Part of being human is that we have big emotional responses or have emotional responses. There is nothing wrong with having emotional responses. What often happens is that we are afraid of feeling our emotions. We are afraid of our fear.

Parts-work has one way of languaging this that I have found helpful, buddhism has another way which I also feel is helpful.

In parts-work language: parts of us got the message when we were young that it wasn’t OK to be afraid, or sad, or needy, or ashamed. So the parts that feel these emotions are often quite young and quite shunned in our inner system. Other parts learned how to manage our emotions or protect our system from feeling overwhelmed by these emotions by doing the various things we do to distract ourselves from the present moment, from the embodied emotional experience that is happening.

This can be anything from working hard, to eating, to phone scrolling, to partying, to spacing out, to anger outbursts, to exercise, shopping, etc… even some forms of meditation–take us out for a while. These strategies aren’t bad, and you can see there is a spectrum of skillful - unskillful responses.

So how do we practice with fear and anxiety?

Practice is always about attention / compassion, awareness / love, presence / acceptance. 

First we need to notice what is happening (presence)…

Listen to the Podcast episode for more!

Spaciousness/emptiness is considered the Ground of Being or the Mind-ground—the heart of who we are.

Here spaciousness is love. But maybe not love in the traditional way that we think of love, which is often conditional. 

Often our loving has to do with–if you really loved me you would do…or say…or show it in some specific way that we feel like we need, or want, or must have in order to really feel or know love.

Spaciousness is love unbounded, completely unconditional–a pure kind of love that is almost impossible to imagine, because we are so conditioned to think of love in a particular way. To think of love the way that we think of human love, which again is conditioned–because often we bring our fears, attachments, longings, desires + hidden agendas to our loving.

Spaciousness-love is the love that accepts, knows, embraces whatever it is that is arising in the moment–simply because it is, simply because it is what’s happening.

What’s amazing and inconceivable and miraculous is that spaciousness-love is our most intimate experience. It’s functioning within each of us, all of the time. Deep fundamental acceptance is the heart of who we are.

Emptiness is an often misunderstood concept in modern Buddhist practice, partially because it is not really a concept so much as a realization. Yet, without the concept we can’t really prepare for what opens up in this path of practice or we may miss the freedom that is part of this path. To talk about emptiness is of course, not the same as realizing emptiness.

In this talk I unpack emptiness as well as exploring how it fits on the paths of practice--exploring the Buddhist path as a path of healing and liberation.

Exploring the Great Element Fire we are invited into the heat within our bodies. Fire illuminates the heat of our living and connects us to our passions. In this talk we are invited to feel the heat of life within and also to reflect on spiritual longing.

In the Mountains and Waters Sutra, we are invited to study water--to take it up as our body and mind? This level of intimacy is characteristic of the Zen school. Water is alive and life-giving. In Mahayana Buddhism the archetype of Compassion is depicted as the Goddess Kannon, transmuting her tears of grief for the suffering in the world, into Compassion.

This Dharma Talk explores the teachings of the waters of compassion. Compassion can meet us in the places that feel unbearable. Compassion can help us open our hearts to our emotional challenges, vulnerabilities and pain. And also give us the strength to show up for others and our world.

The Water Element makes up around 65% of the human body. To attend to the element water we are invited to feel the gravity and flow of embodied experience. Contemplative practitioners throughout time use the images of bodies of water: ocean, lake, river -- to point to aspects of our nature. Flowing yet still, wavey and deep -- the invitation is one of all inclusive awareness, where wave and ocean, drop and lake are of one substance.

Discover the playful joy and freedom of opening to the dimensions of your being.

The first of a five series exploration into the teachings of the Five Great Elements. In this episode we explore the Great Element Earth through embodiment, presence, contemplations on interconnection and the practice of generosity.

If we lose connection to the Earth, our lives are chaotic.—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

How do you stay embodied? How do you practice presence?

What we believe shapes how we perceive. If we think that we are separate from all the rest of life, we live an isolated life--ignoring the everyday magic of the earth, relationships and our human hearts and minds. In this episode we explore how view shapes our life, and what it's like to try on different views. Such as seeing our life as sacred. We also explore the practice of presence as a celebration of our unique beingness, and the freedom and creativity offered in the profound practice of presence.

The miscellaneous koans of the Zen lineage are image rich, as is much of the teachings on awakening found in the Zen literature. In this talk we will open to the image of the koan Count the Stars in the Night Sky and discover within our own soma the wisdom and power of such a simple phrase.

This is an invitation to enter both body and image as a way of utilizing the imagination as part of the awakening process. 

One of the great gifts of the Zen tradition is it's teachings on emptiness. Far from being nihilistic, the teachings and practices of emptiness remind us of the inherent spontaneity and creativity of the universe. This talk explores koan as a technology of awakening, and invites us into koan practice in an engaging way. Time is spent exploring the koan, Everyone Has Their Own Light by Zen Teacher Yunman, from the Blue Cliff Record.