30 Days of Zen (Online Course)

30 Days of Zen: Awakening as the Earth
Daily Emails, Meditations & Cohort Forum: April 1 – 30
Live Workshops: Saturdays, April 4, 11, 18, and 25, 12:00 – 1:15pm MT / 2:00 – 3:15pm ET
What would it feel like to experience the Earth—not as something “out there,” but as part of who and what you are? This April, we’ll explore what it means to live with a deep sense of connection to the natural world. Drawing from the canon of Zen Masters, contemporary ecodharma thinkers, and animist wisdom—with a clear Zen foundation—we’ll gently investigate the idea that our “inner” life and the “outer” world are not separate.
Through daily meditation, practice prompts, teaching excerpts, and community reflection, we’ll explore “oneness” through direct experience. What happens when we listen to trees, weather, cities, and even our own emotions as part of a shared, living field? What shifts when care for the Earth isn’t an extra task, but a natural expression of practice? How are we transformed?
Join Valerie Forstman, David Loy, Shana Smith, Carolyn Seburn, and Scott Thornton, with facilitator Kieran Mead-Ward for this month of Awakening as the Earth. The month includes:
- Daily teachings with meditation & reflection prompts
- 4 live workshops,
- Community inquiry into what it means to belong fully to this living world.
Kieran expands on this theme in the video and writing below:
“What ripens a person into an “ecosattva” – someone who feels keenly that the earth and its citizens are flesh of their flesh, and acts accordingly? We’ll explore that question throughout the month of April as well as the seamless fabric of “inner” and “outer” nature.
A treasury of Zen teachings and images will inspire our lines of inquiry. We’ll test them vividly, with practice experiments on our senses, breath, body, heart and imagination.
We’ll endeavor to live into ecosattva-hood in the most natural and bone-deep ways, not as some dutiful auxiliary to our personal meditation practice, but as its roomiest leg room: a tender ecological sensitivity, leaving no part of us behind.
We’ll also brush against a kind of animist sensibility – not adopting one or another worldview, but rather seeing what unfolds when we take every rock, tree, strip mall and emotion as something vitally communicative, to be heard on its own terms.
In Zen fashion, perhaps we’ll also taste how none of these relations happen outside or at a distance. They’re only always ourself, whose dimensions we can’t frame or limit.”
Registration:
Course Fee: $99
Members receive 50% off. Limited scholarships available; see registration page for details.
and overcoming past traumas that could happen in just one month.
— 2023 Course Participant
Course Components
Daily Emails
Each day, you’ll receive an email with:
- A brief text from the Zen Buddhist canon or related Buddhist teachings
- A message or practice invitation from one of our teachers/guides, helping us bring the chant to life in our imaginations, breath, body, perceptions, self-expression and relationships.
- A reflection prompt, inviting you to share in the optional online community forum
The daily emails are designed to be digestible and catalytic fodder for your daily practice, on and off the cushion.
Live Workshops
During the four live workshops, you’ll be able to engage directly with one of our Zen teachers as well as the course cohort, to explore your burning questions and insights and get live support.
Online Forum
So much magic happens in the optional daily community forum. We reflect and digest our practice and the teachings with our 30-day peers. Past participants have been impressed not only by how much they learn from others, but also what wisdom flows from their own being – primed by this rich and open sharing.
Online Sitting
And finally, our center provides opportunities to sit, daily, online with the cohort and our broader sangha. You have the option to engage in your daily practice independently or join a larger group for online sessions via Zoom (or in-person if you’re local!). See here for our daily sitting schedule.
The sangha aspect of the daily journal–reading others’ shared posts, identifying and learning from those shared posts, responding to others’ posts and getting feedback on my own posts–made me feel part of an open-hearted, like-minded community, which felt wonderful.
— 30-Day Course Participant
Course Fee: $99
Members receive 50% off. Limited number of scholarships available; see registration page for details.
About Scholarships:
A limited number of “barrier-free” 25% scholarships are made available for all of our events, on a first-come, first-served basis. We do not ask scholarship recipients to justify their need, but rather place our trust the sangha to register for scholarships based on genuine need. If you are able, please consider making a donation to help support our scholarship offerings.
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Teachers

