There are many calm and clear states of mind, but the meditation is not about chasing after them. You just show up in any condition and you start to notice.ħ. Secretly, inside any state there’s the glint of something that has always been here. Even if you were delirious, dying, or just really excited, the gold would be there. Your mind presents all sorts of things-coins, lost and found, hidden treasure, the ever-flowing river. Even when you are asleep it might be there, an unnoticed kindness. Keep company with the koan whatever you are doing. Just wondering about that coin will change you you’ll begin to notice it everywhere. It can be the good dog that follows you around. Ask yourself questions: “Is this a coin?” “Is anything really lost?” Experiment.įall into the koan, make mistakes, try to misunderstand it, find its virtues.

Instead, you can let the koan into your heart and your body. If we do that with meditation, we are still outside of our own lives. Usually if we want to understand something we take it up to the top floor and find a shelf with a label for it. It’s personal something in your life will rise to meet the coin that was lost. Before that, meditation is showing up for your own life. Everyone wants to develop meditation as a skill, but building a skill is just making your life smaller than it is. Have the life you have, and let the koan into it. You are joining a timeless conversation and you are forming a relationship with the koan, so you can let all that happen without worrying about it. The coin that’s lost in the river is found in the river. Just repeat the words of the koan to yourself a bit. The coin lost in the river is found in the river. If no koan has already grabbed hold of you, here’s one to try: It is for you the way your life is for you. It can be like an ear worm-it seizes you and won’t go away. If you have heard of a koan and it stayed with you, you can try that one out. You just keep company with the koan, and it draws your attention to something you already have but might not have valued. But the ambition to improve your state of mind is part of the consciousness that finds fault with itself and lives in pain. You might think meditation is difficult-that your job as a meditator is to change your mind about reality and see through your illusions. What’s required is more strange and also less effort it’s outside of easy or hard, yesterday or tomorrow. It’s not training your mind because that is something you already know about. It’s familiar to reach for things you already know about, and meditation means stepping beyond that. In the land of koans, you see that everything that happens in your life is for you.

Before anything is explained, there is the sky, the earth, redwood forests, pelicans, rivers, rats, the city of San Francisco. Instead, they show you something by opening a gate. Then it’s easy to love others, which is the other thing a practice is about. The path is about learning to love this life, the one you have. There’s a tradition of koan study to transform your heart and the way you move in the world. It’s something to keep you company, whatever you are doing. The koan: The coin lost in the river is found in the river.Ī koan is a little healing story, a conversation, an image, a fragment of a song.

101 zen koans