Sit With It
At every retreat I offer what we Zen nerds call “dokusan.” It’s a private meeting between teacher and student — or between retreat attendee and dumb ol’ me, as the case may be. During these dokusans I hear all kinds of stories, ranging from tales of the lovelorn to heartbreaking revelations of recent deaths of […]
Being Into Zen
I write you this entry on an intercity train bound for Amsterdam Centraal calling at Wageningen and… Jeez I don’t know. Some other places. Utrecht, I think, and a few other Dutch towns. I just finished two days of talks in Nijmegen, Netherlands at a place called Jewel Heart, which is a Tibetan Buddhist center. […]
Unmasking the Gurus?
Liebe Freunde, I send you this missive from Deutsche Bahn train ICE 628 from Wurzburg to Dusseldorf calling at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof and… uh… elsewhere I assume. I missed the announcement about the other stops. A friend will meet me in Dusseldorf to drive me to the Netherlands. In an hour and a half or so, […]
Never Check Facebook on a Zen Retreat
I’m leading a retreat this week at Benediktushof, a retreat center in Southern Germany. While I’m here I’ve been working on the talk I’m going to give to the people of London soon (see below for details, you’re welcome to join). As part of preparing for that talk, I needed to know about the way […]
The Four Elements and Me
Here’s an interesting question I received via email recently: I’ve been practicing following the breath and it occurred to me that the air being breathed is as much or even more “me” than the lungs within this body. I hope this is a correct assumption. With this realization I’ve been trying to understand the four […]
