You breathe in so that you can really understand what the Buddha meant when he said that the first noble truth is that life is suffering. What does that mean? With every in-breath, you try to find out by acknowledging the truth of suffering, not as a mistake you made, not as a punishment, but as part of the human condition. With every in-breath, yo

The moral of the story is that it really doesn’t make any difference where you meet your edge; just meeting it is the point. Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again. That’s where you’re challenged; that’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yourself questions like, “Now, why am I so scared? What is it

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they’re going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are. This is why we talk so much about making friends with ou

So taming teaches that meditation is developing a nonaggressive attitude to whatever occurs in your mind. It teaches that meditation is not considering yourself an obstacle to yourself; in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

The teachings of the Buddha are about letting go and opening: you do that in how you relate to the people in your life, how you relate to the situations you’re in, how you relate with your thoughts, how you relate with your emotions. The purpose of your whole life is not to make a lot of money, it’s not to find the perfect marriage, it’s not to bui

In other words, as you work with being really faithful to the technique and being as precise as you can and simultaneously as kind as you can, the ability to let go seems to happen to you. The discovery of your ability to let go spontaneously arises; you don’t force it.

All you feel by being caught up like this is misery, as well as enormous resentment about life in general. How strange! Life is such a miracle, and a lot of the time we feel only resentment about how it’s all working out for us.

Suzuki Roshi was laughing at the fact that people use the dharma to make themselves feel miserable.