Charlotte Joko Beck Quotes

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Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.
Charlotte Joko Beck
It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!
Charlotte Joko Beck
My dog doesn’t worry about the meaning of life.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
If we can accept things just the way they are, we’re not going to be greatly upset by anything.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Religion really means to rejoin that which seems to be separate.
Charlotte Joko Beck
The best way to let go is to notice the thoughts as they come up and to acknowledge them.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
When we’re lost in thought, when we’re dreaming, what have we lost? We’ve lost reality. Our life has escaped us.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
Charlotte Joko Beck
...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.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
We have a fictional “I” that we try to love and protect. We spend most of our life playing this futile game. “What will happen? How will it go? Will I get something out of it?” I, I, I—it’s a mind game of illusion, and we are lost in it.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
If we have the patience to wait until the mud (our mind) settles and the water is clear, if we remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself, the right words will arise, without our thinking about them.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Daily sitting is our bread and butter, the basic stuff of dharma. Without it we tend to be confused.
Charlotte Joko Beck
We all have to practice, and we have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
Anxiety is always a gap between the way things are and the way we think they ought to be. Anxiety is something that stretches between the real and unreal. Our human desire is to avoid what's real and instead to be with our ideas about the world: "I'm terrible." "You're terrible." "You're wonderful." The idea is separated from reality and anxiety is the gap between the idea and the reality that things are just as they are. When we cease to believe in the object that we've created -- which is off to one side of reality, so to speak -- things snap back to the center. That's what being centered means. The anxiety then fades out.
Charlotte Joko Beck
If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as “I’m a good person for doing this” or “Isn’t it wonderful, that I can take care of everything?,” then that would be sufficient.
Charlotte Joko Beck
We enter a discipline like Zen practice so that we can learn to live in a sane way.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Human beings are basically good, kind, and compassionate, but it takes hard digging to uncover that buried jewel.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
Joy is being the circumstances of our life just as they are.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
That’s essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Charlotte Joko Beck, Zen teacher and author, teaches that the “secret” of spiritual life is the capacity to “… return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment—even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.” Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises. Like awakening from a dream, in the moment of pausing our trance recedes and Radical Acceptance becomes possible.
Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha)
When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.
Charlotte Joko Beck
The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
Shakespeare’s Polonius said, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
I struggle with my life because instead of just doing what needs to be done, I fight the underlying fear; I try to unlock the door. Paradoxically, the only way to unlock the door is to forget the door. Instead of obsessing about the locked door, we need to be going about our lives, which means cleaning up the house, taking care of the baby, going to work, whatever.
Charlotte Joko Beck
But if other people are irritable, we may divorce their behavior from their experiencing. We can’t feel their experience; and so we judge their behavior. If we think, “She shouldn’t be so arrogant,” we only see her behavior and judge it, because we have no awareness of what is true for her
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
There’s nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer. That’s false suffering.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
But sitting is not something that we do for a year or two with the idea of mastering it. Sitting is something we do for a lifetime. There is no end to the opening up that is possible for a human being. Eventually we see that we are the limitless, boundless ground of the universe. Our job for the rest of our life is to open up into that immensity and to express it. Having more and more contact with this reality always brings compassion for others and changes our daily life. We live differently, work differently, relate to people differently. Zen is a lifelong study. It isn’t just sitting on a cushion for thirty or forty minutes a day. Our whole life becomes practice, twenty-four hours a day.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
We have all spent many years building up a conditioned view of life. There is “me” and there is this “thing” out there that is either hurting me or pleasing me. We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other. Without exception, we all do this. We remain separate from our life, looking at it, analyzing it, judging it, seeking to answer the questions, “What am I going to get out of it? Is it going to give me pleasure or comfort or should I run away from it?” We do this from morning until night. We have to see through the mirage that there is an “I” separate from “that.” Our practice is to close the gap. Only in that instant when we and the object become one can we see what our life is.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we’re able to see.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.
Charlotte Joko Beck
In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Practice is not a trimming on your life. Practice is the foundation. If that’s not there nothing else will be there.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
Work is just taking care of what needs to be done right now, but very few of us work that way.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
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.
