Everyday Zen: Love and Work (Plus)

As our practice continues and we begin to understand the emptiness and impermanence of these patterns, we find we can abandon them. We don’t have to try to abandon them, they just slowly wither away—for when the light of awareness plays on anything, it diminishes the false and encourages the true—and nothing brightens that light as much as intellig

One mark of a mature Zen student is a sense of groundedness. When you meet one you sense it. They’re with life as it’s really happening, not as a fantasy version of it. And of course, the storms of life eventually hit them more lightly. If we can accept things just the way they are, we’re not going to be greatly upset by anything. And if we do beco

if you think you’re beyond this, well, you can think you’re beyond this.

Our fear drives us to stay over here in our lonely self-righteousness.

“I should not be impatient,” we observe ourselves being impatient.

What we are doing is not reprogramming ourselves, but freeing ourselves from all programs, by seeing that they are empty of reality. Reprogramming is just jumping from one pot into another. We may have what we think of as a better programming; but the point of sitting is not to be run by any program. Suppose we have a program called “I lack self-co

earning the integrity and wholeness of our lives by every act we do, every word we say.

Memories are thoughts and nearly always selective and biased. We may completely forget the nice things our friend has done if there is one incident that we see as threatening.

But we are usually living in vain hope for something or someone that will make my life easier, more pleasant. We spend most of our time trying to set life up in a way so that will be true; when, contrariwise, the joy of our life is just in totally doing and just bearing what must be borne, in just doing what has to be done. It’s not even what has t

It’s that kind of attention which is necessary for our Zen practice. We call it samadhi, this total oneness with the object.