CURRENTLY ON HAITUS

The community at GBZC invites you to participate in the LGBTQIA+ Zen Group, a monthly sitting practice where our focus is on LGBTQIA+ issues. Our aim is to create a safe space for Zen meditation and dialogue for LGBTQIA+ people and allies.

What to Expect:
This is a shortened Zen Buddhist service that will include chanting, seated meditation, walking meditation, and discussion. We will also seek to bring in teachers from the Zen community that can speak to topics affecting the LGBTQIA+ community. No RSVP required.

This is an opportunity to cultivate a diverse community rooted in inclusivity, justice, and compassion. This group is meant to be both an entry point to discovering and practicing Zen and an exploratory practice for LGBTQIA+ people and allies already familiar with Zen.

Location: Currently being conducted via Zoom. Instructions here.

When: Every 4th Sunday from 7:00-8:30pm unless otherwise noted.

Approximate program schedule:
6:30 pm – Early arrival for newcomers that would like an orientation
7:00 pm – Sutra Service (15 min), Walking Meditation (5 min), Sit (20 min), Walking Meditation (5 min), Discussion/Talk (30 min), Walking Meditation (5 min), Closing Service (5 min)
8:30 pm – Out for the evening

Who: All LGBTQIA+ people and allies are welcome.

Questions/Comments: Please contact the group’s facilitator at [email protected].

CURRENTLY ON HIATUS

The Arts as Spiritual Practice group evolved from Writing as Spiritual Practice to reflect the many variegated gifts of its participants. This open group meets twice a month to create a community of loving support for participants’ creative endeavors and to help one another see inherent links to spiritual practice. This is an especially good space for those interested in or engaged in art but who do not necessarily see themselves as “artists.”

We cultivate this community through creative practices of reading and listening (often a close reading from our sutra book), guided prompts and exercises, and space to come forth and share work of any form. We meet one another’s work with attentive, encouraging, and, we hope, inspiring feedback, letting the act of response become an art in itself. All are welcome to join and participate at any level that feels comfortable, either to share work or to listen and marinate in the work of others.

This group is co-facilitated by GBZC members Rebecca Doverspike and Sarah Fleming, who aspire to hold a shared space where all voices know themselves as vibrant and vital.

We have also launched a seasonal creative arts journal, Radiant to the Heart: A Journal of Zen Arts. We invite you to read it—or submit to it!—here. To accompany the release of each new volume, we hold a journal launch for those both in and beyond our community. The theme of the second volume of Radiant to the Heart is art as refuge during turbulent times. Stay tuned!

Location: Currently being conducted via Zoom. Instructions and guidelines here.

When:  Monthly from 7-9pm on the last Thursday of the month.

Who: All are welcome for any of the meetings.

Questions/Comments: Please contact Rebecca Doverspike and Sarah Fleming at [email protected].

Indra’s Net is a Google Group that allows us to invite others to join us in taking action for social justice.

The whole universe is seen as a multidimensional net. At every point where the strands of the net meet, jewels are set. Each jewel reflects the light reflected in the jewels around it, and each of those jewels in turn reflects the light from all the jewels around them, and so on, forever. In this way, each jewel, or each particular entity or event, including each person, ultimately reflects and expresses the radiance of the entire universe. All of totality can be seen in each of its parts.

—”Indra’s Net,” as described by Taigen Dan Leighton

We commit ourselves to actively engaging and fully actualizing our bodhisattva vows in the relative world.
We commit ourselves to doing this fearlessly—opening our hearts to suffering and our eyes to oppression, privilege, marginalization, and injustice.
We commit ourselves to doing this inclusively—embodying the ideals of mutuality, interdependence, and democratic process.
And we commit ourselves to doing this humbly—acknowledging the reality of not-knowing, even as we act in urgent service to all beings.

—Fourfold Commitment to Racial and Social Justice, GBZC Sutra Book

Indra’s Net is a new communications channel that allows community members of the GBZC mahasangha to take action together as one way to continue actualizing our bodhisattva vows. Several sangha members, with help from the Programming Committee, have set up this channel as a Google Group. We describe below a handful of working principles to get the idea off the ground, but we are eager for participants to co-create the shape of this channel as they use it. Everyone within our extended community (regardless of formal GBZC membership) is invited to join.

