Being open to a teacher means not just hearing what you want to hear, but hearing the whole thing. And the teacher’s not there simply to be nice to you.

One mark of a mature Zen student is a sense of groundedness.

Attention is the cutting, burning sword, and our practice is to use that sword as much as we can.

True practice is not safe; it’s anything but safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality.

But you won’t exhaust desires by searching; you will exhaust them by experiencing that which underlies them.

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.

The way we usually hold a relationship is that, “This relationship is there, out there, and it’s supposed to give me pleasure. At the very least, it shouldn’t give me discomfort.” In other words we make this relationship into a dish of ice cream. That dish of ice cream is there to give me pleasure and give me comfort.

And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless. We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.

When we label thoughts precisely and carefully, what happens to them? They begin to quiet down. We don’t have to force ourselves to get rid of them. When they quiet down, we return to the experience of the body and the breath, over and over and over.