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...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Feb 3, 2024
In zazen on the cushion (bench or chair) we look deeply, carefully, minutely into each breath, each sensation, each thought, or impulse…and come to appreciate how ephemeral this “each” is. Beyond zazen on the cushion, the instants unfold in a stream of nowness...
by Abby Mushin Terris | Jan 27, 2024
It used to get so dark you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face. It still does. Do you ever go out into the forest at night, where the canopy is so thick it filters out even the starlight? Or have you been out in the ocean when silence stretched your ears...
