Like an elephant

In one of his insightful talks Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said that in your practice you should walk like an elephant.

It means to move at a comfortable pace. No rushing toward a goal. No push to make it all meaningful. The … texts of Taoism and Zen teach that it’s important to do what you do without trying to accomplish anything.

You don’t have to get anywhere. There are no goals and objectives: nothing to succeed in, and nothing in which to fail. You can sit in your house, as Thoreau did, and be attentive – his suggestion. “We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it – a little? . . . If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the Ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch?”
 

Thomas Moore, A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World

The voice of the mind

There is nothing more important to true growth

than realizing you are not the voice of the mind –

You are the one who hears it

Michael Singer

What causes our agitation

There is a Noble truth about the arising of suffering:

It arises with a thirst for more, that is …always running here and there.

That is, a thirst for sense-input, a thirst to be something, a thirst to not be something.

The Buddha, The Turning of the Wheel Sutta

Sunday Quote: Underneath all the noise

Water is free from the birth
and death of a wave.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Undisturbed

I gaze on myself in the stream’s emerald flow,
Sit on a boulder by a cliff.

My mind, a lonely cloud,
Leans on nothing, needs nothing
From the world and its endless events.

HanShan, Chinese Buddhist and Taoist poet

The dance

The invitation is to throw yourself into the dance,

whether the music is always of your choosing or not,

as if it were both an experiment and an adventure.

Jon Kabat Zinn