Earth Dreams: Zen Buddhism and the Soul of the World

A couple weeks ago I heard a sound near our back screendoor, as if an animal were wrestling with a large bag of cat food. I assumed my cat Sasha was trying to break into her bag of treats, and noted the sound but didn’t respond right away.

A few minutes later, the sound long faded, I went to check on Sasha to see how far she got with trying to claw her way into her treat bag. As I approached the backdoor I did not find Sasha, nor a clawed open bag of treats. Our screen door was open to the size of Sasha, outside her large bag of cat food lay open on the porch stairs. As I stood, stunned at the sight of a catless night—Sasha whipped around the backyard chasing something that remained in the shadows, her tail puffed out to the size of a racoon’s tail.

I have been thinking about wanting. Hunger. The pull of a certain kind of desire to grasp for, reach out for…something else. This energy often creeps up the stairs of my body from somewhere in the dark and before I even realize it my hand is holding my phone, or reading news headlines, or I’m fixing myself a snack or another cup of coffee.

This time of year wanting seems heightened.

Something about the seasons turning deeper into autumn. Trees shedding leaves as the sun looms lower in the fading day-lit sky.

The animal in us is preparing to hibernate. The hungry heart is trying to find nourishment. 

The pull to nourish, to find safety— in the midst of an uncertain world heightened by a polarizing election, on-going war and climate instability—is completely natural. Our bodies and nervous systems seek balance.

Yet what is nourishing? What is safety when the ground appears to be constantly moving? 

Who is the one whose hand slips up from the shadows, then vanishes back into hiding, as spirals of shame circle?

You just wasted an hour scrolling. I can’t believe you ate that. Wow, you pressed snooze again?  

You’re worthless. Unloveable. Unfit for human consumption. 

The shame says…

When I lived at Great Vow Zen Monastery we had a practice of singing to the hungry heart. Calling to this part of us, this part of others and our world. And instead of shunning it or throwing shade on it or blaming and shaming it—we would invite a spirit of welcome, acceptance, love and understanding.

The chant is called the Kanromon and was written together with Krishna Das and Bernie Glassman. Here are the words, if you would like to sing it too.

Calling all you hungry hearts. 

Everywhere through endless time. 

You who wander, you who thirst.

I offer you this bodhi mind. 

Calling all you hungry spirits. 

All the lost and the left behind. 

Calling all you hungry hearts. 

Everywhere through endless time. 

Gather round and share this meal.

Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine.

It is part of a ceremony for the hungry heart, called the gate of sweet nectar. A version of this ceremony is part of the daily liturgy at Soto Zen Monasteries in Japan.

It is one of the songs from our liturgy that I brought into my practice outside of the monastery walls. I sing it on walks through town, sometimes before I eat a meal, to my cat and before my altar with a stick of incense as my heart opens to the size of the world. 

It is a song of offering. It is a song of deep love. It's a song that lets me be lost—a song that speaks to those in the shadows. It has the power to save a ghost. To make the lonely, smile. It empowers us to hug our demons, and face the unpredictability of life in human flesh.

This week I had the opportunity to facilitate and participate in three practice communities where we gathered together to welcome the hungry heart. The gatherings were simple. We sat in loving awareness and invited our hungry hearts to the table of our lives. And, through our collective attention, love and understanding the hungry part was given space to tell + show what it wants and needs, and then experience a deeper form of nourishment. 

The nourishment of compassionate attention and collective witnessing is powerful. When parts of us are hidden in shame, they often feel like they are the only ones who feel this way. Or that they are fundamentally wrong, or unloveable, or unworthy.

To integrate the hungry heart into our lives, to invite them into the light of awareness— is healing. It's like reclaiming a piece of our nature. For in that invitation, transformation starts to happen, true nourishment becomes possible.

As we head into election week, I feel it's important to remember my vows to myself and this world.

I vow to create sacred spaces in this violent and beautiful world where we:

* Center healing

* Remember our true nature

* Challenge our assumptions

* Turn towards the shadow

* And live as if love were the point

What are your vows? How do you intend to show up in this unpredictable, precarious, ever-changing experience we call human life, or the world, or america?

Current Offerings

Spiritual Counseling — I practice at the confluence of spirituality and psychology, integrating mind, body and spirit. Spiritual Counseling can help you:

* Companion Grief + Loss

* Clarify Life Purpose

* Heal Relational Conflict + Inner Conflict

* Work with Shadow Material

* Heal your relationship with Eating, Food or Body Image

* Spiritual Emergence

* Integrate Psychedelic or Mystical Experiences

* Move Through Creative Blocks, Career Impasses and Burnout

In addition to my Zen training, I am trained in Buddhist Psychology, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dream Work, Hakomi (Somatic Therapy), Process Art and Mindful Eating. My approach also has a deep Jungian influence.

Astrology— I am starting to offer astrology readings. I have found astrology to be a helpful map for connecting to the more mythic unfolding of life. It can help us honor our gifts, navigate challenges, get perspective and connect with planetary allies. It can also offer guidance on the questions that arise in our lives and aid us in stepping more fully into our wholeness. I am currently offering the following types of readings

Natal Chart Readings

Astro Counseling Package

Transit Readings

Great Work of Your Life Reading

Monday Night Meditation + Dharma

Every Monday 6P PT / 9P ET

Join me on zoom for 40 minutes of meditation and a dharma talk. We are currently exploring a text called The Eight Realizations of Great Beings, which gives us an opportunity to practice inquiry and embodying love as we discover our Awakened Nature together.

This event is hosted by the Zen Community of Oregon. All are welcome to join. Drop in any time.

Zoom Link for Monday Night

Sky + Rose

What is it? An experiment in the impossible task of excluding nothing and loving everything. An alchemy of play, presence and wandering into the shadows, you could say.

Sky & Rose is a practice container that will:

* Center group parts work practices to explore the fluidity, span and dream of who we are - somebody, nobody, everybody. You will be invited to express yourself vocally and physically, engage your imagination and play outside habituation.

* Do interpersonal and group meditation practices of seeing, being and awakening.

* Directly explore emotional embodiment & shadow work

* Include Beauty, Art & Wonderment as core practice elements 

Through rituals of imagination, meditation technologies and co-created fields of intentional play, we can slip out, for a time, of confining identities defined by our histories, culture and comfort.

Delivered by these practices, we can begin to inhabit perspectives and modes of being that stretch our sense of the possible and refresh our sense of the everyday. 

You might find yourself wearing Luminosities face or inhabiting Laughter’s chest. Together we might try out Venus’s view of the very life we live or we might make space to feel Chaos's dance and shake off some rigidity.

All of these are just examples of where our wondering and feeling into places of vitality and expansion may take us.

We will rebel against the quotidian and respect ourselves too much to only have crumbs of the sacred!

It was also be a time to work together with the challenges to living heart forward with sanity and presence with…

As part of Autumn Ango with the Zen Community of Oregon, we are contemplating a text called the Eight Realizations of a Great Being. A text that some sources say is the last teaching that the Buddha gave. We are working with an interpretation by Thich Nhat Hanh edited by Hogen Bays, Roshi.

I want to start this reflection with a poem that was read to me by another Zen Teacher, Daniel Terrango during a sesshin he led here in Ohio a couple of weeks ago. I felt fortunate to get to sit sesshin with him, and to receive this poem. It’s one of those poems, at least for me, that I want to pass along.

I Was Reading A Poem By David Rutschman

I was reading a poem by Ryōkan about a leaf, and how it showed the front and the back as it fell, and I wanted to call someone — my wife, my brother — to tell about the poem.

