Zen Mind

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 ...

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. Ou...

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 fo...

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...

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 a...

This talk was given on day 3 of a 7-day sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center. It continues an exploration of three modes of attention: focus, field, and full function. Attention is the most foundational way the world comes into being for us. This talk explores what this means for our sense of self and our sense of freedom. It uses a chapter called "Finding Yourself" from a recently published book with talks by Suzuki Roshi. ...

While Zenki Roshi is teaching the Fall Practice Course 'Developing Embodiment' at the Boulder Zen Center, we are re-airing three dharma talks that address fundamental topics and practices related to embodiment.

The third one is "Stepping Back (and Back In)" which was originally published on November 28, 2024. This talk asks what it means to be identified with thoughts, opinions, emotions, personal characteristics...

While Zenki Roshi is teaching the Fall Practice Course 'Developing Embodiment' at the Boulder Zen Center, we are re-airing three dharma talks that address fundamental topics and practices related to embodiment.

The second one is "No Inside, No Outside" which was originally published on September 27, 2023. This talk explores how to make use of the turning phrase "No inside, no outside." A turning phrase ...

While Zenki Roshi is teaching the Fall Practice Course 'Developing Embodiment' at the Boulder Zen Center, we are re-airing three dharma talks that address fundamental topics and practices related to embodiment.

The first one is "Pause for the Pause" which was originally published on June 27, 2024. This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting. It highlights the distinction between the contents of min...

This talk kicked off the new live Practice Course ‘Developing Embodiment’ that just began at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk first defines the ultimate fruition of the Zen path as ‘embodying buddha.’ It’s not enough to understand what liberation from suffering as well as wisdom and compassion mean, our intention needs to be to demonstrate these qualities in each unique situation with our embodied presence, our whole being. The tal...

This talk was given as part of a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It reflects on embodiment practice as the gate to the present and the present as the gate to our true nature. The talk begins with the question, "What is missing in your life?" Happiness, money, love, security? Where does our mind go with this question? Usually to some thought pattern. What happens if, instead, we go to the embodied presence of th...

This talk continues and concludes the mini-series on exploring space and spaciousness. This time the emphasis is on mental space. While the two previous talks emphasized practices with visual objects, body, and breath, this talk makes suggestions for how to investigate and work with thoughts. (1) What is there between thoughts; what kind of space do you find there? (2) Where do thoughts come from, and where do they go? Do thoughts ...

This talk continues the mini-series on exploring space and spaciousness. It presents a variety of practices with gaze, body, and breath that can help us verify in our own experience that the separation of mind from object and self from other is only an afterthought that distorts the original undividedness of space. The experience of undivided spaciousness can help soften conflict, ease trauma, and increase the freedom with which we...

This is the first talk in a mini-series on practicing with the experience of space and spaciousness. The exploration starts with a fundamental shift in view… from “space separates” to “space connects.” We are culturally trained to see space as being between things and separating our self from the world, thus reinforcing opposition and alienation. But what if space is connecting and bonding—and beyond that enveloping, penetrating, a...

This talk was given as an opening talk to a workshop on “Breath Practice.” It explores breath as our most vital form of nourishment. Breath practice has two intertwined dimensions: supporting health and well-being, and serving as a path of spiritual awakening. The first part of the talk looks at the foundations of healthy breathing, drawing on both science and direct experience. From there, it turns to the Buddhist tradition, highl...

This talk was given as part of a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It reflects on moments when we are touched by life. Nothing special, just ordinary moments -- washing the dishes, looking at your child, seeing the grasses outside your window swayed by the wind. To be touched by life is maybe our deepest longing. However, the human mind has the tendency to replace the intimacy of direct experience with concepts, stories, a...

We human beings tend to generate stress—and sometimes even burnout— by perceiving situations and ourselves as not enough. This talk starts out with the question "When is there enough?" and tries on the view that "Just now is already enough." By recognizing that we are always already significantly supported by breath, food, shelter, and our society (however crazy it might appear), we can learn to rest in a basic ...

This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It examines the feeling of alienation that comes from the mental construction of a separate self with an internal and an external space. What is the cure for such alienation? Learning to locate ourselves in an experiential space, in which all the contents of our lives (the physical world as well as our feelings and thoughts) are allowed to happen just as th...

This talk was given at the Austin Zen Center. It addresses the twin Bodhisattva virtues of wisdom and compassion. These ideals can sound lofty, maybe even unattainable. However, if we understand them as momentary expressions of the practice of not-knowing, they are near at hand. Not-knowing isn't willful ignorance or the random rejection of knowledge; it is a practice of radical openness in the present moment. Openness means t...