Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, given the night after the midterm elections, Roshi Joan Halifax speaks into a precarious moment in our national and global culture. Rights are under strain, immigrant families live in fear, and the earth bears the cost of an economy built on extraction. She sees a nation at a crossroads, able to tip toward deeper harm or toward real healing. Relief, she warns…

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In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, Genryu Clayton Dalton explores papañca, the Pali term for the way the mind turns experience into ever-multiplying stories. Most of the time we don’t notice this happening. A narrative takes shape, and we accept it as simply the way things are. The Madhupindika Sutta, or Ball of Honey Sutra, points to this unchecked proliferation as the root of conflict.

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In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, meditation teacher and author Jack Kornfield explores freedom as something already ours rather than a reward for spiritual effort. Many of us treat practice as a self-improvement project, a dutiful effort to become better versions of ourselves. Yet beneath the shifting dramas of body, emotion, and thought lies a timeless awareness no circumstance can…

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On the sixth and final day of the Fall Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Kathie Fischer takes up a koan in which a monk asks Zhao Zhou a sweeping question about oneness, only to hear about a shirt he once made. Kathie hears in that reply the meeting of form and emptiness: the one returns to the many, and the many are always particular. “We don’t live in generalizations,” she says. “We live in the…

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On the fifth day of the Fall Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Shinzan turns to an exchange between Zhao Zhou and his teacher, Nanquan. Shinzan reads the story as a gentle test of how deeply insight has settled into the body. Realizing that every activity is practice is not the same as expressing that realization through action. Insight becomes real only when it comes through naturally…

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