And I thought that maybe my telling about the poem was the front of the leaf and my silence about the poem was the back.

And then I thought that maybe my telling and my silence together were honestly just the front of the leaf, and that the back was something else, something I didn’t understand.

And then I thought that maybe everything I understood and everything I didn’t were both actually just the front of the leaf — so that the totality of my life was actually just the front of the leaf, just the one side — which would make the other side my death. . . .

Unless my life and death together were really still only the front of the leaf?

I had left the branch. I was falling.

I was loose now in the bright autumn air.

Now the first realization.

All the world is impermanent. The earth is fragile and perilous.

The four great elements are both suffering and emptiness.

In the five skandhas there is no self.

Everything that arises, changes, and perishes, is illusive, unreal,

and without a master.

Thought is the root of suffering, The body a reservoir of desire.

Thus, observing and contemplating, one gradually breaks free from

birth and death.

Here in both the poem and realization—we are invited to really take up impermanence as a contemplation. In Buddhism impermanence is considered one of the marks of existence. My teacher Hogen Roshi would often say that these marks are part of what make a teaching, a dharma teaching, so he would encourage us to consider them whenever we gave a dharma talk.

The marks are:

* Impermanence—insight into change, on the minute moment to moment level as well as on the level of our own lifespan, the lifespans of institutions, societies, world systems, the earth itself. This insight is to really see directly that all things are of the nature of change.

* No-fixed-self—nothing is fixed, everything is in relationship, not a single thing or being exists independent of others. We interare, our nature is shared.

* Dukkah/Nirvana—we suffer when we want things to be different then they are, whether that is trying to get rid of an experience we don’t want or trying to get more or hold onto to something that we do want, recognizing this we can discover through practice how to attune to the true nature of things as they are, which is interconnected, not-separate and flowing

The Buddha said: All the world is changing. We can not hold on to a single thing. 

Even the earth itself, our home is fragile and perilous. The four great elements (water, fire, earth, air/wind) can cause suffering, but are empty in their nature (composed of other parts, interdependent, spacious).

How is this true in our experience? All the world is changing. Such a beautiful mantra. The poem I read in the beginning captures the beauty and mystery of a single leaf falling, and how in very real ways this is like our life, we are floating, tumbling, dancing, falling through space. 

We are really bearing witness to the unreliable nature of the earth itself, how the lives humans built isn’t sustainable with the earth’s natural balance. And we are seeing the loss and destruction from these great hurricanes. I happen to have many acquaintances, friends and teachers who live in the Asheville area. There has been so much destruction, devastation and loss from the hurricane. Same too in Florida, in Nepal, in parts of Africa and Europe this year. All over the world beings are experiencing devastation, loss, pain and hardship due to Climate Instability—wildfires, smoke, floods, damaged water supplies, loss of housing and infrastructure—this is the world we live in now.

And, the Buddha gave this teaching before cars and planes and the industrial revolution. The earth has always been fragile and perilous, there have always been storms, volcanoes, fires, floods. Great forces of destruction rising up from the earth, from the great elements. 

This contemplation of impermanence is an invitation to really look deeply into the nature of our experience. What happens when we allow the truth of impermanence to be here. What do we notice? How does attuning to impermanence, contemplating impermanence help us face the climate crisis? Does it?

I was listening to a podcast interview with Susan Murphy who is a Zen Koan Teacher from Australia. She writes on Zen practice and the Earth. One of her first books is called Minding the Earth, Mending the World and her most recent book is called A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis.

I want to share an excerpt from her book, for I feel it is a powerful meditation on how we contemplate impermanence and turn towards the climate crisis as part of our spiritual practice. She says:

The times are always uncertain until we cease longing for certainty, and only then do they become truly interesting. The planetary crisis we’re in together is now simply the given the strange, inarguable gift of what is. The fervent half-prayer of “Precarious!” overhears the realization that any escape is futile. Who now in good faith can dispute planetary heating and its appalling consequences and our drift toward civilizational suicide, ruined lands, biodiversity collapse, record-breaking megafires and megafloods, and new pandemics. And then there’s our shadow pandemic, too: panic, confusion, and conspiratorial rage, shadowed by dread, anxiety, and depression.

The planetary dangers that haunt us make our time an exquisite moment, piercing and inescapable. Also baffling to the point of provoking fresh realizations, hence the description of this time as a “gift” brimming with untested possibilities right along with potentially dire consequences. Dare we celebrate the way it stretches us, this strange privilege of being alive right now? Can we embrace the sheer lunacy of our moment, in which the biggest human “ask” in history up to now has chosen us?

A koan scandalizes all suppositions (literal, rational, empirical, neurotic) that hold up the shaky sky of human knowing and fearing, until the leaves blowing in the street, the wave welling over a rock, the eyelashes of the cow all share the same realm as this mind. The shock of this can stoke new depths of fiery, fiercely protective love for the Earth. With luck, this love is fierce enough to protect our home from the worst impulses in ourselves and turn them to good.

The ecocrisis of our time raises the question of the true nature of our human presence on the Earth as a koan that rightly exerts an almost overwhelming pressure on our hearts. It cannot be resolved, and the suffering it causes cannot be relieved without breaking through the paradigm that is so relentlessly causing it. Zen koans help us grow skilled in tolerating a precarious state of mind, and not turning away but growing curious instead. That we can’t go forward in the usual way becomes the strangely valuable offer of the moment. Not-knowing, in the spirit of improvisation, accepts all offers! And the Zen koan turns every obstacle into the way.

Take a despairing reaction like “There is nothing I can do to stop this disaster!” Looking beyond the ideas of “I,” and “stop,” and even the activity of “doing,” can we even dare to look deeply into the crisis and not-know what it is, or th…

Since leaving the monastery a few years ago, I have become interested in how the ancient Zen teachers talked about the spiritual path. Language about the realizations that compose awakening are nested in the Zen chants that I would chant daily as a monastic, but we were so immersed in the continuous-ness of practice, that rarely would we stop and try to map out the territory. 

We were living it, who needed the borrowed words of those long dead to put a conceptual overlay onto something so fleeting as experience?

My teacher Chozen was fond of saying that Zen was a practice without guardrails or measuring sticks—we stumble around in the dark. And somehow in this stumbling, in the dark terrain of life before concepts— our faith deepens and our sense of self loses its limiting bearings in exchange for an indescribable vastness that belongs to no-one. 

Zen teachers over the years have said of Zen that, “it is good for nothing”, or “a practice of non-attainment.”

Others, including the early founders of the Soto school, described or attempted to show through poetry and image, some of the dynamics at play in this “good for nothing” journey of “non-attainment” and spiritual maturation.

Two such teachers are Zen Masters Shitou and Dongshan Liangjie. Shitou’s famous work The Sandokai or The Identity of Relative and Absolute is still chanted at Soto Zen Monasteries and Temples all over the world. And Dongshan’s Precious Mirror Samadhi, which contains his teaching of the Five Ranks is similarly revered.

There is a magic to language. A symbol is passed down for centuries, from spoken word, to ideogram, to letters and words in our own tongue, which become images again appearing in our imagination, references to a memory that we can almost taste.

Words are sensual. We taste our words as we speak them. We feel their images and are invited into their song. Sentences are like spells. They captivate the heart. They have the power to render us transformed in this midst of their utterances. When used mindlessly words can kill the thing they are attempting to name. They can create landscapes of lies, delusive dreams that collectively capture our imaginations and send us spiraling further away from ourselves.

Yet, words are also alive. Language lets us re-cast the spell on itself. A single word can be a deep medicine for the exiled heart. A point of connection—a way in.

