Joko Beck Quotes

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

Joko Beck

#2. When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#3. 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

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

Joko Beck

#5. Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there's no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#7. Joy is being the circumstances of our life just as they are.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#8. 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

#9. We're constantly waking up to what we're about, what we're really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that's painful. But there's no possibility of freedom without this pain.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#10. Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#12. If we can accept things just the way they are, we're not going to be greatly upset by anything.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#13. Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#15. 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

#16. That's essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#17. When we're lost in thought, when we're dreaming, what have we lost? We've lost reality. Our life has escaped us.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#18. 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

#19. If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won't be threatened.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#20. We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#21. Religion really means to rejoin that which seems to be separate.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#22. 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

#23. Meditation is not about doing something

Joko Beck

#24. My dog doesn't worry about the meaning of life.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#25. In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#26. If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as "I'm a good person for doing this" or "Isn't it wonderful, that I can take care of everything?," then that would be sufficient.

Charlotte 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Joko Beck

#33. 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

#34. Daily sitting is our bread and butter, the basic stuff of dharma. Without it we tend to be confused.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#35. Who is there?" asks God. "It is I." "Go away," God says ... Later ... "Who is there?" asks God. "It is Thou." "Enter," replies God.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#36. We have a fictional "I" that we try to love and protect. We spend most of our life playing this futile game. "What will happen? How will it go? Will I get something out of it?" I, I, I - it's a mind game of illusion, and we are lost in it.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#41. The best way to let go is to notice the thoughts as they come up and to acknowledge them.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#43. If we have the patience to wait until the mud (our mind) settles and the water is clear, if we remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself, the right words will arise, without our thinking about them.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#44. 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

#45. At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#46. We all have to practice, and we have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#47. 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

#48. Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#49. 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

#50. It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#51. Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#52. We enter a discipline like Zen practice so that we can learn to live in a sane way.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck

#55. 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

#56. Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.

Charlotte Joko Beck

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

Joko Beck