When I stop measuring the distance between myself and what is… a lot of times, that's when the M.A.G.I.C. happens… Me And Grace In Conscious Contact. Perhaps the invitation to happiness is giving ourselves intentional permission to put down the measuring tape… to stop constantly evaluating ourselves against some imagined standard of who or what we're supposed to be. And, as we say in NA, self-acceptance comes when we stop working so fn hard to justify our existence… or our so

There was a time in my recovery when I was kinda careless… even shallow in my attitude toward Step Ten. I got the basic idea… continue taking personal inventory, promptly admit when I f’d up, and keep it moving... motionless motion. What I eventually noticed is that limited investment and limited depth produce limited results. I was going through the motions that ‘looked like recovery,’ but it wasn’t moving the bar much. I was still colliding with people, caught up in unneces

The invitation of Zen... We could respond to the present moment as It actually Is, not as the mind expected it to be, and not as the fabricated version thinking mind is trying to self-will into being. In practical terms, that could mean meeting the moment without our presets and defaults... without our habits... without the well-practiced personalisms... without the rehearsed version of ourselves we've been carrying around like luggage on our back. That said, we can be honest

生死事大 無常迅速 各宜醒覺 慎勿放逸。 Shōji jidai, mujō jinsoku, kakugi seikaku, shinmotsu hōitsu. Life and death are matters of great importance. (please, I beg you not to fool yourself. It is really happening). Nothing remains; everything changes. (impermanence) Wake up to the experience that is present. (Notice... please stop trying to so-called 'find.' Reality is not playing hide and seek). Attend carefully, and do not abandon this precious moment. (Truly live before this opportunity is e

When I was training with Lödö Garūng Rinpoché, we were discussing Zazen, and he told me very directly: Zazen is not "meditation." Thinking about it that way, he said, was a mistake causing many to get away from the intention of our practice. Instead, he invited me to experience the practice through the Tibetan word "Gom..." pointing more toward familiarization... becoming intimate with... learning to remain with what is already here. In this Way, sitting quietly... being with

One of the things Genkō Kathy Blackman, Zenni, taught me through the practice of tea was that a tea bowl has a face. We were invited not simply to pick up the bowl and drink, but to look carefully... to experience it... to become intimate enough with the bowl to discover its face. I have one particular tea bowl made by Genki Takabayashi Roshi. Genkō gave it to me before her death. She told me that Eido Roshi, Genki Roshi, Genjo Roshi, and she each had one of these bowls, and

Just for today, the invitation is to experiment with our conversation dynamics and notice the results. Do we have the clear self-awareness to notice if we tend to "center ourselves"... bringing the conversation back to our experience... our opinions... our perspective... our needs... our personal story? Or do we tend to "de-center ourselves"... holding back, minimizing ourselves, disappearing, putting ourself on the 'shelf,' or making everyone else more important? If we do ha

If we're the type of person who's argumentative... combative... contentious... skeptic, consistently leading with the hard edge of personality... because we choose to put it before principle, and then shrugging it off like, "Well, that's just how I am"… what is the cost? What is the consequence to our relationships? Do we build trust, or do we damage it? Do we inject uncertainty and invite anxiety, or do we bring forward comfort, love, safety, and trust? Part of Step Nine and

Zen Master Kōdō Sawaki once said... “We don’t ride on rails laid down in advance. We must improvise at each instant and go forward. Turning the wheel, we determine our direction. We must be ceaselessly alert or, in other words, hold ourselves at the ready.” That said, even though we call it “meditation,” I could just as easily call it untangling attention from the virtual reality headset of thought… so that when I turn the wheel, there’s the opportunity for a response rather

It can sometimes seem as though people have an allergic reaction to genuine friendliness… kindness… compassion… or, more simply, Love. It's not because they're "bad" people, but because genuine care may simply not be familiar to them. Kindness and generosity without an agenda can create suspicion. Compassion without judgment can feel awkwardly vulnerable. Love that asks for nothing in return can be difficult to trust in a society so often predicated on the transactional. You

