“When you encounter obstacles, do not see them as hindrances separate from practice.”
In this talk from the beginning of the year (and in preparation for the Year of the Fire Horse), Koshin Sensei reflects on what it really means to make effort. Not as self-improvement, but as a vow to be fully here.
Drawing on Dōgen’s teachings on continuous practice, he offers simple, direct questions we can live inside: How are you using your time? How are you caring for your body, (the personal and the collective)? Do your investments of time, finances, energy, etc. support what you say you value? And can you meet obstacles not as interruptions, but as the very field of practice?
This talk is both grounding and bracing: a reminder that practice and realization are not separate, that there’s no “arrival,” and the most honest measure of our practice might be how the people around us experience it.
With humor and warmth, Koshin invites us to return, again and again, to uprightness in this moment, and to a life shaped less by habit energy and more by vow.
