Recorded on May 3, 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!

"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!

The intersection of mindfulness and the Bodhisattva practice of patience, as a physical, somatic practice.

Recorded at Millerton Zendo in Millerton NY on March 2, 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!

Recorded on April 19, 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!

Recorded on April 26, 2025 during the Three Day Sesshin 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 April 5, 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 March 29, 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 March 22, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple, Brooklyn, NY.

"What is the ground of my life?

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 March 8, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.

"Can we picture it? 100 years from now, 200 years from now (...) that 'operational worldview of interdependent thriving[1]' becomes the norm...becomes the ground that everybody stands on.

AND—I would say—that to get there, we have to include impermanence and not be afraid of it...and not be afraid of things changing, not be afraid of things shifting and becoming unfamiliar.  Right down to the stuff that we depend on and gives us comfort."

[1] From Norma Wong, When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse.

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!