How to Do Zazen at Home

You know what zazen is. Shikantaza — just sitting. Not progress through stages, not scanning for sensation, not noting. Sitting is the practice complete, and the posture is the instruction.

None of that requires a monastery.

What a monastery has that a corner of your apartment doesn’t is a jikido — someone whose job is to hold the form so everyone else can be inside it. The Han fires. The rin rings. The kinhin bell ends the walking. You don’t track any of that. You sit.

At home you are the jikido unless you arrange otherwise.

Setting up the space

The space should communicate one thing: this is where you sit.

A zafu and a wall to face. The face-the-wall position in Sōtō form isn’t arbitrary — it removes the visual field from negotiation. You aren’t looking at the room. The room is behind you. The sit has begun.

If you don’t have a zafu, a firm cushion at the right height for your knees to drop below your hips. The physical setup matters less than people think and more than people expect. You don’t need to get it perfect. You need to be consistent.

Period lengths for daily zazen practice

A sesshin period runs 25–50 minutes depending on the center. For daily home practice:

25 minutes — The traditional period length. Short enough to be sustainable every day; long enough that the first five minutes of settling is a small fraction of the sit.

40 minutes — Where most practitioners land after some months. The mind has worked through most of its content by the end.

One period a day is a practice. Two periods — morning and evening — is a form. The difference accumulates.

Kinhin is not a break

Kinhin is not a break from zazen. The most common mistake is treating it as one.

In Sōtō form kinhin continues the zazen. The posture shifts — you rise, hands in shashu, pace drops to a crawl — but the quality of attention doesn’t interrupt. If kinhin becomes a moment to stretch and think about how the sit went, you’ve stepped outside the form. The form is what was holding you.

For daily practice: 5–10 minutes of kinhin after each zazen period. One slow circuit of the room. Attention on the foot contacting the floor, nothing else.

The bell problem

A period you start when you’re ready and end when you decide it’s over is not the same period as one bounded by a bell that fires without your permission.

This sounds like a small distinction. It isn’t. The moment you’re tracking time, you’ve shifted from student to administrator. You’re managing the practice rather than being in it.

For daily zazen, a kitchen timer placed out of reach works. The point isn’t the tool — it’s that the decision about when the period ends is no longer available to you in the moment.

For anything longer than a single period — a half-day of zazen, a multi-day sit — the bell needs to be further from your hands. What makes home sesshin hard is this same problem at greater scale.

Daily zazen versus sesshin

A daily zazen practice builds the ground. Sesshin is something else.

Sesshin is an intensive — days of continuous sitting, silence accumulating across nights, the form holding you in a way a single period doesn’t. If you want to sit a home sesshin, the daily practice is the preparation for it, not the same thing.

The daily practice is sustainable. The form is fully portable. A zafu, a wall, a bell that fires at the right time — that’s enough for zazen. Which length to start with if you want to extend into a half-day or full day follows from completing the daily form first.

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Retreat Conductor’s Zen schedule runs the full Sōtō sesshin form — Han, zazen, kinhin, oryoki, chanting — for home sesshin of any length. The two-hour morning form works as a standalone daily practice: Han, two zazen periods with kinhin, closing rin.