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 Appropriate Response — The Essence of the Buddhist Path . Available online and in person. Zenki Roshi's boo...
Feb 22, 2023•46 min
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 expecting any improvement, not even enlightenment. This talk explores how this good-for-nothing approach to zazen helps...
Feb 08, 2023•40 min
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, intention, and cognition) and learn to use and mix them differently. What does that have to do with becomi...
Jan 25, 2023•49 min
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, in which our individual lives are embedded. Finally, it looks at the role of hope and how different types of hope shape our r...
Jan 11, 2023•53 min
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). Zazen can help us to rediscover the world as a partner of resonance—and it is resonance that we truly long for, not co...
Dec 28, 2022•46 min
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, the less alive we feel and the more we are prone to experience anxiety and depression. So what's the antidote? Delibe...
Dec 14, 2022•49 min
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 crisis are solved. Buddhism is more pessimistic, or shall we say realistic. It assumes that there will always...
Nov 30, 2022•54 min
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 moment by moment. What we truly want is not exactly happiness, but to feel fully alive. While happiness is about feeling BE...
Nov 16, 2022•41 min
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 sensorial and conceptual map that it then mistakes for reality. Based on that understanding, we can th...
Nov 04, 2022•54 min
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 things present themselves in this very moment). Welcome to Zen Mind! There's still time to join the Oct ...
Oct 18, 2022•51 min
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 of attention” that is in resonance—a constant felt dialogue—with objects and other people. This res...
Sep 30, 2022•43 min
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. Even though the Zen tradition doesn't explicitly teach stages of mindfulness meditation, it is useful to ...
Sep 16, 2022•50 min
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. In it, we also come face to face with ungraspability and meaninglessness. This talk presents and co...
Aug 24, 2022•58 min
This talk was part of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center and addresses how to approach zazen practice. It explores Dogen's famous statements about his realization that "the nose is vertical and the eyes are horizontal" and about zazen being "the dharma gate of ease and joy." The purpose of zazen is neither to torture us nor to make us feel good. Zazen is about becoming aware of the truth of our experience at this very moment. Welcome to Zen Mind! THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale! Be...
Aug 18, 2022•59 min
This talk explores the relationship between sitting meditation (zazen) and attentiveness in everyday life. It's starts with Joko Beck's definition of enlightenment as the "ending in yourself of that hope for something other than life being as it is" and unfolds practice as the effortless effort to allow one's experience to be exactly what it is at this time—that is, to fully commit to the present moment. Feeling unconditionally alive instead of chasing happy feelings is the fruit of this practic...
Aug 05, 2022•51 min
This talk explores the freedom that opens up when we put ourselves at a distance from the structures within which we live on a daily basis. Freedom has two directions: (1) freedom FROM structures and (2) freedom TO deliberately live within specific structures. To be free from constraints can be liberating and feel exciting, but often it's also anxiety-provoking because we enter into a space of infinite possibilities, uncertainty, and fundamental groundlessness. Our attachments to structures and ...
Jul 14, 2022•36 min
This talk was given in the context of a "rakusu" sewing seminar. Rakusu is the name for the small robe given to a Zen practitioner in a lay ordination ceremony. Part of the ceremony is the giving and receiving of the Bodhisattva precepts. This talk presents the precepts as both common sense ethical guidelines and an expression of Buddha mind. Welcome to Zen Mind! THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale! Become a Boulder Zen Center Member ! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuat...
Jun 05, 2022•50 min
This talk explores practice along the lines of Big Mind and small mind and how Big Mind has to include small mind to be truly Big Mind. It also touches on Suzuki Roshi's remark that "the real purpose of Buddhism is to bring about the right human life where there is no Buddhism, but if you think that without any training you can have that kind of life, … you are either a great fool or a very selfish person. Welcome to Zen Mind! THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale! Use the code TPOA30 for 30% off...
May 22, 2022•41 min
In Zen practice, we are instructed to view each activity as an expression of our true nature or buddha mind. We cannot find buddha mind in the past or in the future—only in the present. Master Mazu famously answered the question ‘What is buddha?’ with the iconic phrase ‘This mind here now is buddha.” This talk considers two common misinterpretations of this statement—naturalness and essentialism—and suggests practices for establishing here-now-presence. Welcome to Zen Mind! Become a Boulder Zen ...
