Quotes Tagged "zen"

In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.

don't wait for the man standing in the snow to cut off his arm help him now

it isn't that we're alone or not alone whose voice do you want mine? yours?

I'd love to give you something but what would help?

In Zen, there is an old saying: The obstacle is the path. Know that a whole and happy life is not free of obstacles. Quite the contrary, a whole and happy life is riddled with obstacles-they simply become the very stepping-stones that help lift us to a new perspective. It is not what happens to us in this life that shapes us, it is how we choose to respond to what happens to us.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love.

The effects you will have on your students are infinite and currently unknown; you will possibly shape the way they proceed in their careers, the way they will vote, the way they will behave as partners and spouses, the way they will raise their kids.

Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.

Wild woman are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves yet give a piece of who they are to everyone they meet. If you have met one, hold on to her, she'll allow you into her chaos but she'll also show you her magic.

A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.

We are not noble by birth. We are noble only by virtue of the way we think, speak, and act.

To succeed is always to fail-in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.

We washed her body, chanted, and stayed to witness the funeral director shrouding her and whisking her down the hall. I thought of the Zen teaching that talks about how all we need to do is allow ourselves and the world to change. Easy to say, I thought. And yet, here I was in the midst of my experience of fullness of the pain, grief, love, and joy of my grandma’s death. Everything did change. Everything I teach now I learned from my relationship with Mimi. Being deeply in relationship changes the world. I didn’t know then that my life would pivot to teaching others and to being with many, many Mimis.

Even though the path is dark there is always a way through.

An instant realization sees endless time. Endless time is as one moment. When one comprehends the endless moment They realize the person who is seeing it.

Everydayness perfumes the depth of life, the huge ocean where all are interconnected, and makes your life mature. Then a new life arises from the depth and appears on the surface. So, by taking care of everydayness, you don’t make just the surface mature; you also make the depth of your life mature.

If I knew then what I know now I guess it'd make no difference; Fate's sure in the way somehow. What's important is the essence. Although we still have free will We also have a whole lot to deal.

When you catch yourself slipping into a pool of negativity, notice how it derives from nothing other than resistance to the current situation.