I’m doing something a little different this week. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sydney Slavitt — a core member of the Dharma Gates programming team, and the person many of you know from running our retreats — to ask her about how she first encountered the Dharma and how she came to work for Dharma Gates. She very generously shared the whole story. This is an experiment in the kind of content that might go out on the Substack, so please let me know in the comments what you think.
You can listen to the full conversation in the audio above. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
The first time anyone told me the truth -
Miro: Let’s start at the very beginning. How did you first encounter the Dharma?
Sydney: I grew up in a family where meditation practice wasn’t super strange. My aunt and uncle are both long-time meditators. My mom is a therapist, and when I was in middle school she was getting really into mindfulness-based stress reduction — she actually had me take an MBSR course in high school. So I had a lot of peripheral contact with meditation.
Then my junior year of high school, I was in a world religions class. We were reading the Bhagavad Gita, and I remember very distinctly feeling differently reading that than I had reading the Torah or the Bible earlier in the class. It felt like it was touching on something I hadn’t encountered before.
And when we shifted to the Buddhism unit, the very first class my teacher Jim Barron put the Four Noble Truths on the board. I remember feeling like that was the first time anyone had ever told me the truth — very explicitly. I had this feeling of, what have I been learning in school this whole time? Why have we been wasting all this time talking about things that are kind of true and kind of helpful, when someone could just lay it out like this?
I looked around the classroom to see if anyone else was freaking out about what we were hearing — like, is anyone else realizing this is it? But everyone else seemed to be having a regular Monday morning. So it landed somewhere in my system, but I didn’t take it up seriously then. I was at a very college-oriented private school in Philadelphia, so I spent the rest of that year doing all the crazy things high schoolers do to get into college.
A hard first year at Wesleyan -
Sydney: I got into Wesleyan and I was so excited. I thought, this is going to be it — I’m going to be an adult, make a bunch of cool friends, get into art stuff, have an awesome time, just be a happy, free young person doing everything I’d wanted to do but couldn’t while living at my parents’ house.
Miro: So the Dharma was not high on your list of priorities at that point.
Sydney: No. I just wanted to be cool and have fun. And then I showed up to college and I was seriously disappointed. I started experiencing really intense social anxiety — I’d had anxiety before, but not in a way where I felt scared to enter a room with my peers, terrified of what people were thinking about me. I felt really untethered. I’m a very social person, I’m motivated by being around people I like, and I just felt lost and alienated that first year.
I had a couple of good friends early on. One of them, Tamar, had taken a transcendental meditation class during her gap year, so she had a practice. We’d talk a lot about meditation and different states of mind and consciousness and reality — all those cool things.
Miro: Sangha.
Sydney: Yeah. Talking to her, I started thinking, this can actually point to more interesting things about reality than just… science. So that freshman year I was living in a forced triple — a dorm room meant for two, but they’d squeezed in a third bed, and I was the one in the middle with no personal space whatsoever. When I was really not feeling good, which was pretty regularly, I’d lie in bed under the covers with a YouTube guided meditation going, just trying to have a few moments of a more settled body and mind.
Looking back, I’m like, whoa, that really helped. It really changed the course of things for me. It didn’t feel like it then — it was hard to see — but it was like putting little drops in a bucket, slowly changing the course of a ship.
Miro: Any YouTube channels you want to shout out?
Sydney: (laughs) I was totally into the psychedelic-vibe stuff — deep meditation with electronic music, “deep breathing for peace and freedom.” Silly stuff. But it got me somewhere. It moved me somewhere.
Adin, and learning to be with herself -
Sydney: Tamar and I would occasionally go to the meditation club at Wesleyan, Wesangha. I didn’t totally vibe with the club at that time — I was still an intimidated freshman girl, and most of the members were junior and senior boys who were well established in it. I was like, this isn’t my group, these aren’t my people.
But I did meet my friend Adin through that network. Adin was a very different type of person than most people I met at college, which was refreshing.
Miro: How was Adin different?
Sydney: Adin walked around campus without shoes, and would often non-verbally come up to people and really get in their space — asking to be engaged with in a physical, non-verbal way. Really radical embodiment. I found it so refreshing when everyone else was so caught up in their own anxiety spins that no one could even engage with each other. Adin would come over and show me a picture of a buddha, or read me the Heart Sutra over dinner and just go, isn’t that crazy? He was sprinkling heavier-hitting Dharma into my landscape than I’d ever encountered, and he was so far outside the normal social sphere that I found it way more interesting.
