From a Gen X teachers conference in Virginia to a White Plum Asanga gathering in the Dutch wheat fields, this talk traces a month of encounters with the living, ever-expanding family of Western Buddhism — Theravadan monks from Guadalajara, Tendai priests in Springfield, Chan teachers from Dublin — and brings back the felt sense that our practice is part of something vastly larger than any single room.

Starting from Maezumi Roshi's question — what prevents you from seeing yourself as constantly dancing and singing with the Buddha? — this talk uses the koan of Mu and the practice of breathing in the whole universe to suggest that what we're looking for isn't somewhere else, isn't achievable through cleverness, and can only be lived directly.

Using the Jungian archetypes of the eternal child and the wise elder, this talk maps the tension between following inspiration wherever it leads and committing deeply enough to actually cook — arguing that neither without the other is anything but a different kind of neurosis, and that real spiritual commitment somehow needs both.

Jogen offers five categories for living a mystical life right in the middle of it — microdosing stillness, staying connected to the tender fleetingness of existence, liquefying your fixity through play, following whatever opens your heart, and finding the skeletal principles that guide you without making your life tight.

Drawing on the Mangala Sutta's teaching on gratefulness and a recent pilgrimage to 400-year-old Soto Zen monasteries in Japan, this talk by Hogen Roshi traces how the abiding belief that "the world should work according to me" cuts us off from the very life we're trying to improve. 

This talk addresses people who know or have known a natural sense of the sacred — and who may have set it aside when they entered a formal tradition — arguing that what you already know is not less valid than what any lama, priest, or roshi says, and that the meeting of inborn spirituality with a tradition can be the most potent combination of all.

In this talk onn self-sufficiency, impossible decisions, and turning failure into wisdom, Hogen Roshi argues that true liberation isn't a state we achieve and protect but a responsive openness that meets whatever comes with curiosity rather than fear.

Sparked by a Fourth of July celebration, this talk cuts through the cultural fantasy that freedom means getting what you want — and points instead toward the Buddhist understanding of freedom as release from greed, anger, and delusion, discoverable not by chasing carrots but by simply stopping, sitting, and breathing.

Contrasting a book of philosophy where every page offers a new way to think about reality with the Buddha Dharma's insistence on direct verification, Hogen argues that contentment and gratitude aren't ideas to adopt but discoveries that arise naturally when we stop managing our experience and simply look closely.

Rather than talking about awareness, this talk by Jogem invites listeners to taste it directly — through guided exhalations, the image of a hollow vessel lit from within, and the Dzogchen teaching of the Nine Amazing Things — pointing to the primordial light that exists in everyone.