Who we really are is the fabric of the moment.
Valerie Forstman delivers the final talk in the 2021 summer solstice retreat. She summarizes that, though the four days of the retreat, we have been cultivating simple awareness of “what is now.” Our job, as humans who want to experience life fully, is to simply pay attention. Valerie asks, what is your truly original and unencumbered self and what difference does it make to see it?
To explore this question Valerie turns to a koan about hearing and how that might include, listening, emptying, realizing, returning; Case 46 from the Blue Cliff Record: Sound of the Raindrops.
Photo by Niklas Ohlrogge on Unsplash