Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin turns to the first two folds of the Eightfold Path—right view and right intention—the wisdom from which the rest of the path grows. Right view, he suggests, is not a belief we acquire but seeing what is actually here, before we add our story about it. “The eye opens. The heart leans,” he says — one sees, one moves, and they are not two. Source

In Part 11, the closing of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax, John Dunne, Molly Crockett, and Adam Frank address questions from the participants. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. Source

In Part 10 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax, John Dunne, Molly Crockett, and Adam Frank gather as a panel to open questions on AI before circling back through the retreat’s full arc. The AI discussion ranges widely: LLM “personas” and sycophancy, the ethics of a technology built without consent (likened to asbestos — useful, but harmful in ways not yet fully known)… Source

In Part 9 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax introduces a pre-recorded conversation with author Michael Pollan on the value and limits of mystical experience. Drawing on William James’s pragmatic test — treat mystical insight as a hypothesis, not proof — Pollan traces what these states teach us: chiefly, that self and consciousness can be disaggregated. Source

In Part 8 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Adam, Molly, John, and Roshi Joan open the floor to important questions of our time. Following Molly’s session on AI and Buddhist ethics, she is asked whether AI models that claim consciousness deserve moral consideration. Molly cautions against the language itself: “There’s no reason that it’s necessary to use words that we use to describe… Source

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, given on the eve of Hiroshima’s anniversary, Sensei Kodo sits with how easily the mind justifies what it later regrets: “It’s very disturbing, isn’t it?… The beauty of science and of discovering truth and of imagining realities that we just can’t conceive, then being co-opted by just the greed, hatred, and delusion of our minds.” Kodo turns to Einstein’s… Source

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Roshi Norma Wong, a Zen priest of Native Hawaiian and Hakka Chinese descent, offers a Zen and indigenous perspective on spirituality and governance. Norma grounds the talk in an unbroken relationship to place and lineage, opening with the Hawaiian chant E Ho Mai, calling in the ancestors and declaring: “There is no human on the face of the Earth who was not… Source

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Butsumon Tuck Stibich describes teaching the GRACE program — Roshi Joan’s framework for compassionate action — to a class of cadets training as correctional officers. Butsumon admits to having judgments and expectations going into the training, and his surprise when cadets explained their reasons for being there: faith, family, and a wish to give others the… Source

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin takes us through the currents of the Buddha’s raft metaphor — where practice becomes binding together grass, twigs, and branches to cross from a shore that is dangerous and fearful to one that is safe. Drawing on Dogen’s Uji (Being-Time), Fushin challenges the notion of completion, suggesting there is actually no shore to rest on: “There’s no… Source

In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries… Source

In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries… Source

In this fifth session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax gathers the community around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Person Born to Farming” — reading it aloud, line by line, drawing participants into its imagery of soil as divine drug, of entering death yearly and coming back rejoicing. The poem becomes a lens for the day’s planting, and a doorway into the concept of sympoiesis — the understanding… Source

In this fourth session of Planting Life, Porter Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — historian, anthropologist, and executive director of Hapo Community School — brings a thoughtful and generous account of what it means to reclaim education on indigenous terms. At the heart of his talk is a clear distinction: “Education is something we do inherently as human beings that never ends. Source

In this third session of Planting Life, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — sculptor, farmer, and founder of Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute — offers a quiet and generous tour of Pueblo agricultural knowledge. Speaking at her first public appearance since a serious accident, Roxanne moves through the ancestral farming methods her people developed for one of the harshest growing… Source

In the second session of Planting Life, following the morning’s planting ceremony, Beata Tsosie of Santa Clara Pueblo brings her decades of environmental justice work to bear. Drawing on her work with Tewa Women United and the Food and Seed Sovereignty Alliance, Beata maps the layered environmental violence of the Greater Tewa Basin — nuclear contamination from Los Alamos… Source

In this opening session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax, Wendy Johnson, and Alonso Mendez gather the community around a single, urgent call: to put our hands into the earth and “give life to life.” Wendy brings the teaching down to its most elemental — the seed splitting, root reaching down, shoot reaching up — and names corn, rice, and barley not as crops but as relatives… Source

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, Roshi Joan Halifax draws on her newly written essay “Mutual Belonging, Compassion, and Social Responsibility” to offer a radical reframing of compassion for a world in crisis. Too often reduced to kindness or pity, Roshi teaches compassion as something far more radical: “Compassion is not an emotion. Compassion is natural courage. Source

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 over the whip-and-tether imagery in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures from the Spring Practice Period, Monshin describes the path of her earnest inquiry. She moves through the Lojong training’s… Source

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 knowledge, Dogen’s Instructions to the Cook, and more than fifty years of earth dharma practice, Wendy plants us deep in our seats, reminding us planting is: “not… Source

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… Source

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 invites open inquiry into grief itself: what it feels like in the body, how it moves, and why we so often push it away. “I think to grieve is to be human,” he says. Source

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 every evolutionary leap our species has made, from language to civil rights. Drawing on myth, story, and contemplative practice, Brach argues that in dark times, imagination is not a retreat from reality but… Source

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 proposes, is better represented as “Residential Zen Training” — a rousing adaptation that places each practitioner at the center of awakening. “Both a scientific lab and Residential Zen… Source

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, barefoot and unadorned, carrying what was glimpsed back into the world. Ryotan traces the inner movement this stage points to: the small self receding as the larger self comes… Source

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 Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, the Xin Xin Ming, and the Song of the Grass Hut, Monshin traces the difference between striving and ease, and how returning to the source is not… Source

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, and the perfectionism that keeps us small. Framing her teaching through the Lotus Sutra’s Never-Disparaging Bodhisattva, who bows to every being’s capacity for awakening even as rocks and… Source

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