Tozan's "No Cold and Heat"

A monk asked Tozan,

"When cold and heat come, how should one avoid them?"

Tozan said,
"Why not go to a place where there is neither cold nor heat?"
The monk said,
"What kind of place is it where there is neither cold nor heat?"
Tozan said,
"When it is cold, the cold kills you; when it is hot, the heat kills you."

-Case 43 from The Blue Cliff Record

Spring is a time of temperature extremes in the Southwest. We literally can go from 60F/15C to 95F/35C in a weekend and when you include the whole elevation factor it gets even more extreme. You can go from sweltering heat to freezing cold in an hour or two.

When I went to Zen Mountain Center in mid-April the forecast for the weekend was sunny and 70F/21C. Before I drove up that Friday afternoon I had lunch with my friend Andy in the valley. It was 85F/27C. We were in shorts and sandals. Then, my Hyundai Santa Fe climbed up the mountain. It was a bit cooler but nothing too extreme. I sat with the group that evening and headed off for bed around 9:00.

When I got up Saturday morning at 4:00am I heard what sounded like wind and rain outside. In a sleepy daze I washed my face and got dressed for early morning sitting. I grabbed my umbrella, opened the door of my cabin to go to the zendo, and stepped into wet, heavy snow.


I was wide-awake. It was about 26F/-3C and I, a little desert rat, was walking though the snow in sandals. Needless to say, it was a bone-chilling day of sitting. All I could think of as I froze was sitting with Andy the afternoon before eating in the hot afternoon sun.


My friends all offered warmer clothes and better shoes but after walking a sitting during the arctic part of the day without them, I decided to just be cold.


By the following afternoon it was sunny and 70F/21C again and within a few hours I was driving through the desert on I-10 sweating in 100F/38C. After freezing my feet off the day before I decided not to turn on the air conditioner but to bake in the sun and just be hot.

I turned the vent on but it was so hot outside that the air blowing on my feet felt like a hairdryer. I could still remember the ice cold sensations in my toes from the day before but now, in the heat of the desert, the idea of running around in my sandals through the snow felt good just as it had only been in the snow that the burn of the desert sun on my feet felt good.

“When cold be cold. When hot be hot. When in pain be in pain . . .” Etc. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.

“Just watch your breath and count to ten. Then start again at one,” I was told by a teacher back in 1988. “If you lose track or get distracted just start at one again. The key is not to get to ten but to forgive yourself for not getting to ten.”

Someone recently asked me what to do in his head when he’s meditating. I told him about counting to ten. Then he asked me what it was like to get to ten without a thought. I told him when it happens to me I’ll let him know.

Every One Deserves Music

What a trippy, sublime, magnificent, grass-between-the-toes, musically-sun-soaked weekend. I’ve got to give the McDowell Mountain Music Festival folks props, they put on a great party.

My advice to the world is that EVERYONE who loves live music should make it a point to see the Flaming Lips at least once in their life. Here are a few pics from the show & a video clip of my friend Rob, Wayne from the Flaming Lips and myself signing Happy Birthday to our friend Laura.

A Big Sky Day

Old School w/ New Riders

Happy Helene

Little Hippies Selling Grateful Grub

Michael Franti & Spearhead
The Fabulous Matisyahu A Flaming Lips Fan!
Fragments of Musical Bliss Wayne as Bubble ManThe End.

A Practice For What?

Way back when I first started dating Helene she caught me in a big lie and almost dumped me. For her, lying is a deal breaker. The strange thing was I could see from her perspective that I was a liar but until she called me on it, I did not see that I was lying.

I promised her that from that moment on I would be as honest with me as I was with her. And I have spent almost a decade peeling back the layers of lies I tell myself everyday as a means of keeping that promise. Somewhere along the way she must have seen that I was sincere as she did finally marry me.

Through this experience I have a hard time looking at homophobic conservative preachers and politicians caught with their “fingers” up inside the “cookie jar” claiming, “It was all a miscommunication!” with anything other than compassion. On some level or another, we are all sneak eaters.

Still, as most of my friends will tell you, no matter how many layers of self-deceit I dig though, I will always be full of shit. That’s why I need BS detectors in my life, like Helene, to keep me honest.

Recently a friend of mine invited me to one of her upcoming gigs. I looked on my calendar and had to decline as I was going to be sitting that weekend at Zen Mountain Center in California. “Damn,” she said, “you’re always going off somewhere for Zen.”

