Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

The Persian poet Hafiz wrote that between now and death he knows of no better topic to discuss than love. Frank Ostaseski agrees. Echoing the Prayer of St. Francis, Frank tells us how amidst suffering he learned that love would not save him by coming toward him but by coming through him. It is when we allow our own suffering to speak that we’re able to love others in their suffering, helping them to love themselves again. This episode also serves as Part 1 of the series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts

An invisible virus has changed our world and our lives, as most of us find ourselves in the process of meeting a pervasive sense of loss, a reshaping of the experience of death, and what it means to care and to love. The practice of turning toward our losses and meeting our suffering with kindness and awareness can support us in letting go of our well-constructed defenses and open to greater love. Frank Ostaseski and Tara Brach introduce ways to invite the pain into our heart where it can finally be held in loving awareness and integrated into our life as a source of wisdom and a well of great compassion. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

Teiwa sculptor Roxanne Swentzell hasn’t owned a refrigerator for 26 years and reminds us that humans have lived without refrigerators for much longer than they’ve lived with them. It turns out that when we’re mindful of the way we prepare, store, and consume food, we really don’t need them. “Nothing is closer to us than what we eat. The seeds and the plants are genetically adapted to this climate and culture. We are too. We’ve been having a lot of health issues because we’ve been eating things that are foreign to our bodies. If we ate what fits us better, we would feel better.” Sensei Wendy Johnson shares a clip from a documentary about Roxanne Swentzell’s Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute and the Pueblo Food Experience. You’ll learn what happens when Roxanne, her family, and the people of the Santa Clara Pueblo stop eating processed Western foods and instead rely exclusively on the diet of their ancestors. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

“Truth is like corn. If you give it time it will appear.” Keido Troy Fernandez’s family has been in New Mexico for 13 centuries. He shares the history of his ancestors in New Mexico, including a fascinating connection between the Teiwa and Arab peoples and encourages us to consider the lands each of us are on now, the lands of our ancestors, and our personal stories and lineages. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

Porter Swentzell talks about Pueblo Country in northern New Mexico. He takes us through his lineage of teachers, including his mother, sculptor Roxanne Swentzell, and tells us what it was like to grow up in Santa Clara Pueblo. He discusses who and what Pueblos are and gives us an overview of Pueblo languages. Porter also teaches us about Pueblo systems of care and responsibility as well as traditional Pueblo agricultural practices. Finally, Porter discusses the complex history of the Pueblo peoples and the Catholic Church, asking the vital question: How do we choose to tell the stories of a place? To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

Professor Melissa K. Nelson speaks about indigenous knowledge systems, indigenous sciences, and traditional ecological knowledges. She explains how these “nested ways of knowing” are rooted in the Earth’s natural cycles rather than human made calendars. Melissa also discusses her work with The Cultural Conservancy and their goals of creating healthy individuals, communities, and ecosystems. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

In this follow up to her talk, Pueblo Culture and Food Experience, Roxanne Swentzell has a discussion with Roshi Joan Halifax and Sensei Wendy Johnson and answers questions from the sangha. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

Hoshi Jill De La Hunt, who is a hospice social worker and bereavement counselor, talks about embodiment as a practice of openness in a culture that often encourages us to constrict.  When we embody a soft front and strong back, and really live into it, we will experience a love that overflows and creates true intimacy. We will be able to stand firmly in the world and say: “I trust you with my openness. And I’ve got you with my strong back.”

Roxanne Swentzell talks about her life as a sculptor, grandmother, and president of Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute in the Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico. The Pueblo people have survived in northern New Mexico for thousands of years by caring for each other and the environment around them. Roxanne wants us to know that if we don’t care for the environment we’re in, it won’t care for us. Roxanne also tells us what it was like to grow up in two worlds, with a father of German descent who was a professor Western philosophy, and a mother born in the pueblo who was a world-renowned writer on Pueblo perspectives. She shares what it was like to have a severe speech impediment as a child and how she learned to “talk through clay,” sculpting clay figurines in order to communicate to her mother. You’ll also learn about Roxanne’s philosophy of “matching food with people through ancestral connections” as she encourages all of us to rediscover the food of our respective ancestors. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

