Zen in Ten: "Each of Us Is Born a Jewel"
The Wisdom of Cheri Huber, Zen teacher extraordinaire
Cheri Huber, author of more than 20 books, has been a student and teacher of Zen for over 35 years. In 1983, she founded the Mountain View Zen Center, and in 1987 she founded the Zen Monastery Peace Center near Murphys, California. She conducts workshops and retreats at these centers, other places around the U.S., and internationally. In 1997, Huber founded Living Compassion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to peace and service. Living Compassion’s primary work is the Africa Vulnerable Children Project, based in Zambia, where for over a decade they have been working with the people of Kantolomba, beginning the process of turning a slum of 11,000 people into a self-sustaining community. Cheri also has a weekly Internet based radio show.
“Dharma is the teaching, the understanding, the contents of the enlightened mind. It is the experience of the joy of intelligence knowing itself.”
“Each of us is born a jewel, a unique expression of the intelligence that animates. Before long we encounter the social context we are born into and begin adapting to survive that environment. As we move through the stages of socialization, layers of conditioning form around us, like a crust. . . . As we identify more and more with the crust, we forget the experience of ourselves as the jewel.”
“Conditioned mind runs on fear and anxiety, based in conditioned ‘realities’ in which bad and good are measured out and should be balanced. But it’s all illusion. Life simply is. We miss our opportunity to BE with Life when we give attention to the meaning-making mechanism of ego-identity’s labeling and interpreting.”
“When we believe the meanings [that] conditioning attaches to what is, when we engage with the conversation in our heads that maintains those meanings, we struggle in a dualistic world filled with bad and good, attempting to cling to pleasure and avoid pain. Here, in the present, there is Life as is, and there’s nothing wrong with any of it.”
“When we begin Awareness Practice, it is necessary to learn to recognize egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate in whatever forms it takes. We sit in meditation and become familiar with ego’s shenanigans, simply observing it as it does what it does. In this way it becomes clear that ego-identity is the conditioned response to whatever arises in life, and that it is absolutely devoted to suffering. . . . Once we are adept at recognizing its tactics, we stop engaging with it.”
“We transcend conditioned mind, we do not resist it.”
“The Buddha taught that we are here to work out our own salvation, diligently. Implicit in that teaching is that we are fully equipped to do so, that we are adequate to our Life experience. In fact, throughout our Life path, we are encountering exactly what we need to transcend, should we choose to. On the other hand, ego-I presents itself as supremely inadequate. It is focused on altering life circumstances in order to avoid what Life is presenting.”
“Ideas about hope and possibilities are ruses conditioning uses to ensure attention is not on the peace of oneness with the present moment.”
“Being is an unfamiliar state. Most conditioned humans feel acute discomfort when faced with ‘nothing to do.’ We idealize that state but seldom enjoy it. . . . Being is spacious, timeless; it’s relaxed grace, effortless unfolding, a perfect symphony of movement and stillness.”
“In the present, nothing ever repeats. ‘Past’ is an illusion. There is no ‘before,’ just as there is no ‘next.’ There is only now. This moment is new, you are new, everything is new.”
All of the above quotes are from Cheri Huber’s book I Don’t Want To, I Don’t Feel Like It: How Resistance Controls Your Life and What To Do About it.