Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi - ZMM - 11/9/25 - Shugen Roshi officiates the November 2025 Ango Jukai ceremony at Zen Mountain Monastery. Today, five students formally receive the sixteen Buddhist precepts, taking up these living teachings, living vows in the company of the sangha with family and friends: Rami Dokyo Eskelin (The Way of Reverence), Sushravya Jigo Raghunath (Compassionate Strength), Josh Tokumon Dittmar (Sincere Inquiry), Robert Kyobu Pile (Dance the Unborn), Joshua Musho Weiner (To Illuminate the Dream).

Linda Shinji Hoffman, Senior Lay Student - ZMM - 10/23/25 - Central to our practice is cultivating an openness to what we don’t yet know. Sounds simple? To continuously return to this openness means to face the habits we have of thinking small, “knowing things,” and return again with an open awareness to the fullness of life. Lay senior student Shinji shares teachings and stories to bring us back to the beneficial mind of not knowing.

Katie Yosha Scott-Childress, Senior Lay Student - ZCNYC - 9/28/25 - The Eight Worldly Conditions are core teachings of the Buddha and provide us with some guidelines in working with the habitual energies of gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. Senior lay student Yosha offers ways of taking up our resistances and clinging as ways to enter a newer freedom through a close study of these habits of mind.

Danica Shoan Ankele, Osho - ZMM - 9/25/25 - Being receptive to our minds and trusting in the path are essential ingredients for a zazen practice that is vibrant and alive. In a way, this is what distinguishes rote practice from real practice — receptivity, devotion, and wakefulness. Are we asking ourselves, “What is it?” Or are we filling in the blanks with our delusive inability to stay with not-knowing? Truly engaging in the practice — not merely thinking about it — is the living edge we all encounter, and it is this edge that Shoan Osho explores in this sesshin talk.

Bear Gokan Bonebakker, Osho - ZMM - 9/14/25 - The Eightfold Path offers us a way to bring the Dharma teachings directly into the practice of our lives. In this talk, Gokan Osho continues exploring these core teachings, turning to how we understand ourselves and how we engage through body, speech, and mind. With attention to moral and ethical conduct, he examines our relationship to cause and effect, and the potential impact — both beneficial and harmful — we can have on everything around us.

Danica Shoan Ankele, Osho - ZMM - 8/22/25 - As we practice over time, we mature in our practice and if we’re lucky we can also experience and appreciate that ripening in each other. Sharing the words of realized women and men from six centuries ago, Shoan Osho brings home our common commitment, shared questions and aspiration within ourselves and our dharma ancestors. Engaging our minds is the simple and direct way to deepen our understanding of our commonality, as well as our own unique ways of walking the Path.

Prabu Gikon Vasan, Senior Lay Student - ZMM - 8/21/25 - Understanding the many negations in the Heart Sutra, and the concept of “emptiness,” requires effort and faith. It asks us to examine what we take as true, and to verify that through practice. Buddhism does not limit this inquiry to abstract concepts; it directly engages our lived experiences and beliefs in order to ease suffering. If there is no value put on something--like a coin before it’s stamped--then what is it worth? Senior lay student Gikon takes up the path of practice, clarifying the essential teachings of form and emptiness.

Suzanne Taikyo Gilman, Senior Monastic - ZCNYC - 7/27/25 - Letting go of being right can be one of the hardest things to do. What happens if, instead of defending our views, we notice the suffering underneath and ask, Where is compassion right now? Becoming conscious through our zazen, on the street or in the zendo, allows us to heal ourselves and benefit others.

Danica Shoan Ankele, Osho - ZMM - 7/26/25 - Invoking is more than simply using words. It is bringing forth all of our life energy and intention in a way that is transformative. Liturgy can be an entryway to this whole-body practice, expanding and opening our consciousness. When free of storytelling about the “self,” we are not at all separated from that “vastness of mind” that pervades the whole universe. In this way we open our whole selves to giving—and receiving—a vast love for all the world.

Bear Gokan Bonebakker, Osho - ZMM - 7/24/25 - The wisdom aspects of the Eightfold Path include Right Intention, or Right Thought. What is it to take full responsibility for our lives by practicing our intentions, our thoughts? How do we access the joy and ease through the Path? We practice zazen as instructed, and we also have to study and understand the truth of cause and effect, action and result, to understand the power of Right Intention and it’s impact on our lives.