Charlotte Joko Beck
There are two kinds of thoughts. There is nothing wrong with thinking in the sense of what I call “technical thinking.” We have to think in order to walk from here to the corner or to bake a cake or to solve a physics problem. That use of the mind is fine. It isn’t real or unreal; it is just what it is. But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality. And we go from birth to death, unless we wake up, wasting most of our life with them.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we’re being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we’re receiving something that’s making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there’s no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.
Charlotte Joko Beck
In this book, you will find one of her favorite quotes, “Rest on that icy couch.” She explained this practice as resting bodily in the physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions. If you return to that icy couch, hour after hour, day after day, it becomes a gateway to freedom and contentment with whatever life brings forward.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice)
Suppose I feel I have no friends, and I’m very lonely. What happens if I sit with that? I begin to see that my feelings of loneliness are really just thoughts. As a matter of fact, I’m simply sitting here. Maybe I’m sitting alone in my room, without a date. Nobody has called me, and I feel lonely. In fact, however, I’m simply sitting. The loneliness and the misery are simply my thoughts, my judgments that things should be other than what they are. I haven’t seen through them; I haven’t recognized that my misery is manufactured by me. The truth of the matter is, I’m simply sitting in my room. It takes time before we can see that just to sit there is okay, just fine. I cling to the thought that if I don’t have pleasant and supportive company, I am miserable.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Sitting is essentially a simplified space. Our daily life is in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense what we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance—which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is—to face ourselves.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
We’re like the earnest fish that spent its lifetime swimming from teacher to teacher. The fish wanted to know what the ocean was. And some teachers told him, “Well, you have to try very hard to be a good fish. This is a tremendous area that you’re investigating. And you have to meditate for long hours, and you have to punish yourself and you have to really really try to be a good fish.” But the fish at last came to one teacher and asked, “What’s the great ocean? What’s the great ocean?” And the teacher simply laughed.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
All these are versions of the god we actually worship. It is the god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness. Without exception, every being on earth pursues it to some degree. As we pursue it, we lose touch with what really is. As we lose touch, our life spirals downwards. And the very unpleasantness that we sought to avoid can overwhelm us. This has been the problem of human life since the beginning of time. All philosophies and all religions are varying attempts to deal with this basic fear. Only when such attempts fail us are we ready to begin serious practice.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Finding Wonder – Loving What Is and What Isn’t Practice isn’t simply being integrated or being healthy or being a good person, though all of these things are part of practice. Practice is about the wonder. If you want to check your own practice, the next time something comes up in your life that you can’t stand, ask yourself, “where’s the wonder here?” That’s what increases as we practice. We gain the ability to see the wonder of life no matter what it is and regardless of whether we like it or don’t like it. For example when we approach a relationship in this way, we can say, “I love you for what you are and I love you for what you are not.” Instead of faultfinding, “ You talk too much. You never talk. You leave your clothes everywhere. You never clean off the kitchen counter. You pick on me all the time” - when you say, “I love you for what you are and I love you for what you are not” the wonder shines through.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Posted 7/17/18 The Breath – Let the Breath be the Boss When we begin sitting, it’s good to begin with several big breaths, filling up the abdominal area,, the middle chest, and the upper chest until we’re full of air, and then just letting it out and holding the exhalation for a moment. Do this three or four times. In a sense, it’s artificial, but it helps to create a certain balance and forms a good basis for sitting. Once we’ve done this, the next step is to forget it: forget controlling our breath. We won’t entirely forget, of course, but it’s useless to control the breath. Instead, just experience it, which is very different. We’re not trying to make the breath long, slow, and even, as many books suggest. Instead, what we want is to let the breath be the boss, so that the breath is breathing us. If the breath is shallow, let it be that. As we become our breathing, the breath of its own accord starts to slow down. The breath stays shallow because we want to think rather than experience our lives. When we do this everything becomes more shallow and controlled.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
we maintain awareness, whether we know it or not, healing is taking place… a door that has been shut begins to open…. As the door opens, we see that the present is absolute and that, in a sense, the whole universe begins right now, in each second. And the healing of life is in that second of simple awareness…. Healing is always just being here, with a simple mind. ‌—‌Charlotte Joko Beck
Joan Tollifson (Nothing to Grasp)
The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure. Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are.
