Quote from Most Intimate

Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges

by Rossi Pat Enkyo O’Hara

Shambhala Publications, Boston, Massachusetts, 2014.   140 pages  

 

Right now, looking into your eyes,
I feel myself falling deeply into you.
Your breath, my breath, bringing us closer,
Skin, sound, touch rapture!
One breath, it breathes, we are briefly one.
And now, the light changes, shifts.
Two again. Look!
The moon’s waxing crescent.


You have to meet and be intimate with yourself before you can truly be intimate with another, and the way to do that is to practice Zen, or sitting meditation. . . Perhaps most of all, in terms of sexual intimacy, your willingness to explore your moment-to-moment experience offers you wisdom and compassion in this most compelling realm of human existence. (pp. 33-35)

"In an old Zen story, a student asks the teacher how to avoid the heat and the cold. The teacher replies, 'When hot, let the heat kill you; when cold, let the cold kill you.' To 'kill' in this phrase is to smash the you that is pulling away from the reality of heat and cold, the reality of fatigue, pain, or a scary diagnosis. When that veneer of separation is smashed, what’s left is just the pain and difficulty, without the extra layer of avoidance, fear, and tightness. It is that pulling away, that wrenching from what is, that creates the greater suffering. When that resistance is 'killed,' there is room for healing." (pp. 74-75)

-- quote submitted by Wesley L.

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