through and were committed to working through it together. As someone who has only had a few friendships of any great degree of emotional intimacy in his life this phenomenon was quite a transformative experience, in and of itself. It was an experience that allowed me to go forth into my daily life with more confidence knowing that if, or rather when, things go wrong I have just about the best support network I could ask for to catch me when I fall. 

However, this is not to discount, in any way, my training in the Virtual Dojo. In fact, a kesshin that I participated in previously was quite instrumental in helping me pull myself out of a reasonably dark place last year. I had a week where I had become basically nonfunctional, in tears most of the day. I couldn’t focus on anything, and basic things like managing to consume a sufficient amount of calories in a day posed a daunting task. To make it worse, this state occurred in the middle of the academic quarter, where deadlines don’t move just because you need some personal space. At that point, there was almost no way I could have made it work to fly to Wisconsin and train in person at the dojo; in fact, I couldn’t even make my schedule work to participate in the full schedule of kesshin. But, the online training I did manage to participate in was enough to help me find some calm in my life and get things closer to being on track.

I think the great part about the Virtual Dojo is that even though it may be different from the time-tested in-person methods of training, it’s always there – just a click away. Life would be a lot simpler if we could schedule our personal crises to ensure they always occur when we can travel to train at the dojo in-person, but that’s not how life works. However, almost anywhere you are, you can click a Zoom link and have a sangha to train with, by your side. After having trained in person with a lot of the faces I see online, I now feel that support from the sangha more strongly, when I train online.