On the first full day of Rohatsu sesshin, Sensei Kaz Tanahashi and Roshi Joan Halifax open practice with teachings on non-division and “undivided activity.” Kaz reminds practitioners that Rohatsu marks the Buddha’s awakening—“birth, enlightenment, and passing, celebrated in one day”—and points to the core insight that “all things have absolutely no separation.” He describes emptiness as “all things are zero,” not nonexistence but “zero of divisions,” a way of seeing that reveals the world as fundamentally one. From this understanding arises the bodhisattva ideal: to embody non-division is to “help awaken everyone,” placing service at the heart of practice. Quoting Dōgen, Kaz emphasizes the paradox that practice begins with enlightenment itself: even one moment of upright sitting makes “the whole world…Buddha’s mudra.”
Building on this foundation, Roshi Joan reflects on the Avatamsaka Sutra and its teaching of “undivided activity.” She brings this vision into urgent ethical reality, insisting, “We’re not separate from Gaza. We’re not separate from Ukraine.” Citing Thich Nhat Hanh after the beating of Rodney King—“I wasn’t only Rodney King, I was the policeman beating Rodney King”—she challenges practitioners to see directly that “we are not separate.” Through the forms of sesshin—bowing, walking, and handling oryoki—practitioners are trained out of “hyper individuality” and into embodying “one body,” where precision, care, and dignity express the bodhisattva vow to give.

In this session of Awareness in Action, spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author Tara Brach begins by acknowledging the profound pressures in our society and the importance of building solidarity in these times. She frames her exploration around the question of what it means to “keep choosing love.” Drawing on Father Gregory Boyle’s work with LA gangs, Tara highlights two unwavering principles of his healing community: “everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions,” and “we belong to each other, no exceptions.” She examines how “bad othering”—reducing someone to an enemy or threat—creates a trance in which we lose sight of basic humanity and belonging. As she puts it, “Humans are not the enemy. It’s the suffering from delusion, fear, and hatred that takes over and possesses us.” She also quotes Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight: “This, my dear, is the greatest challenge to being alive: to witness injustice in the world, cruelty, violence, and not allow it to consume our light.”
Tara invites participants into practices such as “the U-turn” and RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture), pausing to examine what’s happening inside us beneath our reactions and opening us to genuine understanding and resolution. By reconnecting with our own vulnerability and what we truly care about, she suggests that we can begin to perceive the vulnerability in others and ask, “What is love asking of us now?”
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This is the 2nd half of the closing session of the Awakened Action series begins with Christiana Figueres joining from Costa Rica, fresh from COP30 in Berlin. She shares her striking observation of “three realities” at the climate conference: the scientific urgency, governmental paralysis, and 50,000 activists accelerating change. Christiana emphasizes the fundamental importance of choice—between defeatism and opening possibilities—calling this “the COP of choice.” The session spans loneliness, democracy, and the commons, examining how technology can both connect and isolate us. Molly Crockett warns against AI companions as solutions to loneliness, while Roshi Joan notes “In the modern colonial world, we are disciplined to be lonely. The oppressors call this loneliness individuality” (Jessica Chang). Valerie Brown shares Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ “Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times,” reminding us: “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” Encouraging reminds that the future is created not only by our actions but in what we believe is possible.
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This is the 1st half of the closing session of the Awakened Action series begins with Christiana Figueres joining from Costa Rica, fresh from COP30 in Berlin. She shares her striking observation of “three realities” at the climate conference: the scientific urgency, governmental paralysis, and 50,000 activists accelerating change. Christiana emphasizes the fundamental importance of choice—between defeatism and opening possibilities—calling this “the COP of choice.” The session spans loneliness, democracy, and the commons, examining how technology can both connect and isolate us. Molly Crockett warns against AI companions as solutions to loneliness, while Roshi Joan notes “In the modern colonial world, we are disciplined to be lonely. The oppressors call this loneliness individuality” (Jessica Chang). Valerie Brown shares Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ “Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times,” reminding us: “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” Encouraging reminds that the future is created not only by our actions but in what we believe is possible.
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In the sixth session of Awareness in Action, Christiana Figueres discusses Brazil’s Climate Conference, reflecting on our collective anxiety about present conditions and future uncertainties. She emphasizes that “the future is not waiting for us. The future is being shaped right now, every day, in the choices we make.” Drawing on Buddhist teachings of impermanence and interbeing, she argues that “change is not only possible, it is inevitable,” urging us to ask, “What seeds are we planting now?”
