Joko Beck Quotes

#1. 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.

Joko Beck

#2. There are many people in the world who feel that if only they had a bigger car, a nicer house, better vacations, a more understanding boss, or a more interesting partner, then their life would work. We all go through that one. Slowly we wear out most of our 'if onlies.'

Joko Beck

#3. Life is a second-by-second miracle.

Joko Beck

#4. 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.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#6. We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.

Joko Beck

#7. We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#9. 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.'

Joko Beck

#10. Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television.

Joko Beck

#11. Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don't want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#14. We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life ...

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#16. 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.

Joko Beck

#17. Our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#19. If I were to tell you that your life is already perfect, whole, and complete just as it is, you would think I was crazy. Nobody believes his or her life is perfect. And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#22. 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.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#24. 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.

Joko Beck

#25. 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.

Joko Beck

#26. Meditation is not about doing something

Joko Beck

#27. How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don't know. We can't know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it's there.

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#29. 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.

Joko Beck