Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Right effort can seem to make a lot of sense. In right effort I know what to do: “I’m going to get rid of this bad stuff in my mind and make some more good stuff.” It’s a pretty conventional way of being picking and choosing what we want and don’t. This isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just really limited.

Right mindfulness and right concentration allow us to taste and see the endlessly growing, vastly nuanced, incomprehensibly interdependent garden that were usually missing because we’re trying to narrow it down into something we can figure out and arrange according to our own personal tastes. So we let right effort be the small part of our practice – we let trying to control the mind be a small part of our practice and let being mindful of the mind that is here be a big part.’ (Inside the Grass Hut)