Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

Episode Description: In the second part of the session, Roshi Bernie talks about the actualization of an “Indra’s Net” connecting impoverished communities by responding to the various groups’ needs by listening without preconception and acting on what arises within and between. Among other cases of skillful means, he cites his own work with the homeless, near-homeless, and ex-prisoners using the Greyston Mandala to start businesses. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: After Sensei Alan Senauke opens the session with a guided meditation song, Roshi Bernie offers his opinions on “non-dual communication” on interdependence and Indra’s Net, reincarnation, koan study, the 8-fold path, social activism, education, and many other images, models, and practices. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: Sensei Alan discusses the necessity of and yet difficulty in actualizing the perfection of patience, or kshanti paramita, when confronted by violence and oppression as they arise on personal and collective levels. Included in the talk are considerations of beneficial action in response to racial tension in Ferguson, Missouri, war in Israel and Palestine, and the ongoing violence by Buddhists against Muslims in Burma. Bio : Alan Senauke is vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center (BZC) in California. Since 1991 Alan has worked with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, where he presently serves as Senior Advisor. He continues to work as a socially engaged Buddhist activist, most recently founding the Clear View Project, developing Buddhist-based resources for relief and social change. In another realm, Alan has been a student and performer of American traditional music for more than forty years.

Series Description In this weekend retreat, Bernie-Roshi searchingly, tenderly, uproariously probes lessons from a life of contemplative social action -- of expanding experiments in the interconnectedness of life. Roshi Joan Halifax and Sensei Alan Senauke also participate throughout the weekend, including in a panel discussion with Bernie. Episode Description: Bernie-Roshi reflects on three periods of his life, each marked by stepping beyond limited "clubs" into ever wider and less sure circles of caring engagement. He speaks of nonduality as not-knowing, freedom to think and feel outside grooved categories -- a state provoked both by Zen koans and by "plunges" into deeply unfamiliar circumstances. He takes several questions from the audience and confides the exciting new insight he had just yesterday. Roshi Joan prefaces Bernie's talk with an appreciation of her teacher. BIOs: Roshi Bernie Glassman, the founder of the Zen Peacemakers, evolved from a traditional Zen Buddhist monastery-model practice to become a leading proponent of social engagement as spiritual practice. He is internationally recognized as a pioneer of Buddhism in the West and as a founder of Socially Engaged Buddhism and spiritually based Social Enterprise. He has proven to be one of the most creative forces in Western Buddhism, creating new paths, practices, liturgy and organizations to serve the people who fall between the cracks of society. Alan Senauke is vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center (BZC) in California. Since 1991 Alan has worked with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, where he presently serves as Senior Advisor. He continues to work as a socially engaged Buddhist activist, most recently founding the Clear View Project, developing Buddhist-based resources for relief and social change. In another realm, Alan has been a student and performer of American traditional music for more than forty years. Joan Halifax Roshi is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D in medical anthropology in 1973. She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions, including Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, University of Virginia Medical School, Duke University Medical School, University of Connecticut Medical School, among many others. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, and was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University. From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center on pioneering work with dying cancer patients, using LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy. After the LSD project, she has continued to work with dying people and their families and to teach health care professionals as well as lay individuals on compassionate care of the dying. She is Director of the Project on Being with Dying and Founder and Director of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. For the past twenty-five years, she has been active in environmental work. She studied for a decade with Zen Teacher Seung Sahn and was a teacher in the Kwan Um Zen School. She received the Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh, and was given Inka by Roshi Bernie Glassman. A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on applied Buddhism. Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); Shamanic Voices; Shaman: The Wounded Healer; The Fruitful Darkness; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying; and Wisdom Beyond Wisdom (with Kazuaki Tanashashi). To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: Here Fleet sounds out, and leads experiential meditations upon, several dimensions of “basic goodness” or Buddha Nature -- a tenderness, openness, completeness of being that's more fundamental than relative worthiness and unworthiness. On the flip side, he invoices the steep price we pay when we don't appreciate this ground: how unworthiness and shame lead directly to society’s most harmful tendencies and institutions. Bio : Acharya Fleet Maull, M.A., Ph.D. candidate, is an author, meditation teacher, management consultant, end of life care educator and social activist working for peace, prison reform and social transformation. Acharya Maull is a senior teacher (Acharya) appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in the Shambhala Community and is also a Dharma successor of Zen master and social entrepreneur, Roshi Bernie Glassman. Fleet founded both Prison Dharma Network and National Prison Hospice Association while serving a 14-year mandatory-minimum sentence on drug charges in federal prison from 1985 to 1999. Fleet helped start the first hospice program inside an American prison, initiating a prison hospice movement that now includes over 70 hospice programs in U.S. state and federal prisons. Fleet served on the Naropa University faculty from 1995 to 2009, where he taught courses in psychology, meditation, socially engaged Buddhism, and contemplative and integral approaches to social action, peacemaking, and political science. He founded the Center for Contemplative End of Life Care Programs at Naropa University and serves as senior faculty with the Upaya Institute’s Being with Dying program and as co-director of the Upaya Institute’s Chaplaincy Training Program. Fleet also founded and directs Peacemaker Institute, a leading provider of integral and transformative leadership training for nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, community activists, and peacemakers. Fleet is the author of Dharma in Hell, the Prison Writings of Fleet Maull and numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of corrections and end of life care.

