What strikes me is not that I feel two different things. It is that they belong together.

So much of our suffering comes from believing we should only be feeling one emotion at a time. We imagine that if we are grieving we should not feel joy, or that if we are joyful we somehow diminish our grief. But life has never worked that way. The human heart has always been spacious enough to hold delight and sorrow together. Practice, as I understand it, is learning not to simplify our experience but to become intimate with all of it.

When we allow ourselves to stay in conversation with our inner life, we become less certain and more curious. Rather than clinging to what we think is true, we begin asking, ‘What else is here? What haven’t I noticed? What is life inviting me to see?’ Curiosity has become one of the greatest expressions of faith for me because it keeps my heart open to being changed.

Lately I’ve been immersed in the early teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha while working on a new book about his life. The more time I spend with these teachings, the more I appreciate how deeply Dogen Zenji studied them. Dogen wasn’t interested in collecting ideas about Buddhism. He was interested in how these teachings transform the way we actually function in the world.

That is what has been staying with me.

Practice is not measured by how beautifully we speak about compassion or community. It is revealed by the way we arrive, by the promises we keep, by the care we offer, and by our willingness to keep studying ourselves honestly. Showing up on time, listening carefully, apologizing when we have caused harm, remaining curious instead of defensive, these ordinary actions are the real curriculum of awakening.

I’ve been especially interested in the Buddha’s teachings on what creates a healthy sangha because liberation, according to the Buddha, is never simply an individual project. It unfolds in relationship. Left entirely on our own, it is surprisingly easy to believe we are awake. It is community that reveals where we still cling, where we still react, and where we still have room to grow.

Healthy Sangha is a Place of Practice

One of the Buddha’s final teachings offers remarkably practical guidance for communities. He tells practitioners to gather regularly, meet in harmony, honor discipline, respect those who came before them, avoid being dominated by craving, and welcome sincere practitioners.

On the surface these instructions seem almost ordinary. Yet they point toward something profound.

Healthy sangha is never an accident.

Every healthy community is the result of countless ordinary decisions made over and over again by people who are willing to take responsibility for the atmosphere they create together. It is easy to imagine that the quality of a sangha depends upon its teacher or its history. But the Buddha continually points back toward something much simpler.

Communities become whatever their members repeatedly cultivate.

This is why taking refuge in sangha is itself a practice. We are not taking refuge in perfection. We are taking refuge in the opportunity to practice together, to rub up against one another, to discover our blind spots, to become a little less self-centered with every encounter, and to refuse the delusion of separation. When this happens, practice is alive.

Today is the first day of our ninety day practice period called Commit To Sit. Since the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, people have been practicing together, embodying sangha in this living way.

In a few weeks, thirteen members of our sangha will receive Jukai and complete the sewing of the Buddha’s robe. Traditionally that robe is called the Field of Liberation, and I have always loved that image because a field is never created all at once. It is cultivated patiently, season after season, through countless small acts of care.

Our communities are no different.

Every conversation plants a seed.

Every act of generosity waters something.

Every resentment left unattended also grows.

Whether we spend a day marching in the Pride Parade, sitting quietly with someone we love, saying goodbye to a dear friend like Red, or simply making dinner for our family, the same question accompanies us everywhere:

What kind of field am I helping to cultivate?

Let’s Practice Together

As we were driving into the city last Sunday, someone asked me about the history of Pride. I found myself reflecting on how deeply moving it is that an entire movement emerged because LGBTQ+ people refused to accept the lie that some human beings are less worthy of dignity than others.

Whenever we insist on seeing the humanity of another person before we see their label, their politics, their identity, or our opinion about them, we weaken one of the deepest poisons the Buddha described, delusion. The path is always inviting us back into relationship, back into curiosity, back into recognizing that our lives arise together.

Today, notice the communities you belong to, whether they are your family, your workplace, your neighborhood, or your sangha. Rather than asking what you hope to receive from those communities, gently ask yourself what you are actively nurturing within them.

Where are you strengthening trust?

Where are you creating harmony?

Where are you allowing curiosity to replace certainty?

Awakening rarely arrives through dramatic moments. More often it grows through the ordinary choices we make to care for one another, to remain teachable, and to keep showing up with an open heart.

Let’s Have a Dialogue

I am curious.

What is your relationship to belonging? How are you nurturing the spiritual home that supports you?

Please share your reflections in the comments below so that we can continue learning from one another.

May you nurture communities rooted in generosity, curiosity, and love where liberation can quietly grow for the benefit of all beings.

Koshin

P.S. Here are Offerings for Cultivating Community

Commit To Sit Summer 2026 ~ For new and advanced participants alike, Commit to Sit is a guided 90-day practice period designed to support your Zen meditation journey through structured community, daily teachings, and contemplative exploration.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

We had spent almost four hours talking, sharing, laughing, and listening. What struck me was not that we had some extraordinary conversation. It was something much simpler and much rarer.

She was present.

She asked questions and actually waited for our responses. She wasn’t trying to fix, control the conversation, impress us, or prove anything. She was genuinely curious about our experience.

Have you ever noticed the difference between someone asking you a question and someone actually wanting to hear your response?

There is something deeply nourishing about being with a person who can meet you that dharmic way.

As I reflect on that evening, I find myself thinking about what makes a good Dharma friend. What does it mean to be a friend who supports another person’s awakening? And, perhaps even more importantly, what kind of friend am I?

In the Upaddha Sutta, there is a beautiful exchange between Ananda and Shakyamuni Buddha. Ananda says, “Venerable sir, this is half of the holy life: good friendship, good companionship, and good comradeship.”

The Buddha responds, “Not so, Ananda. This is the whole of the holy life.”

I love this teaching because it points to something so ordinary and so profound. The path is not something we walk alone. The people we spend most of our time with shape us.

A good Dharma friend is someone whose presence supports our practice. They help us see our habits clearly. They encourage us to live with more integrity, more compassion, and more honesty.

They help us return to right view, right speech, right action, and right effort.

A good friend doesn’t simply make us feel comfortable. A good friend helps us become more free.

This doesn’t mean that we can judge others or decide who is ‘worthy’ of our compassion. That is another form of confusion. The practice is not about disparaging anyone. The practice is about developing the wisdom to notice and ask:

How do my relationships affect the person I am becoming?

Friendships are a place of practice.

There is an old story about a monk named Meghiya who saw a beautiful mango grove and thought, “This would be the perfect place to meditate.”

He asked the Buddha for permission to go there.

The Buddha suggested he wait because he was alone and did not have supportive companions with him. But Meghiya insisted. He wanted to practice by himself.

Finally, the Buddha agreed.

So Meghiya went to the grove expecting peace and clarity. Instead, he was overwhelmed by disturbing thoughts: desire, anger, and confusion. He returned disappointed. The Buddha taught him that when the heart is not yet mature, there are conditions that support awakening. Among the first is good friendship. This story is so relevant to me because how often do we think, ‘If I can just get away from everything, then I’ll finally be okay’?

But solitude alone is not liberation. Sometimes when we are alone, we simply meet all the things we have been avoiding.

A good Dharma friend doesn’t replace our solitude. They help us enter solitude with more honesty. They help us see ourselves more clearly.

Not every friendly person is a good friend.

The Buddha also spoke about false friends and harmful companions.

One kind of false friend is the taker. They appear to give, but underneath they are looking for what they can receive.

Another is the talker. They say beautiful things, but when you actually need them, they are not there.

Another is someone who quietly supports harmful behavior. They see you moving toward something unskillful and say nothing.

And another is the reckless companion, someone who simply reinforces confusion and habit.

What I appreciate about these teachings is that they are not only about other people.

They are about us.

I can recognize all of these qualities in myself.

When have I wanted recognition instead of connection? When have I spoken kindly but not actually shown up? When have I stayed silent because telling the truth felt uncomfortable?

Practice asks us to look honestly.

A true friend is a place of refuge.

The Buddha also described true friends.

There is the friend who helps when you are vulnerable.

The friend who stays with you in joy and sorrow.

The friend who guides you toward what is wholesome.

The compassionate friend who can rejoice in your happiness without making it about themselves.

This kind of friendship is not dramatic. It is often very ordinary:

A message. A question asked with genuine care. Someone remembering something you shared. Someone waking up the next morning and still holding your experience in their heart.

This is what moved me about our dinner with our beloved dharma friend. The next day, I received a beautiful email from her. She reflected on things we had talked about and shared how she wanted to show up in specific ways.

Not grand gestures. Just care. Just presence. Just practice.

Let’s practice together.

Take a moment to sit down, pause and reflect. Consider the people around you.

Who helps you become more awake? Who encourages you to be more honest, more ethical, more compassionate? Who helps you see your own patterns with kindness?

And then turn the question around:

Who am I being for others? Am I a person who truly listens? Am I someone who can stay present when another person is struggling? Am I willing to offer care without needing something in return?

Our friendships are not separate from our practice. They are the place where practice becomes visible.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I’m curious.

Who has been a good Dharma friend to you?

What qualities do you recognize in someone who helps you become more awake?

And how are you becoming that kind of friend for others, including yourself?

Please share your experiences in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we recognize the friends who support our awakening, and may we become the kind of friends who help all beings become free.

Koshin

P.S. Opportunities to practice with spiritual friends

Commit To Sit Summer 2026 ~ For new and advanced participants alike, Commit to Sit is a guided 90-day practice period designed to support your Zen meditation journey through structured community, daily teachings, and contemplative exploration.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

And that light, the sutra tells us, went on shining for another 1,200 years!

I sat with that for a while on the roof—gazing out at the city I love.

What does it mean to give yourself so completely that your light goes on after you do?

What I love most about this teaching is how gently it corrects our small urgencies. Our disappointments. Our carefully maintained grievances. If the full flowering of practice takes more than a lifetime, then the plateau I experienced last Tuesday is really not that interesting, is it?

This does not mean we suppress what we feel. It does not mean we skip past the pain or the confusion or the long, grey stretches where nothing seems to be happening. Those feelings and experiences are real. But there is a difference between feeling your difficulty and sitting down in the middle of the road with it, repeating, ‘I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed,’ as if disappointment is the destination.

It isn’t.

The 1,200-year view helps us see that every bow matters, every meal matters, the way we look at one another matters, the way we process our pain matters, the way we stay in relationship matters.

Dogen Zenji taught that the way of the Buddhas and ancestors is inevitably accomplished only through continuous practice. Not through peak experiences or dramatic transformations. Through showing up, again and again, and allowing what is true to slowly, finally, begin to teach us.

I’ve been studying the Lotus Sutra for a few decades. Only recently have I begun to feel like I’m actually letting it teach me. I’m a slow learner. I suspect many of us are. That’s okay.

Using everything is a place of practice.

There was a morning not long ago when I was on the roof and something clicked open. I suddenly experienced, perhaps, what Shakyamuni Buddha did when he entered the city of reality. What Bodhidharma did when he faced the wall. What all of our ancestors did when they gave themselves completely. Their light went on. That’s why we are still penetrated by these teachings centuries later. That’s why, I realized, the story of our entire lineage recounted by Keizan Zenji was titled Transmitting the Light. Of course it was. It came from the Bodhisattva Medicine King chapter. I’ve only been studying it for nearly four decades.

This is the teaching I want to share today: everything can be an offering.

Our discomfort. Our self-consciousness. Our nervousness before we speak. Our excitement. Our grief. Not despite these things, but through them. The moment we begin to see our difficulties not as evidence that something is wrong, but as material for practice, something shifts. We become more a part of the world, not less.