The theme of the absolute and the relative is a timeless dance of wholeness. What happens when we really venture to peer into Mind, inquire into the inner workings of our hearts, this experience we call my life?— well it's empty yet appearing, spacious yet seemingly tangible, here yet unfindable. What we call one, is also many—a relationship so intimately entwined, it can feel like a great wrong has been committed to even speak as if they were two separate and distinct experiences. 

And yet, we long to make meaning. To communicate the inner landscapes of the heart-mind. To celebrate the journey. We are map-makers of consciousness, knowing that as we chart the choppy, ever-changing waters of the heart, it's already shifting—there is nowhere where we truly stand besides the momentariness of standing right where we are.

As I study the Sandokai and Dongshan’s Five Ranks, I have come to appreciate the play of light and shadow or relative and absolute as a generous reminder once spoken by Master Ma, and later by my own teacher Hogen Roshi—”we can’t fall out of the deep samadhi of the universe.” We are always on the path, and the path is always revealing a new face of this mystery.

So let’s explore one map of the great ocean of awareness and perhaps through these words and images we will recognize some of our own footsteps.

The Light within the Dark (the Relative with the Absolute)

Dongshan: The third watch of the night, before moonrise—don’t be surprised if there's a meeting without recognition. One still harbors the elegance of former years.

My meditation is so spacious, it reminds me of that time when…

Dogen Zenji says, when the truth fills our body and mind, we realize that something is missing. 

As someone who spent a lot of days, months and years in zazen and retreat, a taste of spaciousness can trigger a longing for my time as a total beginner to practice, who just stumbled into this dark mystery of being and had no skin in the game, no vow, just a heart turned towards spaciousness.

The Dao De Jing says, In the Dark, darken further…

Have you ever meditated in the dark before moonrise? Have you ever let yourself let-go for a moment the ordinary distinctions of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking? What kind of place is this? Does anyone remain?

The Dark within the Light (The Absolute in the Relative)

Dongshan: Having overslept, the elder woman encounters the ancient mirror. This is clearly meeting face-to-face, only then is it genuine. Don’t lose your head by validating shadows.

I love this concept called non-linear emergence. A recognition that being human is non-linear. Healing in non-linear. Awakening surely is non-linear. 

Because we are never outside of the mysterious grace of our awakened nature, sometimes a moment of clarity rises up in the midst of a seemingly ordinary moment or even what we might consider a moment so outside of our concept of practice. Like those days when we sleep in, or are hungover, or ate too much cake, or feel distracted, busy, on autopilot, lost, alone in our suffering, or pain.

Then suddenly, there is an encounter—a stranger smiles, we notice the yellow of a sunflower, a piece of music grabs our attention, we look up at the sky—and something happens. We find ourselves gazing into the ancient mirror. A true encounter. Face-to-face—we glimpse, we remember our shared nature, we feel an enduring love and acceptance, we taste the light of being.

Yes right here in the midst of the ordinary, in the midst of the colossal ways we harm each other, in the midst of all the injustices in our crazy-making world—there is love, there is peace. 

The sacred rises up and kisses us on the cheek. And we keep on living. We go to work, we meet with a friend, we use the toilet when we need to, we continue to heal, we face the innumerable challenges of living a human life.

As one Zen master said, awakening is an accident, practice makes us accident prone.

Just the Dark (Coming from within the Absolute)

Dongshan: Within nothingness there is a road out of the dusts. Just avoid speaking the forbidden name of the emperor and you will surpass the worthies of ancient times, who cut off tongues.

Rinzai says: sometimes I take away the person and the environment

All reference points lost

Just don’t try to speak of it

Though many people practice Zen

Few have lost their Mind

Cutting off tongues aside, let me ask— when your mind isn’t reifying anything—where do you abide?

Enter the dark cave of meditation, it's OK to not-know who you are.

One Zen student said when asked, what happens when you think about the one who thinks—I find that there is nothing there at all.

Just the Light (Mutual Integration / From within the Relative)

Dongshan: No need to dodge when blades are crossed. The skillful one is like a lotus in the fire. Surely you possess the aspiration to soar to the heavens.

In the midst of our work, our relationships, our confusion, our intellectual pursuits—the dharma is here. We don’t need to look for peak experiences or make wonderment happen. Every meeting is genuine. The dharma is us. Our vow, our heart’s aspiration, the bodhisattva dwells in this very ordinary, cryptic, heart-wrenching human realm.

Let yourself be a lotus in the fire.

Aspire to see your life as a lotus blooming in the midst of all these flames.

Light and Dark Together (Arriving at Concurrence)

Dongshan: Everyone longs to leave the mundane stream, still you return to sit in the charcoal heap. 

Zen celebrates such a complete shedding. Is such a place possible? To no longer long for some peak experience, some validation from the universe that you are OK, that all is sacred. Faith …

I am just returning from my first in-person Zen sesshin here in Ohio. It was wonderful to practice the familiar rhythm of a silent, Zen-style meditation retreat so close to the place I currently call home. We practiced as the winds and rain from Hurricane Helene blew through South Western Ohio felling tree branches and power lines on the property of the Jesuit Spiritual Center where we were sitting our retreat. Despite a days long power outage on the property, we continued to practice and deepen into our shared vows and sense of interconnection. 

Our prayers and dedication of merit began to open up and include those living in areas that are affected by the winds, floods and destruction of the hurricane as well as those suffering in other ways all over our world—may they and we find relief from suffering and realize true happiness.

Sesshin has this way of amplifying our aloneness and our togetherness. With nothing to do but sit, walk, eat and sleep, we have the rare opportunity to really let-go of or soften the reification of some of the ordinary functions of the mind, such as naming, conceptualizing, narrating, story-telling, etc. 

One is free to just be. And what is that? Something we are invited to continuously discover. 

So we sit on the edge of knowing and not-knowing, the precipice of becoming, the mystery of appearance inchoate. Being nothing and everything at once. Stopping for times the need to define or find a foothold in such existential territory. 

For me, it has been a while since I sat a full sesshin completely as a student. 

I felt like I had permission to rediscover what this practice is, from the embodied source—ground up. And zazen also had permission to be nothing in particular. There wasn’t something to resolve, or fix or some insight to get. 

In a place of such permission zazen got to be so many things. At times a warm loving embrace, other times a sharpening stone, a quiet refuge, space, a place to explore fears + tensions, to make friends with myself in all its forms and manifestations, a hub of bodhicitta, the entire universe unhinged, rain + wind, a leaf falling, love of the ancestors through our teacher + guide, an iron yoke, a lover…nothing at all.

I am appreciating how the practice does practice us, and how over the decade and a half that I have been engaged in intensive practice, there are so many practices that visit me, offering momentary medicine in this process of living. I don’t need to take anything with me from moment to moment, I can trust that practice truly does continue. Though I do find myself drawn to creating the conditions to recognize the dharma in all times and places.

I left sesshin feeling humbled and full. Daniel Terrango, our teacher and guide kept reminding us that the dharma is generous. Ah, yes. Can you feel it too?

Right here is the heart of bodhicitta, a commitment to awaken together with all beings. Right here, all beings are awakening together in the sometimes maddening, sometimes heart-wrenchingly beautiful conditions of our current world-systems.

In the teaching realm, I have been exploring a Zen poem called the Sandokai or Harmony of Difference and Sameness. In this dharma talk I zoom out and look at how we encounter difference and sameness in our dharma practice as well as our daily lives. It was rich and enlivening for me to engage in this contemplation, and I would be curious for those who listen to the talk or read the transcript—how it is for you.

