In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, Sensei Koshin Flint Sparks explores a simple and radical teaching: our ordinary experience is itself the awakened way. By ordinary, he means not our passing thoughts but the unmanipulated mind that holds them. Many of us come to practice believing that awakening lies somewhere else, in a later time, a better state, or in exceptional people unlike ourselves.

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In this session of the ongoing series, The Measure of Our Humanity, Frank Ostaseski along side Roshi Joan explores what it means to truly belong—not as something earned or arrived at, but as a truth we forget and remember. Frank begins with Sivananda’s teaching that the body is our first home and the ground of belonging, then turns to Tara Brach and John O’Donohue on how we grow estranged from our…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Frank Ostaseski traces what he learned sitting at the bedside of thousands of dying people: “to sit next to people and not mess with them. Not try and help them have some experience, or meet someone else’s agenda, including their own. Just sit with them.” That same quality of presence, he suggests, is what it means to ‘be real’ — an alignment with reality…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Dainin describes bringing Roshi Joan’s G.R.A.C.E. compassion training into New Mexico’s prison system. Working previously with the correctional cadets, and now with men who are incarcerated, Dainin names how the system pushes both groups into opposition, each side dehumanizing the other by default. Looking for guidance on how to serve well in that…

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This session of The Measure of Our Humanity series opens with Roshi Joan Halifax‘s welcome and a grounding meditation led by Dainin, before writer and activist Rebecca Solnit takes the floor. Rebecca nurtures in us the view of possibility, offering it as a path through the false comforts of both optimism and despair. Moving between a 10th-century Zen koan, the deep time of ancient trees…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin turns to the first two folds of the Eightfold Path—right view and right intention—the wisdom from which the rest of the path grows. Right view, he suggests, is not a belief we acquire but seeing what is actually here, before we add our story about it. “The eye opens. The heart leans,” he says — one sees, one moves, and they are not two.

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In Part 11, the closing of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax, John Dunne, Molly Crockett, and Adam Frank address questions from the participants. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

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In Part 10 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax, John Dunne, Molly Crockett, and Adam Frank gather as a panel to open questions on AI before circling back through the retreat’s full arc. The AI discussion ranges widely: LLM “personas” and sycophancy, the ethics of a technology built without consent (likened to asbestos — useful, but harmful in ways not yet fully known)…

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In Part 9 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax introduces a pre-recorded conversation with author Michael Pollan on the value and limits of mystical experience. Drawing on William James’s pragmatic test — treat mystical insight as a hypothesis, not proof — Pollan traces what these states teach us: chiefly, that self and consciousness can be disaggregated.

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In Part 8 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Adam, Molly, John, and Roshi Joan open the floor to important questions of our time. Following Molly’s session on AI and Buddhist ethics, she is asked whether AI models that claim consciousness deserve moral consideration. Molly cautions against the language itself: “There’s no reason that it’s necessary to use words that we use to describe…

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