That was mostly my sophomore year. After my freshman year, I’d seriously thought about transferring.
Miro: It was that bad?
Sydney: My mom came to pick me up at the end of freshman year with no idea how bad it had been. We went out to dinner and I just cried at the table — “I hate it here.” And she said, “Well then let’s get you out. You don’t have to be here.” I spent the summer back at my summer camp with wonderful friends who grounded me back into remembering who I was. And I decided, okay, I’ll give it one more try.
When I came back sophomore year, my friendship with Adin began, and I came back with a very different attitude. It wasn’t as needy — I need people to like me, I need to find my group. It was more protective of my own energy and time. I was taking a yoga class, and a lot of my free time I’d just be in my room doing yoga, or putting on music and dancing around, or meditating, or drawing.
Miro: Wholesome states.
Sydney: (laughs) There may have been some weed involved — it’s Wesleyan. But really taking time to be with myself. If I was feeling sad, just letting that be there. If I was feeling good, letting that grow. So going out stopped feeling like I needed something from the social situation. It felt more like, I’m at a capacity where I can be in this, and if all it is is being there and then I’m done, that’s not a failure just because it didn’t gratify me.
Miro: There’s a kind of tyranny in needing friends and not being comfortable with yourself. You’re a slave to your situation if you can’t just take the night to hang out with Sydney, alone.
Sydney: Totally. And that was without a real practice — I was at the very early stages of exploring what practice could even be. Freshman year it was so hard to be with myself; it just felt uncomfortable and strange. Sophomore year, it started to feel like maybe there was something to learning how to be with myself.
The first retreat: five days of silence -
Sydney: At the end of the fall semester of sophomore year, Adin invited me on a Dharma Gates retreat.
Miro: What year was this?
Sydney: Fall of 2019. Dharma Gates had only started doing retreats in spring of 2019, so this was basically their first year. I knew about Dharma Gates because Aaron — the executive director and one of the co-founders — had been a senior my freshman year, and Nicky, another co-founder, was also a Wesleyan and Wesangha person. So I’d heard about them through the ecosystem. At that time Dharma Gates seemed like an organization that just brought young people to monasteries — which is still what we do, but back then it felt more like they were coordinating school field trips.
Miro: Was this one associated with Wesleyan?
Sydney: Not quite. The very first Dharma Gates retreat ever was just a group of Wesleyan students going to Dai Bosatsu Zendo. Mine was a bit more official — Dharma Gates had just gotten their 501(c)(3) status and had a small budget. I don’t know how big, but enough to run two retreats on basically no money. It was like, let’s go all in on these retreats and see what happens. So that retreat was January 2020, hosted at Zen Mountain Monastery, with an outside facilitator leading meditation and some relational practice. Five days of silence — which I’d never done.
For those of you who know me more personally than just through my Dharma Gates role: at that point in my life, silence was a slightly ridiculous idea. I can be a very chatty person.
Miro: Nary a moment of silence, much less five days.
Sydney: (laughs) A family friend heard I was doing a silent retreat and said, “Whoa — you’re going to need to do a Jewish retreat afterward where you just talk for five days straight.”
So I went, in the winter of 2020. I remember feeling intimidated entering the monastery, the zendo — seeing all the monks and residents sitting there, the room so still. It felt like I was getting squeezed into a straitjacket. I didn’t know how to sit still, my mind was wild. Zen Mountain is not playing around.
But near the end of the retreat there was one moment where all the tension and tightness just gave a little — a flash of hope that this practice could actually transform what experience was. I wasn’t experiencing bliss or ease or waves of well-being in that moment, but I thought, it’s possible. And all these people here are so dedicatedly doing it. I remember thinking, I don’t know what they know, but I really want to know what they know.
Oh — you can just come here -
Sydney: At the end of that retreat we had a Q&A with a handful of residents — some who’d been there a month, some two years. Just seeing that group sitting up there, it dawned on me: oh, you can just come here. You can just be here for a long time and do training. And hearing them talk, I realized they were real, regular people. Not uniquely special or strange. Their lives weren’t so different from mine that I couldn’t do what they were doing. It was just, oh — I could do this.
