Zen Mind

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...

For many practitioners zazen practice is about quieting the mind. Thoughts and feelings are supposed to stop or at least slow down to achieve peace of mind. When this doesn't work, a sense of frustration or even failure can arise. Two misunderstandings need to be corrected here: (1) a quiet mind isn't a mind without contents; it is a mind that is not disturbed by the coming and going of contents, and (2) the right kind of...

This talk explores the experiential territory of the famous slogan from the Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." At first, the talk differentiates between a realizational and a developmental approach in practice: Are we allowing our experience to be exactly as it is [realizational] or are we trying to alter and improve our experience [developmental]? The two approaches exist in an unresolvable tension but ...

This talk was given as a closing talk for the 2025 Boulder Zen Center - Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period. It reviews the basic ingredients of practice and summarizes them as (1) daily zazen, (2) working with views, and (3) cultivating relationships. In traditional Buddhist terms, this can be understood as a commitment to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The talk then explores constancy in practice as the most important attitude for ...

This talk was given as part of a sesshin (7-day meditation intensive) at Boulder Zen Center. It begins by examining the limited view we have in our Western culture of the body as a material object and introduces an alternative view of the body as flow—material as well as energetic flow. The Western word 'energy' is often used to translate the Eastern concept of 'qi,' but this can lead to misunderstandings if ene...

This is a special conversational episode. Zenki Roshi is interviewed by Nicky Antonellis, a co-founder of the nonprofit organization, Dharma Gates, which aims to connect young adults to deep meditation practices. One of their many offerings is a podcast which features different perspectives on the Buddhist path. You can find out more on the Dharma Gates website.

In today’s conversation, Nicky asks Zenki Roshi about the background an...

This talk is a guided meditation that is part of the commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." Instead of continuing with the line-by-line commentary, it takes a step back and points to the mind, from which we need to listen to Dogen's writing if we don't want to get lost in its apparent contradictoriness and complications. The talk attempts to get everyone on a similar experie...

This talk continues the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." The talk takes a deep dive into how to understand and practice with the two central terms, "liberation" and "actualization," which Dogen presents as intimately linked to life and death. The talk unfolds five interpretive dimensions of life and death as: (1) existential states, (2) biologica...

This talk kicks off the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity," which participants in BZC's Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period study together over the course of 3 month. The talk discusses the title and the first sentence, which together introduce four central ideas: (1) undivided activity (that everything is functioning together), (2) the buddha way (that practice ...

This talk was given during a Boulder Zen Center Weekend Sitting. It contemplates the phrase "Everything is functioning together to create this moment." It suggests to understand "this moment" not as a time unit but as the infinite experiential space that presents itself here-now. We can approach the experience of "everything" by letting go of the focus on something and allowing the mind to be aware of ...

This talk was given as part of the Opening Ceremony for Boulder Zen Center's annual 3-month 'Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period,' which intends to create a framework for householders (Everyday Bodhisattvas) to intensify their practice in a committed way. In a monastic 90-day Zen Practice Period, the main commitment is to stay on the premises and follow the schedule completely. If we don't have the support of a...

This talk is the seventh and last talk given during Boulder Zen Center's seven-day December Sesshin. It raises questions about the relationship between being on retreat and practicing in the context of daily life. To address these questions, it shows how the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism goes beyond the idea of transcendence in Early Buddhism. To live as a Bodhisattva is to be committed to this world and its problems ...

We live in an "achievement society," in which we are encouraged to constantly improve our lives in search for happiness. This talk presents Zen practice as a series of simple instructions like sitting down, not moving, and attending to breath and body, which facilitate the discovery and cultivation of a breath-body-attentional-space that can flower into a presence that doesn't go anywhere in the midst of changing exp...

This talk is the third talk given during the seven-day December Sesshin held at the Boulder Zen Center. It is a detailed investigation of why, despite our sincere mindfulness practice, it can be so difficult to disentangle our attention from the thinking process. It explores the hypothesis that thinking can be non-consciously used as a defense against the anxiety and disturbance we experience around existential facts like discontin...

This talk asks what it means to be identified with thoughts, opinions, emotions, personal characteristics, roles, and positions. And then, what it means to dis-identify from those aspects. It explores Dogen's practice instruction "to take the backward step that turns the light around and inward." Dogen's stepping back is to first discover and then establish oneself in the 'field of mind' that is always...