Consciousness × (Awareness ↔ Attention) = Lived Experience… or simply, Thisness. OK… How can this formulation on meditation practice help me? CONSCIOUSNESS means I’m here and having an experience. ATTENTION is where my focus goes… a conversation, a memory, a fear, a craving, something somebody said yesterday, or some thought that showed up out of nowhere. AWARENESS is NOTICING what’s happening… including where my attention has gone. That noticing matters. When we’re operating

Whether it was teachers… mentors… friends… they all keep pointing me toward the exact same thing, that I couldn’t have done on my own. And it was something I had to keep working with until it stopped being a lesson... stopped being something somebody taught me... and gradually became something I lived. Something embodied. Something carried forward into this present moment as the person I actually am that now feels very natural and familiar to me. My values aren’t heirlooms to

In our own personal Wizard of Oz story, when we do Zazen, we’re taking the opportunity to look behind the shoji screen and see: Who is it that sees… hears… craves… wants all the things… gets offended… gets afraid… carries around all the stories and yada yadas about who I am, who you are, and how everything is supposed to be? And when we take our seat to sit… breathe… listen and notice… to look behind the shoji screen of “self”… we might notice there’s no one there, but rather

When I became ordained as a priest, I imagined my life would look like other priests. I thought I'd take care of 'the hearts and minds of the people,' within the configuration of a monastery… doing all the ordinary things that Zen priests and monks do. In reality, the Dharma... what some might translate as 'Grace,' in Western culture, has a way of leading us into spaces that need Dharma paramedics… places we never expected to find ourselves. For me, Dharma AKA grace led me to

Is our heart’s ability to appreciate quicker than the ego can depreciate? The mind has a remarkable talent for finding what’s wrong. It effortlessly picks people, places, and things apart, dissecting them like a frog in biology class. It notices flaws and disappointments before we even realize it’s happening. Whether the reflex is subtle or loud, it sustains suffering by reinforcing the illusion of separation. Untrained and unrestrained, our “I-ness” becomes highly skilled at

For your considerations... Sentient beings don't simply live within environments. We emerge and arise through them… respond to them… alter them… and become environments for one another. Our body is an environment. Mind is an environment. Attention is an environment. Community is an environment. The Earth is the larger field within which all of these environments meet. In this way, how do we engage them? Harmoniously… or disharmoniously? "The powerful play goes on, and we will

This morning I saw a trash can beside a drive-through. Someone had turned it in such a way so that no one could use it. While it fulled the requirement of having to be there, it didn't fill the reality of the need of those who might need to use it. It occurred to me that it wasn’t there to receive anything anymore. It was simply there because a trash can was expected to be there. How often do we do the same with our lives? We meet the technical expectations … but quietly don

When, in the course of human events, conditions emerge that separate one people from another through fear, prejudice, indifference, intolerance, or the pursuit of personal power and dominance, it becomes necessary not merely to resist those forces, but to remember a deeper Reality that can help us rediscover one another. Space is unimaginably vast… and this is the only planet we know where our particular expression of life exists. Out of respect for our shared humanity, and f

Kyakka Shōko (脚下照顧).... Paying close attention and taking care of what's beneath of our feet, instead of what's in our head... in my direct experience is a thousand times more useful than mindfulness. The true universe isn't in my thoughts... it's the reality of not just "Be here now..." But KNOWING here and now. The universe of thinking mind's trials and tribulations? What did Mark Twain once say? Recovery and Zen re-attention me that the problem isn't that the mind produces

Neither recovery from active addiction or Zen practice was designed to be an exercise in image construction. Instead of striving to be performatively real, both paths deeply invite us into genuine realness... sincerity... that allows for a clarity of our personhood, instead of holding out something that's not. In my experience, healing... happen through an intentional process of addition by subtraction. Authenticity and integrity aren't widgets we can manufacture or go into a