I would like to talk about samu and why it is an integral and important aspect of Zen training and practice. Samu means “work practice”. If you have been to a retreat at our Center, you will be familiar with samu. But we rarely do it outside of the context of retreats, so I am going to be introducing it to community as an important part of our Zen training. When we do samu we practice being one with whatever we are doing. In other words, the distance between subject and object shrinks until there is no separation. This intimacy is at the heart of Zen. We call it “giving life to our life”. So w ..read more

All of Jeremy Sekishin’s family were present on this joyous, Easter morning of April 9, 2023, when he took the precepts in a Jukai ceremony at the Zen Life & Meditation Center of Chicago with Roshi Robert Joshin Althouse. Sikishin means “Sincere Heart ..read more

On Sunday, March 26, 2023, Rev. Elizabeth Kaido Carabello took vows in a Shukke Tokudo to become a Zen novitiate priest. Congratuations. See some more photos of the event taken by Christian Baizan Solorazano ..read more

Adapted from a talk by Roshi Robert Althouse at Zen Life & Meditation Center, Chicago and published in Tricycle in the Winter 2020 issue. Z en Buddhist Literature has a reputation for being confounding, yet in many cases the challenges of the texts are a positive feature. The verbal puzzles called koans, for instance, are designed to be so impenetrable that the student is pushed to break through to a nonconceptual understanding. One of the most influential, and perhaps most erplexing, Zen texts is the Shobogenzo, a collection of writings by the 13th-century master Eihei Dogen, founder of t ..read more

Let your heart receive what is rightfully yours. Let tears wash away all that stops vision, and with open eyes see what is before you now. See this time of cleansing, this giving up of all that cannot hold you anymore. Touch the ground beneath it all. Walk with bare feed toward a place you can only feel. Now fall deeply and evermore deeply into something you have never imagined. c@ ae from poems of blue and green ..read more

I wrote this piece some years ago and am rewriting and publishing it today. We have been teaching mindfulness at our Zen Life & Meditation Center of Chicago now for over ten years. Today mindfulness is popular for good reason. We are in need of tools to help us retrieve a quality of attention that can be present to our embodied and relational awareness. Social media has impacted our ability to pay attention without distraction in radical ways and the article the follows will explain some of the ways this is taking place. It is estimated that the average person sees about 5,000 ads a day ..read more

Michael Shikan Brunner received Zen transmission as a teacher and priest from Roshi Robert Joshin Althouse on September 3, 2022. Michael worked in the service and distribution industries leading sales and marketing teams for twenty-five years before becoming the Executive Director of the Zen Life & Meditation Center, Chicago. He has been practicing Zen for fifteen years.    Michael recently founded the One River Zen Center in Ottawa, IL. He is a father and recently welcomed a new son, David, in 2020. He lives with his partner Vanessa ..read more

Where I sit meditation each morning I look out on a neighbor's ornamental pear tree. Last week during a windy and rainy day, a plastic bag blew up from the ally and lodged in the tree. Each morning when I sat I would look at that plastic bag stuck in the tree. Various thoughts ran through my head about the broken and polluted state of our world. In the last few days that pear tree has blossomed into a canopy of white flowers and now I can no longer see the plastic bag. It's still there but the wholeness and beauty of the pear tree is obscuring it.  So here's the stran ..read more

THIS IS PART TWO OF A FOUR-PART SERIES INTRO | part one | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR Meekness is not a word we often associate with strength, but in fact, the spiritual warrior's strength arises from gentleness, not arrogance. It's about being simple, grounded and embodied. Trungpa lays out three stages in the development of meekness.  The first stage is modesty. Modesty here has to do with being simple, without pretense in a way that is completely genuine. Hui-neng, the sixth ancestor of Zen, speaks of this as having a straightforward mind.  The second stage is that of uncon ..read more

THIS IS PART FOUR OF A FOUR PART SERIES PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR This fourth dignity is the dragon of inscrutability. The warrior's spiritual path is rigorous and thorough, beginning with the work of the Tiger of Meekness. It continues with the Snow Lion of perkiness inspired by discipline that is uplifted and joyful. The Garuda of outrageousness helps the warrior go beyond timidity and act in a bold and brave way in service to awakening and healing suffering.  In Eastern traditions, the dragon is viewed as a symbol of vitality and the earth’s liveliness. It’s said ..read more