"Sometimes it can look like the project is not to feel and not to listen to pain. But can we start, instead, to regard our pain as a kind of superpower?"由Brooklyn Zen Center

Our being in the world - and our karmic orientations in everything that is happening - is what makes the world around us what it is.由Brooklyn Zen Center

Reflections on Resistance and Pipeline 3: a share by Yoko Ohashi and Koan Anne Brink由Brooklyn Zen Center

Please take care, and practice this song, this Samadhi song, for the welfare of this world. And listen to the teachings that you working on this Samadhi yourself is transforming beings. We are not doing this just to transform our self, were doing it to transform all beings. But working on our self in this way, transforms beings.…

The focus of the Bodhisattva Samadhi is the Bodhisattva wish, the Bodhisattva aspiration: to make Buddhas for the welfare of the world. And then there is that aspiration, you can also, in a sense, vow and commit to that aspiration. So the aspiration, and the commitment of the aspiration, is at the center of the Bodhisattva Samadhi.…

The beings who have this wish and commitment - to realize perfect understanding for the welfare of all beings - when those beings enter into Samadhi, their vow goes with them. So in that sense, the Bodhisattva Samadhi (or what I would call zazen) - I consider the zazen that I am recommending and encouraging is Bodhisattva Samadhi. And that Bodhisat…

The Samadhi is the teaching of Suchness. The Samadhi is intimate communion. The Samadhi is Buddhas and Ancestors. Buddhas and ancestors are the Samadhi. Buddhas and Ancestors are that teaching. Buddhas and Ancestors are intimate communion. Bodhisattvas want to live in that intimate communion, they want to be Buddhas and Ancestors, they want to be t…

Everything you do is an opportunity. Everything you say, every gesture you make, every thought that arises in your mind. All of those are opportunities - each one is an opportunity to take care of this Samadhi that has been given to you.由Brooklyn Zen Center

In the sensation of the low-grade heartbreak there is gratitude, appreciation, grief and sadness. How can I cultivate the space in my life for a low-grade heartache, that I think is necessary to engage in Bodhisattvic activity? It’s an uplifting grief that sustains us and that can keep us in the game.…

The Bodhisattva vow of living for the liberation of all beings, even before my own, to raise up in the heart the liberation of all beings -- this is the most powerful interrupter and lover of karma. This vow turns everything toward karma.由Brooklyn Zen Center

Sometimes you sit down - or I sit down - because there is fear. But that is still a fearless choice to face your fear, to understand your fear. Bodhisattva can have fear, but does not live from fear. Fear is not the source of Bodhisattva activity.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We deeply desire to be in accord with the natural functioning of life, with dependent co-arising, with the way things interact and support each other, without these false senses of separation. That is what our heart and our lives desire in the deepest sense.由Brooklyn Zen Center

This is our practice, the practice of love, the practice of intimacy. That's why we offer a relationship with a teacher, and we offer sangha, so we can work this way with each other.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We are training ourselves - in our bodies, in our minds, through the practice, through the teachings - to make it more likely that in a moment of suffering, in a moment of threat, that we will be able to have an intention to, and maybe some sort of capacity to respond to courageous connection, instead of tightening into separation and division.…

For me the most powerful things the vows do are because of their impossible nature -- they are humbling. They have a kind of leveling effect. In the face of this impossible vow, I'm one person in a community. So there is an aspect of confession in that vow, of acknowledging our humanness and our limited view. So there is a humbling and tenderizing …

We can cultivate this sense of great expansive unconditioned love. That allows us to meet the difficulty in life without turning away and without getting caught.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We really need human beings that are devoted to the difficult spiritual path required to release the full light of love into the world.由Brooklyn Zen Center

How do we work through our pain, through our numbness? How do we regain a sense of aliveness?由Brooklyn Zen Center

I would suggest a mind that is awake, and that settles, and that finds love, joy, and ease in precariousness, so that we can be with each other, and love each other, and support each other. In very real, concrete meaningful ways.由Brooklyn Zen Center

I think that this gender work is very important for us, it's a real big doorway, and very deep.由Brooklyn Zen Center

In whatever way Buddhas are directing their attention, their abiding and dwelling happens there.由Brooklyn Zen Center

[We can think of] these arising traumas, these beings as I like to think of them, as survival strategies of our ancestors. So fear, anxiety, anger, rage, or joy - these are blood memories. And we all have them, we all carry them. And if we can open them up, see and work with them, we can transform them; we can see what the wisdom is there for us.…

When we talk about karma, it's a way of talking about causality or cause and effects, specifically in human life, in human moral life. It's the effect we cause on the world through our intentions - through our volition, through our will. And the Buddha was clear that when we are looking at the effects we are having, we have to pay attention not jus…

When we work on ourselves deeply enough, when we really are in touch with our own fundamental openness of heart, which really is there, the love that we have for ourselves and other people comes from a place of unconditioned openness. That is what you feel, tremendous gratitude - for every single person.And when you meet them, you are meeting yours…

This darkness, this mystery of who we are, and how we are together, and how we are being influenced all the time, is to be honored and to be listened to, and is necessary for our wholeness.由Brooklyn Zen Center

