Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

koan. This one actually has two formulations: “This” and “What is this.” We’ll try out both in this sit. A key aspect of meditating with a koan is not to try to answer or resolve it. It may seem paradoxical, but instead of seeking a response, see if you can just state the koan in your mind and simply observe what effect the word or phrase has on th

These awakening experiences are of two kinds. The first opens and reveals an indescribable beauty that is utterly new yet tastes of a strange familiarity, and then it closes again, leaving an afterglow that fades in hours or days or weeks, becoming a memory.

It’s astonishing. And now that we taste the “wine of astonishment,” referenced in the Psalms of King David, it’s clear that the one thing that prevented our knowing it earlier was us. Our self. We were the cork in the bottle. Once we are gone, the wine flows freely.

To discover and develop mindfulness is to learn to inhabit and occupy the present moment in ways that can certainly help greatly with stress and anxiety. But it can also do much more. It can awaken us to the richness of experience being granted us at any moment, and open our hearts in gratitude and awe to the incomparable gift of being alive and aw

Woven through his practical guidance, personal examples, and conceptual clarity is a single bright joyful thread: You are already home.

When we see this, we not only see through the illusion of self, but we also discover that all along there has been another dimension of our experience that we haven’t noticed, in which all things are joined, as if belonging to a single fabric. It’s as if just behind our ordinary experience, there is another level of consciousness in which all thing

Someone using a simple koan—for example, as above, What is this?—will find it can relax and expand their awareness. The koan is speaking from a different register of being, and something in us feels recognized and goes gratefully quiet.

Only to love is the fulfillment of our life. We human beings are made to experience love. When we feel love, we feel alive.

Start by saying in your mind the word This . . . This . . . on each exhalation.