Can I suffer this and this and this as an offering? Can I use even my self-protection, my self-importance, my stories about how I’m perceived, and allow them to burn?

My self-importance is sticky. I work with it constantly. My certainty is sticky, too. My grievances, my image of how I’d like to be seen. These are what the tradition calls klesha, the poisons. And it is genuinely excruciating sometimes to let them burn through. This burning is the most important place of practice for me.

Zen is hard, partly because when the practice is actually working, we will run directly into all of this gunk. The sangha will show it to us. Our teacher will show it to us. Life will show it to us, relentlessly.

Most people leave at this point. I understand that. We live in a culture that prefers comfort and confirmation. But the practice was never designed to please our small self. It was designed to liberate us from it.

Let’s practice together.

This week, I invite you to try an experiment. When something difficult arises, whether frustration, fear, embarrassment, or the tight little knot of wanting to be seen a certain way, pause before you push it away or feed it.

Ask instead: How can this become an offering?

Not by suppressing it. Not by pretending it isn’t there. But by feeling it fully, and then releasing it into something larger than yourself. Your vow. Your practice. The simple, enormous fact of being alive alongside other beings.

Sit quietly for a few minutes. Let the breath settle. Then ask honestly: What am I protecting most fiercely right now? What would it feel like to loosen that protection, just slightly, and offer what’s underneath?

Notice what happens in the body. Notice what becomes possible when we stop spending energy guarding what we’ve built and begin offering it up instead.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I’m curious.

What is it that you most want to protect, and what do you imagine would happen if you allowed it to burn away? When was a time that your difficulty, once you stopped running from it, became something you could offer to others?

Please share in the comments below, for the benefit of us all.

May we find the freedom that comes from offering everything, not just what is convenient or comfortable, but all of it, our light and our struggle alike.

Koshin

P.S. Consider the light of these offerings

Commit To Sit Summer 2026 ~ For new and advanced participants alike, Commit to Sit is a guided 90-day practice period designed to support your Zen meditation journey through structured community, daily teachings, and contemplative exploration.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

I understood the question deeply because I have experienced this myself. We sit down and, like so many things in our lives, we start evaluating. ‘Is this working? Am I getting somewhere? Am I doing this right?’ We bring our ordinary habits of judgment and comparison right into our practice.

Yet the question I keep returning to is much simpler, ‘Am I awake?’

One of our Soto Zen ancestors would walk around asking himself, “Are you awake?” And he would answer yes, and he would say, “Do not be deceived by yourself or others.” The response from himself was, “I won’t.”

I find this teaching both beautiful and challenging because, for myself, I am usually not so concerned about being deceived by others. I am much more likely to be deceived by my own mind. My own stories, my own preferences, my own ideas about how things should be.

Not being entertained is a place of practice

When our zazen feels dull or our lives feel uninspiring, it is easy to slip into the question, ‘What is this doing for me?’ It is a very human question. We want to know whether our effort is producing something. We want evidence that we are changing.

But this can also be the place where we get caught. The practice is not here to entertain us or to constantly provide some special experience. It is not about chasing after a feeling of inspiration. It is about discovering the extraordinary nature of what is already here.

The breath.

The body sitting.

The sounds around us.

The fact that we are alive in this moment.

Zazen is so dynamic because we are practicing returning, again and again. Away and come back. Away and back. We are practicing being nowhere else.

Sometimes we are bored. Sometimes we are distracted. Sometimes we are fantasizing, planning, remembering, or getting lost in our own thoughts. The question is not whether these things happen. They will happen. The question is: Are we awake enough to notice and come back?

Another student recently brought up the tension between ambition and aspiration, between slowing down and rushing forward, between grasping and vow. How do we know the difference? How do we navigate these seemingly opposing forces?

I loved this question because it touches something essential about practice. We often want to resolve tension. We want to pick one side and reject the other. But the tension itself is where life is happening.

Our great aspirations can have shadows. We can become so focused on accomplishing something meaningful that we stop noticing the people right in front of us. We can become so committed to our ideas of goodness that we lose our ability to listen.

At the same time, slowing down can become avoidance. Seeking peace can become a way of turning away from what is difficult.

The practice is not about eliminating these contradictions. It is about learning to stay intimate with them.

I often think about the image of a tightrope walker. The beauty is not in standing perfectly still. The aliveness comes from the constant adjustment, the sensitivity, the ability to respond moment by moment.

That is the place of practice.

Someone recently asked about making daily decisions from a dharmic perspective. How do we know what choices support our practice? How do we know what relationships, actions, and commitments are actually nourishing?

I return to the same question, ‘Am I awake?’

Am I making this choice from clarity, or am I being pulled by old habits? Am I paying attention to what my body, my relationships, and the world are showing me?

The precepts are not just rules we follow. They are a way of becoming more clear and receptive. They invite us to look honestly at our lives and ask: ‘What am I creating? What am I supporting? What am I feeding?’

Practice is not separate from our daily lives. It is revealed in the way we speak, the way we listen, the way we show up.

Let’s practice together

Today, notice how quickly the mind wants to evaluate every experience. ‘This was a good day. This was a bad meditation. I am doing well. I am failing.’

Instead of following that story, try asking, Am I awake right now?

Feel your body. Notice your breath. Receive the sounds around you. Allow this moment to be exactly what it is.

Not something to fix.

Not something to improve.

Just this.

The only moment we actually have.

Let’s have a dialogue

I’m curious.

Where do you notice yourself being deceived by your own mind? By others? What helps you return to wakefulness when your practice life feels stale?

Please share your experiences in the comments below. Your words may be exactly what someone else needs to hear.

May we continue waking up, together.

Koshin

P.S. Waking up together with these offerings

Commit To Sit Summer 2026 ~ For new and advanced participants alike, Commit to Sit is a guided 90-day practice period designed to support your Zen meditation journey through structured community, daily teachings, and contemplative exploration.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

When we are uncomfortable, when this awakening way asks something of us that we did not expect or do not want, the first impulse is often to rearrange the furniture. Change the chanting. Adjust the ritual. Question the bowing. Wonder aloud whether the robes are really necessary. I know this impulse intimately, because it was mine.

My first teacher, Daido Roshi, heard a version of my opinions, in dokusan, about what could be adjusted around his monastery more times than I care to remember. I was constantly approaching him with suggestions. Thoughtful ones, I was sure. And what did he do? He rang the bell.

What I could not see then was that I was not yet really in relationship with my discomfort. I was trying to manage the conditions of practice before I had actually let practice in.

How do we actually let the practice enter us, instead of endlessly rearranging it to fit the shape of what we already want?

Recently I was part of a gathering with a wonderful sister organization called Dharma Gates, which brings Dharma teachings to young people. Three teachers were asked to speak about the future of Dharma in America. What kept surfacing for me was a teaching from Shundo Aoyama Roshi. She speaks of two principles: Fueki, what must not change, and Ryuko, what must.

Fueki. Ryuko.

For Aoyama Roshi, and for me, Fueki is the essential heart of the teaching, the important difference between small self and big self. Small mind and big mind. The practice is not about erasing our habits or pretending they are not there. It is about learning to work with them moment by moment. To notice when we have been captured by a story, a feeling of unworthiness, a plateau, a wanting, and to do something new.

That is the unchangeable core. Freedom from the tyranny of habit. Not the absence of habit, and yet to engage our capacity to meet it.

Many people come to our Zendo and look around and say, ‘Why all the ritual? What’s with the bowing? Is all of this really necessary?’ And I understand completely, because I was that person. I had that person’s voice. That person still lives in me.

But here is what I have come to see. Most of the desire to change the forms of life is small self. It is the part of us that wants our environment to accommodate us. That wants the practice to fit around our preferences rather than the other way around.

And yet, this is also not the whole truth.

Ryuko matters too. What serves awakening here, now, in Chelsea, in New York City, in 2026, is also worth asking. The question is not whether to adapt, but from where this impulse comes.

Last night Chodo made a beautiful meal. Afterwards he brought me the tiny bowl with a big bee painted inside it. It was filled with just a little bit of the vegan min chip ice cream I love and four strawberries on top. I love that bowl so much. I genuinely prefer it. That preference is real. It is also fine.

The practice is about what happens when I do not get what I want. What happens when the tiny bee bowl shatters? That is where it gets interesting.

Embracing actions are places of practice.

Dogen Zenji, in one of his most beautiful teachings called Shishobo, which we might translate as “The Four Embracing Actions,” offers four things worth holding as unchanging in our life together. I love the title alone: embracing actions. Not just doing things. Embracing reality with our actions.

The four are giving, loving speech, beneficial action, and identity action.

Giving, dana, is usually talked about in terms of money, time, attention. But lately I have been sitting with a less obvious form of giving. Allowing others to know you. What if practicing generosity includes saying ‘I need help’?

What if giving means sharing your actual struggle with a dear friend or teacher, not so they can fix it, but so you can both be real together?

Loving speech is the second. I listened recently to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Yuval Harari. They spoke about how our social media algorithms feed us only what we already like, only opinions we already hold. No friction, no diversity, no challenge. And AI, it turns out, functions similarly. It agrees. It reflects us back to ourselves. I read that around thirty-five percent of people now identify an AI as their primary close relationship. How do we each allow aspects of life that we don’t agree with in? How do we allow true intimacy?

Loving speech is sometimes saying: take a risk. Get to know someone. Let them know you. Do you truly allow people to know you? Do I?

Beneficial action, the third, asks, ‘Are my actions actually for the benefit of others, or only for myself?’ Not that we cannot do things for ourselves. The little bee bowl, the ice cream, those are for me, and they are lovely.

Beneficial action asks how much of our day are we actually awake to whether what we are doing serves something larger?

And then there is identity action. This may be the deepest. Identity action means entering another person’s world so completely that you recognize yourself in them. You act because you understand, ‘I am you.’

Shinryu Suzuki Roshi offered a teaching that comes back to me often, which one of our community members reminded me of recently. He said, ‘If you try to carry water in a basket, it does not work so well. But if you keep the basket in the water, it works beautifully.’ Basket and water, still different, and yet immersed together. In relationship. That is identity action.

Are you actually in relationship? Or are you managing from a distance, trying to hold the basket above the surface?

Let’s practice together.

I want to invite you to sit with two series of questions that Aoyama Roshi’s teaching opens for us.

Find a comfortable place to settle. Let your body arrive. Let a few deep breaths move through you.

What in your practice, your relationships, your life, must not change? What is the unchangeable core that you are being called to respect and honor, even when it is uncomfortable? Even when your small self would prefer to rearrange it?

What actually needs to change? Not from preference, not from wanting things to accommodate you, but from genuine discernment. What is the skillful adaptation that serves the teaching rather than avoids it?

Notice how these two questions feel different in your body. One may feel like groundedness. The other may feel like freedom. We need both.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

Where in your life are you rearranging the furniture instead of sitting with your discomfort? And where are you perhaps holding too tightly to forms that no longer serve? How do you tell the difference?

How will you step off the hundred foot pole?

Please share your experiences and reflections in the comments below, for the benefit of us all.

May you let the practice enter you. May you stay in the river, basket and all, and feel the intimacy of what it is to be immersed in this one precious life together.

Koshin.

P.S. Four ways to let the practice enter you

Commit To Sit Summer 2026 ~ For new and advanced participants alike, Commit to Sit is a guided 90-day practice period designed to support your Zen meditation journey through structured community, daily teachings, and contemplative exploration.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

Somewhere along the way, the holiday became associated with barbecues and the unofficial start of summer. And there is nothing wrong with barbecues. But underneath all of this, Memorial Day is a day of honoring those who gave everything, including their very lives, in service of something they perceived to be larger than themselves.

