Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, meditation teacher and author Jack Kornfield explores freedom as something already ours rather than a reward for spiritual effort. Many of us treat practice as a self-improvement project, a dutiful effort to become better versions of ourselves. Yet beneath the shifting dramas of body, emotion, and thought lies a timeless awareness no circumstance can…

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On the sixth and final day of the Fall Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Kathie Fischer takes up a koan in which a monk asks Zhao Zhou a sweeping question about oneness, only to hear about a shirt he once made. Kathie hears in that reply the meeting of form and emptiness: the one returns to the many, and the many are always particular. “We don’t live in generalizations,” she says. “We live in the…

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On the fifth day of the Fall Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Shinzan turns to an exchange between Zhao Zhou and his teacher, Nanquan. Shinzan reads the story as a gentle test of how deeply insight has settled into the body. Realizing that every activity is practice is not the same as expressing that realization through action. Insight becomes real only when it comes through naturally…

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In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, given on the fourth day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Cynthia Ryotan Kear explores how Zhao Zhou understands “leaving home.” For the Tang dynasty master the departure from home was never only about robes, shaved heads, or monastery walls. The deeper renunciation is of the dwelling we build in our minds: our fixed ideas…

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In this Dharma talk, given on the third day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer offers gentle guidance on meeting thoughts in zazen. She invites us to sit like a grandmother, with a wide lap for every rambunctious or troubled grandchild: the squirmy, the grumpy, the crying. We can sit with each one, seeing and loving, without getting caught up in their stories.

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