…

I’m Amy Kisei. I am a Zen Buddhist Teacher, Spiritual Counselor, budding Astrologer and Artist. In my Spiritual Counseling Practice, I practice at the confluence of spirituality and psychology, integrating mind, body and spirit. I am trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dream Work, Hakomi (Somatic Therapy) and Mindful Eating. Below are some of my current offerings.

Monday Night Meditation + Dharma

Every Monday 6P PT / 9P ET

Join me on zoom for 40 minutes of meditation and a dharma talk. We are currently exploring the freedom, spontaneity and love of our original nature through the teachings of the Zen koan tradition. Koans invite us into the mythos of practice awakening, gifting us with the ordinary images of our lives, they help awaken us to the wonder, intimacy and compassion of life as it is!

All are welcome to join. Drop in any time.

Zoom Link for Monday Night

Beyond Mindfulness: Deepening Your Meditation Practice Class Series

This workshop style course is designed to provide a map of the meditation path as well as:

* Introduce you to the five main styles of meditation (calm-abiding, concentration, heart-based practices, inquiry and open-awareness)

* Help you understand the intention of each method and how to practice it

* Help you understand how the various methods and techniques fit together and support each other

* Provide a fun, non-judgmental learning environment where you can try things out, ask questions and explore

* Give you the opportunity to work with a teacher with an extensive background in various meditation techniques

I currently live in Columbus, Ohio with my partner Patrick Kennyo Dunn, we facilitate an in-person meditation gathering every Wednesday from 7P - 8:30P at ILLIO in Clintonville through Mud Lotus Sangha. If you happen to be in Columbus, feel free to stop by. We have weekly meditation gatherings, and are offering a day of meditation in October.

Sky + Rose

What is it? An experiment in the impossible task of excluding nothing and loving everything. An alchemy of play, presence and wandering into the shadows, you could say.

Sky & Rose is a practice container that will:

* Center group parts work practices to explore the fluidity, span and dream of who we are - somebody, nobody, everybody. You will be invited to express yourself vocally and physically, engage your imagination and play outside habituation.

* Do interpersonal and group meditation practices of seeing, being and awakening.

* Directly explore emotional embodiment & shadow work

* Include Beauty, Art & Wonderment as core practice elements 

Through rituals of imagination, meditation technologies and co-created fields of intentional play, we can slip out, for a time, of confining identities defined by our histories, culture and comfort.

Delivered by these practices, we can begin to inhabit perspectives and modes of being that stretch our sense of the possible and refresh our sense of the everyday. 

You might find yourself wearing Luminosities face or inhabiting Laughter’s chest. Together we might try out Venus’s view of the very life we live or we might make space to feel Chaos's dance and shake off some rigidity.

All of these are just examples of where our wondering and feeling into places of vitality and expansion may take us.

We will rebel against the quotidian and respect ourselves too much to only have crumbs of the sacred!

It was also be a time to work together with the challenges to living heart forward with sanity and presence within this hyper-fractured funhouse/madhouse world.

Sky and Rose is a place for Jogen and i to invite you into practices and explorations of 'soul work' that are not part of the Buddhist tradition but that have nonetheless been sources of growth and joy for us. Our influences in this include Paratheatre, IFS and Voice Dialogue, Hakomi, Process Work, Butoh, Jungian dream work and more.

We initiate Sky & Rose as an experiment in embracing Spirit and Soul simultaneously, together imagining and practicing interpersonal liberation, playfulness and spaciousness in this time of deep adaptation.

Meets monthly on Sundays from 10:30A PT - 12:30P PT / 1:30P ET - 3:30P ET

Join us for our Opening Ritual + Practice exploring

The Ritual of Liminality

Sunday October 27

A thousand times at least I asked my Guru to give Nothingness a name. Then I gave up. What name can you give to the source from which all names have sprung? –Lal Ded

Language has a trickster quality. At one moment it limits. We find ourselves hard pressed to find the word that captures a feeling, mind state or emotion. Other times, a single word can invoke so many meanings and associations that we are left with a number of mind tangents or in a conversation with people who have very different images in their hearts.

For example—the other day I was working with a colleague to come up with a name for an event that we are collaborating on. They wanted to use the word “vessel”, I said it reminded me of deep sea submarines, they said they thought of a cup or chalice, another friend said they immediately thought of blood flowing through their veins.

Needless to say, we scrapped vessel.

But, how often does this happen?

One of my favorite books as a college student was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (who is a Czech writer and somehow captures something I know so deeply in my bones growing up in a large close knit Catholic extended family with Czech ancestry). In the book he defines words according to the different characters, which opens up a reflection on how a single word also contains personal meaning based on our histories. 

We all have experience with hearing a word, and an image appears in our mind, and suddenly we are in a scene from 10 years ago—smelling the ocean, filled with longing for a lost love or time of connection—or something else.

Given our wide range of life experience and associations, how is it that we are able to communicate at all?

In spiritual practice, we play the trickster, using language we point beyond concepts to a truth outside of our shared vernacular— a secret language of the innermost heart.

Yet, the words themselves can act as traps. We say one thing, and the other side isn’t expressed. Our words amount to an incomplete teaching, a partial truth. 

As practitioners on this path of freedom—we learn to liberate language. To hear beyond the words. 

To—at times—forget words. 

Deviating from conventional conceptualizations — playing in pure potentiality. 

If a tree wasn’t a tree, what would you call it?

If love wasn’t called love, how would you name it?

What is the sound you would give to oneness? 

How would you capture Nothingness?

Don’t tell me about it, my teacher would say in sanzen, show me!

…

For the month of September my dharma talks/podcasts will be exploring the relationship between the oneness and the many, or sameness and difference. We will be using the Zen poem by Shitou called the Sandokai, which is translated as the Harmony of Difference and Sameness or the Identity of Relative and Absolute. This podcast introduces the poem and some other teachings from Shitou, just to give you a flavor for his teaching style. On Monday Sept 16, I plan to zoom out and explore the ways sameness + difference show up in our lives + practice, exploring how we can practice integrating the teaching of one + many in our relational lives.

Another theme I have been reflecting on lately, and this very much is part the exploration of oneness and many—is the relationship between Spirit and Soul in dharma practice. Almost every retreat I have led in a Zen context, someone asks at some point, where is the joy? And while I have found great joy in simply sitting in the stripped down style of a Zen sesshin. I also know that Joy, Beauty, Art, Wonderment and Ecstasy are potent elements to the unfolding and embodiment of dharma in our lives.

Jogen and I have been envisioning a practice space that is both committed to the spiritual practice of waking up, while also exploring together elements of soul work. 

I am excited to introduce……

sky + rose: an emergent, on-line contemplative community braiding Spirit and Soul

Meets monthly on Sundays from 10:30A PT - 12:30P PT / 1:30P ET - 3:30P ET

Join us for our first practice session : The Ritual of Liminality

Sunday October 27

Spirit (sky): indestructible stillness-openness, clarity, perfection beyond the mind’s capacity to grasp or reconcile, the felt unity of all this multiplicity, the cosmos in your cup of coffee. Unstoppable, ever-graceful flow.

Soul (rose): everything alive as Beauty. Art in the everyday quirks, cares, agonies and curiosities. Tending the need to create, relate, build and destroy. Reconciling Psyche’s movement towards wholeness. Answering the call to heal the meanness and alienation that fractures our worlds. Putting on the Altar the dark places and shining light in the shadowy corners of our very human hearts. The love and meaning for the flowers popping up in the cracks.

This is a place for kisei and jogen to weave in practices and explorations of Soul Work that are typically not highlighted in the Buddhist tradition but that have nonetheless been sources of vitality, expansion and joy. 

Here we ask together: What if we lived as if Love were the point?

