.:.
“The core belief is always a negative belief we have about ourselves, an opinion so painful that we will do almost anything to avoid feeling our abject sense of unlovability and worthlessness. The basic strategies are our ardent but deluded responses: fixed reactions in a fluid world.”
.:.
“The paradox of practice is that as we use tremendous effort to stay with this pain the best we can, it slowly erodes, and moments can arise of no effort—of just pain, just joy.”
.:.
“She points out that whenever we are upset, we have a good clue that our patterns are in action.”
.:.
“She emphasizes that we have to do this bodily, experiencing sensations thousands and thousands of times. The thoughts become like bubbles, neither clung to nor amplified with a subsequent train of other thoughts. The body sensations become just that: sensations that are experienced and gradually weaken. Then moments of the joy, regardless of what is going on, appear, unmasked.”
.:.
“Joko also clarifies in her talks that our core belief, our strategies, our thoughts, and our body sensations—all that we think are so concrete—are nothing more than the experience of the present moment.”
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“She teaches that our internal agony is nothing other than enlightenment itself.”
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“we avoid the experience of this moment. And we suffer. Instead of being that which is now arising, we cover it with our strategies.”
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“I realized that her teachings were exquisitely distilled into one sentence: “You’re fine.” She would gently pat me on the arm and say, “You’re fine.”
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“You’re fine.”
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“Our job, as humans who want to experience life fully, is to pay attention when we experience something.
To do this, all we have to do is to begin to be who and what we really are. That’s it.”
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“when we truly experience what we are, whatever it is at every moment, there is freedom.”
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“The more we experience, the less we need things to be different.”
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“The secret to experiencing the whole of life is just to be whatever we are experiencing. Say we manage for a few minutes to feel whatever we feel as opposed to running from it, thinking about it, analyzing it, taking a pill, getting drunk, or whatever we do so we don’t have to feel it. If we can truly rest with it, be friendly and curious with that pain, we can begin to transform.”
.:.
“When we can let go of the thought-based, personal desire for things to work out a particular way, for the first time, the pain that we feel can begin to open up.”
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“And when it opens up, the feeling gets clear and quiet.”
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“And at the end, there’s silence and wonder.”
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“Finally, there’s nothing—just wonder.”
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“Underneath all of our difficulties, there’s this well of silence, which is real wisdom. Whatever you want to call it, it’s there.”
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“Our human desire is that we want life to go our way.”
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“We don’t want to be too cold; we don’t want to be too hot. We don’t want to be too hungry. We don’t want to be uncomfortable in any way. It’s fine to try and make ourselves more satisfied and more comfortable, but when the whole objective of our life is to be more pleased, more comforted, or more anything-like-that, then we’ve lost our way.”
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“What do you really want? Do you just want to be comfortable? Maybe, in this moment, the answer is yes. Perhaps you’ve had such a hard time lately that you want to relax and enjoy yourself.
It’s okay to enjoy yourself, but having the conviction that comfort is all you need to attend to is the error.”
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“When comfort or pleasure is the only focus of our life, then we miss out on life itself. It’s easy to miss it.”
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“Life isn’t miserable or terrible. It’s just what it is, and that can take the form of severe misery at times, tremendous joy at other times, or some feeling between the two.”
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“If I’m sick, I’m sick. Of course, we do what we can to stay well. But, when life is what it is at this second, we have to abandon the never-ending judgments that we tend to make about everything”
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“In real old age, bitterness is obvious: it’s in the mouth, the way the face is, the way the body is held.”
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“Hope is really a thought that maybe it will be different someday.”
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“The snow falling constantly is the great mystery. The person we live with is the great mystery. There’s nothing that isn’t the great mystery. And we say there is neither heaven nor earth because there is just this moment, whatever it is: snowing, raining, being sick, being well, being inspired, being bored.”
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“when you do the work of being with exactly what is, slowly, unexpectedly, transformation happens.”
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“We don’t see the periods of confusion, misery, or mild depression as fruitful.”
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“We don’t see that they’re necessary for growth.”
