Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin Nannette Overley traces an honest question back to its roots: what is determination, and what is its role in our lives? Beginning with her discomfort […]

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk preceding the weekend retreat Planting Life, longtime teacher and master gardener Wendy Johnson calls the community “to plant life together in utterly dangerous times.” Weaving traditional ecological […]

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Dainin — emergency physician turned dharma teacher — explores what western medicine trains us to suppress and what Zen practice invites us to reclaim. Tracing her own path from clinical dissociation to a reawakening of compassion and connection at Upaya’s Being with Dying training, she turns to the well known koan of a water buffalo whose tail catches in a lattice window. Where we instinctively see a problem to solve, Dainin identifies this caught tail as an image of the fixing impulse itself: the urge to suppress or solve rather than turn and face what holds us: “The part that makes us human, that little tiny tail that’s preventing us from going beyond, is what allows us to care, to come alongside, and to vow these impossible vows to save all beings, to alleviate suffering.” What catches us, she teaches, can become what connects us. She reflects on a year in which being with dying became personal — and how non-conceptual practice carried her through what clinical knowledge could not.

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk during Upaya’s Being with Dying intensive, Frank Ostaseski speaks to participants from the loss of three close friends within a matter of weeks. Rather than offering technique or teaching, he […]

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, teacher and author Tara Brach explores imagination as what she calls “an absolute miracle of the human mind” — a capacity that has shaped […]

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Kodo reflects on the just-completed Spring Practice Period sesshin as a window into a larger idea of a Dharma Lab. What has been called “Contemplative Residency,” he […]

In this final talk of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Ryotan and Sensei Shinzan bring the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures to their close with the tenth stage — Entering the Marketplace — the return to ordinary life, […]

In this fifth-day talk, offered during the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Senko and Sensei Monshin explore the ninth ox-herding picture, Returning to the Source — the stage where effort ceases and life simply flows. Drawing on Lao […]

In this third-day talk, offered during the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Ryotan takes up the habit of self-judgment — that familiar contraction after a mistake, the script of not being good enough, […]

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… Source

In this first formal talk of the Spring Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Monshin takes up virya — the Sanskrit term for joyful effort — as the essential energy of practice. What does it mean to sit day after day with the whole catastrophe of the mind: the boredom, the fear, the stories we tell about ourselves? Drawing on the ox-herding pictures’ imagery of taming, she explores the difference… Source