Friday Night Zen: Healing Through Mindfulness
There is nowhere to get to that is more important than the present moment.
Meditation is not Pacifism: The Role of Mindfulness in Social Activism
How can we use mindfulness, as either members of an oppressed community or allies, to actively stand up against systems of oppression?
Coming Home to the Heart: Reflections on Retreat at Hokyoji
This place has been kept alive by the selfless service of steady practitioners. I hope to keep coming home to the heart of Hokyoji again and again so that I may feel the slight awakening of my own heart.
Here, Queer, and Zen
I’ve come to know Zen as intimacy. Going deep to really see, understand, feel, listen – and to do that in relationship with myself and sangha.
Friday Night Zen: Don’t Know Mind
Most aspects of my life are improved by Not Knowing, and I have a hunch that this might be true for the planet as a whole.
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?