(Photo by Vaschelle André_

ONLINE - Join Zenju Earthlyn Manuel on a three-part series on exploring the shamanic roots of Zen and Buddhism in general. We will also look how to practice with clairvoyance and how that arises sometimes within practices of stillness and silence.

We will sit in silence. listen, and have dialogue.

Three Sundays - August 2nd, 9th, and 16th

Purchase Book at your favorite

This is offered through the San Francisco Zen Center.

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We’d like to see you!

GATHERING IN PEACE at Spirit Rock Meditation Center with Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Osho and Rev. Shinmu Tamori Gibson.

We are excited to share some actual in person and online time with folks on JULY 19th from 10 am - 3 pm.

Meditation, chanting, honoring our ancestors, and drawing on the medicine each of us have honed in our lives. It is time to remember what is already in our bones.

Contact with all questions: Registration@spiritrock.org

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Hello You! Yes, Beautiful You!

I’m so glad that you have signed up on this listserv. First, I want to point you to my upcoming events at zenju.org/events. More to come.

Since I have been making my rounds teaching with the mahasangha including San Francisco Zen Centers (SFZC), I was surprised to see how large my audience has grown in my home state of CA while living in my respite state of New Mexico. The events here so far have been super well attended and engaging. Thank you!! Much gratitude from my heart to yours.

These are horrific times. So, the best thing I can do is keep doing what I do and that is to show up for you and to encourage a journey of liberation like no other. In this effort, I would like to expand my work beyond the walls of where I have been so far. In this effort here are some things that I invite you to do:

· Help us find a regular event space for retreats in Northern CA that can host 50 to 100 people for daytime retreats and multiple day retreats for 30 or so with overnight accommodations and meals.

· Become a paid subscriber by upgrading your subscription from free to paid. See below. With nearly 4,000 supporters and growing weekly being a paid subscriber will enable me to create my own retreats outside of established Buddhist institutions around the country. It will also support my residency at Green Gulch Zen Center as a Teacher-In-Residence. It has been a true gift to have been invited here to live and teach.

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A Zen priest offers helpful suggestions for seamlessly transitioning between daily life and spiritual sojourns.

By Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Jul 02, 2025

Adjustments can be made if the retreat is online, including online posture and appropriate environment around the computer, dress, and state of mind.

Many ask, “How do I enter into a silent meditation ritual/retreat and then re-engage the world upon departure?” Buddhist retreats are not of the “spa” nature but more of a shamanic ritual with deep work within and without. Due to the shamanic effects of meditation, I have shared these guidelines for entering, participating, and departing rituals at home or at retreat centers. The silence will expand the territory of your life and may align you with your breath and perhaps allow life to unfold without tampering with it for a day, week, month, or however long your journey of engaging your mind and body. Eventually, retreats will be seamless—you come and you go. Also retreats will become seamless between your life and the scheduled retreats—just another day. But here are a few suggestions you can adjust to your life:

Entering Rituals

• A week to two weeks prior to the time of your retreat, go to bed early, rise early, sit, eat less (eat mostly green vegetables and brown or forbidden rice, and consume less sugar, salt, etc.)
• Drink calming teas such as tulsi (holy basil).
• Reduce or eliminate alcoholic and caffeinated drinks. Discuss the use of cannabis or other medications with your practice leader as to whether or not it will interfere with your sit. Take your usual medications and do not expect to be cured through meditation.
• Read less; view less TV (news, movies, etc.); lessen phone, email, and social media use; and reduce work and contact with others. Less, less, less. . . .
• Rest, rest, and more rest. Do not go to retreat to rest. Catch up on your sleep so that you are awake for the ceremony. Come energized and do not look for the retreat to energize you.
• Walk more than usual to move angst through the body.
• Bathe more often.
• Refrain from any serious conversations or dialogues that need processing but cannot be completed before your retreat.

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(photo by Vaschelle André)

How do we settle the mind, rest the mind, given the turmoil of our times? What shall we do when we hear something in the news or disturbing information we fear? How can we settle the mind with what we are or will be confronted with as we face things in the world out of our control? Do we need years of meditation or is there something more immediate, more accessible, more innate than the practice of meditation? Is there a more sublime meditation than the kind that follows instructions? Can we let the mind rest? Can we let the mind be perfect as it is?

