Many of the customers here are traveling all over the world so they need multiple types of clothes. That's one thing about Urban Zen - it is seasonless and it is timeless. So it's not about the fashion of a moment saying, "I have to have it now." It's something that you become a part of...sort of like a sari.
— Donna Karan
Staggering Zen Like quotations
Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.
I have a deep-seated distrust and even contempt for people who are driven by ambition to conquer the world … those who cannot control themselves and produce vast amounts of crap that no one cares about. I find it unattractive. I like the Zen artists: they’d do some work, and then they’d stop for a while.
If you try to grasp Zen in movement, it goes into stillness.
If you try to grasp Zen in stillness, it goes into movement. It is like a fish hidden in a spring, drumming up waves and dancing independently.
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.
This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
When a garden is used as a place to pause for thought, that is when a Zen garden comes to life. When you contemplate a garden like this it will form as lasting impression on your heart.
Life should be touched, not strangled.
To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.
Quality tends to fan out like waves.
To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you cannot eat.
Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution because in a most Zen-like fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no one at the same time.
The ultimate test's always your own serenity.
If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.
I feel like I'm being too Zen. I'm inhaling too much patchouli and incense. It's embarrassing.
To set up what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind.
To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point;
we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.
Golf is a spiritual game. It's like Zen. You have to let your mind take over.
Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.
There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.
I have developed a Zen-like approach to the operating systems that people use: 'When you're ready, the right operating system will appear in your life.
If you ask Zen people they will say; tea is not something that you pour with unawareness and drink like any other drink. It is not a drink, it is meditation; it is prayer. So they listen to the kettle creating a melody, and in that listening they become more silent, more alert.
Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?
Watermelons and Zen students grow pretty much the same way.
Long periods of sitting till they ripen and grow all juicy inside, but when you knock them on the head to see if they're ready sounds like nothing's going on.
Life shoould be touched, not strangled.
You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at other move forward with it.
Like the moon on the water, in a way.
When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.
I live part-time in a cabin in Colorado up in the mountains and part-time on a ranch in central Texas - but do I really know how to go brand a cow, or do I really know how to go rappelling down a cliff? No. I do the recreational, half-assed version of all these manly activities and then try to keep that kind of Zen masculinity, like, "I'm a man of nature."
But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.
Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.
I think I can pinpoint the moment when my first band recorded, when I was 14 and 15 years old. I always enjoyed writing songs and playing, but there was something about going in and capturing it that felt very Zen and perfect for me. A light switch went on and I just realized that's where my musical capacity was the most suited. I just followed on blind faith that that was like a calling for me.
I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.
I suppose what I like about Zen is that the teachers are constantly questioning your insight and challenging it, looking for sloppiness or laziness in it, and ways you can go past that.
So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.
I make sure I have the best: I figure you could spend $800 on an outfit you wear three times, but with your hair it's there all the time. I also think it is really important to look after your colour once it's been done. I try and give my hair a really nourishing mask every so often to combat against all the styling. I also love to have beauty treatments that really benefit, like massages. t's divine to get up and feel all zen and relaxed.
Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"
