Why Frogs Are Important in Your Practice of Meditation

When a frog is a frog, Zen is Zen.

So what do frogs have to do with Zen? In fact, what do frogs have to do with anything remotely spiritual? A frog’s just a frog, right? It sits there on its lily pad, croaking away, just being a frog! It doesn’t meditate, it doesn’t chant mantras (unless you count the croaking of course!) and it’s not trying to achieve enlightenment.

And that’s the point. The frog is just being a frog. But when we sit to meditate, we imagine that we’re doing something spiritual or special (we’re not), and that we might be able to achieve some goal (we won’t).

It was the great Zen sage, Shunryu Suzuki, that said that when we sit to meditate, we should just sit to sit. That’s all. Just sit to sit. We’re not doing anything special, we’re not trying to be something or achieve something. We just sit to sit and in that way we express our true nature. Just like the frog is not trying to be a frog, it just is a frog.

Can you let go of the feeling of ‘doing something spiritual’ when you sit to meditate and let go of the need to be or achieve something? When you can do that, you truly are doing something spiritual!

I’ll be running another of the official Breathworks Mindfulness for Stress courses very soon. It’s an 8-week, accredited, deep dive into the practice and theory behind mindfulness meditation and how it can benefit you in daily life.

You probably won’t be enlightened at the end of it (but who knows?!), but you certainly will learn how to transform your life, just by sitting to sit.

Keep an eye on my courses page here for further details when the course is available again. I only run one or two of these courses a year, so if you miss this one, it could be some time before there’s another opportunity.

Check out the link here to my courses page for all the latest courses that I’m running and don’t forget to keep any eye on deep dive retreats in various locations around the world.

Steve

PS. My students in Egypt who wish to attend should contact me for details of how to pay in Egyptian pounds.