Brooklyn Zen Center

If you look deeply at where the body ends, you can’t find an end to it.  That is how much we are not separated from anything.  So this idea of separation is an illusion, it’s a inaccurate way of perceiving.

The freedom will be in the allowance of the arising, not in the arrangement of the arising.

It starts to become really clear that […] responding to the difficulties of our lives often requires the energy of others. That being with others, our daily routine that we take for granted, is often the way we gather the strength and energy to meet our lives.

So when we sit in zazen, our karmic patterns come up. And we have an opportunity to see them and to not act on them, to let them fall away. So in that sense we acknowledge them, we see them and in that moment of acknowledging we can take responsibility. So it is a two-part process. There is an acknowledgment of it, and a avowing, which is a take on responsibility and the possibility of space aroun...

We are doing this work of undoing, which is not easy. It’s really having this courage to go into places that you actually don’t want to see. A lot of times we don’t want to see how we oppress others. We don’t want to see how we oppress ourselves. Gender wise, or it could be race, class, age — there are so many kinds of ways that we oppress in this world. And so to really look at how we do th...

The bodhisattva’s job is to care for the pain of the world, not to take care of the problems of the world…. Who in the world can take care of all of this? None of us can take care of all of this, except all of us. And the way all of us take care of all of this is by caring for the pain that is here.

This practice, this way of understanding, this way of knowing, is crafted in such a way that we have access to freedom in each and every moment of our waking hours. The freedom that I am speaking to is the freedom from the conditioning, the freedom from being reactivated in response to conditions or persons or circumstances. The freedom to be who we are, unafraid. The freedom to be able to meet wh...

All I can do is cultivate conditions that are conducive for a vow to emerge. […] Vow is not something I generate out of my own power. It’s something that happens in community and relationship with others and through a practice that cultivates the conditions for it to emerge.

In the knowing that needs no words, the entire reality of the thinking mind is called into question.

The ceremony of zazen is a ceremony of non-separation. It’s our intention to sit down and be with everything. This is how we start working with those many moments of painful separation, of harm enacted upon us, or that we have enacted upon another – all the vulnerability of our humanness.

We all, just like Siddhartha Gautama did, run back to the palace for a bit. We learn about the suffering of the world, we feel it, we run back to the palace. We come out again, we feel it, we run back to the palace. Until we come out enough that we decide: “Ok, I am not going back to the palace, I am staying here. I am going to understand what is going on, I am going to understand why we do this t...

We are being confronted with the amplification of centuries of historic pain that just seems to want to be acknowledged, demanding our attention, demanding we reckon with it.    

We are a very small circle of water. We are not complete. The truth or liberation comes from all the truth manifesting, just like the plum trees – southern branch and northern branch. As they are. As we all are.

Buddha activity is accepting that this conversation may never end, the conversation with evil. It isn’t just accepting it. It’s accepting working with it, it’s accepting responding to it appropriately.

Letting go – real letting go – is letting go that doesn’t abandon the pain. It’s being there completely with it and, through that complete compassion with it, pain is released, without being abandoned, or exiled or tampered with. Compassion respects pain, right now, the way it is. It lets it be. It doesn’t touch it, it doesn’t turn away, it’s right there.

We are being called to compassion. Everybody is calling us to compassion. All the phenomena within our own mind are calling for compassion.  

Buddha activity is a pivotal activity. The pivotal activity of Buddhas can be called zazen. […] It’s the way Buddha or Great Awakening is pivoting with all living beings.

I have been thinking about waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night. It’s my first vow of the day to liberate all beings and it’s my last thought at the end of the day to vow to liberate all beings? And can I try to encourage that in myself? […] Because we know the suffering of the world and we are moved to respond to it.  

I have hope because I think the virus has actually caught our attention. I have hope because it has stopped us in our tracks. I have hope that maybe this time we will rethink our relationship to the Earth, to this living miracle. […] That maybe we can live in gratitude for this gift of life.    

One day you may be serving food. One day you may be ringing a bell. It’s all the same. It’s all about doing that practice together with intention and with, dare we say, love. And it’s about getting in each other’s way. And it’s about knowing when to move. And knowing when to say the appropriate thing, when to correct. When to accept correction.

How can we become a community that fosters awakening to these systems of harm, in our bodies and between us? I want to understand how we can go beyond a fragile superficial harmony in our community to be a better community, to be truly anti-racist. To tear apart what we have to tear apart, to take responsibility for what we have to take responsibility – a loving responsibility, a loving accountabi...

Along with dukkha and the dust of our delusion, there is love and kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. And this is where our Zen practice really begins.

I would like to mention a practice I learned from Dr. T. (a professor at Union Theological Seminary), that he termed the “hospitality of receiving.” […] In this practice, it is possible to meet one another with an attitude of openness and humility, as opposed to a colonialist mode of domination or appropriation. […] That act of receiving is also an act of hospitality &#8211...

There’s always been suffering in the world – nothing new. But these days, I think, we are given the gift to notice it more. We also have the gift of noting that pretty much everybody in the world is kind of suffering right now. There always are, but we don’t notice it. And now we have this gift to feel connected. We have the opportunity to actually, everyday, be with the suffering of people everyw...