Reflections on Repatterning Whiteness
By touching on many different ways of understanding this thing called whiteness, my hope is that each and every person in the room can pick up, sit with, chew on, and keep asking questions about those seeds that resonate with them the most. This is lifelong work.
The Zen Kitchen: Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness
Tidiness leads me to calm myself. When I see objects strewn all over the counter, my mind goes off in ten directions.
Carrot as Dharma Gate
I was alone in the kitchen, preparing food with love and joy, cooking for Sangha members who had been, and are, teachers to me. The sun shone through the window, leaves shimmering, the faintest hint of incense, and there I was, slowly cutting that carrot.
Pop! Goes The Dharma: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
The way to spread healing is presented in EEAAO as two-fold: we must learn to drop our false stories of self enough to discover what someone else really needs, and we must then do what is in our own (limited, conditioned) power to begin to offer it to them.
Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Yasodara
The story many of us have heard is that Shakyamuni left in the middle of the night without letting Yasodara and their newborn son know; that he abandoned them.
Can I Be Frugal and Generous?
I can look at the money I earn and how I use it. I can respect that using it to take care of myself is part of right livelihood too.
The Three Wheels: Giver, Receiver, and Gift
What is dana? How does it relate to our lives? In what ways can it become part of our spiritual practice?
Pop! Goes the Dharma: Be Here Ahora
It’s a moving testament to the power of music, and to the making of music as a Bodhisattva act.
The Zen Kitchen: A Recipe from Our Tenzo’s Hidden Treasure
Someone from long ago left this cookbook at the center, and I found it when reorganizing the kitchen…
Life Is Perfect Just As It Is
How to experience joy in every moment without bypassing the suffering present in every moment?
Thanksgiving Remixed
Can we also allow this to be a day set aside for gratitude for what we have, for those we love, and for those who we wish to be free of their suffering?
Understanding Our Mind
Our seeds of fear, anger, and delusion make the soil of our consciousness difficult to permeate.
May I Rest In Not Knowing
The Chinese character for crisis can also be translated as opportunity.
In the Aftermath of the Election
Now, more than ever, it is important to be connected in community, taking refuge in the sangha jewel.
The Poem That Has Haunted Me for Two Decades
When you manage for even a moment to be free from the constant sorting of each aspect of experience into like/dislike, favorable/unfavorable, and so on, that exact moment is nirvana.
Beyond Word and Letters
There can be an intellectual understanding of what Zen is but it doesn’t really penetrate into our whole lives deeply.
A Method of No Method
In Zen, freedom is not understood as a product of anything, certainly not of one's own efforts.