That is not a small thing.

I have been moved by the sheer fact that hundreds of thousands of people, imperfect and complicated people, chose to give their all. To give themselves completely. And this reflection has led me, as it often does, back to practice.

How much am I giving of myself to practice? How much are you?

There is a teaching from Ajahn Chah that I return to often. He said, ‘If you give a little bit, you will be a little bit free. If you give a medium amount, you will be a medium amount free. But if you want to be totally free, give everything.’

So simple. And yet so hard to do.

Closing the Gap is a Place of Practice.

I had a long, wonderful lunch recently with a dear friend who is also a Zen teacher. We were talking about how he has been caring for his health in ways he had not always done, and he said something that stopped me: “I am in my 70’s and I feel spry. I feel better than I ever have.” He was stretching, moving, paying careful attention each day to what his body needed. And he laughed and said, “It is kind of like Zen practice, actually.”

He is right. When we pay that quality of attention throughout our day, when we realize that every moment is a moment of practice, how could anything be stagnant or boring? How could there be a plateau?

The confusion comes when we approach practice as a transaction. ‘If I sit zazen, I will get something. If I show up, I will be rewarded.’ But that is not what practice is. Practice is giving ourselves to something larger than our small self, not because we will receive a prize, but because the giving itself is the freedom.

I have been spending time lately with Dogen Zenji’s fascicle on Dotoku, which is sometimes translated as “true expression” or “sayings.” Dogen writes. “The Buddhas and ancestors are their sayings.”

What a sentence.

The Buddhas and ancestors are their sayings. What they say they are going to do, they do. There is no real gap. They are reliable, steadfast, consistent. And he goes on to say that when the Buddhas and ancestors pass on the dharma, they ask whether or not their students can say something. They are not asking whether they can talk. They are asking: Are you living what you are saying?

Dogen says they ask this question with their minds, with their bodies, with their staffs and whisks, with the pillars and lanterns. They are watching how we function, how we hold things, how we show up, how we pay attention. The teaching is in all of it.

Are my words and my actions together? Are they intimate?

This is such a dynamic invitation. Not a weapon, but a focus. Something to keep returning to.

He says these sayings cannot be paraphrased. We cannot borrow someone else’s awakening and wear it like a coat. It has to come from the thorough investigation of our own lives. When we truly do that investigation, sayings naturally arise. Three years, eight years, thirty years of concentrated effort.

Sometimes people push back on me when I talk about making effort. ‘Koshin, you are always talking about effort. Why so much effort?’ Because our Buddhas and ancestors are constantly talking about making the effort. And in my experience, it is so worth it.

I was speaking recently with Chodo and our dear Dharma brother who serves as the Abbot of Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland. We were talking about training people, about the joy of it, and also about how many of us want to be further along than we are. We want to be seen. See me, see me, see me. It is so normal and so human. And it does not feel particularly great, does it?

What I have come to understand is that when we indulge our doubts, our distractions, our excuses, we create a gap. And living in that gap is uncomfortable. Tight. Dispiriting. Whereas when we close that gap, when what we say and what we do begin to actually touch, something opens.

Our dedication chant at the beginning of practice is itself a teaching in this. It honors Shakyamuni Buddha because without his complete giving of himself, we would not even be able to practice together. It names his mother, without whom he would not have been born. It names Dogen Zenji and Kei San Zenji, who founded the Soto school as we know it in Japan. It honors Taizan Maezumi Roshi, without whom so many of us in America would never have encountered this practice.

All of these people, imperfect and human, gave everything. And because they did, we can chant. We can practice. We can be together right now.

The dedication itself is dana paramita, the first perfection: generosity. It is acknowledging the generosity of people who gave everything so that they could be free, and so others could be free.

How do we receive that gift? What do we do with it?

Dogen writes: “Amidst those sayings, they practice and fully verify in the past. They concentrate and pursue the way in the present.”

To practice and fully verify in the past means that what I was doing before, I was doing completely. And what I am doing now, I am doing completely. There is no gap, no halfway in. To concentrate and pursue the way in the present means right now. Not deterred by old stories. Not waiting for better conditions.

How do you want to live? What is your life for? And how much of yourself are you willing to give to it?

Let’s Practice Together.

During this week of memorial, I invite you to sit quietly for a few moments. Settle your body. Take a few slow breaths.

Consider the people in our life, known or unknown, who gave of themselves fully so that we could have what we have. Who showed up, imperfectly and consistently, for something larger than their small self?

Now ask yourself honestly: where is the gap between what I say and what I do? Not as a weapon against yourself, but as genuine inquiry. Where am I holding back? What would it mean to close that gap, just a little, today?

Is there a practice you have been giving a little bit to, when you might give more?

Concentration and pursuit of the way in the present is not grand or heroic. It is sitting when we said we would sit. It is looking someone in the eye when we would rather look away. It is showing up without waiting for conditions to be perfect.

Let’s Have a Dialogue.

I am curious.

What are you giving everything to right now? And where do you notice yourself holding back? When was a time that you truly gave yourself completely to something, and what did that feel like? Please share your experiences and reflections in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

With Memorial Day on my mind, I am grateful for all who gave what they had. May we honor that gift by giving everything we have, too.

May we close the gap. May we give everything. May we be free.

Koshin

P.S. A few ways to begin closing the gap

Commit To Sit Summer 2026 ~ For new and advanced participants alike, Commit to Sit is a guided 90-day practice period designed to support your Zen meditation journey through structured community, daily teachings, and contemplative exploration.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

For me, the most important part is the willingness to be uncomfortable, to not know what to say or what to do, to allow the quiet until something becomes clear so that I can meet each person and myself with dignity.

It does not mean their actions are right. It doesn’t mean my actions are right. And all beings have Buddha nature. Each and everyone of us has the capacity to wake up.

And so I ask us: ‘How do we become good spiritual friends to someone we may think of as an enemy, an antagonist, or simply someone we do not like?’ How does what I like or dislike become so important that I would disrupt the harmony of sangha? This feels like urgent practice to me.

In our study of Dogen Zenji, we have been reading this beautiful passage about mitsugo, sometimes translated as ‘secret words,’ and sometimes translated as ‘intimate words.’ Dogen writes, “Secret means the principle of intimacy. It is without interruption.”

We might also say, ‘Intimacy means the principle of intimacy. It is without interruption.’ It covers the Buddhas and ancestors. It covers you. It covers me. It covers practice. It covers the generations. It covers our efforts. It covers intimacy itself.

And Dogen teaches, “The meeting of intimate words with an intimate person, even the Buddha eye cannot see it. Intimate practice is not something known by self or other.”

That line has really stayed with me because, in the face of disparagement, it is so tempting to think, ‘I know. I know what happened. I know who is wrong. I know the story.’ Talk about not intimate.

Being with discomfort is a place of practice.

I have been reflecting on these questions: How do we become intimate with our discomfort? How do we take refuge in our horror so that we do not get caught by every thought and feeling? How can we just do the next thing? How can we do the next thing with everything we are experiencing, without turning one difficult experience into a whole story of self and other?

Judo, Dogen’s Dharma grandfather, said, “The World-Honored One has intimate words for Kashapa. They are not concealed throughout the night. A rain of falling blossoms in the whole city. The streams are fragrant.”

This refers to that beautiful moment on Vulture Peak when thousands gathered to hear the Buddha speak, and instead he simply twirled a flower. Mahakashyapa smiled. That smile was thought to be the first transmission.

“A rain of falling blossoms in the whole city. The streams are fragrant.”

I love this image because it asks something of us. How do we allow, in the whole city of reality, the streams of thoughts and feelings and opinions to be fragrant? Even disparagement can become part of the fragrance. How do I stop fighting what is here? How do I stop separating the streams?

When we enter reality directly, even discomfort can become a place of tenderness.

Let’s practice together.

Practice does not mean denying our feelings. It can be feeling our feelings without becoming our feelings. It does not mean spiritually bypassing. It means meeting what is here directly and taking responsibility for our actions.

Pause. Find a comfortable place to sit. Feel your feet on the ground. Allow these questions in: How do we wrestle with our habitual mind and give way to what is intimate and already available right now, not when things get easier, not when school finishes, not when life changes, but now?

How do you enter life directly and see even disparagement as a treasure to open? How do you let your struggle become a place of intimacy instead of struggling on top of struggle?

Suzuki Roshi called that putting a head on top of a head. We drive ourselves crazy. But what if we simply take refuge in our horror, plant our staff, and make concentrated effort? What if we study intimacy, not as an idea, but as our actual life, not what we wish it was, but this life?

Let’s have a dialogue.

Consider a time you were disparaged or disparaged someone else, how did this feel inside yourself? How did this impact relationship? What supports your capacity to stay grounded and available within struggle and discomfort?

Please offer your experiences and insights in the comments below. Genuine sharing is a gift to us all.

May you meet your life intimately. May you discover that even what feels difficult can become a doorway to tenderness. May you trust that nothing is outside the stream of practice. May you enter this life, just as it is, with dignity, courage, and an open heart.

Koshin

P.S. Opportunities to learn and practice

“Transforming Our Disconnection, Anxiety, & Overwhelm” ~ Join Chodo Sensei and I on Thursday, May 28th for an evening exploring how Buddhist practice can help us meet fear, anxiety, and overwhelm with presence, clarity, and compassion.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation ~ A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

How do I honor having been mothered?

As I was preparing for our morning sit, I found myself sitting with that question. Turns out,all of us come from a mother. And yet, in our tradition, this is not a sentimental holiday, not a Hallmark occasion designed to move greeting cards and flowers. It is something wilder and more confrontational than that.

It is an opportunity to really reckon with the fact that we did not come from ourselves.

Dogen Zenji writes in Bendowa that this body itself is the body of all beings. I am because of all of you, and because of things I cannot even begin to understand. When I sit with that honestly, it is actually disorienting. Because so much of my day can be organized around me – what I feel, what I think, what I want, what I prefer. And then this teaching arrives. ‘Oh. I did not create this meat puppet. Other people and beings did.’

Before our practice, before we ever called anything “our practice,” somebody else was taking care of us. Well or not well, that is almost beside the point. They did it in the way they did. Before any of it, there was milk of some kind or formula, there was fear, labor, exhaustion, some form of sacrifice. Even Shakyamuni Buddha had a mother who gave birth to him and, seven days later, she died. In some ways, our tradition is born out of that very fact. The death of a mother.

How do we reckon with all of this, even what is complicated or painful or just achingly sweet, as part of our reality?

Dogen Zenji was eight years old when his mother died. At her funeral, he watched the incense burning. You know how incense does this: it is a stick, and then it is smoke, and then it is gone. Watching that smoke curl and disappear, something opened in him. He realized that everything vanishes. His mother. The incense. Everything we hold dear. And rather than experiencing that as an interruption of the spiritual path, he experienced it as the gate. His sorrow became the doorway for all of us.

How many of us have used our own sorrow as a gate?

Dogen wrote, “Flowers fall though we love them. Weeds grow even though we dislike them.” For many of us, this day is genuinely complicated. Some of us are mourning mothers who have died. Some of us carry relationships with mothers who harmed us, or who were themselves harmed. Some of us are mothers sitting in the complexity of what that has meant. And some of us are simply, quietly, missing someone.

In our dedications at the Zen Center, we give thanks to our parents. Not sentimentally. Not as a performance of gratitude we do not feel. But as a way of appreciating our dependence. We would not be without them. Full stop.

