PZI Teacher Archives
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Allison Atwill -
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Eduardo Fuentes -
Jesse Cardin -
John Tarrant -
Jon Joseph -
Michelle Riddle -
Tess Beasley
trust
Gifts from the Far Ocean
Our greatest tool from practice is a calm center in the middle of turbulence. My journey’s trajectory and outcome is not completely in my hands. It is hard to say whether circumstances are fortunate or not: are we drifting toward the rakshasas, or is it clear sailing? Lessons from a Polynesian legend: Trust your life, locate with love. As recorded March 18, 2023. Music for meditation from Michael Wilding.
Resting in the Great Silence at the Beginning
Wherever you are, even in the places you are certain the silence is NOT, it is there enfolding you. Even at Walmart with a toddler, in a flood, or at the doctor’s office—it is there, blooming. We are always stepping into that emptiness. Complete January Sunday Zen session, Part 2.
Trusting Your Moves
Things talk to us and the right moves appear, and then we doubt them! From a talk in Summer Sesshin on June 15, 2022. 6 minutes.
Our Part in the Gathering
It’s all here—we’re already taking part in the gathering. We each hold our part so we can experience it together. Recorded during Summer Sesshin on June 15, 2022. 4 minutes.
Awakenings of Linji & the Great Chan Teachers
John revisits the awakenings and koans of the great teachers, among them Yunmen and Linji. The love, and attention, and faithfulness at the heart of the stories and teachings of the Chan ancestors is their gift to us. And everything we bring to it is an addition into this great heritage, and is part of the layering. Transcript from a video talk in Fall Sesshin 2019.
Carl Jung’s Red Book
Jung’s journey is interesting, harrowing, ridiculous, pompous, incomprehensible, amusing, sad, frightening, wise—the whole range of the human is there. Jung’s point of meeting with Buddhism is that, at a time when darkness seemed and was near, he offered the example of a trust in the deepest possibility of transformation, and in the involuntary processes that we contain, and in the depths of what it is to be human.
Let Me Count the Ways
Love is an enlightenment story available to everyone, and that story includes being attacked by demons as well as being showered with roses. If we widen our gaze, in love, we discover what we like about ourselves and how we want to live our lives.
Koans in Your Life
To turn toward the difficult thing is usually a move of compassion. We think it’ll be a fierce warrior move, but it’s not, actually. And when we turn toward what’s difficult, it becomes mysterious and unknown and strange and interesting. Whatever it is, your dilemma—if you turn toward that, it’s to let the koan be there. So we stop trying to flee. And suddenly we’re at peace, and instead of it being the thing that we don’t want to do, it’s the gateway into freedom.
Freely I Watch the Tracks of the Flying Birds
Everybody, every time, has its own difficulty and crisis. This is ours. We can trust our own lives that brought us here, and perhaps we have something to do here. And we don’t know what that is but we’ll find it as we keep walking. The thing about the meditation path is, I don’t have to think a lot about what’s mine to do. You just give yourself to the meditation, and it’s produced for you. It’s given to you. The path opens by itself, you know. Transcript of PZI Zen Online Sunday Talk with John Tarrant, recorded March 29 2020.
Trusting the Universe in the Deep Dark
PZI Zen Online: Excerpted from Handing Things On in the Dark—the universe takes care of us in the middle of deep thick darkness.
The Buffalo and the Lattice Window
John opens the Harvest Moon Retreat at the Angela Center with an ancient koan about a buffalo passing through a lattice window. “It is like a buffalo passing through a window. Its head, horns, and four legs have all passed through. Why is it that its tail cannot?” Meditation on the tail and the question of the tail. What is the tail, why could a huge buffalo enter but the tail cannot? —As recorded October 13, 2013.