To mark its 30th anniversary, Clouds in Water Zen Center in St. Paul is hosting a 30-hour-long meditation “sit-a-thon” on March 23 and 24.

Yes, that’s right: Thirty straight hours of meditation.

Participants don’t have to sit the full time nor do they even have to be practicing Zen Buddhists, said Renkyo Heather Fehst, the center’s executive director. During the event, people can meditate for as long or as little as they feel comfortable, and there’ll be an orientation space for teachers to show first-time meditators how to sit and spend time with their thoughts. Participants can also join via Zoom.

The sit-a-thon starts 7 a.m. Saturday, March 23, and concludes at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 24. The final hour will feature 108 bell-ringings, a Japanese Buddhist ritual that’s frequently part of New Year’s observations. And after the event concludes, the Zen center is hosting a community lunch.

As of now, one person is planning to meditate for the full uninterrupted 30 hours: Clouds in Water’s guiding teacher, the Soto Zen Buddhist priest Sosan Theresa Flynn — “because she’s a bada**,” Fehst said.

(Fehst and Flynn, like many practicing Buddhists, have Dharma names in addition to their birth names, which they receive as part of a rite of passage called jukai in which they accept Buddhist teachings.)

Clouds in Water, which is affiliated with a Japanese school of Buddhism called Soto Zen, opened in 1994 in Lowertown. They’re now located on Farrington Street in the Rondo area, and Fehst hopes the sit-a-thon will help boost awareness of the center’s existence as a broader community resource. Plus, they run entirely on donations, so the event is an important fundraiser, too.

For those new to the form of mostly silent Zen meditation practiced at Clouds in Water, the experience can feel, counterintuitively, like a “blast of noise” at first, Fehst said. Your mind is trying to compensate for the sudden absence of constant sensory stimulation, she said, and it takes practice to simply let your thoughts come and go, with acknowledgment but not judgment.

“The word ‘zen’ is used very casually to mean you’re so relaxed,” Fehst said. “I think that’s so funny. Yes, Zen can be soothing and relaxing, but it’s really trying to befriend your mind. … It can be really uncomfortable, because we’re not used to being with our thoughts.”

The way Fehst and others at Clouds in Water see it, Zen is not effortless, not passive and not exactly about achieving some sort of ‘enlightenment.’ Instead, it’s an understanding that life presents difficulties of all sizes, and we must face them empathetically, without letting them knock us off-kilter.

“It’s really about, how do I just be with this life that I have, with as much grace for myself and others as I can muster?” Fehst said. “Sitting with ourselves is the foundation of that, but it goes beyond that.”

To that end, Clouds in Water prioritizes what Fehst called the “off-the-cushion practice” — how participants can take Buddhist teachings outside the center’s walls. Leaders place specific emphasis on discussions of race, justice, accessibility and community engagement. Many teachers at the center are women, queer or transgender, and the center has specific sanghas, or Zen practice groups, for people of color.

Another key topic of conversation — “a tricky one,” Fehst said — is what it means to practice a Japanese form of Zen Buddhism in America, especially for participants who are not themselves of Japanese descent. How can participants carry on traditions of another culture they find personally meaningful, but in a way that doesn’t whitewash them or recast them as “wellness” trends?

At Clouds in Water, this sort of engagement with social issues is as central to Zen practice as bowing or studying spiritual texts, Fehst said.

“We don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to sit in our little bubble and meditate for peace, but then not do anything,’” she said. “There are some people who just want to hide away. That’s not what we’re about.”

If you go

What: Meditation “sit-a-thon” to mark the 30th anniversary of the Clouds in Water Zen Center.

Where: Clouds in Water: 445 Farrington St., or on Zoom; links at https://cloudsinwater.org/

When: From 7 a.m. Saturday, March 23, till 1 p.m. Sunday, March 24 — but it’s open-house style, so come any time for as long as you’d like.

Cost: Free! Clouds in Water tries to make their programming as accessible as possible. The sit-a-thon is a fundraiser for the center, though, and several participants are committing to meditate for a certain amount of time corresponding to how much money they raise.

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