Four Zen meditation students who were friends decided to spend seven days together, promising to observe complete silence. Everything went well during the first day, and their meditation was deep, but as night came along and the oil lamps were getting dim, one of them couldn’t help exclaiming to a servant, “Fix those lamps!” Surprised to hear his friend, a…
Tag: spiritual healing
How To Cultivate Contentment & Inner Peace
A young woman got pregnant in the small village where Zen master Hakuin was living. Her father forced her to confess the name of her lover, but she managed to protect him by pretending it was Hakuin. When the child was born, the infuriated father brought the baby to the monk, saying, “It appears this is your child!” along with…
The Path To Spiritual Freedom Is Not a Highway
I love this Zen story. A famous Japanese swordsman disowned his son Matajuro because he considered him too mediocre and undisciplined to ever reach the level of proficiency required to inherit his school. Bent on redeeming himself, the young man headed to Mount Futara to find renowned master Banzo, in the hopes to study with him. When he arrived and…
What Is the Spiritual Cure For Anxiety?
Do you worry about the prospect of events you judge as negative or the possibility of future suffering? How about past events and the way you responded to them? Perhaps your concerns relate more to a current self-perception—in terms of being right or wrong, perfect or imperfect—and how others see you now. You worry about whether your self-images are getting…
3 Reasons Why Daily Meditation Is Essential
I’ve always perceived life as energy, but in my 20s, while I was on a ‘personal retreat’ of deep introspection in almost complete isolation, it was much easier to observe the fluctuations of energy within and around me, since all the usual distractions of the external world weren’t there. It was just me and my emotional baggage. Since it was…
Kindness and Empathy Pave Your Path To Freedom
Do you believe people are either good or evil? Humanity seems to have been fixated in the perception of good and evil since time immemorial. Most organized religions have reinforced this polarizing view as well, in an attempt to guide or control the masses with their dogmatic (and sometimes terrifying) versions of the truth. But if you perceive Creation as…