Charlotte Joko Beck
On the withered tree, a flower blooms.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us. Charlotte Joko Beck
Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha)
Take the experience of having been hurt. When we’ve been criticized or treated unfairly, it’s important to note the thoughts we have and move into the cellular level of being hurt, so that our awareness becomes simply raw sensation: our trembling jaw, the contraction in our chest, whatever we may be feeling in the cells of our body. This pure experiencing is zazen.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
In practice, we work with the complex of physical sensation and thought that is “I feel hurt.” If we totally experience the sensations and thought, then the “feeling hurt” evaporates. I never would say that we shouldn’t feel what we feel.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
Our thoughts are not to be relied on. They just come and go. Are they important? No, they’re not important. But until we know our thoughts a little bit, we believe them.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice)
For the psychologically mature person, the ills and injustices of life are handled by counteraggression, in which one makes an effort to eliminate the injustice and create justice. Often such efforts are dictatorial, full of anger and self-righteousness.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion. Not me against you, not me straightening out the present ill, fighting to gain a just result for myself and others, but compassion, a life that goes against nothing and fulfills everything.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
All these are versions of the god we actually worship. It is the god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
Even after much sitting, when we become angry we have an impulse to attack another. We look for ways to punish others for what they have done. Such activity is not experiencing our anger, but avoiding it through drama.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
Changing the pictures on the wall from greed, anger, and ignorance into ideals (that we should not be greedy, angry, or ignorant) improves the decoration, perhaps—but leaves us without freedom.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen)
She felt that five days of sitting still, silent, and experiencing everything that was happening in body and mind, internally and externally, would gradually open a person’s awareness of their core belief.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice)
Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won’t be threatened.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
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.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Practice is about moving from the first to the second viewpoint. There is a pitfall inherent in practice, however: if we practice well, many of the demands of the first viewpoint may be satisfied. We are likely to feel better, to be more comfortable. We may feel more at ease with ourselves. Because we're not punishing our bodies with as much tension, we tend to be healthier. These changes can confirm in us the misconception that the first viewpoint is correct: that practice is about making life better for ourselves. In fact, the benefits to ourselves are incidental. The real point of practice is to serve life as fully and fruitfully as we can. And that's very hard for us to understand: "You mean that I should take care of someone who has just been cruel to me? That's crazy!" "You mean that I have to give up my own convenience to serve someone who doesn't even like me?
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
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.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
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.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
When students come in to see me, I hear complaint after complaint: about the schedule of the retreat, about the food, about the service, about me, on and on. But the issues that people bring to me are no more relevant or important than a “trivial” event such as stubbing a toe. How do we place our cushions? How do we brush our teeth? How do we sweep the floor, or slice a carrot? We think we’re here to deal with “more important” issues, such as our problems with our partner, our jobs, our health, and the like. We don’t want to bother with the “little” things, like how we hold our chopsticks, or where we place our spoon. Yet these acts are the stuff of our life, moment to moment. It’s not a question of importance, it’s a question of paying attention, being aware. Why? Because every moment in life is absolute in itself. That’s all there is. There is nothing other than this present moment; there is no past, there is no future; there is nothing but this. So when we don’t pay attention to each little this, we miss the whole thing. And the contents of this can be anything. This can be straightening our sitting mats, chopping an onion, visiting someone we don’t want to visit. It doesn’t matter what the contents of the moment are; each moment is absolute. That’s all there is, and all there ever will be. If we could totally pay attention, we would never be upset. If we’re upset, it’s axiomatic that we’re not paying attention. If we miss not just one moment, but one moment after another, we’re in trouble.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
