CHAPTER
1

Introducing Zen

In This Chapter

These days, when I tell someone I’m a Zen Buddhist, the response is usually, “Cool.” People don’t necessarily understand exactly what it means to be a Zen Buddhist, but they know there’s a certain level of respect for Zen in Western culture.

Over the last 50 years, Zen has become well established in the West. There’s a Zen Center in most major cities in the United States, most bookstores have a Zen section, and thousands of Americans and Europeans identify themselves as Zen practitioners. Still, if you ask most people—even Zen practitioners—what Zen is, they’ll find it difficult to give you a simple answer. That’s at least in part because it’s the nature of Zen to be difficult to define, but this chapter will give you a basic understanding of what Zen is and why some people are so enthusiastic about it.

Zen Is the Art of Living

Zen is not concerned with the afterlife, or whether or not there is one. It is not concerned with fulfilling obligations to a God, or whether or not there is a God. No matter what you believe, Zen is a method you can use to make the most of your life: noticing it, appreciating it, understanding it, learning how to cause happiness instead of misery, and hopefully even becoming a master in the art of living it fully.

You’ve ended up with a human life—why not master the use of your own mind and body as you might master any skill or art, so you can maintain your dignity while being ready for anything that happens in your life?

Life Is a Great Opportunity

It may not always feel like it, but your life is precious. Viewed without any expectations whatsoever, your heartbeat is miraculous and lifting your teacup to your lips is an amazing experience. Small children know this. So do people near the end of a terminal illness. To someone with only two weeks to live, even an argument or waiting at a red light are experiences to be relished. So what about the time in between childhood and the end of life? Why does life so often seem monotonous, frustrating, vaguely disappointing, or downright painful?

According to Buddhism, the way you experience life depends largely on your views about the world. These views include the way you see your relationship to things and people, what happiness is and how to achieve it, and the apparent permanence of your existence.

As you grow up you accumulate lots of views, and this is only natural. You have things you want to get done, and you need to navigate a complex world; your views help you generalize, predict, and make sense of things. However, many of your views are outdated, limited, and downright erroneous. Because of your views, you experience life through many filters rather than in the direct, appreciative way of someone with no expectations or agendas. The goal of Zen is to awaken to life as it is, rather than stay in the comparative dream world of our ideas about it.

Yet Zen is not about returning to the point of view of a child. Buddhist teaching says that it is a rare and precious opportunity to be born a human being precisely because, as a human being, you have such a capacity for messing things up in your head. That capacity can also be used for refining your understanding and coming around to a much fuller appreciation of reality than a child is capable of.

The metaphor of Genesis from the Bible is quite apt here: when the descendants of Adam and Eve turn toward God, it is a much more profound devotion than that of Adam and Eve before they lost their innocence. When you have lost touch with the preciousness of life and then found your way back to it, your appreciation becomes more conscious and mature.

It’s Like Learning to Drive

Somehow we think that by the time we turn 18, or 21, or 30, or at least 45, we should know how to live this human life. However, learning to live well is a bit like learning to drive—except that the human body and mind make up the most complex machine in the world, that daily negotiates a multidimensional, ever-changing environment.

Imagine you’re sitting behind the wheel of a car for the first time. You have no idea what all the levers and buttons and pedals are for. Maybe someone explains these things to you, but the first time you turn the key and put the car into the gear it’s exciting and somewhat terrifying. Everything is awkward and requires care and planning. Even when you perform all the steps correctly, the car’s movements are jerky and inelegant.

Once you’ve mastered the art of driving a car, there seems to be little separation between you and the car. You’ve learned how to navigate the road safely and efficiently, and your intentions are translated smoothly into the behavior of the vehicle. Because driving has become a natural activity for you, you can merge onto a highway, turn on your windshield wipers, and carry on a conversation all at the same time.

It takes much longer to master the art of living than it takes to master the art of driving. In fact, the art of living is so complex and nuanced that mastering it takes a lifetime—and even then you won’t have reached perfection. A car has one function, while a human being has infinite ways to function. Cars are standardized, while each human being is unique and changes throughout his or her lifetime.

In essence, Zen is the art of living. All the teachings and practices of Zen are aimed at helping you live more wisely, more compassionately, and more fully. A Zen master has become adept at simply living her life, but she is not so much a master of her life as she is a master of the art of Zen study and practice.

