Elena Brower

Turns out that it's an old Chinese sutra from probably in the 700s, Chuang Tzu,

Chan, predecessor to Zen, obviously, the Japanese teachers went to China to find their teachers, took the teachings back to Japan, and it became Zen.

And it said, welcome nothing, refuse nothing, reflect everything, hold nothing.

And this was told to me over dinner in Japan some couple of years ago when I was there with my teacher and we were on pilgrimage.

And I was just sitting with a friend and he said this.

And I just lit up.

I wrote it in three different places in my notebook.

And then it came back to me like a year or two years later with my friend saying, I'd love for you to hold nothing at all.

And I think for folks like us, you and I, we've just confirmed that we came up at the same time and we both kind of were really going for it, shaping this, whatever you want to call it, industry movement.

For us to let go of that and to let it be shaped by itself and to let go of the notion even that we had anything to do with it is what she was implying and what the sutra is implying.

In the context of a relationship, letting the person become new

We're all constantly shedding a million cells and, you know, our bodies are changing.

We're becoming less elastic in cellular form and more elastic, I think, in our minds if we pay attention.

And to let this person to whom we've become habituated become who they are without pigeonholing them into where we think they are, who we think they are.

that's kind of where it lands in relationship.

I think this holding nothing.

Traditions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.