How do our thoughts, words, and actions show our interdependence?

Honoring where we come from is a place of practice.

Taizan Maezumi Roshi, the founder of the White Plum Sangha here in the United States, had a mother whose devotion to practice shaped him profoundly. He was so moved by her that he did something almost unheard of, he took her name as his own. His brothers were all Kuroda. He became Maezumi, his mother’s name. What a gesture. What a way to say, ‘I come from you, and I want that to be visible in how I move through the world.’

Keizan Zenji, sometimes called the mother of our tradition, also lost his own mother early and was given over to monastic training as a child. His grandmother and his mother shaped him so deeply that he became the one who expanded our tradition to reach ordinary people, who insisted that women could fully realize awakening, who argued that practice belongs to everyone. In many ways, the breadth and openness of our lineage today comes from that. From a boy shaped by women who loved him.

And Dogen himself, orphaned at eight, found in impermanence not despair but liberation. The smoke from the incense rose and was gone. And he spent the rest of his life trying to help us see what that means.

All of us come from conditions we will never fully understand.

We came from the earth, and before the earth, from something we cannot even name. Scientists have found traces of human DNA on meteors. Maybe we are from outer space. I love that. Meteor as a mother. Really, it underlines something important. The mystery of how we came to be is so much larger than our personal story about it.

So how does that mystery inform how you walk down the street?

Let’s practice together.

Last week, I wrote about The Bodhisattva Never Disparaging, from the Lotus Sutra, and how he spent his life doing something almost embarrassingly simple. He walked around and bowed to everyone. To everyone, without exception, including the people who threw stones at him. He would say: I will never disparage you. I see your capacity to wake up.

What a way to honor interdependence.

Notice when your day gets organized entirely around what you feel, what you think, what you want. And then, gently, let that be interrupted by this reflection. ‘I did not come from myself. Who and what did I come from? How is my life showing my appreciation for that?’

We do not have to resolve the complexity of our relationships with our mothers, or with being a mother, or with any of it. Complexity does not need to be resolved. It needs to be included.

The practice is to move from affection for this life to wholeness in this life. To stop holding back from our deep love and gratitude for the mystery of being here at all.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

How do we practice appreciating where we came from, especially when that origin is complicated or painful? When was a time that grief, rather than blocking your path, became a kind of doorway? How does your awareness of interdependence change the way you meet the people around you?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we find, in the mystery of how we came to be, a reason for endless gratitude and tenderness toward this strange, precious life.

Koshin

P.S. Ways to honor interdependence

Zazenkai Half-Day Retreat and Sit for Scholarship— Saturday, May 16, 2026: 9am - 1pm. Silently engaging in sitting and walking meditation, hearing a dharma talk, and connecting with community are wonderful ways to spend a Saturday morning.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

Wholehearted Sesshin ~ This summer silent retreat runs from August 2nd - 9th at the Garrison Institute. Seven days of Noble Silence, sitting and walking meditation, dharma talks, and dokusan.

I have. More times than I can count.

There is a chapter in the Lotus Sutra called “Never Disparaging Bodhisattva,” and lately it has been following me everywhere. Our community has been studying it together, and the more I sit with it, the more it exposes something very intimate and uncomfortable in me.

The story goes like this. There is a monk whose entire practice is to bow to every person he meets, without exception. Not just the easy people. Not just the ones who agree with him or make him feel good. Everyone.

And when he bows, he says, ‘I deeply respect you. I would never dare treat you with disparagement or arrogance. Why? Because you are all practicing the Bodhisattva way and are certain to attain Buddha.’

And how do people respond? Some of them beat him with sticks and tiles and stones. They curse him. They call him ignorant and presumptuous. He runs away. But even as he flees, he keeps calling back to them, ‘I could never disparage you. You are all certain to attain Buddha.’

Even fleeing. Even at a distance.

Not disparaging in action is a place of practice.

I was just in Japan. I got back a few days ago and I would like to tell you about something that happened there, because I think it says everything about what “Never Disparaging Bodhisattva” is actually pointing at.

I had the gift of practicing at two monasteries, including Shoboji, a remarkable old monastery in Iwate, in the north. Six monks live there in a very large and ancient place. They care for it with tremendous dedication. One of the practices at Sojiji, the main monastery I was heading to afterward, involves cleaning long corridors with a small rag, running the full length of the them. It is, to put it plainly, physically demanding. I was going to be asked to do one kilometer of this, twice a day.

The monks at Shoboji heard this, and they did something that undid me completely. They do not typically practice this kind of cleaning. Their way is different, softer on the knees. But because they knew I was going to Sojiji, where things are quite rigorous, they spent two days practicing cleaning with me, showing me how, so that I would feel a little more prepared.

They were afraid to go to the main monastery themselves. But they did this for me, this stranger, this visitor from New York who does not speak much Japanese.

I fell all over the place anyway, at Sojiji. Two days of preparation and I still kept slipping. But that is not the point. The point is what those monks offered, which was not a solution. It was just care. It was, in its quiet way, never disparaging bodhisattva in action.

Morita Soko Roshi, the abbot at Shoboji, invited me to practice inside the Zendo itself, which is traditionally reserved for monks who have completed formal training there. He said it was because I had come for no reason other than practice. Not for a title. Not for recognition. Just to practice.

We bowed to each other in the ceremony. Many full prostrations. And I was not supposed to look up, but I did. I peeked. And he had tears in his eyes.

I did too.

In that moment, I understood: equal bowing. No hierarchy of who deserves to be seen. No ranking of who is more worthy of care. Just two people, recognizing something real in each other.

“Never Disparaging Bodhisattva” does not tell us that the people who yell or throw things at us are easy to be with. He ran. He got out of the way. The practice is not staying in harm’s path. The practice is what we carry with us when we leave. What continues to move through us, even as we flee to a distance. Even there, calling back, ‘I could never disparage you.’

Let’s practice together.

Before speaking to someone today, try this. Even briefly. Even in the space between their words and ours. Just a small internal bow.

It does not have to be elaborate. It is just a moment of recognition, ‘You are here. You are practicing the Bodhisattva way, even if you don’t know you are. Even if I find you difficult. Even if we disagree. I would not dare disparage you.’

And then, when we notice the impulse to collapse someone into their worst moment, to turn them into a type, to dismiss what we do not understand in ourselves or in them, pause there too. Ask, What is it that could bow here?

Disparagement is not a new problem. It is older than social media, older than politics, older than the monasteries in Japan. It is part of being human.

What is also part of being human is the capacity to do what those monks at Shoboji did for me. To see someone who is about to face something hard, and quietly, without any fuss, to offer what you have.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I’m curious.

Who do you find hardest to bow to? It might be someone in your life, someone in the news, or the voice inside your own head that tells you you are falling short. What would it mean to refuse to disparage that person, or this part of yourself, even once today?

For the benefit of all, please share your experiences in the comments below.

May we practice never disparaging ourselves and all beings, at least for a lifetime.

That is my plan.

Koshin

P.S. Places to practice bowing

Zazenkai Half-Day Retreat and Sit for Scholarship— Saturday, May 16, 2026: 9am - 1pm. Silently engaging in sitting and walking meditation, hearing a dharma talk, and connecting with community are wonderful ways to spend a Saturday morning.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

A friend in the room asked a question that stopped me: “What is the awakened nature of both sides?”

I keep returning to this question. What is underneath our arguments and conflicts? What unifies us?

We have a habit of splitting the world up. Good people, bad people. My group, your group. What I think is true, what you think is false. And when we feel hurt or unseen, the grip on one side tightens.

I recently read about an experiment where Fox News viewers were asked to watch CNN for a month, and CNN viewers were asked to watch Fox News for a month. And after one month, both groups reported feeling more compassion. Just by receiving information through a slightly different channel, something in them softened. How extraordinary. Not because either network is right, but because encountering a different way of tasting the world is itself a kind of opening.

This opening is what the 22nd ancestor in our lineage, the Venerable Manorhita, was after when he asked his teacher Vasubandhu, “What is the Bodhi of all the Buddhas? What is the awakening of all the Buddhas?”

It is a fair question. A real one. What actually unifies everything?

Vasubandhu answered, “It is the original nature of mind.” Manorhita pushed further, “What is the original nature of mind?” And Vasubandhu replied, “The emptiness of the six sense bases, the six objects, and the six kinds of consciousness.” Hearing this, the story goes, Manorhita was awakened.

What Vasubandhu was pointing to is this: We experience the world through our senses and our mind, and we immediately, almost automatically, decide what things mean. ‘It smells this way, so it is that way. I think it is true, so it must be true. I heard something, so it certainly happened.’ We clump our thoughts and perceptions into positions, into form, and then we argue about the forms.

There is something so liberating about the teaching that points out that what we perceive is not the whole story. Even our most cherished sense of things, and of ourselves, is partial.

Reality is bigger than what any of us can grip.

Taking on life is a place of practice.

We know a few things about Manorhita. He was the son of a sovereign, not choosing this royal life. Vasubandhu came into the kingdom and prophesied that Manorhita would become an ancestral teacher. Essentially, the father said, ‘Off you go, son.’ That was it.

I have been thinking about this a lot.

How many of us have arrived here, at this point in our practice, at this point in our lives, in ways we did not entirely author? A death, a diagnosis, a marriage, a collapse, a chance encounter with a book or a teacher or a moment of undeniable grace. So many causes and conditions we did not design.

And yet.

The question is, ‘Now that we have landed here, what do we do? How do we take it on?

We do not know exactly what Manorhita struggled with, whether he wrestled with resentment or confusion or longing for another life. What we do know is that he took it on. He asked a genuine question, a real one: ‘What is this? What is actually happening? What unifies all of this?’ And he allowed the answer to enter him so fully that something shifted.

This is what I seen happening sometimes at the Zen Center. Someone comes through the door carrying a story about how they arrived, a difficult story, usually. A job lost, a relationship ended, a body betraying them, a sense that the life they were living no longer fits. And they sit down. They sit with what is. And slowly, sometimes so slowly it is difficult to see, something opens. Not because the circumstances change. Because they stop fighting the form of their life and start actually living it.

Let’s practice together.

Take a moment to settle wherever you are. Let your body find a comfortable position, and allow a few deep breaths to arrive naturally, without forcing anything. Be still.

Now, bring to mind the story of how we arrived here, at this particular moment of our life. The causes and conditions, the choices and accidents, the people and losses and openings that carried us to right now.

Can we hold that story with a little more spaciousness? Can we see it not as a fixed form but as a movement, a living thing? What might it be like to take on this life, the one we actually have, just a little more fully today?

Notice what arises. Is there resistance? Relief? Something we have not let ourself feel about where we are and how we got here? We do not need to resolve any of it. Just notice. Just be with it.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

Whatever brought us to where we are right now, what supports us fully taking it on? How can we care for our life, with tender and vigorous practice, by fully meeting even what we did not choose or design?

Please share your experiences and reflections in the comments below, for the benefit of us all.

May we honor what unifies us and cultivate the courage and compassion to take on our life as it is.

Koshin

P.S. Here a few practice opportunities to take on

Zazenkai Half-Day Retreat — Saturday, May 16, 2026: 9am - 1pm. Silently engaging in sitting and walking meditation, hearing a dharma talk, and connecting with community are wonderful ways to spend a Saturday morning.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

I have been sitting with this question lately, particularly while studying the Lotus Sutra on Saturday mornings with members of our sangha. In the chapter on medicinal herbs, Shakyamuni Buddha offers a teaching about the Dharma rain. It falls on everything equally. Mountains and valleys. Great trees and small herbs. The rain does not withhold itself. It is available to everyone and everything.

