by Abby Mushin Terris | Apr 22, 2024
May you be free from stress and its causes. May you have the courage to look at your stress as an elaboration upon, and not an inextricable result of, your experience. Stress leads to poor digestion, poor relationships, expensive vacations, excess spending, headaches,...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Apr 15, 2024
With an open dharma eye an eye in a face in a heart in the arms and legs that propel this body in activity, throughout this instant in all stillness the inmost point extending everywhere. A thread. Continuous...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Apr 13, 2024
This weekend I attended a retreat at the monastery called ‘Liberation Beyond Belief.’ Here are some of my reflections coming out of that retreat… Liberation. This is why we practice. This is the point of all dharma teachings and practices, to help us to get free from...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Mar 30, 2024
Is zazen necessary, or what? How much? What is too much? And what is just right? Life is short. Many take for granted the fact that we were apparently born, ended up with this or that responsibility, and now somehow feel like we’re trying to keep up with something...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Mar 17, 2024
When we come to Zen practice we are answering the call of the Way-seeking mind. The mind that seeks the Way knows what is essential, what it is to be free to be true to what is. Honoring what our life brings our way and responding to it with wholehearted and clear...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Mar 10, 2024
What do we mean by ‘Presence’? In one sense we are always present, there is nothing outside this present moment. Right? This ‘presence’ is all there is. And yet we have the experience of being present and the experience of not being present. It is like night and day....
by Abby Mushin Terris | Mar 3, 2024
‘What is my true path?’ A simple zen answer might be, ‘Well, the one you’re on’. The subsequent exchange follows quite rationally: ‘but where does it go??’; ‘well, walk it and find out’. Where do decisions come from? Do we rightly bear responsibility for making them,...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Feb 24, 2024
Hostility, competition, love, furniture, money, narrative, excitement all mark the dreaming of this life. There’s always a trail that we are following in a dream. It’s real, it’s vivid, it’s saturated with emotion and meaning. It doesn’t have to make sense in a usual...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Feb 17, 2024
How do we know when we’ve made a mistake? Is a mistake something we did in the past, or a consequence we expect to meet us in the future? What if there is nothing within us – nothing at all – endowed with the ability to prevent our making mistakes in the...
by SJZC Administrator | Feb 10, 2024
Every weekday morning after our morning zazen the small group of us have tea around the kitchen table at the Zen center. The guiding teacher (usually Soten) offers a prompt for discussion. This past Monday I offered the prompt, “If you were to substitute another...
