NBMC Dharma Talks

On Sunday, November 5, Shodo Spring will gave with the title: “Making Peace: With the Sutta-Nipatta, and considering the current state of the world.” She is well-known in the sangha as a Zen priest, an activist, and the head of the Mountains and Waters Alliance in Faribault, where she lives on a permaculture farm.

Ben delivered a dharma talk on Imagination, Interdependence, and Liberation: Practicing Yogacara Buddhism with Vasubandhu’s “Three Natures.” Ben teaches mindfulness in a wide variety of secular contexts including police training and addiction recovery groups. He works with multi-faith groups focused on intersectional liberation, racial justice, and climate justice. Ben serves

Sam Johnson delivered a dharma talk on March 5, 2023 on the subject: Is it really just a small world after all? Bhikkhus, I say that the end of the world cannot be known, seen, or reached by travelling. Yet, bhikkhus, I also say that without reaching the end of the world there is no making an end […]

On June 20, 2021 Rocky gave a talk about the challenging journey that led him to join the Northfield Buddhist Meditation Center in 2019, and how the sangha and meditation changed his life. As someone who was able to overcome intense anxiety through sitting, he asks how we (the sangha) can help others who may […]

On October 10, 2021, Ben Connelly gave a talk entitled: Show Up In A Good Way – Lessons from Zen practice at Indigenous Led Water Protector Camps. About Ben: Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen teacher and Dharma heir in the Katagiri lineage. He also teaches mindfulness in a wide variety of secular contexts including police training and addiction recovery groups. Ben is based at Minnesota

Recorded on Zoom on April 11, 2021. The subject of Shodo’s talk was refuge. About Shodo Spring: Shodo Spring is the founder of Mountains and Waters Alliance, dedicated to working together with all beings to protect and restore the earth. She is also a Zen priest, Dharma heir of Shohaku Okumura Roshi, mother and grandmother, leader of the 2013 […]

Mindfulness is an ancient and powerful practice of awareness and nonjudgmental discernment that can help us ground ourselves in the present moment, with the world and our lives just as they are. But there’s a risk: by focusing our attention on something (or someone), we might always see it as something other, as separate from […]

How should we practice through the Covid-19 pandemic? In a recent interview Sayadaw U Tejaniya, the Burmese monk and meditation teacher, answered simply, “the same as we always practice.” Yet the intensity of the crisis, he said, reveals many aspects of Dhamma in unusually high relief, including the need to “quarantine not only the body but […]