Miro: Even the monks. Shugen Roshi has been there what, 41 years now — and he’s still just a resident who never left.
Sydney: (laughs) Right. So as I was leaving, this thought popped into my head: Sydney, you would do a month of residency at a Zen monastery. That sounds like something you would do. It was very much coming from the grand narrative of my life — me as a little bit of an adventuring, maybe hippie-adjacent person who gets into all kinds of cool offbeat shenanigans. A month of Zen monastic training sounded like it could be part of that journey. So I just tucked it away.
Miro: It fit the vibe.
Sydney: Purely on vibes. I was like, you would do that — and I don’t know when, and I don’t know how. I was in college, I was sort of on track according to my family and upbringing, and stepping off track seemed very scary.
COVID, and realizing you can just do whatever you want -
Sydney: I went back to college after that winter break and took a History of Zen Buddhism class — a small one, maybe six of us. In it I had a friend, Arthur, who was one of the leaders of Wesangha at the time, and we’d talk about Buddhism a lot.
Then spring of 2020, COVID came crashing in. We were on spring break when they announced an extended break — ten more days — and then it just kept getting extended. At some point I went back up to school and took all my stuff home, doubling down on the feeling that we weren’t reopening that semester.
Miro: Wise call.
Sydney: (laughs) Turned out great. I finished the semester on Zoom and absolutely hated it. It did not work, and for what Wesleyan was supposed to be, I was like, no way, José. So I was talking to Arthur, and he said that if school stayed online in the fall, he’d just take the semester off and go to a Buddhist monastery.
I remember that conversation — all these things clicking. Wait, I could just do that. It’s something I’d had tucked away as something I wanted to do, and suddenly there was an opportunity opening up where it wouldn’t even look like I was jumping ship on being “on track.”
Miro: That realization — you can actually just do whatever you want.
Sydney: Yeah. Funny thing, coming into adulthood: oh wait, I’m actually free and can make radical decisions in whatever direction I want. I can just do it, and it can actually happen.
So the summer of 2020 I was doing my monastery research. I called up Aaron and asked for an advising call — actually I think I filled out the form, because I didn’t know him well yet. He suggested Zen Mountain Monastery. I called ZMM, spoke to their registrar, said I was interested in doing a residency, and they sent over the application. I filled it out and did my residency interview with Hojin Sensei.
At that time they’d been in complete lockdown since the start of COVID. My hope was to go for three months — basically do my fall semester there. They told me the way they hold residency is you come for one month first, and if it’s a good fit for both you and the monastery, then you can stay two more. That sounded like exactly the right deal for me.
Sydney: Before I even went, my mom — being the Jewish mother she is — was nervous. I don’t know who these people are or what they’re up to. So she set up a call and got on the phone with Gokan Osho and basically expressed a mother’s fear: Is my daughter going to be okay? Do you have eyes on her? And Gokan was the perfect person to set her at ease. For those who don’t know him, Gokan Osho is this tall, very collected Zen monk at ZMM — a very stable force, like a mountain, but also gentle and warm. The one who’ll lay down the law if anyone messes with you. So he was the right one. After that call my mom was like, “Okay, I think these people will be okay for you to spend a month with.”
Residency: just big enough to fill your life -
Sydney: I did a two-week quarantine in my room — this was pre-vaccine, what the monastery asked for. So I watched a lot of the Kardashians in preparation for my time at the monastery. (laughs) And then I went.
It was me and one other resident entering for our first month. There were residents who’d been there through COVID, but only the two of us coming in. The whole residential body was maybe 20–25 people, and nobody was coming and going — Sunday service was just us, group sessions were just us. No weekend retreats. It felt like a family unit; I got to know everybody living there. A very stable container. I didn’t know it could be otherwise — I just thought, this is what the monastery is. I felt so supported, so welcomed into the community, dropped right into stable practice.
All of which is to say: it was very challenging. I found myself scrubbing toilets and washing windows, thinking, why did I put myself here? What was I thinking? What am I even doing?
Miro: That’s Zen. Scrubbing toilets all day.
