"Zen practice teaches you to completely be yourself — if you don’t, who will? Someone’s got to hold down your corner of the universe, and no one else is qualified. If you are not fully present in your life, there will be an absence in the world where you should be. That absence won’t be big or small, it will be the exact same size as your presence — perfectly you-sized."
Shozan Jack Haubner is the pen name of a Zen monk who wrote Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk. His essays have appeared in The Sun, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, The New York Times, as well as in the Best Buddhist Writing book series.
Haubner turns out to be an idiosyncratic monastic whose quirky experiences enable him to say a few things about monastic life, his life-threatening encounters with illness, the death of a friend, and the problems which shook the foundations of his Zen community.
With large doses of creativity and elan, this monk calls himself "a middle-way manager" who ponders the meaning of patience, sexual urges, humility, vulnerability, and the shelf life of a human being. Haubner uses humor as a spiritual tool that helps him stay on his spiritual journey.
