Jonathan Prescott describes how indolence is failing to act on what we know. We can be indolent by doing too little, but also by doing too much. This is the 5th talk in the 8 Realizations of Great Beings practice period.

8 Realizations - Talk 5 - Indolence

Ignorance is the contraction of awareness. It is the foundation of our suffering. Jonathan Prescott describes how ignorance traps us and how the miracle of mindfulness offers a way back to the freedom of the present moment.

8 Realizations - Talk 6 - Ignorance

Our adversaries allow us to see more broadly and act more skillfully. Can we find ways to make those adversaries more beautiful? Jonathan Prescott offers tools to help us open our hearts and work with everyone, even those we've learned to reject.

How To Love Your Adversaries

The Buddha once banished 500 noisy monks from the monastery, sending them on a muddy march across India. Jonathan Prescott explores why Buddhist teachers sometimes behave strangely. How can we understand and make use of their unexpected teachings?

The Buddha Did THAT?

Pain and suffering enter all of our lives. How do we meet that suffering so that it transforms us rather than defeats us? Jonathan Prescott looks at what suffering is, how it arises, and how to practice with it.

Transforming Suffering

Mercy isn’t often explored in Zen but it is a powerful way to release attachment and deepen joy. Jonathan Prescott tells stories of mercy and invites us to become more merciful.

Mercy

Jonathan Prescott explores Right Effort, one of the elements of the Buddha's 8-Fold Path. He shares stories and insights to help us find the balance between effort and ease.

Photo credit: Steamfitter, by Lewis Hine, 1920

Effort And Ease

Bright Buddhas show us how to be free. Shadow Buddhas show us how to suffer. In this talk, Jonathan Prescott offers a 3-step practice to help us embrace our Shadow Buddhas and turn them into transformative teachers.

Embracing Our Shadow Buddhas

The Buddhist Sutras are gems offered by our spiritual ancestors. This talk explores the origins of Sutras from the Theravada and Mahayana traditions and how we can use them to wake up.

Sutra History

Jonathan Prescott describes our Zen practice forms and how we use them to unearth the freedom that lies just beneath our veneer of suffering.

Taking Refuge in Zen

We spend our lives looking for love. But love has been in our hearts all along. Join Jonathan Prescott as he explores how you can feel the joy of meeting life with love.

Meet Life With Love

Jonathan Prescott describes how the precepts arose from the Buddha's awakened mind. All these centuries later, the precepts still call us home to our own awakened minds.

Practicing The Precepts

In an effort to protect ourselves, we wall ourselves off. But this very wall becomes the source of our suffering.

In this talk from Radiant Light Zen's Interbeing of Suffering and Liberation retreat, Jonathan Prescott offers practices to liberate us and shows how love and surrender are powerful tools for dissolving our protective walls.

Take Down Your Wall

We all suffer. And we suffer because we create a war between how things are and how we want them to be. 

Jonathan Prescott shares the story of his own suffering and how the Buddha's example inspired him to end the war with his life.

This is the first talk given by Jonathan Prescott at Radiant Light Zen's Interbeing of Suffering and Liberation retreat and focuses on suffering. The second talk, Take Down Your Wall, focuses on liberation.

The War Inside Us

We often come to meditation practice with an aspiration to alleviate and transform our pain.
Yet for many, sitting in silence with awareness of the breath may actually be quite stimulating rather than calming.
In this talk, Monica Kingsbury will explore how Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness helps us better understand how our brain and nervous system function as we practice, allowing us to maintain safety and emotional regulation.

This talk was offered at Radiant Light Zen's Interbeing of Suffering and Liberation retreat.

Compassionate Trauma Informed Practice

Suffering and liberation are intimately bound together on a continuum of interbeing, intersection, and interpenetration. Liberation is the birthright of our Buddha nature, available to us in every moment. Shining the light within we touch our original nature. Therein lies the liberation we seek. 

This talk by Michael Melancon was offered at Radiant Light Zen's Interbeing of Suffering and Liberation retreat, on October 11, 2023.

Suffering Is The Key To Liberation

Deep within all of us is a golden Buddha. It's been there all along, radiating goodness and wisdom. But because we feel vulnerable in this challenging world, we've covered this precious gift with a 'self' that traps us in a cycle of suffering. 

Join Jonathan Prescott for an exploration of our own goodness. We'll look at the price we must pay to awaken, paid bit by bit with the transformed fragments of our separate selves, so that the Golden Buddha within can emerge.

The Price Of Awakening

In this talk, Jonathan Prescott helps us understand and feel our grief. He describes common types of grief and offers ways to practice so that we can transform our losses into compassion.

Practicing With Grief

13 centuries ago, Zen Master Deshan encouraged us to grab the life of an ordinary person. What did he mean? Jonathan Prescott shows how our ordinary lives can be our awakened lives. We just need to stop.

Grab An Ordinary Life

In Jonathan Prescott's final talk to the Anacortes Mindfulness Community, he offers a concise map of Zen practice, beginning with the establishment of happiness and ending with the depth of Zazen.

