Zen Mind

This talk was given in January 2021 to kick off an 8-week practice course called "Transformative Practice". It reflects on the nature of transformation and shows how it is grounded in what Zen calls the inmost request. The inmost request is what we truly want in life. It's not our calling, not our purpose; it's not about WHAT we are doing in our life but HOW we are doing it moment by moment. What we truly want is not exactly happiness, but to feel fully alive. While happiness is about feeling BETTER, aliveness is about FEELING better. Practicing meditation can strengthen this ability to be unconditionally open to our experience as it is at this very moment--whether we like it or not. It can help us access the joy of being alive for no other reason than being alive.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

Click here for information on the Foundational Zen Teachings course series.

Zenki Roshi's book, THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk continues the inquiry into wisdom. It introduces the Five Dharmas (an ancient teaching from the Lankavatara Sutra) and makes it available as a practice for our everyday lives. In a first step, we need to understand how the human mind produces delusion through ordinary mental activities like sense perception, naming, discrimination, and story-telling. In other words, the mind creates a sensorial and conceptual map that it then mistakes for reality. Based on that understanding, we can then interrupt this process with "right knowledge" and develop a feeling for suchness, the ungraspable mystery of reality, in which each of us is an active participant.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

Click here for information on the Foundational Zen Teachings course series.

Zenki Roshi's book, THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given as the opening talk to the third course in the Foundational Zen Teachings series. It presents wisdom as the ability to respond appropriately to the ever-changing circumstances of our lived situations. This orientation toward appropriateness requires us to shift from knowing (our accumulated concepts and habits) to not-knowing (a non-conceptual, non-habitual openness to how things present themselves in this very moment).

Welcome to Zen Mind!

There's still time to join the Oct 21–23 Weekend Seminar "Navigating Self and Non-Self".

Click here for information on the Foundational Zen Teachings course series.

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

This talk explores the importance of the body in mindfulness practice—not just as a target of attention but as a way to be attentive. Practicing mindfulness as bodyfulness means to shift from attending TO the body to attending WITH the body. By first joining breath and attention into breath-attention and then bringing breath-attention to the parts of the body, we discover our bodymind as a “sphere of attention” that is in resonance—a constant felt dialogue—with objects and other people. This resonance is our original connection with the world and the source of compassion.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

This talk addresses the craft of mindfulness practice. Even though the Zen tradition doesn't explicitly teach stages of mindfulness meditation, it is useful to describe the cultivation of attention as a passage through specific gates—an unfolding of mental spaces that transform how we relate to ourselves, others, and the phenomenal world.This talk addresses the craft of mindfulness practice. Even though the Zen tradition doesn't explicitly teach stages of mindfulness meditation, it is useful to describe the cultivation of attention as a passage through specific gates—an unfolding of mental spaces that transform how we relate to ourselves, others, and the phenomenal world.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

Find out more about the upcoming practice course "Wisdom Mind", taking place both in-person and online Sept 24 – Nov 12.

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

In our meditation, as we drop out of discursive mentalness and into bodyfulness, what do we find? A kind of existential darkness. This darkness is simultaneously our basic aliveness and our core vulnerability. In this darkness, we encounter the groundless joy of being alive as well as our mortality, existential aloneness, and fundamental insecurity regarding our safety, livability, and worthiness. In it, we also come face to face with ungraspability and meaninglessness. This talk presents and considers five basic patterns with which we try to not feel the disturbing and threatening feelings we are inevitably feeling as long as we are alive. These common but ultimately ineffective patterns are: blaming others, blaming oneself, expectations of others, misplaced loyalty, and age regression. Noticing these patterns is a way to practice in our everyday life.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

This talk was part of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center and addresses how to approach zazen practice. It explores Dogen's famous statements about his realization that "the nose is vertical and the eyes are horizontal" and about zazen being "the dharma gate of ease and joy." The purpose of zazen is neither to torture us nor to make us feel good. Zazen is about becoming aware of the truth of our experience at this very moment.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

This talk explores the relationship between sitting meditation (zazen) and attentiveness in everyday life. It's starts with Joko Beck's definition of enlightenment as the "ending in yourself of that hope for something other than life being as it is" and unfolds practice as the effortless effort to allow one's experience to be exactly what it is at this time—that is, to fully commit to the present moment. Feeling unconditionally alive instead of chasing happy feelings is the fruit of this practice.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

This talk explores the freedom that opens up when we put ourselves at a distance from the structures within which we live on a daily basis. Freedom has two directions: (1) freedom FROM structures and (2) freedom TO deliberately live within specific structures. To be free from constraints can be liberating and feel exciting, but often it's also anxiety-provoking because we enter into a space of infinite possibilities, uncertainty, and fundamental groundlessness. Our attachments to structures and concepts serve a purpose: they help to avoid and mask the existential anxiety that comes with freedom. Zazen is a practice of taking our seat in emptiness (infinity, groundlessness) and developing confidence in the face of uncertainty.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.

This talk was given in the context of a "rakusu" sewing seminar. Rakusu is the name for the small robe given to a Zen practitioner in a lay ordination ceremony. Part of the ceremony is the giving and receiving of the Bodhisattva precepts. This talk presents the precepts as both common sense ethical guidelines and an expression of Buddha mind.

Welcome to Zen Mind!

THE PATH OF ALIVENESS is now on sale!

Become a Boulder Zen Center Member! It is the best way to support Zenki Roshi and the continuation of this podcast.

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected] or give us a call: (303) 442–3007.

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on yogic embodiment.