Earth Dreams: Zen Buddhism and the Soul of the World

A common phrase you may hear in Zen meditation groups is: What is your practice? In this talk I explore the thread that runs through all practice forms, as well as clarifying how our different medita…

Part of being human is that we have big emotional responses or have emotional responses. There is nothing wrong with having emotional responses. What often happens is that we are afraid of feeling ou…

Spaciousness/emptiness is considered the Ground of Being or the Mind-ground—the heart of who we are.

Here spaciousness is love. But maybe not love in the traditional way that we think of love, which …

Emptiness is an often misunderstood concept in modern Buddhist practice, partially because it is not really a concept so much as a realization. Yet, without the concept we can’t really prepare for wh…

Exploring the Great Element Fire we are invited into the heat within our bodies. Fire illuminates the heat of our living and connects us to our passions. In this talk we are invited to feel the heat …

In the Mountains and Waters Sutra, we are invited to study water--to take it up as our body and mind? This level of intimacy is characteristic of the Zen school. Water is alive and life-giving. In Ma…

The Water Element makes up around 65% of the human body. To attend to the element water we are invited to feel the gravity and flow of embodied experience. Contemplative practitioners throughout time…

The first of a five series exploration into the teachings of the Five Great Elements. In this episode we explore the Great Element Earth through embodiment, presence, contemplations on interconnectio…

What we believe shapes how we perceive. If we think that we are separate from all the rest of life, we live an isolated life--ignoring the everyday magic of the earth, relationships and our human hea…

The miscellaneous koans of the Zen lineage are image rich, as is much of the teachings on awakening found in the Zen literature. In this talk we will open to the image of the koan Count the Stars in …

One of the great gifts of the Zen tradition is it's teachings on emptiness. Far from being nihilistic, the teachings and practices of emptiness remind us of the inherent spontaneity and creativity of…

In this dharma talk Kisei explore's the phrase from Hongzhi in Silent Illumination:

If serenity neglects illumination; murkiness leads to wasted dharma.

This life is a play of emptiness and illuminatio…

In this talk we explore illumination as an aspect of our awakened nature, sometimes experienced as clarity, brightness, lucidity, alertness. We also look at what happens when illumination is overly e…

We all have had experiences of being in the flow of life. What is this flow? How do we find it? What do learn from the times that we feel obstructed, and what do we learn from being in the flow?

Inspi…

Inspired by the lines from Dogen Zenji's Being-Time:

For the time-being stand on top of the highest peak.

For the time-being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.

An exploration of the interp…

In this Dharma Talk the theme of completion is taken up, from the Zen and Non-dual perspective. How is this moment, this breath, this body, already + always complete?

As we enter the New Year our atte…