Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Everything can be an offering. Our discomfort. Our self-consciousness. Our nervousness before we speak. Our excitement. Our grief. Not despite these things, but through them. The moment we begin to see our difficulties not as evidence that something is wrong, but as material for practice, something shifts. We become more a part of the world, not less.

Can I suffer this and this and this as an offering? Can I use even my self-protection, my self-importance, my stories about how I’m perceived, and allow them to burn?

My self-importance is sticky. I work with it constantly. My certainty is sticky, too. My grievances, my image of how I’d like to be seen. These are what the tradition calls klesha, the poisons. And it is genuinely excruciating sometimes to let them burn through. This burning is the most important place of practice for me.

Zen is hard, partly because when the practice is actually working, we will run directly into all of this gunk. The sangha will show it to us. Our teacher will show it to us. Life will show it to us, relentlessly.

Most people leave at this point. I understand that. We live in a culture that prefers comfort and confirmation. But the practice was never designed to please our small self. It was designed to liberate us from it.’ (from Slow Down. Help Out. Wake Up.)