Episode
Remember Being A Flower?
- Published
- Aug 9, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1829
- Processing state
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- https://amykisei.substack.com/p/remember-being-a-flower
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Summary
Being Flower On Monday night during meditation we sat together as a community of flowers. Sun flower, daisy, rose, violet, marigold, milkweed, celosia, echinacea, blue vervain, poppy, queen anne’s lace, crocosmia, zinnia. We were studying the koan Case 19 from the Hidden Lamp, Flowers in the Buddha Hall. The nuns of Tokeiji were famous for their beautiful elaborate flower decorations on Buddha’s Birthday. Zen Teacher Yodo, the abbess wrote a verse for the occasion: Decorate the heart of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall in nowhere else. Her attendants also wrote verse. Ika wrote: Throw away into the street the years of the past. What is born now on the flower dais— let it raise its newborn cry. Why sit as a flower? It might seem foolish or arrogant. Maybe it is. But its part of the invitation of the koans. To be inhabited by them. To practice seeing through the face of a sunflower—breathing in light—deeply connected to earth and sky. Opening petal by petal into this troubled and mysterious world. Some call the wide-eyed flower jasmine. Some call the wide-eyed flower thorn. The wide-eyed flower doesn’t care what you call it. I bow to such freedom. —Rumi We’ve spent our lives practicing our human conditioning. Telling ourselves things that aren’t true about our worth, our lacks. Reinforcing a sense of separation, loneliness, fear. What happens when you take-up the practice of being a flower? How does a flower respond to you human thoughts and worries? What does a flower think of your so called problems? We find flowers throughout the buddhist teachings and koans. The Buddha gave a whole sermon—holding up a flower. There are recorded stories of practitioners having awakening experiences upon seeing a flower. flowers are silent silence is silent the mind is a…