The Most Important Practice For Walking A Spiritual Path
- Back From Japan
- Insights Into Practices: Good Friends
- Some Poetry
- My Favorite Quote This week
- What I’m Watching: 2 Films
- 3-Month Practice Period
- Half-day Retreats
Today, giving thanks.
It is poignant to return home, especially after two weeks in Japan: teaching a mindful leader workshop in Tokyo, walking the Kumano Kodo sacred trail, and exploring Nara. Here is a photo from a Zen temple in Nara:
Insights Into Practices: Good Friends
In one of the earliest records of a conversation with the historical Buddha, 2,500 years ago, the Buddha was asked:
“What’s the most important practice for a person walking the spiritual path”?
The Buddha replied “Good friends.”
My belief, perhaps bias, is that we are all walking a spiritual path, whether we acknowledge it or not. We all have to contend with the mystery of birth, change, old age, sickness, and death. All relationships and friendships can be challenging: with families, at work, outside of work. And in important ways, all relationships are spiritual in nature. We swim in a sea of relationships, friendships, and hard to define connections.
Interesting and surprising to think of cultivating and embracing good friends as a practice. Our partners, children, siblings, parents, and friends — all have the potential to be good friends. It means expanding and deepening our usual definitions, assumptions, and importance of friends.
Friends have a way of seeing our pains as well as our possibilities. Friends allow us to see ourselves from several perspectives, with both confidence and vulnerability. Good friends widen our worlds and expand our minds and spirits.
Strange how social media “friends” can be obstacles to actual friends. Developing and nurturing friendships takes some intention and some effort and some time.
My experience is that having good friends enriches my life, in many ways. Having good friends is completely worth the intention, effort, and time.
I’ve always been struck by this dialogue with the historical Buddha — naming good friends as the most important practice.
Practice:
Intention: What is your intention regarding cultivating friendships? What is your vision, hope, dream?
Effort: What actions might you take to close the gap between vision and actuality?
Time: What time do you need to make to cultivate friendships?
Poetry
A few lines from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called Kindness where she says:
“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.”
My Favorite Quote This Week:
“When you do not realize that you are one with the universe, you have fear.
Our life and death are the same thing.
When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in this life.
You will find the true meaning in life….You will discover how meaningless your old interpretation (of life) was, and how much useless effort you had been making.
Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life.”
– From Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki:
What I’m Watching: Two Films
Emilia Perez – a Spanish-language musical film directed by Jacques Audiard. It blends crime, comedy, and musical drama. It tells the story of a Mexican drug lord secretly transitioning into a woman named Emilia Pérez. To start her new life, Emilia fakes her death with the help of a dedicated but wary lawyer. The film explores themes of identity, redemption, and love, highlighting Emilia’s struggles as she distances herself from her family and criminal past. I loved this film. So creative and surprising.
Aftersun – a tender exploration of memory and loss. It follows, an 11-year-old girl, on a summer vacation in the 1990s with her loving but troubled father. I found this film slow, troubling, and beautifully creative and artistic. Not for everyone, but I found it worth staying with it.
(Some mushrooms near my Mill Valley, CA home)
Appreciating Your Life: A 3-Month Zen Practice Period
January 8th – April 2nd, 2025
Online
A 3-month Practice Period is a great way to begin or deepen your mindfulness and meditation practice and cultivate ways for integrating mindfulness practice with your work and all parts of your life.
Online meetings are Wednesday from 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. PT. We will begin each session with 30 minutes of lightly guided meditation, followed by a short talk, as well as small group and large group discussions.
The theme for the Practice Period is Appreciating Your Life. This is the underlying theme of meditation practice and Zen practice – seeing and feeling everything, the good, bad, ugly, beautiful – as gift and an opportunity to learn, grow, and engage. It’s the practice of feeling deeply, opening our hearts and minds, with a mindset of appreciation, and of being of benefit, through our ability to see more clearly, to accept what is, and work effectively with change and for change.
Our focus will be on how Zen practice can be integrated into daily life to help us:
– cultivate greater wellbeing
– navigate change and challenges
– discover more meaning and purpose in work and relationship
Our primary reading for the practice period is Branching Streams Flow In The Darkness, Zen Talks on a poem called the Sandokai, or the Harmony of Difference and Equality. This is an excellent primer on the non-dual teaching is Zen practice and how to apply them to your wellbeing, relationships, work, and social and environmental responsibility.
Being part of a community that meets weekly is a powerful way to find more clarity and connection as we begin a New Year. Each week we will meditate together for 30 minutes. Then, I’ll give a short talk, unpacking ideas and practices from Branch Stream Flow In The Darkness. We will have a variety of small group and large group discussions, to practice and deepen the tools and themes discussed. Each week you will leave with an actionable insight, or a practice, and a suggested reading.
Weekly sessions will be recorded and made available in case you miss any sessions or want to revisit them.
I hope you will join me.
Half Day Retreats
December 8th, In Person and Online, in Mill Valley
January 26th, 2025, In Person and Online, in Mill Valley.
In our world of busyness, of more/faster/better, this half-day retreat offers time to stop, reflect, and renew. We will explore the practices of effort and effortless as a path to well-being and “stepping into your life.” Together we’ll follow a gentle schedule of sitting and walking meditation, a talk, and some discussion.
Anyone looking to begin or deepen a meditation and mindfulness practice is invited to attend. What is meditation? I like a definition proposed by Dogen, the 13th century founder of Zen in Japan: “The practice I speak of is not meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of repose and bliss…It is the manifestation of ultimate reality…Once its heart is grasped, you are like a dragon when he gains the water, like a tiger when she enters the mountains.”
Warm regards
Marc