With all the different kinds of meditation there are, how do we go to the root of our situation? Train your mind! How do you do that? See the way your mind is untrained. It is not comfortable. Radical meditation. The way radical may look for any one of you could be quite a bit different. The attitude should be the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cko-T81_jY

Are you actually receiving what comes in or are you adjusting? Get the whole picture as it shows up. Watch very closely. Don’t jump ahead analysis, presumptions, anticipations, elaborations or screenplays. You can occupy yourself with all kinds of things as your life slowly goes back into the elements. It’s called impermanence and the fruition of that is, of course, death. It is not pessimistic it is just true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxg-pyM-KtQ

There probably isn’t a person in this room who doesn’t have some kind of addictive behavior going on. That may happen on lots of different levels. One of the levels it happens on is addictive thinking and anybody may say “Well what’s wrong with thinking about stuff?” But the circularity of wanting this and not wanting that, the little tiny skirmishes in the consciousness that are usually submerged is addiction to negative thinking, sometimes it’s called depression. In the practice of meditation, you could train your mind to see clearly so that when you work with the addiction instead trying to fix it or stop it or control it you could just see deeply what it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNytK1q3ftU

How can I help you? Some people are not ready to be here. This is not a mundane path. This is the spiritual path of seeing what this is fundamentally. My intense motivation is to help people but not to interfere with them. I am here to say: “Don’t believe your thoughts, don’t disbelieve your thoughts, and don’t turn away from your thoughts or try not to think.” How do you do that? Sit down, shut up and watch what keeps talking. And what will that be? Find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB3Z8A1V9k4&t=1s

Sokuzan has taught addiction awareness meditation. in drug recovery situations for a number of years and has trained his students to so the same.

The value of simple awareness practice, whether or not one has a spiritual path, is that it allows the consciousness or the awareness to change gears a little bit so one is not quite so magnetized by the emotions and the thought process. If emotions and thought processes get a hold of you, that difficult enough, but if they have a hold of you with the support chemical dependency, then that gets you to re-prioritize so that the attachment to the chemical comes before anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkvyAoejSco

Everyone has wisdom. What captures your wisdom are the bandits of hope and fear: hope for something better and fear of something else. It is not that there shouldn’t be a little of that happening, but we tend to overdose on it. We tend to fill up our life with wanting something else. This means that that mind which sees very clearly what is happening this present moment, your fundamental natural insight, is compromised. Whole societies tend to function under that hinderance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftzA7BMrUE

Body hurts, mind suffers. Life is painful. Life is difficult. It’s just the truth. if you want to know what your life is about, receive what is coming your way. The suffering is extra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OIe-E5K6uk&t=1s

Sokuzan gives a dharma talk after three jukai ceremonies during which students receive the sixteen precepts in the Soto Zen tradition of Buddhism and responds to questions from students and their families.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S984UbBIbac&t=1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DofNJTdTmwM

Minimize everything you can without struggle. Sit down. Hold still. Just be aware of the body. Look at the wall, look at the floor. Look at your thought patterns. It’s that simple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD_d5yWLo7g&t=1s