Everyday Zen
A Zen guide to the problems of daily living, love, relationships, work, fear and suffering. Combining earthly wisdom with spiritual enlightenment, it describes how to live each moment to the full and shows the relevance of Zen to every aspect of life.
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3recommend
3mentions
3people
2010–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I just finished Everyday Zen by Charlotte "Joko" Beck, and it's very pragmatic and good, IMO, though you won't learn a lot of doctrine from it.
Zen is not a good Buddhist tradition to start with unless you have a skilled personal teacher, IMO. I would recommend starting with something like dhammatalks.org instead. (Click on the "For Beginners" header near the bottom of the page.)
- A great counterpart to this book might be Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. The Mind Illuminated is a technical manual for meditation practice; Everyday Zen is more about how to think of the rest of your life while you’re not meditating as practice. (It’s not much about Zen specifically either; it’s author just happened to be a practitioner of Zen.)
- You are not doing anything wrong. You're just like every single other human ever to exist. The way you describe your problem makes me believe that some manner of Zen/Mindfulness approach would be appealing to you.
"I have a difficult time relating attempted solutions because I'm still not sure what the problem is."
To me, this says that you've already found the fundamental truth of desire-- you cannot sate it with its own ends, as counterintuitive as that is. I realize this is starting to sounds like the dreaded "get religion" solution, but there's no magic or mystery in these approaches. Just 2500 years of close examination human life.
Two specific, small things: I recommend a short, easy book, "Everyday Zen" by Charlotte Joko Beck. Try to sit still and just breathe for around 20 minutes. It's just as easy and just as hard as it sounds.