Zen makes no claim to have an exclusive handle on all the wisdom and practices that help you live a better life; in fact you will find similar teachings and methods in all the major religions and in any program, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, that aims to help people benefit themselves. What is unique about Zen is its singular focus on the art of living, in combination with its incredibly comprehensive approach.

Discovering Your Own Answers

No one can tell you how best to live your life. Be they a Zen master, your mother, or your therapist, others can only tell you what has worked well for them or what they’ve observed working well for others. Your genetics, upbringing, experiences, personality, aspirations, and circumstances contribute to your being an incredibly complex person; no one but you knows what it’s like to be you, no one knows what will work best for you, and no one except you can ultimately change your mind or behavior. Even if you found a perfect guru to prescribe teachings and actions for you, you would still have to enact them yourself.

In its purest form, Zen does not give you answers. Instead, it gives you means to find answers. It gives you tools for settling your mind so you can see more clearly, practices for working toward goals of your own choosing, and teachings to help you raise the most important questions within your own mind.

Of course, the Zen tradition has been maintained over the centuries by human beings, and human beings love to tell one another how it is. Don’t be surprised if during your exploration of Zen you run into some advice or some statements about the way the universe functions. Just remember this is not the essence of Zen; it’s just more food for thought.

Dignified and Ready

So here’s some food for thought: when you experience your life directly, without the filters of your views—the goal of Zen practice—you are at your best. You are dignified and as ready as you can be for whatever arises the next moment.

The dignity you experience when you are living the Zen way involves being self-sufficient, centered, and fearless. You are self-sufficient because you understand the impermanent nature of the self and are no longer casting about for things to make you feel substantial or safe. You are simply awareness meeting flow, and that’s enough. You are centered because you know the answers can’t come from anywhere else but right where you are. You are fearless because fear is based on a worry that an enduring self-nature might come under threat in the future, and while you are facing the future, you know only the present exists.

CONSIDER THIS

Japanese samurai warriors practiced Zen in order to remain fearless, centered, and effective in the midst of battle. Whatever you think of a samurai’s goals, this argues for the potential of Zen practice to result in increased self-possession and readiness.

Living the Zen way means you’re as ready as you can possibly be because, as described above, you’re not grasping, worrying, or anticipating. This leaves you open and aware. When you aren’t trying to guess what’s going to happen next, you don’t constrain your possible responses. Anticipation causes tenseness and just slows you down. If you remain dignified, all you’ve learned and practiced previously is accessible to you in an instant, without your having to worry about it.

The Zen Tradition

The Zen tradition is over a thousand years old and is rich in history, literature, stories, art, and practices. If you’re interested, you could spend your life studying it. However, you don’t have to learn much about Zen as a tradition in order to start making it a part of your life. Here I’ll just try to give Zen some context—particularly what Zen means, how it came to be, how it relates to Buddhism, and how you can engage with it.

The word Zen originally just meant meditation. In India the word for meditation was dhyana, in China the word was chan, and in Japan the word was zen. Over time Zen has come to refer to a number of things:

People generally don’t use the word Zen to refer to meditation itself anymore, so I’ll work on the other meanings of the term.

Zen Buddhism arose in China in the sixth and seventh centuries, when various Buddhist sects were starting to differentiate themselves from one another. At the time there were many different types of study and practice presented by Buddhists as a means of cultivating insight and attaining enlightenment. These included reading and reciting certain scriptures, devotional practices, and esoteric rituals. The Zen folks believed that simple meditation was the most effective and authentic method of Buddhist practice. They cited not only the results of their own meditation, but the scriptures that described the original Buddhist, Siddhartha Gautama, attaining his insight and liberation through meditation.

Probably the most widespread use of the word “Zen” in popular culture is as an adjective referring to a particular aesthetic. Furniture, clothing, and perfumes are labeled and sold as “Zen.” This largely reflects the historical association of Zen with Japanese culture. Many aspects of the Japanese aesthetic have evolved to favor simplicity, clean lines, and minimal adornment. While it’s true that some of this aesthetic is due to Zen’s influence, it’s still quintessentially Japanese. Zen’s influence on other cultures, including Korean, Chinese, and Western cultures, has yielded different results. As usual, the reality is much more varied than the popular conceptions, so beware of equating Zen with things like rock gardens or a lack of clutter.

