Zen Mind

Being excited or disillusioned about the promise of meditation are both signs that we expect meditation to fix our problems. But while meditation doesn't necessarily solve our problems, it can help us change the relationship we have with our problems. Through meditation, we can learn to be willing to have problems and live them. Suzuki Roshi said, "Just to be alive is to have problems." And he said, "When you are you, zazen becomes true zazen. So when you practice zazen, your problem will practice zazen, and everything else will practice zazen too."

It's a new year and many people make New Year's Resolutions to make changes in their lives. Why do these resolutions often not work? This talk explores a Buddhist way to think about intention. Instead of asking "What do I want to do?", we could ask questions like: "What does my body want me to do? What does my family want me to do? What does my community want me to do? What does the biosphere want me to do?" We can find out that our deepest intentions transcend the seeming dichotomy between self-centeredness and altruism.

This is the last talk of this podcast season! Thank you so much for listening. We would be so appreciative if you took a moment to leave a rating or short review! This talk continues the exploration of studying the Buddha Way by studying the self and forgetting the self. Dogen says one's body and mind and the body and mind of the external world fall away when we allow ourselves to be actualized by the 10,000 things. To practice this means to take on the view and to form the intention that our own bodymind is not separate from the space of the world. Then we can grow into the perception that this body is how the whole world manifests in this particular location.Welcome to Zen Mind! New talks will be published bi-weekly throughout the summer. Registration is now open for our fall practice course, "Liberation from Suffering", led by Zenki Roshi. The course will begin on October 1st with a 3-day weekend seminar on "Working with Reactivity", which can also be attend on it's own. 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.

The goal of Zen practice is not to become a better, enhanced person; the goal is an open, flexible mind. Openness may sound attractive, but it actually means we allow the teaching to undermine our habit and personality structures. This can be a bit scary. To study "the Way" is to study ourselves not as a fixed thing that needs improvement here and there but as an open-ended process of unfolding. This talk investigates five interrelated dimensions of how to study this unfolding: (1) psychological, (2) behavioral, (3) energetic, (4) attentional, and (5) conceptual. It shows how we need to navigate within and between these dimansions to make our study work. Welcome to Zen Mind! New talks will be published bi-weekly throughout the summer. Registration is now open for our fall practice course, "Liberation from Suffering", led by Zenki Roshi. The course will begin on October 1st with a 3-day weekend seminar on "Working with Reactivity", which can also be attend on it's own. 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 continues to explore Dogen's statement, "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be actualized by the 10,000 things." This talk uses the teaching of the five skandhas (form, feeling, perception, conditioning, and consciousness) to explore studying the self as being intimate with one's own experience. Suzuki Roshi says that in the experience of breathing in and breathing out, when you say "I breathe," the "I" is extra. Similarly, we can study how the "I" is extra in our material existence, in our feeling, perception, habit structures, and thinking consciousness. When we "forget the self" in this way, how does that change the way we respond to circumstances?