It can be extremely helpful if someone acknowledges what we’ve been experiencing in our own internal process or we happen to read or hear someone talk about something which we’ve been experiencing, but no one else seems to understand. It can be a lifesaver. Or at least reading or hearing them talk about some of…
Category: zen
Getting Into the House: Kufu and Zazen
In our training, the Roshi asks us to go into the house. He says, “Go Straight!” In our zazen, we must find a way in. We all go up to the door and try to push it open. It won’t budge. But the Roshi told us to “Go Straight!” So we push and push on…
The Most Intense Person in the Room
For all of you folks out there who are always the most intense person in the room, or are waiting for everyone to notice the subtext, or can feel other people as yourself, or are a walking pressure cooker, or can’t get yourself going in one direction, or you feel like an exposed nerve, or…
Zen’s Long Slow Humbling Healing Process of the Heart.
In Zen, much of the focus is on doing Tanden energy work. Please see my article on Tanden to learn about it. The Tanden work is huge and never ending, but with time and experience, it becomes apparent that we are also doing heart energy work, the long healing process of working out our emotional…
How Sanzen Shaped My Way of Doing Bodywork
“If we open ourselves completely, consciously or unconsciously, we are ready to listen to the voiceless voice of the universe.” – Dainin Katagiri Recently someone asked me what my practice looks like now that I am not doing koan work intensively in the monastery. This post is a bit of a response to that…
Walking in the Woods
Desperate to find a way to interact with life, catching glimpses in sports when movement and space seemed to bend, seemed tactile and plastic. Not knowing my place or how I’d find my way, I longed for something real with which to commit my awareness. Knowing somehow and yet isolated, I ventured through high…
Unspoken Contracts: The Liberation of Letting Them Go (A Former Zen Monk Reflects on Telling Bad Jokes)
Many of us are constantly, perhaps unconsciously, demanding that others around us agree to contracts we want to be true about our place in the world. We define ourselves by these ideas we have of ourselves. One great lesson I remember of Zen training is having to let go of the demands we put on…
The Embodiment Podcast: Episode 187 Zen Body with Corey Hess
Here is an interview Corey did with Mark Walsh on The Embodiment Podcast. Thanks for listening! Enjoy! Please share it! https://embodiedfacilitator.com/187-zen-body-corey-hess/?fbclid=IwAR3-rb3SnFXDG6oBxQddWhLgYsrksEDBkaQeMRn_J_c0HuM5S26zXtbiRbM
Zen Students Burning Process: Words of Encouragement
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Zhan Zhuang, and as I do it, memories of energetic insights, of struggles and specific leaps in practice have been coming back to me from my first couple of years in Zen training. I think describing some of that feeling will be of value to some training people…
Removing the Barrier Between Self and Other
“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains,…
