I don't actually know what "dokusan" means. As far as I can tell, it's a meeting between a teacher and a student and I think it's meant to benefit the student. I actually had dokusan once. I'm sure I'll discuss it in detail later but for now let's just say that for me, dokusan means meeting with your teacher to see how you're doing.
Today I had dokusan with a young friend of mine. I knew I couldn't be with him for his actual birthday, so I had promised him we'd do something special for his birthday during the time that I was in town. He chose to go hiking. I chose to be present with him the entire time. It was really nice. We just walked and talked. There are some things that I have, in the past, tried to change about him. There are some things that he does that frustrate me. While we were on the hike, I just listened to him. He likes facts. He likes to know things. He thinks he knows more than I do (and maybe he does...) AND he likes to use his facts to protect me (hadn't seen that part of him before). I let him tell me things that I knew weren't true. I let him lead me up rocks and across streams and follow paths that he felt were "easy enough" for me to cross. I even let him keep hiking way beyond the time that we were supposed to turn back. (Though it was really interesting to me how much less present I was for him on our way back when I realized how late we were- apparently tardiness is a trigger point for me and I need to pay attention to that- breathe deeper when I feel it and come back to the moment).
A few things came up for me during our "dokusan" but one stood out for me:
I wanted our time together to be meaningful, I wanted to learn something about him or somehow improve my relationship with him and I didn't. At one point he looked at the scenery and said "This is my safe haven!" I thought, "Wow, this is great, I'm learning what makes him feel safe, what brings him peace." I wanted to know more so I asked him, "Why is this your safe haven?" He just said, "I mean, it's just this natural resource just everywhere!" He's 9. He probably doesn't understand the term safe haven and might not be able to explain it if he did.
But I don't think that dokusan is really FOR something. I think that it's just me being there, with him, and that's all. I know, that sounds so totally zen and "if a tree falls in the forest..." but this is what I'm discovering: You know how things just happen in life and they're just life happening? And then later, some thing that happened a long time ago ends up connecting to something now? I think that's what this whole "do it without having a goal" thing is about. I'm working on trying to accept that I can't control things and I think that's what this is about: you really don't know, so just see it for what it is, not for what it can be. It doesn't always happen that something comes up later but it's kind of cool when it does; and it only connects later if you experience what happened earlier, and now, fully. And honestly, when he and I got into a conflict later that afternoon, he genuinely listened to me (which made me be so much more honest and sensitive when I explained what I needed him to do). Now, was he like that because we had "dokusan"? I don't know, maybe, but the point is that dokusan, or anything like that, when you're "being" with someone just is, it just is.
So, of course, since I'm still a teacher even in the summer, I thought about doing dokusan with my students (I SO hope that I'm not bastardizing this term...). At the beginning of the hike, I thought about having lunch with each of my students so that they would feel connected to me, so that they could open up to me, so that we'd have a relationship. I imagined a series of questions I would make sure to ask, topics to cover, etc. But by the end of the hike I realized that I'm just going to have lunch with my students. That's all, and as long as I'm present, that's enough.
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