Zen Mind

Епизоде

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  Sitting With Your Karma 17.09.2026 1ч 2мин

  Given at a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center, this talk picks up a question left open in the previous episode, "Sitting Like a Buddha." If zazen is not a means to awakening but its enactment, what about karma? Thoughts, fragments of story, and small triggers of dissatisfaction keep arriving, and we assume awakening means their absence. The talk proposes instead that we are always sitting and living with our karma; what changes is our relationship to it. Karma means intentional action,...
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  Sitting Like a Buddha 03.09.2026 55мин

  Where are you located in your body? Most of us, without ever having chosen it, sense ourselves somewhere behind the eyes. Zazen instructions typically bundle two separable practices: disidentifying from thinking, and relocating the self in the belly. Contemporary mindfulness often teaches the first and omits the second. Zen's own instruction is to sit as a buddha rather than in order to become one, trusting a monastic container to do that work silently; outside such a container, this talk sug...
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  Studying the Mind Through the Senses (Part 3) 20.08.2026 49мин

  One week after the Open Sky weekend, this talk was given at the Boulder Zen Center and turns that earlier study of the senses toward a question asked after morning meditation: How do we live well? Two answers our culture commonly offers are laid out and found wanting. "Following the rules" leaves you permanently behind an internal "should" you can never satisfy, and "following your own desires" rests on an inner authority that turns out to be hard to locate. Against both, the talk sets what Z...
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  Studying the Mind Through the Senses (Part 2) 06.08.2026 43мин

  Given outdoors during our recent Open Sky Practice, this talk takes up the Yogācāra teaching of the eight consciousnesses, which splits mind into three to address self, continuity, and karma. (1) Mano, the conceptual consciousness, binds the physical senses into objects and names them. (2) Alaya, the “storehouse consciousness”—maybe better called a “greenhouse” because it is changing from moment to moment—holds not content but dispositional seeds, like the weights of a neural network that eve...
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  Studying the Mind Through the Senses (Part 1) 23.07.2026 41мин

  Given outdoors during our recent Open Sky Practice, this talk takes up the Buddhist approach to the senses. Where we usually count five, Buddhism counts six, treating mind as a sense alongside seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touch, and understanding each as a field that arises when a sense organ meets its object. The visual field we take for reality is itself the seeing mind; what appears belongs neither to the world outside nor to the self within; it simply arises, relationally. The ...
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  Is Zen Buddhist Daoism? 09.07.2026 58мин

  Zen is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Daoism. But which way around: is it a Buddhism with a Daoist inflection, or a Daoism reinventing itself through a Buddhist lens? The question is practical. Zen can be sparse on how zazen translates into everyday life, as if appropriate action would simply fall into place once we sit hard enough. The Daoist stories have more to say. In the Zhuangzi, a cook's blade stays sharp for nineteen years because it follows the inherent structure of the ox; a swimme...
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  Even This Belongs 25.06.2026 47мин

  To be alive is to have problems. While having problems is unpleasant, the deeper difficulty, this talk proposes, is not the problems themselves but the resistance we bring to them. Suffering is not one thing; it is pain multiplied by resistance. Beginning with the Five Remembrances and their reminder that aging, illness, death, and the loss of what we love cannot be escaped, the talk turns to the feelings we least want to feel, taking anxiety and powerlessness as the examples, and asks what i...
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  What You Already Want (On the Precepts) 11.06.2026 38мин

  This talk was given the day before a Bodhisattva Precepts Ceremony (Jukai) for five members of the Boulder Zen Center sangha. After describing the ceremony's lineage papers and the intentional family one joins by receiving the precepts, the talk turns to a difficulty. The grave precepts tend to land as a should, like a parental commandment, in what the talk calls the "structure of should," a morally superior part instructing a guilty one. This structure divides us within ourselves and, in the...
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  Just Now is Enough 28.05.2026 42мин

  This talk was given at a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center in partnership with Dharma Gates, an organization dedicated to opening pathways into formal meditation practice for young adults. The talk's central concern, however, reaches well beyond any one stage of life. It begins from the etymology of satisfaction—Latin satis (enough) and facere (to make)—and frames meditation as the practice of letting what is here be enough. Set against this is the recognition that our culture functio...
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  How Practice Takes Shape (The Role of Vow) 14.05.2026 53мин

  This talk was given during a zazen intensive at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk holds a question often left unasked: what is the role of vow in Zen practice? It opens with a confession of skepticism. Vow can become superego, a new identity to monitor against. The talk works through this tension by tracing how way-seeking mind emerges from the friction of misrepresenting ourselves as substantial, separate selves within a reality that is undivided activity. Just sitting already contains the dy...
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  Make Your Whole Life the Garden 30.04.2026 45мин

