Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Protest can be a collective form of mindfulness practice.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“As practice expands from the personal to the collective, from the internal to the external, from the particular to the universal, it comes to embody the value of inclusion of all things, of all people, of all differences. All of our experiences are invited and belong; none of us is marginalized or excluded. In this way, we are being invited to create beautiful and Beloved Communities.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“Satipatthana Sutta,”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“As global conditions seem increasingly incomprehensible, we can humbly recall these words of Anaïs Nin: “We do not see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.” Therefore, the greater the number of we ares that we see, the more likely a compassionate response to an often unfathomable life becomes possible. If we only understand life through our own particular lives, we will never feel the breadth of life in general and will always be deluded in our pursuit of true awakening. It is only by practicing in a multiplicity of communities — including ones that might seem in existential opposition — that we will have the opportunity to sense that which connects us all as a Universal Family. From this place, we can extend collective effort with our minds and hearts in fellowship together. Cultivating our hearts and minds, we must pay the broadest attention possible to love fully together all aspects of our diverse lives. This inner sense of community between mind and heart is indispensable in creating the outer sense of community and wholeness that benefits all of our experiences. We turn our hearts and minds together toward the lives around us. Who are we beyond who we think we are? Our mind-heartfulness is an invitation to journey into the answers that lie beyond the question. When we come to a common sense of the heart and mind together — in common with every spiritual tradition, not to mention every human being — instead of eating each other alive with violence, succumbing to greed, hatred, and delusion, we might start to feed each other with care, in order to awaken our hearts and minds together”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“At EBMC we don’t always have the space to accommodate everyone to do movement or walking meditation inside the facility, so we do it on the sidewalk”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“Dogen tells us to “cease practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself.”
― James Ishmael Ford, Introduction to Zen Koans: Learning the Language of Dragons

“At EBMC we don’t always have the space to accommodate everyone to do movement or walking meditation inside the facility, so we do it on the sidewalk — moving on the pavement in a slow pace that supports mindfulness.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“The “dream” of the dominant culture since the days of European colonization of North America has been an aspiration or “right” to own a piece of the land around us. As we are thrust into the environmental complexities of climate change, our deepening collective practice in community can support a realignment of priorities and a recollection — itself a quality of mindfulness — of not only what our true nature is but what our true relationship with the earth really is.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“The Satipatthana Sutta, the discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness, supports a direct relationship to earth: A Noble One examines and reflects on this very body in whatever position it remains or is placed, as composed of the primary elements: There are in this body only the earth element, the water element, the fire element, and the air element. The invitation here is to deconstruct the experience of the walking and movement meditation into the four primary elements universal in the material world.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“We do not move and walk on the earth; we are earth that moves and walks with the whole — regardless of the extent of our physical abilities.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“Governance is not simply a management forum to coordinate tasks and roles for particular outcomes. As an organizational resource, governance is instrumental in creating community as opposed to imposing decisions upon community. In order to create community, the governing group needed to be part of the community and also operate with the same principles and values as the community itself.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“Community-building as a spiritual practice is not an easy or simple endeavor.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“At EBMC, we were conscious, even before we obtained a physical space in which to meet, that we were going to address an unmet need in the Bay Area. We had the vision of serving diverse communities that had not been on the radar or recognized by mainstream meditation centers.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“At EBMC, even before we looked for a physical space to call home, we gathered in several community meetings to gauge not only community interest but also what the needs of the interested communities were.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“It is no wonder that it is extremely difficult for any group to realign cultural values, norms, behaviors, and actions once they have formed and already been conditioned over time. The longer they have been conditioned with the norms of the dominant culture, the more challenging that process of change can be. As many predominantly European American–centric Western meditation communities have found, it is extremely difficult and frustrating to retrofit multicultural experience into a community that has already evolved and developed, conditioned by mainstream cultural values and patterns.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“The removal of financial barriers of cost, fee, and price from events is very relevant to multicultural communities because it allows them full access to the teachings.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“Our Western mentality is often inclined toward individualism and the personal goal of healing or attainment of some achievement, whether spiritual or material. This can produce the belief that we should be able to awaken on our own, that we would awaken on our own given the right conditions, and that if we do not awaken on our own, something is wrong or broken with the teachings, the teacher, or ourselves. Yet the teachings of community and sangha invite us into the experience that not only are we not supposed to do this alone but actually we cannot do this alone. We can only awaken within the compassionate arms of our communities together, in solidarity.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“Breaking together with conflict is the process by which we create peace. When we break together and live relationally with conflict, resolved or not, we create peace. We must continually call ourselves back to our higher aspiration of breaking together in order to transform our world together.”
― Larry Yang, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

“A bodhisattva protects the spirit of this vow the way people protect their beloved children. This vow is very fragile: its life is often hanging by a thin thread. You may clearly see that being kind to others would end your problems, and then a moment later someone is rude to you, and you forget all about being kind. In a sense this whole book is about how to protect and bring the spirit of compassion to complete maturity by being upright, which is to receive, practice, and transmit the great bodhisattva”
― Tenshin Reb Anderson, Being Upright: Zen Meditation and Bodhisattva Precepts

“Experiencing our interconnection and interpenetrating relationship with all beings is the genesis of our happiness. Even the most mundane task becomes meaningful and fulfilling when we feel a universal connection with the totality of being.”
― Shinshu Roberts, Being-Time: A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's Shobogenzo Uji

“Finding home, feeling home, and being at home are complex, multilayered, spiritual and cultural experiences independent of the place we live. Where is home? What is my true nature, and what does it mean to be at home with it? When I don’t feel at home, where can I find sanctuary? These questions become critical when our lives are under threat.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging

“The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Still, there were questions that would not go away. None of the usual solutions to life that were on offer meant much to me and, like many young people, I didn’t at first expect to live for a long time. When I continued living anyway and needed to make a life, I found myself yearning to make sense of things. I had noticed, as almost everyone does, moments of great and apparently everlasting beauty followed by standard-issue miseries and found the incongruence hard to deal with. I wanted to be loyal to that beauty while not dodging the dark bits.”
― John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life

“In many ways, Keizan’s Zen is a continuation of the Zen of the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, Dogen—and this should not be particularly surprising. Yet, the two men were different individuals with different teaching methods and different emphases in their writings. In the course of documenting the patriarchal succession over the generations, Keizan centers his talks primarily on two topics. One is the necessity of being totally committed to achieving awakening, of taking the Zen life most seriously, and of making a supreme effort in Zen practice. This is also a focal point in Dogen’s writing, and both men, as Zen patriarchs, are equally concerned with the training of monks and the selection of successors. The second emphasis, and, indeed, the overwhelmingly central focal point of all these chapters, is the Light of the title of the work. It is this light that is transmitted from master to disciple as the disciple discovers this light within himself. In fact, once the light is discovered, this itself is the transmission. The light is one’s Buddha nature or True Self.”
― Francis Harold Cook, The Record of Transmitting the Light: Zen Master Keizan's Denkoroku