We come together to encourage each other in that. The temple is your life, your relationships your work, your mind and heart: that’s the temple. So I always say, Everyday Zen doesn’t have a temple you are supposed to go to. Real spiritual practice is the honesty and reality of each of our lives, and finding how to bring out the truth right there, instead of feeling we have to go somewhere else, and conform the shape of our lives to some pre-existing standard. There isn’t some standard we are supposed to be adhering to, some external authority we are supposed to be bowing to.

Spiritual practice isn’t some predigested pre-arranged thing.

But do we really mean them? I read this one again and thought, yes, this isn’t just talk: I really believe this, I am really serious about it. One reads many such high-minded statements one even writes them now and then. It has no location, and all that it does, it does in the spirit of collaboration and friendship, and in the faith that all of us want and need to engage in spiritual practice of some kind, to benefit ourselves and others, and that all of us can do it.” It goes on, “Everyday Zen is a people centered community. Everyday Zen’s mission is to bring the Zen attitude and spirit to the world in a variety of settings, traditional and nontraditional.” The mission statement of my organization, The Everyday Zen Foundation, says, “We believe in the possibility of engaged renunciation: being in the world but not of it, living a fully committed religious life that does not exclude family, work, and a powerful interest in the world. In this talk, Zoketsu describes key attitudes and practices for studying and practicing Zen as in a committed way within the matrix of everyday life.

Daily zen meditation