Letting Everything Become Your Teacher

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about how everything can become your teacher. So there's a story from a meditation teacher, Larry Rosenberg, about his experience of meditating in the forests of Thailand. So after many years, There's a Zen monk in Korea. He goes on this journey to Thailand to study in this particular tradition, the Thai forest tradition.

And so what he didn't realize is that he also, on this journey to Thailand, took a whole bunch of expectations about what his experience was going to be like there. So he arrived. He was assigned his lodging there. And he was going to be in this small hut each day with an attendant bringing him food. He was just going to be in isolation, just meditating.

So there he was at this retreat, this place where he came to cultivate inner peace in a serene forest. And it turned out that this particular forest was overrun by loud, screeching, scratching, wild chickens. This was not what he was expecting. So as he started to meditate, he started to think to himself, you know, how am I supposed to be at peace with all of this noise around me? My retreat is ruined. I came all this way just for this.

So he started to feel really distressed and defeated and disappointed. But after enduring his own annoyance, frustration, and dismay day after day, he finally realized he had a choice. He cannot control all of those wild chickens, but he could control his response to them. He could choose to keep resisting the fact that the wild chickens were there or he could accept them. Now, as he chose to accept the presence of these chickens, all the negativity and annoyance in him melted away and he found peace in the middle of it all.

As the story shows, our teachers can appear in our lives at any time in the most unexpected ways. And if we're curious, open and willing, we can receive gave teachings from the most surprising sources. Stranger on the street, curious child, an illness, a loud neighbor, even from chickens. To recognize these teachers, all we need to do is stay receptive to being taught. When you do that, life itself and everything that unfolds within it becomes an opportunity to shape your ongoing development in awakening.

As Bruce Lee once said, "Life is your teacher and you can be in a constant state of learning." So that's the invitation for practice today is to let everything become your teacher. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here. And let's settle in for today's meditation.