Reconnection

Are we seeing what’s actually here?

Or are we seeing what aspects of our unhealed self want us to see?

Are we encountering life?

Or a mental story about life?

We’re often encouraged to pierce the veil—when, in reality, there’s no veil to pierce. It’s just a story about a veil that causes us to feel lost, or to misperceive Reality as Reality.

The mind is brilliant at turning friends into threats, fictions into facts, spinning every experience into a narrative that reinforces its own limited perspective.

If we’ve experienced trauma, it often amplifies this distortion… not out of malice, but because trauma, by its very nature, disorients us, ensuring disconnection as a means of survival.

Through Zen training and practice, we could gently and with persistent steadiness turn the soft gaze of our Attention inward—not to fix, judge, or erase our experiences—but to encounter them directly, as they truly are. As someone once shared with me, “we must come to understand our story as it actually was, not as the mind reshaped it to be.”

With patient attentiveness, and giving into distractions, we free ourselves from conditioned patterns, dropping attention from mind’s stories, redirecting Attention into openness and clarity. It is HERE—not somewhere out so-called “there,” off in the distance—resting in compassionate Awareness, that genuine healing and reconnection unfold.

一We Are the Practice Itself.