Claralynn Nunamaker grew up in Chicago. She first encountered Chinese philosophy when at university and particularly resonated with the Dao De Jing. She studied Chinese and spent some time in China before moving to moving to Ukiah, California, home of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas Chan Buddhist monastery. It’s there that she became a practising Buddhist. Soon she became involved in the Theravada Forest sangha in northern California and her interest moved her to learn the Pali language in...

Steve grew up in a Christian family on the Shetland Islands (off the northern coast of Scotland) and was very involved in church growing up. This provided the foundation for a life-long interest in spiritual investigation, philosophy, world mysticism, and body-awareness realms of practice. He has an interest in extreme outdoor survival, and works closely with the well-known therapist Michaela Boehm. Steve teaches a wide range of movement and meditation practices and works with leading figures...

Charlie Morley is a bestselling author and teacher of lucid dreaming, shadow integration and Mindfulness of Dream & Sleep. Since early childhood, Charlie has been fascinated by lucid dreaming. His interest in Buddhism was piqued after reading “The Art of Happiness” by the Dalai Lama on a long flight when he was just 16, and just a few years later he took refuge in Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. After being instructed in the Buddhist practice of lucid dreaming by Lama Yeshe...

Matt has asked that I use only his first name to preserve his anonymity. Matt has been a member of the Zenways sangha for some years. He came to meditation originally through an interest in Asian martial arts and is now an authorised teacher of the Jhana practice method taught by Leigh Brassington. Matt has high functioning autism (Aspergers Syndrome). In this interview, he explores his unique perspective on the intricate world of human interactions, where everyone he meets is essentially a...

Spencer Sherman’s journey started in the late 80s when he had a panic attack and ran into his burning office building to retrieve his client files, sparking a realisation that he had valued money higher than his own life. This inspired him to begin a journey into meditation which brought him face-to-face with his issues around money. In the years that followed, he learned how to befriend his pains and tightly held beliefs and to transform his understanding of identity and wealth. Now based in...

Born in Netherlands, Geshe Namdak completed his university studies in Hydrology and went on to work as an environmental researcher. He found Buddhism via a martial arts practice and a general leaning towards a spiritual perspective on life. On a work visit to Tibet, he encountered the Tibetan style of Buddhism and felt drawn in that direction. He decided to become a monk and commit to the 20-year programme of becoming a Geshe in the Nalanda tradition at the remote at Sera Jey monastery in...

Rehena was born in South Africa to a Buddhist family of Indian origin, who had been brought to South Africa during colonial times as indentured labour (her ancestors are originally from Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment). She grew up in heart of the apartheid movement in a racially segregated area with many other families of Asian descent, and had an education in activism from an early age, with her parents being heavily involved in the anti-apartheid movement....

The ah-un meditation comes from the Rinzai Zen tradition and is a powerful practice for waking up, centering our awareness and energising the hara (belly). It may feel a bit weird at first (and sound strange), but the proof is in the pudding...! Try it and see how you feel. The more familiar you get with this practice, the less physical movements and sounds you'll need. These are helpful in the beginning to create this energising quality, but over time you might find you only need only one...

Evan Williams is a professional French Horn player in an operatic orchestra in Germany and part of the Zenways sangha. Aside his concert appearances, Evan is also a music therapist and passionate about influencing people’s health in positive way through music. He came to meditation after being inspired by his brother to stop reading about it and actually do it! His first serious encounter was on a 10-day Vipassana retreat where he found a sense of contentment arising from within for the first...

Generating the intention or wish that all beings feel well and happy.  The meditation starts by encouraging you to wish loving kindness to yourself. Then it asks you to intensify and expand that feeling to the point where it feels like it's overflowing. Then we bring a friend/loved one, a neutral person and finally a difficult person to mind and send them our loving kindness. The practice finishes by encouraging this loving kindness to grow like an expanding bubble to embrace the whole,...

Zenways sangha member Frank Cook has worked in finance as a stock broker until his retirement a few years ago. He first got into meditation in the 1990s as a way of helping him deal with the stresses of work and having a young family, and has, over the years, primarily practised mindfulness of breathing and metta (loving kindness). In our interview, Frank describes how he’s found the breath-focused meditation of more immediate benefit - helping him to “dial down the noise”and step back from...

Sandy Rinko-an Chubb is the guiding teacher at the Oxford Zen Centre, UK, in the Sanbo Zen lineage. She began Zen practice with Master Yamata Hogen in 1987, then continued her study with Sister Elaine MacInnes (founder of the Oxford Zen Centre) and John Eiun-ken Gaynor, and was appointed Zen Teacher in 2013. For ten years, Sandy was director of the Prison Phoenix Trust, an organisation that offers meditation and yoga to prisoners and prison officers in the UK and Ireland. In our interview,...

