Joko Beck
Joko Beck
Charlotte Joko Beckwas an American Zen teacher and the author of the books Everyday Zen: Love and Work and Nothing Special: Living Zen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth27 March 1917
CountryUnited States of America
paradise seeking
You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeking it.
spiritual compassion maturity
In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice but compassion.
self joy body
Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.
sisyphus
None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.
people anxiety way
We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.
blessing thinking self
We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.
trust years secret
Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don't want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is.
names facts example
Whenever we say a person's name, notice whether we have stated more than a fact. For example, the judgment, 'She's thoughtless' goes beyond the facts 'She said she'd call me and she didn't.
joy willing
Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
inspirational practice might
We are just living this moment; we don't have to live 150,000 moments at once. We are only living one. That's why I say you might as well practice with each moment.
teacher disappointment discovery
Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.
hurt real confused
Practice can be stated very simply. It is moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others. That seems so simple-except when we substitute for real practice some idea that we should be different or better than we are, or that our lives should be different from the way they are. When we substitute our ideas about what should be (such notions as "I should not be angry or confused or unwilling") for our life as it truly is, then we're off base and our practice is barren.
miracle life-is
Life is a second-by-second miracle.
uplifting block self
Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.