Cid

“Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: A Zen Buddhist Guide to Awakening Through Daily Life's Feelings, Relationships, and Work

“If we cease looking, searching, what are we left with? We’re left with what’s been right there at the center all the time. Underneath all that searching there is distress. There is unease. The minute that we realize that, we see that the point isn’t the search, but rather the distress and unease which motivate the search. That’s the magic moment—when we realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way.”
― Charlotte J. Beck, Everyday Zen

“Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: A Zen Buddhist Guide to Awakening Through Daily Life's Feelings, Relationships, and Work

“Anxiety is always a gap between the way things are and the way we think they ought to be. Anxiety is something that stretches between the real and unreal. Our human desire is to avoid what's real and instead to be with our ideas about the world:

"I'm terrible." "You're terrible." "You're wonderful." The idea is separated from reality and anxiety is the gap between the idea and the reality that things are just as they are.

When we cease to believe in the object that we've created -- which is off to one side of reality, so to speak -- things snap back to the center. That's what being centered means. The anxiety then fades out.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck