Everything appears – in the present moment, right now. Things happen, right now, not in past or present. So practice should be the practice of “right now.” When we, you know, catch things, how you catch it? You cannot…..you cannot catch past or future. You can catch just the present moment, right now. If you want to catch someone, you should catch him right now, not past or not in future. So if you want to practice, you should practice right now. But because we are always, you know, involved in thinking mind, and because we try to understand teaching, you know, with seeking mind, in term of present or past or now or later, or always….. The wave and water, right now, it is – wave is water, water is wave. But if you think about it, you have the idea of water and idea of wave because you saw it, because you saw the wave and you have idea of water. And you may think: “But that is water. Water is something like this, you know.” But right now when you see waves on the water, wave is water and water is wave, right now, when you don’t think.
From a transcript of Suzuki Roshi talk, 1969, Emptiness is Form
From time to time we come to a stuck place … After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice… we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an ‘edge.’ We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can’t quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.
The purpose of meditation is to develop a sane relationship to experience. The struggles we have in life – shutting down, pushing away, feeling overwhelmed, and all the neurotic attachment — arise from the confusion we harbor about how to relate to the rich energy of the mind. When eating, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. But how do we digest our experience? It’s not so clear…The practice methods […] are designed to bring us into a sane relationship with our experience. As the great Tibetan Buddhist master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, “Son, it is not experiences themselves that bind you, but the way you cling to or reject them“
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