Daily Quote and Video: Virginia Woolf and Suzuki Roshi on Beginner's Mind

At what point do we start to get overly concerned with future and past? This quote from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf caught our attention today. At what point is the innocence of the present moment lost to the anxious fixation on future and past? That is an eternal question. Suzuki Roshi used the phrase Beginner's Mind, or "shoshin" to elucidate the mind that does not get trapped in the quicksand of past regrets and future worries.

Daily Quote:

"Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss."

-Virginia Woolf

Daily Video: