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Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is 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 Western cultural horizons while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodied practice.
136 Episodes
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This talk continues the mini-series on exploring space and spaciousness. It presents a variety of practices with gaze, body, and breath that can help us verify in our own experience that the separation of mind from object and self from other is only an afterthought that distorts the original undividedness of space. The experience of undivided spaciousness can help soften conflict, ease trauma, and increase the freedom with which we respond to changing circumstances. We can even relax our sens...
This is the first talk in a mini-series on practicing with the experience of space and spaciousness. The exploration starts with a fundamental shift in view… from “space separates” to “space connects.” We are culturally trained to see space as being between things and separating our self from the world, thus reinforcing opposition and alienation. But what if space is connecting and bonding—and beyond that enveloping, penetrating, and accommodating everything as it is? Such a shift can have pr...
This talk was given as an opening talk to a workshop on “Breath Practice.” It explores breath as our most vital form of nourishment. Breath practice has two intertwined dimensions: supporting health and well-being, and serving as a path of spiritual awakening. The first part of the talk looks at the foundations of healthy breathing, drawing on both science and direct experience. From there, it turns to the Buddhist tradition, highlighting four core principles found in key mindfulness sutras: ...
This talk was given as part of a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It reflects on moments when we are touched by life. Nothing special, just ordinary moments -- washing the dishes, looking at your child, seeing the grasses outside your window swayed by the wind. To be touched by life is maybe our deepest longing. However, the human mind has the tendency to replace the intimacy of direct experience with concepts, stories, and identities, thus alienating itself from what is most fulfil...
We human beings tend to generate stress—and sometimes even burnout— by perceiving situations and ourselves as not enough. This talk starts out with the question "When is there enough?" and tries on the view that "Just now is already enough." By recognizing that we are always already significantly supported by breath, food, shelter, and our society (however crazy it might appear), we can learn to rest in a basic satisfaction and inner peace. From a Buddhist point of view, this depends on letti...
This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It examines the feeling of alienation that comes from the mental construction of a separate self with an internal and an external space. What is the cure for such alienation? Learning to locate ourselves in an experiential space, in which all the contents of our lives (the physical world as well as our feelings and thoughts) are allowed to happen just as they are happening. Despite the serious personal and societal pr...
This talk was given at the Austin Zen Center. It addresses the twin Bodhisattva virtues of wisdom and compassion. These ideals can sound lofty, maybe even unattainable. However, if we understand them as momentary expressions of the practice of not-knowing, they are near at hand. Not-knowing isn't willful ignorance or the random rejection of knowledge; it is a practice of radical openness in the present moment. Openness means to let go of conceptual frames, comparisons, and habituated stories ...
For many practitioners zazen practice is about quieting the mind. Thoughts and feelings are supposed to stop or at least slow down to achieve peace of mind. When this doesn't work, a sense of frustration or even failure can arise. Two misunderstandings need to be corrected here: (1) a quiet mind isn't a mind without contents; it is a mind that is not disturbed by the coming and going of contents, and (2) the right kind of effort is not to shift attention from one focus (thinking) to another f...
This talk explores the experiential territory of the famous slogan from the Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." At first, the talk differentiates between a realizational and a developmental approach in practice: Are we allowing our experience to be exactly as it is [realizational] or are we trying to alter and improve our experience [developmental]? The two approaches exist in an unresolvable tension but complement and complete each other like a dancing couple—just like empti...
This talk was given as a closing talk for the 2025 Boulder Zen Center - Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period. It reviews the basic ingredients of practice and summarizes them as (1) daily zazen, (2) working with views, and (3) cultivating relationships. In traditional Buddhist terms, this can be understood as a commitment to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The talk then explores constancy in practice as the most important attitude for making our practice fruitful. Instead of viewing our practice ...
This talk was given as part of a sesshin (7-day meditation intensive) at Boulder Zen Center. It begins by examining the limited view we have in our Western culture of the body as a material object and introduces an alternative view of the body as flow—material as well as energetic flow. The Western word 'energy' is often used to translate the Eastern concept of 'qi,' but this can lead to misunderstandings if energy is understood as the name for a 'quantifiable physical property' rather than a...
This is a special conversational episode. Zenki Roshi is interviewed by Nicky Antonellis, a co-founder of the nonprofit organization, Dharma Gates, which aims to connect young adults to deep meditation practices. One of their many offerings is a podcast which features different perspectives on the Buddhist path. You can find out more on the Dharma Gates website. In today’s conversation, Nicky asks Zenki Roshi about the background and motivation that eventually led to him to Soto Zen practice....
This talk is a guided meditation that is part of the commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." Instead of continuing with the line-by-line commentary, it takes a step back and points to the mind, from which we need to listen to Dogen's writing if we don't want to get lost in its apparent contradictoriness and complications. The talk attempts to get everyone on a similar experiential page and to demonstrate that all of us are undivided from the mind of awakening. ...
This talk continues the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." The talk takes a deep dive into how to understand and practice with the two central terms, "liberation" and "actualization," which Dogen presents as intimately linked to life and death. The talk unfolds five interpretive dimensions of life and death as: (1) existential states, (2) biological events, (3) momentary change (appearance/disappearance), (4) energetic states (feeling alive/de...
This talk kicks off the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity," which participants in BZC's Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period study together over the course of 3 month. The talk discusses the title and the first sentence, which together introduce four central ideas: (1) undivided activity (that everything is functioning together), (2) the buddha way (that practice means to engage this undivided totality), (3) liberation (that realizing undivided...
This talk was given during a Boulder Zen Center Weekend Sitting. It contemplates the phrase "Everything is functioning together to create this moment." It suggests to understand "this moment" not as a time unit but as the infinite experiential space that presents itself here-now. We can approach the experience of "everything" by letting go of the focus on something and allowing the mind to be aware of everything all at once and nothing in particular. Dogen's phrase "forgetting the self is to ...
This talk was given as part of the Opening Ceremony for Boulder Zen Center's annual 3-month 'Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period,' which intends to create a framework for householders (Everyday Bodhisattvas) to intensify their practice in a committed way. In a monastic 90-day Zen Practice Period, the main commitment is to stay on the premises and follow the schedule completely. If we don't have the support of a monastic setting, we need to ask what we need to be able to STAY in a place of pr...
This talk is the seventh and last talk given during Boulder Zen Center's seven-day December Sesshin. It raises questions about the relationship between being on retreat and practicing in the context of daily life. To address these questions, it shows how the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism goes beyond the idea of transcendence in Early Buddhism. To live as a Bodhisattva is to be committed to this world and its problems while continuously practicing non-grasping and non-resisting. The i...
We live in an "achievement society," in which we are encouraged to constantly improve our lives in search for happiness. This talk presents Zen practice as a series of simple instructions like sitting down, not moving, and attending to breath and body, which facilitate the discovery and cultivation of a breath-body-attentional-space that can flower into a presence that doesn't go anywhere in the midst of changing experiences. This always-there presence hosts all of our experiences—pleasant an...
This talk is the third talk given during the seven-day December Sesshin held at the Boulder Zen Center. It is a detailed investigation of why, despite our sincere mindfulness practice, it can be so difficult to disentangle our attention from the thinking process. It explores the hypothesis that thinking can be non-consciously used as a defense against the anxiety and disturbance we experience around existential facts like discontinuity, uncertainty, powerlessness, and pain. As a remedy, we ca...
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