Using poetry, koans, and personal story, this talk paints practice as a slow accumulation of intimacy with the world — with fear, with joy, with the earth itself. It closes on the idea that these encounters don't disappear when we leave formal practice; they continue quietly shaping how we sit, dream, and live.

This talk Kisei explores practice as homecoming — returning to a natural ease we knew as children but lost through striving and adulthood. A folk tale and the Buddha's own reflections before awakening sre explored forgetting and remembering as central to the spiritual path. 

This talk explores what it means to listen beyond the ears — to the earth, to silence, to a mind not bound by self and asks whether the boundary between "sentient" and "insentient" is one we've simply mistaken for the truth.

This talk explores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of caring for someone who is suffering, arguing that presence — flawed, tiring, and imperfect as it is — matters more than solutions. It also explores how our own inner work with fear, mortality, and discomfort directly shapes what we're able to offer someone else in their hardest moments.

Reflecting on today's overwhelming availability of spiritual teachings from every tradition, this talk asks whether sampling freely across lineages creates confusion and explores how practice is a rhythm of deconstructing our misperceptions of self and world, and reconstructing ourselves toward compassion, embodiment, and ease.  

This talk explores vocation not as a career choice but as a calling that arises from deep within the heart. The speaker weaves in poetry from William Stafford, David Whyte and others to illustrate how a life of meaning flows from staying connected to an inner current rather than external trappings.

The Tanha Sutta's core teaching, Hogen explains, is that craving turns the fluid, ever-changing experience of being alive into a fixed identity — "I am this," "I am that" — which then must be defended and reinforced. This talk explores this as an attempt to become a solid "thing" and how that goes against reality itself, making us smaller and more fearful rather than secure.

This talk explores the observation that craving turns ordinary desire into compulsive thinking, creating a tangle of self-concepts — "I am a failure," "I am a success" — that we then mistake for fixed truths. 

This talk explores patience (kshanti), one of the six Paramitas in Mahayana Buddhism, as an essential practice in a culture built for instant gratification and constant phone-driven distraction. Bansho distinguishes true patience from mere "waiting," framing it instead as fully meeting the present moment without needing it to be different.

This talk on reflects on the Five Remembrances — that we are of the nature to age, get sick, die, and be separated from loved ones — as a practice for living wisely rather than in denial. Rather than being purely somber, these reflections are offered as a way to "sweeten the deal," deepening appreciation for the present moment and one's relationships.