the constant striving

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something you’ve carried all along. All that is needed is to let go of the illusions that obscure your true nature – the stories, the judgments, the constant striving. When you drop these, what remains is what was always there: your original mind, clear as the sky.

People think they must climb a mountain to reach the top, but in Zen, the mountain vanishes, and you discover you were never at the bottom to begin with.


Suzuki roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Sunday Quote: as you go

To be a pilgrim is to notice the way the light changes the color of the hills,

to listen for the stories embedded in the path,

to let the journey rewrite you

Rebecca Solnit, The Blue of Distance

Stop chasing

Happiness is a butterfly

which, when pursued, is always beyond your grasp,

but which, if you sit down quietly,

may light upon you

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The painful illusion

Our sense of incompletion comes not from lacking something, but from the stubborn and relentless act of comparing ourselves to others. The flower doesn’t look at its neighbor and think, I should be taller, or redder, or more like a rose. It just unfolds in the sun, moment by moment, wholly itself.

We, however, are caught in the painful illusion that we must be better than or different from who we are to be worthy of love. But the lesson of the flower is clear: There is no other. There is only this – this moment, this self, this blooming.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

trust the process

Alert to the needs of the journey

those on the path of awareness

like swans, glide on,

leaving behind their former resting places

Dhammapada 91

Relaxing into the flow

Everything changes. This is the first law of life. When we resist this truth, we suffer.

But when we relax into the flow of the present – allowing each moment to arise and pass without clinging – we discover a paradoxical stability: the ground of being that never leaves us.

David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change… and the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them