Podcast
Zen Mind
Hosted by Zenki Christian Dillo · EN
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the Guiding Teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the Center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom, and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within Western cultural horizons while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodied practice.
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Episodes
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How Practice Takes Shape (The Role of Vow)
3w ago00:53:11Tap to summarizeThis talk was given during a zazen intensive at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk holds a question often left unasked: what is the role of vow in Zen practice? It opens with a confession of skepticism. Vow can become superego, a new identity to monitor against. The talk works through this tension by tracing how way-seeking mind emerges from the friction of misrepresenting ourselves as substantial, separate selves within a reality that is undivided activity. Just sitting already contains the dynamic of practice: a backward step into undifferentiated awareness and a forward step into responsive engagement. Vow's role is not to add discipline on top of this. It is to keep reconnecting practice to way-seeking mind, because for most of us its felt urgency is not consistently present.Welcome to Zen Mind! Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-pacedIf you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Make Your Whole Life the Garden
Apr 3000:45:53Tap to summarizeThis talk is about how aliveness wants to unfold through our life process. It opens with the question of what it means to find an activity that expresses one's aliveness (for example gardening), and how to widen it so it can inform all of life's activities. The talk names five unfoldings of a "realizational life": aliveness, order, expression, form, and Way. Each requires the practitioner's awake participation; none can be skipped or forced. The talk also names three ways aliveness can be displaced rather than expressed in the present: deferral into the future, nostalgia, and longing for an imagined other life. A turning word is offered for each. The talk closes on the practice that holds the whole movement together—noticing where one actually is and meeting that place fully. To be awake to the unfolding is already a realizational life.Welcome to Zen Mind! Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-pacedIf you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →This Mind Here Now is Buddha
Apr 1600:46:23Tap to summarizeThis talk was offered on Day 3 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center, continuing the investigation of mind begun the previous day (published two weeks ago). The inquiry turns to the koan exchange between Damei and Matsu: "What is Buddha?" – "This very mind is Buddha." Dogen warns that students have misunderstood this teaching in two ways. The first error is to equate Buddha with the ordinary functioning of mind—thinking, feeling, perceiving—which leads to complacency: if I'm already Buddha, why practice? The second error is subtler, taking the field of awareness as an eternal soul or spiritual essence that stands behind and survives the passing show of experience. Both errors are forms of grasping. In one we grasp the contents of mind, in the other we grasp the field itself. The solution Dogen points toward is not a third thing to grasp but a release from grasping altogether. When Dogen says "the mind is mountains, rivers, and earth," he is not pointing to something behind experience but to full inhabitation of form, both liberation and a more complete entry into the world as living, dynamic appearance.Welcome to Zen Mind! Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is now available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-pacedIf you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →The Mind is Mountains, Rivers, and the Earth
Apr 200:42:40Tap to summarizeThis talk was offered on Day 2 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center. It takes up a classic koan exchange: “What is the wondrous clear mind?” – “Mountains, rivers, and the earth. The sun, the moon, and stars.” The talk invites practitioners to investigate where the mind is located in their own experience, moving through a progression: from the familiar default of a private chamber behind the eyes, to attention merged with breath traveling through the body, to the senses opening outward until the visual field, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations all become part of a field of mind. The questions “What is the mind?” or “Where is the mind?”, asked in a Buddhist context, are not just philosophical but probe which views of the mind support or hinder liberation. A distinction between the contents and the field of mind is necessary but can lead to subtle forms of dualism. This is countered by the teaching of emptiness, which reveals the mind to be not a static expanse but a dynamic, ungraspable mystery and the self to be a moment-to-moment expression. This is what makes the mind “wondrous."Welcome to Zen Mind! We are excited to announce that the self-paced course, Developing Embodiment, is available! Taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, this course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. You'll investigate what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment supports a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. You can learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-pacedLove the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Resonance - In Touch with the Root of Compassion
Mar 1900:51:20Tap to summarizeThis talk is from the Practice Course "Developing Embodiment," originally offered live at the Boulder Zen Center and now available as a self-paced course. It challenges a common assumption, that ethics is a luxury, something we attend to once our basic needs are met. Drawing on evolutionary perspectives, the talk suggests the opposite: cooperation and care are existential facts for human beings, built into our very survival as a species. Compassion, then, is not a virtue we impose on ourselves but a capacity we already have. The Sanskrit root of compassion, karuna, means something like "to be shaken" or "to quiver"—a bodily experience. We are stirred by the presence of others, moved by their suffering, drawn out by what we encounter. The talk explores how this resonance is rooted in openness rather than contraction, and how being moved is not a problem to solve but a capacity to inhabit. The practice is to notice when we contract and to open again. The talk also addresses how, in a world with so much suffering, we can relate to our compassionate impulses without shutting down.Welcome to Zen Mind! We are excited to announce that the self-paced course, Developing Embodiment, is now available! Taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, this course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. You'll investigate what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment supports a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. You can learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-pacedLove the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Completing the Past in the Present