She shares an incredible and harrowing story from the 2015 Paris Climate Conference—when a bomb was discovered in a train station used daily by 45,000 people. She recounts the moment of panic, the fear of all that could go wrong, and how returning to her breath brought the clarity needed “to protect the field of concentration” for the negotiations. Just a few mindful breaths shifted the conditions that made the historic agreement possible. Christiana encourages cultivating this steadiness collectively, saying that wisdom emerges through deep listening, shared intelligence, and joy, reminding us that “the future is always now.”
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In the fifth talk of the Awakened Action series, Rebecca Solnit invites participants to name acts of moral beauty—from tribal leaders honoring Japanese American internment survivors to the Rainbow Defense Coalition protecting LGBTQ+ events. Rebecca reflects on falling into depression amid political darkness, emphasizing that the long view of history offers an antidote to despair. Highlighting this year as the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she traces how Rosa Parks sparked global transformation through nonviolent resistance. “We often underestimate ourselves, but… our opponents often estimate us more truly in telling us that we are actually very powerful. They are afraid of us.” Citing climate-vulnerable nations securing the 1.5-degree threshold in Paris, immigration solidarity, and Epstein survivors’ courage, she argues we’re witnessing the Great Turning—reminding us that “hope is a discipline.”
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In the fourth session of the Awakened Action series, Terry Tempest Williams shares the quiet, touching story she “could never write”—the killing of Harvard Divinity School’s beloved 200-year-old red oak in 2019. Sleeping beside the tree the night before its death, she received its transmission: “My absence will be my presence…this is transformation.” Witnessing its four-hour dismantling while grieving her brother’s recent suicide, Terry entered a profound hopelessness. Yet the tree’s prophecy proved true: its absence created space for radical student activism and transformative conversations. Six years later, a woodworker in possession of the tree’s body heard its call: “Take me back to the Divinity School.” Through sincerity and effort the tree returned as a “listening table” for hard conversations, demonstrating that “to bear witness is not a passive act.” Terry beautifully illustrates the tangled web of suffering and transformation, encouraging our quiet and steady hearts to love and persevere
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In part three of the Awakened Action series, Roshi Joan Halifax invites participants to imagine the world in 20 years, revealing how we’re often “living in dread” rather than envisioning liberating possibilities. She distinguishes between liberating imagination—”the capacity to be with what is possible, even inside seeming impossibility, and to respond in an unprescribed way”—and toxic imagination rooted in fear and division. Drawing on Norman Fischer, she emphasizes that “fully developed imagination enables us to live in a world that is ennobling without dwelling in some fantasy land.” Through this framing, Roshi demonstrates that liberating imagination isn’t escapism but rather a grounded ethical practice—a way of seeing the world’s hidden potentials and possibilities for transformation, making the future present through creativity, moral responsibility, and relational connection.
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In this second session of Awakened Action, Valerie Brown explores where we encounter the charnel grounds—a Buddhist metaphor for places where deep suffering is present, including in our own minds. Valerie shares her own charnel ground: the dismantling of civil rights in America and invites participants to name their own charnel grounds within and outside themselves. She weaves together teachings from Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on practicing peace in ourselves even in the face of obvious injustice. Through the practices of right view and becoming “transformed non-conformists,” Valerie calls us to meet “the sweeping, dismantling, and elimination of every office and every program designed to protect and defend civil rights of the most vulnerable and marginalized people in the United States” with courage and compassion—to refuse the normalization of injustice and to act from love. Her message: in times of violence, love itself becomes revolutionary resistance.
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The opening session of Awakened Action lead by Roshi Joan, Rebecca Solnit, Valerie Brown, and Terry Tempest Williams, participants are invited to explore how futures are shaped through attention, relationship, and imagination. The teachers emphasized that “place is so important,” grounding the gathering in the land, labor, and layered histories that make the present moment possible. Valerie noted how assumptions narrow our view and encouraged a shift in perception—toward checking our own perceptions and cultivate opportunities to break through our habitual thinking.
