What: Group meeting Weekly

When: Every Tuesday,

Time: 6:30-9:00 pm

Where: Denver Zendo

How Much: Dana / donation-based

We come into balance in our lives when we learn to marry wisdom with compassion.  Too much wisdom without emotional maturity, and shadow, projection, and rigidity can result.  Too much compassion without wisdom, and “grandmother Zen”, and “idiot compassion” flow, where we don’t know how to stand firm, with clear boundaries, in the face of another’s suffering.

We must first marry wisdom and compassion within ourselves.  Only then can we bring it out into the world and to our other relationships.  Mondo Zen takes our negative, conditioned reactions and teaches us how to transform them into emotional freedom and spiritual insight.  By working primarily with shame and anger responses (traffic, spouses, parents, children, career, finances, intimacy, sexuality, or any of the dozens of places our emotions ‘get the better of us’), you will learn how to take a deeper cut into your true self.

It’s not enough to wake up.  We must also grow up, and then we must actually show up.

Most therapy and shadow work is done from the perspective of a dualistic understanding of our ego and our world.  As such, it can never deliver the very thing it promises: freedom from the bondage of ourselves. You will forever be chasing something, because the root cause of your suffering is duality itself, no matter how it may be dressed up for our therapist.

From Pure Awareness, you will see with your own eyes how your emotional body looks, from the a vast, silent, empty, non-dual perspective that is the ground of your being.  You gain the insights of shadow work and emotional maturity, but as a means to liberate yourself from dualistic suffering and its never-ending self-criticism, judgment, and suffering.

Group Purpose

Be advised that this group often serves as a training ground for those who want to learn to develop the skillful means to facilitate this work. You may be ask if you are willing to participate in this process learning in which we will all learn a great deal.

Group Leadership

Doshin Michael Nelson Roshi will be leading the group.  He started studying Zen in the late 60′s, but without the guidance of a good teacher, he was confused and discouraged by the teachings.  In earnest he began studying other meditative practices and martial arts that were difficult but less obscure.  It wasn’t until he met JunPo Kando Denis Kelly, Roshi that the disciplined practice and eloquent simplicity of Zen suddenly took root and began to penetrate the dense clouds of his stubborn conditioned mind, revealing the ordinary, openness of vast empty sky.  Additionally, he has spent over a decade involved in the ManKind Project and doing other various kinds of intense shadow work.

Doshin Roshi is a poet, speaker, troublemaker, and teacher – a Zen priest of no rank.  He is the founder of Integral Zen, Inc. the Colorado branch of the Hollow Bones Zen Order and co-founder of the Poetry of Dying Project, which uses the mirror of death to point to the essence of life.  Doshin has been fully trained and is adequately skilled in Mondo Zen™.