Sensei Wendy Johnson reflects with the sangha on Stephanie Kaza’s talk, Dharma and Ecology, and tells a story about joining other faith leaders at Standing Rock in North Dakota to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

Dr. Stephanie Kaza tells us how we can draw from our Buddhist roots in caring for this Earth. She explains how Buddhist traditions provide strong foundations for doing the work of planting life, sustaining life, and making sure that life continues. At this critical moment, Dr. Kaza insists, Buddhists must partner with others to work for a sustainable future. There is no time to waste. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

Series Description: Upaya Zen Center’s Planting Life is a yearly program grounded in the fields of environmental activism, engaged spiritual practice, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Planting Life: Learning from Traditional Ecological Knowledges and Cultivating the Dharma (2022) opens  with an introductory teaching on Dharma and Ecology and Systems Theory by Stephanie Kaza, PhD, author of Green Buddhism and professor of Environmental Studies. Following this, renowned Tewa artist and culture holder Roxanne Swentzell grounds us in the traditional ecological knowledge practices of the ancestral Pueblo foodways. After the Upaya community gathers to sow the seeds of the Three Sisters of antiquity—corn, beans and squash—in the Zen Windmill Garden, there is an immersion in the great wisdom traditions of the Tewa Cultures of the Rio Grande Valley, led by Indigenous scholar and historian, Porter Swentzell. This teaching is followed by a presentation showcasing a range of innovative Native Foodways programs, offered by ASU Professor of Indigenous Sustainability, Melissa Nelson, PhD (Turtle Mountain Chippewa). On the final day of Planting Life (which is the anniversary of the United Nations World Environment Day), the program faculty discuss the intersection of traditional ecological knowledges and socially engaged Buddhism in light of our climate catastrophe and the worldwide pandemic. Episode Description: Roshi Joan Halifax and Sensei Wendy Johnson introduce Upaya’s Planting Life 2022 program. Part 1 of this series was published as episode #1991 titled: Planting Life and Growing the Seeds of Persistent Culture by Wendy Johnson. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Planting Life 2022

To love ourselves, we must know ourselves. To love one another, we must know one another. But our assumptions, distractions, fears, expectations, and personal sense of unworthiness obscure these kernels of truth. We yearn for connection with others — but our minds get in the way, constantly spinning judgments about how we are fundamentally alienated from one another. We can train ourselves to change, to “hear” more of what is out there – and to “listen” less to our limiting and often self-condemning thoughts along the way. With core mindfulness and lovingkindness techniques, Sharon Salzberg guides participants through the process of seeing through layers of habit – whether rooted in fear, self-condemnation or other mental conditioning – to find a truer meaning of love for themselves, for their loved ones, for those they don’t know but with whom they share this planet –for all beings everywhere. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

Our world is on fire and Sensei Alan Senauke reminds us that it is nothing new. 2,500 years ago, the Buddha said that everything is burning with the fires of greed, hatred, delusion. And now in the midst of our climate catastrophe the fires are both figurative and literal. In the grip of greed, hatred, and delusion, we are destroying our world. During this week in August we remember the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the immediate blasts more than 130,000 people were incinerated. Many more died in the next few weeks and hundreds of thousands in the years to come. We still live with battles being fought over nuclear plants in the Ukraine and conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. And we live with the ongoing fires of racism and the pernicious habit of othering. In the midst of these fires caused by our greed, hatred, and delusion, Sensei Alan insists that we must ask ourselves the question: How do we truly be ourselves? It will involve internal transformation, which will demand a very close investigation of ourselves. And that is what we do when we sit zazen. Every time we sit down we face ourselves. And this is the internal cultural change we have to take on in order to change the culture at large.

At the end of the previous Varela 2022 talk, John Dunne asks the Varela faculty, namely those coming from an enactive perspective, the questions listed below. These questions are explored here, especially in their ethical implications. Listening first to Varela 2022 Part 7 is recommended. Varela faculty explore the following questions from John Dunne: What is the purpose of enaction as an explanatory system? Is it more than descriptive? What is the enactive anthropology? What is the enactive vision of the world we make? What are the distortions in the enactive perspective? Does it undo itself? To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Varela International Symposium 2022