This communication channel takes its name from Indra’s Net, an image of interconnection and interdependence within Buddhist cosmology. It is an image, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, of “interbeing.”  It is precisely because of this interbeing that we actively engage our bodhisattva vows, including our Fourfold Commitment to Racial and Social Justice. And it is precisely because of this interconnection, interdependence, and interbeing that we recognize the need to act in urgent service of all beings.

How to Join:

To join the Google Group and receive communications about upcoming actions, please click here and click “Ask to join group.”  If you have any difficulties, you can send an email to [email protected] to request to be added directly.

How and What to Post: 

The main principle of Indra’s Net, in order to keep it an action-oriented space, is that users only post actions that they themselves are committed to doing. Users must also be willing to do a bit of organizing work to enable other sangha members to join them in doing the action. What it means to “do” an action may look very different for different actions, especially in this time of social distancing and Zoom meetings. It might mean joining up together (at 6 feet apart!) at a street rally, or it could mean making a phone call or sending an email from home. The requirement that users only post actions that they themselves are doing prevents the list from becoming a channel for information-sharing alone—a worthy purpose but not the purpose of this group.

Actions do not have to be applicable to every possible group member. You are welcome to post an action that is (for example) a women of color space only, or that is only for people living in a certain legislative district, as long as it is something applicable to you yourself and you are planning to participate.

Once you’ve joined, you can post an action by sending an email to [email protected].  The message will automatically go out to all members of the group.  Please include at least the following details in your email:

• What is the action?
• When is it? (Is it one specific time/place? Is it something each person does on their own time?)
• How would you like people to contact you if they are interested in participating?

It’s important for people who are interested in an action to be able to connect with each other— we know that “life happens,” and if the person originally posting the action is for some reason unable to participate, they can keep others in the loop (especially important for an in-person action where others may be relying on having a companion there). Even for an action that involves people doing something individually on their own time, it can be powerful and useful to be connected to others doing the same.

Community members may reasonably disagree about the effectiveness or value of some proposed actions, and that’s okay. We just ask users to be thoughtful about whether the action they wish to post is aligned with GBZC’s values as a community.

“Vast is the robe of liberation, 
a formless field of benefaction;
I wear the Tathagata’s teaching,
saving all sentient beings.”
—GBZC Sutra Book

The Precepts of skillful action are the moral and ethical teachings of the Zen Buddhist tradition. You can find two Precepts recitations in our liturgy book.

The Precepts are not rules to be followed, but suggestions on how to navigate the difficult and messy business of being human in this human world. They describe how to fully actualize the absolute truth of interconnection and oneness in the relative of world of this and that. Moreover, the Precepts are among the Buddha’s clearest suggestions about how to find liberation right in the middle of our everyday lives.

We offer Precepts Discussion Groups two to three times a year. These usually meet weekly for twelve weeks. While there is no expectation that everyone in the group will want to formally receive the precepts, participation in such a discussion is a requirement for participating in the ceremony. Sessions missed in one discussion cycle may be made up in another. 

The ceremony of formally receiving the precepts is called Jukai. People who have received the Precepts wear a rakusu (pronounced “rock-su”) during zazen, the black bib-like garment that is a miniaturized version of the Buddha’s robe, the robe of liberation. In this ceremony, each person receiving the precepts has the opportunity to read a sentence or three about each of the sixteen precepts. In this way, the ceremony is extremely powerful, communal, and inspiring. If possible, you should attend at least one Jukai ceremony before receiving them yourself. Most people sew their rakusu themselves. For more information, see  Preparing for Jukai. 

Receiving the Precepts is not something we do when we believe we will never act against them, but is itself an expression of our bodhisattva aspiration to return, again and again, to our intention to let Precepts guide our lives.

Jukai Ceremonies in which the precepts are received are scheduled on an “as needed” basis, usually about twice a year.  (The most recent one took place on April 8, 2023.)  All GBZC participants, as well as friends and family, are welcome to attend, to witness this important event! 

Contact [email protected] for more information.

Our next Jukai ceremony at GBZC is scheduled for November 15th, 2014 at 4:30 PM.