Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

Joan Halifax | Zen Buddhist Teacher Upaya Abbot

The Upaya Dharma Podcast features Wednesday evening Dharma Talks and recordings from Upaya’s diverse array of programs. Our podcasts exemplify Upaya’s focus on socially engaged Buddhism, including prison work, end-of-life care, serving the homeless, training in socially engaged practices, peace & nonviolence, compassionate care training, and delivering healthcare in the Himalayas.

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50 episodes
Updated Monday

Episodes50

Newest first

Monday · 1 hr 24 min
The Measure of Our Humanity: WISDOM
In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity series, Roshi Joan Halifax opens with a guided meditation grounded in stability, breath, and the bodhisattva’s aspiration to meet suffering with mercy and care, before introducing Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi. In the main session, Bhikkhu Bodhi explores what he calls the “world-sustaining Dharma” — the moral order that Buddhist teaching asks us to bring… Source
Monday · 47 min
Open Dharma: Taking Refuge in Community
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Senseis Kodo and Dainin join Roshi Joan Halifax as she explores what it means to live and take refuge in spiritual community. Drawing on decades of building and residing in community herself, she traces valences of the three jewels — Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha — to their most human dimensions. Refuge, she suggests, is not rest in the ideal alone… Source
July 20 · 53 min
Caught in the Self-Centered Dream
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Koshin Flint Sparks takes up an old question posed to the Buddha’s disciple Mahakaccana: what drives our conflicts? Mahakaccana answers that conflict arises from our attachment, adherence, fixation, addiction, obsession, and holding firm to our personal views and pleasures. Koshin answers the same question, borrowing language from Joko Beck’s four-line practice… Source
July 13 · 38 min
The Transformative Power of Suffering: Finding an Appropriate Response
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Genryu Clayton Dalton — emergency physician and novice priest — draws on stories from his hospital work to explore how we can meet suffering without turning away from it. Memories of long-ago encounters in the ER, returned to and turned over again, have become a kind of teacher: moments of violence, grief, and quiet tenderness witnessed at the bedside… Source
July 6 · 34 min
Breathe with Your Ears
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Butsumon Tuck Stibich describes teaching the GRACE program — Roshi Joan’s framework for compassionate action — to a class of cadets training as correctional officers. Butsumon admits to having judgments and expectations going into the training, and his surprise when cadets explained their reasons for being there: faith, family, and a wish to give others the… Source
June 29 · 42 min
Appreciate Your Life: Reflections on Interbeing
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, delivered on the eve of the 15th anniversary of her twin sister Ellie’s passing, novice priest Jimon Lorene Flaming tenderly opens the bittersweet space of her sister’s life and death. Jimon traces Ellie’s path — a woman who lived entirely on her own terms, spending her life in nature, deeply embodied, trusting the flow of life — and the shock of losing not… Source
June 22 · 41 min
The Raft and the Shore
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin takes us through the currents of the Buddha’s raft metaphor — where practice becomes binding together grass, twigs, and branches to cross from a shore that is dangerous and fearful to one that is safe. Drawing on Dogen’s Uji (Being-Time), Fushin challenges the notion of completion, suggesting there is actually no shore to rest on: “There’s no… Source
June 17 · 32 min
Planting Life 2026: Corn, Culture, and the Living Stars (Part 6b)
In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries… Source
June 17 · 1 hr 55 min
Planting Life 2026: Corn, Culture, and the Living Stars (Part 6A)
In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries… Source
June 17 · 1 hr 3 min
Planting Life 2026: Rewilding
In this fifth session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax gathers the community around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Person Born to Farming” — reading it aloud, line by line, drawing participants into its imagery of soil as divine drug, of entering death yearly and coming back rejoicing. The poem becomes a lens for the day’s planting, and a doorway into the concept of sympoiesis — the understanding… Source
June 17 · 1 hr 10 min
Planting Life 2026: Indigenous Education
In this fourth session of Planting Life, Porter Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — historian, anthropologist, and executive director of Hapo Community School — brings a thoughtful and generous account of what it means to reclaim education on indigenous terms. At the heart of his talk is a clear distinction: “Education is something we do inherently as human beings that never ends. Source
