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...
by SJZC Administrator | Jan 20, 2024
From Shinei… How do you meet your life? This life right now? Are you meeting it as a task to be accomplished? A problem to fix? As an opponent to brace yourself against? Right now, you have a choice. Take a deep breath, relax the body and drop all notions of...
by SJZC Administrator | Mar 27, 2018
Dear Sangha (Community), As I prepare to take refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha next month in the Jukai (or 16 bodhisattva precepts) ceremony and make my commitments as a buddhist publicly to you, I have been studying the meaning of the precepts and...
by SJZC Administrator | Dec 5, 2016
by Mary Leigh Burke When people asked the Buddha about metaphysical issues (is there a God? Is the soul reborn?) he replied with some variation of: “I don’t speculate on these things. I teach only suffering and the end of suffering.” So some people...
by SJZC Administrator | Aug 28, 2016
One of my most deeply rooted, and least helpful, habits was berating myself when I thought I had said or done something “wrong.” At one point I stumbled across a loving-kindness meditation in Ezra Bayda’s Beyond Happiness (see below.) I began...
