Posted February 13th, 2010 by Rebecca
On March 13th & 14th 2010, Daniel Doen Silberberg Sensei will be leading a retreat, The Traveler’s Intentions. Participants will experience the freedom and joy that comes from approaching life as a traveler. This retreat is being held in Park City, Utah, and is open to the public as well as Lost Coin students. Doen Sensei encourages non-members to attend. Doen Sensei will be interacting directly and often with the participants and will provide plenty of opportunity through meditation, group processes and talks, to really look closely at beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, and habits which create barriers for us.
To register for the retreat, please click here. The cost of the retreat is $130 and includes lunch on Saturday. Please bring your own sitting cushions and whatever you will need to be comfortable. Saturday, we’ll begin at 9:30 a.m. and end at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, we’ll begin at 9:30 a.m. and end at 1:30 p.m
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Lost Coin at contact@lostcoinzen.com or call 800-731-5061.
Tags: Doen, park city, sensei, silberberg, transcience, traveler, utah, warrior, zen
Posted February 2nd, 2010 by Daniel Doen Silberberg
One thing I hope you all do is devote yourself to this practice with love, with a wild abandon and passion. You need that love to really be able to fly. Love for the practice, love for each other, love for yourself, love for your teacher.
As Maezumi Roshi always said, “appreciate your life!” And I hope you appreciate it with a burning, fiery love. Really let go into your life and really appreciate it. Cultivate a certain potency, a loving warriorship, and choose a path with heart.
Fling yourself into the practice, into your life. This is physical and it’s emotional. Let go of your inner critic. Be like the Sufis described a Man of God: he’s like a moth. He knows the flame will destroy him, will burn his ego to ashes, but he goes straight for it–because he has no choice.
You’re just passing through. If you abandon yourself to the practice, to appreciating your life with real gusto, you’ll never look back and regret it.
Tags: Alice in Wonderland, Daniel Silberberg, Deustchland, Doen, Germany, lost coin, zen of alice
Posted December 16th, 2009 by Liz McCoy
Today’s post is by Liz McCoy, a Lost Coin student in Salt Lake City.
There was a discussion in the Salt Lake City Lost Coin class recently about the Lost Coin Blog. What is a blog? Why have a blog? Should we all write for the blog?
The discussion left me thinking – 2009 is the year blogs transformed my life. And no, I am not a technology junkie; I am more or less a technophobe. For me the blog discussion and my experiences with blogs illustrate many of the lessons Doen teaches us.
Since August of 2009, I have learned about or been invited to join five blogs. Each blog describes someone’s battle with cancer or some other random and inexplicable phenomena that is trying to extinguish their lives.
Each person shares their story through their blog and although each blog is unique, many aspects are the same. Each blog demonstrates the power of community, of love, of effort. Each blog has made me laugh a big ol’ belly laugh and shed tears. Each offers mind blowing wisdom and beautiful memories. Every day I read at least one entry and am reminded to expect the unexpected. Today my cells give me life – tomorrow, my cells might take it away. Chemo, a poison, gives hope, gives life. “We are all travelers; we are all just passing through” as Doen often says.
The blog I am most familiar with, however, is my mother’s. My mother died on July 31, 2009. After spending 50 odd years befriending her Multiple Sclerosis, she chose not to fight stage IV colon cancer. As soon as we learned of the diagnosis we knew we needed to communicate, simultaneously, with many people around the world. With help from fellow Lost Coin student, Sterling, we set up a blog; a first for most of us.
By the time we started posting to the blog our journey with my mom’s death was fast tracked. We decided to post twice a day. I wrote some of the postings and organized the rest. The sprint became a marathon and the twice daily postings became stressful. The experience started to feel like a reality TV show. I wasn’t a professional blog poster or a writer. Was this offensive? Did people care? What else could we say? Hello crisis of confidence. Hello negative thoughts! Hello fear!
According to Sterling’s analytics and personal emails we knew many people were following the blog closely, relying on the blog to stay in touch with a person they loved. Daniel often talks about facing our fears and dropping our negative thoughts so I tried to do that.
By following Doen’s teachings and trying to drop my own negative thoughts, I found I had more space in my head to listen to what people said more intently, to read emails and guest book entries more carefully, to pay even closer attention to my mother’s breathing patterns, her pulse, her face, her smile. The stress was gone, the entries were right there, they were easy to compose. Some were funny, some sad, some witty, some wise, some were poems, some were prayers, some were hymns, and some were fanciful songs. But none of them would have existed if I had stayed in my head, with my own thoughts.
Every time someone asked “Are you sure you want to post that?” I would ask if they had another idea and when they did not, I would post the post in question. Later I would receive one, then two, sometimes three emails thanking me for the entry. The lesson – what touched one person, deeply, did not resonate with another. The variety of thought and voice created and strengthened my mother’s community.
