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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  • Teisho: A Map of Zen Training (Part 4) & Case 64, Book of Equanimity: Shuzan’s “Bride”

    MCZCApril 12, 20181 min read

    "... the most important thing about Zen training. It is the experiential discovery that we are not alone, we are not individual, we are not separate from anything ..." Zazen is the gate of ease and joy.                                           Dogen Description: This teisho is the fourth talk from the Fall 2017 sesshin. Sitting is a life-long settling down process. We can trust what...

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  • Message from Henry: Enter Practice

    MCZCApril 10, 20182 min read

    Perhaps with the disenchantment of old formal religious institutions many of us are left with a reflex toward the sacred ... without having ... frame of reference ... Enter Practice.  Koans are ingenious teaching devices. You can’t “get” them but by radical shifts in perspective. As a means of spiritual training they are superb: they give us one aspiration after another; they gauge our clarity; they scour and scrape the mud-encrusted windshield of our vision. And...

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  • Are Human’s Special? Part 1 by David Loy

    MCZCApril 7, 20185 min read

    ...according to traditional Buddhist teachings, only humans can awaken and become Buddhas. That is why it is so important not to waste our precious human birth. David Loy will be offering an eco-dharma lecture and workshop at Mountain Cloud, May 18-20.  Click here for details about the Eco-Dharma weekend. We are featuring some of David's recent writing on our website to introduce you to this thoughtful and prescient  Zen teacher, writer and environmental activist.  ******* Obviously we are a...

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  • Spring Sesshin Photo

    MCZCApril 5, 20181 min read

    March 2018 - Spring Sesshin Participants

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  • Teisho: A Map of Zen Training (Part 3) & Case 65, Book of Equanimity: Shuzan’s “Bride”

    MCZCApril 5, 20182 min read

    "... only one well-being that unites all things in boundless love ..."  To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not.                                                 John of the Cross Description: This teisho is the third talk from the Fall 2017 sesshin. Henry discusses Bodhidharma’s entry by practice and entry by principle and addresses...

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  • Mountain Cloud Goes Solar

    MCZCApril 3, 20181 min read

    Solar Electric Panels are installed on the roof of our main building! We are online, interconnected with the power grid, generating our own electricity and supplying excess to the grid. Donations are requested for our eco-friendly power system. Click here to donate.  

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  • Teisho: A Map of Zen Training & The Jhanas (Part 2)

    MCZCMarch 29, 20181 min read

    "... The work of concentration, deepening and clarifying makes us more available to the moment ..."   Description: This teisho is the second talk from the Fall 2017 sesshin. Henry continues to outline an overall map of what Zen offers as a means of extinguishing the three fires—desire, aversion and delusion. This unfolds into further discussion of the jhana states, followed by the Four Noble Truths, the three marks and the five skandhas. The work of concentration, deepening and clarifying,...

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  • Message from Henry: Great Freedom

    MCZCMarch 27, 20182 min read

    This is the great freedom of our existence which Zen practice can open up -- truly life beyond life, life in life, life in death. This is Holy Week, when Christians remember the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, an agonized and ecstatic spiritual transformation that defies rationality, through which Jesus revealed a total liberation. For Jesus himself, and for numberless Jews, this was and is also the season of Passover in the Jewish calendar, which...

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  • Teisho: A Map of Zen Training & The Jhanas

    MCZCMarch 22, 20182 min read

    "... Whatever your practice is, let it absorb you ..."   Description: This teisho is the first talk from the Fall 2017 sesshin. In the first half of the talk, Henry outlines a map of Zen training, beginning with Bodhidharma and the two entries of Zen practice—by “practice” and by “principle”. This leads into the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the Six Paramitas, which are analogous to the early stages of  the ten oxherding pictures which depict the...

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  • Message from Henry: Skilled Practice

    MCZCMarch 20, 20181 min read

    Everything, each thing, is just waiting to be met. A musician, through practice, not only gets skilled at their instrument, but also learns to hear in greater detail what a whole orchestra is doing - both overall, and with specificity. Their own focused skill develops the clarity and range of their listening. In an analogous way, the meditator develops their own skill at observing and noticing the "symphony" of sense-experience that actually constitutes our life. Everything, each thing,...

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  • Walking Meditations, by Gail Snyder

    MCZCMarch 17, 20183 min read

    The Earth is sacred and we touch her with each step.  ~ Thich Nhat Hanh As a new arrival to this world, just delivered from our mother’s body, each one of us knew to do the exact same thing as our first action: Draw a breath. We didn’t dither around in our heads worrying because we’d never breathed before and what if we did it wrong or forgot to keep doing it? We were entirely attentive...

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  • Teisho: Practice & The Jhanas

    MCZCMarch 15, 20182 min read

    "... where the entire body is pervaded by pure awareness ..."   Description: The focus of this talk is basic awareness practice and the jhana states, which are meditative states marked by deep stillness and concentration. Henry reads Stephen Batchelor’s translations of the metaphors associated with the first four jhana states. The first is a state of complete absorption; there is well-being and delight derived from solitude, or withdrawal. The second is a well-being born of concentration and composure. The...

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  • Guest Message: The Bodhisattva’s Joy of Offering by Sandy Chubb

    MCZCMarch 13, 20182 min read

    ...in the act of giving, one who gives and one who receives form a connection with each other…  ~ Dogen This week, a message from Sandy Chubb, Zen Teacher at Oxford Zen Centre, UK. Dogen said that when we study ourselves thoroughly, we understand others thoroughly as well; as a result, we cast off the self and the other. He said: The self gives the self for the sake of giving the self; the other gives the other...

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  • Teisho: What, Why, & How

    MCZCMarch 8, 20182 min read

    "... We sit when we are sitting, eat when we are eating, walk when we are walking. We taste the wonder of being alive ..."   Description: Henry begins with further discussion of two aspects inherent in the Zen lineage as expressed by Bodhidharma—practice and principle. Practice is a means of investigating what it is to be human, to be alive. It is the method or the instrument to help us dive in; it is not a thing, in itself....

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