Rebecca Hines shared the following parable in class this week:
A Zen monk asked his students, If you’re carrying a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you, why did you spill the coffee?
All the students answered because someone bumped into me. But he said, No. You spilled the coffee because coffee was in your cup. If you’d had water in your cup, you would have spilled water. If tea was in your cup, then you would have spilled tea.
This is such a beautiful forgiveness practice!
A Hawaiian practice for forgiveness or reconciliation, it works outside the bounds of imagination or understanding, in a realm of love and illumination.
Why is forgiveness so hard? When it’s so important and so healing to forgive?
Our egos have our necks in their teeth, that’s why, making us SURE that we are right, that THEY are wrong, and that we must NEVER give up what is clearly our RIGHT to be RIGHT!
Huh?
There are some simple, beautiful meditative practices we can use to help heal suffering. They can provide comfort in moments of acute distress and give us confidence in our ability to move forward. And we can share them with friends. 🙂
On the first full day of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington’s weeklong 2021 fall retreat, entitled Intimacy with Life, one of my favorite of all moments came during La Sarmiento’s dharma talk. They had been speaking about their love for walking meditation, and shared, “My vow in this lifetime is to have an open heart.” (They recommended having a dimmer switch rather than an on/off one, however. 🙂
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