What We Do

Zazen, or just sitting. The center of Soto Zen is a practice Dogen called shikantaza, which means just sitting. You are not trying to empty your mind, reach a special state, or accomplish anything at all. You sit with an upright, settled posture and an open, awake attention, and you allow each moment to arrive and pass. When you notice your mind has wandered into thinking, you return, without judgment, to your posture and your breath. The returning is the practice, and it is enough.

Kinhin, or walking meditation. Between periods of sitting, we practice slow walking meditation. Moving the same attention from the cushion into the body in motion, we take slow, deliberate steps in rhythm with the breath. It is a reminder that practice lives in standing, walking, and ordinary action, not on the cushion alone.

A Sunday morning together. A typical morning holds two periods of zazen with kinhin between them, a brief reading to close, and time for tea afterward. We sit in silence, and we sit together, and the company of others gives the morning a steadiness that practicing alone rarely has.

Why we practice. People come to Zen for many reasons, often during a hard season of life, looking for some ground to stand on. What they find in just sitting is a way of meeting their own experience with more honesty and more kindness, and of carrying that steadiness back into family, work, and the rest of an ordinary week. We make no grand promises. We offer the practice itself, which has sustained people for many centuries.