Sit, Breathe, Bow: Recent Episodes
Ian White Maher
Each week leading Buddhist teachers share life experiences and insights to help guide your meditation practice as well as your life off the cushion.
This show is going on hiatus. I have taken a new job out west and I just won't have the time to keep it up. This has been a life-changing experience and I am so grateful to all of you.
The spiritual practice of sharing the dharma is not a form of entertainment. This is something we do to find out what life is. At the foundation of the practice is dana or generosity.
When you’re living the precepts, when you’re living according to your values, then meditation becomes much easier because the precepts are the foundation for what it means to do the work of meditation.
So many people are chasing after happiness like it is something that can be attained. But happiness comes and goes. How can you be with "what is" in this moment?
This practice invites us to be vulnerable, open, and intimate. This is incredibly challenging and requires courage, but it also is the only way to look deeply into who we are.
Living in the dharma allows us to be vulnerable and to connect with the rest of the universe. Practice dismantles the habits of trying to build up the delusions around us.
When we are being choice-full, we are able to live into our values, we can live into the things we care about.
How can we not be deluded? By investigating the great matter of life and death, we see what our thinking creates. By using the Four Great Vows as a guide we see more clearly how to help.
Practice is doing something with intention. You enter into a moment deliberately. You choose into it. There is a willingness to be here. It is an attitude of mind.
There is a process of growing into our roles as students and as teachers. There is a discipline but also a willingness to play and even provoke as we find a way to live within the tradition and to make it a home of our own.
Each of us has a job to do and it depends on what is happening right in front of us. There is a role we play that asks for something specific. What is your job?
The challenges of the pandemic can provide the opportunity for us to see deeply into the many ways that we can connect with others.
Kozan shares his own journey as a priest and activist and how we can use the practice to provide a foundation for our work as people committed to healing our communities.
What is a great woman? The practice of Zen is about looking inward and seeing who you really are and what this life is about.
Everything is Included Here. Practice isn't about finding the perfect situation, it is about welcoming what is present and not making it wrong.
Your life is Zen. If you try to make your life Zen, then you are adding something. Don't make distinctions, don't make differences, and live your life in the present.
The essence of faith is not faith in some thing. It is not an object. It is the absence of doubt. When we are truly entrusting in the heart, there is no faith there just is no doubt. Faith is the eyes we are looking through, the ears we are hearing with. It is the doubtless, present awareness that allows what is arising to arise as intimate and worthy of engaging.
We are constantly trying to distract ourselves from our busy day or an uncomfortable reality. But if we don't make anything or distract ourselves, then our lives are not a problem.
Jiri (George) Hazlbauer, JDPSN, discusses what living in a Zen community can do for your practice. Your zen family will change you for the better, even if you can't see it in the moment. If you have the chance, please try living in community.
Ellen Birx, Roshi, is fully immersed and fully committed to both Zen Buddhism and Christianity. She doesn't collapse either into the other but allows the two paths the full integrity of their truth all the while following them into the ineffable.
This is a rebroadcast of an episode recorded with Zen Master Dae Bong in March of 2019.
How do we balance our practice between the Zen principle of "no-gaining" and the deep and strong aspiration within Mahayana Buddhism to realize awakening for the benefit of all beings?
When you make the experience of a completely quiet mind, you gain an understanding of what we talk about when we say you can be free. Usually we are just dragged around by our opinions, by our likes and dislikes, but if this stops this then you get an expression of freedom and that is also a different happiness.
Karin Ryuku Kempe, Roshi reminds us there is a danger in the koan path where we can skate through without addressing the basics of becoming a grown-up adult capable of practicing with the precepts with other human beings in an ethical way.
The power of the bodhisattva is found in the unleashing of the virtue of our lives. The virtue of our lives is the only authority that any of us have. Our practice is to live in a way that is present and compassionate and always working for the weal of all beings.
We live in a Buddha-field that has delusion, greed, and hate and we should strive to overcome this by entering the Bodhisattva path. We do this to enact more and more helpful energy to heal this Buddha-field.
Can you see how the practice is impacting your life? Are you looking to see how you can use the practice to change it? This will give you a good indication of the nature of your practice.
Zen Master Jeong Ji, Anita Feng, invites us to meet the moment with clarity, compassion, truth, and a fitting function.
Acceptance of What Is
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