Munky MindOne part of the Eightfold path described by Buddha is Right Intention, also called Right Resolve. Or at least those are two English translations of the original terms. My understanding of Right Intention is that it is about having the intention of letting go of things rather than grasping for the things we desire in…
The whole Earth is medicine. – Yunmen Wenyan I am sick, for the second time, with COVID. I’ve been isolating at home for the last few days, mostly napping and watching too much television. I’ve not had the energy to do much more than that. I don’t think I even had the mental energy to…
“A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.” Dogen Zenji, Founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan Thinking about attachment and nonattachment. We get attached to the things we want, and we feel aversion to the things we don’t want. We most definitely…
AI didn’t write this post, but you can’t really know that for sure. That’s the sad thing. I could’ve just asked ChatGPT to write a post that sounds like this, about this topic, and then maybe tweak a bit to add in my own language. I didn’t, but you don’t know. Pandora’s box has once…
There’s nothing new under the sun, even this sentence. Which is precisely why I’m alright with choosing it. I’m sitting down to write this post after having come to this virtual page without a plan for what I’ll write about. Yesterday, however, I drew the kettle that’s the featured image of this post, which led…
Thinking about identity, how we get wrapped up in our ideas about who we are, so much that we don’t always actually see who we really are. As a Zen Buddhist, the concept of self is always very interesting to me. We study the Buddha way to study the self. In studying the self, we…
I’ve found myself thinking a lot about how I continue to get in the way of my own goals, and most of the time it’s just due to my own insecurities. My self-doubt’s a constant companion. The other day I was on the highway heading toward Fresno when I started feeling a sense of general…
I went to sit. After a little over 3 years of Zen practice being a major part of my life, I was invited by my teacher, Rev. Ōshin Jennings, founder and guiding teacher of No Barriers Zen, to attend part or all of the Rohatsu Sesshin at Jikoji Zen Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains…
This morning I was reading one of the stack of books that I’m reading at the same time (I can’t seem to keep my attention on just one book at a time these days), a book called Going To Pieces Without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein. I came across a sentence that hit me as…
