Your journal can be about anything you want. You may not know what to write about and that’s okay. It is a great tool for writing anywhere and keeping your work in one place. It will save all your work and date it for you, so you never need to remember. It will make your journal writing incredibly easy-to-use, accessible, organized and private. Penzu is a digital journal that will allow you to write from any device. Buy a physical journal or Sign-up for Penzu An office or a study room is always great. Make sure you are able to sit upright and are comfortable. Allow yourself to focus on your writing, without any interruptions. A quiet room with no distractions works best. When you’re writing, it is helpful to be in a space where you can focus and concentrate. By scheduling the same times, journaling will become a natural and regular part of your agenda that you can look forward to. Pick a time and the days of the week you will want to write and create a timely calendar reminder, so you don't forget. You want to turn your writing into a habit, so create a schedule. Set up a schedule of when you play to write in your journal. Once you’ve decided you want to create a journal, here is a long list of instructions to guide you: You don’t even need to decide what to write, you just need to let your words flow. You don’t have to write well, you just need to want to do it. To start a journal, you just need to be willing to write. Writing is a great exercise for anyone and by expressing yourself in a personal place is a wonderful way to stay sane. How do you remember all of them? How do you keep them organized? A great way to keep your thoughts organized and clear your mind is to write them down in a journal. You have to-do lists, hopes, dreams, secrets, failures, love, loss, ups and downs. All those thoughts and ideas bouncing around can sometimes feel overwhelming. Instead of a teacher assigning you a koan, Life brings its own mystery to solve.We keep a lot of things in our heads, but we put less down on paper. It may appear as a question you just can’t answer or solve, and like koan practice you keep returning to this riddle for years. Life itself presents its own koans to us if we are examining closely. Best to let all of them wash through us and let them go. The other way the adventure gets muddied is all the enlightenment stories which, once again, are someone else’s attempt to describe something indescribable. These reflect spontaneous encounters that are for us now just stories of someone else’s adventure. It can never be enough to read the stories about the encounters of Zen masters and their students or to take one of the well know koans in the collections and take it for oneself. For those who have never been given a koan or hua tou to investigate, how do you proceed? “ When working at Zen” – Po Shan gives us a few guidelines to help steer this wandering path we are on. Only then can one be considered as having drawn near the entrance of Tao.Įxcerpted from The Practice of Zen – Chang Chen-chi 1959 out of print One who has really attained the state of flexible hollowness sees no world without and no body or mind within. It lacks nothing and nothing remains in it.” The masters of old said: “Tao, like the great Void, is all-inclusive. In this moment heaven spins, and the earth somersaults. In the moment of awakening, the clouds vanish and the clear sky shines vast and empty nothing can obscure it. In other words, one should exert all one’s strength to penetrate into the hua tou, pressing one’s mind to the utmost in order to achieve realization.ĭo not misunderstand what I have said and just wait for awakening to come. Likewise enlightenment is not so attained, but comes on its own when conditions are ripe. Flowers cannot bloom by waiting, but blossom of themselves when the time has come. One cannot by waiting awaken from a dream, but one does so automatically when the time for sleep is over. One must press forward with all one’s mind to get this enlightenment.Īttainment of the great enlightenment is like the sudden blossoming of the lotus flower or the sudden awakening of a dreamer. Likewise, when working at Zen, one never reaches enlightenment merely by waiting for it. This is like a traveler who sits idly by the road and expects his home to come to him. When working at Zen, one should not just await the coming of enlightenment with an expectant mind.
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