Very early we all begin our attempt to protect ourselves against the threatening occurrences that pop up regularly. In the fear caused by them, we begin to contract. And the open, spacious character of our young life feels pushed through a funnel into a bottleneck of fear. Once we begin to use language the rapidity of this contracting increases. And particularly as our intelligence grows, the process becomes really speedy: now we not only try to handle the threat by storing it in every cell of our body, but (using memory) we relate each new threat to all of the previous ones—and so the process compounds itself.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or what ever, the next teacher is going to pop right up. —CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK
Pema Chödrön (The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times)
Peaceful Dwelling In the service we do, one of the dedications states, “Unceasing change turns the wheel of life.” Experiencing, Experiencing, Experiencing, change, change, change. “Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all its many forms. Peaceful dwelling as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings, and brings them to great joy.” Peaceful dwelling as change itself means feeling the throbbing pain in my legs, hearing the sound of a car: just experiencing, experiencing, experiencing. Just dwelling with experience itself. Even the pain is changing minutely, second by second by second. “Peaceful dwelling as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings, and brings them to great joy.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special)
A few weeks ago someone gave me an interesting article on suffering, and the first part of it was about the meaning of the word—“suffering.” I’m interested in these meanings; they are teachings in themselves. The writer of this article pointed out that the word “suffering” is used to express many things. The second part, “fer,” is from the Latin verb ferre meaning “to bear.” And the first part, “suf,” is from sub, meaning “under.” So there’s a feeling in the word “to be under,” “to bear under,” “to totally be under”—“to be supporting something from underneath.” Now, in contrast, the words “affliction,” “grief,” and “depression” all bring images of weight; of something bearing down upon us. In fact the word “grief” is again from the Latin gravare, which means “press down.” So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we’re being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we’re receiving something that’s making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
It's the play of our minds, of conceptualization about anything that happens to us, that is the problem. There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
This in turn would begin to untangle the tangle of thoughts and emotions that lay at the heart of the suffering of the person’s “false, self-centered life,” a life that she called the “consolation prize.” She was clear that this process was not easy—was often painful—but led ultimately to complete transformation.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice)
Compassion may be the end result of practice. Nobody is always compassionate, but if our practice is real, we’ll become more compassionate. We become more aware of others as persons, not simply as things to be controlled or manipulated or fixed, but as centers of real awareness. That capacity grows with practice.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
When we’re caught in our thoughts, we won’t be compassionate. So all of practice is to investigate the self-centered dream which we like so well. If we’re not caught in that, we’ll be compassionate.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
we do what human beings spend all their time doing, which is a complete waste of time: we try mentally to scheme so that we will never have to suffer through a crisis.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
Sooner or later we realize that the truth of life is the second we are living, no matter whether that second is at the ninth floor or the first. In a sense, our life has no duration whatsoever: we’re always living the same second. There’s nothing but that second, the timeless present moment.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Nothing Special: Living Zen)
The film showed the work she had done that had enabled her to care for him as he was. Some people are not easy. We don’t want to care for people as they are. We want to care for them after they’ve made a few changes. You know, just a few. Then we might consider it.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice)
There is a film called Dead Man Walking about a Catholic nun who’s working with a man on death row. At the end of the film, someone says to her, “I wish I had your faith.” And she says, “It’s not faith really; it’s work.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice)
problem. The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure. Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
If you are new to practice it's important to realize that simply to sit on that cushion for fifteen minutes is a victory. Just to sit with that much composure, just to be there, is fine.
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
It’s the very last thing, isn’t it, we feel grateful for: having happened. You know, you needn’t have happened. You needn’t have happened. But you did happen. —DOUGLAS HARDING What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. —CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
I recommend Charlotte Joko Beck’s bracing collection Nothing Special: Living Zen. Joan Tollifson approaches the topic from a more eclectic perspective in her wonderfully titled Death: The End of Self-Improvement, while Kelly Kapic investigates its relevance for Christians in You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News. (Jordan Raynor’s Redeeming Your Time is another Christian book, full of finitude-embracing productivity tips that don’t depend on any particular religious belief.)
Oliver Burkeman (Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts)