Our practice is to enter Zen from here — from whatever is happening right here, right now — through our senses. However, entering is just the beginning. What happens once we have entered?

Gyodo Sensei offers reflections on the precious refuge of Sangha, the growth of Eon Zen Center over the years, and practice intentions in 2025.

During Rohatsu Sesshin, Gyodo Sensei reflects on our Ango Practice Period and the Jukai Ceremony earlier in the day where four members received the precepts. Drawing from the final chapter in Maezumi Roshi’s Appreciate Your Life, “Shakyamuni and I are Practicing Together,” he encourages us toward this same deep realization. Appreciate your life as the very life of the Buddha.

During the final week of Ango leading up to Rohatsu Sesshin and Bodhi Day, we are inspired by the Buddha’s awakening -- when he realized his true nature. Many of us have this aspiration, which can motivate us to practice.

Gyodo Sensei explores the spiritual theme of poverty through the koan “Seizei, a Poor Monk" and Maezumi Roshi’s chapter "Pure in Heart" from Appreciate Your Life. We carry around so much, all day, every day. Habits, opinions, ideas desires, plans, ambitions. We also carry around our self-centeredness. What happens when we let these go?

In Zen practice, we study our reactivity to things, the extra reactions we put on top of uncomfortable feelings. In this way, the uncomfortable feelings become the most powerful gateway for practice.

In this talk, given during an introductory retreat, Paul Gyodo Agostinelli Sensei offers an overview of the practice and teachings of Zen Buddhism and responds to questions, comments, and check ins from newer practitioners attending.

True appreciation is a deep and intimate practice. It requires a quality of attention and acceptance which may be difficult at first. In this talk, Gyodo Sensei offers some steps to deepen into full open-hearted appreciation. We’re told by the dharma that our life is the life of the Buddha. Can we really see that and experience that directly?

Dukkha, often translated as “suffering," is more precisely translated as insufficiency, or dissatisfaction. The Buddha taught that this is the root of our dis-ease. The Buddha also taught that there is One — our Buddha Nature -- who is completely satisfied. What gets in the way of you being satisfied?

Gyodo Sensei offers encouragement as we enter our Fall Ango Practice Period, which we might think of as a “walled garden.” We are all guardians and tenders of this garden. How do we do this? By taking good care of our lives and nurturing our practice.

In this talk, Gyodo Sensei gives an overview of the tradition and theme for our Fall Ango intensive practice period, and shares about Eon Zen's Ango programs. Ango, which translates as "peaceful dwelling,” has been a traditional 90-day practice period in Zen for centuries.

In Buddhist practice, we see that the human condition creates a basic self-centered attitude which is unsatisfactory and causes suffering — this is the first noble truth. With continuous practice, or "Gyoji," as described by Master Dogen, there is a shift in the basic attitude towards our life.

How do we work with challenging feelings when they arise -- sadness, fear, anger, guilt and shame? It is common to want to avoid or push these feelings away. However, when we don’t identify with them, strong feelings are often a powerful doorway to non-dual consciousness.

Gyodo Sensei share reflections on the practice of weeding at our July retreat. As any gardener knows, weeds seem to continuously proliferate and we must take care of them or they will take over. What are the weeds of our life — the weeds on the inside?

Zazen is simply being with life as it is. Without any need to change it, grasp after it, or figure it out. It isn’t a passive, however — in Zen, we see how we are actively engaged with our life AS life, which is endlessly, infinitely changing and fluid. It is also seamless; this infinite variety, which is our life, is one with unity. How do we experience this unity within differences?

While we may find there is an organic unfolding of our path of practice in the dharma, there are often clear moments when we take a turn into a deeper commitment to practice. And other times where we are diverted from the path, like an eddy in the stream, not really growing or progressing.

In Zen we talk a lot about no self — but what is this no self? It points to the reality that there is no "fixed" self. We actually have many selves, perhaps an infinite number of internal perspectives, all co-existing. Some, perhaps, in conflict with others. How might we love, nurture and integrate all of our selves to be more fully embodied in our lives?

