Whether you’re waiting tables or washing laundry, meditating or making art, the key, Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara teaches, is always to savor the task at hand. Find a calm space and sit comfortably. Try to view what you experience as neither bad nor good. Sit at ease and let the sounds in. Feel your body; allow the sensations in your body to be present and not blocked off. Include [...]
Include Everything
A teaching by Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara. A group of twelve of us lived on the streets in Lower Manhattan for four days, practicing meditation and experiencing how it is to survive without money or cellphones. It was a renunciation and a pilgrimage, a way to give up all our habitual comforts and resources and to open up to reality, to the conditions of the world of which we are [...]
What might “Ordinary Zen” look like?
I tend to photograph my sangha, the Village Zendo, at aesthetic high points. Like when we're on retreat and there are 80 of us meditating in black robes, sitting in the big old church we rent in winter. Or when Enkyo Roshi stands at the altar in a cloud of incense. We look exotic, like Zen monks. But in 2011, I started to ask about our ordinariness. What do we look like [...]
Feminine Principal
The principal figure in Buddhism is the teacher, a role traditionally dominated by men. Andrea Miller profiles three women teachers — Trudy Goodman, Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, and Lama Palden Drolma — who are changing the face of Buddhism and making the teachings whole. In a hospital room in Buffalo, New York, Trudy Goodman had a spiritual experience she had no way to [...]
Our Moment of Possibility and Joy
Who am I, really? Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara shares three teachings that have given her solace and strength as she’s asked that question. Conceived as part of our “Rainbow Dharma” coverage focusing on LGBTQ Buddhists, the lessons here are universally helpful to us all. The walls that separate us seem to be falling away. These days, many of the old constructions and categories [...]
Rainbow Dharma: Teachings and articles for, about, and by LGBTIQ Buddhists
Our culture, thankfully, is increasingly embracing the fact of diverse sexual and gender orientations. Yet everyone—gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, intersex, asexual, cis, straight—struggles with questions about identity. It's easy to interpret the Buddha's teachings on emptiness as meaning that sexual or gender identity is irrelevant. But that's simply not true. As Roshi Pat [...]
The Work of the Moment
Like the monk who strived so hard he couldn’t see the goddess right behind him, if we push too hard for results we miss what is most intimate. When we and our work are one, says Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, even the most mundane of life’s activities are profound and beautiful. Several years ago, I was in the Catskills with a colleague, celebrating the completion of a [...]
Which River Will You Cross?
Whether buying products on the Internet or Skyping with our students and teachers, we instantly recognize our interdependence, and yet how about when we walk outside our door? It feels as if the ways of teaching and studying the dharma are changing at an accelerated rate. Today, with apps, blogs, tweets, and podcasts, there are numerous possibilities for connecting with [...]
About a Poem: Pat Enkyo O’Hara on an Anonymous Poem by a Sung Dynasty Nun
Pat Enkyo O’Hara on an Anonymous Poem by a Sung Dynasty Nun Searching for spring all day, I never saw it, straw sandals treading everywhere among the clouds, along the bank. Coming home, I laughed, catching the plum blossoms’ scent: spring at each branch tip, already perfect. Everybody is looking for something. The writer of this poem, a Sung Dynasty nun, is [...]
The Challenges Ahead
Two hundred teachers gathered for a Buddhist Teachers Council to discuss the future of Buddhism in the West. Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Gina Sharpe, Ken McLeod, and Diana Winston assess the key issues. This past June, about two hundred Buddhist teachers from across North America and Europe gathered at the Garrison Institute near New York for a three-day conference that had been [...]
