Blogma
exploring the Dharma one blog post at a time...
Dharma Blog Posts – Posts by Buddhist teachers or senior practitioners on specific Buddhist teachings. They are educational, instructive, or insightful posts to help others understand the teachings of Buddha.
Sangha Member Blog Posts – Posts by Sangha members (members practicing with Corvallis Zen Circle) about their experiences and their Zen practice on the path to awakening.
Heart
The Buddha heart is our very own heart. Each of us has a heart of gold that is shining just now just below any dis-ease we may be feeling. It is our responsibility and our joy as practitioners to uncover this awake heart and share it with one another. The heart cares, it welcomes, it smiles and is grateful. Each moment we have the opportunity to appreciate the life we are given in this moment, to breath deep, to relax the body, to release our fear, and open to the beauty that is.
Love,
Shinei
Stuck
“Separate yourself from disturbance and face whatever appears before you”
~Master Hongshi
Sometimes we think we are stuck, stuck in habit, stuck in our responsibilities, stuck in our emotions. But in reality, we are never stuck and at any moment we have the opportunity to recognize our freedom, to let go, stop thinking, and meet exactly what is before us. We have the power to separate ourselves from inner disturbance, to release any view, belief or story and enter this very moment of living. Simple, open and unbounded.
What is actually happening right now? Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, listening. Relax into the sky-like openness of your very own heart-mind that receives whatever appears. Where are your problems if you cease thinking about them? Let’s release the imagined world of ‘me and my problems’ and come into the real living breathing reality of our lives together, right here, right now. Whatever is appearing before you is the entrance gate to freedom, enter it completely and release the worry of thousands of years.
Love,
Shinei
Questions
Where do we come from? I mean, all of us, all of this.
Where do our thoughts come from? Our feelings? Projections?
Can we watch them arise? Not just a story about them, but the actual thoughts themselves. Or is that when we really look, really look, there’s actually nothing there.
Zen is about going beyond any doubt. What is really happening here, and who is it that is experiencing it? To assume that these questions are beyond us is a great disservice. We owe it to ourselves to take this phenomenon of living quite seriously.
Only Right Here
The dharma works at every level of consciousness. As ordinary life flows along, you turn towards the dharma whenever you wonder how to be thoroughly present. What is the true nature of this presence? Resting all your awareness on the body experience is a reliable starting point for investigating this. Only ever right here, body sensations orient us immediately to the moment at hand, to the conditions at hand. In zazen, is the body upright? Does your posture support the spine? Are you breathing? What do the hands feel like? Where is your vision resting? Are you gazing at the floor 3 to 5 feet ahead or on the patterns playing on the inside of your closed lids? Or are there images in your minds’s eye? Do you notice the thought paths in the thinking mind? In a state of full attention, you are bearing witness to the most immediate sensation of the self, we call “me”. The self that we identify with as “me”. Then we keep going. Always going beyond.
Listening
The stillness of the afternoon just now, the silence that is filtering through the stream of sunlight is just freely offered. Distant children’s voices. What else is freely offered at this very moment? We have to stop to notice. It’s not so much that we have to live a different life, but just to live this very life in all its fullness, as it shows up right here and now. What stands still? What flutters? What ticks and tocks, and whooshes? And walks by. That person on their phone in mid-sentence ambling by the open window, ear to phone, sharing a morsel of their world, “…so I said to him that I didn’t want to….”. The wonders of our life are always flashing up minutely and altogether. There’s so much charm, magic, when we can be free of our own internal narration and appreciate just for the moment how the world is always narrating with its many voices, when we listen.
Finding the Truth
Once a monk asked Master Shirto, what are monks supposed to do?
Shirto said, “Why are you asking me?”
The monk said, “If I don’t ask you, how will I find the truth?”
Shirto said, “Are you sure you have lost it?”
How are we to practice? How are we to discover the liberation that the Buddha speaks of? This is a good question, and the Buddha beautifully laid out the path of practice to help us, step by step, purify our bodies, hearts, and minds and free ourselves from the delusion of separation.
And yet, Shirto asks, are you sure you are not already free? Could it be that all we have ever longed for is already with us? The feeling of this body breathing. The subtle quality of the air around us. The beating heart. The soundscape. The thoughts. The feeling in the heart. The openness that receives it all. Could it be that the liberating truth is already everything we are? Could it be that the sense that we have a problem or our bound in some way is simply a misunderstanding? What if right here where you sit, or stand, or lie down, is exactly the truth you have been looking for, already complete.
Love,
Shinei