Sydney: (laughs) At the end of the first month I thought, well, I have to keep going — I still don’t know what’s going on, but these people know. I’ll admit I came into training with a, looking back, ridiculous attitude: looking at all the residents in the zendo thinking, look at all these fools, they haven’t gotten enlightened yet. I’m going to come in, get enlightened right away — give me two weeks. Like it should just be immediate. I don’t know why the Buddha took so many years to figure it out. I didn’t even really know the Buddha’s story.
But the Zen container recalibrated my whole sense of what the path was — how long it takes, how big an undertaking it really is. In a beautiful way. I said to one of the monks, “This is big. This is a really big thing. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” And he said, “Oh no — it’s just big enough to fill your life.” And I thought, okay, that seems like something I can do.
So I spent three months there. Made lots of wonderful friends, struggled my way through practice — touched over and over by how beautiful it was, then crushed over and over by how difficult it was. Then I left for the winter, did some babysitting work, and considered: do I go back to school in the spring, or keep going to the monastery? School was still pretty COVID-heavy, so I went back for three more months of more intensive residential training — a different group, some people left, some came.
What kept me going back was that, even though it was challenging and I wasn’t always clear about my motives, I could just feel that my life felt better. My general state of being was more well. Something was happening, even if it was on the periphery of my experience. I could feel: this is the right direction. There is less suffering as a general state of being when I do this practice more intensely.
Back to school, oriented from practice -
Sydney: After that second three-month stint, I had a summer with friends and family, and then went back to school. We were all back in person; things were restarting full blast. My intention going back was very clear: I want to establish my daily practice as an unquestionable aspect of my life.
I had a friend, Bell, make an agreement with me that we’d meet every single morning and meditate together for 30 minutes before class. That was so stabilizing and grounding for establishing a practice in college, where everything is going to pull your attention.
Miro: A big shift I remember for myself, too, was when I could finally say, I have a daily practice, I’m committed to doing this every day. That just changes things.
Sydney: Yeah. I felt like a different person going back, and the school felt like a different school, because my whole orientation was different. Similar to that sophomore-year shift of not needing things to be a certain way to like them — but even more dramatic. I’m orienting from practice now. Even if it was a very new, freshly budding practice — a little seedling — that was the orientation I was bringing to college, and I wanted to use college to support it.
And suddenly I started seeing people differently. When someone was anxious, instead of oh, get me away from this, it was more like, oh man, you’re having a hard time. I felt less tossed by the waves of it, so I could actually be with it and have more compassion for everybody.
Miro: Compassion allows for a lot more space — everything doesn’t have to be a fixed way. We can understand that people have issues, that we’re the same, and by understanding ourselves we can take it easy on everybody else.
Rekindling Wesangha -
Sydney: Early that fall, Arthur — who’d also gone to a Zen monastery during COVID — came to me and said Wesangha had died out, because no one had been doing anything on campus. He asked, “Do you want to restart the club?” And I was like, okay, we have to rekindle the flame of the Dharma.
He brought in someone named Nate, who’d approached him asking where Wesangha was — is it happening? I really want to sit. Originally it was going to be the three of us, but it ended up being me and Nate. We started sitting, totally experimenting with what shape would work. We began by sitting three times a week to stir up energy — but we’d only get one person per meeting, and a different person each time. No continuity, no community, no retention. It was scattered and chaotic.
So we pared it down to once a week and started sitting in a steady, regular way. The first few weeks were when it really started to take hold. Over time it just grew — the same people started showing up consistently. We had a steady core, and then these new young freshmen would come, and from their perspective it was just a fully functioning club that had always existed. From my perspective I was like, you guys are the ones making the club. You’re the real thing.
It was a really beautiful club, and it became the highlight of my time in college — my junior and senior years. That felt like the thing I cared about, and I did school around it. I reached out to Aaron a couple of times during those years for his support bringing different Dharma teachers to campus for bigger events.
The river, and an offer from the universe -
Sydney: During school breaks I’d keep going up to ZMM to sit sesshin. Around then Aaron moved to Fire Lotus Temple in New York City — the temple connected to Zen Mountain Monastery — so when I’d go up for sesshin over winter or summer break, he’d be there too. We became more like friends: both young Dharma practitioners, both Wesleyan, both connected through Dharma Gates.
