words from upaya

I receive the e-mail newsletters from a Zen center in New Mexico called Upaya.

I first heard of the Upaya Zen Center a few years ago when I went on an amazing retreat here in the Twin Cities on care for the dying.

Upaya sent this passage today and I’d like to share with you:

To meet suffering and bear witness to it without collapsing or withdrawing into alienation, first we must stabilize the mind and make friends with it. Next, we open the mind to life—the whole of life, within and around us, seeing it clearly and unconditionally from that stable inner base. And then we fearlessly open our hearts to the world, welcoming it inside no matter how wretched or full of pain it might be. I’ve come to call this the “threefold transparency”—us being transparent to ourselves, the world’s being transparent to us, and us being transparent to the world. Roshi Joan Halifax