Finally, my mom’s blog allowed many people to remember and celebrate her perfection. When someone reminded me of my mothers’ weaknesses, I was surprised to know, to feel, that it was these blemishes that made her, and me, and you, perfect. I did not have to talk about anything negative because I had come to fully accept my mother, who like all of us was perfect by virtue of her imperfection. I celebrated her completely with my whole heart. This is life. This is practice. This is perhaps what Daniel means by asking us to “just be nice”.
These experiences opened my mind and my heart to blogs, to modern Lost Coin non-monastic Zen practice. Yes, like it or not TODAY translates to technology, to life, to Lost Coin. By reading, writing for and organizing posts to a blog I practiced. I observed myself, my negative thoughts and my fears. I practiced being nice. I efforted and stretched my abilities. I never dreamed technology could touch me and so many others so deeply. Although the blog was about my mother, the posts were about all of us, about all our journeys through life “as we pass through”.
So how about it? Let’s put a similar effort into the Lost Coin blog. Let’s make it alive, let’s make it life. Let’s all participate and add our unique voices and touch someone. Let’s strengthen and widen our community. Let’s laugh, sing, and cry. Let’s share our wisdom, our jokes, our songs and our poetry. Let’s celebrate the beauty of perfection that is Lost Coin, that is a blog, that is Life.
Tags: blog, community, death, Doen, fear, lost coin, practice, technology, traveler, writing
Posted September 26th, 2009 by Tawni Anderson
Today in Salt Lake City Doen held a book signing for his just-released Wonderland: The Zen of Alice. We had known that Wonderlandwas swiftly rising up the Amazon best-sellers (in the Zen and philosophy categories), but were all a bit surprised when Doen’s book was sold out a mere 45 minutes after the signing started!
We eked out the books, promising to hold another signing as soon as we could get one put together, and Doen graciously chatted with the crowd that had come hoping to walk out with several copies each. But one determined biker would not be deterred. After riding to the book store on a fairly warm day, hearing that the book was sold out, and making sure (“very sure, no, Doen is not kidding”) that it really was sold out, he hesitated not a moment longer, pushed up his shirt sleeve, and presented his arm for Doen to sign and stamp with his chop.
Doen and Stephen
The party continued for quite a while after the books were gone. For those of you in Salt Lake, stay tuned: we hope to organize another signing (with a reading, perhaps, and maybe even a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party) in the next few weeks.
If you’re outside of Salt Lake City, please check out the list of upcoming signings here. Doen will be in San Francisco this Thursday, October 1st, signing copies of Wonderland at Books Inc.
We’ll try to keep you up to date with his flurry of book signings as he goes through the West coast. Check back here at the blog (subscribe to the RSS feed for the easiest updates) or on the Lost Coin website’s Events page. We’re also using Lost Coin’s Facebook group page a lot more; if you’re on Facebook, search for Lost Coin and sign up!
Tags: book signing, Daniel Doen Silberberg Sensei, Doen, lost coin, wonderland, wonderland: the zen of alice
Posted August 11th, 2009 by Tawni Anderson
Wonderland: A Voyage With Doen Sensei and the Lost Coin Sangha
Venture down the rabbit hole with Daniel Doen Silberberg Sensei, author of the forthcoming Wonderland: The Zen of Alice, as he reveals the Wonderland that is our lives.
Doen Sensei will conduct a retreat in the dramatic Wasatch Mountains of Utah from September 18 through 21, 2009.
We often hear about and search for the “other shore,” or Wonderland, and try to figure out how to get there. The practice of Buddhism has pointed to this other shore for thousands of years; it’s the realm where body and mind fall away. If we persist in our search for it and are lucky enough to find a rabbit hole, at the end of our travels we might find that this shore really is the other shore, and our wondrous lives and deaths are themselves the Wonderland that we seek.
The retreat will be held at The Inn at Solitude. Rooms are very reasonably priced (a special rate of $139) and can be shared. For a 360 degree view, check out http://www.skisolitude.com/accommodations/inn.php. Camp sites are also available at the nearby Spruces Camp Grounds or, even closer to Solitude, Redman Camp Grounds. It may be best to reserve your camp site in advance.
Please call 1-800-731-5061 or email contact@lostcoinzen.com with any questions. To register for the retreat, please visit www.lostcoinzen.com/retreat. Registration fees for the retreat are $275.
If you would like to reserve a room at Solitude, please contact Jeremy Chase at 801-536-5721 or jchase@skisolitude.com and mention that you are with Lost Coin.
Tags: Doen, Doen Sensei, lost coin, rabbit hole, retreat, Solitude, wonderland, Wonderlannd: The Zen of Alice, zen
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