It was the summer between my junior and senior year, after August sesshin — Aaron and I were swimming in a river, just chatting about Dharma — that we got to talking about Dharma Gates. From his perspective, he had no idea if they’d have funding to continue at all. Dharma Gates at that point was a lot of enthusiasm for practice and a little bit of support — running on let’s just make this thing happen.
He said, “Well, if Dharma Gates has enough funding by the time you graduate, would you want to work for it?” My response was, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I was still very much living out of that grand narrative from my first retreat — I’ll do a little bit of this, life’s going to take me some direction, I don’t know which way. And he wasn’t making a very compelling offer either: yeah, the company might collapse, but if it doesn’t, maybe you can have a job.
Miro: (laughs)
Sydney: I wasn’t really thinking about what job I wanted. I figured the world was going to invite me into something, and I didn’t yet know its shape, but I was going to say yes when the thing came. So when Aaron offered, I thought, I don’t know if this is the thing. It might be, it might not be. Right now we’re just having a conversation.
The ten-hour Dharma nerd-out (a.k.a. the job interview) -
Sydney: I went through my senior year — full of college shenanigans and, of course, the meditation club, the beautiful gem. I stayed in conversation with Aaron through the year, and he invited me to come to a Dharma Gates retreat over winter break as a volunteer retreat manager — kind of a testing-the-waters job interview.
Miro: A mutual feeling-out.
Sydney: Exactly — me feeling out whether the role was something I wanted to do, and him and the team feeling out what it was like to work with me. So Aaron picks me up at my parents’ place in Philadelphia in a rented car full of meditation cushions — classic — and we drive ten hours down to North Carolina. No music, no podcast — we talk Dharma straight for the whole drive. We’re getting into all the details of the Abhidharma, he’s breaking down subtle things he’s learned on retreats with different teachers, and I’m asking, okay, so how does this lineage explain what happens at the moment of death, and how does that indicate your next rebirth? Just totally nerding out about traditional frames on the Dharma.
Miro: Aaron Stryker is a huge Dharma nerd. Let it be known.
Sydney: (laughs) And then we get to the retreat — a retreat with Jogen Sensei, my first time practicing with him. Whoa. It was a great time. But COVID started happening again near the end of the retreat, so from a retreat-manager perspective it became this creative problem of quarantining people as they got sick, testing, masking. We just ran with it as best we could.
Miro: Crazy that Dharma Gates survived COVID with no money.
Sydney: What happened during COVID was they sort of just paused — which makes sense. But we wrapped up that retreat, and then on the last day Aaron started feeling sick. Uh-oh — I think you have COVID now too. So I ended up driving the van about ten hours back up to Philly — we stopped in DC halfway — while he was basically passed out in the car with COVID. I put on a couple of Dharma talks and just cruised straight up. I think that was a successful job interview. (laughs) A bit of, I’m down to roll with the punches, improvise on the fly with chaotic retreat logistics.
A thank-you note, written and rewritten -
Sydney: From that point it seemed like a yes — we were going to do this. I finished school, took a month before starting at Dharma Gates, and went on a month-long retreat in Hungary — my first month-long. One of my big fantasies during that retreat was a thank-you email I kept drafting and redrafting in my mind, to send to Wesangha. I wanted to tell everyone how deeply touched I was by the group — how personally inspiring it was for my practice to have to show up every week, to show up for others, and how much everyone else showing up supported me.
Miro: That’s so sweet. Usually for me it’s, I’ve got to go give that guy a piece of my mind when this session is over — and I just sit with that the whole time. (laughs)
Sydney: (laughs) No, it was a thank-you note. And it just kept getting written in my mind. After that retreat I joined Dharma Gates — started organizing retreats, traveling around, continuing my own practice at ZMM. And now we’re here.
Now we’re here -
Miro: So that’s how the legendary Sydney Slavitt came to be — a plucky young retreat manager on these Dharma Gates retreats. Thank you so much for sharing this saga, which is still continuing. Maybe in the future I can have you talk about what it’s actually been like to work for Dharma Gates — that feels like a separate episode — and how the organization has evolved since you got involved.
Sydney: Yeah. Thanks for asking about the beginning of my practice in this lifetime.
Miro: Thank you, everybody, for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. This is an experiment in the kind of content that might go out on the Substack, so please let me know in the comments what you think. We’ll talk to you later — wishing you all very well.
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