Welcome to Storyflo Daily Yoga. I'm Yui.
The teaching I want to lead with this week: per Jack Kornfield's piece "Where Does the Eightfold Path Go?" — Kornfield offers what is probably the cleanest framing I've read of the Buddhist path's geometry. People assume a path goes from here to there. The Eightfold Path, he argues, goes from there to here. It takes us from being lost back to the freedom of wisdom and love just where we are. The Buddha's line he quotes — "Just as the four great oceans have but one taste, the taste of salt, so do all of my teachings have but one taste, the taste of freedom" — is the kind of teaching that's been quoted enough to lose its edge; Kornfield restores it.
The teacher remembered: Kornfield's piece on Dipa Ma Barua, his Buddhist teacher in the Theravada lineage. She was a grandmother and householder, and also one of the most accomplished meditators of her tradition. The line Kornfield opens with is the line worth taking with you: "The first thing is to love yourself. You cannot progress by self doubt and self hatred. You can only progress by self love." The framing matters because so much contemporary spiritual-bypass language confuses self-improvement with self-love. Dipa Ma's teaching draws the line clearly.
For the meditators among us: Kornfield's "The Earth is My Witness" essay, anchored on the Buddha's line "Make your mind like the earth which receives all things steadily." The Russian cosmonauts opening — they ran into trouble on their space station, eventually returned safely, kissed the ground when they landed — is the kind of grounding metaphor that lands on first reading and continues working on second.
On the feminine in the tradition: Kornfield's piece from Spirit Rock with Ayya Anandabodhi and Ayya Santacitta — two new-generation American nuns running the small Aloka Vihara nunnery in San Francisco. Both trained 20 years in the lineage of Ajahn Chah. Worth reading for the practice-anchored discussion of joy, commitment, and living on faith. The structural point: female monastic infrastructure in Western Buddhism is being built right now by these teachers, and Kornfield's piece is the most useful entry point I've seen.
And his "Poetry of Awakening" — the meditation on coming home after a teaching trip in Costa Rica, on the mystery of crossing continents inside aluminum tubes at 38,000 feet, and on the bigger mystery beside it. A good closing essay if you've been pushing hard and need a quiet read.
That's your Storyflo Daily Yoga. Sources in the notes. Yui out.
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