Not sure how to begin your practice or what the BDC is about? Join us at 5 PM on the first Thursday of each month for an orientation to the Center and basic meditation instruction!
Newcomer Orientation
Category Archives: Lineage
Awareness, Kindness, & Community
Join us for this daylong retreat led by visiting teacher, Vance Pryor on Saturday April 8. Cultivate qualities of awareness and metta and explore how they work together to deepen feelings of belonging and community. Learn more here. As physical space is limited, please try to register soon!
Creating Calm Within Chaos
Vance Pryor gives a Dharma talk on Friday, April 7 from 7-9 PM. Discover mindfulness meditation and how it helps us develop greater resilience in the face of adversity, equanimity and ease in the face of change, and calm in the midst of chaos.
Learn more here. As physical space is limited, please register soon!
Zen Half-Day Moved to ONLINE Only
Due to the snow and extreme driving conditions, the Bozeman Zen Group has moved the half-day sit for tomorrow, March 26 to online only. Please use the regular BDC Zoom link to participate from 9 AM – 1 PM.
From Karen: Let’s sit together in our homes and bring forth the dharma. You may arrange yourself so that you can practice with your whole life. It’s great if you can keep your camera on, but you don’t need to face forward toward the camera. Do your best to sit each scheduled period fully, AND take breaks as you need either in between or for a full period (meaning, try not to move or decide to stop meditating in the middle of a period).
Half-Day Schedule:
9:00 Welcome, robe chant + zazen
9:30 kinhin
9:40 zazen
10:10 Break/stretch and have tea
10:25 Dharma talk
Open lecture chant
Bodhisatttva vows at end
10:50 zazen
11:20 kinhin or stretch
11:30 zazen
12:00 break
12:15 zazen
12:45 Gather, questions, reflections
12:55 Recite the Metta Sutta and dedicate merit
1:00 End
Please contact info@bozemanzengroup.org for questions or copies of the chants.
Vance Pryor comes to Bozeman!
We are excited to welcome Vance Pryor to Bozeman in April! Vance will offer several opportunities for practice. First, save the date for Thursday, April 6 when Vance will be the guest speaker at the Bozeman Insight Community.
Get to know Vance as he introduces himself to our community, sharing some stories of his journey in the dharma and taking questions of all sorts.
All are welcome! No prior experience or registration necessary. This will be a hybrid event offered in-person and via Zoom.
When Things Fall Apart– BDC book study group
We’re excited to announce our next book study group led by Katie Arnold beginning Tuesday, April 4th. Each session of this six-week series will focus on a different portion of Pema Chodron’s book, When Things Fall Apart, Heart Advice for Difficult Times. No need to have read any chapters before the first meeting. Great for beginners or for more experienced practitioners. Please pre-register as in-person space is limited.
From the publisher:
In this most beloved and acclaimed work, Pema shows that moving toward painful
situations and becoming intimate with them can open up our hearts in ways we never
before imagined. Drawing from traditional Buddhist wisdom, she offers life-changing
tools for transforming suffering and negative patterns into habitual ease and boundless
joy.
Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun in the lineage of Chogyam Trungpa and
resident teacher at Campo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan
Buddhist monastery in North America.
The Merit of our Practice
This Dharma thought offered by Karen DeCotis of the Bozeman Zen Group.
As I write and you read this, we are still in the midst of Covid, severe partisan politics, the aftermath of mass shootings, the war in Ukraine past the one-year mark, and a most devastating earthquake in Syria and Turkey. Difficult indeed to imagine the loss of life, of home, livelihood, security and comfort. And let us not be helpless in the face of tragedy.
May we suffuse love over the entire world, above, below, all around without limit, so let us cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world.
So encourages the Metta Sutta. Offer the merit of your good practice. May we apply our practice diligently; may we also remember that the catastrophic suffering outlined above does not diminish the good efforts we must make to confront our own lives, our families and workplaces, our joys and difficulties – to cultivate self-compassion, energetic discipline and never turn away from our own suffering.
Zen Half-day Sit
On Sunday, March 26, join the Bozeman Zen Group and Karen DeCotis for a half-day sit with periods of sitting and walking meditation. The theme is “Making Practice Your Whole Life.” Appropriate for beginners who wish to try a retreat practice opportunity as well as for experienced practitioners to deepen their practice.
Please register by Thursday, March 23.
Thought Experiment
This Dharma thought brought to you by Steve Allison-Bunnell, leader of Joining Rivers Sangha.
“Could a brain in a vat meditate?” I posed this question to students in the Psychology of Consciousness course at MSU this last week. One thought so, because the brain would still have memories and thoughts to contemplate. Another thought no, because the brain has no body to actually experience the world with. That was my answer. The Buddha understood and taught that for a human at least, meditation is an embodied practice. Coming home to ourselves through Mindfulness is in its essence living in our own body in a particular moment. We now also know that many aspects of our feelings come from our bodies and do not arise only in the brain. When do you feel like a brain in a vat? How to you get back in touch with your body?
BIC Presents the Three Core Trainings
The tool kit of Insight Meditation practices includes three core teachings: concentration/tranquility practice, Insight/wisdom practice, and the development of heart qualities (the Brahma Viharas). On Thursday, March 23 from 7-8:30 PM, Suzanne Colón reviews the instructions for these three core teachings and clarifies how they each support awakening of the heart-mind.
Used skillfully in combination, these three meditation practices complete the path and give us a sturdy rudder through life’s 10,000 joys, 10,000 sorrows, and 10,000 things that gotta get done.
Drop-in, freely offered and appropriate for all levels of experience.
Find out more about this class or the Bozeman Insight Community here.
