I sat cross-legged on the tatami floor of Kyoto’s Shunkoin temple, desperately trying to locate my tailbone. Reverend Takafumi Kawakami, the black-robed Zen priest seated in front of me, instructed me to push my breath against it with my stomach and pay attention to the texture (crisp), temperature (spring-rain cool), and aroma (ancient wood, sweetly perfumed with incense) of the air flowing through my lungs.
But I struggled. I wouldn’t be able to locate my tailbone at the best of times, and Kawakami’s instructions to let go of any mental image of this body part and to truly feel it didn’t make it any easier. I tried to mentally scan through my nether regions, hoping for some sort of signal from the bottom of my spine, but my attention kept shifting elsewhere: the wisps of incense smoke lingering in the air, the rain tip-tapping on the shoji-paper screens on the windows.
After a while in suspended silence, a copper bell rang to mark the end of my first-ever zazen meditation. Over matcha and sweet mochi, Kawakami (whose family has been taking care of this 16th-century temple for the last 120 years) gave me a primer on Zen, a Buddhist philosophy with roots in India and China. We dove into the differences between wisdom and knowledge, and how the wordy thoughts in our head are mere metaphors for our existence. But beyond those wooly ancient wisdoms, Kawakami looked at the present. “Human culture is increasingly focused on controlling the things around us,” he said. “The pandemic taught us to simply accept—to deal with what life throws at you.”
The experience (booked via tour operator Red Savannah) was a fitting introduction to my stay at Six Senses Kyoto, which opened this April in the city’s temple-dotted Higashiyama ward. Given the brand’s affinity for sprawling resorts embedded into nature, the urban setting of its Japanese debut—a low-slung building along a busy thoroughfare, and not, like many of its five-star peers, on the forest-covered hills on the outskirts of town—took me by surprise. But from the moment I stepped into the stone-floored lobby, the din of the city had all but disappeared.
Photo: Courtesy of Six Senses Kyoto
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