“Yes,” I replied piously, “It’s part of my practice.”

“A practice for what? Avoiding your life?”

Her comment pissed me off and I should have looked at it right there. If she was wrong, I would have laughed as it was said playfully not maliciously. The fact that I was pissed and indignant should have told me that I was lying to myself about something.

Three weeks ago Dogo Sensei lent me the DVD How To Cook Your Life: with Zen Chef Edward Espe Brown. I loved the film so much that as soon as it ended I looked Brown up and saw that he was doing an all day workshop at Green Gulch Zen Center on April 18 and running the Sunday service April 19. In investigating it, further several other details made it so that could have flown there, stayed with family in the area, and done the whole event for less than $100.00. I felt like the timing of it all was a sign and that I was being called to go. (Called by who you might ask.)

Then I looked at my calendar. Damn! A Zazenkai on April 18 here with the Sitting Frog Zen Sangha. I picked up the phone. “Well,” I thought, “I’m just going to call Dogo Sensei and tell him he has to run this one on his own. After all, it’s not like I would be blowing the Sangha off for the Coachella Music Festival. Seeing Edward Espe Brown is Zen! I’d be blowing them off for my practice.”

Then my friend’s words pierced me, “A practice for what? Avoiding your life?”

I put down the phone and started my April Zazenkai To Do List.

photo by Vegar Svanemyr

Zen Geek, Music Freak

Zen Geek, Music Freak, I’ve been calling myself that for years now. At first I saw these two major passions of my life being at odds with each other. There are some great shows over the years that I have missed because of Buddhism retreats. When I first meet Genpo Roshi at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico I asked to be his student. I had never asked that before of any spiritual teacher and was quite serious about my commitment. I asked him what I should do next. “Coming up to practice with us in Salt Lake City might be a good start,” he said. This was before we could download dharma talks from the digital zendo.

Later that night, I looked up their website on my laptop and saw that the October Bodhidharma Dharma Big Mind Zen Retreat fell perfectly into a week that I already had off from work. I had intended to go to the Hardly Strictly Blue Grass Festival in San Francisco for my vacation. I felt like the universe was asking me how serious I was about working with Genpo Roshi. My response was to skip the festival and sit in SLC.

This weekend is the Coachella Music Festival. For the last few years America has had two regular legendary music festivals, Bonnaroo and Coachella. The second one is a mere four hours from my house. Last weekend, I drove through Coachella, California to get to the Zen Mountain Center, which is five hours from my house. While I was sitting on the mountain last weekend Mirah and Vetiver played in Phoenix and I missed them. The week before Leonard Cohen played in Phoenix and Zen commitments kept me away from that show too.

So am I back over to the desert cities this weekend for music? No. I’ll be sitting for 12 hours on Saturday with my Phoenix Dharma family, the Sitting Frog Zen Sangha. The funny thing is I think I’m the one that picked this weekend for the April Zazenkai.


There was a time when I felt that these two major passions of my life were at odds. Today I don’t feel that way. Ultimately I can’t do everything so I choose to prioritize those activities that involve family.

Saturday I will sit with my Dharma brothers and sisters from 5:30am to 5:30pm. At 7:00pm I will check out the end of National Independent Record Store Day at Stinkweeds owned by my friend for almost 20 years, Kimber. (Who also owns the space where we sit on Sundays, Modified.) Then, around 9:30, I will go to fellow Zen student and friend, Lonna Kelly’s gig, Grand Ole Opry at the Ruby Room. She has asked that Dogo Sensei and I come in robes, cowboy hats and boots. Zen Geek, Music Freak! Odd? Maybe but not at odds.

Teachers Are Troublemakers!!

Being both and English teacher and a Buddhist monk, I’m generally doomed when it comes to meeting other people’s expectations of me. Somehow that combination means I should move through this life with a detached holy piety of perfection. Or at least that’s what’s suggested. It’s funny how many times I am told what I should or should not be doing. I should be a vegetarian. I shouldn't drink beer. I should be driving a Prius. One guy insisted that if I was a monk, I should get a divorce, as I shouldn’t be married. Nice.

Ahh, projection, projection, projection.

