Quotes from Charlotte Joko Beck

I struggle with my life because instead of just doing what needs to be done, I fight the underlying fear; I try to unlock the door. Paradoxically, the only way to unlock the door is to forget the door. Instead of obsessing about the locked door, we need to be going about our lives, which means cleaning up the house, taking care of the baby, going to work, whatever.

That's essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.

But if other people are irritable, we may divorce their behavior from their experiencing. We can't feel their experience; and so we judge their behavior. If we think, "She shouldn't be so arrogant," we only see her behavior and judge it, because we have no awareness of what is true for her

When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.

Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.

There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer. That's false suffering.

The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.

Shakespeare's Polonius said, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.

At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see.

So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we're being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we're receiving something that's making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.

Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there's no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.

Practice is not a trimming on your life. Practice is the foundation. If that's not there nothing else will be there.

Take the experience of having been hurt. When we've been criticized or treated unfairly, it's important to note the thoughts we have and move into the cellular level of being hurt, so that our awareness becomes simply raw sensation: our trembling jaw, the contraction in our chest, whatever we may be feeling in the cells of our body. This pure experiencing is zazen.

Our thoughts are not to be relied on. They just come and go. Are they important? No, they're not important. But until we know our thoughts a little bit, we believe them.

It's the play of our minds, of conceptualization about anything that happens to us, that is the problem. There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer.

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are.

On the withered tree, a flower blooms.

Changing the pictures on the wall from greed, anger, and ignorance into ideals (that we should not be greedy, angry, or ignorant) improves the decoration, perhaps—but leaves us without freedom.

Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself.

If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won't be threatened.