One can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities.
You do not need to know what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
The start of a New Year often gives rise to a restless energy, thoughts of needing to do better, to achieve more, to comparing our actual life with some better life, berating ourselves for perceived failures and shortcomings. Dogen reminds us to let go of this drama, these continually shifting ideas created by the mind, and rest in a sense of completeness
No creature ever falls short of its own completeness
Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.
Dogen
There are several aspects to meditation that are part of establishing friendship with yourself. One is mindfulness. Mindfulness is keeping track, or keeping a pulse, of being there, in a nonjudgmental way. There is no good or bad. Everything is allowed to be. Among other things, mindfulness is a stabilizing or pacifying influence. The panic of everyday life and every expectation laid on life can subside.
This is a huge relief.
It is called the discovery of peace.
Carolyn Rose Gimian, What’s Good About Being You
Two quotes from Mazu, 709–88, one of the greatest of the ancient Chinese Chan (Zen) masters, to remind us to live in the immediacy of the present moment and not in how our thoughts tell us what our life should be like:
When successive thoughts do not await one another,
and each thought dies peacefully away,
this is called absorption in the oceanic reflection.
A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhism?”
Mazu said, “What is the meaning of this moment?”
Christmas and New Year can give rise to a lot of “I am” or “I am not” thoughts…
We tend to just react and take it for granted that all the ‘I am’ and ‘I am not’ is the truth. We create ourselves as a personality and attach to our memories. We remember the things we learned, we remember what we’ve done – generally the more extreme things; we tend to forget more ordinary things. In meditation we are bringing awareness to the conditions of the mind here and now, just by being aware of this sense of ‘I am, I am not’. The thought ‘I am’ is an impermanent condition. The thought ‘I am not’ is an impermanent condition.
Ajahn Sumedho, Investigating the Mind
Sitting in meditation is a way of clarifying the ground of experience and resting at ease in your Actual Nature.
It is called “ Revealing the Original Face” and “Bringing to light the landscape of the basic ground.”
Put aside all concerns. Let go of all the things that hook you.
Simply, do nothing at all.
Don’t create things with the six senses.
Clear water has no back or front, space has no inside or outside.
Objects of mind and the mind itself have no place to exist.
Zazen Yojinki, one of the two founders of Sōtō Zen in Japan, late-13th/early-14th century AD, Notes on what to be aware of in Zazen
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