What about Zen as a description of the supposed results of meditation, such as an imperturbable state of mind, a quiet wisdom, self-restraint, or non-attachment? This use of the term reflects some of the ideals and goals of Zen practice. However, only a handful of the ideals and goals of Zen practice have made it into the popular culture, and many of those are misunderstood. For example, people often equate non-attachment with the aloofness of dissociation, but this is not the Zen ideal at all. This book will help clarify and expand your idea about what is Zen.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

It’s important to make a distinction between ideals and people. Just as a good Christian aspires to be Christ-like but would never claim to have fully achieved that goal, a Zen practitioner aspires to Zen ideals but doesn’t necessarily make any claim about always manifesting them.

How Zen Relates to Buddhism

If you’re not already a Zen Buddhist, you’re probably wondering, “Do I have to be Buddhist to practice or appreciate Zen?” The answer is debatable. It’s impossible to clearly separate Zen and Buddhism; Zen developed as a form of Buddhism, and many core Zen practices and teachings are pre-Zen Buddhist in origin. At the same time there are many Buddhist practices, teachings, rituals, and so on that are not essential to Zen practice.

If you’re hoping for a simple explanation of how Zen relates to Buddhism, you’re likely to be disappointed. In comparison to the Abrahamic faiths with their one God and their authoritative texts, Buddhism can seem like a many-headed, many-legged beast. It’s not just that there are different sects of Buddhism, it’s also that there is no deity guiding its practice, no authoritative text held commonly amongst all Buddhists, and no restraints put on the proliferation of its teachings and practices except this: does the teaching or practice reduce suffering?

Basically, the only thing all Buddhists have in common is the goal of attaining liberation from delusion and suffering. Buddhist masters of every generation are actually encouraged to interpret and adapt teachings and practices to fit their audiences. Most Buddhists acknowledge that there are many different methods for attaining liberation, and which one you choose is your own concern.

In a sense, then, Zen is just a method to use to attain the Buddhist goal of liberation, a goal that is set out in the Buddhist mythology describing the spiritual journey of Siddhartha Gautama. In brief, Siddhartha lived the first part of his life in the lap of luxury but was still troubled by the prospect of unavoidable suffering in the form of disease, old age, and death. He subsequently spent six years doing ascetic spiritual practice in the Indian style of the time, but did not come to the peace or understanding he longed for.

Finally he settled on the middle way between indulgence and asceticism and decided to sit in a calm, balanced meditative state until he resolved the problem of human suffering. The way the story goes, he did resolve the problem—by realizing in what sense human beings create their own suffering, and how they can stop doing it.

After his realization (which is much more complicated than what is described here), Siddhartha was called a Buddha, which simply means “awakened one.” The idea is that he woke up to the truth. It doesn’t matter so much, here, exactly how early Buddhists described that truth, or whether the truth you might be trying to wake up to is Buddhist.

I’ll go more into Buddhist teachings that are relevant to Zen practice later. The important thing is that a Buddha is liberated by truth, and all Buddhists subsequent to Siddhartha have striven to either wake up to truth themselves, support those who are trying to wake up, or in some way demonstrate their devotion to the Truth Which Liberates (even if they don’t expect to attain it).

When you distill Buddhism down to its basics, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to divorce it from Zen. However, in true Buddhist style, Zen has reinterpreted, rephrased, and even built on pre-Zen Buddhism, so unless you want to you don’t need to go back to the pre-Zen stuff. Other Zen teachers may differ with me here, but I think that would be less of a comment on the inadequacy of Zen in and of itself and more a comment on the richness of the Buddhist tradition as a whole: why not avail yourself of it?

Still, if aspects of the Buddhist tradition turn you off (mythology, supernatural imagery, teachings on reincarnation, and so on), please disregard what doesn’t ring true to you and concentrate on what does. This is entirely consistent with Buddhist teaching; before his death, Shakyamuni Buddha’s last admonitions to his students were that they should rely on their own conviction about what is true, rather than on what someone else tells them is true.

Practice Versus Philosophy

Many people ask whether they can just have Zen as a philosophy. The answer, of course, is, “Sure! Use Zen in whatever way is beneficial to you and others.” However, if you’re thinking you’d like to stick to Zen-as-philosophy, you might want to ask yourself why. Is it because you don’t want to make any changes in your life? That’s fine, of course. But if you do want to make changes but you’re just wary of having to join a group or be told what to think or do, consider identifying with Zen as practice.