Mar 500:47:49Tap to summarizeZazen reveals how much of our mental struggle is bound up with time. The future presses in as plans, goals, and ideals of what we or the world should become. The past returns as memory, justification, and attempts to reinterpret difficult experiences—often in the service of protecting an image of who we are. In a psychological approach, we might be guided to explain and rearrange our story in healthier ways. In meditation practice, however, when the past resurfaces, it becomes an opportunity to complete what wasn’t fully lived. Completion is not perfect resolution. It is meeting a situation fully and openly. This can change our view of time altogether. Rather than an abstract series of points, time is the dynamic of living situations asking to be met and completed.Welcome to Zen Mind! Our annual Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period is well underway. Practice Periods are guided by Zenki Roshi together with members of the Practice Council. The 2026 Practice Period emphasizes the study of Dōgen’s fascicle Being-Time (Uji). Learn more here: https://www.boulderzen.org/practice-period-2026Following the Practice Period, a full commentary on Being-Time (Uji) will be offered later this summer as a self-paced course. To be notified when it launches, please join our mailing list.Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Noticing with Subtlety
Feb 1900:49:24Tap to summarizeThis talk was given as a practice encouragement before entering the silence of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It highlights aspects of zazen relevant for any practitioner. It begins with three observations: we cannot think our way to the fruits of practice; awakening is an accident, though meditation makes us accident-prone; and many meditators, after an initial period of dramatic transformation, watch their practice plateau. So what do we do? The suggestion is to notice experience with greater subtlety in three arenas: posture, breath, and the field of phenomena. The upright posture reveals tension and, over time, opens into a subtle energetic balance—lifting through the spine and grounding into the earth at once. Breath attention becomes a gateway to a refreshed, warm feeling. The world itself begins to shimmer with quiet delight. Practice may plateau, even feel boring, but when balance, warmth, and delight in ordinary appearance settle into something familiar, separateness softens—not as an achievement, but as a new way of being.Welcome to Zen Mind! Our annual Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period is well underway. Practice Periods are guided by Zenki Roshi together with members of the Practice Council. The 2026 Practice Period emphasizes the study of Dōgen’s fascicle Being-Time (Uji). Learn more here: https://www.boulderzen.org/practice-period-2026Following the Practice Period, a full commentary on Being-Time (Uji) will be offered later this summer as a self-paced course. To be notified when it launches, please join our mailing list.Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Timelessness, Change, and Everyday Life
Feb 500:46:55Tap to summarizeThis talk was given as an introduction to a multi-week study of Dogen’s essay Being-Time (Uji) during the Boulder Zen Center Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period. It doesn’t go into the details of the text yet but sets the ground for engaging Dōgen (or any difficult dharma text) not as philosophy, but as practice. The question isn’t about the nature of time (what it is), but how we relate to time in ways that bind us or free us. Our ordinary assumptions about time operate invisibly, shaping anxiety, expectation, and disappointment. Through everyday examples—broken machines, shifting plans, bodily limits—we see how attachment to what should last creates suffering. Practice invites a different intimacy with impermanence, not as an idea but as lived experience. The key to this is a shift in how we attend to the present moment, which leads to shifts in our sense of time and our sense of self—thus opening the gate of transformation.Welcome to Zen Mind! Our annual Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period is currently underway. This three-month period offers an opportunity for Sangha members to come together and deepen their practice through individually designed schedules, supported by Dharma teachings and peer-to-peer Sangha dialogue. Practice Periods are guided by Zenki Roshi together with members of the Practice Council, and the 2026 Practice Period emphasizes the study of Dōgen’s fascicle Being-Time (Uji). Learn more here: https://www.boulderzen.org/practice-period-2026Following the Practice Period, a full commentary on Being-Time (Uji) will be offered later this summer as a self-paced course. To be notified when it launches, please join our mailing list.Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Staying in the Zone of Nourishment
Jan 2200:49:42Tap to summarizeThis talk was given at the opening of the 7th 90-day Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period at the Boulder Zen Center, as participants were clarifying guiding intentions for the months ahead. Zen practice—and life more broadly—organize themselves around what we commit to. Rather than emphasizing goals, intention is presented as direction: the way attention is shaped and sustained. From this view, positive change does not come from forcibly fixing or cutting away what is unwholesome. Practice is instead to nourish what is already wholesome, allowing what is unwholesome to wither from lack of attention. Nourishment becomes a guiding orientation: staying in the zone of nourishment, investigating what truly supports life, and trusting one’s own sense of it—while recognizing that personal nourishment and true wholesomeness is inseparable from the well-being of others and the living world.Welcome to Zen Mind! Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Become a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/Our annual Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period is now underway! This three-month period offers an opportunity for Sangha members to come together and deepen their practice through individually designed schedules, supported by Dharma teachings and peer-to-peer Sangha dialogue. Practice Periods are guided by Zenki Roshi together with members of the Practice Council. The 2026 Practice Period emphasizes the study of Dōgen’s fascicle Being Time (Uji). Learn more here: https://www.boulderzen.org/practice-period-2026See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →Receiving and Unfolding (On Right Intention)
Jan 800:40:49Tap to summarizeAt the turn of the year, we often pause to reflect, set intentions, and imagine a better version of ourselves ahead. Yet often we experience a stubborn gap between those ideals and the lived texture of daily life. This talk questions whether that gap can be closed through effort and control, or whether something else is being asked of us. After reflecting on traditional Buddhist teachings on right intention and critiquing them from a Zen perspective as dualistic (a self trying to improve itself over time), attention turns toward the present moment itself. What if liberation is not postponed to the future, but available now? Through zazen and beginner’s mind—allowing experience to be exactly as it is—intention becomes less about fixing ourselves and more about a continued pulse of receiving the texture of this situation here now and trusting its unfolding.Welcome to Zen Mind! Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Become a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/Our annual 'Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period' is now open for registration! The 3-month Practice Period is an opportunity to come together with other members and deepen your practice with an individually designed schedule supported by a variety of Dharma teachings and peer-to-peer Sangha dialogue. Practice Periods are led by Zenki Roshi, BZC’s Guiding Teacher, together with members of the Practice Council. The 2026 Practice Period will emphasize the study of Dogen's fascicle 'Being Time' (Uji). Learn more and register here: https://www.boulderzen.org/practice-period-2026See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.
Transcribe →