Dialogue between a little dog named Maya and myself. or Zen Buddhism in a nutshell. Without having an exciting life, I could not understand Maya’s  ongoing happiness, even serenity  so, one morning, I took her for a one-on-one chat and asked her:   “Maya: tells me how can you be so happy and serene all the […]

  Not Knowing: being at ease with not knowing, and why that? Zen is teaching us to let go of our addictive preoccupation with accumulating knowledge, opinion, and judgment. He is asking us to embrace an attitude of “don’t know mind” or “not knowing” This “Not knowing ”does not mean stupidity, laziness, confusion, or rudeness. We […]

   Giving up defining yourself A Zen approach  “ Be yourself. It will help you feel better” said my former teacher Yanguil Sunim.  He met: stop posturing, stop creating a persona that is not you. When we do not play roles which is rare, it means there is no self (ego) in control of our thoughts, […]

  What is Ignorance?   A Zen perspective   Ignorance with desire/attachment/clinging (I want), dislike/hatred (I don’t want) is one of the so-called 3 poisons causing suffering.  There is a difference between ignorance in the common sense of the word and the Zen Buddhist meaning. In the Zen Buddhist the sense of the word, rather than a […]

The figure we know as the Buddha was a real person, Siddhartha Gautama. He lived and he died, as all humans do. He was not a god or born of a god. But his discoveries about how we experience reality are practical, profound, and groundbreaking, and over the ages, people have felt compelled to share […]

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 NOW: The magic of the present moment Try to answer this question. How often your mind is in the present moment where your body is and what it is doing? For example, while you are driving, brushing your teeth, cutting the grass, eating, etc…. The answer:  Almost never. Apart from exceptions such as working, our […]

How many triangles do you see in this picture? Unless you’re being cheeky, you’d probably say five. Now imagine that you take one of the small outer triangles - say, the one on the top - and slide it away from the group. You move that triangle somewhere else: When you did that, what happened […]