March 7, 2020 Enkyo Roshi takes up the koan Mu, employing poetic commentary of three Chinese Women Zen Masters from the 12th and 17th century.

February 20, 2020 We’re perfect and complete, especially when we’re completely unhappy with our own perfection.  Nonetheless, can we offer ourselves compassion and embrace the person we think we are without forgetting that the self does not exist?

Jo An shares his experience of watching vultures devour a deer carcass on his property. He ties this to Xuefeng’s “Dreg Slurpers” in our study text Zen Echoes, reminding us that the dharma does not live in the dregs of the ancients, but it is here and now.   (photo by Melissa MacMasters)

What happens when life as we know it changes, when our previous assumptions no longer hold and the structures by which we know ourselves collapse? Using Chiyono’s experience of kensho in No Water No Moon, Joshin shows how Zen practice helps us accept the fact of death in life itself.

Tokuyu Hoshi speaks of koans and zen practice — how they lure us in, and can eventually push us to a point of having a direct experience with our lives. Recorded February 13th, 2020.

Roshi connects compassionate listening to the Buddhist view that our conceptions and ideas about each other are really ‘empty,’ and that is the key to compassion. Recorded February 9th, 2020.

Meditation trains us to look directly and compassionately at ourselves and our behavior.  This meticulous self examination ultimately leads to freedom from the bondage of any fixed identity.  When the self is seen, the self disappears; when the self disappears, the world is healed.

Roshi brings up Case 8 of the Mumonkan, Keichu Makes Carts to ask “How can we express emptiness?”  She suggests that we approach it not with words, but by allowing our views of a separate and enduring self to drop away. Recorded January 19th, 2020.

January 18, 2020 A nameless woman gives advice. Do we want to listen? Check it out.

January 16, 2020 Myoko Sensei brings up Case 7 of the Mumonkan to point to our capacity to stay alive and fresh to the ever-changing conditions of our every day activity.