We will:

* Create a practice ethos of radical non-duality, a commitment to see into the dream of the self. Grounding in dharma practices of stillness, inquiry and openness.

* Center parts work practices to explore the fluidity, span and dream of who we are - somebody, nobody, everybody.

* Do interpersonal and group meditation practices of seeing, being and awakening.

* Directly explore emotional embodiment & shadow work

* Include Beauty, Art & Wonderment as core practice elements

We initiate Sky & Rose as an experiment in embracing Spirit and Soul simultaneously, together imagining and practicing collective liberation, playfulness and spaciousness in this time of deep adaptation.

We will begin with monthly 2 hour online sessions on Sundays. Each month we will have a different theme.

The schedule for a session can be found below. We ask each person to commit to coming for the entire session.

Opening—Sacred Invocation (10 min)

Meditation/Universe Somatic (45 min)

Group Shadow Work / Relational Practices (1hr)

Closing Dedication 

….

I’m Amy Kisei. I am a Zen Buddhist Teacher, Spiritual Counselor, budding Astrologer and Artist. In my Spiritual Counseling Practice, I practice at the confluence of spirituality and psychology, integrating mind, body and spirit. I am trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dream Work, Hakomi (Somatic Therapy) and Mindful Eating.

I also lead a weekly online meditation group through the Zen Community of Oregon and am leading a class series on the Zen Bodhisattva Precepts this Fall. Also if you are interested in workshopping your meditation practice join me in collaboration with Pause Meditation for a 5-week online class series called Beyond Mindfulness. More information can be found below.

Monday Night Meditation + Dharma

Every Monday 6P PT / 9P ET

Join me on zoom for 40 minutes of meditation and a dharma talk. We are currently exploring the freedom, spontaneity and love of our original nature through the teachings of the Zen koan tradition. Koans invite us into the mythos of practice awakening, gifting us with the ordinary images of our lives, they help awaken us to the wonder, intimacy and compassion of life as it is!

All are welcome to join. Drop in any time.

Zoom Link for Monday Night

Living the Questions: 16 Bodhisattva Precepts Class Series

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers, which can not be given to you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. And perhaps you will then gradually…find yourself living the answer. — Rilke

Far from being a set of rules or doctrine that we must follow, the Bodhisattva precepts act as koans, inquiries that we are empowered to take into our life. They ask us to consider, what does love look like in this situation? In this relationship, how do I work with my anger? Who is it who wants to gossip, or inflate one’s self? How can I show up authentically in the world?

With the final …

We are emerging from the monthly return of the moon’s dark face—where from earth’s perspective the sun and moon appear to kiss, an aspect that astrologers refer to as a conjunction. In the Zen tradition, the moon cycles served as markers for the calendar year—with the new and full moons being opportunities for ritual and ceremony around atonement and renewal of vows.

In my own life and practice, I have been contemplating the mystery of being, what is often unseen or unacknowledged in the ways we normally move through space and relate to others and the world. In celebration of this New Moon and the Great Mystery, I offer a reflection on the following koan, Zhaozhou’s Deeply Secret Mind.

Hidden Lamp: Zhaozhou’s Deeply Secret Mind

A nun asked Master Zhaozhou: What is the deeply secret mind?

Zhaozhou squeezed her hand

The nun responded Do you still have this?

Zhaozhou replied: You are the one who has this

I was reflecting the other day about why I started practicing Zen. In my home sangha, the Zen Community of Oregon, we have been having conversations about paths of practice. So, I invite you to reflect as well. Why did you start practicing meditation? And if you practice in a particular tradition, why that tradition?

In my own reflection, it seems like Zen chose me. Someone gave me a Zen book and it resonated, then the meditation group I sat with in college was Zen, then my partner in college took me with him to a Zen Temple—at that point I didn’t really think about the other meditation traditions and if one would have been a better fit. I just followed the path that was opening itself up before me.

When I entered a Zen Monastery for my first retreat, I was greeted by an ambiance that felt ancient. The dark zendo, the temple bells, physical mudras that evoked stillness, gratitude and wonder as the monastery building played with the natural world in a way that the two felt indistinguishable. Though my thoughts frequently played the worries and dreams of this particular person, I had a sense that these stories weren’t the whole of who I was. The ancient timeless peace of the monastery was my heart too.

It was here that I felt, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, Zhaozhou’s hand reaching out and squeezing mine—the monastery + zen forms provided the physical invitation into this open secret.

Another way this koan is translated is: The nun asks, What is the inner-most heart?

We say Zen is transmitted heart to heart, mind to mind. A few weeks ago I was at Great Vow for a weeklong silent meditation retreat called Grasses and Trees Sesshin. The retreat takes place completely outdoors, we practice with the grounds and forest, the trees, leaves, meadows, birds and bats.

During our sharing circle on the last day, someone shared a story of sitting with a spider, and feeling the spider extend one of its legs, as the person held out a hand.

Others spoke of touching the earth, a rock, a tree —palm to palm, hand to heart, eyeball to eyeball, soma to soma.

When we spend a week, or a day or years or even minutes sitting with another being in silence, in openness, in presence—we know each other in a way that words can’t even begin to explain.

Think of all the hands you have held over the years. The hands you have squeezed. What was being communicated? What were you sharing? What state of Mind? What quality of Heart?

All the time we are holding hands with this sacred life.

Tooth brush hands, tea cup hands, peach + apple hands, dirt hands, human hands, dog hands.

Sometimes maybe we are saying, I love you, I’m scared, hold me, other times especially with the seeming objects of our lives, it might feel more transactional, or maybe we fail to notice this ordinary intimacy.

Chozen Roshi would invite us to take up the practice of Loving Hands. A way of really attending to all the beings, all the life energy that moves through our hands in a given day. How many hand squeezes are we giving and receiving? How many moments of intimacy kiss our lips, and pass us by?

Patrick and I have been doing some teaching with a local sangha called Mud Lotus Sangha here in Columbus, OH, and sometimes the question comes up—what is Zen good for?

Or another way a similar sentiment arises for folks who have been practicing for a while is, I know what Zen is good for. It helps me feel calm, or less anxious, or more connected.

We have the habit of relating to this practice as another thing that we can measure—whether it is working for me, or not. Whether I am getting what I want from this, or not.

This koan is reminding us that Zen or our spiritual lives don’t work that way. Even sitting meditation doesn’t work that way.

When we try to measure our spiritual practice, we overlook the mystery—we violate the deeply secret transmissions, we forget about our inner-most heart.

Many of you have heard me use the teaching tool of inner, outer and secret. Let’s go into that a little bit more in relationship to the practice of Zen, or spiritual practice more generally.

So, we have the physical things that we do, maybe that is meditating daily, or once a week, maybe that is doing bowing practice, or chanting or walking meditation, precepts study or some other practice. This is the outer form of the practice. It is important in that it gives us a form, a temenos, a sacred vessel and structure to our practice. This form is helpful. It reminds us that we are practicing. It gives our bodies and minds something to do, to settle into, to trust. This allows practice to deepen and open.

Then we have what we are doing with our minds / attention. I call this the inner dimension. This starts with intention, and then the method—how we are actually meeting the changing experiences on an inner level. This could include practicing acceptance, loving kindness or compassion for ourselves, or learning to relate to thoughts as another sense happening. Or beginning to look into the nature of our experience (we call this inquiry). What is the source of thoughts, what are emotions made of? How long does any experience last? All these practices compose the inner dimension—what we are doing with our attention moment to moment.

