Zen Habits

All of this suffering because of my Childish Mind’s desire to be special. To be someone unique, honored, respected, loved. Which is a very normal desire, to be sure . . . but what if we could let go of this need to be special? What if the Self that we put above all else could be forgotten for a minute, and we could just be in the world and enjoy the world and not worry about the Self?

I was mad because I wanted the person to be the way I wished them to be. Why couldn’t they just be that way? Then I realized how crazy that was, to expect other people to be the way I wanted them to be. To expect the world to behave the way I wished it would. To expect reality to match up to my ideals, as if my ideals were more important than anything else.

it’s not the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer, “it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening.” So the suffering isn’t created by the other person’s actions, or our failure to stick to a habit, or bad external circumstances . . . but by the Mind Movie we’ve made up about those things.