Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Every single one of us has someplace in which we feel that tension of external belonging and trying to navigate it. It’s the hallmark of our existence as human beings that our sense of belonging defines us as human beings, and being able to locate that. Now if you add to our maturing adult selves coming into adulthood, the fact that we are going to be pulled in some ways by marking our territory, if you will, as to where it is that we find ourselves belonging that through my spiritual path and I would say even before my… Actually, I would say that this determined my spiritual path.

I realized that I had to have a fundamental belonging that was not predicated on something external, because if that were the case, I would always be in tension with what is going on outside that I actually can’t control. So that if I’m going to have any sense of self-agency, of being able to be in alignment with myself and understand my own truth – not pulled by the external forces, by the waves of outside, by what people say, by the fashion, by the time, by the era, by gender, by the prescriptions of society, the prescriptions of my family, the prescriptions of my church, my culture, faith, all of those things – I had to get to someplace that was going to be essentially my own. And so I have this concept of one’s own belonging, of belonging to oneself first and foremost, and cultivating that as the reference point for discernment about all of the other ways in which we belong.’ (from Sounds True)