And yet.

Some of us walk around feeling dry. Wondering why the rain does not seem to reach us. I have been that person. Perhaps you have too.

This teaching offers something worth sitting with. Large trees absorb more water, producing great flowers and fruit. Small herbs receive only what they can hold. Neither is better. Each is fulfilling its purpose, being exactly what it is. The task is not to be the plants we wish were, but to know which plants we actually are.

Receiving what is nourishing is a place of practice.

Roots really matter. How deep do they go? How well established are they in the ground where they are?

We had a very old maple tree on our roof. It struggled for a long time and finally died. The head gardener, Mark, pulled it up and showed me something I had never considered before. As the tree was dying, its roots had contracted. They had lost their depth. The tree was not receiving what it needed because it could no longer reach far enough into the soil to receive it.

I found this image haunting. How many of us, when we are suffering or confused or afraid, contract our roots? We pull back from the sangha, from honest relationship, from the practices that nourish us. Somehow, we convince ourselves we do not need what we actually need.

And yet the Dharma rain keeps falling.

The issue is never the rain.

An important question arises from this. How are we actually receiving the teachings that are meant for us, for the specific way our life and vow actually are, rather than for the life we wish we had?

I remember a story about Maezumi Roshi. He was once crying and his jisha asked him what was wrong. He said, “So many people say they want to practice in a certain way, and rarely do they follow through.”

I have turned this story over in my mind for years. Sometimes I used to hear Maezumi’s words as a kind of verdict. Sometimes as a lament. Lately I hear them as something more tender. A recognition of how hard it is to be honest with ourselves about what we are doing versus what we dream of doing. What we say versus how we actually show up.

Our actions are always more revealing than our intentions.

What we commit to doing again and again matters.

Disappointment is a place of practice.

Some people avoid commitment entirely because they are afraid of disappointment. I understand this. Perhaps if I never fully commit to a community, a teacher, a lineage, then I cannot be let down. I can keep my fantasy intact.

But here is what I have found. Disappointment is not a sign that something went wrong. It is, almost always, a sign that I was relating to a fantasy rather than a person. A projection rather than reality.

When I am disappointed by a teacher or a community, the real question is: what did I imagine them to be that they are not? What did I expect them to provide that only my own practice can provide?

To have real relationships with real people, we have to let the fantasies and projections dissolve. And that, I promise you, is not comfortable.

But it is alive.

Something remarkable has been discovered recently about plants. They actually thrive when placed near other plants. There are these micro forests now, where different species are clustered together in tight spaces, and they flourish far more abundantly than plants growing alone. Sangha is like this. We flourish when we stay with the reality of each other over time. With the joys, with the disappointments. We do not need each other to be perfect. We need each other to be real, and to stay.

Our roots go deeper when they are entangled with others.

Let’s practice together.

Sit somewhere comfortable. Allow your body to settle into stillness. Take a few slow breaths and let your belly soften.

Now ask honestly: ‘What kind of plant am I?’ Not what I wish were true. Not what I think would most impress those around me. ‘What am I, actually? What are my roots like? How deep do they go? Where do I receive nourishment, and where do I pull back and contract?’

What is the life I actually have? How might I honor it more completely, today, just as it is?

Sit with this for a few minutes without rushing toward an answer. Let the questions do their work.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

Where in your life are you trying to be something other than what you actually are? When was a time you stopped, even briefly, and allowed yourself to simply be the plant you are? What did that feel like?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we receive the rain that is always already falling, just for us, in exactly the measure we can hold.

Koshin

P.S. Here a few nourishing practice opportunities

ZazenkaiHalf-Day Retreat — Saturday, May 16, 2026: 9am - 1pm. Silently engaging in sitting and walking meditation, hearing a dharma talk, and connecting with community are wonderful ways to spend a Saturday morning.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

I looked out at everyone gathered and asked a question that has been sitting with me ever since.

‘You could be a one moment old baby right now. Can you allow that?’

I want to stay with this question. It points to something most of us quietly long for and quietly resist in equal measure.

Hana Matsuri commemorates the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha. In the traditional story, his mother Queen Mahamaya dreamed of a white elephant entering her side, and the child was born from that side, took seven steps, and proclaimed, “I am the one who has come to serve the world.”

Now, babies do not typically walk and proclaim things. That is not actually how birth works. The historical Buddha was, in the end, a person. He suffered. He struggled. He was confused. Just like all of us. But what I love about this story is what it is pointing toward: something in us is always being born. Something in us can always begin again.

This is the relief and invitation of the flower festival. Not that we venerate a perfect being from a safe distance, but that we recognize, ‘Oh, I can also be born right now. I can put that story I have been dragging around and suffering with, down.’

In Japan, kindergarten groups come to temples during cherry blossom season to bathe the baby Buddha. There is something so wise about that. Children understand new beginnings in their bodies. They are not yet so committed to who they have decided they are.

Shakyamuni’s father, being a ruler, hoped the young Siddhartha would become a great ruler himself. ‘Why don’t you be like me?’ So many parents feel this way. I grew up with a version of this. ‘You could be a doctor or a lawyer.’ It didn’t quite work out like that for me. But this is the same energy, isn’t it? The desire to have someone we love stay within a known shape. To not have to greet them as something new and surprising.

And yet, here we are.

Caring for what is fresh is a place of practice.

During the ceremony, we bathed the baby Buddha with sweet tea. This is not incidental. It matters what we bathe with.

How are you caring for the freshness in you? Are you actually tending to it? Or are you pummeling it?

This is an important and caring question because I know how easy it is to do the latter. So many of us meet the tender, beginning parts of ourselves with harshness. With impatience. With the voice that says, ‘You should already know how to do this. You should already be further along.’

But a baby Buddha bathed in harshness does not thrive.

This holiday is really asking ‘What conditions are we creating to support our Buddha nature?’ Not our habitual nature. No one’s habitual nature needs more energy. I have yet to meet the person who said, ‘You know what I need? More of my same old reactions.’ We all need more attention turned toward what is genuinely alive, fresh, and true in us.

Our habitual nature will take care of itself. It always does. The question is whether we are also feeding something else.

There is a teaching from Dogen Zenji that I keep returning to in this season of blossoms and beginnings. He writes about what he calls the “unborn,” which in Sanskrit is anutpada. The ‘an’ means not, and ‘utpada’ means coming forth at birth having no origin.

What if, for just one breath, we could meet this moment without our origin story? Without all the evidence we have accumulated about who we are and what we are capable of? What if we were one moment old?

This is not about bypassing what has happened to us. The losses are real. The harm is real. The long, dragging weight of old patterns is real. Issa, the eighteenth-century haiku master, wrote this after his wife and multiple children had died: “This dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet...”

This ‘and yet’ is the doorway. Not denial. Not pretending the suffering away. But also says, ‘I am here. And I can begin.’

Let’s practice together.

Find somewhere comfortable to sit. Let your body settle.

Now, for a moment, try to set aside everything we know about ourselves. Our history, our roles, our grievances, our accomplishments, our failures. Not permanently. Just for a few breaths.

Ask, ‘What is fresh in me right now? What part of me has not yet been shaped by habit or fear? What is alive and new in this very moment, underneath all the familiar weight?’

Can we tend to this place? Can we bathe it with a little sweetness rather than another round of harsh assessment?

If it helps, we can imagine the baby Buddha. The baby does not know yet how difficult things will become. The baby has not yet decided that certain experiences are too much to bear. The baby is simply here, in the world, taking the first steps, open to what comes.

We were that baby once. This capacity for total beginning is still in us.

It does not need to be your actual birthday for this to be your birthday.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

Where in our lives do we most need a fresh beginning right now? What parts of ourselves have we been bathing in harshness that might be ready to receive a little sweetness instead? And what makes it hard to give ourselves this?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we allow ourselves to be one moment old, to set down the old story, even briefly, and to care for the freshness that is waiting in us.

Koshin

P.S. Ways to allow something fresh

Zazenkai Half-Day Retreat — Saturday, April 18, 2026: 9am - 1pm. Silently engaging in sitting and walking meditation, hearing a dharma talk, and connecting with community are wonderful ways to spend a Saturday morning.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

Sitting with them, I kept thinking: ‘Wow. We don’t live forever. How do I want to live?’

This question is not rhetorical. It is not a riddle to be solved once and filed away. It is a living question, one that every ancestral altar is asking us to hold. That picture in a frame, that plaque, maybe someone will remember, maybe not. One day, it will be each of us.

So how do we want to be alive until we’re not? This is the question I want us to sit with today.

The teachings in our practice period have been returning, again and again, to this same essential challenge: What does it mean to actually live in accordance with what we say we care about and what we say we are going to do?

Emerging from the earth is a place of practice.

In our Saturday Lotus Sutra study group, we have arrived at a chapter called “Emerging from the Earth.” I want to share a slice with you as it has been living and flowing through my body.

In this chapter, bodhisattvas from distant lands gather before the Buddha and make an earnest offer. They are generous, full of goodwill. “After you enter extinction,” they tell him, “we will protect the sutra. We will preach it widely throughout this land. Don’t worry. We’ve got this.”

And the Buddha’s response surprised me the first time I heard it. He essentially says: leave off. There is no need. Because right here, in this very world of suffering, there are already countless beings ready to protect what is true. And as he speaks, the earth trembles and splits open, and from beneath the ground an immeasurable number of bodhisattvas emerge. They had been there all along.

I find this image so moving. These beings do not arrive from somewhere pure and untouched, descending from the heavens in pristine robes. They come up from the earth. A little dusty. A little funky. They emerge from entanglement itself, from confusion, from the ground of suffering, and the ground of the end of suffering.

You could say they emerge from exactly where most of us live.

And they are not naive. Because they have been in the earth, buried in what is hard, they know what they are stepping into. They know the texture of the ground. That is precisely what makes them ready.

Here is what strikes me about this teaching. The bodhisattvas who arrive from distant lands are wonderful. They are sincere. They want to help. But they don’t know what they don’t know. And the Buddha, gently, is pointing us to that. ‘There is so much you have not even considered.’

Most of us are pretty sure we know the story. Our story about ourselves, about others, about what practice is and what it is for. We are quite certain about the ground beneath our feet, about what is solid and what isn’t.

But the zendo where we sit zazen is four floors up. We call it the ground, but we are held by beams and wood and forces we cannot see. The floor is not the earth. And yet we live as if we know exactly what’s what.

What a relief it is, actually, to let this certainty go.

If the earth itself can split open and reveal what was already there, then maybe what I think is the whole story about my capacity, my limitations, my life, is also not the whole story.

I hear this from students so often. Someone will say: “I would love to come to the Zendo, but I can’t.” And I want to ask, gently: Is that true? Is it genuinely not possible? Or is that a story, a groove we have worn so smooth we no longer notice we are in it?

What is already here that we keep overlooking? What capacity, what freedom is ready to emerge, what bodhisattvas are already present beneath the ground of our own ordinary life?

What I find so encouraging about the earth-spitting image from the Lotus Sutra is this:

Practice does not belong to exceptional beings. The bodhisattvas who emerge are not monks or nuns or any particular kind of person. The text does not say. They are us. They are every confused person. Every person who has struggled and been buried in difficulty.

This is the teaching right here in the midst of discomfort. The ground cracks open. What is real within ourselves and between one another can emerge.

