Angel City Zen Center - Beginners Only Podcast

In the long awaited premier to Emily's new in depth series on the precepts, she takes us on a wild ride through 2500 years of making and breaking the rules, as we whittle an unwieldy set of hundreds of vows down to the familiar 16 that we Zennies know and love today. Join us as we find Buddha laying down the law about the proper relationship one should have with a monkey (respectful of course...)...

Emily brings us Dogen at his most poignant and poetic as he gives us a rousing pep talk for practice, complete with inspiring stories and exhortations on giving up everything except for all of the bounty you already possess in every moment. Fame and profit? Who needs it. The body? No big deal! Its the endless path of existential ease, and Dogen and Emily are the perfect team to inspire us to it.

Dave opens up his own inquiry into the precepts with a deep look at the sounds of silence that ultimately animate everything we do. Dragon's moan, persimmon's speak, and a snake loses its head in a free wheeling talk filled with poetry that reads like koans, koans that read like poetry, and to top it all off Dave throws in some personal stories of the times when doing it wrong had a peculiar way o...

In a glowing reminder of what exactly we're doing here and why we do it, Sara generously shares her personal practice story of turning her back on church and finding the sacred that lies just beyond the strange. She tells us about losing trust in yourself only to realize yourself as part of something much, much bigger. And, in a tradition admittedly short on coddling, she reminds us about the comm...

Dave tries to answer the question of whether our zazen is actually working with an in depth look at Dongshan's Five Ranks and the last time Soto Zen accidentally created a gradated system for practice.

In our ongoing series of sangha members sharing their personal practice stories, Cat Kilmer takes us on a quest of love and non duality through ashrams, yoga studios, and heartbreaks to find revelations, disillusionments, and an ultimately simple little truth beckoning to us from the wall.

In another timely talk, Emily tackles Dogen's "Ceaseless Practice," where Dogen opens up in personal terms about his own struggles with the frustrations of an endless practice. How is giving up practice is still part of practice? What do they mean "let go of letting go of attachments" and can we still love our loved ones? How does our practice create the whole universe?? How can we make friends wi...

In a special History of Zen, Dave turns to the life and poetry of Ikkyu to try to answer the question of how Zen has historically responded to times of crisis. In Ikkyu’s case the answer was great art, bad behavior, and a desperate need to get to the ultimate truth of a world that felt like it had left any such thing behind. Join us as Dave brings us his compelling life story along with some bawdy...

“Why crave happiness, why push away the sadness. Why not just let everything be? We put so much energy into resisting the things we have no control over (which is actually everything), it’s a little silly.” - Emily Eslami

Our favorite in house psychiatrist, Erik, gives a perfect combination of ancient Zen and modern expert advice for managing a time of stress & anxiety.

Jason Dodge tells us the story of what he’s doing and why he’s here, while just maybe we learn something about those things for ourselves. In an especially warm and fuzzy installment, the sangha doubles down and shares their own stories too!

Dave gives us an in depth look into the Buddhist creation myth. it's the question Buddha famously  refused to answer (except of course for when he changed his mind). It's a beginning in an ending and a story with no beginning and no ending. It's a story of nothing that confused itself for something, and was cursed to wander for endless kalpas trying to forget that one pesky thought. What the hell...

Let’s talk about love! We all know Zen can be reluctant to talk about mushy things like love and kindness, but Emily bravely tackles loving kindness head on in the latest installment of her series on the Bramaviharas. From Buddha, to Dogen, to us, it’s a 2500 year long epic love story where the happy ending is always right here and now. How do we love the people we hate? (Boundlessly!) How do we l...

In our latest installment of History of Zen, Dave gets very excited about sharing one of his favorite books with us that also happens to be the original defining text of Zen as we know it. In this 1300 year old sutra, Dave reads to us the warm words of our self professed good friend Huineng, who offers up a surprisingly modern take on secular spirituality. With humble wit and good humor, Huineng l...

Michele Roldan-Shaw spins classic Jataka Tales (folk tales of the Buddha's past lives) for us with all their ambiguities, tough love, and hard choices. We get to meet sea spirits, unruly crows, guilt ridden partridges, and yes a renunciant hermit disappointing his parents, all running around out there trying to figure out how to be decent beings in a world that rarely wants to make that easy for u...

Erik looks at anxiety in a wide ranging and well informed discussion of everything from the intricacies of classic Zen literature to contemporary psychology and all the vulnerable (and personal) twists and turns he takes to be able to share them with us. With readings from the great Huangpo, and tips and techniques from the latest in mental health science, Erik generously presents us with his own...

In the year 757 in the middle of a catastrophic civil war surrounded by ruins and disaster, a monk named Shenhui stands on a hastily built grass platform and invents Zen as we know it with fiery speeches of enlightenment right here and now. The country, and the fledgling Buddhist school, are torn apart and put back together into something new and unique in world history. Continuing our series on S...

Dave reads us excerpts from Suzuki's talk "The Bluejay Will Come Right Into Your Heart" and adds some of his own commentary on embracing distraction, sound and listening as practice, and fighting the urge to run after sirens. Along the way we get good advice on how to thoroughly hate the person next to sitting next to you on retreat, why maybe enlightenment is more trouble than it's worth, and how...

Emma Roy takes us on a journey through one of our favorite pieces of Zen writing, The Harmony of Difference and Equality. We get a poetic reading of the piece, helpful context of the why, when, and where it comes from, and commentary from the great Sunryu Suzuki himself. The sangha runs with the conversation in a wide ranging discussion about how to measure time from the moving platform of life, w...

In the year 700, a humble mountain monk named Shenxiu was called to the Chinese capitol by the Empress Wu. Within just a few years he almost single handedly made Zen the foremost religious school in China and was universally recognized as the greatest spiritual teacher of his time. Emperors bowed to him, thousands converted. For the first time, Zen was cool. But within decades of his death, Shenxi...

Dave Cuomo delves into Nishijima’s Four Views with SOAR!, the handy four letter acronym that explains all reality. It’s the “philosophy of action” that Nishijima humbly tells us is “the solution to western philosophy.” It’s the place where the rubber meets the road, where your subjective experience meets an objective world that might very mush disagree, and the great sparks of reality that fly whe...

Emily Eslami gives us a Zen take on sympathetic joy. With readings from Dogen, Sawaki, the Pali Canon and more she takes us through on honest and vulnerable look at the difficulty of taking selfless joy in the successes of others, even when that seems really hard to do…

Jack Taylor regales us with his personal practice story as part of our ongoing series where sangha members try to answer the question of what they’re doing and why they’re here in the off chance that we might learn something about those things for ourselves. This month Jack looks at the fits and starts to maintaining a regular practice and how falling off the wagon can be just the push you need to...

I wish I could tell you this was the talk where Emily unveils the secret Zen teachings on immortality, but alas, as you probably could have guessed, that's not what we do here (at least not publicly...). But just as helpfully (if not more), Emily instead gives us a thoughtful and thorough exploration of Zen teachings on death. Starting with Buddha's (quite graphic) recommended meditations on the u...

He's the man, the myth, the legendary founder of Zen himself. Some claim he never existed, some claim his eyelids invented tea leaves while he was off inventing kung fu in his down time. Clearly he is a legend that cannot be ignored, and Dave gives us the full scoop as we finally get to the story of Zen itself and its beginnings in ancient China. Dave claims this might be the greatest story ever t...