How Do We See Our Life As Enough?

Barry Magid, June 20th 2026

It’s been an interesting experience editing this new collection of my talks, going over things I’ve said the last decade or so since the last book. And while occasionally there’s something I’ll come across that I’ll be surprised by — oh, I don’t remember talking about that — for the most part, you just see recurrent themes coming up over and over again. This morning I was just trying to think to myself how I would sum up some of these recurrent themes that have characterized what I’ve been talking about all these years.

It’s an interesting exercise. You might ask yourself, if you travel around to other Zen centers and see what other teachers are doing, and somebody in another center asks you, what’s Magid like? What does he teach that’s different? How would you answer that? What do you think is distinctive about what I’m saying and what we’re doing here?

So I’m going to try to talk a little bit about my own list of highlights of what I think the themes are that have emerged. And maybe the one I’ll start with is the central idea of the transformative power of leaving everything alone. Basically what we do when we sit is just leave things as they are, experiencing our mind and body in the moment, allowing them to show up in the mirror. It’s not a process of trying to change them or discipline them or shape them, but: what is it like just to stay with this moment just as it is?

In particular, I’d say one of the things I’ve stressed is how leaving things alone is not simple for us because it immediately runs up against all our curative fantasies of what we think practice is or what it’s going to do. Our whole self-organization is assembled around notions of control and fixing and improvement, and leaving anything alone is the last thing we know how to do or think to do.

Our projects fall into a couple of basic categories. One is the inner project, what I call purification — the project of trying to make the mind be what we think it ought to be, whether that’s a matter of calming the mind, purging it of what we think of as intrusive or improper thoughts or conceptions, as if we’re going to free it of any kind of conceptual intermediaries that block us from pure and immediate connection with reality. Basically, I think I’ve talked about various versions of that under the maxim that our mind is not contaminated by its contents. Zazen is not a purification process. We’re here to leave our mind alone, to watch all the ways in which we resist doing that. Not only resist doing it, but that we think our whole purpose here is to transform our mind into something else.

The other side of that particular coin of curative fantasies is the relational side. The purification side is the internal side. The relational side is one that’s typically geared towards autonomy — a way in which we rebel against interdependence, that we imagine our practice will make us either impervious to the vicissitudes of bodily or emotional or relational vulnerability, that we will somehow become stronger, more self-sufficient, more resilient. All those things are true up to a point, but there’s a way in which we have this curative fantasy that this is going to allow me to handle anything that comes my way. In particular, there’s a kind of shunning of emotional dependency or attachment or the need for love or recognition. Those things don’t get a lot of support from traditional Buddhist literature — that we might actually need love and recognition and attachment.

So probably one of the distinctive things I’ve been talking about all these years is that practice teaches us to learn to be dependent intelligently. Dependency is not something that is ever going to be eliminated through our practice. That’s a corollary to Joko’s notion of learning to suffer intelligently. The relational part isn’t going to go away either. We need to learn to be dependent intelligently.

Another theme — in a way these are all tied together and are different perspectives on the same thing — has to do with my favorite duck-rabbit image, which is my way of talking about the two sides of problem versus koan, of barrier versus gate. That basic shift in perspective back and forth is part of what happens in the course of practice. To see something as a problem is to look for a solution, to see something that needs to be fixed. But the other side is to see it as a koan, where what happens is we become non-separate from it. It becomes just this, becomes this particular embodiment of the absolute in the moment, in which nothing needs to be fixed, nothing is lacking, nothing is hidden. It’s just this.

And it’s important to remember that we need to live on both sides of that dichotomy. The goal is not to completely eliminate the relative, to eliminate the side of problems in our life, because that side is also the side of agency, the side of freedom, the side in which we’re able to say things could be otherwise and should be otherwise. It’s how we want to be able to respond to injustice, to the things that need to be changed. It’s a whole dimension of life that we don’t want to eliminate in the name of pure acceptance of everything just as it is. Too often that gets perverted into submission or resignation if we lose sight of the proper place of agency in our life.

But Zen in particular, I think, also tries to open this gate of the absolute, of things being just what they are. And in some strange sense, perfect in just being. This is the traditional dichotomy of barrier versus gate that we encounter at the very beginning in the Mumonkan, the gateless gate, the gateless barrier. We don’t have to struggle necessarily with a koan like Mu to try to somehow break through that once and for all. And there is no once and for all in this life anyway - we encounter it moment after moment.

I think this was one of Joko’s main teachings — that just the way we encounter each moment, we can see how we are facing it. Are we facing it as a gate, or are we facing it as a barrier? The barrier is characterized by our emotional resistance, our anxiety, our irritation, our expectation, our anger, all the ways in which we say, this is not it. Or there’s something wrong with this moment. There’s something lacking. All the ways we face life as not it.

I think our practice here is distinctive in that we try to look at each one of those little moments, a kind of bottom-up confrontation with the millions of little barriers we create for ourselves in the course of a day — not tackle in a top-down way this sense of Mu as an ultimate barrier that we’re going to break through, and then that breakthrough is going to trickle down once and for all into all the little barriers of everyday life. It can be fine to work from both directions, but I think what’s distinctive about Joko’s style and what we’ve done here is that bottom-up working with each one of those little moments.

And one of the ideas that I encountered in rereading some of these old talks that I particularly liked was the emphasis on the idea of finitude as a way of talking about impermanence. Talking about finitude as well as talking about mortality, and how we resist this reality of impermanence in our life. Mortality is the usual way we talk about things — the fear of death, of not being. It’s the thing that hangs over us and that we all struggle to deny, ward off. But like Mu, facing mortality is to face the big once-and-for-all problem. How do I face death? Well, we’re not going to really face that emotionally or realistically every day in every moment.

What we face in a bottom-up way is this problem of finitude — of things being this way rather than that. That I’m going to have this life, not a different life. That I’m going to be able to do some things but not others. That my partner is going to have some characteristics and qualities but not others. That my job will have certain characteristics but not others. That in a thousand little ways, we face this but not that. And how do we approach that? Is it a source of endless complaint? A sense in which something is always missing, always lacking. Why can’t I have the whole thing? Why do I have to agree to only have this one little part? That, I think, manifests in our life and our practice over and over again.

But life comes to us in particulars. Life comes to us here and now rather than there and then. And like with the problem of fixing versus acceptance, there are obviously ways in which we want to hold on to the sense of possibility and opportunity and making things different than the way they are. That’s obviously a legitimate side of every life. To lose that is to lose agency and to fall into resignation. But no matter how much agency we are able to exert, there’ll always be limits. Our arm can only stretch so far. We’re embodied and we’re limited. How do we make our peace with that in a way that is not submission or resignation? How do we find the fullness, the completeness in just this?

Our ōryōki practice is a version of that, where ōryōki means, if I remember correctly, just enough. How much are we able to take that attitude into how we experience our daily life? Is it enough? That, I think, is one measure of our practice, one other version of this gate-versus-barrier dichotomy. Do we see our life as enough, or are we always a day late, a dollar short, focusing on what’s missing, what’s lacking?

I think off the top of my head, that’s a set of Magid’s greatest hits over the years, the themes I keep coming back to. It’d be interesting to hear from you all if you have others that have been in the foreground that I’m not mentioning, or what you think the core of this practice is for you.