Valerie Forstman is an Associate Zen Master of the Sanbo Zen lineage and our Guiding Teacher here at Mountain Cloud. Her first teacher, with whom she continues to work, was Ruben Habito Roshi. Since 2003, she has also trained under the guidance of Yamada Ryoun Roshi, current abbot of Sanbo Zen.
Valerie came to Mountain Cloud with a shared vision of the core of the Zen path, a way of coming home to who we truly are. In keeping with the Sanbo Zen tradition, this path or ‘way’ may include koan training, “just sitting” practice, or simple breath awareness practice, all of which funnel into what it means to undergo the immense change of heart implied by the term “awakening.” What a joy and what a rich process it can be, not just to taste this, but to embody it and live it out in lives of compassionate service.
A first-career classical musician, Valerie holds degrees from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and Stony Brook University in NY. She has taught and performed in the U.S., Canada, and around Europe. After discovering Zen, Valerie went on to earn a Masters of Theological Studies and Ph.D. from Brite Divinity School.
As Guiding Teacher, Valerie is responsible for the quality and integrity of Zen offerings at Mountain Cloud. She offers dokusan to over 50 students a week and runs our sesshin and zazenkai. Alongside her guiding work at Mountain Cloud, Valerie leads sesshin (intensive Zen retreats) annually at two Zen centers in Germany.

Scott Thornton (San’un-ken) is a Teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and a Teacher and Residency Advisor at Mountain Cloud. Scott provides practice guidance to residents and leads our weekly Book Group, monthly Aging Buddhas gatherings, and weekly Intro to Zen classes.
Scott and his wife, Guiding Teacher Valerie Forstman Roshi, came to work at Mountain Cloud in July of 2022. After an early career as an actor and singer, he turned to Clinical Psychology, a profession he has worked in for over 45 years (and from which he plans to retire in early 2026), though he still enjoys the occasional singer-songwriter gig! He began meditating on his own for 12 years before joining The Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas and beginning Koan study with Ruben Habito Rōshi in 2000. He continues his training with Henry Shukman Roshi.

Carolyn Seburn is a Sanbo Zen Teacher based in Ontario and a regular teacher in our hybrid/online events. She provides online dokusan to our members and during our 6-day retreats, dharma talks, and workshops for our 30 Days of Zen Course.
She is an authorized Dharma successor of Roselyn Stone (Sei’un An – Clearing Away the Clouds) Rôshi of the Mountain Moon Sangha (Toronto and Brisbane). She has been practicing Zen meditation since 1985 and guiding Zen practice since 2015. Married, with one offspring, Carolyn is also a biologist and public servant who focuses on wildlife conservation. Carolyn is also appointed a Zen teacher with Sanbo Zen International.

Shana Smith is an Assistant Teacher of Sanbo Zen based in Florida. Shana provides online 1-1 practice support to our members, and provides workshops for our 30 Days of Zen Course and sesshins.
Shana discovered yoga in 1990 and began attending regular classes in several different styles of yoga. After several years of ardent practice and study, she began to teach at her local studio and Yoga Temple. Shana became interested in the sensations and insights she experienced in Savasana, which led her to begin a regular meditation practice and in 2007 took refuge in the Sanbo Zen Lineage, and recently become a Sanbo Zen Assistant teacher. Over the years, she has found a tremendous synergy between Yoga and Zen, and integrates the two in her daily, committed practice.

David Robert Loy is a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen tradition of Japanese Zen
Buddhism. He is a prolific author, whose articles appear regularly in the pages of major journals such as Tikkun and Buddhist magazines including Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, and Buddhadharma, as well as in a variety of scholarly journals. Many of his writings, as well as audio and video talks and interviews, are available on the web. He is on the advisory boards of Buddhist Global Relief, the Clear View Project, Zen Peacemakers, and the Ernest Becker Foundation. David is one of the founding members of the new Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center, near Boulder, Colorado. Please visit the website at rockymountainecodharmaretreat.org for more information.
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Registration is open throughout the course, and upon signing up, you will receive a digital copy of the previously sent daily emails, along with recordings of all live events.
If you have any questions about the program, please contact Kieran.
- Start
- April 1 @ 12:00 am
- End
- April 30 @ 12:00 am
- Event Categories
- 30 Days of Zen, Community Events, Sanbo Zen, Special Events