There seems to be this notion that spiritual teachers must live up to people's ideals of what a spiritual teacher should be. The only problem is that each person has a slightly different set of ideals based on their own ego issues and they project all their own shit on their image of perfection, their teacher. In his book, The Spiritual Tourist, author Mick Brown, a journalist, travels around the world checking out different spiritual traditions. In India he visits both living and dead Gurus and at one point makes the observation that he prefers the dead ones.

Genpo Roshi has often said that the problem with only having teachers like Jesus and Buddha or even a man like the Dalai Lama (if all you’ve ever done is read his books and see him in movies) is they’re our ideals of perfection and because they are not here in our everyday lives they never disappoint us.

If we take on a spiritual teacher, part of that teacher’s job IS to disappoint us, to use our own projections against us. If we see the imperfections of our teachers we become more likely to see the imperfections within ourselves. And if we learn to face the real in our teachers and the real in ourselves, we might actually start living life as it is and not as we wish it could be.

A living-breathing teacher is SUPPOSED to be a troublemaker. An instigator.

It works like this: My teacher is the mortar and I am the pestle that grinds my ego to a fine power. Ground fine enough, it becomes a healing compound for others.

But don't just take my word for it, here's what Pema Chodron has to say about teachers:
(Facebook readers click here.)

If you want to read more about this check out Trungpa Rinpoche's book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Oh, and Happy Easter.

A Junkie's Confession

I'm off to Zen Mountain Center for a long weekend and feeling the anxiety of knowing that I will be forcefully unplugged until Monday night. Sure you could get all Zen on me and say that really I'm going to plug in. Yeah, well you try to catch up on 96 missed hours of tweets.

The funny thing is I feel like I'm sacrificing one fix for another. Only a junkie like me would spend his weekends and vacations sitting at Zen Centers and then spend his nights after work sitting in front of a computer screen writing.

I'll be dropping an Easter post automation style but otherwise I'm outta here.

Good-bye virtual world. I shall miss you.

Hello Zen Center, I'm excited to visit. I've missed you.

Here's joke before I go:
Facebook readers go here

Our Sangha Rocks

I grew up in an Evangelical-Fundamentalist Christian home and my father was always a church leader in one form or another, from deacon to assistant pastor. Whenever ugly politics got in the way of his ministry my mom would say, “People don't come to church because they’re healed, they come because they hurt and when a sick person goes into a room full of people with weak immune systems it becomes an infirmary. But remember, Honey, we’re all one in the Holy Spirit.”

As a Zen Buddhist I have translated my mom’s sentiment to: “We sit in the Zendo as one but after the final bell all hell can break loose when we open our mouths as we put are shoes back on in the foyer.”

This practice would be a lot easier if there were only two of the Three Treasures, the Buddha and the Dharma. I could simply meditate alone in my home every morning in front of my statue of the Buddha, read books on Buddhism at night, and live piously knowing I had life all figured out.

The problem is the pesky third treasure, the Sangha. As soon as I start sharing space with others around that Buddha statue they become a constant reminder that maybe I don't have life all figured out, but they think they do. And this becomes a battle of wills. And we find all sorts of “logical” reasons why the other is wrong and I am right.

When I was a child we called other people not of our faith, secular, and lived by the mantra, “We are to be in the world but not of it.” There was much security being within the thick granite walls of dogma, but as I grew, the lies, deceit, and hypocrisy within those walls fractured my heart into rubble. The fire of community had burned my faith to ash.

When I left home at eighteen for college in 1986, I swore I would never be part of a religious community again. By 1988 I had a double major in English literature and religious studies and shifted from the born again beliefs of my childhood, to a pushy “born again” atheist, to a polite agnostic, to a student of Eastern and Western mysticism. I started a meditation practice on my own.

I had opened space up again for spirit but kept the door of my heart locked tight on spiritual community. Religious study consumed me, but only as an academic through the tomes on my bookshelf. It never occurred to me to travel to places like India. That just seemed like a great deal of bother and diarrhea. I sat on my own and I read a lot of Thomas Merton, Allen Watts, and Trungpa Rinpoche. I preferred my teachers dead.

This was my practice for ten years until 1998 when I was hit with a crisis. It came to me in sitting one morning that I was stuck. I needed to be pushed. I needed a place where I could sit for weeks, not minutes. But that would require a support system and meant finding a religious community. It felt like I was once again entering a fire only this time to sit willingly.

