Taigu responded to a post I made in the "Is Zazen the highlight of your day?" thread, that leads me to a question, or rather a request for tips on how to deepen my practice. Taigu said,
I feel that the path I am on is helping me to a greater understanding of the Dharma everyday, but I do not feel that this is enough. There are still times when I won't let another car in front of me at an intersection because I'm in a rush and I'll think afterwards, " Well that wasn't very compassionate of me." or my son will be sitting behind me on the couch and regardless of how many times I have told him to cover his mouth when he sneezes, will sneeze directly overtop of me and cover me in snot (true story) and I will loose my temper and later think, "That was not in keeping with the Precept on Anger." Sometimes a person will cut me off in traffic and I will curse them and stew about it for the rest of the day, knowing full well that they might have been in an emergency (they might have cut me off to take their son to the hospital for all I know), and if they didn't have an emergency and just cut me off because they felt like it, I know that that karma and the karma of their other actions is theirs to bear. Later, sometimes much later, I'll think about that and feel bad for how I reacted in the moment, what if they really did have an emergency? How could I not be understanding? What if they cut me off because they were just trapped by their delusions and desires? How unfortunate for them, how I wish I could help them get free from that. But that's only later. In that moment, and sometimes for a while afterwards, I react as though I did before coming to the Way.Trying is extra. Trying is misleading, I am afraid. Allow your practice to flow into your life and let your life turn into practice, allow the moment where you cannot separate one from the other. That's practice. Otherwise you are pretty caught up in the trying and trying again.
So, my question is..... How do you guys and gals keep the faith in your every day lives? What helps you to speak and act from a place of buddha-nature, when things pop up through out the day? How do you live your practice? And do you have set backs? Or rather, is it as difficult for any of you as it seems to sometimes be for me?
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Originally Posted by SNPII