Shelley Albrich is a high school art teacher based in Eugene, Oregon and a member of the Blue Cliff Zen group led by Shinkai Roshi (who I interviewed a few episodes back). She encountered Zen and Buddhism via a yoga class that Shinkai was teaching, when he invited the class to come on Zen retreat with him. In this interview, we talk about how her Buddhist practice influences her creativity - both in her personal work and teaching. She describes how she sees part of her practice as fostering...

Bradley Jinaiyo Nussbaum is a Lay Minister with the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness and is based in New Jersey, USA. He is a social worker with a background in addiction and substance abuse and currently works in a hospice. His journey into Buddhism began when a colleague brought up the role of spirituality in mental health treatment and addiction recovery, and it occurred to him he had never included this important dimension in his own work, or indeed in his own life. After searching around...

My podcast has been going now for a year! Thank you so much to everyone who has listened over this time. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to share with you interviews with some very inspiring people, which I hope you’ve enjoyed and got a lot out of. And we’ve got some great people lined up for next year… In this episode I thought it would be nice to do a Christmas special and talk, myself, about a particularly thorny area of practice: spending time with family – which for many of us sums up...

Birgitte Dosanjh is a physiotherapist and pilates teacher, and mother of two: Iona, 5 and Oskar, 2. Although it’s a slight departure for this podcast to speak to someone who doesn’t identify as a Buddhist or have a regular meditation practice, Birgitte has resonated a great deal with my book “Zen and the Art of Dealing with Difficult People” and wanted to share some of her own amazing insights here around dealing with her children. (Full disclosure: Birgitte is one of my wife’s oldest...

Satya Robyn is a Pure Land Buddhist teacher and co-runs the Bright Earth Pure Land temple in Malvern, UK with her husband. She’s also a a psychotherapist and author – her latest books are 'Dear Earth: Love Grief and Activism' and 'Coming Home: Refuge in Pureland Buddhism'. In this interview Satya talks about her involvement in climate activism and her acts of civil disobedience taken in conjunction with XR Buddhists and other inter-faith groups. She tenderly describes how her practice...

Matt Shinkai Kane Roshi is head of the Blue Cliff Zen Centre in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Before that he spent 7 years as a monk in Japan under Zen master Shinzan Miyamae in Gyokuryiji, becoming a teacher in 2012 and given transmission in 2017. He’s also a Zen Yoga teacher and is on the faculty in the University of Oregon’s PE mind-body department. In this interview, Shinkai talks about his time as a young monk in Japan training under Shinzan Roshi. He describes how Shinzan had a special knack of...

Russell Razzaque is a consultant psychiatrist working within the NHS, and author of “Breaking Down is Waking Up” (Watkins, 2014), a book that explores the relationship between psychological breakdown and spiritual awakening. His work involves research around creating systems of care based on mindfulness, embodied listening and giving patients agency in the decisions made around their treatment. For a number of years he’s been involved in bringing a revolutionary new psychiatric treatment...

Wendy Shinyo is a long-time Buddhist practitioner and lay minister with The Bright Dawn Center of Oneness. She is also the host of the podcast, "Everyday Buddhism: Making Everyday Better", and works as a life coach, meditation teacher, and spiritual companion. In this episode Wendy talks very honestly about how her practice was turned upside down during the pandemic after she started to feel anger and act irrationally with people close to her. She experienced these people as very ‘other’...

Bhante Vannyapamsa grew up in Sri Lanka in a Catholic family. He was drawn to Buddhism in his teens after a poignant encounter with an enlightened monk. After becoming a monk himself in Burma, he moved to the UK to study for his masters in cognitive science and has since founded the Dhamma Center in Colchester, Essex. In this episode he talks very lucidly about his personal experience with working with prisoners in India, Burma and the UK. He candidly discusses the difficult time he had when...

Jason Christopher is a London-based member of the Zenways sangha. He came to Zen through Christianity after he started meditating with a group run by a Christian minister with a long-time interest in Zen. In this episode, he discusses the effects of his upbringing, the emotionally dependent relationship he’s had with his parents, and his journey through psychotherapy and meditation. He describes a dramatic shift some years ago where he was able to drop out of the world of thoughts and...

Pete Cherry joined the Zenways sangha in 2012 after having already been a yoga teacher for many years. He is now a trainee Zen teacher and regular in the community. He lives with his wife and son in London. In this episode, Pete discusses how jealousy and envy have always been his biggest troublesome sticking points. He’s learnt how the need to ‘get even’ or ‘prove yourself right’ can so easily highjack you and take over your actions through the strong magnetic pull of emotion. After...

Scott Snibbe is an interactive media artist, entrepreneur, and meditation instructor. He’s been a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism for many years and is host of the popular “A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment” podcast. In this episode, Scott discusses the very troublesome situation that arose after his grandfather’s death, when he was sued by a distant relative who’d hoped for an inheritance and thought Scott had embezzled his grandfather’s savings. Scott very honestly describes the pain and...