Recent Posts
Garden of Flowers & Weeds: Seppo’s Grain of Rice
Seido introduces koan practice for students of the Soto way that emphasizes the koan that arises in everyday life. This talk includes reflections on Blue Cliff Record #5 in which the Zen Master tells his students to "pick up the whole great earth in your fingers and...
The Edge of Trauma and Zen
In this talk, Seido summarizes some of the key teachings presented at a recent workshop on healing trauma for Zen practitioners. Included are ways of understanding the karmic imprint of trauma, the essential need for compassion, and how Zen supports a return to direct...
Heart Sutra: The Meandering Nature of Practice
In this talk, Seido shares her own meander through the sixty days of the spring Ango period studying the Heart Sutra. Rather than a straight line, practice often takes on this winding journey involving inspiration and boredom, insight and forgetfulness, passionate...
Heart Sutra: The Power of Disillusionment
Seido talks about the Heart Sutra as a process of "disillusionment" - a teaching that takes everything away to reveal something of great value. Rather than be a depressing failure of life, Zen celebrates the liberating moment of disillusionment that brings us closer...
Earth Day Celebration
On April 24, 2022, the Zen West sangha honored the giant incense cedar in the courtyard with an enormous green rakusu and the dharma name of Mokukan, Gentle Patient Tree. In the talk prior to the ceremony, Seido addresses the ecological crisis of our times and...
Heart Sutra: Fundamental Belonging
Seido talks about recent events that express the Heart Sutra. She recounts a story about a spiritual opening Buddhist Environmentalist Joanna Macy relayed at a recent Summit on Ecology and Buddhism. The talk addresses the 2nd Noble Truth of "tanha" or craving and...
Mark Unno on Boundless Compassion
Shin Buddhist Priest and U of O Professor of Religion Mark Unno speaks to Zen West about the Pure Land concept of the "foolish being" and the way of infinite light at the heart of Shin practice. Mark offers a journey of story, poetry, and film to illustrate the...
Zen Essentials: What Does It Mean to Have a Practice?
In this talk, Seido offers ways to allow practice to seamlessly enter one's life. It can be particularly challenging to keep the thread of practice alive during spring and summer vacations as well as amidst the demands of daily life. However, whenever we turn the mind...
Heart Sutra: Where’s the Heart?
In this talk, Seido suggests the Heart Sutra can be viewed as a way of teaching us how best to love the world by seeing it clearly, not through our "thought coverings," but by being directly in touch with the nature of change. The talk closes with a koan from the Blue...
Heart Sutra: Follow Your No’s
Seido talks about the no's of the Heart Sutra - the no eye, no ears, no nose, no tongue, body, mind and so forth. She suggests a daily practice of "following your no's" and what it means to release our "thought coverings" from our experience, or to "slip the word star...