“I am not in the manifesting-your-dream business. I am in the waking-up-from-your dream business”

An exerpt from Karen Maezen Miller’s blog post from a couple of days ago.

Where are you?

Readers are almost never where I am, sitting side-by-side with me in a Zen retreat, using the medicine for human ills prescribed by Buddha 2500 years ago. But the distance between us still compels me to try.

I am not a bestselling author, and I don’t have the first idea how people become a success. I don’t know how to fix a relationship, manufacture happiness, or realize one’s passion. I don’t know the alchemy that turns fiction into fact or pain into pleasure. If I did know how to do that, I would be doing things the easy way. But I’m not. I am doing things the hard way. We are all doing things the hard way, as best as we can.

In short, I am not in the manifesting-your-dream business. I am in the waking-up-from-your dream business. The former is more popular and lucrative than the latter. I’m sure it is more temporarily uplifting, inspiring and entertaining. What it entertains is fantasy. I don’t put my faith in fantasy. I put my faith in the path you least desire, the path you most avoid, and the option of having no other option.

All my faith is in the practice of simply noticing where you are, seeing things as they appear, and neither clinging to nor rejecting them. I don’t know where you are going to end up and neither do you. Life’s purpose is to keep going, step by step, using the smallest increments and the easiest implements – using what’s at hand. This is the faith that sustains me because it is real, not what is yearned for, imagined, or guessed at….(read the rest here)