Category Tricycle’s Daily Dharma

Practice is never a straight line to a fixed goal. It is always a mixture of moments of confusion and moments of clarity, periods of discouragement and periods of aspiration, times of feeling like a failure and times of going…

Some People think of Zen practice as a kind of therapy. That’s not completely mistaken, of course. Yamada Koun Roshi used to say that the practice of Zen is to forget the self in the act of uniting with something—Mu,…

For a few moments just feel the body’s warmth and strength, its ability to hold itself upright. The vitality and aliveness that you experience in your body require various chemical and mineral substances, a continuous supply of oxygen, the energy…

Simply see the natural phenomena of physical and mental events as they arise and pass away. They’re not you. They’re not really yours. You don’t have any real control over them. —Upasika Kee Nanayon, “Tough Teachings to Ease the Mind”

You can’t go preventing pleasure and pain, you can’t keep the mind from labeling things and forming thoughts, but you can put these things to a new use. If the mind labels a pain, saying, ‘I hurt,’ you have to…

We have the habit of always looking outside ourselves, thinking we can get wisdom and compassion from another person or the Buddha or his teachings (Dharma) or our community (Sangha). But you are the Buddha, you are the Dharma, you…

When the Buddha confronted the question of identity on the night of his enlightenment, he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as separate beings. He saw into the human tendency to identify with a limited sense…

The desire to know something is wisdom at work. Being mindful is not difficult. But it’s difficult to be continuously aware. For that you need right effort. But it does not require a great deal of energy. It’s relaxed perseverance…

The wildness of mind that we experience when we sit quietly noticing our body and breathing for five minutes is the result of everything we’ve been doing before those five minutes. – Gaylon Ferguson, “Fruitless Labor”

Handling our suffering is an art. If we know how to suffer, we suffer much less, and we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering inside. —Thich Nhat Hanh, “Why We Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Suffering”