To me, real relationships are kind. Not about keeping everything smooth, not managing how others feel, but actually being in genuine contact with each other. Saying, ‘You seem like you’re struggling.’ Saying, ‘What is your deal lately?’ Saying, ‘I care about you enough to not pretend I don’t notice.’

Let’s practice together.

Find a place to sit. Let your body settle. Feel the floor beneath your feet, and beneath that, the earth, steady and vast and full of what you cannot see.

Ask yourself this question, and really stay with it: What is already here that I keep overlooking?

Maybe it is a capacity we have dismissed. Maybe it is a relationship we have been taking for granted. Maybe it is a practice we keep waiting to begin until conditions are right. Maybe it is someone in our life who is trying to give us a teaching we are not quite receiving.

And then ask: How do I want to be alive, right now, knowing this moment will not repeat?

We do not have forever. So let us not waste this time in a performance of harmony. Let’s get real with ourselves and each other. That is what Marvin brought to this sangha. That’s what his beautiful face on the altar is still asking of us.

Breathe into that. Let it be uncomfortable if it needs to be. The bodhisattvas emerged from discomfort. So can you.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

What is emerging from the earth of our ordinary lives right now? What capacity or truth have we been overlooking, buried just beneath the surface? And what would it mean to let it rise? What supports our being receptive to whatever emerges?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we trust what is already here, rising from the ground of this one, precious life.

Koshin.

P.S. A few opportunities not to overlook

Hana-matsuri “Flower Festival” — Sunday April 12, 2026 ~ 10am - 12pm. Join us online or in-person at the New York Zen Center for our Sunday morning meditation and celebration of Shakyamuni Buddha’s birthday. Bring the whole family at 11 am!

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

This question has stayed with me.

Were you actually in your life?

Not, ‘Were you productive?’ Not, ‘Were you good?’ Not, ‘Were you spiritually accomplished?’ Just: ‘Were you here?’

I keep thinking about peek-a-boo. You know how babies respond to that game? Their whole face lights up with this wild, full-body delight. ‘I’m here, I’m not here, I’m here, I’m not here.’ It is adorable beyond measure in an infant. But what about when we do it with our own lives? When we are present for a moment and then drift off, present and then gone, here and then somewhere else entirely. This is heartbreaking.

We know when we are here and when we are not.

This is one of the things I find most humbling about practice. We cannot actually fool ourselves. We can try. I have tried. And yet somewhere in the body, we know.

Not Leaving is a place of practice.

During our current practice period, we have been sitting with a teaching from Suzuki Roshi. He says that when we transmit the precepts, we are not transmitting a checklist. We are not transmitting two hundred and fifty rules to follow, a kind of spiritual behavior management program, a Ten Commandments energy transposed onto the Zen path. What we are transmitting, he says, is something far more intimate.

We are transmitting the question: 'How is your original Buddha nature going? Are you caring for it? This reframes everything.

If the precepts are about our original nature, our essential awakeness, then breaking a precept is not disobedience. It is not moral failure. It is not proof that you are bad at meditation, bad at being a Buddhist, bad at being a person.

Breaking a precept is forgetting yourself. It is wounding yourself.

How often do we do that?

There is a famous koan about Baizhang and a fox. It is a long story, but essentially a monk is asked whether an enlightened person can escape cause and effect. He answers yes, and turns into a fox for five hundred years. Five hundred years of self-deception. Five hundred years of believing that if he just practiced enough, studied enough, sat enough, he could transcend the ordinary consequences of being human.

We recognize this fox immediately, don’t we? We are all this fox. We have all believed, at some point, that if we just get good enough at this, we will be beyond having to actually feel things. We will be beyond being knocked around by our own minds. We will be beyond getting hurt.

The answer Baizhang finally offers is that an enlightened person does not ignore cause and effect, but is not blind to it either. You can drop a stone on your foot and it will still hurt, no matter how many years you have practiced zazen. The practice is not to escape that. The practice is to be awake to reality in the here and now—again and again.

What I love about this koan is how it names the exact moment most people leave practice. We start sitting, and after some time, we begin to see really difficult things about ourselves. Real things. Uncomfortable things. So many entanglements arise with the clear mirror of zazen. And that is precisely the point where the impulse to flee becomes almost overwhelming. This was supposed to be a self-improvement program! This was supposed to be a not-feeling program! And instead, here I am, feeling everything.

That moment, that exact moment when you most want to leave, is the most important moment of practice.

Let’s practice together.

Find a comfortable place to sit. Let your body settle. Put your palm on your lower belly and feel the breath move your hand.

Now, instead of trying to be present, simply notice when we are not where we are. When the mind wanders to a plan, a worry, a grievance, a craving, just notice: I am not here. Then return. Not with effort. With something more like gentleness.

When we are really here, we do not need to be told not to harm. Caring for others arises on its own. When we are really here, we do not need to be managed into ethical conduct. It flows from the intimacy of actually being present.

What would it be like to practice that today, just for today?

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

When do you notice yourself playing peek-a-boo with your own life? What pulls us away? What brings us back? And when was a time you were genuinely, fully here, and what did that feel like in your body?

Please share your experience in the comments below for the benefit of us all. Your honest reflection may be exactly what someone else needs to read today.

May we be awake, not to the life we wish we were living, but to the one that is actually here, waiting for us to show up.

Koshin

P.S. Opportunities to practice showing up

Hana-matsuri "Flower Festival" — Sunday April 12, 2026 ~ 10am - 12pm. Join us online or in-person at the New York Zen Center for our Sunday morning meditation and celebration of Shakyamuni Buddha’s birthday. Bring the whole family!

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

People stepped over it without a glance. I almost did too. But something about it stopped me. The quietness of it. The way it seemed completely given to the cold. I felt a small sweetness, almost absurd given everything else going on in the world.

Lately, many of us have been speaking about feeling overwhelmed. Discouraged. Anxious. Confused about what is happening around us and within us. After an early morning meditation, a service at the Zen Center, or an intensive retreat, it is easy to think, ‘I did that. I checked that box.’ As if practice were something to complete.

I recognize that tendency in myself.

But over time, I have found something very different. The joy of practice is not in finishing it. The joy is realizing that it is not possible to finish it.

Once, the day after sesshin, a dear friend told me about the sudden death of her kitten. She was devastated. And somehow, in the middle of her grief, there was also a quiet joy in me. Not because anything was okay. But because I could be there with her. Nothing needed to be fixed.

This is the joy Dogen Zenji points to. Not a happiness that replaces sorrow, but a capacity to be intimate with everything—in the midst of joy, the sorrow.

When we become one-sided, it is a signal. Even if that one side is despair. We begin to lose contact with the fullness of our life.

The frozen glove disappears. The stranger on the corner becomes invisible. The moment closes.

And yet, everything is still right here.

There is a man I see most mornings who asks for money. We have an ongoing joke about whether it is beach weather. Today he looked at the gray sky and said, “Definitely not.” We both laughed.

Practice is not separate from these moments. It is these moments.

Including everything is a place of practice.

Dogen Zenji writes that all living beings, in their entirety, have buddha nature. Not the polished parts. Not the peaceful parts. The entirety.

So what happens to the parts of ourselves we do not like?

Many of us try to become calm, kind, composed. We try to be the version of ourselves we think practice demands. But underneath, something else is moving. Anger. Fear. Restlessness. Even joy can feel like too much.

We exile these parts. Push them down. Hide them from ourselves and others.

What we push away does not disappear. It pulls at us. It drags us here and there.

There is an old Zen image of a person trying to control a wild ox. The more they pull, the more the ox resists. The struggle becomes the whole world.

The point is not to control the ox. The point is to be in attuned relationship with reality.

I once heard a story about a great teacher who, in a moment of frustration, raised his voice sharply at his students. People nearby were shocked. They expected constant serenity. But he was simply expressing what was true in that moment, without cruelty, without holding on. Sometimes kindness looks many different ways.

How different that is from suppression.

Even in our home we see this. Our cat, Boychik, has a very fiery nature. If he is hungry, you will know it immediately. There is no pretending otherwise. Someone once watched him and said, “He is intense.” Yes. He is. And somehow, there is nothing wrong with him.

What if we allowed ourselves the same dignity?

Not acting out every impulse. But also not pretending parts of us are not there.

What we exile becomes what controls us. What we include becomes part of our awakening.

Often, the clearest mirror is the person who bothers us. The one we judge. The one we wish were different. They show us the very qualities we struggle to accept in ourselves.

There is a story of a man who loved dragons. He collected dragon paintings, statues, stories. He spoke about dragons constantly. One day, a real dragon came to his door to thank him. When the man opened the door and saw the dragon, he was terrified and ran away.

We can love the idea of practice. The idea of being open. The idea of compassion.

But when the real thing appears, fiery and unpredictable, we turn away.

So I find myself asking: Where am I still loving the idea, but resisting the reality? What parts of my life am I refusing to include?

Practice is not about becoming someone else. It is about including everything.

The frozen glove. The grief of a friend. The joke on the corner. The anger we do not want to admit. The joy that feels almost unbearable.

All of it.

Let’s practice together.

Take a moment today to notice something you would usually pass by. A face, a sound, a feeling moving through you that you would ordinarily swat away. Stay with it a little longer than feels necessary.

And when something arises in you that you would rather not feel, see if you can let it be there without immediately fixing or hiding it. Not analyzing it to death. Not performing acceptance. Just allowing it to be present, the way that glove was present in the ice, given over completely to what is.

There is nobody who is too fiery, too tender, too much. There is only the question of whether we are willing to let all of ourselves come along.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

What do we tend to exile in ourselves? What feels hardest to include? Where do we notice life becoming smaller because of that exile?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we trust that nothing within and around us is outside of practice. May we find the courage to include even what feels most difficult. May we discover that our fiery nature, too, belongs.

Koshin

P.S. Opportunities to practice including everything

Zazenkai Half-Day Retreat — March 28, 2026 ~ 9am - 1pm. Silently engaging in sitting and walking meditation, hearing a dharma talk, and connecting with community are wonderful ways to spend a Saturday morning.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

And then the text alerts started.

One hour delay. Two hours. Three. Four. Five. Maybe six. I lost count.

What struck me was not the delay itself. What struck me was how completely the universe had shrunk down to one thing: my nice evening at home. All I could think about was getting back, resting up, and heading to the Zendo the next morning. And I want to tell you I found some way to frame this as noble. Like, I had this idea that it was a benevolent wish. But honestly? It felt tight. And when something feels tight in our chest, that is a teaching.

The people on our plane, that is, the plane we were eventually going to board, had been sitting on the tarmac for five hours in New York, waiting to come to us. Families, children, exhausted travelers. They did not exist for me in those first hours of delay. I was too busy mourning my evening plans.

When they finally disembarked, bedraggled, stretched thin, I found myself feeling something open. You could actually get to Japan in the amount of time those people had been in the airplane today. And just seeing them, really seeing them, all those ordinary tired beautiful people, something loosened.

That loosening is big mind.

Small mind is contracted awareness. It is our attention folded in on itself, circling around our plans, our preferences, our stories of how things should be. Big mind is just the whole field of life existing together at the same time. It is not a special achievement. It is available in every moment, even in a delayed airport terminal.

Nourishing big mind is a place of practice.

Suzuki Roshi taught that we do zazen, activities of Zen training, in order to digest our experience. He used the word digest deliberately. Not to accumulate. Not to perform. To digest. To let it all become the body.

I love this because it asks something honest of us. How are we digesting our lives? Or are we mostly making everything about our own agendas?

This is not a harsh question. It is a tender one. Because all of us know what it is to be caught in small mind. We chase the best version of the future or we rehearse how badly things went, and these two habits, the chasing and the rehearsing, are actually the same habit. Both are ways of being somewhere other than where we are.

