Nothing Special

Nothing Special

“…In the end, it doesn’t matter how we feel. It’s not important whether we feel depressed, jittery, scattered, happy. The job of the student is to look, experience, be aware...No circumstance, no feeling, is the point. The point is the opportunity to experience.

We often suppose that we have to dredge up submerged psychological “stuff” and work on it. That’s not quite true...these emotions are not hidden mysteries that suddenly appear. This is just who we are...Practice is not a matter of sitting so that our stuff can come up in order that we can work on it and make ourselves better. The fact is, we’re already fine. It’s not a question of going somewhere...

The only thing that matters is awareness of what’s going on. When we get into ideals and guilt, decisions themselves become difficult, because we don’t see how we’re caught in our worries: “Is it going to benefit me? What will happen? Is it really a good move? Is my life going to be more secure, more wonderful, more perfect? ” Those are the wrong questions. What are the right questions?...at some point, we will know, if we don’t get caught up in the guilt, the ideals, and the perfectionism we usually bring to our decisions. Sitting is about this kind of clarification.

All techniques are useful, and all are limited. Whatever technique we bring into our practice will serve us for a while—until we start not really using it or drifting with it or dreaming. So the important thing with any technique is our intent. We must intend to be present, to be aware, to be practicing. And nobody has that intent all the time. We have it intermittently. We also want to find a teacher who is going to take care of all of this for us; we all want to be saved and taken care of. The intent to practice is the most important thing. There’s no technique that will save us, no teacher who will save us, no center that will save us.

There’s no anything that will save us. That’s the cruelest blow of all. Turning our lives of drama to lives of no drama means turning a life where we’re constantly seeking, analyzing, hoping, and dreaming into one of just experiencing life as it appears, right now. The key factor is awareness, just experiencing the pain as it is. Paradoxically, this is joy. There is no other joy on this earth except this.

This kind of practice has a deadly effect: it will take away our drama. It doesn’t take away our personality. We’re all different, and we will remain different. But the drama is not real. It is the blockage to a functioning, caring life.”

~ Charlotte Joko Beck (1917-2011) received Dharma transmission from Taizan Maezumi Roshi, she opened the Zen Center San Diego in 1983, serving as its head teacher until July 2006.

Nothing Special, is, as Maezumi himself once remarked, very special. In it Joko says, “Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.”