Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

Using poetry, koans, and personal story, this talk paints practice as a slow accumulation of intimacy with the world — with fear, with joy, with the earth itself. It closes on the idea that these encounters don't disappear when we leave formal practice; they continue quietly shaping how we sit, dream, and live.

This talk Kisei explores practice as homecoming — returning to a natural ease we knew as children but lost through striving and adulthood. A folk tale and the Buddha's own reflections before awakening sre explored forgetting and remembering as central to the spiritual path. 

This talk explores what it means to listen beyond the ears — to the earth, to silence, to a mind not bound by self and asks whether the boundary between "sentient" and "insentient" is one we've simply mistaken for the truth.

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This talk explores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of caring for someone who is suffering, arguing that presence — flawed, tiring, and imperfect as it is — matters more than solutions. It also explores how our own inner work with fear, mortality, and discomfort directly shapes what we're able to offer someone else in their hardest moments.

Reflecting on today's overwhelming availability of spiritual teachings from every tradition, this talk asks whether sampling freely across lineages creates confusion and explores how practice is a rhythm of deconstructing our misperceptions of self and world, and reconstructing ourselves toward compassion, embodiment, and ease.