“Always now – just now – come into being. Always now – just now – give yourself to death. Practicing this is Zen practice.” Soko Morinaga Everyone wants to figure everything out. Everyone wants to have the real true thought to explain our lives with meaning. Most of us want some extreme, an absolute, to…
Video: Life at Sogenji and My Ordination
This video shows a snippet of the life at Sogenji Rinzai Zen Monastery in Okayama, Japan. It is an unfinished NHK (Japanese Television Station) program, so the editing is not ideal. It shows a lot of life there, with informal meals, a sense of the work, some footage of the beautiful temple. It also gives…
Breathing from the Belly: Tanden, a Great Rolling Ball
A friend recently asked me to help clarify the tanden, also known as lower Dantien. This is a big subject. I have written about it before here. I will try to briefly convey a sense of what it is like to feel the tanden, develop the tanden in sitting and everyday life, and what it…
Letting the Body Fully Express
Doing internal energy work throughout the day can be really simple. We can ask ourselves, “How is my body trying to fully express itself energetically right now?” Our bodies are like kinked hoses, and we are kinked where we are mentally and emotionally stuck. Allowing the body to fully express this energy means learning to…
Spiritual Pirates
There seems to be a feeling among some practitioners who have never lived in a monastery or Zen center, that it is some kind of cloistered, strange place, where socially awkward people go to be alone and get away from society. That society is one thing and the temple is separate. I thought this as…
Intuition is Becoming What is Happening
I wanted to write a bit about intuition. And through that explain how becoming what is happening right now is a way to live in a much more connected way. Why are some people more intuitive than others? How can we be more intuitive in our daily lives? And how can a certain orientation to…
Engaging with Our Own Process: Finding Our True Home
Each of us has our own personal unique way of practicing and engaging in our internal process. We all have our own style of discovering our entryway into truly experiencing reality. In this blog post I am attempting to shed light and give permission to anyone feeling a bit lost in his/her internal world. It…
Excerpts from a Paper : The Koan of SourcePoint.
Originally posted on January 11, 2018 AT SOGENJI SERVING ZENZAI WITH SHODO HARADA ROSHI, C. 2005 Below are a few excerpts from a paper I am writing about how doing traditional Japanese monastic koan work relates to my current life doing SourcePoint Therapy. I will publish the entire article once it is formally published in…
Practical Tips: Does It Have a Direction?
I’ve been in a few workshops again recently, and it is very common to have one or two people having really intense internal issues. The workshops often bring these issues out more intensely than in our normal life. And this is a real gift. Often the language used to describe working with this type…
