What is “true practice”? We say it’s “just sitting,” which is what’s left over when all our hope, all our projects, all our aspiration have been cut away.

Shunryu Suzuki addressed the assembly, “Each one of you is perfect the way you are and you can use a little improvement.”

Leaving that mind just as it is the hardest thing to do.

So our practice of just sitting is designed to bring us back, over and over, to where we already are, rather than helping us get somewhere we imagine we ought to be going. But it can take a long time to recognize that practice is the donkey we’ve been riding on all along.

After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized, spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative.

As I’ve said, my old teacher Joko Beck used to say that it took many, many years for students to finally discover what practice really meant, and when they did, most of them quit. That’s because the end of suffering that we realize we can achieve through practice turns out to be an end of separation from suffering.

We may remain oblivious to the ways in which we have used practice in collusion with our personal—and often neurotic—pursuit of autonomy, emotional invulnerability, or an attempted purgation from ourselves of the longings and desires that leave us open to suffering.

Zazen is not a technique. It is not a means to an end. It’s not a way to become calmer, more confident, or even “enlightened.” Indeed, our whole practice can be said to be about putting an end to self-improvement, an end to our usual compulsive pursuit of happiness—or its Zen equivalent, the pursuit of enlightenment. Not that we can’t be happy (or

The changes that we notice after years of analysis or practice may not be anything like what we anticipated when we first started out. In a deep sense, they both change us by teaching us to leave everything just as it is—but leaving everything alone isn’t what we usually want or expect.