Once a student at one of my talks said that they had been trying to meditate and it was making them suffer. The person’s facial expression showed anguish. I leaned towards the student in a room of about sixty people, and said, “Stop meditating.” I said this at a Buddhist meditation center, wearing my Zen Buddhist robes. It was an offer to the student to not struggle; to stop forcing themselves to reach for some idea of a meditative state of being; to forget about levitating above the shaky ground of suffering and drifting off into the heaven of nirvana.

I wanted to throw that person off their cushion or seat of meditative achievement. I wanted to dismantle the expert mind of knowing how to meditate. I feel it important to startle meditators and shake them loose from the habit of meditation, the notion that thoughts are the worst thing that can happen to a meditator. My interest is to encourage meditators to expand the walls of meditation beyond instruction, posture, time spent, and methods of breathing—to cease targeting their meditation upon their perception of transformation or change that is inherently already taking place. Many say they don’t have time to meditate. This is because they see the act of meditation as something in which one steps out of or stops their lives and then returns with a clear mind and a happy heart. It is as if they go into some invisible magic box and erase all thinking.

In asking aspirants to stop meditating I’m turning hardened views of meditation towards the nature of mind as already free and allowing the mind to remain free of our alterations.

Many are taught in regard to meditation to pay attention, to cultivate, to be mindful, to be in the present moment, to count the breath, to cease discursive thinking, to concentrate, to achieve emptiness, to think non-dually, to look deeply, or to do something to stop our minds from being a problem. Some are taught to listen and yet this listening often becomes yet another task to accomplish.

Many try to do the things I just mentioned all at the onset of their meditation practice and then try to master it all within a month or two. They feel they must hurry towards a profound state of focus and a unified consciousness of the highest reality. They must hurry so that all suffering can cease and so that all is good at their job or in relationship with loved ones. The practice of meditation then becomes an intellectual effort, a task, hard work in the midst of other hard work, a place of struggle, and even perhaps a source of suffering. What would it feel like to climb down from the ladder of mastering meditation and to land on relief, on a peaceful relationship with the mind?

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Protesting in spirit. Always rejuvenating for the long haul.

These are not religious words. This is a call. Can we be here for it even with the ever familiar fear and anxiety rooted in us from living in this world?

Touch the earth for that is who and what we are and nothing else.

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One of the largest rituals this country engages in is casting votes, to make our marks, to say something. We may cast a vote, not only for oneself, but, for those who are ill or incarcerated, for those who are illiterate, for those who have lost interest. We do this knowing that the outcome of voting is actually something we cannot really see in an instant. We cannot see the results today or tomorrow. Because the outcome of the ritual is not only about who won and who loss. It is about our coming together every four years; our desires expressed, a chance to return love and honor to those who fought for the participation of all in this ritual. And yet, this ritual induces false security for some and doubt and fear for others.

Our fear that things will get worse, tends to lead to things getting worse. When driven by fear we fall to those who prey on our terror, rage, pain, loneliness, and need for salvation. Our collective fear today is whether or not anyone can live as who they are in this country or in the world, despite being right, middle, or left on the political continuum or off the linear political path all together. Our fear is whether or not our own strategy will eventually work even though it has failed many times.

A week before this election, I spotted a large Silverado truck and a huge blue flag with red stars mounted in the back. The flag said, “Kamala sucks.” I had my eye on the truck but lost track of it

as I headed to a doctor’s appointment. I wasn’t feeling very well. Although hatred is not a human right, it is a human flaw. Soon the driver was alongside me honking his horn. He started towards my car and made a great effort to forced me off the road with his truck. It must have been the thrill of his day because it’s very difficult to find a black woman alone driving anywhere in New Mexico. He thought he had scored in a game in which he was as invisible as me. He may have been telling me that I suck too. But this life that I am living is in the hands of something that wants me here, something more powerful than him. My life is also in the hands of my ancestors. This he did not know. He did not know his ancestors were also with him.

