In this talk, Zuisei shares teachings on contemplating and feeling into the body’s experience of aliveness as practices of awareness and dharma. Through understanding our experiences through the five aggregates, (form, sensation, conception, discrimination, and awareness) we practice opening ourselves to the fundamental interconnectedness of this body, to all.

“If you meet a person of the Way on the way, greet them with neither words nor with silence. Now tell me, how will you greet them?”

In this talk, Zuisei speaks on a koan that helps us to reflect on how we regard and interact with others on the path. She asks: If we do not greet one another with words nor with silence, what is the ground that we meet each other on?

Through the practice of zazen, we come to see the unruliness of our minds more intimately. In this talk, Zuisei speaks on the arising of “no”— the “not this” aspect of our practice that allows for discernment and the continual practice of turning towards a more ultimate truth.

And after all the “nos”, Zuisei says, there comes a “yes”— an opening to infinite possibility and freedom.

“All of these ‘nos’ are so we can get to ‘yes.’ ‘Yes’ on which not just the future, but this world and every world depends. This is what we’re doing in seshin, nodding our yes’s, so we can get to that final, that incontrovertible yes.”

Zuisei speaks on the Buddha’s Eight Conditions for Wisdom: studying, asking, withdrawal, ethical conduct, learning and reflecting on the teachings, energy, right speech, and understanding the rise and fall of the five aggregates.

These eight conditions give us the ability to see things more clearly and allow us to cultivate the space to hold the knowing of our inherent goodness. Through cultivating wisdom, we are able to accept where we are with more grace and love.

Do we choose the course of our lives, or is it divinely chosen for us? In this talk, Zuisei explores the age-old question of the relationship between pre-determination and free will using the support of the Buddha’s teachings coupled with wisdom from other spiritual and philosophical traditions.

Zuisei says that regardless of the cause and effects of our circumstances, we do have the ability to choose how we respond to what happens to us. Through cultivating awareness of our actions, we can be of benefit to ourselves and others—whether that’s in the present moment, or for lifetimes to come.

“The Incalculable” is a chapter in the Avatamsaka or Flower Garland Sutra whose purpose is to blow open our ideas of reality.

In this talk, Zuisei uses this chapter, as well as readings from Hildegard of Bingen, Master Dogen’s “Sound of the Valley Streams” and excerpts of the modern mystic’s Flora Cortois’ record of her enlightenment experience to speak of the beauty and extraordinary nature of our most ordinary moments.

The more we practice, the more open-hearted we become, and the more able we are to practice boundless generosity. Cultivating bodhicitta— the awakening heart—calls us to let go of our conditional giving and well-wishing, and invites us to practice extending our generosity without restraint.

In this talk, Zuisei speaks on what it means to give boundlessly and wakefully, and to give what the sutras consider the most significant gift: the gift of fearlessness.

In the second half of her talk on Suchness, Zuisei speaks further on the nature of reality and our place in it.

“Our lives are just long enough for us to ask, ‘What is this?’ and to find an answer to that question. But they are too short not to ask at all.”

Do we know things as they truly are, or as our ideas and perceptions of what they might be?

In this talk, Zuisei speaks on a concept from Yogachara’s philosophies of consciousness , wherein the first field of perception is the “field of suchness”— where we perceive reality directly.

Cultivating this discernment between truth and perception is an ongoing practice— one that ultimately opens us up to liberation.

“As long as human beings have walked on this earth, there have always been those who’ve said, ‘This is not the way. This isn’t working, it’s never worked. So let me spend my life looking for another way. Let me spend my life living another way.”

In this talk, Zuisei speaks on waking up from our conditioned sleepwalking to find the innate wonder that life has to offer. Through watering seeds of practice and presence, we choose wakefulness and seek truth.