I researched and eventually found Vipassana meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka and went to a 12-day retreat in North Fork, California. It was sort of a community / anti-community conveyor belt style meditation retreat complete with DVD Dharma talks. Strangers moved through a rigorous monastic schedule together alone covered with a blanket of conduct codes that included a vow of silence. I loved it. I came and went to these retreats when I wanted and was nice to everyone but knew no one. Goenka may have been alive, but he was far away as I watched the recording of him teach on TV.

Still, Sangha was beginning to warm my cool academic exterior and get back under my skin. I see now that by meditating with others I did indeed begin to enter the fire. In the middle of my first silent retreat there was a guy in my cabin that made my blood boil every time I saw him. He really pissed me off. The problem was that I had never spoken to him and we had never really had an interaction. How could I hate a guy I hadn’t even met? My projection onto this man was so obvious it hurt. With nothing to keep it attached to him, after a few days, the anger snapped back into my own heart. And that hurt even more. My heart had been cracked opened to the realization that I was using my conflicts with others as means of not dealing with the conflicts within myself.

Today, the Sanghas of Phoneix, SLC, and beyond hold a prominent role in my life and my teacher, Genpo Roshi, is very much alive and well. I find myself grounded within community once again, my heart right in the middle of those flames. At times I feel the lies and deception and hypocrisy; but more often, I feel the warmth of the Sangha, which opens me to love, the sacred beauty of awe, and the truth of vulnerability among us.

All religion, and by association, all religious communities are a combination of the divine and the absurd, but through our connection with each other, in Sangha, we can learn to live the middle way of including and transcending those extremes.

Be it Dharma brothers and sisters or brothers and sisters in Christ we are all family.

I have heard that Maezumi Roshi used to call the community within the LA Zen Center a rock tumbler where everyone bumped and crashed into each other until they became smooth and shiny. I like that metaphor.

In the past, I avoided community because I saw it as a place where eventually everyone knocks into one another, chipping and cracking each other until we break. But in life we are always smashing into each other whether we want to or not.

In a spiritual community where there is a foundation of practice, insight, and a collective orbit our inevitable collisions become part of the practice, not a reason to stop practicing. Without Sangha we just feel cracked; within Sangha we are cracked open.

Have Poet, Will Travel. (No Joke)

I exist as I am—that is enough;
If no other in the world be aware, I sit content;
And if each and all be aware, I sit content.
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

Those are the words that have inspire me to continue teaching for almost twenty years. I do not teach with the expectation that I am going to get anything from my students or that they even want anything from me other than a grade. I simply offer a space for them to study the self. Some respond. Most don’t. Either way, I’m at their service.

Tonight, I had an AMAZING young man in my writing classes share his voice with us. I am in the last week of my fifth term this year and in the last week we do a writing showcase where nine of my writers share the stage with a pro and together we explore the power of the spoken word and share our lives. This term’s pro was Apollo, the Traveling Poet. Rather than type a lot of words trying to describe what it’s like to watch this talented artist check him out for yourself: (If you're reading this on Facebook you're going to have to click here.)

He is always looking for sponsors for his current quest to bring poetry across America and document his journey.

Afterward, we went to VYBe Poetry Lounge hosted by the fabulous Ms. Wisdom Soul at Oscar Taylors (OTs) for a few more hours of poetry and Jazz accompanied by a former students who read one of his pieces and KILLED THE MIKE. This was the kid’s first gig outside of school performances and he blew all of us away. Several of the other poets gave him props before they read. I sat there full of pride remembering when we worked on his poem in my class and rehearsed his delivery.

Apollo interviewed me earlier this afternoon for his film and asked what I want students to “get” out of my class when they’re done. I told him, “That’s easy. I want my students to know that the power of their words belongs to them and now that they own it, no one can take it away. NO ONE. I want them to decide that if they choose to be here, THEN BE HERE.

Be present in who you are and use the pen & paper & pages of the books you choose to read to help in grounding you in your own voice in order to sound your 'barbaric YAWP' however you see fit."

Tonight two young men help this old teacher up as the power of their words lifted me with the sincerity of their hearts.

Some Photos from OTs

The VYBe
Apollo's third poetry reading session of the day.
A few of the other artists

Camelback Road
Before we left, I fell in love with this piece
that I watched the artist Stevo
paint while the night progressed.
And bought it.

Then I came home and wrote this to you.

“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Good night.

Peace.