Zen Simplified

Jonathan Prescott offered this exploration of hospitality to the Guemes Island Community Church. Jonathan uses poems and stories to reveal deeper aspects of hospitality, including the call to welcome those we don't agree with.

Hospitality

The Buddha taught that ignorance is the root of suffering. To ignore means to turn away from the truth. While speaking to the Guemes Island Community Church, Jonathan Prescott shows how Buddhism and Christianity both point towards overcoming ignorance through awareness and love.

A Buddhist View of Communion

Jonathan Prescott offers a 3-step process for spring-cleaning our hearts so that we can restore relationships that have soured over the long pandemic winter. This talk was offered to the Guemes Island Community Church

Cleaning Your Heart

Welcome to week 6 of The Anacortes Mindfulness Community's 8-week long Four Noble Truths practice period. In this talk, Jonathan Prescott introduces the Noble 8-Fold Path and dives into Right View and Right Thinking. Think non-thinking!

5 - 8-Fold Path 1 - 4 Noble Truths Practice Period

The truth of impermanence can feel like a slap in the face: We're going to lose everything we love, everyone we love, and, eventually, our own lives. But in reality, impermanence is good news. It is a gateway to happiness. In this talk given to The Anacortes Mindfulness Community on May 21, 2019, Jonathan Prescott explores how to embrace life's ever-changing nature.

The Interbeing of Happiness And Impermanence

In this talk given at the Puget Sound Zen Center, Jonathan Prescott cuts to the bone and addresses a realization that's difficult to face: Knowing that you will die. This seemingly bad news is actually good news because it spurs us to explore how this finite body expresses reality's no birth, no death nature.

Knowing You Will Die

What do we mean when we use the word, ‘Love’? It commonly refers to preference, greed, infatuation, lust, affection, and more. But in Buddhist practice, ‘Love’ means something different.


Loving-kindness (along with compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) is a Brahmavihara - a facet of Awakened Mind that is vast, bottomless, non-personal, and fully developed within each of us. Loving-kindness isn’t like the set of afflictive mind states we usually refer to when we use the word ‘love’: When love is a preference, attraction, or transaction, it afflicts us with desire and it’s inevitable shadow, aversion.


Loving-kindness is an inexhaustible love that arises from Awakened Mind. It flows universally to the ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’; to those we like and don’t like; to those who benefit us and harm us. We don’t need to develop loving-kindness: we simply need to practice ardently so that the barriers to loving-kindness within our hearts and minds soften and allow True Love to flow. 


Metta practice is an effective way to transform personal qualities that prevent the flow of True Love. Traditionally, loving-kindness is offered first to yourself, then to others who are close, neutral, and distant from your heart. I suggest that we practice this only for ourselves and trust that loving-kindness will tell us when we’re able to extend it to others.

Here’s the practice: 

Breathe in and out with the following phrases, allowing them to unfold at their own pace. You don’t need to figure them out. When done daily, the practice becomes a joy.

May I be filled with loving-kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.

On the in-breath, accept whatever is present. On the out-breath, relax completely and allow loving-kindness to breathe out. This cycle of ‘breathing in life, and allowing loving-kindness to breathe out for you' is very healing. It is a lovely way to flow with this moment. This is the practice of love.

Love

Thanksgiving gives us the chance to offer thanks for our 
 abundance (thanks-giving) and to celebrate our ability to give 
 (thanks for giving.) 

 Because we live this balance between gratitude and generosity 
 in the often challenging environment of our extended families, 
 I ’d like to offer 5 practices that can help us align our behavior 
with our ethical aspirations.

See the Process: Everything changes. The Buddha taught that much of our suffering comes when we see things as fixed and ignore their ever-changing nature. How might you apply this insight to those you consider adversaries? Rather than hang a sign on your adversary labeling them ‘difficult’ or ’stubborn’ or ‘jerk’ could you instead see that they are in the process of growth and change?

Give Away Control: When you identify and uphold your bottom-line principles, you have a firm spine. This then allows you to offer a soft front for incidental tussles that come along. How might living in the balance between a firm spine and a soft front allow you to be kind to your adversaries?

Let Go of Anger: Many of us carry anger about other's past behavior. We hope that our hard hearts will somehow punish or exclude them, but in reality, our anger harms only us. What would it be like to let go of your anger towards an adversary? How might you feel lighter and more free?

Help Your Adversaries Be More Beautiful: Everyone has a beautiful seed within them. We can choose to water those beautiful seeds or we can water seeds of conflict and strife. What are your adversary’s beautiful seeds? How might it change your relationship if you watered them?

Help Yourself Be More Beautiful: There’s only one you. We need you to be the most beautiful person you can be. What would it be like if you gave yourself permission to be beautiful right in the midst of difficulties? How might your beauty change the situation? How might it help others?

Please don’t wait for conflict to begin practicing these techniques. We can practice them in every moment so that, when conflict arises, we have confidence in our ability to embrace change, give up control and anger, and water beautiful seeds.

