Shows / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks
New podcasts every Tues, Thurs and Sat. Here you can find talks from various teachers involved with the Zen Community of Oregon. We share talks from our retreats, as well as our different weekly offerings between Great Vow Zen Monastery and Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple. Zen Community of Oregon's purpose is to express and make accessible the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s teachings, as transmitted through an authentic, historical lineage. To support and maintain Zen Buddhist practice in…
Episodes
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksA Mind Open to Wonder - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei
Jogen explores how Zen practice can restore our capacity for wonder and gratitude, even amid life’s difficulties and disappointments. Through meditation and…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksChanting Our Way to Wholeness - Hogen Roshi
Hogen explores how chanting the Buddha’s name can loosen our sense of separation and help us reconnect with the fullness of our experience. Through…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksAwakening Is Already Here - Shonin Ashton, Zen Teacher
This talk explores stories of awakening from Japanese women Zen practitioners, showing how moments of insight can reveal the Buddha nature present in all of…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Crucible of Practice - Bansho Green, Sensei
Bansho explores Zen practice through the image of fire, which can both destroy and transform, forging us through the challenges of being human. Drawing on…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Teachings of Dipa Ma - Shonin Ashton, Zen Teacher
Dipa Ma’s life offers a powerful example of how meditation can transform suffering into concentration, loving-kindness, and peace. Drawing on her teachings…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksKarma and Freedom - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei
Jogen continues his exploration of karma, focusing on how habitual actions and desires can shape our lives and lead us away from ultimate peace. He explores…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksPatience In Practice - Bansho Green, Sensei
Bansho explores patience as one of the six paramitas, a practice that helps us meet ourselves, others, and the changing circumstances of life with presence and…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Shape of Karma - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei
Jogen explores karma as the ongoing relationship between our actions, habits, and experience, emphasizing that practice gives us freedom in how we respond to…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksDon't Expect Applause - Bansho Sensei
Threaded through this talk by Bansho Sensei is the tension between wanting recognition for helping others and the practice of "not expecting applause." It…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksGive Life to Life - Hogen Roshi
Centered on the idea of "futuring" or craving, this talk by Hogen Roshi examines how the mind actively shapes an infinite, formless world into a narrow…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksSlipping Beneath the Difficulty - Hogen Roshi
This talk by Hogen Roshi explores craving as the mind's habitual grasping — "I want, I want" — and how it quietly generates most of our dissatisfaction. It…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksAvoiding Foolish Ways - Hogen Roshi
This talk by Hogen Roshi unpacks a traditional chant on "blessings" by redefining the word away from divine reward and toward human capacity. It centers on…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksA Whole Forest Within You - Kisei Sensei
Using poetry, koans, and personal story, this talk paints practice as a slow accumulation of intimacy with the world — with fear, with joy, with the earth…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksRemembering How to Come Home - Kisei Sensei
This talk Kisei explores practice as homecoming — returning to a natural ease we knew as children but lost through striving and adulthood. A folk tale and the…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksListen With Your Eyes - Kisei Sensei
This talk explores what it means to listen beyond the ears — to the earth, to silence, to a mind not bound by self and asks whether the boundary between…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksCreatively Companioning Distress- Jogen, Sensei
This talk explores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of caring for someone who is suffering, arguing that presence — flawed, tiring, and imperfect as it…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksSipping From Many Flowers - Jogen Sensei
Reflecting on today's overwhelming availability of spiritual teachings from every tradition, this talk asks whether sampling freely across lineages creates…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksWhat the River Says: on Vocation and Calling- Hogen, Roshi
This talk explores vocation not as a career choice but as a calling that arises from deep within the heart. The speaker weaves in poetry from William Stafford…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksI'm a Thing! : How Craving Dreams Us Into Lumps- Hogen, Roshi
The Tanha Sutta's core teaching, Hogen explains, is that craving turns the fluid, ever-changing experience of being alive into a fixed identity — "I am this,"…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Weaver That Chokes the World: on Grasping Thoughts- Hogen, Roshi
