Zen Mind

This talk was given as part of a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It reflects on moments when we are touched by life. Nothing special, just ordinary moments -- washing the dishes, looking at your child, seeing the grasses outside your window swayed by the wind. To be touched by life is maybe our deepest longing. However, the human mind has the tendency to replace the intimacy of direct e...

We human beings tend to generate stress—and sometimes even burnout— by perceiving situations and ourselves as not enough. This talk starts out with the question "When is there enough?" and tries on the view that "Just now is already enough." By recognizing that we are always already significantly supported by breath, food, shelter, and our society (however crazy it might appear...

This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It examines the feeling of alienation that comes from the mental construction of a separate self with an internal and an external space. What is the cure for such alienation? Learning to locate ourselves in an experiential space, in which all the contents of our lives (the physical world as well as our feelings and thought...

This talk was given at the Austin Zen Center. It addresses the twin Bodhisattva virtues of wisdom and compassion. These ideals can sound lofty, maybe even unattainable. However, if we understand them as momentary expressions of the practice of not-knowing, they are near at hand. Not-knowing isn't willful ignorance or the random rejection of knowledge; it is a practice of radical openness in t...

For many practitioners zazen practice is about quieting the mind. Thoughts and feelings are supposed to stop or at least slow down to achieve peace of mind. When this doesn't work, a sense of frustration or even failure can arise. Two misunderstandings need to be corrected here: (1) a quiet mind isn't a mind without contents; it is a mind that is not disturbed by the coming and going of...

This talk explores the experiential territory of the famous slogan from the Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." At first, the talk differentiates between a realizational and a developmental approach in practice: Are we allowing our experience to be exactly as it is [realizational] or are we trying to alter and improve our experience [developmental]? The two approaches ex...

This talk was given as a closing talk for the 2025 Boulder Zen Center - Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period. It reviews the basic ingredients of practice and summarizes them as (1) daily zazen, (2) working with views, and (3) cultivating relationships. In traditional Buddhist terms, this can be understood as a commitment to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The talk then explores constancy in practice...

This talk was given as part of a sesshin (7-day meditation intensive) at Boulder Zen Center. It begins by examining the limited view we have in our Western culture of the body as a material object and introduces an alternative view of the body as flow—material as well as energetic flow. The Western word 'energy' is often used to translate the Eastern concept of 'qi,' but this c...

This is a special conversational episode. Zenki Roshi is interviewed by Nicky Antonellis, a co-founder of the nonprofit organization, Dharma Gates, which aims to connect young adults to deep meditation practices. One of their many offerings is a podcast which features different perspectives on the Buddhist path. You can find out more on the Dharma Gates website . In today’s conversation, Nicky ask...

This talk is a guided meditation that is part of the commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." Instead of continuing with the line-by-line commentary, it takes a step back and points to the mind, from which we need to listen to Dogen's writing if we don't want to get lost in its apparent contradictoriness and complications. The talk attempts t...

This talk continues the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." The talk takes a deep dive into how to understand and practice with the two central terms, "liberation" and "actualization," which Dogen presents as intimately linked to life and death. The talk unfolds five interpretive dimensions of life and death as: (1...

This talk kicks off the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity," which participants in BZC's Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period study together over the course of 3 month. The talk discusses the title and the first sentence, which together introduce four central ideas: (1) undivided activity (that everything is functioning together),...

This talk was given during a Boulder Zen Center Weekend Sitting. It contemplates the phrase "Everything is functioning together to create this moment." It suggests to understand "this moment" not as a time unit but as the infinite experiential space that presents itself here-now. We can approach the experience of "everything" by letting go of the focus on something an...

This talk was given as part of the Opening Ceremony for Boulder Zen Center's annual 3-month 'Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period,' which intends to create a framework for householders (Everyday Bodhisattvas) to intensify their practice in a committed way. In a monastic 90-day Zen Practice Period, the main commitment is to stay on the premises and follow the schedule completely. If...

This talk is the seventh and last talk given during Boulder Zen Center's seven-day December Sesshin. It raises questions about the relationship between being on retreat and practicing in the context of daily life. To address these questions, it shows how the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism goes beyond the idea of transcendence in Early Buddhism. To live as a Bodhisattva is to be commit...

We live in an "achievement society," in which we are encouraged to constantly improve our lives in search for happiness. This talk presents Zen practice as a series of simple instructions like sitting down, not moving, and attending to breath and body, which facilitate the discovery and cultivation of a breath-body-attentional-space that can flower into a presence that doesn't go an...

This talk is the third talk given during the seven-day December Sesshin held at the Boulder Zen Center. It is a detailed investigation of why, despite our sincere mindfulness practice, it can be so difficult to disentangle our attention from the thinking process. It explores the hypothesis that thinking can be non-consciously used as a defense against the anxiety and disturbance we experience arou...

This talk asks what it means to be identified with thoughts, opinions, emotions, personal characteristics, roles, and positions. And then, what it means to dis-identify from those aspects. It explores Dogen's practice instruction "to take the backward step that turns the light around and inward." Dogen's stepping back is to first discover and then establish oneself in the &apos...

This talk is plucked from the middle of the 6-week Practice Course 'Transforming Habits' which just concluded at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk provides a summary of some of the ground that has been covered during the course up until this point: the nature and purpose of habits; the structure of habits – cue, craving, behavior, reward; how habits can become dysfunctional; and the &quot...

This episode is a conversation with meditation teacher and author Gaylon Ferguson about his new book "Welcoming Beginner's Mind." The conversation touches on the main themes of the book and their importance in our practice and everyday life such as welcoming experience just as it is, spaciousness, control and grasping, stages of practice, and what is called our true nature or Buddha...

This talk was given in preparation for this year’s Lay Initiation Ceremony (Jukai). It explores the ethical dimension of Zen practice as expressed in the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts. On the one hand, the precepts don’t appear to be different from other religious moral codes. They formulate common sense behavioral guidelines. On the other hand, they can be interpreted from the point of view of emp...

This talk was given to kick off this year's fall course on 'Transforming Habits.' It considers Ken Wilber's distinction between 'waking up' and 'growing up.' It then asks how being intimate with the field of mind (open awareness) can be used to facilitate the transformation of unwholesome habits, which is essential for the process of growing up. In contrast...

This talk was given as part of a One-Day Intensive at Boulder Zen Center's new Mountain Zendo. It takes the following quote from Suzuki Roshi as its jumping-off point: "When you're sitting in the middle of your own problem, what is more real: your problem or you yourself? That you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact." Usually, the contents of our minds seem more real—obje...

This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting. It explores the question of how we enact practice-enlightenment (Dogen's concept) in our daily activities. It talks about the importance of pace for attuning to the field of undivided activity and specifies two requirements: (1) letting go of resistance or being truly open and (2) a change in worldview. To shift our view of the world not just...

This talk continues to explore bringing attention to how attention functions in our lives. The distinction between focused consciousness (contents of mind) and nonfocused awareness (field of mind) is discussed as two different kinds of concentration. Learning to rest in and trust this nonconscious field, which is marked by interdependence and impermanence, is an essential part of the spiritual jou...