How we live is our spiritual life. As one wise student remarked, “If you really want to know about a Zen master, talk to their spouse.”

equanimity and balance. May I be open and balanced and peaceful. Acknowledge that all beings are heirs to their own karma, that their lives arise and pass away according to conditions and deeds created by them. May I bring compassion and equanimity to the events of the world. May I find balance and equanimity and peace.

Suzuki Roshi summed up all of the teachings of Buddhism in three simple words, “Not always so.” When we try to repeat what has been in the past, we lose the true sense of life as an opening, a flowering, an unfolding, an adventure.

A fifth quality of spiritual maturity is a sense of the sacred that is integrated and personal. “Integrated” in that it does not create separate compartments of our life, dividing that which is sacred from that which is not; “personal” in honoring spirituality through our own words and actions. Otherwise, our spirituality is not of any true value.

The aim of meditation is to open us to this here and now. Alan Watts put it this way: We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of

Since beginning to teach, I’ve seen how many other students misunderstand spiritual practice, how many have hoped to use it to escape from their lives, how many have used its ideals and language as a way to avoid the pains and difficulties of human existence as I tried to do, how many have entered temples, churches, and monasteries looking for the

It is an easiness of heart that understands that all of the spiritual vehicles are rafts to cross the stream to freedom.

Spiritual maturity honors our human community and interconnectedness. Nothing can be excluded from our spiritual life.

ZEN MASTER DOGEN, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, declared, “To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.”