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“We’re much more likely to think there’s something wrong with us and that we need to do something or take something to counter this down period.”
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“We don’t practice meditation to make things all better. The purpose is not to get to the up.”
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“We practice so we can be at peace at any point, no matter where we are in the up-and-down curve of our lives.”
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“Our children leave us or they return home.”
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“The thought that I should be joyful at the bottom of the trough is a thought. It’s a concept.”
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“The reality is that when we experience the moment fully, for whatever it is, joy is revealed. But we don’t have to do anything for that reason; joy just is.”
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“That joy is available at any point.”
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“When we can be absolutely just where we are, there is a surprising and easy joy.”
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“Happiness is the “up-up-up.” Joy is the peace in what is.”
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“Joy is what’s going on, minus our opinion about it.”
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“It means that life and me, we’re the same thing. It’s just “That’s what’s going on.” That’s joyous.
You might already know this. But when you really know it in your body, you feel it. You know joy in what is. You don’t get thrown so much by every little quirk in the way your life goes.”
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“EVERYBODY IS STRUGGLING with something: their work, their marriage, their kids, the world around them. Even if they look outwardly successful, there is a constant flow from one crisis to another.”
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“If you leave a human being alone for a little while, struggles come up.”
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“There are a lot of things about practice that can be very nice, but they’re not crucial. It’s fine to wear robes, but it’s not crucial. It’s fine to chant, but it’s not crucial. It’s nice to have a very simple beautiful space to practice in, but it’s not crucial.”
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“We come to a sitting practice not to get answers but to become more aware.”
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“Ten minutes ago, I didn’t want to talk. Now, it’s fun.”
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“Our thoughts are not to be relied on. They just come and go.”
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“When you label your thoughts, be like a court reporter. You’re just taking it down. I doubt if a court reporter even knows what they’re taking down.”
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“If you find it dull, just know: you’re not interested in your life but in the mental version that you cook up about it.”
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“Human situations, when you get four or five people together who don’t practice, tend to be lethal. It’s very easy to get caught in the swirl of judgments of yourself and other people.”
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“slowly we learn to go toward experience with less resistance. Because it’s the only thing we can do.”
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“I notice in my own practice the one thing that slowly, slowly, slowly diminishes is any desire to fix anyone else. As far as I’m concerned, more and more, they’re just fine being the way they are.”
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“You don’t have to accept anybody. “Accept” is a judgment, something you think you should do.”
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“The less we try to control this person or this moment, the more we can experience our own lives.”
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“Life doesn’t work. It can’t work.”
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“There’s nothing called “life.”
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“There are just enormous energy fields changing at tremendous speeds.”
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“Every single person over the age of two or three has a core belief—it’s just the nature of being human to have one.”
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“This core belief is not something true. It is always negative.”
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“This is because it is a product of the ego or separate self, the nature of which is to feel threatened.”
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“Nothing is truly separate, and so if we feel separate, we feel threatened.”
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“This young ego, this “separate self,” is frightened and angry, and the core belief arises out of this situation.”
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“We all have a core belief. You may not know it yet, if you haven’t thought about your life this way, but it’s there.”
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“Most of us spend years, decades, or our whole life, busy with these efforts to avoid feeling what’s there.”
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“Sitting builds the power and the sensitivity so that we can be with ourselves. At first, we can do it for maybe ten seconds. Then, over time, three minutes, ten minutes. Finally, we can sit in dignity in the middle of that. Just sit there and let the pain and the misery be. That’s the dignity of sitting.”
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“When unreality (the core) meets reality, which is experiencing, then slowly the unreality just fades away.”
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“Your basic strategy is how you behave in reaction to the thought, “I am this; therefore, this is the action I must take.”
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“Whatever difficulties entered his life, he stepped back and tried to become invisible.”
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“But, as we know from experience, life is unpredictable. It’s flowing, and it throws up all sorts of things. So, a simple, rigid reaction doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t feel good either. And yet, most of us have some kind of habitual, automatic reaction left over from childhood that we use for almost any challenging situation. This unconscious basic strategy might work pretty well for a while, but eventually it stops working.”
