Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I have something of an allergy to the word spiritual for various reasons, and I never think of mindfulness as religious. The interesting thing about the Buddhist tradition is that there is no God (although there are many deities, but that is another story), making it different from God-based religions. It’s more akin to a scientific inquiry, an investigation. That’s what meditation is. You investigate the nature of your own mind directly, tapping into our capacity to take up residency, so to speak, in awareness itself.  

We are all born with this capacity for holding and recognizing experience, namely awareness itself. Over the decades, I’ve come to see awareness itself as a kind of superpower, one that everyone already possesses by virtue of being born a human being. So, meditation is not a matter of acquiring anything or having a “special” experience. Rather, it is simply recognizing that any and every experience—good, bad, or ugly, pleasant, unpleasant, or neither—is already special, and waking up to that way of seeing and being involves accessing a dimension of being that we all already have, rather than acquiring anything new that we are missing.’ (from Lion’s Roar)