Gyodo Sensei explores a passage from Hongzhi's Cultivating the Empty Field on leaving home: "Face Everything, Let Go, Attain Stability." When we truly leave home in the deepest sense, letting go of the attachments and habits of our conditioning, we come home to our life.

In this talk, Gyodo Sensei share a passage from Hongzhi's Cultivating the Empty Field titled “ The Practice of True Reality.” The practice of true reality is to be present with true reality, even when we face hardship or adversity. Zen path embraces meditation as the front door for shifting our relationship with ourself and our hardships. To practice true reality, vulnerable and open, tender and unhindered.

The antidote for the poison of ignorance of delusion is wisdom, or clear seeing into our true nature. But this wisdom is not something you can attain — and there is no shortcut. It arises as embodied experience through the practice of not-knowing or not-abiding in anything. Including not abiding in not-abiding. No one to abide. No one to not-abide. Not getting stuck anywhere.

In the Shobogenzo, Dogen encourages us to “simply release and forget both your body and mind and throw yourself into the House of Buddha.” Releasing our ideas about the ways things are, our preferences, opinions, and truths, and our desire for clarity, "then there can be no obstacle in anyone’s mind.” This spirit of practice is essential.

Ignorance is one of the three poisons that the Buddha taught which create all suffering, and it’s also the root of all three. To counteract ignorance, we have to choose to live with what is, including our confusion — to radically accept everything, including ignorance itself. This is the spirit of the Holy Fool, the grace of foolishness. Can you live like this, and also not attach to ignorance either?

The first collection of koans in our lineage is called the Mumonkan, or Gateless Gate. Mumon himself says “Zen has no gates”? And yet we chant “Omnipresent Dharma Gates I Vow to Experience.” How can something be both a gate and no gate at all? How do we experience a gateless gate?

When we turn the light inward and become a lamp unto ourself, we find our true power, our agency. In our delusion, we often give this power away. What type of wisdom and power unfolds when we make the decision to practice? How does agency differ from willfulness? How do we take responsibility for our actions, for our life?

The Buddha taught “Be a lamp unto your self.” To study the self, to become fully intimate with our life, we practice not resisting or grasping at anything we experience. Through this practice, we fundamentally shift our relationship with ourself, and find our true power — our agency — in our life, in our relationships and in our work in the world. This is the path of Zen.

What is delusion? Zen Master Dogen said "To carry youself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is enlightenment." Do you experience yourself as experiencing things? Or is life just happening?

Physical and Mental Postures are the essence of our Zen practice. By committing to and bringing our attention to postures of stillness, non-reactivity, non-thinking and non-interference in both our body and our mind, a transformation happens.

Our Zen practice is actually quite simple: be fully alive. When we experience our life fully with -- as Shishin Roshi encourages -- awareness, courage, and tenderness, we wake up to our true nature and find liberation. This is the essence of the Bardo teachings.

GYODO SENSEI | Impermanence is a primary seal of Buddhism -- it is the reality of life. Everything is always changing. We’re always in transition from one state to another. Our habit patterns of our mind are not very oriented to appreciating this constant transformation. Bardo practice help us to experience this at the most intimate level.

Faith, Doubt and Determination are the Three Pillars of our Zen Practice. Together, these qualities can serve as a firm foundation for our practice and as a useful guide to see where we may be out of balance.

In our life, we make and cling to distinctions, alive and dead, dreaming or awake, enlightenment or delusion — but it’s not like that. Everything seems to have a real existence, but when we look deeply and see reality as it is, we realize the line from the Lotus Sutra: "this fleeting world is like a phantom, like a dream.”

Tibetan Teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote about the experience of the Bardo as being both confused and awake at the same time, of the possibility of experiencing both absolute sanity and complete madness simultaneously. Both/And. This bothness is the quality of awakeness, of Zen -- to have all of our experience present at the same time.