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Flex-bod = Flex-mind?

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This young man from Seoul will be joining our three-day intensive silent retreat at ZCR this weekend. I met him last week during the visit to Korea, and he contacted us just now and asked to join our experience this week. Fortunately for him, there was a sudden cancellation.


Usually, with beginners, a big part of my concern needs to be extended to whether or not they can handle the regimen of 10 hours per day of formal practice. This is especially true if I have no previous sense of their practice. I had heard that he is also a yoga teacher, but that is never a guarantee: some people who have had the hardest, most physically intimidating experiences in a Zen retreat, in my experience, have been experienced teachers of yoga, believe it or not.

So, our team needed to do a little research. We actually curate these events pretty closely.

Scrolling through his social media presence, I’m guessing now he won’t have at least some of the usual problems with the extensive sittings.

My students in Korea informed us that the young man is an up-and-coming top model, active in Asia and Europe. He will take a bus down to Regensburg immediately following a big photo shoot in Berlin.

Still, there is no guarantee that flexibility of body, in itself, is even the slightest guarantee that someone can persevere through the vagaries of their own restless thinking-mind as it settles, over several days (many filled with uncontrollable imagery and unfiltered remembrance), into the infinite stillness of our Now-nature. As I said, I have experienced several boldface-name yoga teachers actually shorten their commitment to retreat here after finding the work of sitting meditation to be far too difficult for them to handle. This, despite their decades of work in the Buddhism-adjacent field of yoga , the very mother from which Buddhism sprang!

But it’s certainly inspiring that a man of his age and social/professional flow is willing to take the dive, isnt it? We will do our best to help him find his latent inner-seed that animates his flexible stalk. I am motivated to do everything possible to guide him back to his unborn root.

Zen-Dialogue on Social Media (2): Jesus Christ (Superstar)!

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Again, the policy is: a public statement made openly on social media might cause someone to put time into replying. And that reply might sting a little bit — like any visit to the dentist — but the reply is time and effort given over to helping to guide that person’s assertion in the light of Dharma.

If you have made that effort publicly, and I have put time and energy into replying publicly, then there is nothing “confidential” about sharing it with those lucky fuckers not overly-connected to Facebook.

So, to welcome people into our Dharma Room for retreat, my Team suggested that we advertise, which I used FB to do:

Then, the replies:

Eventually, you find what you are dealing with:

(And Mark David Chapman’s “boss” was the same as his.)

Zen-Dialogue on Social Media (1): “Hard/Soft-Hacking”

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Yesterday, as our Zen Center Regensburg crew began ramping up the in-house video systems to livestream our upcoming silent retreat online, I changed my “profile picture” on FB to emphasize our community’s return to livestream broadcast of the practice. We do this live-streaming for the many people who wish to connect with the practice, but who cannot actually travel here for the retreat itself. There is no other gaining-idea in the project, which requires a great deal more daily concern and attention that you could imagine.

The image I chose for the profile is a photo which was taken two years ago, during lockdown, by one of our members who was practicing together along with our daily lockdown during the pandemic. It shows the practitioner, a certified “ethical hacker”, sitting beside a computer screen broadcasting our Dharma Room during practice.

A very good and sincere Zen student sent me an interesting reaction on FB to some detail in the photo.

Since the commentator commented publicly on social media, and because I replied publicly, there is no need to obfuscate for purposes of confidentiality. But it seemed worthwhile to report it here for those who do not (deep respect to you!) use social media — Facebook in particular. Already several people told me that there might be some teaching value in the exchange:

Our daily livestream can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/user/cloudpath108/streams