Zen Mind

This talk explores birth and death as a practice of moment-to-moment change—in addition to birth and death as biological events. While it appears situations come and go and beings are born and die, things ultimately don't come into and go out of existence. Instead, everything is a continually changing expression of what Dogen calls "undivided activity"—everything-all-at-once coming...

This talk continues the exploration of everyday life practice as a dance of form and emptiness. The focus is on the contradiction yet undividedness of order and chaos in work activities (such as sweeping), in the mind (as clarity and discursiveness), and in how we organize time (schedule and spontaneity). Welcome to Zen Mind! Please consider donating to our annual fundraiser. Love the dharma talks...

What if we stopped trying to dispel disturbance, confusion, and crisis from our experience and, instead, made use of these unwanted mind states as gates to appreciating our lives as a continual dance of form (fixations) and emptiness (radical openness)? This talk provides an initial conceptual understanding of emptiness as change, interdependence, and non-self. As always, intellectual study is not...

This talk was given as the public portion of a Weekend Workshop, during which a number of Boulder Zen Center practitioners came together to prepare for a Bodhisattva Precepts Initiation Ceremony. The Bodhisattva precepts are a practice of investigating one's ethical conduct based on the principle of doing no harm. In the midst of our everyday activity, what does it mean to vow to do no harm?...

This talk explores the relevance of a practice and culture of transformation in the face of an ecological crisis that will more likely than not lead to a severe degradation of living conditions, especially for future generations. How will we respond pragmatically, compassionately, and responsibly to this crisis? And how will we maintain self-respect and dignity in the midst of our actions? The tal...

The freedom we can realize through Zen practice (or any existentially honest spiritual practice) manifests not so much through THE CONTENT of our experience but through HOW WE RELATE to our experience. This HOW is a fundamental attitude—an attitude that expresses itself throughout our lives. This talk uses Master Yunmen's teaching phrase" Every Day is a Good Day" as well as a couple...

This talk explores the distinction between two perspectives on our human existence: aliveness and life. Aliveness is this here-now moment unfolding as ever-changing sensorial contents within a field of mind. Our life, in contrast, can be understood as the result of a weaving of past and future into a life story. The unsatisfactory nature of our life presents us with the question and task of how to...

The ability to deal with our manifold problems is rooted in the craft of being present with what is happening in our life. What is the importance of cultivating mindfulness of the body (bodyfulness) in this? This talk explores the fruits of learning to locate ourselves in and through the body: (1) transforming the NOW of the present moment into a HERE that covers the whole of the sphere of experie...

This talk introduces some of the main themes of Zenki Roshi’s book “The Path of Aliveness.” It was given to an audience largely new to Buddhism at the Aspen Chapel . At the core of all Buddhist practice is recognizing suffering (our desire for life to be other than it is) and committing to a path of liberation (allowing our experience to be exactly what it is). The talk reframes our deep wish to b...

Zen practice can be thought of as a craft of opening our minds to complexity—to the complexity of our lived lives that cannot be conclusively grasped by our thinking minds. It is common to feel overwhelmed by complexity and frustrated that it cannot be reduced to black-and-white concepts. This talk continues the discussion of the teaching of the Five Skandhas (see March 8, "Empty of Separate...

This talk was given at the beginning of a weekend intensive. It provides a framework for how to cultivate attentiveness—on an off the cushion. The fundamental mental posture in meditation and mindfulness practices is to allow one's experience to be exactly what it is at this very moment. However, to be able to be present to the present in this all-encompassing way, we need a path to cultivate...

The dis-ease with our existence often manifests as a lingering feeling that there is something wrong with us and/or the world. The first sentence of the Heart Sutra gives an instruction for how to liberate ourselves from this kind of suffering. It asks us to practice the realization that the five skandhas—the experiential domains of form, feeling, perception, conditioning, and consciousness—are em...

