I used to carry around a cartoon that depicted a beautifully robed monk with a Japanese shoji screen behind him, everything perfectly in its place—and behind the screen everything was complete chaos  •  it’s very tempting to create a façade of tranquility and peacefulness in our meditation practice and ignore what’s behind the screen: the roiling emotions and thoughts, the confusion and history and regrets  •  how do we unify our world so there’s not a front and a back, a side we present to ourselves and others, and a side where everything is hidden?  •  it’s tempting to think we can create some kind of pristine experience for ourselves, and just ditch the rest—the messiness, the embarrassment, the regrets—so we can hang out in a peaceful and serene place... but we still have this lingering, lurking collection behind the screen  •  but here’s the twist: to the extent that we begin to let go of clinging to our “front of the screen” experience of serenity or peace, to the extent that we loosen our attachment to a particular state of mind, we discover a deeper kind of peace and tranquility, one that comes from incorporating the whole thing  •  I call this “peacefulness in the midst.”

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