Being in the present is the point of sitting and of practice in general : it helps us to be wiser about life, more compassionate, more oriented to what needs to be done. We need to prepare the necessary conditions. We need to be sure that the soil is well prepared, rich and loose and fertile, so that if seed falls, it will spring forth rapidly. In a sense, our path is no path. The object is not to get somewhere. There is no great mystery, really ; what we need to do is straightforward. I don't mean that it is easy ; the path of practice is not a smooth road. It is littered with sharp rocks that can make us stumble or that can cut right through our shoes. The longer we practice, the more we begin to understand that those sharp rocks on the road are in fact like precious jewels ; they help us to prepare the proper condition for our lives. The sharp rock might be working with a nasty person or living with somebody who is hard to get along with. There are sharp rocks everywhere. What changes from years of practice is coming to know something you didn't know before : that there are no sharp rocks -the road is covered with diamonds. The longer we practice, the very difficulties that life presents more and more can be seen as jewels. Increasingly, problems do not rule out practice, but support it. Instead of finding that practice is too difficult, that we have too many problems we see that the problems themselves are the jewels, and we devote ourselves to being with them in a way we never dreamt of before. It's not that problems disappear or that life "improve", but that life slowly transforms-and the sharp rocks that we hated become welcome jewels. We embrace them rather than running away from them. Even that difficult person, the one who criticizes you, the one who doesn't respect your opinion, or whatever-everybody has somebody or something, some sharp rock. Such a rock is precious ; it is an opportunity, a jewel to embrace.
We may absolutely refuse to see the jewel ; we may not want to do anything with it. Yet we must constantly wrestle with this basic problem. Because we are human, much of the time we don't even want to know about it. Why ? Because to wrestle with it means a life that is open to difficulty rather than hiding from it. Wresteling with the reality of our lives is part of the endless preparation of the ground.
Human life should be like a vow, dedicated to uncovering the meaning of life. The meaning of life is in fact not complicated ; yet it is veiled from us by the way we see our difficulties. In a way, practice is fun : to look at my own life and be honest about it is fun. It is difficult, humiliating, discouraging ; yet in another sense, it's fun-because it's alive. To see myself and my life as they truly are is joy. After all the struggle and avoiding and denying and going the other way, it is deeply satisfying for a second to be there with life as it is. The satisfaction is the very core of ourselves. If we have fertile, well-prepared soil, we can throw anything in there and it will grow.
An enjoyable life includes heartache, disappointment, grief. That's part of the flow of life, to let such experiences be. They come and go, and the grief finally dissolves into something else. But if we are complaining and holding on and being rigid ( which is what we like to do ), then we have very little enjoyment. If we have been aware of the process of our lives, including moments that we hate, and are just aware of our hating-"I don't want to do it, but I'll do it anyway"-that very awareness is life itself. When we stay with that awareness, we don't have that reactive feeling about it ; we're just doing it. Then for a second we begin to see, "Oh, this is terrible-and at the same time, it's really quite enjoyable". We just keep going, preparing the ground. That's enough.
Nothing Special Living Zen
By/ Charlotte Joko Beck
Salam,
Cherine
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