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: Introductory Talk #5: Five Kinds of Zen

    MCZCDecember 23, 20172 min read

    "... Supreme way practice has no objective. It is associated with the practice of just sitting. There is no desire to realize anything—it is simply, this ..."   Description: This talk covers the five kinds of zen: ordinary practice, outside practice, lesser vehicle practice (Theravada), greater vehicle practice (Mahayana) and supreme way practice. Ordinary practice is practice for ordinary benefits, like decreased anxiety, increased focus, improved health and more harmonious relationships. Outside practice refers to someone who...

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  • Nutshell Zen

    MCZCDecember 23, 20171 min read

    Zen... it's as if we set up constraint, restriction, confinement, in order to force our dissatisfaction into a tight box of intensity... so that we can be squeezed out through a gate too tiny otherwise to be found, let alone passed through. ~ Henry Shukman Image: Universe in a nutshell by Christoph Settgast, CC by-SA 2.0 from Flickr.com

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  • Rohatsu 2017… Enter Practice

    MCZCDecember 20, 20171 min read

    Perhaps with the disenchantment of old formal religious institutions many of us are left with a reflex toward the sacred, the numinous, the ineffable, without having an immediate frame of reference by which to interpret what the impulse is, or what to do with it. Enter Practice.    ~ Henry Shukman

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  • Message from Henry: Leaking Samadhi and Non-leaking

    MCZCDecember 19, 20171 min read

    ...the person has disappeared, and joined the great single existence... Leaking samadhi is valuable. It’s a quantitative shift in experience and perspective. Non-leaking samadhi is a qualitative shift. In the former there is still a self, still a world of forms, still a person doing practice intent on various objectives in their practice. We have to work on this side, this level, all of us. It can get very, very thin though, so both world and self...

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  • Dogen: Fleeting Dharma

    MCZCDecember 16, 20171 min read

    Everyone admires A graceful horse Galloping past the streaming sunlight, But few realize that this fleeting image Is itself the way of Dharma. ~ Dogen Text from The Zen Poetry of Dogen: Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace, by Steve Heine Image: Wild Horses by skeeze,  CC0 Public Domain from Pixabay.com

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  • Teisho: Introductory Talk #4: Three Fruits of Zen Practice

    MCZCDecember 14, 20171 min read

    Description: This talk explores the three fruits of Zen practice. The first is concentration. The second is kensho, “seeing reality” or “seeing true nature.” The third is embodying this experience in everyday life. Concentration, or con-centration, is the process of continuously coming back to the present moment, where our lives are happening, in the center of our being. Kensho is a moment when everything falls away and we glimpse our “true nature,” as Zen calls it....

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  • Message from Henry: Relaxation

    MCZCDecember 12, 20172 min read

    Practice: part about improving, and part about changing our attitude to imperfections.  Relaxation methods can be very helpful. But they tend to exert their effect only as long as we do them. Stop them, and we may cease being relaxed. On the other hand, to rest in present moment awareness, just as things are, with no need to adjust how we are, or how things are, is to taste a more durable kind of peace. We can let...

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  • Message from Henry: Crash Course

    MCZCDecember 5, 20171 min read

    Practice is a lifelong craft...it is the craft of living itself. I recently heard about "Forty Years of Zen" -- an outfit that promises a crash course in Zen training that they claim will give you the effects of forty years of practice in exchange for just five days of training (and a modest $15,000). "There is no such thing as a crash course for a lifelong craft," says Guardian sports journalist Bryan Armen Graham, writing on...

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  • Introductory Talk #3: Why Meditate? (Part 2)

    MCZCDecember 2, 20172 min read

    "... our existence where nothing is separate from anything else ...” Description: This talk explores why it’s worth practicing meditation, in a broader context. Henry points to four main areas of human healing and exploration where mindfulness meditation, or present moment awareness practices, have great benefit. The first area is personal psychology. Over time, as we practice, the things that trigger us and stir up our individual psychology, i.e, our neuroses or internal challenges, tend to lessen....

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  • 21st century Buddhism: Facing Institutionalized Suffering, Part 4

    MCZCDecember 2, 20173 min read

    To be a bodhisattva today means not just helping other people to wake up individually, but also working with others to address the socialized dukkha. Work hard to help to heal the earth. In this finally installment of Matthias Luckwaldt’s interview with David Loy, David discusses the new bodhisattva and buddhist ethics. If you missed them, click here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In your book A New Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution, and Ethics in the Modern World...

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  • Message from Henry: Our Humanist Practice

    MCZCNovember 28, 20173 min read

    "...our notion of a human being shifts, broadens, changes ... the distinction between secular and sacred becomes pointless." Contemporary Western Buddhism appears to be settling mostly on an atheistic secular approach. The mindfulness movement, and the modern reformed Buddhist movement of vipassana, both regard Buddhist practice as a therapeutic retraining of an individual's psychology. Modern Zen is down with that too. That kind of approach has been designated as “ordinary Zen” since the 7th century, and many...

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  • 21st century Buddhism: Facing Institutionalized Suffering, Part 3

    MCZCNovember 25, 20174 min read

    ...we have a problem that the Buddha didn’t face, and this is institutionalized dukkha. Our economic system is institutionalized greed.  In this installment of Matthias Luckwaldt's interview with David Loy, David answers questions about the poisons, precepts and the Eightfold Path.  If you missed them, click here for Part 1 and Part 2. When we talk about Buddhist ethics we usually look at the Three Poisons, the Five Precepts, and the Noble Eightfold Path. Do you feel that those concepts need...

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  • Introductory Talk #2: Why Meditate? (Part 1)

    MCZCNovember 24, 20171 min read

    "... There is nothing but the present moment ... there is nowhere but here and now ...”   Description: As we cultivate present-moment awareness, we are training ourselves to really experience what we are experiencing right now. There is nothing but the present moment. If we are thinking about the past or the future, we are doing it now. Through meditation we develop three skills: concentration; clarity; equanimity. Concentration is the ability to come back to an object of...

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  • Message from Henry: Breath and Space

    MCZCNovember 21, 20172 min read

    In the end, there is only one journey.  All beings, all things, are making one and the same journey. Try this: focus on breath. That is, turn the inner gaze down into the belly and either experience the sensations there as the breaths come and go, or else become aware of the space in which the breaths arise and fall – a kind of interior hall. Then shift the gaze to somewhere in the distance, not too...

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