In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin Nannette Overley traces an honest question back to its roots: what is determination, and what is its role in our lives? Beginning with her discomfort over the whip-and-tether imagery in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures from the Spring Practice Period, Monshin describes the path of her earnest inquiry. She moves through the Lojong training’s…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk preceding the weekend retreat Planting Life, longtime teacher and master gardener Wendy Johnson calls the community “to plant life together in utterly dangerous times.” Weaving traditional ecological knowledge, Dogen’s Instructions to the Cook, and more than fifty years of earth dharma practice, Wendy plants us deep in our seats, reminding us planting is: “not…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Dainin — emergency physician turned dharma teacher — explores what western medicine trains us to suppress and what Zen practice invites us to reclaim. Tracing her own path from clinical dissociation to a reawakening of compassion and connection at Upaya’s Being with Dying training, she turns to the well known koan of a water buffalo whose tail catches in…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk during Upaya’s Being with Dying intensive, Frank Ostaseski speaks to participants from the loss of three close friends within a matter of weeks. Rather than offering technique or teaching, he invites open inquiry into grief itself: what it feels like in the body, how it moves, and why we so often push it away. “I think to grieve is to be human,” he says.

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In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, teacher and author Tara Brach explores imagination as what she calls “an absolute miracle of the human mind” — a capacity that has shaped every evolutionary leap our species has made, from language to civil rights. Drawing on myth, story, and contemplative practice, Brach argues that in dark times, imagination is not a retreat from reality but…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Koshin Flint Sparks — psychologist, Zen teacher, and longtime student of the intersection of mind science and contemplative practice — offers a wide-ranging inquiry into what he calls “the double helix of maturity”: the intertwined work of growing up and waking up. Drawing on attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, and teachings from across the Zen…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Kodo reflects on the just-completed Spring Practice Period sesshin as a window into a larger idea of a Dharma Lab. What has been called “Contemplative Residency,” he proposes, is better represented as “Residential Zen Training” — a rousing adaptation that places each practitioner at the center of awakening. “Both a scientific lab and Residential Zen…

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In this final talk of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Ryotan and Sensei Shinzan bring the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures to their close with the tenth stage — Entering the Marketplace — the return to ordinary life, barefoot and unadorned, carrying what was glimpsed back into the world. Ryotan traces the inner movement this stage points to: the small self receding as the larger self comes…

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In this fifth-day talk, offered during the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Senko and Sensei Monshin explore the ninth ox-herding picture, Returning to the Source — the stage where effort ceases and life simply flows. Drawing on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, the Xin Xin Ming, and the Song of the Grass Hut, Monshin traces the difference between striving and ease, and how returning to the source is not…

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In this third-day talk, offered during the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Ryotan takes up the habit of self-judgment — that familiar contraction after a mistake, the script of not being good enough, and the perfectionism that keeps us small. Framing her teaching through the Lotus Sutra’s Never-Disparaging Bodhisattva, who bows to every being’s capacity for awakening even as rocks and…

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