All it means to have a Zen practice (as opposed to just having a Zen philosophy) is that you do things in order to get yourself to think and act more in accord with your own Zen ideals. Zen philosophy alone can mean you just try to think about things in a Zen way. This might actually change how you act, which is great. If you’re like most people, though, just knowing “you should let it go” or “there’s really no separation between self and other” doesn’t help all that much. Knowing or believing something intellectually can be very, very different from actually being able to enact what you know.

Zen practice is simply employing tools and methods to slowly but surely change your mind and behavior. You get to pick the goals and the tools, so in essence it is just as independent as a personal philosophy. However, you can get some good ideas about how to best use Zen tools and methods from other people, and you can get together with people to use them. You don’t generally “have a philosophy” with anyone else, so a Zen practice can be richer in this aspect, too, if you’re so inclined.

Dispelling Some Myths About Zen

I don’t know what your ideas about Zen are; maybe you don’t even have any. However, I know what mine were before (and after) starting Zen practice, and what kinds of Zen or Buddhist images are presented in popular Western culture. For me the stereotype of the Zen master looked like this: male, the strong silent type, in control of himself, aware of his superiority and strength relative to others, and above simple human desires like those for comfort, affection, pleasure, and social contact. This stereotyped Zen master could also do kung fu, of course.

Thankfully this stereotype is untrue, or lots of us would be out of luck when it comes to trying to practice Zen. In reality, there’s no ideal Zen person! The goal of Zen is to become more fully and completely ourselves, whether we’re male or female, strong or weak, silent or talkative, aloof or thoroughly engaged in all kinds of human activities. What people often do, despite this, is set up some ideal that is usually not what they are, but rather what they think they should be.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

What kinds of changes would you like to make in your life? How many of those changes would truly result in more happiness for yourself and others, and how many of them are about ideals you’ve gotten from outside—from parents, friends, or popular culture? Zen asks you to examine your goals carefully; some of them you just might want to drop!

Zen practice can indeed give you more strength and help you keep your mouth closed when it would be better not to say anything. Zen can help you find a reliable and accessible source of peace and joy that’s not dependent on your access to things like food, alcohol, or the company of others. The thing is, if you achieve some of these things, you’ll probably end up being surprised by how these changes look in your life and by how much of your resistance to change was due to a misunderstanding about what change really entailed. For example, you don’t become less dependent on others by breaking free of the natural human need for intimacy; you become less dependent on others by recognizing that nothing separates you from intimacy except your own mind.

What Zen Practice Has to Offer

You won’t hear many Zen teachers talking at length about the great things you can get out of Zen, or what Zen can help you achieve. This isn’t because Zen practice doesn’t have benefits, it’s because thinking about the benefits causes problems in your practice. As long as you’re thinking about what’s (hopefully) going to happen in the future, you can’t be fully present with what’s happening now. (At least, not as completely present as Zen practice requires.) As long as you’re hoping to become different, you can’t clearly see and accept yourself as you are, which is a Zen prerequisite for lasting change. Still, diligent Zen practice is likely—although never guaranteed—to have some super benefits, and some of them are described here.

Waking Up to Your Life

How many times have you arrived somewhere, usually somewhere you go all the time, and realized you can’t remember anything about the drive there? Have you ever been listening to someone talking and suddenly realized you haven’t heard what they’ve been saying for the last couple of minutes?

It’s very easy to spend a majority of your time “up in your head”—worrying, planning, judging, analyzing, fantasizing—rather than being present in your body. You can miss, or be only partially aware of, what’s actually going on around you. Hurrying to get to the next thing, you’re likely to be oblivious to the pleasant sensation of warm dishwater on your hands, or your spouse’s subtle gesture of apology. Not only do you miss out on experiences as your limited time on Earth ticks inexorably by, you aren’t functioning at your best when it comes to responding to people and situations.

The Zen practices of zazen and mindfulness first increase your awareness of your own mind states, and then build up your attention “muscles” so you choose what you want to pay attention to. The awareness of your mind states has to come first, because you can’t make the choice to be present if you aren’t even aware your mind is wandering. Then you practice over and over bringing your mind back to the object of your attention, whether it’s just sitting, your breath, the sensations in your hands, or a conversation. Eventually, if you really do the practice, you get better at it.

