Joko Beck Quotes

We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.

But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.

With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.

All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That's all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.

It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.

Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.

Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.

We are just living this moment; we don't have to live 150,000 moments at once. We are only living one. That's why I say you might as well practice with each moment.

Whenever we say a person's name, notice whether we have stated more than a fact. For example, the judgment, 'She's thoughtless' goes beyond the facts 'She said she'd call me and she didn't.

None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.

Life is a second-by-second miracle.

An old Zen rule of thumb is not to answer until one has been asked three times.

In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice but compassion.

To enjoy the world without judgment is what a realized life is like.

We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeking it.

We're constantly waking up to what we're about, what we're really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that's painful. But there's no possibility of freedom without this pain.

Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering; holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream; each moment, life as it is, the only teacher; being just this moment, compassion's way.

There is no end to the opening up that is possible for a human being.

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way.

Meditation is not about doing something

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.