Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Valerie Brown discusses how spiritual power and presence are among the greatest forces for healing and transformation, personally and societally. Now, more than ev...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, given on the eve of Hiroshima’s anniversary, Sensei Kodo sits with how easily the mind justifies what it later regrets: “It’s very disturbing, isn’t it?… The beaut...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Roshi Norma Wong, a Zen priest of Native Hawaiian and Hakka Chinese descent, offers a Zen and indigenous perspective on spirituality and governance. Norma grounds ...

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity series, Roshi Joan Halifax opens with a guided meditation grounded in stability, breath, and the bodhisattva’s aspiration to meet suffering with mercy an...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Senseis Kodo and Dainin join Roshi Joan Halifax as she explores what it means to live and take refuge in spiritual community. Drawing on decades of building and re...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Koshin Flint Sparks takes up an old question posed to the Buddha’s disciple Mahakaccana: what drives our conflicts? Mahakaccana answers that conflict arises from o...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Genryu Clayton Dalton — emergency physician and novice priest — draws on stories from his hospital work to explore how we can meet suffering without turning away f...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Butsumon Tuck Stibich describes teaching the GRACE program — Roshi Joan’s framework for compassionate action — to a class of cadets training as correctional office...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, delivered on the eve of the 15th anniversary of her twin sister Ellie’s passing, novice priest Jimon Lorene Flaming tenderly opens the bittersweet space of her sis...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin takes us through the currents of the Buddha’s raft metaphor — where practice becomes binding together grass, twigs, and branches to cross from a shor...

In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty year...

In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty year...

In this fifth session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax gathers the community around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Person Born to Farming” — reading it aloud, line by line, drawing participants into it...

In this fourth session of Planting Life, Porter Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — historian, anthropologist, and executive director of Hapo Community School — brings a thoughtful and generous account ...

In this third session of Planting Life, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — sculptor, farmer, and founder of Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute — offers a quiet and generous tour of Pueblo ag...

In the second session of Planting Life, following the morning’s planting ceremony, Beata Tsosie of Santa Clara Pueblo brings her decades of environmental justice work to bear. Drawing on her work with...

In this opening session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax, Wendy Johnson, and Alonso Mendez gather the community around a single, urgent call: to put our hands into the earth and “give life to life...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, offered during Upaya’s Young Adult Sesshin, Sensei Kodo and Sensei Dainin explore two practices that shape the foundation of sesshin: noble silence and Oryoki. Kod...

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, Roshi Joan Halifax draws on her newly written essay “Mutual Belonging, Compassion, and Social Responsibility” to offer a radical reframing of compassion...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin Nannette Overley traces an honest question back to its roots: what is determination, and what is its role in our lives? Beginning with her discomfor...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk preceding the weekend retreat Planting Life, longtime teacher and master gardener Wendy Johnson calls the community “to plant life together in utterly dangerous tim...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Dainin — emergency physician turned dharma teacher — explores what western medicine trains us to suppress and what Zen practice invites us to reclaim. Traci...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk during Upaya’s Being with Dying intensive, Frank Ostaseski speaks to participants from the loss of three close friends within a matter of weeks. Rather than offerin...

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, teacher and author Tara Brach explores imagination as what she calls “an absolute miracle of the human mind” — a capacity that has shaped every evolutio...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Koshin Flint Sparks — psychologist, Zen teacher, and longtime student of the intersection of mind science and contemplative practice — offers a wide-ranging inquir...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Kodo reflects on the just-completed Spring Practice Period sesshin as a window into a larger idea of a Dharma Lab. What has been called “Contemplative Resid...

In this final talk of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Ryotan and Sensei Shinzan bring the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures to their close with the tenth stage — Entering the Marketplace — the return...

In this fifth-day talk, offered during the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Senko and Sensei Monshin explore the ninth ox-herding picture, Returning to the Source — the stage where effort ceases and li...

In this third-day talk, offered during the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Ryotan takes up the habit of self-judgment — that familiar contraction after a mistake, the script of not being good e...

During the second day of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Senko takes up the koan of relaxed effort — how effort and ease, far from being opposed, are expressed in the same movement. Drawing on Seu...

In this first formal talk of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Monshin takes up virya — the Sanskrit term for joyful effort — as the essential energy of practice. What does it mean to sit day...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, offered during the fourth day of Upaya’s Spring Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Shinzan guides us through the seventh and eighth stages of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictu...

In this Zazenkai Day talk during Upaya’s Spring Practice Period, Sensei Shinzan surveys the first six pictures of the ox herding series, from the first pull toward practice to the hard won ease of rid...

In this Zazenkai day dharma talk during the Spring Practice Period, Sensei Ryotan takes up the first two ox-herding images — Searching for the Ox and Finding Traces of the Ox, presenting these images ...

In this second session of Upaya’s Spring Practice Period, Senseis Shinzan, Monshin, and Ryotan, and Hoshi Senko introduce the text that anchors this practice period — The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures: Our ...

In this opening session of Upaya’s Spring Practice Period, Senseis Ryotan, Monshin, and Shinzan, and Hoshi Senko welcome residents, guests, and the Cloud Sangha into a month of shared practice. Drawin...

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, peacebuilder and Professor Emeritus John Paul Lederach — welcomed by Roshi Joan and Sensei Dainin — opens with the question his life’s work has turned o...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, offered during Upaya’s Spring Practice Period, Sensei Ryotan explores a central theme of the ten ox-herding pictures: why is simply being present so difficult? Dra...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, offered during Upaya’s Spring Practice Period, Sensei Monshin and Hoshi Senko guide us through the heart of the oxherding pictures — the ancient Zen metaphor of sp...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Genryu Clayton Dalton — emergency physician, journalist, and newly ordained novice priest — reflects on what it means to bear witness across the vast distances of ...

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, Roshi Joan Halifax opens by reflecting on six years of monthly gatherings exploring socially engaged Buddhism — and on the urgency of the question anima...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Roshi Joan Halifax opens by naming her deep concern for the ongoing wars, displacement, and political upheaval seen throughout the world. Rather than offering dire...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Butsumon Tuck Stibich — a resident priest at Upaya — opens with a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh. No stranger to war, Thich Nhat Hanh explains that our anxiety abou...

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin addresses what so many of us are carrying right now — the weight of a world in upheaval, the accumulation of personal grief, and the stories we tell ...

In the final session of The Poetry of Cold Mountain, participants share their overnight translations of Hanshan’s poems — working from character-to-word guides across five poems. The range and depth o...

In Part 6 of The Poetry of Cold Mountain, the evening session gathers around two offerings. Kaz Tanahashi gives a live calligraphy demonstration, rendering Hanshan’s poem “You Ask the Way to Cold Moun...

In Part 5 of The Poetry of Cold Mountain, the session opens with a participant unexpectedly sharing two pieces of calligraphy prepared before the retreat — Hanshan poems rendered by hand as an act of ...

In Part 4 of The Poetry of Cold Mountain, the session opens into a shared creative space. Kaz Tanahashi and Peter Levitt shape the afternoon around two fundamental poetry practices — writing from the ...

In Part 3 of The Poetry of Cold Mountain, Peter Levitt offers a deep dive into the craft and consciousness of Hanshan’s poetry. Drawing on three defining qualities of Hanshan’s work — plain speech, im...

Roshi Joan Halifax opens this first full session (Part 2) of The Poetry of Cold Mountain by acknowledging the violence unfolding in Iran, holding the gravity of the world alongside the refuge of pract...