Daily Dharma

The ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to realize the union of your mind and ultimate reality. You discover eventually that not only are you in reality but that you also embody that reality.

All beings have been your mother in a former life. This is the concept my teacher presented to his class of Western students. Holding this idea in our minds, he told us, would help us to generate a sense of connectedness and all-encompassing compassion.

An empty vessel refuses nothing and receives everything that is coming at it from all directions. By practicing in this way, you can create more space to accommodate your own reactivity and the points of view of others.

To meditate effectively, all we need to put forward is our effort in following our immediate experience, and our honesty in acknowledging it.

We are never more than a breath away from the home we share with the entire universe. Zen meditation is just us checking back in.

The only person we can lead to liberation is ourselves. Everybody has to go alone. Anybody who would like to come along is welcome. The bandwagon is big, and yet there aren’t enough people on it.

When we realize that being fully alive is to be fully alive with and through others, the distinction between selfishness and altruism falls away.

There’s nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer.

In Tibetan, one of the main terms for renunciation—nge jung— can be translated as “the determination to be free.” “Free of what?” you might wonder. Free of the suffering that comes when we depend on circumstances outside our control to be content—like a job, another person, or a certain status.

Sitting 10,000 hours on a cushion does not entitle you to any kind of insight or enlightenment. We have to be open to the fact that we may not achieve anything that corresponds to our preconceived idea of what the goal of the practice might be.