VOICES

A pilgrim chooses to leave home in order learn something, or find an answer, to grow, or to heal. The pilgrim leaves, to be able to return, transformed.

We are pleased to announce the completion of the Kyudo Matoba, or 'Target House,' at the Spring Green Dojo.

Zen training is 24/7, and it involves discovering any opportunities to get out of our heads and take our training more deeply into our bones.

The topic at hand is the physical training we do in Chosei Zen. But I would turn that into a question: How do you develop a refined sense of all that lives inside your skin?

Now instead of performing kata to the point of exhaustion, we blow one note each with one breath to the same extreme… Tanouye Rotashi said “to practice so that one note puts someone into samadhi”

In this video, Esteban Martinez Sensei talks about "How We Train" in Zen using meditation, physical training, and fine arts.

In striving to cut through our habits, there is a profound and transformative power to being seen and accepted for exactly what you are, by someone with the eyes to see.

Relationships that were heard, food that was felt, and music that was alchemy.

One of the lesser known laws of the universe (like gravity) is that the state of no-mind can be transferred to others. We call it “transferring samadhi” but also talk in more serious terms about “giving fearlessness.”

In a growing series of publications we are presenting edited versions of talks that Tanouye Roshi gave more than forty years ago in various settings, some of them quite informal while others are formal teisho given during sesshin.

The reason that repetition is the best way to master any martial art, because it will lead to perfection of desired skills, since incorrectly performing a skill wastes energy and is inefficient.

Tanouye Roshi looked at me, shook his head, and said, “You read too much.” Then, he surprised me handing me a book that he had been reading and saying, “Here, read this.”

In Xhosa, an indigenous language spoken in South Africa, the word apha means “this location”, “this place” or “being here right now”.

“If you cut open my veins, I would bleed green!”

The lessons are all there and available, I just have to be sensitive and present for when they come up.

And then my world flipped, just like a coin that has consistently landed heads up suddenly landing on tails.

There came a moment during the sitting when I was no longer in my tatami room with a panoramic view of our prairie and oak savanna. Instead, I felt myself strapped to the front of a locomotive speeding down the track toward a black tunnel.

It’s hard to describe in words what it feels like when a group of people ceases to be made up of individuals, and starts breathing, living, and acting as one big loving heart and hara.

Sit 30 minutes and do something vigorous that you enjoy to move your body everyday. See how it changes your life.

An interview with Joe Pittelli Sensei.

“How do we use training in Spring Green to prepare people for the severe limitations in resources that the climate crisis is bringing closer to our doors?”

The rock that you cannot move or project that is beyond your grasp will teach you much more than the one that is within your known limits.