Very fun “KonMari” workshop taught by Yuriko Beaman for eleven All Beings Zen Sangha Members last Saturday. Yuriko inspired us to begin to look at our homes in a fresh way. Asking us “What do you want from your life?” “What does your ideal home after it is tidied look like?” She then outlined the way to move ourselves in that direction by focusing on one area at a time and holding and evaluating each item asking what action with this item moves us toward the tidied home and life we envisioned. She gave us direction on how to say goodbye to items we are ready to let go of and instructions on how to fold, store, displaying the items that we’ve decided to keep. She asked us to shift our mindset asking what items are joy sparking. She can be contacted for personal consulting via her web site www.joyandspace.com

Here are a few photographs from our 5 day All Beings Zen Sangha Spring Sesshin at Woodburn Hill Farm. In the background you can see that the trees had a neon green of pollen to drop. The bird songs in the mornings were a glorious symphony. And the full moon filled the night sky and our dreams. What a great time and place for deep diving into Dharma practice

Photography by  Kaizen and Longman.

Photography by Vero Hires

When: Saturday –  March 23th, 2019  9-11:30 a.m.

What : Workshop: Diving deeper into Restorative Justice Practices 

What are the ways we show up in conflict?  Do we head into it, avoid it or some combination?  What do we do when we’ve been harmed or harmed someone?  How does this compare to our nation’s way of handling “crime”?  

In this workshop you will get an overall understanding of what the umbrella term “restorative justice” means in different contexts.  We will dive deeper into methods of conflict resolution, looking systemically and personally.  We will also explore our own relationship to conflict and specifically how our Zen or Buddhist practice meets this very natural part of being alive.

No prior knowledge or experience of these topics is necessary.  We will explore it together.

About Rev. Michaela

Rev Michaela O’Connor Bono is a Soto Zen Buddhist Priest, and the resident teacher for the Mid City Zen Sangha in New Orleans, LA.  Ordained in the Suzuki Roshi Lineage, she has trained at both Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and Green Gulch Farm.  She is a founding member of Sakyadhita USA( a branch of the International Association of Buddhist Women) and has served as a board member for Buddhist Peace Fellowship.  She is active in prison meditation and chaplaincy ministry and believes everyone has a mystic heart. 

 

In Gassho,

Inryu Sensei

Exploring the place of Women in the Soto Zen Lineage

In our long service of bowing and chanting, we recite the “Names of Buddhas and Ancestors” – beginning with the Seven Buddhas Before Buddha, and ending with the founder of our Soto Zen School, Eihei Dogen, and his two immediate successors who established the lineage of teachers that we now honor. All of these are male. In fact, we used to call them “Buddhas and Patriarchs”. In recent years, much research and collaboration by a group of Zen teachers and scholars have created a parallel document, a women ancestors document. What does it mean to have a separate women’s lineage? Why are there no women in the lineage we do chant – or are there? And what does Dogen have to say about women, gender, and separation?

Rev. Choro with Sensei Inryu in 2015

Rev. Choro Carla Antonaccio is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest ordained in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi by her teacher, Roshi Josho Pat Phelan. She began formal practice in 1999 at Chapel Hill Zen Center where she has been a resident practitioner since 2005. Rev. Choro has trained at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, San Francisco Zen Center City Center, and Green Gulch Farm. She was Shuso for the Chapel Hill Zen Center community in 2016.

Photograph taken after our first Zen Retreat of 2019

Join members of the All Beings Zen Sangha for a Fire Ceremony.  This is a ceremony were we write down the habits and tendencies, difficult states of mind, tangled aspects of relationships, and so on, that we would like to release. We will have an outdoor small fire to burn our papers along with the name cards from Memorial Services held during the past year and incense stubs and zen sewing thread bits that have accumulated throughout year. Everyone is welcome.

Following the ceremony please feel welcome to join us inside for our regular Wednesday night zen sewing practice and precept study which ends at 7:30pm.

Poem by Benji Robert Quinn on the occasion of Shinren Mark Stone’s Shuso ceremony

All Beings Zen Sangha – Washington DC

December 15, 2018

306: a poem

I

Right here, if you stay very still and wait

You might just glimpse a dragon take her seat,

Unfurl her wings and gaze at a floor

Whose lines shoot an arrow straight at the dusty world,

Where birds sing and blowers wail and lions roar,

Whose footworn sheen is lit by lamps that pass their light

To four windows, each painting a neverending picture

Entitled: “The birth and death of leaves in the wind.”

II

Right here, be you.

Whatever your path,

Whatever the hundred thousand pages

You have written about yourself reveal,

The good, the bad the ugly all meet the same response:

A simple bow that says “I see you. You matter.

But don’t take my word for it. Have a seat and find out why.”

III

Right here you have helped me to carry my heavy book,

Taken the smoking incense from my fingers with care,

Fallen to the floor, just to look into the eyes of a child,

And drawn a wide and gentle circle that asks to be stepped into.

IV

Right here, you have held our practice with your open arms.

Now, hear the Shuso!