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Sarah gives the fourth night talk on “Sickness and Medicine.” (check back soon for expanded notes on this episode!)

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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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Megan 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 discussed include “Dongshan is Unwell” and “Master Ma’s Sun-Face Buddha Moon-Face Buddha.”

*

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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Tenney 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:

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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Open 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, Arizona. All these groups hold regular events on Zoom.

(Talks given September 30, 2024 at the Open Source Mahasangha Retreat held at 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 activities, you can make a tax-deductible donation on our website at https://www.desertrainzen.org/donate.html

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Tenney 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 Perfection of Wisdom; the loom of origins and the source; the Tathagata Garba or womb of Buddha nature that we also carry within us; original perfection.

 A group conversation follows the talks.

  (talks given March 8, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center 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 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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Megan 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 its transformation, and our own? 

A group conversation follows Megan’s talk.

 (talk given March 6, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center 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 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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Tenney 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 conversation follows Tenney’s talk.

 (talk given March 5, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center 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 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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Send us a text

Tenney 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 experiences of joy, and also of heartbreak and loss?

Tenney Nathanson Roshi leads Desert Rain Zen in Tucson, Arizona. Megan Rundel Sensei leads the Crimson Gate Meditation Community in Oakland, California. Together with Springs Mountain Sangha in Colorado Springs, led by Sarah Bender Roshi, these groups comprise The Open Source, founded by Joan Sutherland Roshi. The Open Source is part of the Pacific Zen School, co-founded by Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant.

(talks given March 4, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center 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 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

For more information you can email us at desertrainzen@gmail.com or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com