The secret dimension is all that can not be said, what we don’t have names for. The physicist David Bohm said that if we used the analogy of the ocean to describe what we know and don’t know about the universe, what we know would be comparable to the foam that rests on the surface of the ocean. What we don’t know—is the rest of the ocean.

The opening lines to the Dao De Jing say it this way:

The dao that can be named is not the eternal dao.

And so Zhaozhou gives our hands a squeeze. And it’s not about the hand or the squeeze per se, but the intimacy. The connection. Not the words intimacy or connection, but the direct, living intimacy. The dissolving of self and other. Releasing the world from our concepts about it. It’s the heart at home with itself. The great mystery of being and non-being—simultaneously. 

I think you know what I am trying to say. There are times in our practice, in our life as practice where we hear the words behind the words. We hear the secret language of a chant, dharma talk, gesture, sound and part of us understands.

Chozen Roshi would invite us to listen to the birds so closely, that we could almost understand what they were saying. I think a similar kind of listening emerges in Zen, we hear and learn to speak the language behind the words and forms, the secret language of true intimacy.

So we practice Zen in all its forms, we set intentions and put into practice the teachings that help us cultivate mental stability, equanimity, ease, loving kindness, compassion, gratitude, joy.

And at times we are touched by the mystery. The great love of being. We sense our shared nature, and the wisdom, openness and clarity of the heart as our own nature. And then, without us even noticing it secret language emerges from our own lips.

….

This dharma talk was shared live during the Monday Night Dharma event through the Zen Comm…

Blue Cliff Record Case 39: The Golden Haired Lion

A student asked Yunmen, “What is the pure and everlasting body of reality?”

Yunmen said, “A fence of flowers and healing herbs.”

The student asked, “What’s it like when I reach there?”

Yunmen said, “A golden-haired lion!”

I am landing back in Ohio after about two weeks visiting my old homes in Oregon, Great Vow Zen Monastery and Portland. I was at Great Vow for a weeklong sesshin that we call Grasses, Trees and the Great Earth—a unique retreat where we move the zendo outside, and sit in a circle together in ceremony with the Earth, Sky, Trees, Grasses and beings of the forest, meadow creek and pond. 

I initially gave this series of talks in the heart of the summer, when flowers, healing herbs, tomatoes and blueberries are fruiting on the fences, in the gardens and windowsill pots of our lives. 

A time of year that tropical astrologers assign to the constellation Leo, the lion—a fixed fire sign, ruled by the Sun. As Leo season ends, and we find ourselves in late summer, returning back to our own inner light, and the work that needs to be done. I offer these talks and reflections on the Golden Haired Lion, Koan Work and the Changing of the Seasons.

The ancient greek astrologers saw the sun as the heart of the cosmic animal as well as the heart of the human being. To know one’s heart was to connect to the wild, mysterious heart of the cosmos.

Lion-imagery crosses cultures. Lions have spoken to the human heart throughout antiquity we see remnants of this relationship today on the lion panel of the Chauvet Cave in France painted 30K years ago, in the image of the lion-headed dakini in Tibet, Sekhmet the Egyptian warrior-healer goddess with a lion head and in the strength card in the tarot. 

The RWS version of the strength card in the tarot is quite evocative of the imagery from this koan. A woman wearing flowers in her hair and on her dress, pets a seemingly tamed lion—framed by a bright yellow background invoking the summer sun. 

Who or what are these part lion-part human beings?

Animals and nature frequent koans. I always feel like their appearance reminds us that our spiritual lives unfold within these animal bodies, within the place that we live, within our passions and desires. The appearance of a wild animal connects to our instincts. The lion to our sovereignty as well as our magical child.

So here we are again. Conversing with a Zen teacher about the body of reality. And again, the teacher points to the flowers. This time blooming together with medicinal herbs on a fence.

While the image was probably something in the immediate environment of the questioner. There are always levels of meaning and exploration within a single interaction. The questioner is asking—what is it? What is always present? Is there something that you can say to express the freedom and love of our original nature, how is it—what is it—right, here–right now?

Yunmen shares a bit of his mind by naming— the flowering fence, the medicinal herbs.

Images of beauty as well as nourishment—medicine. Alive right here in the present. Is beauty medicine? What nourishes your heart? This koan is very much a koan with heart.

Earth Dreams is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Have you ever meditated on a flower? Or attended to a flower blooming over the course of days or weeks. Budding, the opening which is a process of contraction and expansion, then the full expression of its open-ness and followed by the falling petals that slowly turn to soil.

Flowers reveal nature's beauty in full display. Their sweet smells and arresting appearance attract humans as well as pollinators. Long associated with the heart, they show us something about the tender process of moving towards openness. As well as reflecting to us the nature of cycles and deep interconnection. Flowers are in-bedded in a place, they are relational.

In the Buddhist tradition the nature of mind, the pure body of reality, awareness is likened to a flower that is eternally blooming—always present. While simultaneously human life, the life of the world is —seasonal, is changing, is subject to the whims of nature, the turning of the earth, night and day and all the other beings that we share this cosmos with.

What’s it like when we realize the pure body of reality for ourselves? 

A golden haired lion.

Together we share the great heart of the cosmos, like the lemniscate above the woman in the strength card—we recognize our continual inter-connection, our shared being with animal, earth, flower, night sky. We find and lose and find ourselves in the heart of our being.

In Hua-Yen Buddhism, the golden-haired lion is a symbol of inter-being, inter-penetration. Like a great hologram, it was said that each of the lion’s hairs contained the whole lion. So the lion itself was an embodiment of Indra's net. It was a symbol for the living body of reality, where everything is contained within everything else.

Majushri, the bodhisattva of Wisdom, is said to ride on this lion. Living this insight.

So the appearance of this lion in this koan is an invitation to walk through the world as such. Seeing everyone you meet, every interaction as a reflection of the whole cosmos. Similar to the gnostic belief that the divine is contained within each of us. We are of one substance, and we are utterly unique in our expressions. Our heart is both the heart of the cosmos, and our personal heart (soul/psyche) which will flower in its own way, based on the causes and conditions of our precious life.

The lion’s gaze is another teaching in the buddhist tradition. The analogy goes that if you throw a ball to a dog, the dog will run after the ball. If you throw a ball to a lion, the lion will look back at the source. As practitioner’s we train in the lion’s gaze. Instead of following every thought form that flashes through our mind, we trace the thoughts back to our embodied experience, back to awareness itself—back to the source.

We learn to gaze into the spacious source of our nature.

The images of a koan are like the images of a dream, or even a fairy tale. Where each image is us. We are questioner, we are teacher, we are flowers opening alongside medicinal herbs, we are fence, we are lion, we are the bodhisattva of wisdom.

Koans invite us to carry these images into our meditation practice and into our day. Where, like dreams, our associations carry insights into the more personal as well as archetypal dimensions of the koan. 

Perhaps we will find ourselves practicing our roars, or walking with confidence, embodying courage, letting ourselves shine or take up space. Maybe we will learn more about the mythological lions from fairy tales.

Koans invite participation. Embodiment. Creativity.

What is it like to sit as a lion? To walk down the street as your lion self? To show-up at a meeting with lion-like courage or confidence, optimism? How familiar are you with your inner strength? What would it be like to practice the lion’s gaze when someone criticizes you, or when you criticize yourself? 

What is it like to let yourself be accompanied by such a lion? This is something I love about koans, they offer support. Companionship. As we get acquainted with the lion of our true nature, we can imagine having them around. Perhaps like in the strength card.

Another dimension of this koan is the flower and the medicinal herbs. And so one tangible practice is to simply spend some time meditating with flowers or looking at flowers—really seeing them. Or maybe making yourself some medicinal herbal tea.

