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PODCAST

Zen Mind

Zenki Christian Dillo

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.

religion & spirituality buddhism

All Episodes

37:52

Best of Zen Mind: Pause for the Pause

Zen Mind ·

2025/10/30

While Zenki Roshi is teaching the Fall Practice Course 'Developing Embodiment' at the Boulder Zen Center, we are re-airing three dharma talks that address fundamental topics and practices related to embodiment. The first one is "Pause for the Pause" which was originally published on June 27, 2024. This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting. It highlights the distinction between the contents of mind and the field of mind. Dogen encouraged his students "to be continuously intimate with t...

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57:40

Embodied Presence – Why It Matters!

Zen Mind ·

2025/10/19

This talk kicked off the new live Practice Course ‘Developing Embodiment’ that just began at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk first defines the ultimate fruition of the Zen path as ‘embodying buddha.’ It’s not enough to understand what liberation from suffering as well as wisdom and compassion mean, our intention needs to be to demonstrate these qualities in each unique situation with our embodied presence, our whole being. The talk then presents the general unfolding of the Zen path, the rol...

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45:02

Nothing Missing

Zen Mind ·

2025/10/02

This talk was given as part of a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It reflects on embodiment practice as the gate to the present and the present as the gate to our true nature. The talk begins with the question, "What is missing in your life?" Happiness, money, love, security? Where does our mind go with this question? Usually to some thought pattern. What happens if, instead, we go to the embodied presence of this moment - allowing our experience to be exactly what it is? What happe...

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58:44

Shot through with Space (Part 3)

Zen Mind ·

2025/09/18

This talk continues and concludes the mini-series on exploring space and spaciousness. This time the emphasis is on mental space. While the two previous talks emphasized practices with visual objects, body, and breath, this talk makes suggestions for how to investigate and work with thoughts. (1) What is there between thoughts; what kind of space do you find there? (2) Where do thoughts come from, and where do they go? Do thoughts have a source? (3) Are thoughts fundamentally different from t...

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52:12

Shot through with Space (Part 2)

Zen Mind ·

2025/09/04

This talk continues the mini-series on exploring space and spaciousness. It presents a variety of practices with gaze, body, and breath that can help us verify in our own experience that the separation of mind from object and self from other is only an afterthought that distorts the original undividedness of space. The experience of undivided spaciousness can help soften conflict, ease trauma, and increase the freedom with which we respond to changing circumstances. We can even relax our sens...

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54:33

Shot through with Space (Part 1)

Zen Mind ·

2025/08/21

This is the first talk in a mini-series on practicing with the experience of space and spaciousness. The exploration starts with a fundamental shift in view… from “space separates” to “space connects.” We are culturally trained to see space as being between things and separating our self from the world, thus reinforcing opposition and alienation. But what if space is connecting and bonding—and beyond that enveloping, penetrating, and accommodating everything as it is? Such a shift can have pr...

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52:45

Breathing Through the Whole Body

Zen Mind ·

2025/08/08

This talk was given as an opening talk to a workshop on “Breath Practice.” It explores breath as our most vital form of nourishment. Breath practice has two intertwined dimensions: supporting health and well-being, and serving as a path of spiritual awakening. The first part of the talk looks at the foundations of healthy breathing, drawing on both science and direct experience. From there, it turns to the Buddhist tradition, highlighting four core principles found in key mindfulness sutras: ...

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40:40

Being Touched By Life

Zen Mind ·

2025/07/24

This talk was given as part of a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It reflects on moments when we are touched by life. Nothing special, just ordinary moments -- washing the dishes, looking at your child, seeing the grasses outside your window swayed by the wind. To be touched by life is maybe our deepest longing. However, the human mind has the tendency to replace the intimacy of direct experience with concepts, stories, and identities, thus alienating itself from what is most fulfil...

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45:03

The Art of Enough

Zen Mind ·

2025/07/10

We human beings tend to generate stress—and sometimes even burnout— by perceiving situations and ourselves as not enough. This talk starts out with the question "When is there enough?" and tries on the view that "Just now is already enough." By recognizing that we are always already significantly supported by breath, food, shelter, and our society (however crazy it might appear), we can learn to rest in a basic satisfaction and inner peace. From a Buddhist point of view, this depends on letti...

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45:22

On Alienation and Intimacy

Zen Mind ·

2025/06/26

This talk was given as part of a Weekend Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center. It examines the feeling of alienation that comes from the mental construction of a separate self with an internal and an external space. What is the cure for such alienation? Learning to locate ourselves in an experiential space, in which all the contents of our lives (the physical world as well as our feelings and thoughts) are allowed to happen just as they are happening. Despite the serious personal and societal pr...

