Jun Po Roshi: Interview Archive
My mother carried nine children to term and lost six others to late-term miscarriages. One of my brothers, the one born just before me, lived a single day. I bring that up because being conceived and carried under that kind of strain, almost a survival situation inside the womb, shaped something in me. I spent years in psychological work trying to reach my shadow states, to understand my psyche and my ego, tracing it all back through childhood. I kept looking and couldn't locate the source. Eventually I went at it more carefully, more structurally, and found it there: the root of what you might call my intensity, the basic drive in my character.
I was raised Roman Catholic and tried hard to be a good Catholic boy. But I was confused early on, and the confusion turned into questions. Mortal sin bothered me, the notion of eternal damnation handed down for a finite act. How could a single deed earn punishment without end? The virgin birth, the whole mystic and mythopoetic framework of belief, I wanted to actually understand it rather than just accept it. So the search started young, built around simple questions: where do I come from, what is this life, who am I?
About twenty years into that, I landed in California and ran into psychedelics. I worked with them for roughly a decade, never as recreation. I'd arrange a meditation setting, do my yoga practice, and keep trying to push the door open through the chemistry. It worked, in the sense that it produced genuine state experiences. The problem was I had no container for them. No perspective, no framework, no ground to stand on so I could absorb and make sense of what I was seeing. That lack is what turned me back toward yoga as a discipline, and the more I practiced the more serious I got about it.
Inside yoga I found what I'd call the great yoga school, which is Zen. The Japanese say it one way, Zen-a or Zen-ah; the Chinese pronounce Jhana; and Jhana traces back to dhyana, the second stage in the meditative tradition that runs through India and into Buddhist practice. First comes concentration, which opens into deep awareness and realization, and then into what I like to call unreasonable enjoyment, Samadhi. That whole arc. I set about it with real discipline, and from there I went looking for teachers and for the teaching itself.