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“We do all sorts of things, and they may look very different from one person to another. One person has to be busy all the time or talking all the time. Another person is always so quiet that you wouldn’t know they’re there. Some people will tell you off in a minute. Some people will never say anything that would hurt your feelings. Strategies. Strategies. Strategies.”
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“Practice is seeing what is there without our basic strategy.”
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“Personally, I think a little bit of formality is nice. It makes it special, in the same way you don’t go to the prom in your shorts. But it’s not the core of practice. Practice is returning again and again to this awareness, experience, and exploration.”
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“The fact that you had a moment of awareness three months ago doesn’t have anything to do with anything. You have to get it now. Then there’s that weightlessness almost. You know each moment as if it’s happening “for the first time.”
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“Our central work is to shift—very slowly, usually over a lifetime—from a self-centered view of things to a life-centered view of things.”
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“Our core belief has us seeing a tiny piece of something as everything, because our emotions say it is everything.”
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“With practice, our world opens to the wonder of experiencing that this thing we thought of as our self is just a tiny part of everything we see.”
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“No self is neither wonderful nor terrible. We’re just here at this second. We create space and time, but life is just happening.”
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“People often come to Zen because they’re looking for the true self. But you can’t look for the true self. It’s nothing; there’s nothing to find.”
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“since we are selfish, in the sense of wanting our lives to be joyous, practice unveils this joy.”
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“With this growing practice, we become less disruptive to our self and to others.”
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“In fact, our lives tend to become more cooperative, more creative, and more loving.”
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“How do you know if you are practicing well? I find it to be the ability to be sorry, truly sorry, when you’ve hurt someone.”
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“No one is going to thank you for practicing.”
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“We are nothing but the second-by-second manifestation of that reality.”
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“When we think without truly experiencing, we’re trying to live three feet off the ground. Our life lacks solidity and firmness.”
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“Much of our lives is spent going after something we want: a job, a relationship, our kids to be all right, money, health. There are so many things to want.”
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“Our practice is always to uncover what’s blocking our awareness of the wonder that is life.”
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“People are not usually the way they look.”
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“As long as we think the aim of practice is comfort, pleasure, and being calm, we miss it.
In the long run, people who practice are calmer—but that’s not the point of practice.”
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“If you have an idea of yourself as someone who has a Zen practice or someone who sits, you have to be very careful not to respond reflexively to everything that happens with, “It doesn’t bother me.” The fact is, it probably does bother you.”
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“I once had a student who kept challenging me about little things. I was fine with that. I told my daughter, “I see what the student is doing. It’s obvious why he’s doing that, and it doesn’t bother me.” And she said, “Mom, how do you really feel?” I said, “Oh, I’m mad!”
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“I also make sure I always have friends who have nothing to do with practice. That’s a trip in itself. Some of them have no idea what I do. It’s hard on the ego.”
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“To really surrender to pain and to be friendly with it, to embrace it, is probably not what we thought this practice was about. We thought it was about becoming enlightened. But enlightenment is not some tremendous state of being. It’s simply being with what is.”
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“You can be thankful when your boredom comes because it means you have space to experience what’s underneath it.”
Nota: el espacio es el cielo de la mente entre las nubes de los pendientes y las emociones y los sentimientos.
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“This doesn’t mean you like to sit in pain, or with the dullness, or with the heat. But then, there is something that develops in you when you keep sitting. There’s a steadiness. And the longer you sit, the more that steadiness takes charge.”
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“the longer you sit, the more that steadiness takes charge.”
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“Most of our life is lived in this space in our mind. We aren’t experiencing; we’re being pushed by the core belief into moods and opinions.”
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“Aspiration gives us diligence and discipline. It’s different than ambition, which is about trying to get somewhere. Ambition is motivated by our core belief that there is something wrong with us that can be fixed if we can get to a certain place.”
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“If you say, “I’m going to feel my anger,” that’s not feeling your anger. That’s talking about it.”
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“Until we know our true self, that’s who we think we are. We have no intention of giving it up, not at all.”
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“practice is not easy. That pain becomes your true teacher.”
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“When you can, even briefly, experience your pain instead of thinking about it, it changes you.”
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“ALL HUMAN BEINGS are at war with themselves. You may meet people all day long who are smiling and seem self-assured. Trust me, the wars are there.”
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“the war is where the practice is.”
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“The war is between the way we think we should be and who we are.”
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“The war is between wanting pleasure (or ease or success) and being with the truth that life doesn’t care about our pleasure (or ease or success).”
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“How are we really? Just the way we are.”
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“Because we believe we are a certain way, and the world is a certain way, we are therefore compelled to act a certain way.”
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“because we have so much pain, most of us would rather choose immediate pleasure than our true life.”
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“So, one side of practice examines our core belief, which will pull your sense of your life apart, and the other side of practice is careful, meticulous work. Both don’t seem that fun, so why do we practice? Because our true self is there, yearning for the freedom and spaciousness that is our true life.”
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“Old Buddhist texts talk about having your head in the fire. There has to be struggle in practice.”
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“With practice, we don’t “win” the war, but we have moments of peace.”
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“A life of practice is the most rewarding, the most exciting, and the most alive thing you can do. But it’s no piece of cake.”
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“today, I tried to prepare to give a talk and to do nothing else. I was trying to follow Charles Dickens’s description, to do one thing and to do nothing else. I lasted about ten seconds. “Then, I had a little itch on my face. Of course, I didn’t just scratch my face. I got busy thinking about the itch.”
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“In the realm of no liking or disliking, the world is absolutely perfect. We do each single thing with no discrimination.”
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“Being in harmony means you’re experiencing your self as an integral part of life instead of as someone who is opposing a piece of life.”
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“When you experience harmony, you know it.”
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“Harmony can occur right in the middle of a messy situation. It’s when we can experience the mess, but not be that mess.”
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“We start out believing our judgments instead of seeing, noticing, and labeling our judgment”
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“The effort is our willingness to turn toward the unknown of this moment and stay there.”
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“Most of the time, we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’ve added tension.”
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“If you need something to make you feel good, practice is not much help. But if we just experience the pain, without thinking and overthinking, the pain transforms.”
Nota: ahora sí entendí: veneno es medicina.
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“The discipline, the bravery, and the consistency of sitting regularly builds our ability to experience our true lives.”
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“Nothing we do is wasted if we’re aware of it.”
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“Americans are good at unreality. Our whole culture is based on trying to alter our reality. It hurts—well, go buy a new dress. It hurts—get a new partner. It hurts—take a pill. We have dozens and dozens of ways to cover that hurt.”
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“usually when we’re feeling some hurt, the mind is going, “It’s so bad. I’m suffering so hard. It shouldn’t be like this for me. And oh, yes, I’m experiencing it.” That’s not experiencing—that’s thinking.”
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“One reason to sit every day is that sitting can develop our ability to separate thoughts and sensations. For most people who haven’t practiced, achieving this separation is almost impossible.”
.:.
“it’s important to really sit still, without tension or rigidity. Just be still. When you do this, you create a container for yourself in which every movement of the mind and body becomes obvious.”
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“If the cup shatters, it just shatters; that’s all.”
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“I always say that it’s a good idea to practice with smaller things so when something big comes along, we have some idea of how to practice.”
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“What does it feel like to be freer of the need for control? What is our experience when it’s not motivated by fear, anger, and guilt? It’s terrifying, because we have given up all illusion of control. And it’s glorious and wonderful to feel the freedom of a truly experienced human life.”
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“I USED TO throw things at my husband. Bricks, even. Actually, I threw the bricks at windows, but I wanted to throw them at him. I’d been raised to be a good girl, no matter what the circumstances. And good girls have a lot of anger, you know.”
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“Each time we can remain quietly with that anger, it weakens just a little bit, and we have just a little freedom to act more appropriately in the situation rather than react habitually.”
