The Zen Mountain Monastery Podcast

Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei – ZCNYC – 8/30/26 – Join Hojin Sensei offering opening remarks to the practitioners at Fire Lotus Temple in Brooklyn to begin the Fall Ango Practice Period:

“Now the hundreds of grasses are actually gathering for the Fall.
Plucked from the entire earth, there would be ten million stalks.
One flower with five petals opens in the sky and the mud.
Without doubt it will natu...

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi – ZMM – 8/29/26 – Breathing, sitting, walking, all of these ordinary activities offer the capacity to train the mind. But in what? Awareness, non-grasping, insight, stability, all these good qualities essential for liberating ourselves and others. Training is a vessel, it holds whatever we bring and it carries us along as well, a vehicle for practice. Shugen Roshi reminds us that trus...

Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei – ZCNYC – 8/29/26 – The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is where Buddha gives the four postures: walking, standing, sitting, and lying down. The instruction is essentially to know the body as it is disposed: “when standing, one knows, ‘I am standing.’” walking they know: ‘I am walking.’ When sitting they know: ‘I am sitting.’ And when lying down they kno...

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi – ZMM – 8/23/26 – Breath is the quality that brings and sustains life–an inspiration of what enters us and provides nourishment. To have aspiration, in a sense, is the desire and motivation inspired by the Dharma which brings us into practice, inspired by our own internal call. When we cultivate even a small aspiration toward awakening, we encounter the possibility of freeing ou...

Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei – ZCNYC – 8/23/26 – Someone asked the teacher: “Are you lonely”? Hojin takes up these senses of loneliness, solitariness and aloneness. The Buddha taught, “All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.” Can you relate? (From The Hidden Lamp #48:...

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi – ZMM – 8/22/26 – Many times our practice can be simple and straightforward. But when conditions become adverse, how do we stay on the path? The Dharma points us toward beneficial qualities within ourselves that we can cultivate and draw upon for strength—to support our focus, deepen our faith, and develop clarity. Sometimes called the Beautiful Qualities, or Beautiful Mental Fa...

Danica Shoan Ankele, Sensei – ZMM – 8/21/26 – What do we aspire to in our practice? What are we looking for? This deeply personal question can help us find our way among the many Dharma offerings we encounter, which can sometimes feel difficult to take up. In this vast, wide world, why practice? Why? This fundamental question opens many fruitful avenues of practice. Looking within—deepening our zazen—w...

Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei – ZMM – 08/16/2026 – Drawing on Dogen’s Mountains & Rivers Sutra and various texts on walking meditation, Hojin Sensei brings alive a study of how we move through space and time. Drawing on the “virtue of walking” as a constantly alive practice , she asks: how does stillness move? How does practice on the cushion stand up and move through all aspects of our live...

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi – 8/9/26 – With effort in practice, we bring forth our natural aliveness. To do this we make an effort to let go of self-clinging and other ways we deplete our energies. Even with expectations of the way we imagine “letting go” to be, when we encounter the reality of how tight we grasp on to our attachments, can we yield our fixed and self-centered ideas? Shugen Roshi explores t...

Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei – ZCNYC – 8/9/26 – The Buddha said that all conditioned things—all things that begin to exist at a particular time—are impermanent, and will eventually decay and disappear. Aging is normal. Illness is normal. Death is normal. Yes, I will be separated from what I hold near and dear. My only real possessions are my actions. This is normal for everyone, no matter where we are. Is...

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi – 8/2/26 – Koan study can turn our minds inward, showing us where we get stuck in our own habitual tangles and ways of thinking about reality. What is the true nature that ’mind training’ can reveal? Shugen Roshi brings alive the subtle teachings of Zhao Zhou with this question. Through practice, we gain some ground in working with our own minds, therefore finding ways to untan...

Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei – 8/2/26 – “A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air.” Following a retreat at the temple, Avian Traces, Hojin Sensei speaks about being with her mother recently in her dying process, and a bird showing up on the windowsill making contact. She links this with other stories of birds and the fact that birds have been showing up in the Buddhis...

Danica Shoan Ankele, Sensei – 7/26/26 – In sesshin, the deep work of transformation is held within a supportive container. Yet each of us must still discover the capacity for faith as we learn to settle the mind and realize our true nature—our fundamentally free nature. This cultivation of faith can be understood in three ways: faith in practice and the path, faith in the boundlessness of the bodhisattva vow, and...

Bear Gokan Bonebakker, Osho – ZMM – 7/25/26 – Zazen practice of shikantaza, “just sitting” comes from the Chan practice of Silent Illumination. In solitude we find our way, in the support of the teachings and learning to allow our minds to settle and come to rest. How we can understand this practice requires knowing that it’s open and available all the time. Gokan Osho reminds us that this path o...

Bear Gokan Bonebakker, Osho – ZMM – 7/12/26 – Ancient masters offer us teachings that speak to us in subtle ways, communicating insights that can be transformative even though they may not yet be our conscious experience. Hongzhi’s guidance speaks directly to our practice, toward how we can let the thinking mind go and let everything reveal itself. Gokan Osho says the revolution of practice is to see the min...

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi – ZMM – 6/28/26 – This teaching from ancient master Yunmen calls us not to ignore the strife around us, but to see it all through the eye of wisdom and compassion which does not get entangled by it. Even when the outer circumstances are not favorable—which is typical for samsara—we still have agency to affect things beyond our understanding when we take the Dharma as our r...