Zen Mind

This talk looks at "nourishment" as the other side of suffering. When is an experience nourishing-independent of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant? The answer lies In the practice or completing th…

What is enlightenment? And what is the relationship to habits and karma? This talk examines what the words "enlightenment," "awakening," and "realization" point to. It presents a "practice of enlight…

Using the koan of "Baizhang's Fox" (Case 8 in the Book Serenity), this talk asks about the Middle Way of being simultaneously free from and entangled in the world of karmic patterns. We are free from…

Transformation through Buddhist practice includes changing our habits/karma. Karma refers to the patterns in our life that emerge from repeated intentional action that, through the repetition, gets a…

Transformation through Buddhist practice includes changing our habits/karma. Karma refers to the patterns in our life that emerge from repeated intentional action that, through the repetition, gets a…

This talk takes up a question many people ask these days in the face of political polarization and climate change denial. How can we have compassion with those we disagree with? Usually, we try to es…

How can we use the 16 Bodhisattva Precepts to study our own experience and transform it? Buddhism tells us that the root of unwholesomeness (harm, evil) in our own experience is the Three Poisons: gr…

This talk is about exploring the basic practice instruction of shifting from the focus of attention to the field of mind and back and forth. The practice, applied in all six sense fields, reveals a b…

The fundamental instruction of our school is "Just Sitting." This "just"—not limited to the sitting posture—means to allow your experiencing to be exactly what it is at this time. Now. Such non-inter…

How can you be you yourself? "Being you yourself" implies there are ways you can lose yourself. The antidote to losing yourself is mindfulness practice, which reveals a basic structure of immediacy: …

This talk was given as part of the "Inaugural Weekend Sitting" that marked the transition of the Boulder Zen Center to an urban residential practice center. It uses the feeling of "homelessness" and …

This talk starts out discussing "identification" and "personal identity" as a kind of defense against the groundless, momentary, and insubstantial nature of our existence. It then presents a set of p…

The pandemic brings out emotions in us: anxiety, sadness, anger, impatience, worry, etc. This talk discusses the "anatomy of emotions" by distinguishing the sensation level from the interpretation le…

Suffering = Pain x Resistance. When pleasure and grasping are included, the formula can be rendered as: Suffering = Experiential Intensity x Reactivity. This opens up two pathways to end suffering: r…

This talk is about how we use narratives as support for personal and collective identity and how the current societal conditions challenge our stories and can leave us with a feeling of groundlessnes…

This talk is about the difference between healthy and unhealthy transcendence. Meditation practice and the concept of detachment can create the fantasy that we might be able to transcend our humannes…

This talk, originally given to a Zoom audience of white people, acknowledges the intensity of this moment in American history: a convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic collapse with 40 millio…

This talk gives Zazen instruction for disentangling attention from thinking. The koan story of Baizhang’s Wild Ducks (Case #40 of the Blue Cliff Records) is brought up to clarify the attentional body…

This talk continues the exploration of impermanence, momentariness, and insubstantiality—all aspects of what Buddhism refers to as emptiness—and adds the aspect of interdependence. It highlights the …

This talk articulates impermanence as momentariness and insubstantiality, continuing the discussion of the practice of impermanence from last week. To investigate and enact our experience as both mom…