Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart

“The journey goes down, not up.” She is saying that spiritual awakening is not like climbing up a mountain on our own and leaving others behind. We are letting go of our attachments, even to climbing the mountain.

The awakened mind of buddha is available to each one of us. But we have to take down the walls. We have to clear out any ill will that we can notice. We have to find out what’s feeding it and how we can disconnect it from our lives and put it down. To see what’s separating us from all of those around us. To recognize greed, anger, and delusion when

We all want to be the one who knows. But if we decide we “know” something, we are not open to other possibilities anymore. And that’s a shame. We lose something very vital in our life when it’s more important to us to be one who knows than it is to be awake to what’s happening.

this practice was not some exotic trip or a passing fad but a matter of life and death that required an equal commitment from us to meet him completely with our whole heart.

to see buddha in everyone and, of course, to see buddha in ourselves.

And as I continued to practice and to talk with other students of the buddha dharma, I found that many people share the conditioning that leads us to think that there’s something wrong with us. If we could only get, do, or be something more, then we would be all right. It’s so easy for us to get the idea that there’s something wrong with us. And it

are we practicing just to express this limitless being, or because we think we’re not a limitless being? And once we discover we are a limitless being, will we continue practicing? Well, of course. That’s what limitless beings do. This is Dogen Zenji’s practice-enlightenment, practice-realization. This practice itself expresses the limitlessness th

the thing is not to deny it or turn away from it but to recognize it, let the fact of the limited nature of our life be an encouragement to live it well, to live it in a way that benefits everyone, not to get caught up in fear and self-clinging and forget our connection with everything and everyone but to live our life in a way that makes of it a g

that kind of slight switch of saying, “Oh, good, I noticed. Now I can stop,” instead of, “Oh, bad, I’m doing it again”—that slight switch is very, very helpful. It allows you to notice sooner, because instead of getting hit with a stick, you’re going to get a little pat on the back

Do not count your breaths just to avoid your thinking but to take the best care you can of your breathing.