Getting Along With Others

This week we enjoyed our first-ever Anacortes Mindfulness Community online gathering. We shared our open-hearted presence without sharing any pesky viruses :) 

We began our Peace Is Every Step practice period by learning a bit about Thich Nhat Hanh, including what led him to write the book we’re currently enjoying. For more information about Thay’s life, explore this article.

Thay can’t be understood deeply without also understanding the Sangha, particularly Sister Chan Khong, his long-time companion and a great teacher in her own right. A lovely article about her can be found HERE

We read aloud the first four chapters of Peace Is Every Step and Jon offered some insights based upon his own practice of them. You can listen here:  Podcast.  

Next week, we’ll examine pages 11-20: Thinking Less, Nourishing Awareness in Each Moment, Sitting Anywhere, Sitting Meditation, and Bells of Mindfulness. Please read them often and allow Thay’s gentle poetry to sink into your heart. How does practicing with Thay's words effect you? How do these practices feel in your body? What insights arise?

eSee you next week!

Peace Is Every Step 1 - Introduction

Guest teacher Michael Melancon shares warm wisdom about using COVID to see more deeply into our relationships with the earth and our practice.

COVID As Metaphor - Michael Melancon

If we want to escape being victims of our mind, we have to understand how our mind works. A map helps; even (and especially) a simple one. The simple mind map we’ll look at today has only two elements: perception and evaluation.

Perception: Our mind perceives what arrives through the senses. Humans have many ways to perceive the world (more than the traditional five senses) and in Zen we recognize that the mind is also a source of perception. Our mind takes in lots of data yet we are aware of only a little. Becoming aware of what we perceive is called ‘mindfulness.' Mindful living is enjoyable yet we don’t often simply perceive and enjoy things as they are. 

Evaluation: The ego mind fixates on evaluating objects of perception, constantly asking, ‘Will this person benefit me, or not? Will this activity get me what I want, or not?’ So when we notice a perception (mindfulness), instead of remaining with that perception over time (concentration), our mind quickly begins evaluating whether what is seen or heard or thought about benefits itself. We abandon the experience of ‘just this’ in the pursuit of ‘just me.’

Mindfulness practice is the art of embracing perception. We know what is present; we remain with what is present; we embrace what is present. Living in this way is joyful. We are freed from the constant dissatisfaction of seeking our own benefit. We learn to regard our preferences as passing thoughts and drop our demand that things be like that rather than like this. 

Ajahn Chah, the great Thai Master, said: If you let go a little, you’ll have a little joy. If you let go a lot, you’ll have a lot of joy. If you let go completely, you’ll have complete joy.’ 

Test his words for yourself. Let go of evaluation a little. Do you feel a little joy? Let go a lot. Do you feel a lot of joy? Your own experience is your most reliable mind map.

Untangle Your Mind

This week, we returned to the ‘our minds are a mess’ theme and looked unflinchingly at the three-ring-circus of our minds. Even as we resolve to sit in meditation and simply observe, we find ourselves almost instantly swept into our minds' dramas and ruminations. In Buddhism, we name this experience samsara. In English, we name it delusion.

Naming helps. Naming is a three-step practice:

Name what is - We practice mindfulness to become aware of what is happening, simply noticing our sensations, thoughts, emotions, and perceptions

Allow what is - Once we see what’s happening, we allow it to be present. This takes courage and kindness. It isn’t easy.

Name what is - We gently give our experience a name, such as ‘anger,’ ‘frustration,’ or ‘rumination.’ 

Naming in this way gives us clarity. We see how we habitually create similar experiences over and over, and when we see that what we name is our own creation, it’s easier to let it go.

But naming isn’t enough. Naming our mind’s tangles doesn’t transform them. For this, we need to practice un-naming, or signlessness. The Buddha taught that when we create signs (another word for names) we also create delusion. Signs become simple shorthands for complex realities. When we engage only with the sign, we fail to engage with the underlying reality.

One sign alive for us today is the sign of race. Long ago, humans noticed that there were differences among us; we varied in skin tone, eye shape, hair color, and more depending upon where our ancestors lived. We created such signs as ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘asian.' These signs helped us distinguish one from another but they also became barriers for seeing that all humans are one. 

Signlessness is a deep practice. It invites us to look past surface qualities and instead see interbeing. Thich Nhat Hanh poetically invites us to see the cloud in our tea, the compost in the rose, the mud in the lotus. 

Practicing Zen means living in the balance of naming and un-naming. We lean into naming when necessary and into un-naming when necessary, not getting caught in either extreme. This allows us to see beyond self and other, beyond subject and object, beyond perceiver and perceived, yet also to act in this world of names. It is a path with nowhere to stand, yet we stand everywhere.

A Dharma talk is just a sign. Don’t be satisfied with the names I use. Please touch the reality for yourself.

Naming And Un-Naming Our Experiences

Dharma talks presented to Radiant Light Zen by Jonathan Prescott, Michael Melancon, and other RLZ teachers.

Radiant Light Zen

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