Sometimes we can get stuck in our habits or our personal struggles, and we trap ourselves in a cage of our own making. OR, we see others who are unable to move forward and feel inclined to help them, but find they resist efforts to untangle the strands of their situation.
But we can move forward and grow if we face our challenges wisely and with patience.
That’s what I reflected on this week in my talk on Making Your Own life, with a meditation on Patiently Being — and I hope you find it helpful.
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Meditation: Patiently Being
Talk: Making Your Own Life
The book I mentioned during the talk is Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura, and below are some of the quotes I referenced.
From the Buddha, there is the central focus on personal responsibility and effort, deliberate intentions, not empty practices.
One is not low because of birth
nor does birth make one holy.
Deeds alone make one low,
deeds alone make one holy.
Sutta Nipāta 1.136
Help Yourself
Take existential responsibility (a broad term that means essentially realizing that you have fundamental responsibility to your own life – and for your own life – that is inescapable, and which involves using the energy and “power” that you do have as best you can) for your own life.
It is your life, and no one else’s.
No one can do your work for you.
You are your own master,
you make your future.
Therefore discipline yourself
as a horse-dealer trains a thoroughbred.
Dhammapada 25.380
If one going down into a river,
swollen and swiftly flowing,
is carried away by the current —
how can one help others across?
Sutta Nipāta 2.321
The two great risks are risking too much but also risking too little. That’s for each person to decide. For me, not risking anything is worse than death. By far.
Jimmy Chin
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Goethe
Think not lightly of good, saying, “It will not come to me.”
Drop by drop is the water pot filled.
Likewise, the wise one, gathering it little by little,
fills oneself with good.
Dhammapada 9.122
Wonderful it is to train the mind,
so swiftly moving, seizing whatever it wants.
Good is it to have a well-trained mind,
for a well-trained mind brings happiness.
Dhammapada 3.35
No mother nor father nor
any other kin can do
greater good for oneself
than a mind directed well.
Dhammapada 4.43
If by renouncing a lesser happiness
one may realize a greater happiness,
let the wise one renounce the lesser,
having regard for the greater.
Dhammapada 21.290
One truly is the protector of oneself;
who else could the protector be?
With oneself fully controlled,
one gains a mastery that is hard to gain.
Dhammapada 12.160
Things fall apart
Tread the path with care
The Buddha (last words, translated by Stephen Batchelor)
Help Others Help Themselves
You can’t help someone who won’t help themselves.
Know that you cannot do others’ work for them, and know that anything helpful must be grounded in whatever is actually true.
But don’t let this knowing fuel a coldness, or laziness, or indifference.
With good will for the entire cosmos,
cultivate a limitless heart:
Above, below, & all around,
unobstructed, without hostility or hate.
Sutta Nipāta 1.150
Have compassion for everyone you meet,
From The Ways We Touch: Poems. Copyright 1997 by Miller Williams.
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.
Let the Universe Help You
The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.
John Muir
Beloved one, you are not something that has been created – you did not come into the realm of being from the realm of nonbeing. You are a wonderful manifestation, like a pink cloud on the top of a mountain, or a mysterious moonlit night. You are a flowing stream, the continuation of so many wonders. You are not a separate self. You are yourself, but you are also me. You cannot take the pink cloud out of my fragrant tea this morning. And I cannot drink my tea without drinking my cloud.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Inside the Now: Meditations on Time
You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
We participate with the whole universe as it practices through our individual bodies and minds. We don’t practice individually to improve ourselves; rather, we settle down peacefully within the network of dependent origination and allow the universal life force to practice through us for all beings.
Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura, p. 70
When we take ourselves out of the picture, then all that’s left is everything.
Joseph Goldstein, Tricycle, Winter 2023, p. 109
Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization.
Dogen, in Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura, p. 1
This integration of totality and individuality is the way we actually live and the reason we must practice. Although the boundless moonlight is reflected in each drop of water, we must still care for the drop.
Shohaku Okumura, Realizing Genjokoan, p. 166
I think and experience that our minds and bodies are patternings of allness, which itself rests at the edge of the Unconditioned. Patternings arise and pass away, but allness endures and the Unconditioned is eternal. In a sense, reality is God’s skin, a conditioned process within the Unconditioned. I don’t mean to blather at you: I’m just trying offer my own conviction that the eternal ground of our being is conscious loving and free.
Rick Hanson
