Zen Mind

This talk was given at a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center in partnership with Dharma Gates, an organization dedicated to opening pathways into formal meditation practice for young adults. The talk's central concern, however, reaches well beyond any one stage of life. It begins from the etymology of satisfaction—Latin satis (enough) and facere (to make)—and frames meditation as the practice of letting what is he...

This talk was given during a zazen intensive at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk holds a question often left unasked: what is the role of vow in Zen practice? It opens with a confession of skepticism. Vow can become superego, a new identity to monitor against. The talk works through this tension by tracing how way-seeking mind emerges from the friction of misrepresenting ourselves as substantial, separate selves within a reality th...

This talk is about how aliveness wants to unfold through our life process. It opens with the question of what it means to find an activity that expresses one's aliveness (for example gardening), and how to widen it so it can inform all of life's activities. The talk names five unfoldings of a "realizational life": aliveness, order, expression, form, and Way. Each requires the practitioner's awake participation; none can be skipped ...

This talk was offered on Day 3 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center, continuing the investigation of mind begun the previous day (published two weeks ago). The inquiry turns to the koan exchange between Damei and Matsu: "What is Buddha?" – "This very mind is Buddha." Dogen warns that students have misunderstood this teaching in two ways. The first error is to equate Buddha with the ordinary functioning of mind&mdas...

This talk was offered on Day 2 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center. It takes up a classic koan exchange: “What is the wondrous clear mind?” – “Mountains, rivers, and the earth. The sun, the moon, and stars.” The talk invites practitioners to investigate where the mind is located in their own experience, moving through a progression: from the familiar default of a private chamber behind the ...

This talk is from the Practice Course "Developing Embodiment," originally offered live at the Boulder Zen Center and now available as a self-paced course. It challenges a common assumption, that ethics is a luxury, something we attend to once our basic needs are met. Drawing on evolutionary perspectives, the talk suggests the opposite: cooperation and care are existential facts for human beings, built into our very survival as a sp...

Zazen reveals how much of our mental struggle is bound up with time. The future presses in as plans, goals, and ideals of what we or the world should become. The past returns as memory, justification, and attempts to reinterpret difficult experiences—often in the service of protecting an image of who we are. In a psychological approach, we might be guided to explain and rearrange our story in healthier ways. In meditation pra...

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...

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 ...

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. You can fi...

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, roles, and positio...

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 is a verbal expression that ca...

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 mind and the field 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 pres...

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 this moment ...

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 ...