Dreams were offered as a form of deep guidance, “Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed,” showing how inner and outer change are inseparable. Together, these themes called participants to stay awake to beauty, hurt, and possibility, and to act with clarity about what they love and wish to protect.
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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Roshi Joan Halifax, joined by Senseis Kodo and Dainin, reflects on how Thanksgiving is both a time of festivity and a day of mourning for Native peoples. She raises this not to “send us down,” but to remind us not to turn away from the truth of suffering. Roshi moves through stories from her life, gathering us close to the heart of practice through moments of tenderness and sobering clarity. She recalls nuns in Nepal who “transformed their suffering in such a way that they could experience pain, but…they didn’t make it suffering.” She highlights that we often recognize suffering born of pain or catastrophe, but overlook the suffering created by attachment to our own stories—our accomplishments, our realizations, the identities we cling to.
Reflecting on Bernie Glassman’s Three Tenets—not knowing, bearing witness, and compassionate action—Roshi shares how they changed her understanding of practice. Though she had spent decades working with dying AIDS patients and prisoners on death row, she realized, “I had used that knowing… as a defense against bearing witness to the suffering of others.” Roshi invites Kodo and Dainin to reflect on the Three Tenets. Kodo speaks to the fear that can arise with uncertainty—particularly in our real lives and circumstances. Addressing the paradox of acting spontaneously, he clarifies that spontaneous action is not careless or ‘whatever’ action: “there is a spiritual technology here.” Dainin adds that one of the challenges of bearing witness is the stickiness of self-attachment. When we cling to our goals, ideas, or expectations, our responses become less authentic and less attuned to the moment. Roshi closes by emphasizing that community—shared vows, seeing ourselves in one another—forms the crucible in which the Three Tenets mature from concepts into lived experience.

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Rebecca Solnit explores empathy as an act of imagination—the capacity to feel beyond the boundaries of one’s own body. She begins with Roshi Joan’s distinction between empathy as “feeling into another” and compassion as  “[empathy] accompanied by the aspiration to take action.” Rebecca considers how our inner capacities to both care and act shape our public lives and notes from surgeon Paul Brand’s work with leprosy patients, “it’s hard to care for what you can’t feel.” This turns into a broader inquiry about what we allow ourselves to feel or what we may avoid feeling. The shared roots of sutra and suture—“to sew together”—anchor her critique of the Ideology of Isolation and frame her call for relational responsibility. Citing Bell Hooks’ insight that “the first violence patriarchy commits is against men,” Solnit argues that disconnection is culturally produced. She closes with a mention of the community safety patrols in North Carolina, where neighbors gather nightly to protect immigrants: a living example of what feeling-for and acting-with can look like.

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin explores what it means to be truly nourished. While attending to a full day of cooking chiles rellenos, Monshin opened to how her ingredients might bring health to her body and her practice. In discussing the fifth precept as it relates to spiritual nourishment, Sensei Monshin challenges us to find contentment with life exactly as it is—without wishing things were different. Even seemingly innocent ideas like improving a cloudy day with a little sunshine are challenged. She reads, “It does not seem like such a terrible thing to wish for a little sunlight, but this precept is gently indicating a way of being upright that is so much more at peace—so much at peace that you’re free of the impulse to bring something in. You don’t reach for anything. You’re content with the gray sky.” This radical practice of not reaching for anything connects with gratitude and acceptance as well as a natural resistance to our culture of consumption. From this arises the liberating alternative: to be genuinely nourished by what we already have.

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, delivered under the largest supermoon in two years, Sensei Kodo reflects on fusatsu—the full moon ceremony of vow renewal—his own marriage vows, and the absence of regular ceremony in our lives. He notes how ceremony awakens in us something our culture has largely forgotten: “We hunger for ritual.”
Drawing on Taigen Leighton’s essay from the book Zen Ritual, Kodo describes zazen as an “enactment and expression of awakened awareness,” suggesting that wholehearted zazen might be a ritual expression of—rather than a method for achieving—the four great bodhisattva vows, or more simply, our vow to awaken.
Kodo also explores the four perfections of Buddha nature through self-annihilating paradoxes that resist easy understanding. How can something be eternal if it’s impermanent? What is intimacy when there’s no separate self? Sharing that giant sequoia seeds must be burned before they can sprout, Kodo reflects: “That to me is that expression of life within the destruction… the lotus blooming on a sea of fire.”
