Being Satisfied With What Is

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ej4LwHp2e8JfovYuyAMvC?si=CQ15rLbGRmK-sIlKw61gzg

I desperately needed this talk from my zen teacher, Sensei Kōshin Paley Ellison. I was fortunate enough to have been at the NYZCCC while he delivered this message, and I searched it up on Spotify (where all the Zen Care podcasts can be found) while wrestling with (and losing) to a certain theme of afflictive thoughts and stories. It’s amazing how I can know the medicinal solution that’s needed but at the same time completely forget. That’s what human beings do. We move away from wisdom yet are designed to return, remember, and refresh. My teachers and zen community are some of the ways I get back on track.

The story I’m currently tangled in is a very old one. I find that the older the story, the stronger a hold it has on me. The brain reaches for the familiar no matter how shitty something feels. And so my brain, on this particular Sunday, after I spent a whole morning practicing at the zen center, is replaying a narrative that I know well, one I’m pretty sick of carrying around but that clearly still needs tending to. That’s ok, it takes lots of time and practice to begin to untangle these tightly knotted wounds of the past. Which is why this dharma talk will likely be played an infinite amount of times. Wisdom has no expiration date. Santosha is the yogic limb of contentment, and cultivating the heart quality of such is one of the paths to freedom. The heart has an innate ability to plant and nourish seeds of deep contentment which leads us to a deeper intimacy with each moment to moment experience. I know all this and yet I’ve been kinda going crazy with a certain situation. Fall, get up, fall, get up; such is life. Knowing that I have supportive reminders for how to put down the heavy stories is in itself a great comfort. I’ve been working with using my stuff as compost, taking the very thing weighing on me and using it to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Cultivating deep satisfaction is like building up spiritual muscle. It’s going to an emotional gym. We need the weight of the challenge to make us stronger, otherwise there’d be nothing to practice with. And I have much to be satisfied with in any given moment, so it’s a damn shame when I overlook the blessings that are right in front of me.

What am I focused on? How am I framing the situation at hand? How can I refocus and reframe to snap myself out of it? I hope you find this talk as helpful as I did. When the poison becomes the medicine, a central Buddhist idea, this is when true transformation occurs and we taste liberation.