Delaware Center for Mindfulness

I can speak to this from my own experiences. That practice is not outside of this very moment. 

For a long time, I had thought realization was somewhere up ahead of me.

I've been on this path for decades now — not always steadily, but persistently. There were years I spent looking for the right teacher, the right lineage, the right transmission, the right kind of practice. I wanted something that would finally say *yes, this is real, you have arrived, you may now teach.* And, I did teach. I was a Sr. Dharma Teacher. I was an Abbot of a Zen Center. I received teacher certification in MBSR and MBCT and became a teacher-trainer. I still consider that I am a Dharma Teacher and I am a Zen Priest. But many doors were passed through during all of these years of practice. One might see this as chasing recognition. But, the kind of recognition that was being sought was not to satisfy ego but to establish a resonsible and ethical teaching of the Dharma. One that would stand for something honest and sincere. Some of those doors turned out to be less solid than I'd hoped. Some closed. Some I walked away from once I saw what was actually on the other side of them. 

I won't pretend that wasn't painful. There's a particular kind of grief in discovering that a path you trusted wasn't what it claimed to be, or that the credential you sought isn't available to someone in your circumstances, at your age, with your life already built around you rather than around a monastery. For a while, that grief made me feel like I was standing outside the tradition, looking in through a window at something I could see but not touch.

But somewhere in the middle of all that searching, I kept coming back to Dogen. And Dogen keeps saying, in every way he knows how, the same devastating and liberating thing: *you are not outside of it. You never were.*

In the Genjokoan, Dogen writes that to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. He isn't describing a destination. He's describing what's already happening the moment you stop looking elsewhere for it. Firewood does not become ash — firewood is fully firewood, and later ash is fully ash, each complete in its own dharma-position, not a stage on the way to something else. Your sitting this morning was not practice *toward* realization. It was practice-realization, whole and complete, the instant you sat down.

I tell you this not because I've finished searching — I don't think anyone does, not really — but because I want to spare you some of the years I spent looking past my own cushion for what was already happening on it. The robe doesn't make the practice real. The title doesn't make the practice real. The robe is the robe of liberation handed down from Buddha to Buddha. The zazen makes the zazen real, simply by your doing it, fully, this morning, this evening, in whatever room you happened to be sitting in.

So here is what I want to offer our sangha, more than any teaching about lineage or authority: **don't wait.** Don't wait for a retreat, a teacher's approval, a milestone, a better year, a quieter mind. Dogen would say — and I've come to believe with my whole life — that if realization isn't here, in this breath, on this cushion, in this very ordinary moment of your ordinary day, it isn't anywhere else either. Not later. Not elsewhere. Not in someone else's recognition of you.

Sit down. Tend your altar if you have one, or don't, if you don't. Bow to whatever you bow to. Let this moment be the whole of the practice, because it already is.

That's the only journey I can really report back on: it circles home to right here, again and again, no matter how far it seemed to wander.

See you on the cushion.