The Path is Personal and Intimate

It is essential at the beginning of practice to acknowledge that the path is personal and intimate. It is no good to examine it from a distance as if it were someone else’s. You must walk it for yourself. In this spirit, you invest yourself in your practice, confident of your heritage, and train earnestly side by side with your sisters and brothers. It is this engagement that brings peace and realization.

- Robert Aitken Roshi, "The Teacher in Everything"

Received as Daily Dharma from Tricycle.com on the 12th of June 2011

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I think Robert Aitken Roshi makes an important point here: "It is this engagement that brings peace and realization." Not some amazing 'spiritual experience', not meditating for hours on end, not cracking a particular Koan, not receiving a nice pat on the head from the teacher, not taking vows, not becoming a monastic... although of course all these things will bring about their own results.

It is the genuine hard work and engagement with something that has deep personal meaning that brings peace and realization.

Being Peace

Excerpt: If You Can't Smile, You Can't Help Others Smile

In the peace movement there is a lot of anger, frustration, and misunderstanding. The peace movement can write very good protest letters, but they are not yet able to write a love letter. We need to learn to write a letter to the congress or to the President... that they will want to read, and not just throw away. The way you speak, the kind of understanding, the kind of language you use would not turn people off. The President is a person like any of us.

Can the peace movement talk in loving speech, showing the way for peace? I think that will depend on whether the people in the peace movement can be peace. Because without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.

I hope we can bring a new dimension to the peace movement. The peace movement is filled with anger and hatred. It cannot fulfill the path we expect from them. A fresh way of being peace, of doing peace is needed. That is why it is so important for us to practice meditation, to acquire the capacity to look, to see, and to understand. It would be wonderful if we could bring to the peace movement our contribution, our way of looking at things, that will diminish aggression and hatred. Peace work means, first of all, being peace. Meditation is meditation for all of us. We rely on each other. Our children are relying on us in order for them to have a future.

Being Peace (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Quoted here.