This talk explores the relationship between zazen mind, awakening, and everyday activity. In Zen, we use bodily markers and shifts to create a sense of continuous practice. Essentially, this is about finding a way to maintain the presence of the FIELD of mind in the midst of the ever-changing CONTENTS of our lived life. Welcome to Zen Mind! Learn more about our upcoming Weekend Seminar, An Appropr...

In Soto Zen practice we say, "Zazen is good for nothing." Or we say, "You should sit without any gaining idea?" There is a disturbing paradox here: We all start to practice because we want an answer to an existential question or a solution to a deep-seated problem, and yet the teaching tells us to just sit and allow our moment-to-moment experiencing to be exactly what it is—not...

What if we (like Bodhidharma) refrain from answering the question ‘Who am I?’ with the concepts and categories our culture provides and expects? What if we allowed ourselves to exist outside of the culture—not functionally, but fundamentally? Instead of trying to define our identity, we can practice being intimate with the basic ingredients of our existential activity (attention, sensation, intent...

Around the transition from one year to the next, many people engage in the practice of year-end reflection and new-year resolutions. This talk, given on New Year's Eve, asks about the source from which intentions arise. What makes them stick or not stick? It explores the wisdom phrase 'If it's your intent, it's not pure intent," and asks about the role of the wider field,...

This talk was given during a Weekend Meditation Intensive. It begins by exploring zazen as a way of noticing layers of inner bracing and discovering a willingness to soften, accept, and be intimate with experience as it is, not as we desire it to be. Our modern culture of control conditions us to relate to the world more and more as a "point of aggression" (Hartmut Rosa's term). Za...

This talk relates the details of a particular koan story ("Don't try to control the 10,000 things") to the societal conditions of late modernity. Our culture has the means to bring more and more aspects of our daily lives under control and therefore implicitly, as well as explicitly, expects us to participate in that dynamic. Paradoxically, the more we live in a controlled world, th...

Welcome to Zen Mind! This talk was given in October 2021 to kick-off the second 8-week practice course in the Foundational Zen Teachings Series called "Liberation from Suffering". Generally speaking, we tend to interpret freedom from suffering as personal happiness (feeling good) and, on a societal level, as a world, in which big problems such as poverty, inequality, war, and the climate...

This talk was given in January 2021 to kick off an 8-week practice course called "Transformative Practice". It reflects on the nature of transformation and shows how it is grounded in what Zen calls the inmost request. The inmost request is what we truly want in life. It's not our calling, not our purpose; it's not about WHAT we are doing in our life but HOW we are doing it mom...

This talk continues the inquiry into wisdom. It introduces the Five Dharmas (an ancient teaching from the Lankavatara Sutra) and makes it available as a practice for our everyday lives. In a first step, we need to understand how the human mind produces delusion through ordinary mental activities like sense perception, naming, discrimination, and story-telling. In other words, the mind creates a se...

This talk was given as the opening talk to the third course in the Foundational Zen Teachings series. It presents wisdom as the ability to respond appropriately to the ever-changing circumstances of our lived situations. This orientation toward appropriateness requires us to shift from knowing (our accumulated concepts and habits) to not-knowing (a non-conceptual, non-habitual openness to how thin...

This talk explores the importance of the body in mindfulness practice—not just as a target of attention but as a way to be attentive. Practicing mindfulness as bodyfulness means to shift from attending TO the body to attending WITH the body. By first joining breath and attention into breath-attention and then bringing breath-attention to the parts of the body, we discover our bodymind as a “sphere...

This talk addresses the craft of mindfulness practice. Even though the Zen tradition doesn't explicitly teach stages of mindfulness meditation, it is useful to describe the cultivation of attention as a passage through specific gates—an unfolding of mental spaces that transform how we relate to ourselves, others, and the phenomenal world. This talk addresses the craft of mindfulness practice....

In our meditation, as we drop out of discursive mentalness and into bodyfulness, what do we find? A kind of existential darkness. This darkness is simultaneously our basic aliveness and our core vulnerability. In this darkness, we encounter the groundless joy of being alive as well as our mortality, existential aloneness, and fundamental insecurity regarding our safety, livability, and worthiness....