The Dhammapada puts it plainly: “With an impure mind, a person speaks or acts, suffering follows them like a wheel that follows the foot of an ox.”

What is this impure mind? To me, it is simply the small mind. Not evil. Not monstrous. Just small. Just contracted. Just convinced that its particular wants and worries are the whole of the world.

The purified mind, the big mind, speaks and acts from the whole. And when we do this, when we are really functioning from the whole, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs.

A friend of mine has a piece of land in the Pacific Northwest that he worked for years to protect. Before he could buy it, a developer got there first. The old growth was cleared. Cul-de-sacs were built. And then the developer died, and my friend was able to purchase the land after all.

Here is the thing. In that damp Northwestern climate, moss does not wait. In just a short time, those roads had been overtaken completely. Green, quiet, beautiful. He calls them his Zen pathways now.

What we are afraid will be permanent, rarely is. The earth reclaims things. Life reclaims things. And so can we, if we stop being so certain we know exactly how it all should go.

On the plane, finally boarding, there was a person who got on first and then stopped in the middle of the aisle, absorbed completely in their phone. Nobody could pass. People were getting frustrated. I was getting judgy. You know that feeling, when we catch ourselves thinking very clearly that we would never do what that person is doing?

And then they looked up. “So sorry, so sorry.” They went to their seat. And what was left was just a person, trying to navigate a long hard day, same as the rest of us.

That tiny moment, catching the judgment and not fully believing it, that is the practice. Not some dramatic awakening. Just catching it. And doing something new.

Shakyamuni Buddha said, “Though one may conquer a thousand people in battle a thousand times, it is the one who conquers themselves who is the great victor.”

Not conquered in the sense of suppression or control. Conquered in the sense of clarity. Really getting honest with our bullshit. The resentments, the fears, the fantasies, the ways we keep ourselves from being truly free and loving.

Big mind asks: what would relieve suffering here? Small mind asks: what do I need? What will make me feel seen?

Both are human. But only one of them can actually serve.

Let’s practice together.

Suzuki Roshi reminds us that everything can be practice. Drinking tea. Eating. Walking down the street. Boarding a plane. But how we understand these things is very important.

Throughout this day, I invite us to notice the difference between these two modes. When our attention contracts, when the whole universe becomes one problem or one longing, see if we can soften. Not by forcing ourselves to think positively. Just by widening out, even slightly. Look up. See who else is in the room. Feel the ground under our feet.

And in our interactions, ask this question offered by Suzuki Roshi: ‘Am I doing this for myself, or for the sake of truth, for the sake of others?’

Hold it tenderly and with rigor. It is humbling. It is sometimes embarrassing. It is also one of the most life-giving questions I know.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

When was a time you caught yourself in small mind and managed to widen out? What helped you make that shift, even just a little? What do you notice in your body when you move from contracted awareness into something more spacious?

Please share your experiences in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May we nourish the big mind again and again and again. It is the most worthwhile use of energy I know.

Koshin

P.S. Ways to nourish the big mind.

Daily Meditation with the New York Zen Center sangha in person or online.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

I know. You might be reading this and thinking, ‘I thought this was going to be a spiritual talk.’ And I want to say gently, clearly, and with some humor, ‘This is exactly a spiritual talk.’ In fact, every time I have ever spoken about money, someone has said something like that to me afterward. As if money were somehow separate from practice. As if our landlord would be happy to accept our good intentions in lieu of rent.

Suzuki Roshi taught that money is meant to be exchanged. We should not stop the flow of money. The Buddha’s first principle is that everything changes, everything flows. Money, then, is not merely a symbol. It expresses the value of things that change, things that are impermanent, things that are alive. When it circulates, there is vitality. When it freezes, there is suffering. I find this startlingly simple and true.

A tight fist is exhausting. To give freely is not.

Generosity is a place of practice.

When Chodo and I started the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care nineteen years ago, we had no space, no cushions, no backing, no funding. We had our small rent-controlled apartment and a practice. For two years, our combined payroll was close to $200 a month. We walked a lot. We ate a lot of those sad, little packets of ramen, not the super yummy kind.

Everyone around us had opinions about vision for the Zen Center. Some of our Board members said it was too risky. This is fair. It is risky! Some friends said the idea was crazy. What kind of business model is that? A Zen Center? Teaching people about how to walk the path of Soto Zen, bring their values into alignment with their actions? Are you sure this is workable? Supportable?

What we had was generosity. Ours, and then others’. Someone heard what we were trying to do and wrote a check for $100,000 to move into our first dedicated home in Chelsea. Just like that. Without that person, without that one act of open-handedness, this Sangha would not exist here. Each offering keeps the river moving.

There is a teaching I love in the Dhammapada. The Buddha says, “If people knew, as I know, the results of giving and sharing, they would not eat without having given.” I do not think this is meant to be taken as guilt. I think this teaching is an invitation to notice something essential. Giving, real giving that is aligned with what we truly care about, is one of the most direct paths into awakening available to us.

Before the Buddha talks about meditation, before wisdom, before enlightenment, he speaks about generosity. Dana. The order of that matters.

How are you being generous?

I have been reflecting on generosity, and money in particular, because money is where many of us experience one of our most persistent and honest teachers: the scarcity mind.

You know this mind. It says, ‘What if I give and then there isn’t enough? What if I open my hand and something falls out that I can’t get back?’ The Buddha has a name for this pattern. He calls it the mind that is jealous of others’ gains. He teaches that with this kind of mind, we cannot attain concentration. We cannot really settle. We cannot really practice. The scarcity mind, no matter how dressed up it gets, is a form of contraction. A closing off. And contraction, as we know in our bodies during zazen, is exhausting.

How does this pattern show up in your life? What are we stopping from flowing?

Working with people at the end of their lives has taught me something peculiar and clarifying about the stuff we hold on to. After people die, their houses remain, often filled with objects. Dozens of lion statues. Thousands of books. Rows of cans of creamed corn. I am not talking about hoarders. I am talking about ordinary people, people like all of us, who were, in some way, trying to fill something in.

We humans are like magpies. We see, we want, we grab. It seems almost innate. The Buddha saw this clearly, which is why he did not start his teaching on practice with meditation or wisdom. He started with generosity, because without some loosening of the grip, the rest of the path is nearly impossible to walk.

I notice this in myself with new iPhones. Apple seems to release a new version every other week, and I am right there, practically licking the glass of the display case. I notice the wanting rise in my body. I notice the justifications assemble themselves. I notice how the phone represents something so much larger than a phone. Maybe it is connection. Maybe it is relevance. Maybe it is just habit energy that has learned to put on a particular costume.

The point is not to shame the wanting. The wanting is ancient. According to Harari’s book Sapiens, the Homo sapiens who left Africa 40,000 years ago left because they felt something was missing and went looking for it in new territory. This wanting has been with us a long time. It is something we can work with, not something to be horrified by.

Nothing, the Buddha reminded us, actually belongs to any one of us. Not our money, not our children, not even our bodies. We are all part of a wider flow, whether we recognize it or not.

The practice is to notice the tight fist, and then, with curiosity rather than judgment, to ask, ‘what am I afraid will happen if I open my hands?’

For me, when I look closely and honestly at my own relationship to money and giving, I find that the real territory underneath is fear of letting things flow. A fear of being with things as they are. A worry that if I release my grip, I will have less, be less, matter less.

And yet every single time I have practiced genuine generosity, something loosens. Not just in my wallet, but in my chest. In my posture. In the quality of attention I can bring to my life.

Generosity spreads beyond what we can measure or even know. The Buddha taught that the fragrance of virtue travels even against the wind.

Let’s practice together.

When someone in our community recently stepped forward and offered support we had not even asked for, I was moved to tears. Not because the need was finally met, but because of what that gesture represented: someone who had genuinely asked themselves how they could help, and then answered. Without being prompted. Without calculation. With the kind of open hand that is itself a form of waking up.

Take a real look this week. Open your bank app, or sit down with your statements, or simply spend a few quiet minutes reflecting on where your money has gone recently. Not with shame. With genuine curiosity.

Does how you spend your money match what you say you care about? Does the amount you give to others, in whatever form, match the depth of your care?

This is a mirror. The same way we use zazen to catch ourselves getting lost in thought and return, again and again, to the breath, we can use the question of money to catch where we are quietly building dams out of fear and ask whether we want to keep building them.

If you feel some tightness as you do this, that is the practice point. Stay there. Breathe. Ask what the tightness is protecting. Ask what might open up if you let the river flow a little more freely.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

When you look honestly at your relationship to money, what do you find? Where do you feel the scarcity mind arise most strongly? When was a time that an act of genuine generosity, whether giving or receiving, surprised you?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May you open your hand, trust the river, and discover that what flows through you is far more nourishing than what you manage to hold on to.

Koshin.

P.S. Ways to learn how to be in the flow.

Daily Meditation with the New York Zen Center sangha in person or online.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

I found myself standing in front of “my” dryers.

She looked at me. I could feel it. And I realized, with a small jolt of embarrassment, that I was blocking her way. Just slightly. Just enough. There was this little tightness in me that wanted to hold my ground over these dryers, and in doing so, I was making another person uncomfortable.

I said, “I’m so sorry. Please come through.”

Such a brief encounter. And yet, in that moment, I was turning my back on my neighbor. Over dryers.

When she and I crossed paths again later as our loads finished, I felt that flicker of embarrassment. She was folding her clothes. “How’s it going?” she asked. “Much better,” I said. “I’m really sorry about being weird before.” She laughed, and we ended up having a genuinely delightful exchange. But I kept thinking about that small, tight, guarded moment, and how many others like it pass through a day without notice.

Not turning our backs is a place of practice.

Zen teacher Kodo Sawaki once offered this teaching about self and non-self. ‘Non-self means not turning your back on people.’

I find this so useful because it takes what can feel like an abstract philosophical concept and makes it immediate and embodied. Non-self is not about dissolving into some oceanic nothingness. It is about this moment, in front of the dryers, noticing that a tightness is making someone else uncomfortable.

Our dharma brother Norman Fischer speaks about what he calls secular life, meaning the way most of us are orient ourselves most of the time – getting stuff, reinforcing who we are, protecting our preferences as if they were our freedom. What strikes me about this is how tiring this self-orientating is. How much energy we spend on the shape of ourselves and our own importance.

When we are so self-oriented, we will bang into things more. We will impede things. We are more awkward. We create more disharmony. Not because we are bad people, but because the field of awareness has narrowed to a very small territory: me, my dryers, my needs right now.

The Japanese Founder of our Soto Zen school, Dogen Zenji, in the Genjokoan, writes, “A person’s attaining of awakening is like the moon residing in the water. The moon does not get wet, and the water is not disturbed.”

There is no tension. There is no division. Everything is reflected in everything. This experience is what begins to open when we loosen our grip on selfing, on this endless reinforcement of the small shape of who we think we are.

Let’s practice together.

A dear friend of mine offers this practice. Track, carefully, how much time you spend actually fostering anxiety and fear through your behavior and thoughts, and how often your words and actions foster wisdom and compassion.

This is not just a gentle suggestion. It is an invitation to actually look, atone and tale responsibility and do something fresh and new.

When we look closely, we begin to notice these micro-moments of turning away. The thoughts that actually never consider how something lands on another person. The small maneuvering of the body to secure what we want. The way we fold ourselves inward without realizing it, until someone is standing there wondering why we are blocking the dryers.

