Desert Rain Zen

Send us Fan Mail Sarah Bender Roshi gives her first talk on the opening night of the Springs Mountain Sangha Retreat, on March 9. * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.   Desert Rain Zen podcasts are free. If you'd like to support our podcasting an...

Send us Fan Mail In these talks from the last evening of retreat, Tenney returns to Zhaozhou's mondos and talks about how they show different ways of knowing, and subject-object relationships. Megan comes back to the theme of the knowing body and explored the relational and collective field of awakening.   * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activitie...

Send us Fan Mail Megan gives the third night talk at our spring retreat focusing on Zhaozhou. She explores the crucial ways in which Zhaozhou’s teaching not only emphasizes our ordinary mind and our actual lives, but does so by inducing us to ground ourselves in our embodied experience, in our actual bodies, where prajna is already at home. * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney gives the second night talk at our spring retreat focusing on Zhaozhou. Bringing in several short Zhaozhou mondo, Tenney talks briefly about some of what he’s noticed keeping company with these short dialogues, and then opens things up for a koan conversation. * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as h...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney and Megan give the opening night talks at our spring 2026 retreat, which focuses on the teachings of Chan teacher Zhaozhou.  * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.   Desert Rain Zen podcasts are free. If you'd like to suppor...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney gives the second night talk at our March 2024 Desert Rain Zen Desert Sunrise Refuge Retreat.   “There is someone at peace, / walking in the Tao . . . “ (Yongjia Xuanjue, “Song of Realizing the Way”)  Is that about realizing “oneness” and, if that’s the case, is that the whole story, the whole of “the absolute”?  Maybe not. As Shitou puts it, in Joan Sutherland and John Tarr...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney and Megan give the opening night talks at our March 2024 Desert Rain Zen Desert Sunrise Refuge Retreat, suggesting some ways we can let ourselves fall open to what’s already available, on offer.   “There is someone at peace, / walking in the Tao . . . “ (Yongjia Xuanjue, “Song of Realizing the Way”)   (talks given March 19, 2024 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center out at Pic...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney gives the talk on the second night of our retreat. Beginning by exploring various translations of the “Golden Wind” koan and the different feel they give to Yunmen’s response to the student, Tenney brings the case into relation to Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man.” Then, via consideration of commentaries on the case by Xuedo, Yuanwu, Hakuin, and Tenkei, dragons get into...

Send us Fan Mail Sarah gives the talk on the fourth night of our retreat. A group conversation follows Sarah’s talk. (talk given October 16, 2025 at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico)  * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.   Deser...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney, Megan, and Sarah give brief talks on the opening night of our Fall 2025 Open Source “Golden Wind” retreat.    A student asked Yunmen, “When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what’s that?” Yunmen said, “The Golden Wind reveals itself.”                                                                         Blue Cliff Record Case 27    (talks given October 13, 2025 at th...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney gives the second night talk on “Sickness and Medicine,” discussing the Blue Cliff Record commentary on the case and bringing in a few anecdotes, from both his own practice history and the Open Source community. Hakuin says that if you take the phrase “sickness and medicine cure each other” as itself being medicine, that’s a big mistake (it’s too glib). Sickness isn’t “quell...

Send us Fan Mail Sarah gives the fourth night talk on “Sickness and Medicine.” (check back soon for expanded notes on this episode!) * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.   Desert Rain Zen podcasts are free. If you'd like to support our podcasting...

Send us Fan Mail Megan gives the third night talk on “Sickness and Medicine,” focusing on sickness and suffering not as mistakes to be “fixed” but as inescapable aspects of our vulnerable lives in the world that deepen and humanize our hearts, making us tender and strengthening our practice, our zen minds. Medicine, likewise, takes multiple forms: often it consists of a widening of perspective, a...

Send us Fan Mail Open Source teachers Tenney Nathanson, Sarah Bender, and Megan Rundel each give introductory talks on the first night of our retreat. Our retreat takes its title from Blue Cliff Record Case 87: “Yunmen said to the assembly, ‘Medicine and sickness cure each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is the self?’” (translation by Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant).   Sarah Bender Rosh...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney and Megan each give talks on the final night of the retreat. Tenney brings in a collection of anecdotes to continue exploring the sustenance available when we allow loss and grief to permeate us and intertwine with the radiance and eternal quality of things that practice helps make palpable. Megan muses on the Prajna Paramita teachings and their grounding in our deep and pr...

Send us Fan Mail Megan gives the third night retreat talk, bringing in several Issa poems that focus on impermanence, loss, and grief, then offering an extended meditation on “the world of dew / is the world of dew / and yet, and yet.” How can we allow ourselves feel this “and yet, and yet” fully, letting our hearts be broken when they are broken and feeling and working through our grief as deeply...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney gives the talk on the second evening of our retreat (the end of our first full day). Taking up three koans from The Blue Cliff Record that all concern the mysterious interweaving of the ephemeral and the eternal, he focuses on our mobile and multiple human responses to this intertwining of what’s poignant, painful, or tragic with a maybe unanticipated sense of radiance, tim...

Send us Fan Mail Tenney and Megan give introductory talks on the first night of our Spring 2025 Desert Sunrise Retreat, "The World of Dew." Issa's heartbreaking haiku for the death of his young child is a central focus of these opening talks, and of the retreat. Tenney and Megan each begin to explore the intertwining, in our practice, of our deepening awareness of the stillness and...