Dale

“When life becomes difficult, allow yourself to feel the pain in the moment. Go with it for as long as it lasts, and then watch it dissolve away. Pleasure and pain are merely states of mind, rather than situations. Every situation is neutral.”
― Daniel Levin, The Zen Book

“Become aware of what you feel. When you see parts of yourself that you don’t like, just watch the feelings come and go without getting too caught up in what it is you’re feeling. Everything passes—these emotions will, too.”
― Daniel Levin, The Zen Book

“In one life Buddha chose to be a deer, and he became the leader of a large herd. The king at the time was a hunter, and his subjects thought to trap some beasts in a canyon so that the king could come there to hunt. They arranged an elaborate trap and then chased two herds of deer from different directions into it. It worked flawlessly, and in a very short time thousands of deer were trapped. When the king came, he saw the majesty of the two leaders of the herds and told his subjects that they weren’t to be sacrificed. Nevertheless, the “Buddha deer” chose to be the first one sacrificed. Seeing this, the subjects of the king went to tell him that one of the leaders was volunteering to be sacrificed to save the others from being killed on that day. The king came and spoke with the Buddha deer, saying that his life was spared. But the deer would hear nothing of it, for how could he serve his herd if he could let them die so that he could live? The king agreed to set his herd free, but the Buddha deer replied, “My gracious king, I cannot walk away and allow my herd to go free, for that means that I will be the cause of suffering for all the deer of the other herd.” After much deliberation and many rounds of the Buddha deer sacrificing himself so that no other creatures would suffer, the king ended up banning all hunting of wildlife in his kingdom. He ended up building a statue of the deer on the site of this conversation to remind all that we cannot live in happiness as long as others suffer.”
― Daniel Levin, The Zen Book

“INTERBEING If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper “inter-are.” “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper would be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without non-paper elements, like mind, logger, sunshine, and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh