Thisness…

Up and out for a 5k run this morning. Legs really feeling it after our hike up to the Bluff yesterday.

Then over to Brecon for a dog walk and lunch before leaving for my afternoon/ evening shift at work.

Reading the latest despatch from Joan Tollifson over coffee. I enjoy her perspective and insights and she has a fascinating biography.

I belong to a local meditation group of about 16 people. We meet once a week for a couple of hours to sit for two meditation periods, a hot drink, snacks and general chat.

The group is non-denominational and open to all. We rarely speak about meditation or so called spiritual matters unless someone feels moved to. Occasionally someone might read a poem or a text for contemplation or discussion. Now and again people share their experience of a recent retreat they attended.

I’ve been attending for about 10 months now and it is the only time that I formally meditate these days. When I joined, the group was smaller, perhaps only half a dozen.

These days my practice has become far more ambivalent about formal meditation and I’m not entirely clear whether that’s just the way it’s changed over time due to myriad causes and conditions or whether it has something to do with now meditating only among a growing group of people.

This only makes sense in the context of me being a highly solitary person. I may be completely wrong however.

I was slightly alarmed in the group chat yesterday when one member asked another how they spell their Sanskrit name.

I promised myself I’d start 2024 writing more openly and freely here. That never happened. Well not yet anyway. Consider this a tiny first step away from my usual arch and austere posts.

Realisation is reality right now. Even shocks, doubts, fears, and frights are none other than reality right now…

Dogen

Realisation is reality right now. Even shocks, doubts, fears, and frights are none other than reality right now…

Dogen

Realisation is reality right now. Even shocks, doubts, fears, and frights are none other than reality right now…

Dogen

Whether you’re sitting alone in a cave or stuck in a traffic jam you’re always exactly where you need to be, indeed, the only possible place you can be at that moment. Neither situation can bring you any closer to or further away from your life.

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

Hermann Hesse

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.” – A.A. Milne

嗦丢 Is The Secret To Living A Zen Life

The key to peace of mind, I say, resides not in practices and paths, but in suffering consciously the ordinary pain, fear, and confusion that come into every life automatically, and differently for each of us.

This right now is it, whether you ‘meditate’ or you don't. For me, awake means living this right now fully with eyes wide open.

Robert Saltzman

The key to peace of mind, I say, resides not in practices and paths, but in suffering consciously the ordinary pain, fear, and confusion that come into every life automatically, and differently for each of us.

This right now is it, whether you ‘meditate’ or you don't. For me, awake means living this right now fully with eyes wide open.

Robert Saltzman

The key to peace of mind, I say, resides not in practices and paths, but in suffering consciously the ordinary pain, fear, and confusion that come into every life automatically, and differently for each of us.

This right now is it, whether you ‘meditate’ or you don't. For me, awake means living this right now fully with eyes wide open.

Robert Saltzman

I’m compelled to draw attention to the totality of all experiences of aliveness. There seems to be an over emphasis on just the so-called positive aspects of being in contemporary spiritual discourse which, to me, seems inaccurate, and unhelpful.

I’m with Ordinary Mind Zendo’s lay teacher Barry Magid on this when he says:

Zazen is a complete experience of being for its own sake; it is not a means to an end, not some curative fantasy. All you're going to do is sit, and experience whatever is going on. This means feeling whatever you feel (emotionally or physically), think whatever you think - and just watch. What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.

Barry Magid

One can not feel the conscious need or want to do anything at all, yet be powerfully moved to simply act out of nowhere.

One can not feel the conscious need or want to do anything at all, yet be powerfully moved to simply act out of nowhere.

One can not feel the conscious need or want to do anything at all, yet be powerfully moved to simply act out of nowhere.

Your life
Your lived experience
Your own unique aliveness
That simply is
Without need or want
In every moment
Is the only possible way

Your life
Your lived experience
Your own unique aliveness
That simply is
Without need or want
In every moment
Is the only possible way

Your life
Your lived experience
Your own unique aliveness
That simply is
Without need or want
In every moment
Is the only possible way

You want to become a Buddha? There’s no need to become a Buddha! Now is simply now. You are simply you. And tell me, since you want to leave the place where you are, where is it exactly you want to go?

‘Homeless’ Kodo Sawaki