Category Archives: Nona Strong Roshi

[AUDIO AND TEXT] I woke up this morning and found myself treading water in a deep well of, “I don’t know.” I’d had a dream that featured the cast of the original 1960s TV series, “Star Trek” – you know, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley; the rest remain faceless. I have no idea whyContinue reading “not knowing is most intimate”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] The world today is all jumbled up, as we all know. We strive to find a way to reconcile, internally or otherwise, the wars and injustices we see with the promise of peace that is offered by our various religious and philosophical traditions. But where does that reconciliation lie? Here is St.Continue reading “idealism or realization?”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] This is the first talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the August 2023 East-West meditation retreat at Mercy Center Burlingame. Most of you probably are familiar with the opening line of Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities. I knew that line – “It was the best of times,Continue reading “regarding life’s dualities”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] This is the second talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the August 2023 East-West meditation retreat at Mercy Center Burlingame. Yesterday we talked about life’s dualities – the seemingly irreconcilable opposites that we encounter every day and everywhere. And last night, we read a selection from an early Christian mystic thatContinue reading “plenitude and emptiness”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] This is the third talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the August 2023 East-West meditation retreat at Mercy Center Burlingame. We’ve seen that we have a broad field to play in when we come to any silent practice, whether it be Christian contemplation, Zen meditation, or some other tradition we haveContinue reading “divine consolations and divers gifts”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] This is the fourth talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the August 2023 East-West meditation retreat at Mercy Center Burlingame. In his book Listen to the Desert: Secrets of Spiritual Maturity from the Desert Fathers and Mothers (© 1996, Liguori Publications, Liguori, MO), Fr. Greg Mayers cites this anecdote about aContinue reading “our fundamental inquiry”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] Here’s a seminal verse that’s attributed to Bodhidharma, the Indian sage who is said to have brought the dhyana (zazen) meditation that became Ch’an to China and then to points East, with other names: A special transmission outside the scriptures,Not depending on words and letters;Directly pointing to the mindSeeing into one’s trueContinue reading “recognition and resonance”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] During a recent gathering of friends, the subject of discarding old stuff came up among us. This “stuff” might be in the form of books, unopened and unread for years; clothes, unworn since then (whenever “then” was); photos, unseen since we carefully and lovingly pasted them in scrapbooks (which many of usContinue reading “leaving ourselves behind”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] A personal confession. Back in olden times, that is in the late 1980s, this person that you’re looking at took a sojourn into the world of Lifespring, a self-discovery group that ultimately got branded as a cult and a dangerous, mind-breaking fraud. (There was probably a bit of the pyramid scheme involved,Continue reading “living in the question”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] Tonight I’d like to offer some expressions from a teacher named Susan Murphy, who comes to us from the lineage of Robert Aitken Roshi and John Tarrant Roshi. In her book, Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary (Wisdom Publications, Boston, © 2006), Susan Murphy shares her experience of living ZenContinue reading “just sitting”