DHARMA TALK ARCHIVE

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2020

Jisan Tova Green has been in residence at San Francisco Zen Center for over twenty years. She was ordained as a Zen priest and received Dharma Transmission from Eijun Linda Cutts. She is currently the Liaison for the Branching Streams Zen Centers and sitting groups -- over 70 in the U.S. and nine in other countries. Tova co-founded the SFZC Queer Dharma Group in 2009 and the group Unpacking Whiteness – Reflection and Action in 2017. Tova has worked as a hospice social worker, plays the cello, and writes poetry.

Cuca Kosen Montecel is a Mexican-American Zen teacher in the White Plum Lineage. She received Dharma Transmission from her teacher, Robert Kennedy, S.J., Roshi of Morning Star Zendo, and was installed as a Sensei in June of 2015. She has a Ph.D. in Urban Education and works to assure educational opportunity for all children. She is a Roman Catholic, mother of two adult sons, and lives in San Antonio, Texas with her husband of thirty-eight years.

In this talk, given during her online sesshin, Not Knowing Is Most Intimate, Cuca Montecel Sensei speaks about the unknowable nature of life, the futility of attempting to control it, and the intimacy that not knowing brings.

Myogan Djinn Gallagher is the resident priest and teacher at Black Mountain Zen Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Djinn started practicing in 1993, meeting her teacher Ryushin Paul Haller in 2003. Her intention to train as a priest led her to residential practice at San Francisco Zen Centre where she lived from 2007 until 2016, first in the monastery, Tassajara, and then in the urban temple in San Francisco. Ordained as a priest by Ryushin in 2013, she completed her training with a three-month practice period as “shuso” (head monk) in Tassajara in the autumn of 2015. She returned to Ireland in late 2016 and has been practicing at Black Mountain Zen Centre since January 2017.

Colin speaks about Sejiki, a ceremony to comfort the ancestral spirits, and an important ceremony in the Sōtō Zen School. This ceremony is performed as a way of making offerings to the family ancestors, to one’s parents, relatives, and spirits of other people we are connected with, as well as for spirits that are no longer connected to any living person, also known as Hungry Ghosts.