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I always consider it quite a blessing to have found my way to the Spiritual Path. I didn’t always feel this way. I remember early on in practice wishing that I could just be satisfied with the flow of everyday life—tv, movies, music, entertainment, a regular job. As an 18 year old, I wished that the urgency of my spiritual angst wasn’t so pressing. That I could go back to normal.

I’ve heard this sentiment echoed a lot since the beginning of the pandemic. A desire for normal. When is it going to go back to the way it was? When will it go back to normal?

In Dharma practice we are encouraged to bring curiosity to the desires and pulls that arise in our minds. We are invited to ask:

What is normal?

An illusion. A phantom. A dream.

Can we ever achieve it? Is it even desirable?

When my younger self dreamed of normal, it was a dream of going back to sleep—back to the ignorance and bliss of youth. It was also a dream of finding ease within the pressing weight of my existential doubt.

My Zen teacher would often say, “the only way out is through.” There is another side, beyond the doubt, fear, confusion of the present situation. But running away, going to sleep, forgetting about it is not the way to the other side. It is only through acceptance, through being with, accompanying our apparent suffering, or our reaction to the suffering in the world, that a larger, more inclusive view emerges.

Our struggles, our challenges can be fuel for a deeper intimacy, a more enduring love, a fiercer compassion and boundless wisdom to emerge. Our desire for normal, may be a wish for a raft, some ease or ground in the midst of transformation—some reassurance that we will survive, that we will be OK.

In my experience, dharma practice offers such a raft—that develops into an embodied trust that we are held in the enduring pulse of the universe, in the spacious embrace of our true nature.

At the beginning of the year, I took up the Ox-herding pictures as a teaching inquiry and exploration for our Monday Night Online Zen Meditation group. This podcast episode is the 5th of the Ox-herding pictures, entitled—Taming the Ox.

These pictures are the stages of awakening in the Zen tradition, where we are OX and ox-herder. The OX being our true awakened nature, and the herder being our mind of both practice and habit energy.

So when we say we are herding the OX we are really herding ourselves.

And when we say the fifth picture is taming the OX, we are talking about the stage of practice where we are taming ourselves in our realization of our true nature. Despite the wonder, peace, satisfaction and beauty of awakened awareness, our habit mind seeks pleasure in fleeting desires and follows trains of thought that lead to despair, division, pain and suffering.

We are learning here to recognize our true nature, the source of ultimate happiness and to stay in or stabilize this recognition. I shared a few stanzas of The Little Prince as a way of connecting to the spirit of taming in Spiritual Practice.

"Please--tame me!" he said.

"I want to, very much," the little prince replied. "But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand."

"One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . ."

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me--like that--in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a lit