I picked up my copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, sometime in the 1980’s, when I was buying a Zen book a year but wasn’t meditating. Suzuki Roshi wasn’t talking to me. I didn’t finish it. A decade later, when I was sitting every morning, I tried Suzuki again. I loved him. When I began hosting a sitting group– Roshi Jishu Holmes told me I wasn’t ready to give talks myself; I could read something – I read each week from Beginner’s Mind. “In the beginne

Every year around Yom Kippur I talk about one of Roshi Bernie’s most impactful teachings. I’d always thought about atonement as making amends. Bernie suggested that atonement meant quite literally “to be at one with.” To be at one with what? With all the ingredients of my life – all of them, not just the pleasant and the pretty. This teaching has changed my relationship to Yom Kippur and to the Gatha of Atonement, but it took many years for it to occur to me that the Gatha sh

As the Jewish high holy days approached, I found myself thinking about the future of Zen in America where religion is such a family thing. If Zen is going to engage broadly with American families, we are going to have to have something for the kids. It got me thinking about Sunday school and my experience. When Morri was little, Dee and I wondered how to support her spiritual development. Dee had found her spiritual home in the Hindu Christian world of the Self-Realization Fe