To Be or Not to Be
How do we live with this outrageous fortune?
Matthias Esho Birk
Matthias Esho Birk is a Zen Dharma Holder in Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s White Plum Lineage and teaches at New York’s Still Mind Zendo. He is also a psychologist, leadership trainer, and executive coach, teaches leadership at NYU and Columbia University, and has taught meditation to organizations such as Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and the United Nations. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two young kids, and when not with his family, on a cushion, or at work, he can probably be found trying to catch a wave in the Rockaways.
Immature Practice Imitates, Mature Practice Steals
Inspired by a child’s drawing, a Zen teacher expounds on the nondual nature of piety.
Personal Reflections Zen Buddhism
Sitting Long and Getting Tired
A teacher on the all-inclusive nature of Zen meditation
When Is a Word Dead?
A Zen teacher revisits the timeless words of one of poetry’s most cherished writers to explore the limits of language in expressing the ineffable.
Parmenides, Descartes, and Awakening
What two Western philosophers can teach us about practice
Enlightenment Is Broadway
Stripping away the ritual and finding Zen at the checkout line
Personal Reflections Death & Dying
Zen and ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’
What Albert Camus and the absurdists can teach us about our wandering minds
Personal Reflections Zen Buddhism
At the Beginning You Hold the Structure, Then the Structure Holds You
How the Zen practices of form and structure hold the key to being with uncomfortable states of mind
Forgetting the Self at a Party Full of Strangers
How tending to the very thing we fear can offer a path to awakening
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