Episode Description: Frank talks about healing by being a companion to grief in the course of losing ourselves and the ones we love rather than trying to manage grief by imposing maps on it. Being a companion means going towards the uninvited whether it be wild behavior or numbness as it manifests in our body and soul. Bio : In 1987, Frank Ostaseski helped form the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created Metta Institute to broaden this work and seed the culture with innovative approaches to end-of-life care that reaffirm the spiritual dimensions of dying. A primary project of Metta Institute is the End-of-Life Care Practitioner Program that Frank leads with faculty members Ram Dass, Rachel Naomi Remen MD, and many others. Frank is a dynamic, original, and visionary workshop leader. His public programs throughout the United States and Europe have introduced thousands to the practices of mindful and compassionate care of the dying.

Episode Description: The panelists and program participants conclude their discussion on Dogen. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: The panelists share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences surrounding favorite writings of Dogen including "Dragon Song," "Enlightenment," and "Lancet of Zazen." The readings are followed by an open discussion on Dogen between the panelists and program participants. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: Kaz places Dogen within the context of his 13th century contemporaries, who saw the period as an age of decline for the dharma; however, Kaz demonstrates that Dogen was able to offer a positive alternative based upon his realizations through study and practice. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: Kaz places Dogen within the context of his 13th century contemporaries, who saw the period as an age of decline for the dharma; however, Kaz demonstrates that Dogen was able to offer a positive alternative based upon his realizations through study and practice. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: Natalie offers different angles on Dogen by viewing his "Being-Time" fascicle through the lenses of William Faulkner and Dadaism. Bringing this to life in the last part of her talk, she leads the class in a Dadaist poetry exercise. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: Carl continues his talk on Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye "The Ocean Seal Samadhi" and presents his own academic paraphrasing of the text, as well as what it means for him personally. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: Carl walks us through a sample passage from Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye "The Ocean Seal Samadhi," touching on styles of translation and the influences, intentions, and allusions found in Dogen's text. Carl's approach here is an attempt at a faithful literal translation. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Episode Description: Kaz concludes his interview with Carl on Carl's translation work with the Soto Zen Text Project. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Dogen Symposium Series: All 9 Parts

Series Description Over the course of the three day Dogen Symposium, Kazuaki Tanahashi, through his passion for poetry, practice, painting, and interpretations, explores being a clumsy student of a great master, and Roshi Joan Halifax shares the deep ...