This talk explores the observation that craving turns ordinary desire into compulsive thinking, creating a tangle of self-concepts — "I am a failure," "I am a…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksWhat's the Hurry? - Bansho Sensei
This talk explores patience (kshanti), one of the six Paramitas in Mahayana Buddhism, as an essential practice in a culture built for instant gratification and…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksNot Personal, Permanent, or Perfect: The Three Dharma Seals- Zen Teacher Jomon
This talk on reflects on the Five Remembrances — that we are of the nature to age, get sick, die, and be separated from loved ones — as a practice for living…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksGood in the Beginning, Good in the Middle, Good in the End -Zen Teacher Jomon
This talk explores how the ups and downs of a single sitting period mirror the larger arc of a retreat or an entire life of practice. Drawing on the image of a…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksCourage To Be Afraid- Working Our Edges- Jogen Sensei
Drawing on the eleventh-century yogini Machig Labdron's uncompromising slogans—confess your hidden faults, approach what repels you, help those you think you…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Timeless in Direct Experience- Hogen Roshi
This talk is a teaching on the ageless, ever-present awareness beneath our changing thoughts and circumstances. Drawing on the Mangala Sutta, this talk…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksOur Inseparability From The Natural World- Zen Teacher Jomon
Drawing from an annual outdoor meditation retreat , this talk explores how sitting in silence among deer, mosquitoes, and fallen apples can reveal our…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksMaking Peace with Your Inner Critic - Zen Teacher Jomon
This talk explores the inner critic as a habitual pattern of thought, emotion, and body sensation—not a fixed truth- as well as offering practices of…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThis Heart is Mirrored Everywhere- Jogen Sensei
By stepping out and seeing the noisy marketplace of endless consumption and self-fixation, we align with a source that never loses its luster. Living from this…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe World Lies To Us- Jogen Sensei
This talk emphasizes that by alertly seeing through life's illusions—rather than chasing temporary worldly comforts or getting caught in abstract spiritual…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksSerenity Is a Stance Not a State- Jogen Sensei
When you sit and look for the self you never find it — just thoughts, feelings, space and energy — and this talk traces how that discovery becomes practical…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksLooking for Something Dependable - Hogen Roshi
The Buddha said he kept looking for real stability and kept reaching for things that couldn't provide it — and this talk uses a dying biohacker, the nature of…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksJoyful Mind, Grandmother Mind, Magnanimous Mind: Dogen's Three Hearts of Practice - Bansho Sensei
Drawing on Dogen's instructions for the monastery cook, this talk unpacks three orientations that Dogen considered essential to wholeheartedly engaging the way…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThis Is Not Mine- Not-Self and Thoughts That Moved In Without Paying Rent- Bansho Sensei
Walking through the Buddha's discourse on the five aggregates — form, feeling, perception, thought, consciousness — this sesshin talk asks a deceptively simple…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksRight Now It's Like This: Practicing Honestly with Heat, Sweat, and a Wandering Mind- Bansho Sensei
Borrowing Ajahn Sumedho's simple phrase as its anchor, this sesshin talk invites practitioners to stop arguing with their experience — the drowsiness, the…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Diamond Sutra, a Tea Lady, and the Freedom of Not Knowing - Zen Teacher Jomon
The Diamond Sutra says there is no such thing as x, it is only called x — and this talk traces what that teaching looks like when it stops being a concept and…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksDharma Travels: Meeting the Extended Family of Western Zen- Zen Teacher Jomon
From a Gen X teachers conference in Virginia to a White Plum Asanga gathering in the Dutch wheat fields, this talk traces a month of encounters with the…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksDancing and Singing with Shakyamuni- Zen Teacher Jomon
Starting from Maezumi Roshi's question — what prevents you from seeing yourself as constantly dancing and singing with the Buddha? — this talk uses the koan of…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThe Eternal Child, The Old Man and Spiritual Commitment - Jogen Sensei
Using the Jungian archetypes of the eternal child and the wise elder, this talk maps the tension between following inspiration wherever it leads and committing…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksHow To Be A Mystic In The City- Jogen Sensei
Jogen offers five categories for living a mystical life right in the middle of it — microdosing stillness, staying connected to the tender fleetingness of…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksAccording to Me: Opinions About Reality Keep Us From Living It- Hogen Roshi
