Chozen Bays Quotes

Kind words are a gift. They create wealth in the heart.

When you are unhappy, discover what you are clinging to and let it go.

Resting in this moment, we have no age.

Anxiety is the subtle and pervasive destroyer of our happiness. It depends on thoughts of past and future. It cannot exist in the present.

The inner critic doesn’t exist in the present moment. It depends on endless rumination over the past. We wouldn’t rent the same bad movie 250 times, but we do that in our own mind. —JAN CHOZEN BAYS, PHYSICIAN, ZEN PRIEST, AND CO-ABBOT OF GREAT VOW ZEN MONASTERY

Words: First practice leaving no traces. Then practice leaving things better than you found them.

Según las enseñanzas Zen, cada vez que comemos ingerimos la energía vital de incontables seres. La comida en nuestro plato es producto del sol, la tierra, la lluvia, los insectos que polinizaron las plantas y de muchas personas, como labradores, camioneros y tenderos.

It is common for healthcare professionals to be able to maintain a demanding work schedule, coping well with frequent medical emergencies and tragedies—until something falls apart in their personal lives.

A few years ago a corrective report announced that people had misinterpreted the first report. Humans needed a total of sixty-four ounces of liquid a day, but they did not have to drink that amount from a glass. It actually all could come from food. And coffee and tea counted. Studies showed that these caffeinated beverages didn’t deplete the body’s liquids after all. Why, in the midst of this epidemic of grown-ups toting and constantly nursing from water bottles decorated with various company logos, has no one asked how our mothers and fathers and our grandparents, and the entire human race for tens of thousands of years before, escaped mass annihilation by dehydration because high-impact polycarbonate plastic bottles filled with “spring water” hadn’t been invented yet? Our modern minds believed what putative “science” and old wives’ tales in magazines told us and overrode the wisdom of our bodies. WHEN

ritual del oryoki.

Cuando miramos de verdad, todo lo que vemos se torna hermoso: las grietas en la acera, una planta muerta, las arrugadas manos de una anciana. Los navajos advierten a su pueblo: «Caminad por la belleza». Cuando nuestra mirada está atenta, todo es hermosura y todo el mundo camina por la belleza.

¿Por qué, en medio de esa epidemia de adultos acarreando y constantemente mamando de botellas de agua decoradas con distintos logotipos empresariales, no se ha preguntado nadie cómo ha sido posible que nuestras madres y padres, y nuestros abuelos, y toda la raza humana a lo largo de decenas de miles de años, se hayan salvado de la aniquilación masiva por deshidratación porque no se habían inventado todavía botellas de agua de plástico policarbonatado llenas de “agua mineral”? Nuestras mentes modernas creen en lo que nos cuenta la “ciencia” putativa y otras historias de viejas en las revistas, erosionando la sabiduría de nuestros cuerpos.

So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do. Jack Kornfield: A similar diagnostic process is needed both in meditation teaching and in insight therapy. When people come in to see a teacher, they present specific and unique difficulties, traumas, problems with circumstances in their life, or struggles with their mind and personality. Skillful teaching requires a subtle evaluative process to sense what particular intervention out of the many practices will be most helpful to a given individual. For example, for people with powerful self-critical and judgmental thoughts, a necessary part of meditation instruction will be teaching them how to work with these thoughts. If we don’t attend to this problem, they can do all kinds of other practices, but those self-critical patterns will keep repeating, “You’re not doing it right,” and as a consequence, the other practices they are engaging in may be quite ineffective. Jan Chozen Bays: I want to suggest that we study an intervention that I call media fasting. As I said, we’re not designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world.

way agave syrup went from a miracle sweetener to a dangerous substance.

it is all too easy for us in this postindustrial era to take eating so for granted that we engage in it with huge unawareness, and also freight it (all puns intended) with complicated psychological and emotional issues that obscure and sometimes seriously distort a simple, basic, and miraculous aspect of our lives.