Sincere Heart, Blazing Furnace.
I was talking with some of the sangha after evening practice last night, and we were all still basking in the glow of last weekends sesshin which as you may be able to deduce from this pic happened in our family's living room this time around - but that's another story... There is something both utterly mysterious and radically dependable in the practice of sesshin, and the rhythm of joining sesshin, re-emerging into the karmic unfoldings of my life's many up's and down's and then plunging back into sesshin again over and over has in many ways been the root of my spiritual path. At once, it is the place of ease and repose, and it is a intentional holding oneself in what truly is the furnace of deep practice - melting us down over and over as David Sensei so perfectly put it. But any form, any way of practice is no guarantee of anything in and of itself - not even my beloved sesshin retreats. The whole thing, it seems to me, turns (or doesn't) on one...