Drawing on the Mangala Sutta's teaching on gratefulness and a recent pilgrimage to 400-year-old Soto Zen monasteries in Japan, this talk by Hogen Roshi traces…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksTrusting Your Sense of the Divine - Jogen Sensei
This talk addresses people who know or have known a natural sense of the sacred — and who may have set it aside when they entered a formal tradition — arguing…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksYes, Yes, Yes - Hogen Roshi
In this talk onn self-sufficiency, impossible decisions, and turning failure into wisdom, Hogen Roshi argues that true liberation isn't a state we achieve and…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksFree From What? - Hogen Roshi
Sparked by a Fourth of July celebration, this talk cuts through the cultural fantasy that freedom means getting what you want — and points instead toward the…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksThere Is No Better You Somewhere Else: Respect, Humility, and the Mangala Sutta- Hogen, Roshi
Contrasting a book of philosophy where every page offers a new way to think about reality with the Buddha Dharma's insistence on direct verification, Hogen…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksSacred Lamp Of Awareness- Jogen, Sensei
Rather than talking about awareness, this talk by Jogem invites listeners to taste it directly — through guided exhalations, the image of a hollow vessel lit…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksHow To Not Waste Time- Jogen Sensei
This talk from Jogen offers a multilayered Zen framework for not wasting time — from daily contemplation of death to touching the bedrock desires beneath our…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksCarrying the Baton: Leadership, Loss, and the Long Arc of Practice-Jomon, Zen Teacher
In this talk Jomon asks what it really means to belong to a spiritual tradition — and finds that the answer has less to do with personal achievement than with…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksI Can Be Right or I Can Have Peace: Impermanence, Identity, and Caring for Aging Parents- Jomon, Zen Teacher
Using the Heart Sutra's teaching on the emptiness of the five aggregates as a guide, Jomin weaves together a daughter's struggle to let her mother make her own…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksDifficult, Easy, Both and Neither- Kisei, Sensei
Using the koan of Bodhidharma's transmission and the Pang family's teachings on difficulty and ease, Kisei closes sesshin by pointing practitioners toward the…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksAncestral Wakefulness- Kisei, Sensei
Weaving together the koan anecdotes, the awakening poems of early Buddhist women, and the living support of sangha, in this talk Kisei invites practitioners…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksDon't Give Up, Don't Be So Sure! - Bansho, Zen Teacher
In this talk, Bansho explores two traps that derail even experienced sitters — premature conclusions and comfortable coasting — and points toward the three…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksZazen Is Alive- Bansho, Zen Teacher
Drawing on Dogen's meditation manual, Rumi's "Guest House," and the playful wisdom of Zen ancestor Joshu, Bansho explores how zazen is an embodied practice of…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksA Buddha Weighs Less Than A Feather- Bansho, Zen Teacher
How is it a Buddha weighs less than a feather? In this talk, Bansho shares about the generosity, mystery and richness of his time training in Japan. ★ Support…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksMind Abiding No Where - Kisei Costenbader, Sensei
In this talk, Kisei explores the Buddha's teaching on how we should practice if we truly seek liberation, as offered in the Diamond Sutra. ★ Support this…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksCelebrating The Poetry Of Zen - Kisei Costenbader, Sensei
Poetry has a way of cutting to the heart of our lives, and expressing the inexpressible. In this talk Kisei explores the styles of poetry used in the Zen…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksEncounters with the Stone Woman - Kisei Costenbader, Sensei
During this talk Kisei explores the line from the Mountains and Rivers sutra, "a stone woman gives birth to a child at night", and entertain our own encounters…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksNuts and Bolts of Meditation- Jogen, Sensei
In this talk, Jogen frames the entire practice — regardless of specific method — as the conscious, intentional use of attention. The core of the talk breaks…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksEmotional Avoidance in Zen - Jogen, Sensei
In this talk, Jogen Sensei makes a distinction between detachment (checking out), non-attachment (neither clinging nor pulling away), and fearless intimacy…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksPracticing Honestly- On the Mangala Sutta Pt 2 - Hogen, Roshi
This talk on the Mangala Sutta includes the importance of responding to life's circumstances with a calm, clear mind; the idea that each person has a unique…
Zen Community of Oregon Dharma TalksCompulsion Could Arise In Wisdom - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher
Jomon contemplates the teachings of Dogen Zenji's Eight Realizations Of a Great Being. She touches on how our minds give us a surprisingly inaccurate picture…