Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, Sensei Koshin Flint Sparks explores a simple and radical teaching: our ordinary experience is itself the awakened way. By ordinary, he means not our passing thoughts but the unmanipulated mind that holds them. Many of us come to practice believing that awakening lies somewhere else, in a later time, a better state, or in exceptional people unlike ourselves.

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In this session of the ongoing series, The Measure of Our Humanity, Frank Ostaseski along side Roshi Joan explores what it means to truly belong—not as something earned or arrived at, but as a truth we forget and remember. Frank begins with Sivananda’s teaching that the body is our first home and the ground of belonging, then turns to Tara Brach and John O’Donohue on how we grow estranged from our…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Frank Ostaseski traces what he learned sitting at the bedside of thousands of dying people: “to sit next to people and not mess with them. Not try and help them have some experience, or meet someone else’s agenda, including their own. Just sit with them.” That same quality of presence, he suggests, is what it means to ‘be real’ — an alignment with reality…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Dainin describes bringing Roshi Joan’s G.R.A.C.E. compassion training into New Mexico’s prison system. Working previously with the correctional cadets, and now with men who are incarcerated, Dainin names how the system pushes both groups into opposition, each side dehumanizing the other by default. Looking for guidance on how to serve well in that…

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This session of The Measure of Our Humanity series opens with Roshi Joan Halifax‘s welcome and a grounding meditation led by Dainin, before writer and activist Rebecca Solnit takes the floor. Rebecca nurtures in us the view of possibility, offering it as a path through the false comforts of both optimism and despair. Moving between a 10th-century Zen koan, the deep time of ancient trees…

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