Shows
Desert Rain ZenDesert Rain Zen Desert Sunrise Retreat, March 2024: Refuge Retreat, 1st night talks: Tenney & MeganSend us a textTenney and Megan give the opening night talks at our March 2024 Desert Rain Zen Desert Sunrise Refuge Retreat, suggesting some ways we can let ourselves fall open to what’s already available, on offer. “There is someone at peace, / walking in the Tao . . . “ (Yongjia Xuanjue, “Song of Realizing the Way”) (talks given March 19, 2024 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center out at Picture Rocks in Tucson) * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid ev...
2026-01-2428 minDesert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, October 2025: “Golden Wind,” 4th night talk: SarahSend us a textSarah gives the talk on the fourth night of our retreat.A group conversation follows Sarah’s talk.(talk given October 16, 2025 at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico) * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us. Desert Rain Zen podcasts are free. If you'd like to support our podcasting and other act...
2025-11-231h 09Desert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, October 2025: “Golden Wind,” 2nd night talk: TenneySend us a textTenney gives the talk on the second night of our retreat. Beginning by exploring various translations of the “Golden Wind” koan and the different feel they give to Yunmen’s response to the student, Tenney brings the case into relation to Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man.” Then, via consideration of commentaries on the case by Xuedo, Yuanwu, Hakuin, and Tenkei, dragons get into the mix. This leads, courtesy of a suggestion made by Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi in a recorded talk on the case, to an exploration of dragon imagery and energies in...
2025-11-231h 01Desert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, October 2025: “Golden Wind,” 1st night talks: Tenney, Megan, and SarahSend us a textTenney, Megan, and Sarah give brief talks on the opening night of our Fall 2025 Open Source “Golden Wind” retreat. A student asked Yunmen, “When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what’s that?”Yunmen said, “The Golden Wind reveals itself.” Blue Cliff Record Case 27 (talks given October 13, 2025 at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico) * About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to...
2025-11-2336 minDesert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, September-October 2024: “Sickness and Medicine,” 2nd night talk: TenneySend us a textTenney gives the second night talk on “Sickness and Medicine,” discussing the Blue Cliff Record commentary on the case and bringing in a few anecdotes, from both his own practice history and the Open Source community. Hakuin says that if you take the phrase “sickness and medicine cure each other” as itself being medicine, that’s a big mistake (it’s too glib). Sickness isn’t “quelled” so simply, through a formula or an upbeat attitude, one-and-done. If not, what might the koan ask of us, and what might it offer us? * About us...
2025-10-2540 minDesert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, September-October 2024: “Sickness and Medicine,” 4th night talk: SarahSend us a textSarah gives the fourth night talk on “Sickness and Medicine.” (check back soon for expanded notes on this episode!)* About us: Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us. Desert Rain Zen podcasts are free. If you'd like to support our podcasting and other activities, you can make a tax-deductible donation on our website at https://www.desertrainzen.org/donate.html
2025-09-221h 02Desert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, September-October 2024: “Sickness and Medicine,” 3rd night talk: MeganSend us a textMegan gives the third night talk on “Sickness and Medicine,” focusing on sickness and suffering not as mistakes to be “fixed” but as inescapable aspects of our vulnerable lives in the world that deepen and humanize our hearts, making us tender and strengthening our practice, our zen minds. Medicine, likewise, takes multiple forms: often it consists of a widening of perspective, a softening of our views about our illness, a sense that suffering might draw us toward others rather than isolate us. “Sickness and medicine correspond”: an always unfolding conversation, a shimmer. Other koans discus...
2025-09-221h 06Desert Rain ZenOpen Source Retreat, September-October 2024: “Sickness and Medicine,” 1st night talks: Tenney, Sarah, & MeganSend us a textOpen Source teachers Tenney Nathanson, Sarah Bender, and Megan Rundel each give introductory talks on the first night of our retreat. Our retreat takes its title from Blue Cliff Record Case 87: “Yunmen said to the assembly, ‘Medicine and sickness cure each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is the self?’” (translation by Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant). Sarah Bender Roshi leads Springs Mountain Sangha in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Megan Rundel Sensei leads the Crimson Gate Meditation Community in Oakland, California. Tenney Nathanson Roshi leads Desert Rain Zen in Tucson, A...
2025-07-2725 minDesert Rain ZenDesert Rain Zen Sunrise Retreat, March 2025: "The World of Dew," 4th night talks: Tenney & MeganSend us a textTenney and Megan each give talks on the final night of the retreat. Tenney brings in a collection of anecdotes to continue exploring the sustenance available when we allow loss and grief to permeate us and intertwine with the radiance and eternal quality of things that practice helps make palpable. Megan muses on the Prajna Paramita teachings and their grounding in our deep and primal relation to the maternal, evoking the receptive, embodied, and pre-verbal aspects of practice revealed in gesture, breath, and rhythm. The Mother of all Buddhas, Prajna Paramita is the...
2025-07-2249 minDesert Rain ZenDesert Rain Zen Sunrise Retreat, March 2025: "The World of Dew," 3rd night talk: MeganSend us a textMegan gives the third night retreat talk, bringing in several Issa poems that focus on impermanence, loss, and grief, then offering an extended meditation on “the world of dew / is the world of dew / and yet, and yet.” How can we allow ourselves feel this “and yet, and yet” fully, letting our hearts be broken when they are broken and feeling and working through our grief as deeply as we can? What makes it hard to do this, and how can our practice help us enter this difficult terrain and accompany our grief, allowing...
2025-07-211h 04Desert Rain ZenDesert Rain Zen Sunrise Retreat, March 2025: "The World of Dew," 2nd night talk: TenneySend us a textTenney gives the talk on the second evening of our retreat (the end of our first full day). Taking up three koans from The Blue Cliff Record that all concern the mysterious interweaving of the ephemeral and the eternal, he focuses on our mobile and multiple human responses to this intertwining of what’s poignant, painful, or tragic with a maybe unanticipated sense of radiance, timelessness, and serenity. The Blue Cliff koans: case 82, “Dalong’s Flowers Like Brocade”; case 18, “Huizhong’s Seamless Monument”; and case 53, “Ancestor Ma’s Duck Flies Away.” A group conversa...
2025-07-1440 minDesert Rain ZenDesert Rain Zen Sunrise Retreat, March 2025: "The World of Dew," 1st night talks: Tenney & MeganSend us a textTenney and Megan give introductory talks on the first night of our Spring 2025 Desert Sunrise Retreat, "The World of Dew." Issa's heartbreaking haiku for the death of his young child is a central focus of these opening talks, and of the retreat. Tenney and Megan each begin to explore the intertwining, in our practice, of our deepening awareness of the stillness and silence at the heart of things with the endless rising and falling that are its manifestations. How might "the deep samadhi of the universe" let us open more fully to our...
2025-07-1224 min