Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart

Even though you sit trying to have the right posture and counting your breath, it may still be lifeless zazen because you’re just following instructions; you’re not kind enough with yourself.

The role of mindfulness is to keep the mind properly grounded in the present moment in a way that will keep you on the path.

We don’t sit to become a buddha, we sit because it is what buddhas do. And we are all buddha from the beginning. So

What is the effort that daffodils make in order to bloom?

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

What does it mean to make total effort with no gaining idea? Notice that any gaining idea implies that just this is not complete as it is.

We are very skillful. We can hold both an extremely elevated view of self and an extremely negative view of self at the same time. Neither one is accurate.

This is the whole point of mindful awareness: to be able to live our life truly as we wish to live it

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.