Our shared suffering is less than one degree from each other. Our shared liberation must be the same. No matter who won this 2024 presidential election, twenty-four years into a new millennium, there is something that we all must do more than ever. We must keep faith in those around us. We must relish and cherish the relationships of family and friends no matter their human flaws. It doesn’t mean we have to suffer other’s suffering but the way to our liberation is to forge, with our heat, all that is broken in this country into a kind of freedom we never imagined we had the power to shape. I say this because it is only us that we have and only us who will need to stand at the doors to protect our free communities, free spaces, free loved ones, and more—not as protectors of people only but protectors of what has always been sacred and that is life itself. We must value all life even in the middle of all life not being valued.

Are we ready and capable of dismantling the distorted perceptions we have of each other that are now strangling us, personally and collectively? No matter what gender, what skin tone—and there are more than two genders and two tones—we must ask what is it that causes us to do or fear not doing what we know shouldn’t be done? How will we lift the noose from around our own necks so we can do the same for another?

If possible we will live in the difficult and in the more difficult and in the difficult after that not because we are becoming stronger but because we know that freedom is tied to what we create out of what sits at our feet. Freedom is to not long for what a president, alone, could never give us. Can we feel the freedom we already have despite things causing us to feel otherwise?

Can we change the ritual? Look into someone’s frightened or confused face today and say, “I got you. I got you.” Saying it out loud is one way but saying it in your heart silently is also a way to access innate empathy, recognize the world’s grief, for the sake of everyone’s wellbeing. Can this be our sacred campaign forever?

Link to article on Lions Roar Magazine: https://www.lionsroar.com/to-have-and-to-hold-each-other/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGYXz1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUPc49zzVQ0FCqqggwKzN-IxR8E-GJ-j787kpseYz9TsA30voa3-N343qg_aem_g3gWenYaG4Mknz5gaMupTw

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We are saying more than ever that these are horrific and scary times. There is no greater need then now to settle the mind, to be still, so that what we are clear on how to take action. The scattered, fearful, judgemental and blaming mind will only keep us in the direction of more suffering.

Oftentimes we find ourselves running to our altars when we need saving or when we are at a loss. In this weekend time together, we will explore ways to move from a crisis-oriented meditation practice to one that is a sacred way of life. How can we attune our habitual meditation activity to ancestral wisdom? Discover how to transform your sitting practice into one that consistently honors the ancestors, the land, and all sentient beings.

Please join me ONLINE for an evening of dialogue and Q&A and the next day filled with chanting and meditation hosted by Spirit Rock Retreat Center. Let’s see what we can invoke besides our habit of struggle.

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It’s been a while. With the loss of a partner and the ordination of three folks, I have been swirling about. To be busy while grieving is not easy. I’m looking forward to more stillness and sanity in 2024, at least that’s the wish.

PLEASE COME. I will be giving an ONLINE talk for Tara Mandala Retreat Center on January 20th. Below is the link to register. Let’s explore the darkness we live in. What is it’s purpose?

Darkness: The Landscape for Transformation

REGISTER AT: https://www.taramandala.org/programs-2/15307/

You might also enjoy this bonus talk with Lama Tsultrim and myself:

https://www.taramandala.org/wisdom-rising-podcast/episode-library/episode-17

I look forward to seeing you in the new year.

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A THREE-PART DHARMA TALK SERIES with Upaya Zen Center, with Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. She will introduce teachings from her new book, Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times.

Keynotes:

Our longing for light and the call to "enter our caves"

The connection between the bias toward light and the oppression of Black-bodied people

The notion of "the absence of light"

Going beyond what is taught and learned about darkness and blackness

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Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s powerful new book, Opening to Darkness, was written during the peak of the COVID pandemic—a time when the entire world was trapped in fear and there was nowhere to flee. There was also a rise in anti-blackness at the time. This period of deep darkness inspired Zenju Osho to ponder if there is a way to live in unsettling times that most humans have forgotten. “I felt called to share teachings about darkness, so I asked myself, ‘What do I, a black-bodied person who has lived my entire life through systemic oppression, know about darkness? What is it about darkness and blackness that terrorizes us so much that we run from it, rather than go deeper into it? How can we experience dark times, with the skill of an awakened one?’”

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