Suffering ceases to exist when it is no longer something we experience as impinging on our life, as an unnecessary, avoidable intrusion that we finally learn to exclude from our lives once and for all.

Joko always talked about sitting as building a bigger container, and what was contained was primarily emotion. She wanted the container of sitting to hold all the painful, messy, inconvenient things that we usually come to practice to get away from. We sit still with what we’ve come to avoid. Although the pain we may be most immediately aware of is

that “secret practice” that we all engage in behind the scenes, so to speak, in our imagination, the practice that we hope will be our fix or our cure.

It takes a long time to give up on our secret practice, and to accept that we’re not sitting here to get away from anything, but that we’re here precisely to face all the things we want to avoid.

Let’s enjoy our dream. It’s the only life there is.

The verse says a teacher is always at hand—that sounds like good news. The bad news is that the teacher is life-as-it-is and that is the only teacher. Life as it is means the stream itself. It is always there to remind us that time’s arrow flies in one direction only. Our self-centeredness is, at bottom, our desire to stop time in its tracks, to ma

We must pursue this fantasy until we prove to ourselves that it is truly empty. I wish I could say, “until we prove it to ourselves once and for all”—but alas, we all seem to need to prove it over and over again, as our fantasy reasserts itself in ever new guises at each turn in our life. Like the mythical monster Hydra that Hercules battled, it gr

I’m not making this up—though Freud, I’m afraid, was. It remains for me a cautionary tale of an explanatory system run amok. Freud was so sure of what he was looking for that he began to see it anywhere and everywhere.

Norman Fischer, a former Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, has emphasized our resistance to leaving everything alone, and the temptation to turn zazen into a technique: “The problem is that we actually are incapable of seeing zazen as useless because our minds cannot accept the fundamental genuineness, the alrightness of our lives. We are act