I have a few friends who as a practice always have a bouquet of flowers on their altar or table, as a way of connecting to beauty and remembering self-appreciation (one friend realized that it was a way of giving herself a gift everyday, the other said it was a small way of connecting to joy).

Last year Kennyo and I watched the early season of Twin Peaks, and there was this scene where A…

For whom do you bathe and make yourself beautiful?

The cry of the cuckoo is calling you home;

hundreds of flowers fall, yet her voice isn’t stilled;

even deep in jumbled mountains, it’s calling clearly.     

—Dongshan

One way of appreciating this experience we call life is to see it through the eyes of devotion. Whether we are conscious of it or not our lives are woven together through simple, ordinary acts of devotion. We are moved by our love, our sense of duty, our responsibilities and our passions. 

In spiritual practice we are invited to make our devotedness conscious. To ask —what am I devoted to? What do I devote my time and energy towards? How do I use my attention?

As the poem echoes—

For whom do you bathe and make yourself beautiful?

What wakes you up in the morning? How do you greet your day?

Why do you make breakfast, exercise, listen to music, work?

And what if this was a living inquiry? Not another reason to shame yourself into being different, or think about how you should be waking up, or what you should be devoted to…

But instead, perhaps allowing devotion a place at the table of your life. How are you already devoted to your living and loving? How does this devotion show up in your life? What is the shape of your love? What does it feel like to appreciate the commitments that you have? How are you already an accomplice to beauty?

Sometimes we move on auto-pilot. We forget that in the midst of this giant machine of our society, we have agency. And are using it all the time in creative and kind ways. We create beauty. We nourish the ones we love. We turn towards love and compassion countless times throughout the day. We practice seeing more clearly.

We are always in cahoots with the great mystery. The cuckoo calls to us. The cicadas sing. The tea pot whistles in a cadence with the mid-summer breeze. A child laughs, another cries—as our hearts and bodies respond.

Our longing for healing + wholeness, our desire for connection, the passion with which we wish to share our gifts, talents and heart with others and the world—these are the ingredients for living a spiritual life. These are the seeds that open the world of wonder and interconnection.

Underneath every action we take there is a thread of our devotion, a thread that can be traced back to the heart of who we are.

For whom do you bathe and make yourself beautiful?

The cry of the cuckoo is calling you home;

hundreds of flowers fall, yet her voice isn’t stilled;

even deep in jumbled mountains, it’s calling clearly.

May we continue to hear its vital call.

This podcast episode is an exploration of a Zen story from the koan collection The Hidden Lamp. It explores the themes of devotion and listening on the spiritual path. 

Asan’s Rooster

Asan was a laywoman who studied Zen with Master Tetsumon and was unremitting in her devotion to practice. One day during her morning sitting she heard the crow of the rooster and her mind suddenly opened. She spoke a verse in response:

The fields, the mountains, the flowers and my body too are the voice of the bird—what is left that can be said to hear?

Master Tetsumon recognized her enlightenment.

…

I’m Amy Kisei. I am a Zen Buddhist Teacher, Spiritual Counselor, Meditation Coach, budding Astrologer and Artist. In my Spiritual Counseling Practice, I practice at the confluence of spirituality and psychology, integrating mind, body and spirit. I am trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dream Work, Hakomi (Somatic Therapy) and Mindful Eating.

I also lead a weekly online meditation group through the Zen Community of Oregon and am leading a class series on the Zen Bodhisattva Precepts this Fall. Also if you are interested in workshopping your meditation practice join me in collaboration with Pause Meditation for a 5-week online class series called Beyond Mindfulness. More information can be found below.

Monday Night Meditation + Dharma

Every Monday 6P PT / 9P ET

Join me on zoom for 40 minutes of meditation and a dharma talk. We are currently exploring the freedom, spontaneity and love of our original nature through the teachings of the Zen koan tradition. Koans invite us into the mythos of practice awakening, gifting us with the ordinary images of our lives, they help awaken us to the wonder, intimacy and compassion of life as it is!

All are welcome to join. Drop in any time.

Zoom Link for Monday Night

Living the Questions: 16 Bodhisattva Precepts Class Series

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers, which can not be given to you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. And perhaps you will then gradually…find yourself living the answer. — Rilke

Far from being a set of rules or doctrine that we must follow, the Bodhisattva precepts act as koans, inquiries that we are empowered to take into our life. They ask us to consider, what does love look like in this situation? In this relationship, how do I work with my anger? Who is it who wants to gossip, or inflate one’s self? How can I show up authentically in the world?

With the final five grave precepts, pure precepts and refuges as our guide we will explore the heart of what it means for each one of us to live a life of integrity and love. We will explore how each precept touches the personal, interpersonal, global and secret dimensions of our living.

Beyond Mindfulness: Deepening Your Meditation Practice Class Series

This workshop style course is designed to provide a map of the meditation path as well as:

* Introduce you to the five main styles of meditation (calm-abiding, concentration, heart-based practices, inquiry and open-awareness)

* Help you understand the intention of each method and how to practice it

* Help you understand how the various methods and techniques fit together and support each other

* Provide a fun, non-judgmental learning environment where you can try things out, ask questions and explore

* Give you the opportunity to work with a teacher with an extensive background in various meditation techniques

I currently live in Columbus, Ohio with my partner Patrick Kennyo Dunn , we facilitate an in-person meditation gathering every Wednesday from 7P - 8:30P at ILLIO in Clintonville through Mud Lotus Sangha. If you happen to be in Columbus, feel free to stop by!

Earth Dreams is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Our attention is a precious resource. We use it all the time, and so, might forget what a resource it is. Contemplative traditions throughout the ages recognized the preciousness of attention. And also recognized that if we don’t put in the effort to train our attention, our attention may get hijacked, scattered, frittered away by the thieves of time or thoughts of worry, disappointment, greed and hatred.

With the election news blaring right now. It might feel easier then ever for attention to get hijacked in doom-scrolling, anxieties about the future, worries and fear.

It is an on-going practice to notice where our attention is being pulled, and to remember that we have choice about what we are attending to. To remember that attending to joy, compassion, equanimity and loving kindness awaken these qualities in our own hearts and in the world.

The intellect can only get us so far, as individuals and as a species. We have other resources and capacities that are under-valued in our capitalist society, but are life-affirming and necessary for our wellbeing. Qualities like spaciousness, presence, clear-seeing, compassion for others, curiosity and play allow us to connect beyond our differences in views and even across species-lines. These qualities potentiate other ways of showing up for ourselves, others and the world—ways of being that empower us to companion uncertainty and awaken to our inter-connectedness.

About a thousand years ago, a Zen teacher named Yunmen said to their community:

Within heaven and earth, through space and time, there is a jewel, hidden inside the mountain of form. Pick up a lamp and go into the Buddha Hall, take the triple gate and bring it on the lamp.

In Zen, we call statements like this koans. Words or phrases that can’t be understood with our intellects alone but require a different kind of attention and inquiry. Koans like this, invite us in to ways of seeing that are as multifaceted as this jewel. They invite us into their world, a world of possibility—a world that is right here, inside this one that we are already living. So if you can for a moment, slip below the apparent linearity of time—into the present—and conjure for a moment—MOUNTAIN.

Maybe you live by a mountain. Maybe you have only seen pictures of them. Maybe at some point in your life you backpacked or camped or hiked on a mountain. Mountains have presence. To view a mountain, even an image of one can often invoke a sense of inner stillness, a sense of awe or even majesty.

