“Separate yourself from disturbance and face whatever appears before you.”
Sometimes our being is described as like a mirror.
There are several conditions that a mirror can be in. A dirty mirror might reflect what’s in front of it in a distorted way. A broken mirror might be even worse.
But a mirror that is clear and clean is going to give you an accurate representation of whatever you put in front of it.
We often see the world in distorted ways. We’re like a dirty mirror. We don’t see things clearly, rather we see everything through the filter of that dirt. We might feel like a cracked or broken mirror if we’ve had some particularly awful traumas in our lives.
We come into every situation carrying disturbances with us. Sometimes that’s okay. If you’ve been struck by lightning it certainly makes sense to be wary of all storms.
But other times it gets in our way.
We’ve all been kicked in the heart and a bad relationship can haunt us forever, making it hard to let people get close to us, making it hard to trust and have an open heart.
Or in the workplace, if you’ve ever had a boss that you really trusted who let you down…well, you know what I’m talking about. That’ll make you look sideways a little at all employers for a while.
And a lot of the time we project our own things onto others. If we feel really guilty about some aspect of ourselves, selfishness for example, it’s really easy to project that on others and see everyone as selfish. Or look for any little clue that might make that argument.
So, with our practice, what we’re trying to is train our minds, so we can learn to see things as they really are. We may not be able to clean the mirror, really. But what we can do is remind ourselves that it’s dirty. In itself, that is a kind of success.
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*quotes are taken from “Cultivating the Empty Field, The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi” by Taigen Dan Leighton, which you can get here:
Cultivating the Empty Field | amazon
Daniel Scharpenburg
Daniel lives in Kansas City. He leads public meditation events through Fountain City Meditation. Daniel is an ordained Zen teacher in the Order of Hsu Yun and he regularly teaches at the Open Heart Project. Daniel is also a co-owner of the website The Tattooed Buddha
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UPCOMING EVENTS
4/6/19: 10am-11am
Fountain City Meditation: Meditation Gathering KC
Nelson Atkins Museum Lawn
4525 Oak St.
Kansas City, MO
This is a public event. I’m going to give a short talk and a bit of guidance, then we will sit together. Tell all your friends.
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