Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In Part 3 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, the faculty explores the nature of experience in this Day 1 panel session — reflexive awareness, the distortions of the “perception box,” and the intimacy of not-knowing. John Dunne frames the core teaching: “we already know what the nature of our experience is. We already have that capacity. We already have non-dual awareness… it’s…

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In Part 2 of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, John Dunne, PhD, opens with a guided meditation on reflexive, non-dual awareness before turning to a central question of Buddhist epistemology: what is real? Testing the room with a white mug — is its color in the object, the brain, or somewhere else? — he distinguishes a transparent mode of perception, which sees through experience to act in…

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In this opening session (Part 1) of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax welcomes practitioners on-site and online, tracing the retreat’s roots to her decades-long friendship with the late neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner Francisco Varela and how their conversations from 1981 ultimately seeded what became the Mind and Life Institute. Roshi reminds the room that this…

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In this final session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer takes up Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra, tracing how sustained attention dissolves the boundary between self and world. Drawing on stories from her own practice life, she returns often to the way small, ordinary contact with things — a stone, a teacup, a mountain trail — can either be led by our concepts or…

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In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Reverend Tenmyo Dojima introduces baika, the Soto Zen tradition of Buddhist hymn-singing, chanting a hymn drawn from one of Dogen’s own poems: “Even upon a high, steep cliff where the rough waves cannot reach, the true Dharma clings and takes firm root, just as oysters cling to the rock.” Roshi Joan introduces the faculty panel of the weekend’s…

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