Consciousness × (Awareness ↔ Attention) = Lived Experience… or simply, Thisness. OK… How can this formulation on meditation practice help me? CONSCIOUSNESS means I’m here and having an experience. ATTENTION is where my focus goes… a conversation, a memory, a fear, a craving, something somebody said yesterday, or some thought that showed up out of nowhere. AWARENESS is NOTICING what’s happening… including where my attention has gone. That noticing matters. When we’re operating

Whether it was teachers… mentors… friends… they all keep pointing me toward the exact same thing, that I couldn’t have done on my own. And it was something I had to keep working with until it stopped being a lesson... stopped being something somebody taught me... and gradually became something I lived. Something embodied. Something carried forward into this present moment as the person I actually am that now feels very natural and familiar to me. My values aren’t heirlooms to

In our own personal Wizard of Oz story, when we do Zazen, we’re taking the opportunity to look behind the shoji screen and see: Who is it that sees… hears… craves… wants all the things… gets offended… gets afraid… carries around all the stories and yada yadas about who I am, who you are, and how everything is supposed to be? And when we take our seat to sit… breathe… listen and notice… to look behind the shoji screen of “self”… we might notice there’s no one there, but rather

When I became ordained as a priest, I imagined my life would look like other priests. I thought I'd take care of 'the hearts and minds of the people,' within the configuration of a monastery… doing all the ordinary things that Zen priests and monks do. In reality, the Dharma... what some might translate as 'Grace,' in Western culture, has a way of leading us into spaces that need Dharma paramedics… places we never expected to find ourselves. For me, Dharma AKA grace led me to

Is our heart’s ability to appreciate quicker than the ego can depreciate? The mind has a remarkable talent for finding what’s wrong. It effortlessly picks people, places, and things apart, dissecting them like a frog in biology class. It notices flaws and disappointments before we even realize it’s happening. Whether the reflex is subtle or loud, it sustains suffering by reinforcing the illusion of separation. Untrained and unrestrained, our “I-ness” becomes highly skilled at

For your considerations... Sentient beings don't simply live within environments. We emerge and arise through them… respond to them… alter them… and become environments for one another. Our body is an environment. Mind is an environment. Attention is an environment. Community is an environment. The Earth is the larger field within which all of these environments meet. In this way, how do we engage them? Harmoniously… or disharmoniously? "The powerful play goes on, and we will

This morning I saw a trash can beside a drive-through. Someone had turned it in such a way so that no one could use it. While it fulled the requirement of having to be there, it didn't fill the reality of the need of those who might need to use it. It occurred to me that it wasn’t there to receive anything anymore. It was simply there because a trash can was expected to be there. How often do we do the same with our lives? We meet the technical expectations … but quietly don

When, in the course of human events, conditions emerge that separate one people from another through fear, prejudice, indifference, intolerance, or the pursuit of personal power and dominance, it becomes necessary not merely to resist those forces, but to remember a deeper Reality that can help us rediscover one another. Space is unimaginably vast… and this is the only planet we know where our particular expression of life exists. Out of respect for our shared humanity, and f

Kyakka Shōko (脚下照顧).... Paying close attention and taking care of what's beneath of our feet, instead of what's in our head... in my direct experience is a thousand times more useful than mindfulness. The true universe isn't in my thoughts... it's the reality of not just "Be here now..." But KNOWING here and now. The universe of thinking mind's trials and tribulations? What did Mark Twain once say? Recovery and Zen re-attention me that the problem isn't that the mind produces

Neither recovery from active addiction or Zen practice was designed to be an exercise in image construction. Instead of striving to be performatively real, both paths deeply invite us into genuine realness... sincerity... that allows for a clarity of our personhood, instead of holding out something that's not. In my experience, healing... happen through an intentional process of addition by subtraction. Authenticity and integrity aren't widgets we can manufacture or go into a

A younger version of myself... in the first 10 or 15 years of recovery from active addiction... the early stages of Zen training and practice... spent a lot of time trying to add something to myself, trying to fill a space that thought and felt like something was missing. A voice in my head that I nicknamed 'turd,' cause it likes to 'shit-post' at me, told me in my thoughts... if you become stronger, smarter, wiser, more lovable, more worthy, more secure, or more awakened, th

A basic Theravādan meditation practice that supports self-awareness often involves observing "feeling tones. It took me two years to realize that I wasn't actually observing a feeling tone at all--my attention was registering in cataloging "thought tones..." noticing what thinking mind interpreted or thought of sensations I was experiencing. My attention kept getting pulled into the mind's attempt to understand, define, and explain my sensations in relationship to my experien

Zazen In the past, way too many times, I confused approval with worthiness… with being lovable… with being loved. Somebody clapping for me or telling me what a great job I did was like getting a hit of dope. As I started learning the way of recovery and healing... which is really the way of developing the ability to express friendliness with ourself and others consistently, I began noticing that approval is often conditional, transactional, and dependent upon performance, agr

Some might not be aware but the word 'slop' was 2025's word of the year. In particular the expression "AI slop" to describe the flood of crappy, repetitive, shallow, mass-produced content made by artificial intelligence, shoved in our face. A lot of what AI makes can be hollow, lacking true insight, designed to occupy Attention rather than deepen understanding. It often has the appearance of meaning without the weight of lived experience behind it. But before we get to be smu

If we are sitting in Zazen and we say, " I am thinking ," the " I " might think it is the one doing the thinking. But when we look closely, we're not that so-called "I" that is thinking. We're the formless Awareness to which the thought "I am thinking" occurs . The sky doesn't try to control the clouds. It doesn't manage them... approve them... reject them. There isn't even really a consideration of the clouds. They come and go on their own, and the sky gives zero f*cks, be

when our boundaries are our values rather than rules, we have a direction we're moving that's coming from the inside, instead of rules we hold up like a shield to protect ourselves from the outside. Rules that have the effect of expanding and extending anxiety, insecurity, worry, and fear... depriving us of the benefits of being fully whole and wholly free. Values as our boundaries can be a beautiful compass to us guide in our present moment experience. 一We Are the Practice I

Reflections on Chisokū (知足)... having the ability to appreciate that when we're not entangled in thought we might be able to notice that we have enough and are enough. 一We Are the Practice Itself

Indecency brought me to recovery. Lying to family and friends. Five incomplete suicide attempts as an adolescent. A naturally dysregulated mind—what we now call generalized anxiety disorder—expressing as depression and isolation. I was seeking things outside myself to fill what I believed was a hole in my soul. As it turned out, there wasn't a hole. There was a story in my mind about a hole. One day in 1987, I found myself in the threshold of a doorway at a meeting at St. Alb

Identity passes through awareness like weather through seamless, unbroken sky. It never owns the space it moves through. It’s simply making temporary use of what is always free and available. 一We All Share the Same Sky

誠 (Makoto) carries a ruthless simplicity. Sincerity. Undividedness. No daylight between what is seen and how one lives. Humans struggle with it not because it is complex, but because it leaves nowhere to hide. Without honesty, nothing coheres. Speech fractures from action. Intention drifts from impact. Identity becomes theater. Zuigan’s call points straight at this... “Master.” “Yes.” “Are you awake?” “Yes. Yes.” “Do not be deceived by the other.” “I will not.” The so-called