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Recorded during Three Day Sesshin on October 25, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.
The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive.
If these teachings have benefited your life, please consider supporting the program with a donation (suggested $2-7/episode, or whatever feels right for you!). You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!er ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!
Recorded on October 11, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.
Technical Note: Low audio levels at the very beginning and increases to normal levels after 30 seconds
Resources Referenced in This Talk
https://www.kairajewel.com
https://www.normawong.com
Joanna Macy, The Milling Exercise
The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive.
If these teachings have benefited your life, please consider supporting the program with a donation (suggested $2-7/episode, or whatever feels right for you!). You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!er ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!
Recorded on October 6, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple, Brooklyn, NY.
Technical Note: Low audio levels at the beginning and increases to normal levels after 90 seconds
Resources Referenced in This Talk
Bodhisattva Precepts
Jewel Mirror Samadhi
The Dogen story and quote from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi are from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive.
If these teachings have benefited your life, please consider supporting the program with a donation (suggested $2-7/episode, or whatever feels right for you!). You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!
Recorded on September 20, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.
Resources Referenced in This Talk
Hospicing Modernity: Facing Modernity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliviera
Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging Through Collapse by Kazu Haga
"Death Doula to a Dying Empire" by Kazu Haga
Published on One Earth Sangha
"How I Became a Localist" by Deborah Frieze
TED Talk
In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Time of Uncertainty by Francis Weller
No. 92 of 108 by Norma Wong
The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive.
If these teachings have benefited your life, please consider supporting the program with a donation (suggested $2-7/episode, or whatever feels right for you!). You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!er ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!
Recorded on September 6, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple, Brooklyn, NY.
References mentioned in the talk:
Abuse, Sex and the Sangha: a Series of Healing Conversations: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpxqAk60QqWrlqnlVVWr4IvLyv1GtBw5I
Resilient Sangha Project: https://bostonzen.org/resilientsangha/
Buddhist Healthy Boundaries: https://www.buddhisthealthyboundaries.org/
"Sexual Ethics and Healthy Boundaries in the Wake of Teacher Abuse" by Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg: https://www.lionsroar.com/sexual-ethics-and-healthy-boundaries-in-the-wake-of-teacher-abuse/
Book by Julie Seido Nelson, "Practicing Safe Zen: Navigating the Pitfalls on the Road to Liberation": https://julieanelson.com/2024/11/21/practicing-safe-zen/
The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive.
If these teachings have benefited your life, please consider supporting the program with a donation (suggested $2-7/episode, or whatever feels right for you!). You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!
Recorded on July 26, 2025 at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, NY.
The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If these teachings have benefited your life, please consider supporting the program with a donation (suggested $2-7/episode, or whatever feels right for you!). You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!
Our being in the world – and our karmic orientations in everything that is happening – is what makes the world around us what it is.
Reflections on Resistance and Pipeline 3: a share by Yoko Ohashi and Koan Anne Brink
How do we work through our pain, through our numbness? How do we regain a sense of aliveness?
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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. And that our deep service to each other will really be everything.
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.
The freedom will be in the allowance of the arising, not in the arrangement of the arising.
In whatever way Buddhas are directing their attention, their abiding and dwelling happens there.
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 manifest, and we ask for their support.
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 we are, unafraid. The freedom to be able to meet whatever comes our way with a magnitude of heart and wisdom. To know in that moment what the action may be or not be. Where we want to direct our energy — not in reaction to something but because we want to be engaged in contributing in the lessening of suffering for all beings.
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.
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