Hello everyone,   I have gotten behind in my recording schedule and I am working on getting back in the groove.  So here is a guided meditation that I wrote for our Summer Retreat in the Uinta Mountains. This meditation was inspired by a book written by Hideo Yonezawa where he talks about when we breathe we have no control over it - we just breathe and with each breath, we touch the inconceivable.  So the idea behind this meditation is to help cultivate our awareness of our interconnectedness...

Kakuyo Sensei continues this podcast with ideas of the Four Graces of Won Buddhism and looking how Naikan reflection relates to this grace.    Excerpt   "Gratitude is born out of the realization of how much is given, up until now we have not been able to see the abundance. The small egoic-self’s constant craving and its relentless state of perceived scarcity is finally permeated by the reality of so much grace; by a new understanding of the oneness of life. This is only magnified when...

Kakuyo Sensei continues talking about the Path of Gratitude. In this podcast episode, he shares his thoughts on oneness and the Four Graces of Won Buddhism and how we can cultivate our awareness of our absolute interdependence will all things.    From the podcast "So understanding the truth of our interdependence our mutual resonance as Soga Ryojin writes, our very being is relational; this is oneness – and our natural response to oneness is an appreciative humility. We become aware of...

In the podcast episode, Christopher Kakuyo Sensei talks about the problem with the ideas of deserving and not deserving, and how we all can aspire to transcend the dualism and suffering inherent in these concepts.    "We love our concepts of deserving and not deserving, it gives us a sense of controlling our worlds., I am not saying that we do not need to “earn” a living or do the things that we need to do to be responsible for our families, what I am saying is that our sense of...

 Over the years we have talked a lot about our stories of self and how these stories are rarely examined, and how our sense of a solid, unchanging self is really a creation of these unexamined stories – today I would like to talk more about this – As a child I was raised to be a martyr – my mother being Catholic, unconsciously had sewn the book of martyrs deep within her heart and when I came along, into mine also ...it too became my story, a dubious one at best.  Guy Claxton has...

The title of this podcast comes from a poem by Rumi. “What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”  Here Kukuyo Sensei shares how darkness is not something the be afraid of, but something to learn from.  He draws on various teachers to share their insights and his in regards to the valuable lessons we can learn from the dark, not the dark that can be tamed by electric illumination - but the wild an unknown parts of ourselves –

Kakuyo Sensei starts this talk with a quote from his mentor Gyomay Kubose Sensei,   “ A reporter from a local newspaper came to our house to interview my wife about the Japanese tea ceremony. This report continually asked, “What is the meaning? What for? Why do you do that? What is the purposes for that?” This kind of question was directed at everything in the making tea – at every gesture, every implement. Without thinking or deliberating, my wife finally replied, “No meaning....

“It’s important to take time to have some quiet moments in our lives, otherwise we get caught up in the busy-ness of always having something going on.” Gyomay Kubose Sensei   With this quote, Kakuyo Sensei shares his thoughts on the importance of Quiet in our lives and seeking out silences.

A talk by Christopher Kakuyo Sensei of the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship.  Many people aren't aware that gratitude and grace are a very important part of the Buddha Way - Grace from a more modernist Pure Land Buddhist view can be seen as the "other-power" that Amida Buddha represents.