DEFINITION

Zazen, literally “seated (za) meditation (zen),” is a silent, introspective form of meditation that is the central practice of Zen.

All this paying attention to what’s actually going on results in another kind of waking up to your life: you wake up to—and are therefore able to appreciate and take care of—the specifics of your life. This includes the subtle dynamics of your relationships, your limitations, and your deep aspirations. You can get used to saying, “Wow, I never realized before ….”

Less Controlled by Emotions

Unfortunately, many people think Zen is about gaining control over your emotions, or even about attaining some state of mind where you don’t feel your emotions as intensely. This way of thinking about Zen makes the practice attractive to some. To others, who value the emotional aspects of their lives, it can make Zen practice seem problematic or even repellant. Fortunately, Zen practice is not about deadening your emotions or even gaining control over them. Instead, it’s about increasing your awareness of your emotions, accepting them, and learning a new way to relate to them.

It’s typical to believe emotions are legitimate reactions to, or feelings about, beings or situations that have an inherent, enduring reality. You feel anxiety; therefore, there’s something to be anxious about. You feel as if you will never be complete without a particular person as your mate; therefore, you must obtain said mate or face a lifetime of despair. When you interpret emotions this way, they become imperatives you would be foolish not to take seriously and act on. In reality, emotions are simply a response arising within you to your perceptions. Sometimes your perceptions are fairly accurate, sometimes they are not; and they always apply to a fluid and dynamic reality.

By watching your emotions carefully over time, you can see how they arise and fall—they don’t last forever, even if conditions don’t change. You also see how sometimes they give you valuable information and sometimes they do not. Some emotional reactions are based on faulty perceptions, false assumptions, unfounded fears, or simple conditioning. When you act based on this kind of emotional reaction, you usually cause problems for yourself and others. When you gain some perspective on your emotions, you’re less controlled by them and have more freedom in the way you choose to respond to things.

Stress Relief

There are physiological aspects to the way practices like Zen meditation and mindfulness can relieve stress. The very act of turning the awareness toward bodily sensations changes the functioning of the mind and body. Physical, mental, and emotional changes are caused by the simple act of paying attention to exactly what’s going on in front of you without analysis or judgment.

It may be that human beings are too smart for their own good, and spend too much time and energy thinking about events in the past that they can do nothing about—or anticipating an infinite number of possible future events, most of which will never happen. It’s natural to want to feel safe and in control—and the only thing you can actually control is yourself, right here, right now. By practicing the ability to return your awareness to the present, you become able to center yourself in a much more manageable field of operation (here and now) at any time, no matter what’s going on around you.

Whatever techniques you use, however, you can’t bear an infinite amount of stress. Stress is pressure, whether it arises from deadlines, expectations, debts, illness, loss, or ambition. Too much pressure and something’s going to give. The good thing is, other Zen practices can help you cultivate acceptance, patience, and compassion for your own limitations, so if you succumb to stress you can give yourself a break. And a break might be just what you need.

Greater Authenticity

Who are you, really? If you think you know the answer to that question, how many people regularly get to see and interact with that person you really are?

The irony of the questions above is that there is no fixed, “real” you, and understanding the truth of this is a key to greater authenticity. You think, act, and express yourself differently in different situations, at different times, depending on your surroundings and the people you are with. This doesn’t make you flaky or characterless; it makes you alive and responsive. What we’re looking for in Zen is not the authentic person (a thing) but the authentic response. You’re responding to the world constantly, and the flavor and skillfulness of your responses is what makes you you.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Sometimes when people are aiming for greater authenticity, they think it involves saying whatever they “really” want to say, or doing what they want to do as opposed to what others want them to do. There’s a time and a place for these approaches, but authentic does not mean self-centered. Being authentic to your deeper self includes sensitivity to others, generosity, and the willingness to put off short-term gratification for longer-term benefits to yourself and others.

A fixed idea about the person you are only constrains and impedes your authentic responsiveness. You work on greater authenticity in your responses by gradually deconstructing your ideas about yourself and about life, including your fears, the opinions you hold that you know are absolutely right, and the behaviors you know are absolutely the best or only way. You don’t deconstruct these ideas in order to destroy them, you deconstruct them in order to understand them better. Maybe you reconstruct and keep them, maybe you don’t. If you keep certain ideas or behaviors around, you relate to them in a new way. You know they aren’t true, and they aren’t the essence of who you are.

