The Zen Mountain Monastery Podcast

By Zen Mountain Monastery

The Mountains and Rivers Order (MRO) is a Western Zen Buddhist lineage established by the late John Daido Loori Roshi and dedicated to sharing the dharma as it has been passed down, generation to gene... more

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The podcast currently has 1,568 episodes available.

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Number 1: This Life
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi - 8/19/26 - What are the qualities that help, or hinder, our ability to enter and sustain practice on a path of liberation? What to cultivate, what to mindfully let go of? The Buddha and later practitioners studied and taught these ways to support our practice, to best support us in this life, for the life of all beings. Shugen Roshi offers this guiding talk during the Hazy Moon sesshin.
August 19, 202645min
Number 2: Taking Up Zen Training
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi - ZMM - 8/29/26 - Breathing, sitting, walking, all of these ordinary activities offer the capacity to train the mind. But in what? Awareness, non-grasping, insight, stability, all these good qualities essential for liberating ourselves and others. Training is a vessel, it holds whatever we bring and it carries us along as well, a vehicle for practice. Shugen Roshi reminds us that trust in the process of Zen training is essential, but we will need to take that first step to enter training, and to continue coming back to receive the benefits of what it has to offer.
August 29, 202642min
Number 3: Good Qualities
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi - ZMM - 8/22/26 - Many times our practice can be simple and straightforward. But when conditions become adverse, how do we stay on the path? The Dharma points us toward beneficial qualities within ourselves that we can cultivate and draw upon for strength—to support our focus, deepen our faith, and develop clarity. Sometimes called the Beautiful Qualities, or Beautiful Mental Factors, these qualities can sustain and strengthen our practice, especially as we encounter negative conditioning and our habitual patterns.
August 22, 202641min
Number 4: Just Walking
Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei - ZMM - 08/16/2026 - Drawing on Dogen’s Mountains & Rivers Sutra and various texts on walking meditation, Hojin Sensei brings alive a study of how we move through space and time. Drawing on the “virtue of walking” as a constantly alive practice , she asks: how does stillness move? How does practice on the cushion stand up and move through all aspects of our lives?
August 16, 202644min
Number 5: Effort And Aliveness
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi - 8/9/26 - With effort in practice, we bring forth our natural aliveness. To do this we make an effort to let go of self-clinging and other ways we deplete our energies. Even with expectations of the way we imagine “letting go” to be, when we encounter the reality of how tight we grasp on to our attachments, can we yield our fixed and self-centered ideas? Shugen Roshi explores this energy of aliveness with the Five Powers of the Buddha as well as a koan from Dogen’s 300 Koan Shobogenzo. (From The True Dharma Eye, Case 44: Guishan's "I have already exhausted myself for you.")
August 09, 202642min