Teachings

  • Message from Valerie: An Invitation to Serve

    Valerie ForstmanJanuary 25, 20232 min read

    Mountain Cloud sangha members are currently coming together once each month to prepare and serve a delicious meal at the Interfaith Shelter, known as Pete’s Place, here in Santa Fe. For members interested in further engagement with vulnerable segments of our community, we have an opportunity to serve with fellow practitioners in Upaya’s Street Ministry project.  Upaya’s Street Ministry focuses on supporting member’s of Santa Fe’s community who are experiencing homelessness. Volunteers in the Street Ministry not only...

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  • It Is You (Video)

    MCZCMay 9, 20221 min read

    Does it matter? Koans speak to this, addressing us in a language beyond words... a language that is utterly selfless and that points directly to who we really are. Valerie Forstman Valerie Forstman reflects on a Q&A session she recently hosted with the Sanbo Zen sangha in Gainesville, FL, in which many of the questions pertained to suffering. Koans speak to this suffering by highlighting things, what they are, and by extension - what we are....

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  • Three Fruits

    Valerie ForstmanMay 5, 20222 min read

    Every single thing holds all things. - Kongshi Daoren Zen is an ingathering into the silence that is always waiting for us, a silence that excludes nothing. As we give ourselves to daily practice, all-pervading silence expresses itself in our sitting - straightforward and at ease, dynamic and poised, like a fine instrument tuning and calibrating to things as they are: this body, this breath, this moment. Just as it is. Excluding nothing. The singular, wondrously distinct, all-inclusive now. Zen’s...

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  • Message from Henry: Sign of Maturity

    Henry ShukmanMay 4, 20221 min read

    Any form of spirituality that needs to put down other kinds of spirituality – well, it's maybe a little suspect, or anyway has a little maturing to do. I remember when I finally started to get somewhere in my therapy as a young man, one of the unexpected markers was that the compulsion I’d felt for months to try to convert other people into doing therapy like me, lifted completely. That was their business. Nothing to...

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  • Dharmatalk: Three Simple Lines

    MC PodcastMay 3, 20221 min read

    Description: Natalie speaks about her new book Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. The final section includes a short exchange with Sanbo Zen teacher Ruben Habito and Maria Reis Habito. Note: The start and end of the recording was clipped due to a technical issue. Our apologies for any inconvenience. And, here's a link to our YouTube video of this talk. Also, check out our Upcoming Events: Original Love, Zone 2 Support...

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  • Mindfulness and Suffering

    Valerie ForstmanApril 28, 20222 min read

    The dharma is beautiful at the beginning, beautiful in the middle, and beautiful at the end. The Buddha Mindfulness – present moment awareness, bare attention, or nonjudgmental awareness – is a key aspect of meditation. As soon as we settle into a meditative posture, tune into the breath, and allow present moment experience to come into view, we are practicing Mindfulness.  Mindfulness is the reality of how things truly are, and it is a practice that helps us...

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  • Message from Henry: Mountains

    Henry ShukmanApril 27, 20222 min read

    Mountains -- it's breathtaking to arrive in mountains by day. The bright sky, the searing clarity of the light, the sharp air. The chest fills and opens. And all the great geometric shapes up above, shining like new coins. But if you arrive by night, perhaps slogging up with a pack on your back, through mud and sleet and low clouds which obscure all but the immediate slopes around you, it’s different. Just murk and cold....

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  • Dharmatalk: Introduction to Meditation Retreat: Abundant Advantage (Part 2 of 2)

    MC PodcastApril 26, 20222 min read

    "May each and everybody whether staying still or standing up have ten thousand blessings....Today I have advantage after advantage, now, please practice." ~ Dogen Description: Valerie explores the dharma hall discourse that Dogen gave to his monks in 1241, The Advantage of New Years. Valerie describes the tradition of a dharma talk (or teisho which means presentation of the shout). To use Vimalakirti's language, Zen practice is entering the gate of not-two? How is this entrance achieved,...

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  • Surpassing the Master: Rupert Spira and Henry Shukman

    MCZCApril 25, 20221 min read

    Steve James of the Guru Viking Podcast hosts a dialogue with Rupert and Henry. Rupert Spira is a teacher of the direct path method of Advaita and an internationally acclaimed ceramic artist. Henry Shukman is a Zen teacher and award winning poet and writer. Rupert and Henry discuss the path of deep training in both art and spirituality, why traditional forms are repositories of generational understanding, and the meaning of spiritual friendship. Rupert reflects on how art points...

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  • Message from Henry: Sunyata

    Henry ShukmanApril 21, 20222 min read

    In his massive, strange book Nostos, the Irish philosopher-poet-sage John Moriarty bemoans the loss of a human and mythic cosmos, in the face of the vast, bleak Newtonian and geological universe. He sees the scientific view of the last three hundred years as having stripped away the richness of a mythic view of things. But how about this: Consider the internet for someone using it – its richness, its multiplicity of experiences. Yet it’s all coming...

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  • Thinking – Nonthinking

    Valerie ForstmanApril 20, 20222 min read

    When you practice just sitting and continuously give up all thoughts and views, the way becomes more and more intimate. ~ Eihei Dogen One of the most common questions around the practice of silent sitting is what to do with the many thoughts that come up. A famous exchange between the 9th century Chan master, Yaoshan, and a monk speaks to this: The monk asks, "What are you thinking of, sitting there so fixedly?" Yaoshan responds, "I'm thinking of not thinking."  The...

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  • Dharmatalk: Introduction to Meditation Retreat: Invitation to Trust (Part 1 of 2)

    MC PodcastApril 19, 20222 min read

    "When you sit, the whole world is sitting... We really don't have to do anything, just show up". Description: The invitation of Zen practice is to sit with the world, just as it is - keenly critical now, during challenging and distressing world events. At the same time, this practice is larger than any circumstances. Valerie encourages us to entrust ourself to this practice and to the silence which has the capacity to be thoroughly transformative....

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  • Zen Jhanas – Dharma Talk with Stephen Snyder

    MCZCApril 17, 20221 min read

    Guest speaker Stephen Snyder of the Jhana tradition visits Mountain Cloud and offers a teisho on the Buddha’s first and last practice. Jhana practice predates the Buddha by at least 1000 years and is one of the roots in Zen lineage. Stephen offers an introduction: what is Jhana practice? How are the lineages entwined?  https://youtu.be/bk3pteJ-y4c Featured photo by Mark Paul Petrick Recorded in our virtual zendo on April 7, 2022. Photo by vaazdev on Pixabay....

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  • Gratitude

    Valerie ForstmanApril 14, 20222 min read

    Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude ~ Eihei Dogen With regular practice, meditation is known to calm our nervous systems, enhance present moment awareness, and make us more available to lived experience, the reality of our lives. In time, we become less reactive, more responsive; less quick to judge and more open to not-knowing; less caught up in the scaffolding of who we think we are, the construct of a...

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  • Message from Henry: Cowpat

    Henry ShukmanApril 13, 20221 min read

    Walking up a steep hillside meadow in Warwickshire. Cows grazing near the beech wood on the other side of the field. In front of me, half of a cowpat  has an oily blue metallic sheen on it. The other half is dull brown. As I step closer, the oily sheen breaks into hundreds of points that lift off and buzz away in sudden little cloud, revealing the same dull brown beneath them. They were flies – fat,...

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