Breath vs. Distraction
January 28, 2016
Just sitting here with nothing to do is very ordinary. It’s so ordinary that the mind doesn’t stay here very easily. It seems ordinary, but if you learn how to ask questions about it, you find that the more questions you ask, the stranger it gets. You’ve got this body, and you’ve got the mind that’s aware. What are they doing here together? How do they relate to each other? A famous Zen master, Dogen, recommended asking questions like this: Is the body sitting in the mind, or is the mind sitting in the body? Which is the container for the other one? Or does there have to be a container? The reason for asking these questions is to start probing around into your assumptions about how you relate to your body, how you relate to your mind.