June 17 · 54 min
Planting Life 2026: Ancestral Knowledge
In this third session of Planting Life, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — sculptor, farmer, and founder of Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute — offers a quiet and generous tour of Pueblo agricultural knowledge. Speaking at her first public appearance since a serious accident, Roxanne moves through the ancestral farming methods her people developed for one of the harshest growing… Source
June 17 · 1 hr 11 min
Planting Life 2026: A Little Drop of Love
In the second session of Planting Life, following the morning’s planting ceremony, Beata Tsosie of Santa Clara Pueblo brings her decades of environmental justice work to bear. Drawing on her work with Tewa Women United and the Food and Seed Sovereignty Alliance, Beata maps the layered environmental violence of the Greater Tewa Basin — nuclear contamination from Los Alamos… Source
June 17 · 1 hr
Planting Life 2026: Plant Life Wherever We Are
In this opening session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax, Wendy Johnson, and Alonso Mendez gather the community around a single, urgent call: to put our hands into the earth and “give life to life.” Wendy brings the teaching down to its most elemental — the seed splitting, root reaching down, shoot reaching up — and names corn, rice, and barley not as crops but as relatives… Source
June 15 · 40 min
Nothing Extra
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, offered during Upaya’s Young Adult Sesshin, Sensei Kodo and Sensei Dainin explore two practices that shape the foundation of sesshin: noble silence and Oryoki. Kodo opens by naming what we’re actually up against: a culture of constant stimulation that makes stillness feel uncomfortable, citing silence as “an alternative to modern culture, i.e., samsara. Source
June 15 · 1 hr 33 min
The Measure of Our Humanity: COMPASSION
In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, Roshi Joan Halifax draws on her newly written essay “Mutual Belonging, Compassion, and Social Responsibility” to offer a radical reframing of compassion for a world in crisis. Too often reduced to kindness or pity, Roshi teaches compassion as something far more radical: “Compassion is not an emotion. Compassion is natural courage. Source
June 8 · 43 min
Great Determination
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin Nannette Overley traces an honest question back to its roots: what is determination, and what is its role in our lives? Beginning with her discomfort over the whip-and-tether imagery in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures from the Spring Practice Period, Monshin describes the path of her earnest inquiry. She moves through the Lojong training’s… Source
June 1 · 48 min
Planting Life, Honoring Traditional Ecological Knowledge
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk preceding the weekend retreat Planting Life, longtime teacher and master gardener Wendy Johnson calls the community “to plant life together in utterly dangerous times.” Weaving traditional ecological knowledge, Dogen’s Instructions to the Cook, and more than fifty years of earth dharma practice, Wendy plants us deep in our seats, reminding us planting is: “not… Source
May 25 · 38 min
Buffalo Tail: A Story of Continuous Practice
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Dainin — emergency physician turned dharma teacher — explores what western medicine trains us to suppress and what Zen practice invites us to reclaim. Tracing her own path from clinical dissociation to a reawakening of compassion and connection at Upaya’s Being with Dying training, she turns to the well known koan of a water buffalo whose tail catches in… Source
May 18 · 38 min
A Raging River: Grief and the Human Condition
In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk during Upaya’s Being with Dying intensive, Frank Ostaseski speaks to participants from the loss of three close friends within a matter of weeks. Rather than offering technique or teaching, he invites open inquiry into grief itself: what it feels like in the body, how it moves, and why we so often push it away. “I think to grieve is to be human,” he says. Source

Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

The Measure of Our Humanity: WISDOM

Open Dharma: Taking Refuge in Community

Caught in the Self-Centered Dream

The Transformative Power of Suffering: Finding an Appropriate Response

Breathe with Your Ears

Appreciate Your Life: Reflections on Interbeing

The Raft and the Shore

Planting Life 2026: Corn, Culture, and the Living Stars (Part 6b)

Planting Life 2026: Corn, Culture, and the Living Stars (Part 6A)

Planting Life 2026: Rewilding

Planting Life 2026: Indigenous Education

Planting Life 2026: Ancestral Knowledge

Planting Life 2026: A Little Drop of Love

Planting Life 2026: Plant Life Wherever We Are

Nothing Extra

The Measure of Our Humanity: COMPASSION

Great Determination

Planting Life, Honoring Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Buffalo Tail: A Story of Continuous Practice

A Raging River: Grief and the Human Condition