Recorded on July 12, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.

Please note: The first 50 seconds of the dharma talk is not audible due to technical issue.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

Recorded on June 28, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

Recorded on June 21, 2025 during the One Day Sit at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

Recorded on June 7, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple, Brooklyn, NY.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

A Dharma Conversation about sacred activism and environmental justice as a Bodhisattva practice with Rev. Chelsea MacMillan and Matthew Menzies 

Chelsea MacMillan is an interspiritual minister, the Senior Organizer at GreenFaith, and founder of Brooklyn Center for Sacred Activism. Between 2019-2021, she led direct actions and facilitated regenerative culture with Extinction Rebellion. You can find her writing in Order of the Sacred Earth by Matthew Fox, and at revchelseamac.substack.com.

Matthew—born in Harlem in ‘93, by way of Belize, Central America—is an indigenous Yucatac Mayan Activist-Organizer. Through his spiritual animist roots, formal training in Soto Zen Buddhism, past experiences working on our local farm market food distribution systems and the NYC Compost Project, to most recently focusing non-violent civil disobedience campaigns with Extinction Rebellion NYC, Matthew finds his life purpose, on lenapehoking: to live for the benefit of all beings, and preserve the Earth’s animals, soils, and waters for the future generations to come.

Recorded on April 27, 2025 at Millerton Zendo, NY.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

Recorded on May 10, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple, NY.

Guest Speaker, Willie Mukei Smith gave a powerful talk on based on the Bearing Witness to Racism Retreats in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, asking what kind of people of "the way" are we going to be? We are honored to share a recording of his talk on our podcast

Willie Mukei Smith is a Senior Student and Novice Zen Priest at The Village Zendo. He leads The People of Color Group at The Village Zendo and is a Member of the Buddhist Council NYC. Mukei is a Board Member of Zen Peacemakers International and leads Bearing Witness to Racism Retreats in Alabama.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

Recorded on May 3, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.

The ground that we’re on, all the time, is one that has wounds in it. There are bodies in it, there are stories in it, there are injuries in it, wherever we’re moving.  The ground of our sangha has wounds in it. We’re going along, we think we’re fine, and then we trip, and there’s a gash in the ground. Our country, this country, the ground of this country has wounds in it. Big holes, gaping gashes in it. (…) What if we become all about this? What if we become all about healing of these wounds in our sangha. What if that becomes the lighthouse? What if that becomes the compass? 

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

"Fields are greener in their description than they are in their actual greenness." - Fernando Pessoa

"Yes, we want to clarify the stories that are keeping us separate and maybe causing harm for ourselves and others. That doesn't mean that we don't need stories that support community that keep us in touch with ancestors that help us make meaning of the world. I think Pessoa is talking about the power of our descriptive faculty, our imagination to make meaning of greenfield that we experience. So I want to lift up both of those aspects of stories."

"I started thinking about what is the power of community at this moment, when there are so many forces that are driving us to isolation and being siloed. I enter into a situation with my own description of "the field" in a community like this where we share an intention, and I can have that description of the field bounce up and open up to your descriptions of the field. Simultaneously in those moments, I am shown how I create my own world and I can feel like the suffering of my own grasping onto my idea of the field. There's also a relief and wonder in the realization that I'm involved intimately involved in the creation and expression of worlds. And then collectively, I can imagine there's a field of possibility that gets plugged into the context of a community like this. That feels really necessary and powerful at this moment."

Texts referred to:

Recorded at Millerton Zendo in Millerton NY on April 6, 2025.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!

Selected quotes:

"Meditation is not about taming anything. It's about trusting. Trusting our bodies, trusting our breaths, trusting our minds, just trusting everything. And that releases tension. And when we do that we create the conditions to be able to see, or have the dharma reveal itself in the sitting." 

"Tension is karma in the form of the body."

"Something comes into our environment, and our body is fine with it, but our minds, or our histories, our experiences resist it. There’s almost like a body inside a body, or an egoic body, or a body that tenses. And then the energy gets blocked or dulled—this is when we talk about ignorance—we can’t quite take our experience in... This is what we also notice in zazen too."

"The good news is that the body’s tension is useful for us. (...) Those tensions that we’re opening up to, the body is trying to show us things that need to be healed or transformed. It’s trying to thaw us so we can feel the sunshine of spring.”

"And when we allow the world to touch us, we can hold what it feels like to be in somebody else’s experience."

"We don't want to turn away now."

Recorded on March 16, 2025 at Millerton Zendo, NY.

The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!