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“If we can just stay with what we are feeling, we’ll have a naturally increasing awareness of the appropriate thing that needs to be done or said and the practical actions that need to happen next.”
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“We always think we can make a right or wrong decision. It’s not really true. Whatever decision you make is your newest place to be, to experience your life from.”
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“Practice is a space where we can be the anger without hurting anyone, including ourselves.”
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“Life and other people aren’t what cause us to suffer. It’s our anger, our own reactivity, that causes the bulk of our suffering.”
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“With practice, we develop steadiness within ourselves so that under the pressure of illness, misfortune, or unfairness, we don’t hurt ourselves or others. Or at least we hold steady for longer.”
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“Staying with anger is difficult. That’s why we often express it so explosively; we want it gone. When something nice is happening, I don’t mind experiencing it, and I don’t mind if it lasts forever. In fact, I would love it. But when anger comes up, often our first thought is, “How long is this going to last?”
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“even when it seems some people are doing you wrong, you have some understanding of why that’s happening. And you have some understanding of how to react to it in a way that doesn’t cause trouble. A revolution takes place.”
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“Practice is never about not handling things but always about how you handle them.”
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“When you walk out, your situation just stays the same. If that’s the case, you’re going to meet it again. Believe me, if you haven’t resolved something, life will just make sure you meet it again and again and again.”
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“The minute you stop thinking (the thinking is covering the pain) and the minute you stop doing (the doing is covering the pain), you feel it.”
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“The more your life experience develops and refines this kind of clarity, the more you realize awakening isn’t something you look for; it’s something you are.”
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“There’s not some virtue attached to sitting; it’s only a matter of your intention for your own life. And as you spend more time residing in your experience, the intention itself will change and change and change and change.”
.:.
“Are you tasting your food or are you worrying, analyzing, speculating, and remembering? Right now, are you reading these words or are you judging? Probably a little of both. Do I like this idea? Do I agree with this idea? Or perhaps you’re trying to hurry up and finish this chapter so you can get to whatever else you want to do with your afternoon.”
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“The minute you’re feeling your body, the minute you taste, there is no self.”
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“but fundamentally it’s just that you have an experiential day as opposed to that day of rushing, worrying, blaming yourself, and finding fault with somebody else.”
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“Our work is to really feel our misery, with no thinking, as much as we can. If we can feel it, without judging, it begins to heal itself.”
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“Training is exercising the mind so it doesn’t have so many automatic pathways to jump into.”
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“The idea that there is a universe that existed five minutes ago or that will exist in five minutes is just that: an idea in your head. There is only arising, just arising, that’s all.”
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“If the universe is just arising with no space and time, it means everything that is arising is of equal importance.”
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“To see everything arising isn’t a thought. It’s just, “Here we are.”
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“And the only thing that interrupts the unity is thinking.”
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“If I’m truly looking at you, if you have my full attention, it’s pretty hard to be unkind.”
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“If you are stuck in fear, you can’t pay attention, and paying attention is the best thing you can bring to a situation.”
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“Believing intellectually in emptiness is an error, but believing in some other things is a catastrophe in terms of practice.”
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“We may think practice is about our own suffering, but when we don’t do our practice, other people suffer. That’s a very powerful motivation.”
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“Practice is more difficult when you’re just struggling to survive.”
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Total “confidence would mean we were 100 percent comfortable with life being what it is and us being what we are.”
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“THERE IS A famous Sufi teaching story in which a man loses his keys. He is looking for them under the streetlight when his friend walks by. His friend asks, “What are you doing?” The man answers, “I’m looking for my keys.” The friend stops to help him look. They search and dig around for a long while. Finally, the friend asks, “Are you sure you lost them here?” And the man replies, “No, I lost them back there somewhere in the dark.” His friend stops, astonished, and says, “Well, then why are you looking for them here?” And the man says, “It’s so much easier to see.”
