SPP2026: Sesshin Day 2: Free From The Start

During the second day of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Senko takes up the koan of relaxed effort — how effort and ease, far from being opposed, are expressed in the same movement. Drawing on Seung Sahn’s story of a bear who, long after escaping his circus cage, keeps turning somersaults in the mountains hoping to be fed, Senko asks us to look honestly at the conditioning we carry into practice: the identities, the resistances, the habitual performances that persist long after the cages that shaped them are gone. Sesshin, he suggests, is a kind of homeopathic medicine — a voluntary cage that lets us finally see the ones we forgot we were living in. The bear was always free, as are we. The question is not how to earn that freedom but how to stop obscuring it, as Senko puts it: “How can I get out of the way of my own awakening?” Returning again and again to just this — the breath, the cushion, the bow — the practice. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.