The place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.
Our Beloved has bowed there knowing
you were coming.
I could tell you a priceless secret about
your real worth dear pilgrim.
Any unkindness to yourself,
any confusion about others,
will keep one
from accepting the grace, the love!
Hafiz, Persian Sufi poet
No matter how much the spring wind loves the peach blossoms,
they still fall.
Dogen Zenji, 1200-1253
If you can accept your body, then you have a chance to see your body as your home. You can rest in your body, settle in, relax, and feel joy and ease. If you don’t accept your body and your mind, you can’t be at home with yourself. You have to accept yourself as you are. This is a very important practice. As you practice building a home in yourself, you become more and more beautiful.
Thich Nhat Hanh
By teaching “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1), the great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “no.” You have to start with a “yes” of basic acceptance, which means not too quickly labeling, analyzing, or categorizing things as in or out, good or bad, up or down. You have to leave the field open, a field in which God and grace can move. Ego leads with “no” whereas soul leads with “yes.”
The ego seems to strengthen itself by constriction, by being against things; and it feels loss or fear when it opens up. “No” always comes easier than “yes,” and a deep, conscious “yes” is the work of freedom and grace. So the soul lives by expansion instead of constriction.
Richard Rohr
Zen speaks of “expressing a dream within a dream”, acknowledging that we never quite rid ourselves of delusion and confusion, yet we can be present and fundamentally kind. There is so much bounty, so many tangled and twining vines, as well as so much lostness. Practice isn’t abut escaping any of it. It is about putting our feet on the ground, feeling the moist grass, knowing the wet stream of tears on a cheek…and not wandering off, looking for something better. “Here is the place; here the Way unfolds”, Master Dogen wrote.
Summer asks that we not confuse enlightenment with distraction. Where there is a dream of intractable pain, Buddhas show up to be a salve to that suffering. They show up for you. They are not other than you. “Just as cages and snares are limitless, emancipation from them is limitless” Dogen also wrote.
Bonnie Myotai Trace, A Year of Zen
Intellect gets you to the door,
but it doesn’t take you into the house.
Shams-i Tabrīzī, 1185–1248, Persian poet
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