In the summer at great vow we would often study the Mountains and Rivers Sutra by Dogen Zenji. In it Dogen says:

Mountains possess complete virtue with nothing lacking. They are always safely rooted yet constantly moving. You should study the meaning of always moving. You should study the green mountains. Just because the movement of mountains is not like the movement of human beings, do not doubt that it exists.

We would practice sitting like a mountain. My teacher Chozen Roshi said, “If you sit like a mountain everyday for a month, it will change you.” What is it like to sit as a mountain. To sit in your completeness, to sit as though nothing were lacking. To be both safely rooted, connected to the earth, woven into the landscape, deeply connected to yourself as ecotone, as ecology, as a network of being—in constant movement, yet so Here.

Mountain practice reminds us that we too are emplaced. Whether you live by mountains, or in the valley, or on the prairie, plains, forest, desert, coast—we are always emplaced. In a network of relations. In this city of sirens and heavy exhaust—a cardinal sings, a bright yellow finch bathes in the neighbors gutter, edible mushrooms grow in the metro park, walnut trees dine with paw-paws creating a ceaseless canopy near the rushing river, where a doe cleans her new born babe, whose fur is covered in white spots, legs still wobbly.

Where-ever you find yourself right now, you are emplaced, connected to a geography, a living landscape of relationships. In part it is the quality of our attention that awakens a belonging to this earth community, to the breath of the wind and the space of the sky—

Even though in parts of the human mind there appears to be so much division, contempt and fear. Interconnectedness is also true. We are also Mountain, landscape, a web of relatedness—we are also movement, breeze, sky, song. And within this mountain of form—there is a jewel.

Within this mountain of form, within this life we find ourselves in, our particular karma—body pain, unanswered emails, childhood traumas, societal divides, violence, fear, disappointment, hope. There is a jewel.

Within this body/mind with its beliefs about being unworthy, too much, not-good-enough. There is a jewel.

In dharma practice, we are invited to awaken to the jewel of our true nature. To recognize it. To refamiliarize ourselves with it. And to remember that this precious jewel doesn’t exist outside of the actual emplacement of our living. The actual events, fears, disappointments, pains.

We don’t have to go somewhere else to find it. We don’t have to transcend this earthly existence. 

Right here in this mountain of form. This mountain of being. We are spacious clarity, love is our heart’s nature—this is the great mystery. 

For what we are at the core is radiantly present, and vastly undefinable.

The buddhist path recognizes that human life throws a lot of shade on this jewel, that we get sucked into believing things about ourselves, others and the world that appears to cover over our radiant jewel. We forget that the mountain is alive, that it is, we are— part of a great re-cycling of energy—that the re-circulating of earth, winds, waters, hope, love + bone is how the mountain continues.

In our forgetting, we attempt to make sense of life and death, violence, lack of care—and develop strategies, beliefs are reinforced from caregivers or religious systems, stories are told that aren’t true but helped to keep us safe when it seemed like nothing else would.

Beliefs like, I alone am responsible for the injustice in the world. I alone should be able to fix this. If only I tried harder, read more, woke up earlier…was more enlightened. Or I’m not good enough. I am a failure. This shouldn’t be happening….

What we call practice is a path of reckoning with what is true. Coming back to the ground, to the earth, to the body, this mountain of form.

Right here—there is aliveness.

Right here—mysterious grace.

Pure possibility.

Then we have the second part of the koan. Use this mountain of form with its precious jewel—pick up a lamp and go to the buddha hall, take the triple gate and bring it on the lamp.

It’s not enough to recognize the jewel. Now let it shine, share it.

It’s a ridiculous image. I picture this giant toreii gate smashing through the buddha hall—bringing the temple entrance right here, right next to the buddha, right into our meditation space. Or bringing the buddha hall out through the temple gate. Out into the world.

Dharma practice invites us to ask—what is your dream for the world?

Sometimes we forget that we get to have one. We are so busy just trying to survive, to manage, to get enough of what we want. Spiritual practice really continues to ask us some version of this—why? What for? 

So what is your dream for yourself, others—the world? 

I want to allow what we usually call VOW to be a dream today. Vow can get us stuck in perfection or overly involved in commitment

Dream invites imagination, process, experimentation…mystery…

It invites us to smash into the buddha hall with all our fears and hopes about the world—to bring everything we’ve got to our spiritual practice.

Dreaming also appreciates that there is uncertainty, much we don’t know, that we can’t be responsible for everything—but can be responsive.

Part of what Yunmen is showing is a kind of radical faith. Yes, this world seems so fixed, but maybe much of what is fixed is your way of thinking about it. Maybe you are taking a limited human view.

Or yes our …

With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together, and then the bottom fell out.

Where the water does not collect, the moon does not dwell.—Chiyono

This is the awakening poem of Chiyono, a Japanese Zen practitioner in the early 17th Century. The poem comes after a much longer story about this person’s path of practice. In the story, Chiyono has a sincere aspiration to practice the dharma, but isn’t able to spend a lot of time in formal meditation practice because of her work responsibilities.

She seeks out an elder nun at the local convent—and though she is full of self-doubt, she expresses to the nun her aspiration to practice the dharma, as well as her situation and self-doubt. The nun meets her with reassurance, she affirms Chiyono’s aspiration and tells her that there is a path of practice that she can do—even if she doesn’t have time for a lot of formal practice.

The nun gives Chiyono these instructions:

* Affirm your sincere aspiration to awaken

* Cultivate compassion for all beings

* Recollect that you are complete as you are

* Recognize delusive thoughts, and look into their source

This dharma talk/podcast episode was recorded on during the weekly Monday Night Meditation & Dharma event (learn more below). In this dharma talk I explore practices for looking into the source of thoughts.

This is a vital practice that has the ability to completely change our relationship to thoughts and the power that they can have over us.

What are thoughts made of?

What happens when you take thoughts as the object of attention?

Or trace thoughts back and feel the sensations/emotions in your body?

To look into our thoughts is a courageous practice, to feel our feelings directly unmeditated by thought is also a courageous practice. Doing it can help us recognize the spaciousness and clarity of Mind’s nature. Doing it can awaken the heart of compassion.

How much energy do we spend using thoughts to patch together this bucket of self?

How much energy do we use trying to prove that we are unworthy, unloveable, undeserving?

What if instead of believing these lies about ourselves, we looked into the nature of these thoughts?

What if we began to truly trust that we and all beings are complete as we are?

While sitting meditation can be a great support for looking into the source of our thoughts, this is a practice we can do throughout the day—try it, its empowering!

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I’m Amy Kisei. I am a Zen Buddhist Teacher, Spiritual Counselor, Meditation Coach, Astrologer and Artist. In my Spiritual Counseling Practice, I practice at the confluence of spirituality and psychology, integrating mind, body and spirit. Spiritual Counseling can help you:

* Companion Grief + Loss

* Clarify Life Purpose

* Healing Relational Conflict + Inner Conflict

* Work with Shadow Material

* Heal your relationship with Eating, Food or Body Image

* Spiritual Emergence

* Integrate Psychedelic or Mystical Experiences

* Move Through Creative Blocks, Career Impasses and Burnout

I am trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dream Work, Hakomi (Somatic Therapy) and Mindful Eating.

I also lead a weekly online meditation group, you can read more about below.

Monday Night Meditation + Dharma

6P PT / 9P ET

Join me on zoom for 40 minutes of meditation and a dharma talk. We are currently exploring embodiment, compassion and the principles of engaged buddhism. All are welcome to join.

Zoom Link for Monday Night

I currently live in Columbus, Ohio with my partner, we facilitate an in-person meditation gathering every Wednesday from 7P - 8:30P at ILLIO in Clintonville through Mud Lotus Sangha. If you happen to be in Columbus, feel free to stop by!

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