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Active Awareness: Interested In Everything
Read time 5 minutes. Zen in not disinterested. Disinterest numbs. Active Awareness sharpens. Last week, while looking at acceptance, we discovered how easy it is to slip into subtle bias. We may force a kind of enthusiasm that isn’t really there, and when we can’t maintain it, frustration follows. Neutrality offers relief—but if we swing…
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Acceptance As Awareness: Goldilocks Gets It Just Right
Read time 4 Minutes. Acceptance reframed as awareness. In the ongoing effort to simplify the teachings, acceptance seems—at first glance—like the simplest lesson of all. Familiar, gentle, obvious. Yet if taken too literally, acceptance can lead to confusion or frustration. I know it did for me in the early stages of practice. So let’s revisit…
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Spontaneous Mind: The Paradox Of An Actively Passive Existence
Read time 4 minutes. Spontaneous Mind is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. Former pro quarterback Hugh Millen once told a story about John Elway, who gave him a deceptively simple piece of advice: “You don’t want to be thinking out there. You just want to be reacting.” At the highest level of the…
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Unknowing Into The Peace of No-mind: Who Knows?
Read time 7 minutes. Unknowing is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. We have been winding our way through the endless dualities that rise up in Zen thought and practice. Each step reveals how overlapping, how intertwined, these ideas actually are. Such is the case with today’s topic: no-mind. I like to think of…
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Wu Wei: Self-reliance As Radical Liberation
Read time 6 minutes. Wu Wei is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. Wu wei is one of Taoism’s most vital and misunderstood concepts. Often translated as non-action or effortless action, it can sound like passivity. But that’s not it. Wu wei is not about avoiding action—it is about action so attuned to Tao that effort disappears.…
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Unconditional Trust: A Leaping Embrace Into Uncertainty
Read time 6 minutes. Unconditional Trust is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. Today we turn again to paradox. Specifically, the paradox of being and becoming, and how this dance reveals the deeper presence of trust. In doing so, we must also recall the earlier lesson of simplicity and complexity—because unconditional trust, like…
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Koan Practice: Self-discovery And The Virtue of The Unknown
Read time 6 minutes. Koan Practice is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. We’ve been exploring the role paradox plays in cultivating a stable Zen mindset. Each paradox nudges us out of conventional thinking and into a new way of being. Today, let’s pause and step back. What is paradox, truly, in practice?…
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Impermanence and the Paradox of Being/Becoming
Read time 5 minutes. Impermanence is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. In our last lesson, we explored the paradox of everything and nothing, of absence and presence. Today we turn to another paradox: presence itself—not as the presence or absence of a thing, but as it relates to time, to this fleeting…
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Everything and Nothing: The Paradox of Empty, Pure Potentiality
Read time 5 minutes. Everything and Nothing is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox. Let’s continue to dissect paradox in its many forms. Today: the paradox of everything and nothing. Nothingness holds the potential for everything. Yet if we fixate on that potential, we’re still lost in illusion. The two are aspects of…