The talk moves between observation and inquiry, closing with a poem by Ryokan: “The moon in the water. You try to scoop it up, your hands are wet. That is all.”

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Valerie Brown honors the life and legacy of Dr. Larry Ward, a pioneering African-American Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition. Valerie recounts Larry’s journey from his Baptist roots to his work with Thich Nhat Hanh and his creation of the first BIPOC retreat in North America, and shares his teaching on the “inner sangha”—a community of compassion and wisdom within. “It is really important to know who your core community is inside,” he taught, “just like we do externally with Sangha.” Reflecting on her own practice of healing, Valerie describes a moment of self-compassion when she wrapped her arms around herself and said, “I’m going to be with you. You are totally safe.” The talk closes with Ward’s encouragement: “A full and open heart of just one person is enough to change the world.”

On the closing day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Kathy, Hoshi Senko, and Sensei Monshin offer an integrated reflection on continuing practice beyond the zendo. Sensei Kathy grounds us in the body, reminding us that awareness can arise anywhere—and that mind and mood are contingent, not fixed. She encourages returning to simple acts of life—walking, breathing, drinking coffee—as ways to stay connected to practice. Senko invites us toward creative, courageous presence and invokes Bernie Glassman’s insight that “the thing we have in common is our difference.” He calls us to bear witness to all of life, meeting each moment without shrinking from discomfort or difference. Sensei Monshin reminds us that sincere action, however small, can spark transformation in ways we cannot foresee. Together, their teachings bridge sesshin’s stillness to the busy, conventional world awaiting our return.
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In this Day five talk during the Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Monshin weaves together stories of generosity, effort, and hummingbirds to explore “effort without desire”—the natural, uncalculated movement of life giving to life. Beginning with the question of “deserving” in the meal chant, she challenges the logic of worthiness and turns us instead toward reciprocity and appreciation. From the tireless flight of hummingbirds to Lingzhao’s “neither difficult nor easy,” Monshin reveals how effort arises freely when it’s not driven by comparison or grasping. Drawing on Dogen’s teaching that “realization is effort without desire,” she describes practice as a vast call and response with all beings—where “your effort calls forth what is already given,” and even the grass, trees, and walls radiate the light of awakening.
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On Day three of the Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Hoshi Senko begins with Suzuki Roshi’s simple reminder: “Appreciate your life.” Senko describes sesshin as a means for this, saying sesshin is “a kind of resensitizing to our lives, a coming back into that kind of intimate contact with our lived experience.” Through the quiet repetition of meals, sitting, and silence of sesshin we relearn how to be our true selves. “After all this,” he says, “we are normal. We weren’t normal when we came in.” The talk moves between humor and depth as Senko shares two koans of Xiangyan: his awakening to the sound of a tile striking bamboo, and his later response to a student after that awakening—“A dragon is singing in a withered tree.” In both koans, Senko suggests, the ‘sound’ of awakening cannot be held (or heard), only lived through our own practice within our own life.
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In Day two of the Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Kathie Fischer likens sesshin to an artist’s colony where each practitioner’s work unfolds through the act of doing itself. “Each of us is unique,” she says, “and therefore we express ourselves in this practice uniquely,” yet we also “fiercely protect the quiet space and resources we share.” She speaks of forms—silence, stillness, attention—not as restrictions but as supports for our genuine expression. When restlessness or pain arises, the instruction is simple: stay with it, breathe, and trust the process. Fischer weaves this with Dogen’s teaching that realization isn’t elsewhere or later: “Practice of the present moment is practice-realization.” What appears ordinary—this sitting, this breath—is the full expression of awakening itself.
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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk and Day 4 of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Kathie Fischer brings our attention to resonance—the way one vibration awakens or encourages another. Drawing from physics, poetry, and the words of the ancestors, she invites us to hear the dharma not as explanation but the vibration of practice itself.  She reminds us, “Do not be concerned with the splendor of the words” but instead use words and teachings to “put us into the territory” of practice. Always encouraging direct experience Kathie offers a profound question: “We long for peace, our hearts ache with this longing. This is our resonance with the suffering of so-called others… I am wondering, is this where we generate our concept of the future? Projecting our heartache for the vision of the future?”
A gentle pointer to the real ground of practice and the living reality of our non-separate nature.
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