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41:01

The Wisdom and Compassion of Not-Knowing

Zen Mind ·

2025/06/12

This talk was given at the Austin Zen Center. It addresses the twin Bodhisattva virtues of wisdom and compassion. These ideals can sound lofty, maybe even unattainable. However, if we understand them as momentary expressions of the practice of not-knowing, they are near at hand. Not-knowing isn't willful ignorance or the random rejection of knowledge; it is a practice of radical openness in the present moment. Openness means to let go of conceptual frames, comparisons, and habituated stories ...

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41:47

How to Empty the Mind (and Invite Wisdom)

Zen Mind ·

2025/05/29

For many practitioners zazen practice is about quieting the mind. Thoughts and feelings are supposed to stop or at least slow down to achieve peace of mind. When this doesn't work, a sense of frustration or even failure can arise. Two misunderstandings need to be corrected here: (1) a quiet mind isn't a mind without contents; it is a mind that is not disturbed by the coming and going of contents, and (2) the right kind of effort is not to shift attention from one focus (thinking) to another f...

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45:54

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form

Zen Mind ·

2025/05/15

This talk explores the experiential territory of the famous slogan from the Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." At first, the talk differentiates between a realizational and a developmental approach in practice: Are we allowing our experience to be exactly as it is [realizational] or are we trying to alter and improve our experience [developmental]? The two approaches exist in an unresolvable tension but complement and complete each other like a dancing couple—just like empti...

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48:16

Constancy in Practice: Zazen, Views, Relationships

Zen Mind ·

2025/05/01

This talk was given as a closing talk for the 2025 Boulder Zen Center - Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period. It reviews the basic ingredients of practice and summarizes them as (1) daily zazen, (2) working with views, and (3) cultivating relationships. In traditional Buddhist terms, this can be understood as a commitment to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The talk then explores constancy in practice as the most important attitude for making our practice fruitful. Instead of viewing our practice ...

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58:35

Finding Your Energy Body - Sesshin Day 5

Zen Mind ·

2025/04/17

This talk was given as part of a sesshin (7-day meditation intensive) at Boulder Zen Center. It begins by examining the limited view we have in our Western culture of the body as a material object and introduces an alternative view of the body as flow—material as well as energetic flow. The Western word 'energy' is often used to translate the Eastern concept of 'qi,' but this can lead to misunderstandings if energy is understood as the name for a 'quantifiable physical property' rather than a...

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77:05

Unfolding the Path of Practice: Zenki Roshi in...

Zen Mind ·

2025/04/03

This is a special conversational episode. Zenki Roshi is interviewed by Nicky Antonellis, a co-founder of the nonprofit organization, Dharma Gates, which aims to connect young adults to deep meditation practices. One of their many offerings isa podcast which features different perspectives on the Buddhist path. You can find out more on the Dharma Gates website. In today’s conversation, Nicky asks Zenki Roshi about thebackground and motivation that eventually led to him to Soto Zen practice. T...

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43:30

Undivided Activity (Guided Meditation): Life as It...

Zen Mind ·

2025/03/20

This talk is a guided meditation that is part of the commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." Instead of continuing with the line-by-line commentary, it takes a step back and points to the mind, from which we need to listen to Dogen's writing if we don't want to get lost in its apparent contradictoriness and complications. The talk attempts to get everyone on a similar experiential page and to demonstrate that all of us are undivided from the mind of awakening. ...

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58:00

Undivided Activity (Part 2): Liberation and...

Zen Mind ·

2025/03/06

This talk continues the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity." The talk takes a deep dive into how to understand and practice with the two central terms, "liberation" and "actualization," which Dogen presents as intimately linked to life and death. The talk unfolds five interpretive dimensions of life and death as: (1) existential states, (2) biological events, (3) momentary change (appearance/disappearance), (4) energetic states (feeling alive/de...

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48:37

Undivided Activity (Part 1): The Buddha Way

Zen Mind ·

2025/02/20

This talk kicks off the line-by-line commentary on Dogen's fascicle "Shobogenzo Zenki – Undivided Activity," which participants in BZC's Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period study together over the course of 3 month. The talk discusses the title and the first sentence, which together introduce four central ideas: (1) undivided activity (that everything is functioning together), (2) the buddha way (that practice means to engage this undivided totality), (3) liberation (that realizing undivided...

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48:43

Everything Is Functioning Together to Create This Moment

Zen Mind ·

2025/02/06

This talk was given during a Boulder Zen Center Weekend Sitting. It contemplates the phrase "Everything is functioning together to create this moment." It suggests to understand "this moment" not as a time unit but as the infinite experiential space that presents itself here-now. We can approach the experience of "everything" by letting go of the focus on something and allowing the mind to be aware of everything all at once and nothing in particular. Dogen's phrase "forgetting the self is to ...

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