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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  • Summer 2023: Sesshin Talk 4

    MCZCAugust 1, 20232 min read

    A sincere heart – just one – is simply the ten directions crystal clear... the ten directions themselves squeeze the marrow from the bone. Dogen A hawk travels many miles by its stillness Valerie richly unfolds Case 46 from the Mumonkan, Sekiso’s “how do you step forward from a 100-foot pole?” (...And manifest your whole body in the world of ten directions)? The pole-top evokes that state of not-one-thing: house fallen, person forgotten, not a speck of cloud...

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  • Message from Valerie: Am I Enough?

    Valerie ForstmanJuly 27, 20232 min read

    This past week we formally welcomed Sarah Giffin as the new Executive Director of Mountain Cloud. With glad appreciation, welcome, Sarah! Thanks ring out to Bryan Baldwin for shepherding the MCZC organization during the generative transitions of the past year.  Last Sunday, with Sarah’s oversight, Mountain Cloud’s 15-Day ‘Wild World of Koans’ course began. The opening session included the prompt, “What brings you here? What is your intention? What is your earnest question?” One participant wrote...

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  • 2023 Summer Sesshin Talk 3

    MCZCJuly 23, 20231 min read

    The Radiant Light Allows the Radiant Light to Respond To examine “radiance,” Valerie takes up Mumonkan case 39, “Unmon and a Mistake in Speech.” She turns it in a kaleidoscope with Dogen, Hongzhi, Chosetsu, heartbreak and failure, her revelatory stroll one day at Sonnenhof when the koan “where will you go when you die” accompanied her into the fields. The radiance these ancestors speak of doesn’t really have two sides – form is emptiness – yet...

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  • Message from Valerie: Already Home

    Valerie ForstmanJuly 20, 20232 min read

    Turn around the light to shine within, then just return. The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned away from. Shitou Xiqian In his 8th century poem, “Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage,” Master Sekito Kisen (Shitou Xiqian) offers a dharma wellspring of instruction for practice and a presentation of the fact - the fact of who and what we truly are.  “Turn around the light to shine within, then just return. The vast inconceivable source can’t...

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  • 2023 Summer Sesshin Talk 2

    MCZCJuly 18, 20231 min read

    Practice-realization, suffering-compassion, wind-fan, and hyphenless reality Why do we practice, if our fundamental nature is unimprovable? Mu is a sun with stone-melting power, and the fact itself. A way and the way. Vows express our utter commitment to this reality and our seamless belonging. Effects of our practice are noticeable and unmeasurable. The unmeasurable expresses itself as our practice, regardless of whether we perceive it. In any case, the way this oneness world works, there’s a...

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  • Message from Valerie: To Know Oneself Completely

    Valerie ForstmanJuly 12, 20232 min read

    Watching the moonat dawn,solitary, mid-sky,I knew myself completely:no part left out. ~ Izumi Shikibu It is not unusual to take up meditation practice out of a longing to know ourselves, to be more authentic, to see and be who we truly are. What might that be? What is it to ‘know myself completely’? What if ‘no part left out’ means ALL - whole world included? Mustn’t it then also mean ONE - no border, no boundary, no possibility...

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  • 2023 Summer Sesshin Talk 1: Mu and the Spirit of Dogen

    MCZCJuly 7, 20231 min read

    We can’t do it, this great release – but Mu can... “Because Mu is whole, the power of this whole Mu awakens you” ~ Ryo’un Yamada. It causes... “body and mind of self and other to fall away” (Dogen) revealing that the place where you’re sitting is vacant, as the myriad things rush in. The gateless gate of Mu, a gate with a front and no back, “a peal of thunder under a bright blue...

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  • Message from Valerie: Gratitude

    Valerie ForstmanJuly 6, 20232 min read

    Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude. ~ Eihei Dogen The summer sesshin at Mountain Cloud ended on Sunday. The sesshin opened with a line from Dogen: “When you walk in the mist, you get wet.” Six days later, soaked in the dharma, the week of shared practice culminated in expressions of thanksgiving. At Mountain Cloud, we celebrated with a feast of delicious food prepared by master chef, Nic, in the...

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  • Invitation only – Register for Rohatsu 2023 On-site Attendance

    MCZCJuly 1, 20231 min read

    Use this form to register and pay for attending Rohatsu 2023 on0site, as either a, lodger, commuter or camper. You MUST have received an invitation to attend on-site in order to use this form.

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  • Eyebrow to Eyebrow, Shana Smith (Video)

    MCZCJune 26, 20231 min read

    Assistant Sanbo Zen Teacher Shana Smith examines “Zuigan’s Eyebrows,” Case 8 in the Blue Cliff Record, and sheds abundant light and color on what it might feel like to be “eyebrow to eyebrow” with the Zen ancestors, with one another, with our whole lives. In this effort, she stints neither on rich storytelling nor on the unimprovable intimacy of the shout. (“Teisho,” Dharma talk: literally “presentation of the shout”). One of many vivid illustrations comes...

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  • Message from Valerie: The Backward Step

    Valerie ForstmanJune 21, 20231 min read

    In his “Universal Instructions on Zazen,” Dogen advises practitioners: “Stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward.” Sitting in straightforward zazen, we let the activity of our discursive minds settle, stop the incessant search for something outside ourselves - the grasping after something we imagine to be lacking - and come home to the intimacy and immediacy of this moment. Here and now, in this body, is where...

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  • Only as Sick as our Secrets: the Urgency of Nuclear Disarmament, Archbishop John C. Wester

    MCZCJune 17, 20232 min read

    Archbishop John Wester joins Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and MCZC guiding teacher Valerie Forstman, to pull back the veil on nuclear business as usual. The moment is dire. Archbishop Wester speaks with a disarming combination (one hopes) of innate gentleness and distilled urgency. He says the very first thing to remedy is the severe lack of conversation in so many contexts, from casual chats to elected officials. We needn’t all...

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  • Nansen’s Circle and the Seamless Tomb

    MCZCJune 17, 20231 min read

    Valerie takes up case 69 from the Hekiganroku, “Nansen draws a circle,” and traces what it might mean to accord with this “circle” (or perhaps to notice how powerfully we are in accord, willy-nilly) exactly as we are, including when we’re sick, in pain, or porous to the world’s unimaginable pains. She draws a half-dozen other koans into case 69’s circles of resonance, and students’ stories and insights, and Yamada Koun’s favorite circle: the zero...

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  • Message from Valerie: Center

    Valerie ForstmanJune 14, 20231 min read

    The German Sanbozen master, Silvia Ostertag, had a practice of sitting every morning and every evening. No matter how full the day, she framed it with zazen. After sitting, Silvia Roshi would sometimes compose a poem, a few words springing from her practice that served as pointers for students. A number of these poems have to do with time - or more to the point, no time.  The absolute timelessness of each moment. Boundless, borderless, replete...

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