Sublime

When the sun shines on the land, it doesn’t neglect any area. It does a thorough job. Similarly, as a warrior, you never neglect your discipline. We’re not talking about military rigidity here. Rather, in all your mannerisms, every aspect of behavior, you maintain your openness to the environment. You constantly extend yourself to things around you

YOU’RE NOT THE limited, anxious person you think you are. Any trained Buddhist teacher can tell you with all the conviction of personal experience that, really, you’re the very heart of compassion, completely aware, and fully capable of achieving the greatest good, not only for yourself, but for everyone and everything you can imagine.

By that stage of my growth, I could see that the practice of surrender was actually done in two, very distinct steps: first, you let go of the personal reactions of like and dislike that form inside your mind and heart; and second, with the resultant sense of clarity, you simply look to see what is being asked of you by the situation unfolding in f

The book was entitled Three Pillars of Zen, by Philip Kapleau.

Because our own nature is unconstrained by arbitrary distinctions of being “this way” or “that way,” or having only certain capabilities and lacking others, then we would be able to meet the demands of any situation in which we might find ourselves.

I’ve been as guilty of this belief as anyone else, and, as a result, have allowed myself to become isolated, trapped in a dualistic mode of thinking, pitting my weak, vulnerable, and fearful self against everyone else in the world, whom I thought of as much more powerful, happy, and secure.

I finally discovered the only reliable liberation from suffering: not trying to get rid of the problem.

The koan’s been working on me, and I on it. For a while, I’ve been working on the idea that the koan itself is a container, like this: “I don’t need to work on anything else, just these words of the koan; I don’t need to fall apart if I’m having a bad day.” The big negative emotions aren’t scaring me. I like to see how they feel in my body rather t

The opposite of samsara is when all the walls fall down, when the cocoon completely disappears and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior’s journey.