Short answer: I have no idea. I am not a zen monk.

Well, that is not exactly true. I do have an idea.
Long answer: buckle up, this is going to be a long and weird-ass answer.

Preamble:

I have been practicing Zen for some years now. I sit zazen every morning. I have a “qualified” Zen teacher. I have sat many 7-day silent meditation retreats (called sesshin). I have taken ‘Jukai’ (a formal commitment to follow a set of precepts – these ones).

I tell you all that so you can get an idea that I take my Zen practice seriously. I might not be able to tell you what it feels like to meditate like a Zen monk….but I can tell you what it feels like to meditate like me.

There are copious articles and videos online that show you HOW to meditate. If you have gone looking, it quickly becomes clear that there are many different techniques — from mindfulness, to guided meditations, to drug-assisted explorations of alternate realities, to esoteric weird and super weird stuff.
The bona fide credentials of those offering up these practices are equally variegated.

So. I will skip the how and leave the why up to you. But if you are interested, please proceed with due diligence.

Let us sit together.

This is what it feels like to me.
Full disclaimer, I have been doing this for a while now….but I am far from an expert meditator and I am a metric-shit-tonne of light years away from any claim to enlightenment.

Sitting down on the cushion (or zaffu) usually happens early in the morning. 0630 hrs. I usually sit for 40 minutes.

I sit down. Organise myself into my sitting position. Blow my nose, scratch any itches (there are always itches), adjust my glasses. Wriggle around a bit. That sort of stuff.

The beginning of the session is marked by a ‘meditation bowl’ sounding three times.

Initially my attention goes to my breath. The best way to describe this is that if feels like my centre of awareness-gravity shifts from my head to just inside my abdomen just below my belly button.

Now, from this point on, things get difficult to describe. I will tell you why in a moment. Bear with me.

Zen is the direct embodied experience of our true nature.
That is: Inhabiting this moment as it fully expresses itself without adding anything extra.

Awareness of the inbreath.
There is a feeling of negative pressure or space in my abdomen.
I feel air moving down into that space. I can feel the movement simultaneously at my nose, in my trachaea, and in my lungs. My abdomen moves out and air moves down into the bottom of my lungs and then my chest expands as the air fills my entire lungs.

BUT I am not thinking about any those descriptions or objects. There is just an experience of something like space moving down and filling up space.

At the end of the inbreath there is an ever-so-slight pause and then there is awareness of an outbreath (and I am not directing the form or duration of each breath, I am just along for the ride¹)….

There is a sensation of positive pressure or fullness and then I am usually aware of the sound of my slow outbreath through my nose. This fullness sensation persists throughout the outbreath. The the very end when there is another pause and the fullness becomes a space once more.
Actually, these two sensations: space and fullness are different….but not separate².

Sometimes I count my breaths in rounds of ten (and you can research this technique yourself) and sometimes I just drop quickly into the next phase.

You can see that all this is highly experiential, and there is very little thinking or internal dialogue going on. Throttling down the persistent narrative chatter of our brains (often referred to as our monkey mind) is one of the things that develops as your meditation practice matures.

Remember back at the beginning (was that only two breaths ago?) when I said that my centre of awareness-gravity shifts to my abdomen?
Now (on a good sitting) over a few breath-cycles that centre dissolves, or perhaps you could say it enlarges to encompass everything. I’m not sure which.
Let’s just say that the world is no longer Ian-centric.

There is still an awareness of my inbreath and outbreath, but it is no longer breathing, there is nobody experiencing, it is just THIS.

There are the sounds of the birds in dawn chorus outside the window. And a ringing silence. And a random thought arises. And sometimes the sound of blood swishing around in my vessels. Another thought (without a thinker). And a visual fragment of a dream plays out. Discomfort in my knee. The weight of my body. And something else….something I can’t say.

However, none of those things are things anymore. Each sound is THIS (nothing more added). Each thought is THIS. The blood….THIS. The dream…THIS. Discomfort…THIS.

And….each of the separate THIS’es is really a single THIS.

That is the best I can describe it. Im sorta making it up…because I wasn’t there.

The technical name for this state is: samadhi

The word samadhi comes from the Sanskrit and is most commonly translated as concentration. In a bottom-line sense samadhi is a word for different states of openness. It is a field of consciousness, a place of preparedness and willingness.
[…] And, this is important, samadhi isn’t the point of it all. Rather it is a place we can find in human consciousness where the universe, the real, can present viscerally. A common term for this is unmediated. Bit as everything is mediated, we experience the world through our six senses, and then create stories to understand what we experience. Samadhi is a place where the stories don’t grab us by the throat. It is a place where the stories can shatter. And deeper truths can be discerned.

James Ford.

You may note that I am not striving to achieve a blankness or ’empty my mind’…and that there are sometimes thoughts arising (oh boy, sometimes….whole essays). Meditation is not trying to zone everything out and sit in a state of empty bliss.

This practice-experience-realization continues until the meditation bell rings twice to signify the end of the sitting. Sometimes it feels like forever. Sometimes it feels like 5 minutes has passed.

I slowly get up and shake myself out. Everything is incandescently ordinary. I feel light.

And now the practice is to carry that samadhi out into everyday life. This is Zen.

1. Now I have never had anyone count my respiratory rate when I am meditating….but I suspect my breathing drops down to 3-4 breaths a minute. ↩︎
2. Again, it is so difficult to parse out these experiences. ↩︎