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“Hay una famosa historia de enseñanza sufí en la que un hombre pierde sus llaves. Las está buscando bajo la luz del faro de la calle cuando pasa un amigo. Su amigo pregunta: "¿Qué estás haciendo?" El hombre responde: "Estoy buscando mis llaves". El amigo se detiene para ayudar. Buscan y rebuscan durante mucho tiempo. Finalmente, el amigo pregunta: "¿Estás seguro de que los perdiste aquí?" Y el hombre responde: "No, los perdí en otro lugar, en la oscuridad". Su amigo se detiene asombrado y dice: "Bueno, entonces, ¿por qué las buscamos aquí?" Y el hombre dice: "Porque es más fácil, aquí hay luz”.
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“Often, we would rather be safe than free.”
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“Some people, since the Zen Center has become relatively big, don’t like it as well as when it was small. That is also looking at the surface of things. We look the way we’re used to looking.”
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“Because the core belief is a fixed, rigid assemblage of thoughts, it keeps running our lives in a very false way. That’s what we do. We don’t necessarily like our core belief, but we’re used to it.”
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“As human beings, we like things to be fixed. We’re always trying to control the world so we can be safe.”
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“Dharma talks are one thing, but the actual practice is the thing that makes our life have depth and richness.”
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“All we are is relatedness. We’re not separate. I don’t exist, except that there’s a rug there for me, and it’s that moment of contact with the rug that is my existence. Our existence is just moments of contact. In the present moment, all we can do is to make contact. There isn’t any past or future.”
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“The moment we make contact creates my life and your life.”
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“If my core belief is that I can’t be loved, perhaps I’ll take on the role of teacher, a strategy from the second circle, so I can look for love and admiration from the third circle.”
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“Some people have very successful lives, and some people have very satisfying lives. They can look the same, but the thing that’s driving those lives is different. Practice is about moving out of a life “that’s falsely driven into one that has a genuine motivation.”
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“simply being at peace with wherever you are.
So, why launch off from the shore in the first place? What is the point if it seems to be untold uncertainty and struggle, with no new land to arrive at? Our practice is not to arrive somewhere, but to see that these three “places” are the same, and that we have already arrived.”
.:.
“Hmmm, try this.” Then one day, the man got it. Becoming quite mad, he went to his teacher and said, “I can’t believe I did all that struggling for twenty years only to realize that you don’t need the struggle.” And the teacher said, “If I had spared you your struggle, you would have never seen that there’s no struggle necessary.”
.:.
“As you engage in that struggle, no matter how you do it, if there’s any “awareness, then you’re maturing. You’re changing into what you always were.”
.:.
“As you sit, you may gain an understanding, very slowly over time and without trying to do anything about it, that the purpose of your life is just to be yourself.”
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“I’m not saying go out and save the world. But people who practice regularly do change the world.”
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“if you think you’re going to run around and change people, you’ll notice they begin to avoid you. I’ll avoid you too.”
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“I don’t think of teaching or sitting as sacrifice. I think what I’m doing is fun.”
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“If you’re trying to save all sentient beings, you’re trying to fix something, usually in yourself. The only way you can save all sentient beings is to be your true self.”
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“Service and willingness to do the work flows naturally out of a good practice. This doesn’t mean we work all the time. It means there is less separation between being of service, doing the work, and living our true lives.”
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“Part of waking up to the present moment is to become aware of the fact that, usually, we’re just shadowboxing and not making contact with life.”
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“A lot of people who practice begin to feel a little freedom. This is probably the best way to describe a life that is less and less caught by self-centered attachments. It’s free. It’s also flexible. It’s kind. And it’s fun. We forget about fun.”
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“Practice is the slow effacement—usually over many, many years—of this false master called the core belief. You efface the fixed picture of how you should be. And when you efface it, you don’t replace it with another fixed picture called “enlightenment.”
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“You can’t imagine the freedom to be your true self. It’s an absence, and you can’t pick up an absence.”
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“Freedom is the name of the game. Freedom to be nothing.”
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“What is most clear from Joko’s writings is that this path is extraordinarily simple. This does not mean it is easy to walk this path; indeed, it requires everything we have.”
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Lunes 11 octubre 2021
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