Podcasts | Upaya Zen Center

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Butsumon Tuck Stibich describes teaching the GRACE program — Roshi Joan’s framework for compassionate action — to a class of cadets training as correctional officers. Butsumon admits to having judgments and expectations going into the training, and his surprise when cadets explained their reasons for being there: faith, family, and a wish to give others the…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, delivered on the eve of the 15th anniversary of her twin sister Ellie’s passing, novice priest Jimon Lorene Flaming tenderly opens the bittersweet space of her sister’s life and death. Jimon traces Ellie’s path — a woman who lived entirely on her own terms, spending her life in nature, deeply embodied, trusting the flow of life — and the shock of losing not…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin takes us through the currents of the Buddha’s raft metaphor — where practice becomes binding together grass, twigs, and branches to cross from a shore that is dangerous and fearful to one that is safe. Drawing on Dogen’s Uji (Being-Time), Fushin challenges the notion of completion, suggesting there is actually no shore to rest on: “There’s no…

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In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries…

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In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries…

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In this fifth session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax gathers the community around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Person Born to Farming” — reading it aloud, line by line, drawing participants into its imagery of soil as divine drug, of entering death yearly and coming back rejoicing. The poem becomes a lens for the day’s planting, and a doorway into the concept of sympoiesis — the understanding…

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In this fourth session of Planting Life, Porter Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — historian, anthropologist, and executive director of Hapo Community School — brings a thoughtful and generous account of what it means to reclaim education on indigenous terms. At the heart of his talk is a clear distinction: “Education is something we do inherently as human beings that never ends.

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In this third session of Planting Life, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — sculptor, farmer, and founder of Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute — offers a quiet and generous tour of Pueblo agricultural knowledge. Speaking at her first public appearance since a serious accident, Roxanne moves through the ancestral farming methods her people developed for one of the harshest growing…

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In the second session of Planting Life, following the morning’s planting ceremony, Beata Tsosie of Santa Clara Pueblo brings her decades of environmental justice work to bear. Drawing on her work with Tewa Women United and the Food and Seed Sovereignty Alliance, Beata maps the layered environmental violence of the Greater Tewa Basin — nuclear contamination from Los Alamos…

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In this opening session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax, Wendy Johnson, and Alonso Mendez gather the community around a single, urgent call: to put our hands into the earth and “give life to life.” Wendy brings the teaching down to its most elemental — the seed splitting, root reaching down, shoot reaching up — and names corn, rice, and barley not as crops but as relatives…

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