  This talk is about how aliveness wants to unfold through our life process. It opens with the question of what it means to find an activity that expresses one's aliveness (for example gardening), and how to widen it so it can inform all of life's activities. The talk names five unfoldings of a "realizational life": aliveness, order, expression, form, and Way. Each requires the practitioner's awake participation; none can be skipped or forced. The talk also names three ways aliveness can be dis...
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  This Mind Here Now is Buddha 16.04.2026 46мин

  This talk was offered on Day 3 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center, continuing the investigation of mind begun the previous day (published two weeks ago). The inquiry turns to the koan exchange between Damei and Matsu: "What is Buddha?" – "This very mind is Buddha." Dogen warns that students have misunderstood this teaching in two ways. The first error is to equate Buddha with the ordinary functioning of mind—thinking, feeling, perceiving—which leads to complacency: if I'm already...
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  The Mind is Mountains, Rivers, and the Earth 02.04.2026 42мин

  This talk was offered on Day 2 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center. It takes up a classic koan exchange: “What is the wondrous clear mind?” – “Mountains, rivers, and the earth. The sun, the moon, and stars.” The talk invites practitioners to investigate where the mind is located in their own experience, moving through a progression: from the familiar default of a private chamber behind the eyes, to attention merged with breath traveling through the body, to the senses opening outw...
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  Resonance - In Touch with the Root of Compassion 19.03.2026 51мин

  This talk is from the Practice Course "Developing Embodiment," originally offered live at the Boulder Zen Center and now available as a self-paced course. It challenges a common assumption, that ethics is a luxury, something we attend to once our basic needs are met. Drawing on evolutionary perspectives, the talk suggests the opposite: cooperation and care are existential facts for human beings, built into our very survival as a species. Compassion, then, is not a virtue we impose on ourselve...
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  Completing the Past in the Present 05.03.2026 47мин

  Zazen reveals how much of our mental struggle is bound up with time. The future presses in as plans, goals, and ideals of what we or the world should become. The past returns as memory, justification, and attempts to reinterpret difficult experiences—often in the service of protecting an image of who we are. In a psychological approach, we might be guided to explain and rearrange our story in healthier ways. In meditation practice, however, when the past resurfaces, it becomes an opportunity ...
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  Noticing with Subtlety 19.02.2026 49мин

  This talk was given as a practice encouragement before entering the silence of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It highlights aspects of zazen relevant for any practitioner. It begins with three observations: we cannot think our way to the fruits of practice; awakening is an accident, though meditation makes us accident-prone; and many meditators, after an initial period of dramatic transformation, watch their practice plateau. So what do we do? The suggestion is to notice experie...
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  Timelessness, Change, and Everyday Life 05.02.2026 46мин

  This talk was given as an introduction to a multi-week study of Dogen’s essay Being-Time (Uji) during the Boulder Zen Center Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period. It doesn’t go into the details of the text yet but sets the ground for engaging Dōgen (or any difficult dharma text) not as philosophy, but as practice. The question isn’t about the nature of time (what it is), but how we relate to time in ways that bind us or free us. Our ordinary assumptions about time operate invisibly, shaping a...
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  Staying in the Zone of Nourishment 22.01.2026 49мин

  This talk was given at the opening of the 7th 90-day Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period at the Boulder Zen Center, as participants were clarifying guiding intentions for the months ahead. Zen practice—and life more broadly—organize themselves around what we commit to. Rather than emphasizing goals, intention is presented as direction: the way attention is shaped and sustained. From this view, positive change does not come from forcibly fixing or cutting away what is unwholesome. Practice is...
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  Receiving and Unfolding (On Right Intention) 08.01.2026 40мин

  At the turn of the year, we often pause to reflect, set intentions, and imagine a better version of ourselves ahead. Yet often we experience a stubborn gap between those ideals and the lived texture of daily life. This talk questions whether that gap can be closed through effort and control, or whether something else is being asked of us. After reflecting on traditional Buddhist teachings on right intention and critiquing them from a Zen perspective as dualistic (a self trying to improve itse...
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  What Can Be Relied On When Everything Changes 25.12.2025 48мин

  This talk explores impermanence as an intimate fact of lived experience, in contrast to our desire for permanence and stability. Along with conditionality and no-self, impermanence is a core principle of Buddhist wisdom teachings. Yet these principles only matter when they are felt directly-in this breathing body, in sickness, aging, loss, and vulnerability. This is why we meditate: practice allows impermanence to be known not as an idea, but as an existential fact of our life. What we call "...