Young Urban Zen SF San Francisco Zen Center

Eli Brown-Stevenson: in this week's gathering we will talk about the heart/mind that brings us to practice and we will also do a welcoming exercise to help inspire our zazen practice.  

Zachary Smith: Lately I’ve been thinking about all the cases where some teacher, for some reason, has been required to boil their knowledge and experience down to a single, simple compelling expression and deliver it. The Buddhist literature is full of examples and we’ll talk, at least briefly, about some of them but I’ll also be giving it a try as well.

Mei Elliott: Mindfulness has the extraordinary capacity to cultivate wholesome states and diminish unwholesome ones, illuminating the path to happiness. In this meeting we'll explore the Buddhist roots behind the buzzword, and discuss the liberating potential of this practice. 

Kogetsu Mok: discussing the Buddhist principle of the "Perfection of Patience" and how this can help us to meet our suffering, anxieties, and difficulties. How can we examine the nature of our suffering with self-awareness and clarity? How can we cultivate patience and tolerance? How can we meet every moment of our lives with wisdom and equanimity?
Patience can help us to find inner freedom and peace which can remind us that we are all interconnected. We can learn to find agency to act skillfully and to not be controlled by habitual patterns. In this, we can begin to create better karmic conditions for ourselves and others.

Michael McCord: in a world with so much suffering, how can a person (should a person?) be joyful? Is this not taking the cares of the world seriously?  And in the face of so many existential threats (pandemics, climate change, political polarization, wars, etc.) - what is the appropriate way to live a life that is responsible, connected and thriving?
We'll unpack this from the context of Zen Buddhist principles.  Since Buddhism has at its core the concept of "liberation", one shouldn't have to wait until some distant time in the future to exhale and set down the baggage of the world, and find ways to live into mini-liberations all along the way.

Zachary Smith shares a collection of strange Zen stories, including Case 19 of the Blue Cliff Record, about a teacher named Jùzhī with a very eccentric teaching style.