Zen

...in everyday life

It has been many times now. A look into the mirror has taught me so much. From Who am I, to I am That - every spiritual truth has expressed itself so beautifully when I look into the mirror.see myself in reflection.

Once I saw my face on a glass pane of a car moving ahead of me. I saw myself. But I thought at first that the face I saw was me. But then every reflection shared its space on that single glass pane - the other motorists and their vehicles, the trees, the birds that flew past, the blue sky, the sun and all it's glory. I saw myself indeed! It took just a moment before my mind expanded from 'i' to I - the little me to the big universal myself.

I realised today why tea is most celebrated in the land of Zen. Today I sat on a jute swing to spend some quiet moments with a cup of the brown liquid. Beside me, on a bookshelf was Adi Sankara's Dakshinamurthy Stotra - verses that tell that this Universe is a solid dream, just as the one we have in sleep is an amorphous transient one.

Seeing the name Dakshinamurthy took me to my being of Silence that the incarnation of Shiva is said to embody.

I sipped my tea in this thought and I discovered that the liquid was flowing through consciousness, in the space of the foodpipe connecting the mouth with the stomach. It simply travels through silence and rests there for a while. Anything eaten, drunk, spoken or done are just movements in consciousness. That I call some Zen Tea!

- Swahilya Shambhavi