Relax the fist

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I hope you can live your life with slightly less firmly clenched fists and slightly more open hands. Slightly less control. Slightly more trust. Slightly less I need to know everything beforehand. Slightly more take life as it comes. It does all of us a world of good. Life doesn’t have to be lived with constant anxiety about things not turning out the way we want. We don’t have to make ourselves smaller than we are. We have a choice. Do we want to grab life by he throat or do we want to embrace it?

Relax that fist as often as you can.

Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad, I May be Wrong, and other wisdoms from life as a Forest Monk.

Sunday Quote: We can choose joy

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It’s not what happens but how we relate to it…

Is it the weather that is cold,

or is it the person who is cold?

Think neither cold nor heat —  at that moment, where is the self to be found?

Dogen, again, in his commentary on Dongshan’s (807–869) koan “Cold and Heat”

Eating breakfast

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We sometimes think that happiness comes from special circumstances or lofty insights, involving practices which require great effort, rather than the simple day-to-day circumstances before us:

Dropping off body and mind is good practice.

[There is]…nothing fundamental to rely on, including not others, not self, not sentient beings, and not causes or conditions.

Although this is so, eating breakfast comes first.

Dogen, 1200-1253, founder of the Soto branch of Zen Buddhism.

(“Dropping off body and mind” refers to sitting meditation)

You know you have to follow

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There is a road always beckoning.

When you see the two sides of it

closing together at that far horizon

and deep in the foundations of your own heart

at exactly the same time,

that’s how you know it’s the road

you have to follow.

that’s how you know

it’s where you have to go.

That’s how you know.

It’s just beyond yourself,

it’s where you need to be.

David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself

Summary of all teaching

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The ten directions converging,

Each learning to do nothing,

This is the hall of Buddha’s training;

The mind is empty, all is finished.

P’ang Yün (Layman Pang) 740-808

Being the moon

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Everyone wants to be the sun

to brighten someone’s life,

but why not the moon,

to shine on someone’s darkest hour?

Don Jose Ruiz