Online via Zoom

Deep Sangha Work — The Five Poisons

A five-week online inquiry into the Sangha awakening to itself. We begin with jealousy — the final poison — and explore how our patterns arise not only within us but between us. Limited to twelve.

Dates

October 24 & 31, November 7, 14 & 21, 2026

Format

Online

Group Size

12 Participants

Led By

Mary Ellen Seien Roshi & Charlotte Jigen Sensei

Event Details

Sangha Awakening to Itself — collective realization through relationship

This final series brings the first full cycle of Deep Sangha Work to completion. Over the course of the year, we have moved together through the Five Poisons, Core Fear and Core Contraction, and Sangha Awakening to Itself.

Deep Sangha Work — a year-long inquiry. Workshop I: The Five Poisons — greed, anger, ignorance, pride, jealousy. Workshop II: Core Fear and Core Contraction. Series III: Sangha Awakening to Itself — collective realization through relationship.
The full cycle — from seeing the patterns, to what they protect, to awakening in relationship.

In this series, we begin with jealousy, the final poison in our exploration. Jealousy contains and reveals all the other poisons in different ways: greed, anger, ignorance, pride. It also brings us directly into relationship, where our core fears and deepest patterns of identity and separation become visible.

Rather than examining these patterns only as individual experiences, we will explore how they arise between us and within the Sangha itself.

Our relationships become the field of awakening. Reactivity, projections, difference, and vulnerability are not separate from awakening — they become the very material through which awakening can deepen.

As we bring awareness to what happens between us, a new space opens. The Sangha begins to realize not only its shared conditioning, but also its true nature. This is collective realization through relationship: awakening together in the midst of our actual human lives.

This is not an idealized vision of community. It is Deep Sangha Work: meeting ourselves and one another, discovering what becomes possible when awakening is no longer seen as an individual matter alone.

It has been a powerful and deeply inspiring process — yet we also feel we have only scratched the surface. This kind of exploration as a group is new to us all. Together, we have been learning not only to recognize our individual patterns, but also to see how they arise and become visible between us, and, most powerfully, to realize the universal nature of our conditioning, revealing the unity within our differences.

The work will continue in the new year, when we will open the process to new groups while also creating opportunities for those who have completed the first cycle to deepen the work.

Sessions

Five Saturdays — October 24 and 31, and November 7, 14 and 21, 2026 — 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Mountain Time, live on Zoom. Ninety minutes each. Enrollment is limited to twelve participants.

A few spots remain. You can also read about the previous two series here.

What people are saying

This series was rich and meaningful from the very start. The gentle opening built trust, and the skilled facilitation encouraged genuine participation. I loved the clarification that ignorance is the fundamental mistake from which the other poisons become magnified. Attraction and aversion become greed and anger from the mistaken sense of me and mine, mine, mine.
— Kamie B.
Facilitation was brilliant. Really appreciated how everyone was not just encouraged but expected to participate. Felt like a transformative conversation, a solitary “big mind” working together. The open mike could have been messy, but due to the size of the group, or the quality of the participants, or just plain magic, it worked really well.
— Dan C.
The workshop was powerful and eye-opening. Exploring ignorance in depth gave me clarity, and hearing others’ experiences made me feel connected. I left with a deeper awareness of how anger and greed operate — both in myself and in the world — and a renewed sense of how to meet them with practice.
— Melissa A.

Active Students

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General Admission

$375

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