Excerpt   When I first started to explore and examine this precept, my first inclination was to feel guilt for taking paper clips from work or printing things for personal uses on my work computer.  Funny, that I found ways around it Like buying a ream of paper to replace the 40 pages I used. I started to make sure I paid for all of my Trax rides. I did start to examine some of my motivations for doing what I was doing, but for me, most of these simple practices were very superficial and more...

Even though the precepts were not directed to the community directly, they are all about community. The precepts are about action and intention.  I appreciate this from Wendell Berry, “ To act in short is to live. Living is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. And one does not live alone. Living is a communal act… He goes on to quote Emerson, “I grasp the hand of those next to me, and take my place in the circle, to suffer and work.” I love the lack of sentimentality in these words. For...

Excerpt from the dharma talk.   The heaviest burdens we can carry are the burdens of the past- either for something that was done to us or done by us, and we spend so much time there.   I have talked about this before, that we are constantly time-traveling from the past to the future and rarely present in the flow of now.  We fix ourselves firmly in the past or because our dissatisfaction with the present or our unwillingness to change in the present, we travel constantly to the future,...

From the dharma talk,   "Whatever it is inside of ourselves that we are running from – that is what we attend to because we know we can come as we are. As Jung said, I would rather be whole than good. This is meeting each other in the open field – the pure – land – out beyond good and bad. This is attending to yourself.  This acceptance is the opposite of spiritual bypassing.   When we attend to ourselves and others, we take the journey into all the places we have hidden our suffering,...

This is something I have been thinking about in our current environment. With so much polarity in our greater community, we stop listening to one another and when we do we start seeing one another as enemies. The Buddha taught 2600 years ago that hatreds never cease through hatred ... through love alone they cease. This is an eternal law. The challenge we face is that our own righteous anger can be a barrier to listening and close us off from love. Sometimes I think we fall into this trap...

excerpt "The first thing we need to remember is that the five precepts are fields of practice and not a checklist of our failures- that sometimes the commandments were for me. Our relationship with them can be contemplative in nature and whose manifestation comes from within in a natural outflowing instead of from guilt or shame of some external ideal. The ethical ideal is not something outside of ourselves but something that comes from with us and flows outward. They are the practice that...

From the dharma talk   "Many appreciate and value the teachings of the Buddha,  post endless memes with quotes he said and never said, there are some who have got out of bad marriages, bad jobs because of something they read or heard on a Buddhist podcast – and all this is the fruit of the teaching. At the same time, going for refuge is more than just an intellectual appreciation of the Buddhas Brains. Going for refuge is not simply an activity of thinking, of ideas or concepts but the...

excerpt...   "Awareness practice is not just breathing in and breathing out, it's not just noticing the breathing of your lover or the dharma talk of a meadow of wildflowers, it is also going down in the muck and mud of ALL of who we are, not just the curated parts of who we share on Facebook.   Awareness practice supports our aspiration to forgive and be forgiven, it is at the heart of accepting who we are as we are, and others as they are, and this aspiration is at the heart of come as you,...

  excerpt from the Dharma talk delivered May 26th in Salt Lake City.   "..that brings to my mind the Mojave desert at night - the Mojave Desert Preserve is also a dark skies Preserve meaning that any artificial list is restricted and it is one of the few places that you can see the Milky Way the way our ancestors did for millennium - Lots of tourist come get of the tour bus and look up at the night sky for about 5 minutes and say “that’s nothing I can see that at home”  disappointed they get...

excerpt of a talk given on May 12, 2019, in Salt Lake City.   I really love this from Gyomay Kubose Sensei. He was talking to a bright you man who said his mother did nothing for him growing up, that she only caused him trouble. I appreciate this insight from my teacher.   In ordinary moral life and modern utilitarian point of view if someone was kind to us then we express our thankfulness. This is to say, if we received some benefit, then we expressed thanks and appreciation. This kind of...

Dharma talk given May 5th in Salt Lake City   Excerpt "Here is something that many are not aware of and I have heard this before but just found this quote  Samyutta Nikaya,   “We will develop and cultivate the liberation of mind by lovingkindness, make it our vehicle, make it our basis, stabilize it, exercise ourselves in it, and fully perfect it.” The Buddha    So what is the Buddha saying is the path to cultivation a liberated mind? Loving-kindness. Loving Kindness is the way, the ground...

Dharma talk delivered April 26th, 2019 by Christopher Kakuyo Sensei at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship    Excerpt from Intimacy with All Things,  If I am a stranger to my own mind carried away by the rise and fall of thought and feelings I am going to be blind to see the grace that abounds and the final aspect of intimacy that I want to talk about is, the cultivation of the practice of intimacy with “all things”  as Dogen teaches   When we forget ourselves then we are awakened by the...

below is an excerpt from Dharma talk given at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship Aril 21st 2019   I want to start from the account of the Buddha’s retelling of what happened on during the night just before his awakening experience.   From the MahaSaccaka Sutta and for me this has become the practical understanding of non-self for my everyday life.   “When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, & attained to...

From Already Broken a Dharma talk given March 31st, 2019 at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship.   "Without an intimacy with impermanence, our whole lives are spent in what we can do or will do tomorrow or we spend time worrying about the past, not living in the here and now. The problem is that we think we have time. We don't. Living without an intimacy with impermanence, our lives lack a deep transformative gratitude and in its place, there is a subtle but stifling entitlement. Somehow we...

A Dharma talk given By Christopher Kakuyo Sensei at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship March 24th, 2019   " On first blush – Impermanence, suffering, and non-self – this sounds rather dreary. Nothing lasts, life is suffering and you’re not anybody after all. The curious thing about this and the insight of the Buddhas is actually the opposite, understanding impermanence, the nature of suffering and our true selves is actually the path to boundlessness, equanimity, and joy. Our engagement with...

From our Right Speech Dharna talk "As humans, we are worded beings – we engage with the world through the abstraction of language. The thing we call “us” is a language created story. It makes sense that words can both heal and harm and reveal and hide. Our very existence in a languaged existence; verbal and non- verbal. Is that the reason we all long to be heard, to be deeply listened to?"

an excerpt from a Dharma talk given Jan 27th at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship by Christopher Kakuyo Sensei   " I don’t think that violent images make us more violent  but I do think that it makes us numb to violence, and also teaches us to objectify the "other" as objects that we can justify hurting or killing because they are different from us, because they are bad, because we do not see them as "subjective" beings with; fears, hopes, dreams and their own tender suffering that may be...

  "Our aspiration is for awakening but If we decided to wait until we are awakened to help others, what good would that be. Our vows are the vows of ordinary human beings sparked by love, we vow to become wounded healers. Our awakening is in the vow itself " - Christopher Kakuyo Sensei

"I don’t know" also applies to our practice. When we think we Know with a capital K what mediation is, what Buddhism is, what awakening is, even who we are, we cut ourselves off from what these really are and by so doing we keep them from manifesting in our lives naturally, unhindered by our silly meddling."   Christopher Kakuyo Sensei

In this Dharma Talk, Christopher Kakuyo Sensei looks at how we can get stuck in the past and how doing so pulls us away from the ground of being that can only be found in the flow of "Now".   From What are you Carrying,   " My biggest reason for visiting the past was to find the answer to the chant-like question that echoed in my heart and in my head, "Why me?, Why me?"  Why me? is ultimately an unknowable question. Maybe it is the first "koan" we are ever given. In my own experience,...