Episode
Circling Back to Ourselves
- Published
- Apr 1, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1641
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://amykisei.substack.com/p/circling-back-to-ourselves
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Summary
Greetings Friends, Happy April Fool’s Day! Last week I had the opportunity to co-facilitate a Zen sesshin in the mountains of West Virginia at Saranam Retreat Center . Sesshin, a zen-style silent meditation retreat which translates as touching the heart-mind, has been a huge part of my adult life. While living at Great Vow Zen Monastery , I practiced sesshin together in sangha for a week every month. Such is the rhythm of monastic life we enter this cauldron of awakening together and let our hearts and minds simplify to reveal their true nature. Preparing for sesshin has a feeling of preparing for death— for opening to oneness is not the ego’s domain. Sesshin is grounded in the aspiration to awaken with all beings. An impossible vow that truly we are entangled in, this springing forth of great love is actualized through our practice—realized in this heart. For the dharma teachings are not just “good ideas” but insights we can come to know in our bones, as our body-mind. There is something utterly incomprehensible about sitting together in silence and allowing ourselves to be touched by the great mystery. To return from sesshin is impossible, and yet—here we are. Back from the dead, changed, transformed. Heart’s silent presence alive in our inter-relations. Vow awakened and lived into here-and-now. This is compassion! During sesshin we practiced with Dogen Zenji’s Mountains and Waters Sutra . Which I have been giving dharma talks on over the last few weeks, during the online Monday Night Dharma. This week we explored the practice of circling back to study ourselves. In the Mountains and Waters Sutra, Dogen says: The blue mountains devote themselves to the investigation of walking; the East Mountain studies “moving over the water.” Hence, this study is the mountain’s own…