In this evening’s talk, Michael discusses the maturation process of spiritual work. How is it, for example, that we can evolve into deeper expressions of embodied helpfulness; especially in the context of activism in general and the Iranian situation specifically.

In this evening’s talk, Michael discusses helpful ways of looking at what in Zen we call, “beginner’s mind.”

In this evening’s talk, Michael talks about how meditation is designed to help us fail. He also speaks to the fact that we are essentially walking around in life as ghosts. Knowing what’s underneath the ghostly sheet is the Path to Awakening.

In this evening’s talk, Michael addresses the divine and eternal source of all things.

This talk is the second of two parts and comes from an intensive at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. The theme for the day was getting beyond pain.

This talk is the first of two parts and comes from an intensive at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. The theme for the day was getting beyond pain.

In this evening’s sitting, Michael reads Old Turtle and the Broken Truth by Douglas Wood. It’s an enjoyable story that, among other things, points out the spiritual hazards of ethnocentrism and how limited truth falls apart under the weight of Absolute Truth.

At a recent sitting, Michael offered up a poem from Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s book, The Invitation. This is the podcast of that evening. Several subjects were broached including how practice can get heavy the further along the Path we get, as well as how we might best deal spiritually with faltering economic situations. Rather than go to war with our situations, Michael suggests we allow life to tenderize us and then to live consciously from that softened space. As odd as this may sound to the ego, it is a shortcut to realization.

Of all the driving forces behind an authentic spiritual practice, none is more important than the willingness to go deeper. Rather than meaning that we need to move anywhere, going deeper means that we must continually surrender to the source of our impulse to move. We must constantly face what is arising, in other words, without flinching, and then from this non-avoidance, we deepen and broaden our expanse. From this expanse we spontaneously get beyond those mind states and behaviors that will always prevent us from realization.

How do we ever move past the addiction to a sense of self? Furthermore, how do we ever get past our clinging to the ideals of the way we think things should be? If we loosen up around our sense of what is black and what is white; what is right and what is wrong; who we are and who we aren’t; then a spacious path into Truth-realization is possible. Opening, therefore, is our work.