Apr 10, 2022•40 min
When it comes to big issues like the war in Ukraine or the climate crisis, we can feel unnervingly powerless. This talk presents a simple practice of listing all of our concerns, everything that is on our minds and weighing on our bodies. Through Zazen we can know that we are simultaneous very small and very large. We are capable of resonating with everything in this globalized world. The way this largeness and smallness comes together is through the actions we take—one step at a time.
Mar 17, 2022•41 min
This bonus episode is the introductory talk to a recent Weekend Sitting retreat. It offers detailed instructions for how to hold the body-mind in sitting meditation (zazen) with an emphasis on energetic flow and balance.
Feb 26, 2022•46 min
What exactly are we doing in zazen meditation? What kind of effort is necessary? This talk addresses the shift we are inviting when we sit still, and it explores three zazen instructions and how they are interrelated: (1) just sit, (2) think not-thinking, and (3) counting the breath.
Feb 11, 2022•41 min
Being excited or disillusioned about the promise of meditation are both signs that we expect meditation to fix our problems. But while meditation doesn't necessarily solve our problems, it can help us change the relationship we have with our problems. Through meditation, we can learn to be willing to have problems and live them. Suzuki Roshi said, "Just to be alive is to have problems." And he said, "When you are you, zazen becomes true zazen. So when you practice zazen, your problem will practi...
Jan 28, 2022•40 min
It's a new year and many people make New Year's Resolutions to make changes in their lives. Why do these resolutions often not work? This talk explores a Buddhist way to think about intention. Instead of asking "What do I want to do?", we could ask questions like: "What does my body want me to do? What does my family want me to do? What does my community want me to do? What does the biosphere want me to do?" We can find out that our deepest intentions transcend the seeming dichotomy between self...
Jan 16, 2022•39 min
This is the last talk of this podcast season! Thank you so much for listening. We would be so appreciative if you took a moment to leave a rating or short review! This talk continues the exploration of studying the Buddha Way by studying the self and forgetting the self. Dogen says one's body and mind and the body and mind of the external world fall away when we allow ourselves to be actualized by the 10,000 things. To practice this means to take on the view and to form the intention that our ow...
Sep 30, 2021•49 min
The goal of Zen practice is not to become a better, enhanced person; the goal is an open, flexible mind. Openness may sound attractive, but it actually means we allow the teaching to undermine our habit and personality structures. This can be a bit scary. To study "the Way" is to study ourselves not as a fixed thing that needs improvement here and there but as an open-ended process of unfolding. This talk investigates five interrelated dimensions of how to study this unfolding: (1) psychological...
Sep 10, 2021•51 min
This talk continues to explore Dogen's statement, "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be actualized by the 10,000 things." This talk uses the teaching of the five skandhas (form, feeling, perception, conditioning, and consciousness) to explore studying the self as being intimate with one's own experience. Suzuki Roshi says that in the experience of breathing in and breathing out, when you say "I breathe," the "I" is ext...
Aug 27, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Studying the Buddha Way depends on studying the felt body. When we study the felt body by bringing attention to sensations of breathing and the body, our sense of space can change. We can realize that what we feel in the region of the physical body is an open, connective space that includes the sense perception that we typically interpret as the outside world. This talk brings this experience, which we can practice in meditation, in relationship to Dogen's famous statement from the Genjo Koan: "...
Aug 13, 2021•51 min
This is a short talk given by Zenki Roshi prior to a recent Weekend Sitting retreat. He gives instructions for zazen, which is Zen meditatiton. I hope that you find these instructions helpful in your own meditation practice. Boulder Zen Center is hosting four Weekend Sitting throughout the year. They are silent, 1.5 day retreats with a lot of meditation, a shared meal practice, and dharma talks. It's a great introduction to Zen practice and anyone can join. Follow this link to find out about the...
Aug 05, 2021•36 min
This talk is the first in a series of talks on study. How do we study the Buddha Way? Often we bring ideas about study that are rooted in our experience with being in high school or college. But to study Buddhism isn't just a conceptual endeavor; we need to start with our own inmost request. Are the tenets of Buddhism—transformation, liberation from suffering, wisdom, and compassion— truly expressions of what it means for us to be fully alive or fully ourselves? Zen writings supply us with image...
Jul 21, 2021•44 min
