Gyodo Sensei offers a talk on the spirit of entering the Ango Practice Period as a vibrant, challenging, and sometimes wild garden of practice. The theme for our Fall Ango is "Koans of Everyday Life, Waking Up with the Eight Sufferings." Birth, aging, illness and death are four universal sufferings. The other four arise in everyday life all the time: encountering the unwanted, separation from the loved, failing to obtain desires, and clinging to the five aggregates. Working with these as koans brings us directly into uncomfortable areas of pain and confusion. Surrendering attempts to control, we open our hearts to both the joys and suffering of life as a path of awakening to our true self for the benefit of all beings.