28 Quotes by Charlotte Joko Beck

When we’re engaged in pure activity, we’re a presence, an awareness. But that’s all we are. And that doesn’t feel like anything. People feel that the so-called enlightened state is flooded with emotional and loving feelings. But true love or compassion is simply to be nonseparate from the object. Essentially, it’s a flow of activity in which we do not exist as a being separate from our activity.

...we're constantly waking up to what we're about, what we're really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that's painful. But there's no possibility of freedom without this pain.

Zazen is actually not complicated. The real problem is, we don’ t want to do it. If my boyfriend begins to look at other women, how long am I going to be willing simply to experience that? We all have problems constantly, but our willingness just to be is very low on our list of priorities, until we have practiced long enough to have faith in just being, so that solutions can appear naturally. Another mark of a maturing practice is the development of such trust and faith.

When we discover Zen practice, we may hold out a hope that it is going to solve our problems and make our life perfect. But Zen practice simply returns us to life as it is. Being our lives more and more is what Zen practice is about. Our lives are simply what they are, and Zen helps us to recognize that fact. The thought "If I do this practice patiently enough, everything will be different" is simply another belief system, another version of the promise that is never kept.

103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.

In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.

We enter a discipline like Zen practice so that we can learn to live in a sane way.

Daily sitting is our bread and butter, the basic stuff of dharma. Without it we tend to be confused.

When we’re lost in thought, when we’re dreaming, what have we lost? We’ve lost reality. Our life has escaped us.