Present Still

“We do only three things in life: we sit, we stand, we lie horizontal. That’s about it. Everything else is a story. Life is not difficult; it’s your thinking that makes it difficult.” (Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy , p. 157) When Venerable Beopsang read this passage at the start of his Dharma talk, it really resonated with me. All we do in life is stand, sit, and lie down. That’s it. It may sound too simple to mean much. But it brought to mind a teaching the Buddha emphasized. I was surprised by the connection. When you are standing, know that you are standing. When you are sitting, know that you are sitting. When you are lying down, know that you are lying down. Photo by the author Yet in daily life, we’re often unaware of what we’re doing in the moment. Why can’t we see things as they are? We constantly assign meaning to things, judge them as good or bad, and compare ourselves with others. We do this so automatically that we hardly notice it. Ven. Beopsang pointed out that ...

Have you ever felt thrown off because someone who was warm yesterday sounds completely different today? Or been left baffled when a plan you had already settled was changed, with no discussion?   When this keeps happening, you may find yourself wondering, “Why can’t this person ever be consistent? ” Not long ago, I listened to a Dharma talk by Venerable Jinkyung , in which someone asked how to deal with an unpredictable person.  How should we look at the pain that comes from someone like that? She began with something else: what life is actually like. Photo by the author Unpredictability Isn’t Strange. It’s How Life Works. Before discussing people’s changing moods, she pointed out that life as a whole is unpredictable.  She shared something that had happened close to home. A healthy monk she lives with was walking down the stairs, lost his focus for a moment, and hurt his back. She has been lying in bed for days. Nobody could have guessed that the day b...

A few months ago, I came across a talk on YouTube by Dr.  Hyunsu  Jeon , a psychiatrist who is also a Buddhist practitioner. He described a moment when a patient asked him a simple question. “Doctor, are you happy?” He said he wasn’t sure whether he was happy, but he wasn’t suffering. It was an unexpected answer, and it has stayed with me ever since. We treat happiness as one of life’s most important values.  “Are you happy?”  “You’re happy, right?”  “I just want you to be happy.”  These questions come up in everyday conversation all the time. We tend to think that happiness is what life is all about, and that we should keep striving for it. And yet, when I heard “I don’t know if I’m happy, but I’m not suffering,” something in me relaxed. So what would a life without suffering look like? Photo by the author Why doesn’t happiness last, even when we get what we want? More recently, I heard a teaching from the Korean monk Venerable Beopsang that touched ...