In the way of the Buddha, karma is always in the background. It's like the little key that unlocks all these teachings. When you kind of understand that, as I'm sure many of you do, when we understand that karma is such an important teaching, it unlocks all these teachings. This is the teaching of karma.…

The Bodhisattva path is a counterintuitive approach. It’s a method to help us let go of this obsession over ourselves. This is very different from our usual mode of operation, if you think about it. That is why it feels counterintuitive, and it can take a really long time for us to really understand and to get into it. We are very much conditioned …

When we come together and sit, then we are supporting each other. And this is a interesting practice, to think that the person sitting next to me is practicing dying. And that when someone is stuck -- we use that word when someone is stuck in their conditioning -- that part of that stuckness is the fear of dying. It is a fear of actually letting go…

To live by vow. To live by not your conditioned mind, but to live with intention. Beyond the little selflessness. To live by vow, is to live as the universe. This is practice realization.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We sit together, and in that sitting together we carry our individual practice. But also there is no distinction among us, we are sitting together. And together we are actually supporting each other’s practice. We are not sitting in a cave by yourself, we are sitting right next to each other. It's lovely, I saw that during this last period of zazen…

Sometimes that Buddha ancestral connection is represented between a teacher and a student – which Dogen talks a lot about – but it can be represented by our relationship to the Buddhas and ancestors we don’t see right in front of us, that we know came before us. And so we speak to them about what it is we wish to renounce and what is we wish to man…

Practice is taking that step time and time again and slamming again and again into the reality that the world is not built for me, around me, by me alone. That my story is just that - a story. And that there is a reality that I am a part of, that other beings are a part of, and would not happen without all of us.…

In order to get free in this human life we have to meet these parts that are really broken at times. They are not broken out of hatred. They are broken out of a lack of love.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We are in a time where being able to take refuge in each other, being of service to each other, being a community that can rely on each other - this is something that we put forward, and that we understand that zazen is certainly important, our ritual practice is certainly important. But our sangha is the thing that will allow all of that to be. An…

If you look deeply at where the body ends, you can't find an end to it. That is how much we are not separated from anything. So this idea of separation is an illusion, it's a inaccurate way of perceiving.由Brooklyn Zen Center

The freedom will be in the allowance of the arising, not in the arrangement of the arising.由Brooklyn Zen Center

It starts to become really clear that […] responding to the difficulties of our lives often requires the energy of others. That being with others, our daily routine that we take for granted, is often the way we gather the strength and energy to meet our lives.由Brooklyn Zen Center

So when we sit in zazen, our karmic patterns come up. And we have an opportunity to see them and to not act on them, to let them fall away. So in that sense we acknowledge them, we see them and in that moment of acknowledging we can take responsibility. So it is a two-part process. There is an acknowledgment of it, and a avowing, which is a take on…

We are doing this work of undoing, which is not easy. It’s really having this courage to go into places that you actually don’t want to see. A lot of times we don’t want to see how we oppress others. We don’t want to see how we oppress ourselves. Gender wise, or it could be race, class, age -- there are so many kinds of ways that we oppress in this…

The bodhisattva's job is to care for the pain of the world, not to take care of the problems of the world.... Who in the world can take care of all of this? None of us can take care of all of this, except all of us. And the way all of us take care of all of this is by caring for the pain that is here.…

This practice, this way of understanding, this way of knowing, is crafted in such a way that we have access to freedom in each and every moment of our waking hours. The freedom that I am speaking to is the freedom from the conditioning, the freedom from being reactivated in response to conditions or persons or circumstances. The freedom to be who w…

All I can do is cultivate conditions that are conducive for a vow to emerge. […] Vow is not something I generate out of my own power. It’s something that happens in community and relationship with others and through a practice that cultivates the conditions for it to emerge.由Brooklyn Zen Center

由Brooklyn Zen Center

In the knowing that needs no words, the entire reality of the thinking mind is called into question.由Brooklyn Zen Center

The ceremony of zazen is a ceremony of non-separation. It’s our intention to sit down and be with everything. This is how we start working with those many moments of painful separation, of harm enacted upon us, or that we have enacted upon another - all the vulnerability of our humanness.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We all, just like Siddhartha Gautama did, run back to the palace for a bit. We learn about the suffering of the world, we feel it, we run back to the palace. We come out again, we feel it, we run back to the palace. Until we come out enough that we decide: “Ok, I am not going back to the palace, I am staying here. I am going to understand what is g…

We are being confronted with the amplification of centuries of historic pain that just seems to want to be acknowledged, demanding our attention, demanding we reckon with it.由Brooklyn Zen Center

We are a very small circle of water. We are not complete. The truth or liberation comes from all the truth manifesting, just like the plum trees – southern branch and northern branch. As they are. As we all are.由Brooklyn Zen Center

Buddha activity is accepting that this conversation may never end, the conversation with evil. It isn’t just accepting it. It’s accepting working with it, it’s accepting responding to it appropriately.由Brooklyn Zen Center

Letting go - real letting go - is letting go that doesn’t abandon the pain. It’s being there completely with it and, through that complete compassion with it, pain is released, without being abandoned, or exiled or tampered with. Compassion respects pain, right now, the way it is. It lets it be. It doesn’t touch it, it doesn’t turn away, it’s right…