And what is the essence of who you are? No essence, only living function. You know an authentic response when you give one; it arises without a lot of worry or forethought, and afterward you can rest in knowing you’ve done your best. It feels clean and wholehearted, even if its effects aren’t exactly what you’d hoped for.

Being a Nicer Person

There’s a Zen chant that begins, “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.” And what are you saving all beings from? A Zen teacher I have studied with, Jan Chozen Bays, answers that question like this: you are trying to save all beings from you. As mentioned earlier, the only thing you really have any control over is yourself (and even that control is limited). You can significantly help the world by sparing it your anger, judgment, self-centeredness, rudeness, and insensitivity, to name just a few things.

Just intending to be a nicer person is usually not enough. Ideals and “shoulds” are easy to come by and take you part of the way, but whatever your aspirations, you probably find yourself not quite able to be as kind, generous, or patient as you’d like to be. That’s why Zen approaches this from a different angle than most religions, practices, or self-help programs: Zen starts with the premise that in your heart of hearts you really are compassionate, and it’s misunderstandings and habits that get in the way of you manifesting that compassion. Therefore, if you work on clarity and unraveling some of those habits, you’ll naturally end up a nicer person.

According to Zen, the fundamental misunderstanding, the one that’s at the root of most of your problems, is about the nature of your self. At some level you think you have an inherent, enduring self-essence. Because you believe that, you have a deadly serious mission to protect that self-essence and watch out for its best interests. This leads to all kinds of self-absorption and selfishness, even when you’re trying to have a self that’s really nice to others.

If you personally see how this inherent, enduring self-essence is an illusion, you recognize that your “self” is actually an amazing phenomenon of dynamic interaction and change. This kind of self is better taken care of by dancing with life than maintaining boundaries against it. No self-essence you can protect? Suddenly the world is full of beings just like you and not separate from you; what benefits them benefits you. Just like that, you’re inclined to be a nicer person.

Satisfaction and Gratitude

Try this premise on for size: any dissatisfaction you feel about life is due entirely to your expectations that life should be a particular way.

When you consider this premise, chances are you can think of some of your expectations about life that are either entirely reasonable or, even better, righteous. How can you help hoping life will be relatively free of mean people, disappointment, illness, trauma, or loss? What’s wrong with expecting life to be free of incredible pain, injustice, prejudice, war, or environmental degradation? Fortunately, dissatisfaction is not caused by simply acknowledging that we prefer happiness over suffering, or by the sincere desire to make the world a better place.

Dissatisfaction is caused by carrying a subtle but pervasive expectation that life should conform to your preferences and ideals. It’s one thing to hope you don’t get sick; it’s another to feel like you’ve made some kind of deal with life so when you get sick anyway you feel somehow betrayed. Why you? What did you do to deserve this? Now you’ve entered dissatisfaction territory.

It’s one thing to work tirelessly for justice in the world, but it’s another to resent the injustice you encounter just for being there. “This just shouldn’t be,” you think. Internally you strain against the injustice’s very existence, rather than acknowledging that, yes indeed, there it is (and then doing your best to end it). With internal straining against what is, dissatisfaction arises (and probably burn-out, too).

It may sound bleak to live life without any expectations, but it’s not. When you give up your insistence that life be anything other than what it is, it ironically frees up a lot of energy that you can put to use on improving life. It also results in a satisfaction with your life just as it is; challenges become part of an ongoing dance that lets you stretch, learn, and improve your skills.

In place of a laundry list of complaints about life, you now have a sense of gratitude. If you don’t expect to get a bigger house, you can appreciate the one you have. If you don’t expect to have an exciting social life, you can be grateful for the opportunity to sit and sip your tea. When you know life doesn’t owe you anything, you are naturally grateful for what you have.

Of course, dropping—or even recognizing—your expectations is not at all easy. In Zen practice you cultivate the ability to do this by carefully examining your mind moment after moment, day after day, year after year. You start to notice the space between thoughts, and eventually develop the ability to use that space in order to make a different choice. Rather than embrace one of your expectations, it occurs to you to enter the next moment without it. Lo and behold—life looks better!

The Least You Need to Know