Find a quiet place to sit. Let your body settle down. Take a few breaths and allow a gentle awareness to spread outward from the small circle of your immediate concerns.

Pause to reflect. ‘Who am I turning my back on today? Not dramatically, not cruelly, but subtly. In a thought. In a hesitation. In a tightness around the dryers of my life.

Notice what it feels like to imagine the other person’s experience fully. Their needs, their day, their presence. Let that imagination soften something in you. This is where no-self stops being a concept and starts being a lived, breathing, ordinary practice.

Having an imagination about others is a wonderful way to begin practice.

Bringing curiosity about what is happening with those around us. How they are. What burdens them. What delights them. This does not mean we our erasing ourselves. We are actually creating the conditions for expansion. It is learning to widen the view and experience who we actually are together.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

When have you noticed yourself in a moment of small selfing, turning away from someone without noticing the impact? And, if you were aware enough to turn back, what happened? Please share in the comments below, for the benefit of us all.

May we hold our preferences lightly and feel the great relief of turning toward what is all around us in each moment.

Koshin.

P.S. Ways to learn how not to turn away, together.

Daily Meditation with the New York Zen Center sangha in person or online.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

Untangled and Wholehearted ~ Books I’ve written reflecting on how the Four Noble Truths and Buddhist precepts inform our everyday lives and relationships.

We get afraid. Even of ordinary things, of snow. This is so human.

I am currently working on a new writing project and spending a lot of time with the primary teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, particularly his teachings on generosity. I keep finding myself surprised. Not because the teachings are unfamiliar, but because they continually point at something I thought I already understood. We often think of generosity as something we do when we have extra. When we have enough left over to give.

But what if generosity is actually a practice of trust? What if it is less about abundance and more about our willingness to plant a seed without yet knowing the fruit?

A few weeks ago, someone sent me three bulbs in the mail. There was no note. No explanation. Just these three mysterious little bulbs sitting in a box. I put them in water, and they have been growing ever since, sending up these long, strange shoots that our cat Bodhidharma Burrito has been treating as personal dental floss. I have no idea what they will become. A flower? Some kind of tree? I genuinely do not know. But I tend to them every day because they arrived at our door, and that feels like enough of a reason.

This, I think, is what the Buddha was pointing at when he spoke about giving with faith. The Sanskrit word is sada. Not blind belief, not the kind of faith that means I refuse to look. But a confidence born from actually being receptive to what is possible. The willingness to give yourself fully to this moment, especially when you do not know how it will turn out.

Giving out of faith is a place of practice.

Last week I met with someone who was applying to one of our educational offerings. They were very certain. Certain about their views, their understanding, certain about who they could and could not learn alongside. When I asked what would happen if someone with a different perspective joined the group, they said, with real honesty, “I would not be able to learn.”

I appreciated their honesty enormously. And I sat with my own version of that same thing. Because if I am looking clearly, there are people and ideas and political views and ways of being in the world about which I sometimes think, ‘No. Not you. You do not get to exist in my practice.’

If we see everything as a place of practice, except that group or this person, what are we actually practicing?

The Buddha taught about three forms of generosity. When we hold them together, they feel like a complete picture of what it means to really give oneself to life.

The first is material generosity. Giving what we have. Food, shelter, resources, time, money to the organizations, communities, and people who need it. Suzuki Roshi wrote that sowing a seed is not enough. Taking care of a seed day after day is also important. This is so easy to forget. We give once, check it off the list. But the garden, as he reminds us, requires tending every single day. Our sangha requires tending. Our relationships require tending. Our own minds require tending, every single day, without exception.

The second form of generosity the Buddha speaks of is the gift of fearlessness. This does not mean the absence of fear. It means being willing to say, ‘I am here, and I am not leaving, even in the face of your fear or mine.’

I was recently with a dear friend who has a serious form of metastatic cancer. He is an extraordinary person, and he is now reckoning with things they thought they would have more time to reckon with. A grandchild they might not know. A child’s wedding they had assumed they would attend. He and his husband were talking about how to actually give themselves to this time, to this reality, without pretending it is something other than what it is.

To sit with someone in that room, in that kind of truth, is an invitation to offer fearlessness. Not by being unafraid. Not by saying the right thing. Simply by being a steady presence that does not flinch, does not rush toward comfort or reassurance, does not abandon the moment in search of something more manageable.

We do this all the time. We abandon the moment. We contract when the people we love need us to expand. We retreat into our own fear and call it being realistic. We give in to the sensation of protection that is actually no protection at all. It’s a fantasy of protection.

When we contract, we shake trust. When we stay, even imperfectly, we offer something real.

The third form of generosity is the gift of Dharma itself. And I want to be very clear about what this does not mean. It does not mean lecturing people about the teachings. I used to be one of those people you would not want at your dinner table. I was vegan and very, very vocal about it. And then when I got into practice, I transferred all of that energy into lecturing everyone around me about Buddhism. My friend Todd, one of my oldest dearest friends and fraternity brothers, finally looked at me and said, in the most loving possible way, '“You are being an asshole.”

I was so grateful. That is a real friend. That is the gift of Dharma, actually, offered without decoration. Just the truth, given because he loved me.

The gift of Dharma is not instruction. It is the quality of how we show up. It is asking yourself, genuinely: am I living in a way that helps the people around me wake up to their own nature? Not by telling them what to think, but by being someone they can actually trust.

Are we really willing to receive what we ask for? Or do we mostly want others to agree with us?

Generosity is not a transaction. It is the constant cultivation of what is.

Think of these three gifts as a garden. Material generosity prepares the soil. The gift of fearlessness protects the garden, keeps it safe enough for things to actually grow. And Dharma is what nourishes the roots, what goes deep beneath the surface, what sustains everything even when you cannot see it working.

Every day. Your mind. Your relationships. Your sangha. Your capacity to be present to whatever arrives in the mail with no note and no explanation, just three mysterious bulbs waiting to become something you cannot yet name. And then Suzuki Roshi’s reminder: even once the garden is finished, it is always necessary to take care of it every day.

Let’s practice together.

Find a comfortable place to sit. Let your body settle. Take a few slow breaths into your lower belly and allow yourself to arrive here.

Now, with genuine curiosity, consider these three questions. Not as homework or another reason to shame yourself. But as actual, healthy inquiry.

What am I being asked to give materially right now? What resources, time, or support is actually needed, and am I giving it freely or with strings attached?

Where am I indulging my fear instead of offering steadiness? Where do I contract when someone needs me to stay?

How am I giving Dharma, not through words, but through the quality of how I show up? Is my presence something that helps others feel safer, more awake, more themselves?

Notice the seeds of generosity these questions uncover. How will you tend to them today, next week, in five years?

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

What does it feel like in your body when you give freely, without expectation? And what does it feel like when you hold back? Where in your life right now are you being asked to plant a seed without knowing what it will become?

Please share your reflections in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May you give out of faith, offer fearlessness wherever you can, and tend the garden of your life with the care it deserves.

Koshin.

P.S. Ways to tend to the garden of practice.

Daily Meditation with the New York Zen Center sangha in person or online.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.

In Japan, this is when spring is said to begin. Some years ago, Chodo and I were at Kosho-ji for Nehan-e, the ceremony honoring the death of Shakyamuni Buddha. Kosho-ji was Dogen Zenji’s first monastery, and in the courtyard stand these remarkable, gnarled plum blossom trees, blooming beautifully right there in the snow. A wonderful reminder of something we forget again and again—courage to bloom in the midst of challenge.

Last Saturday, many of us sat for Nehan-e zazenkai, a day-long sit in honor of the Buddha’s death—at the Zen Center. Really let this in: he died.

And so will I, so will you.

He died and is so alive. Everything at once.

How do we actually allow things to die to allow ourselves to live while we’re alive?

When the Buddha is dying, Ananda, his beloved attendant, is overcome. He leans against a doorway, undone by grief. We do not know exactly what was happening in that moment, but there is that little detail that moves me every time I read it. Something so human about it. ‘My teacher is going to die.’

Ananda says he was still comforted by the thought that the Buddha would not come to his final passing until he had given some last instruction. Ever want more from a. friend, a partner, a teacher? Ever ask, ‘Can you tell me something more?’

The Buddha responds, ‘What more does the community expect from me? I have already given my life, Ananda.’

He says, ‘I’ve already set forth the complete Dharma, without making any of it hidden. Nothing is hidden.’

How do we hide it from ourselves? There is no closed fist, no secret teaching. And yet we create difficulties, pile on suffering, and remain in hiding.

Not deceiving ourselves is a place of practice.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi says, the main purpose of our practice is to realize what we are and what things are in a true sense. This is not a self-improvement practice. It is not about transcending. It is about realization. Realizing things as they are.

How do we make things so complicated?

He teaches us that on our black cushion, when we find ourself in a true sense, we exist there.

I love how not fancy this is. On our black cushion, when we find ourself in the truest sense, we exist there. Just here. And this means that everything exists in the same way that we exist. The way we sit is the way each thing exists in its own position.

Simple. And we make it so complicated. Create and plot and fabricate so many layers of drama.

The Buddha says, all fabrications are subject to decay.

Everything falls apart. Everything.

So what would it be like to practice completely now?

I think often about my Japanese Soto Zen teacher, Kojima Roshi, who is younger than me. This does not mean he won’t die before me. And so I always reflect: am I practicing in a way that honors his impending death? Knowing he, too, will not live forever. Am I practicing in a way that honors Dai En Sensei in her ninety-seventh year, knowing she too will not live forever?

When the Buddha became totally unbound by his body, there was a great earthquake. Awesome and hair-raising. The world trembles.

But what continues?

Practice.

We have 87 generations of dead teachers. All of them human beings who practiced and died and handed something forward. We are here because of their lives. And we too will die.

So how do you want to practice, knowing this?

How do you allow your own impermanence to actually enliven and clarify what you are doing? How are you working with your thoughts and your words and your actions? Are they in accord?

Are you indulging your thoughts and feelings and fears? How’s that going?

What will you do differently now, knowing that trusting your wisdom and not living a life of holding back is what you actually have?

Let’s practice together.

Find somewhere to sit, and make yourself comfortable. Let your body settle. Soften your gaze or close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and let them go completely.

Now bring to mind the question: Am I really living? Am I really giving myself to this practice?

We do not ask this question as a judgment, but as a genuine inquiry.

Notice what comes up. Notice where you are holding back. Notice what you are waiting for. Notice the small creature inside who says, just a little more time, just the right conditions, just one more teaching.

Breathe. What is coming up in this moment? What is actually here? Not what you wish were here. What is here?

Let your awareness arrive fully in your body, in this breath, in this moment that is already happening whether you show up for it or not.

This is the complete teaching. Nothing is hidden.

Let’s have a dialogue.

I am curious.

What are you waiting for? When you imagine practicing with complete wholeheartedness, knowing impermanence is real, what arises in you? What is the thing you keep putting off, and what would it look like to stop putting it off, beginning now?

Please share in the comments below for the benefit of us all.

May you practice with great vigor and tenderness, knowing that it will not last, and therefore knowing exactly how precious it is.

Koshin

P.S. Opportunities to practice with vigor and tenderness.

Daily Meditation with the New York Zen Center sangha in person or online.

Commit to Sit: Becoming Your True Self It is not too late to join our 90-day guided meditation period with daily teachings, weekly dharma talks, and community practice. We’ll work with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s teachings on becoming yourself.

An Introduction to Zen Meditation — A 3+ hour video course on the fundamentals of practice: how to pause, see clearly, and complete each thing with your whole heart.