Facilitated by Mary Ellen Seien Roshi and Charlotte Jigen Sensei 

Suffering sucks! We don’t like it. And yet, although we know from the Buddha’s teaching that the key to joy and happiness is to not resist what is, but instead to face and embrace our suffering, the truth is we rarely do!

In these meetings, we will explore the various ways we react to our suffering, which can be boiled down to what is called the Three Poisons in Buddhism: greed, anger, and ignorance. However, as you will discover in these calls, when we work with and embrace these Poisons intimately, they transform into the hidden gems of liberation: compassion, clarity, and spaciousness.

We are very excited to introduce you to this work. As we have already been discussing in our Living-Zen calls, it has been at the core of our practice for the past several years, and we have found it to be extremely powerful.

This workshop is a general introduction to working with the poisons, as it takes one’s own practice and perseverance to experience the liberating power they hold.

About the Facilitators Seien Roshi & Jigen Sensei

What other people have said about the series

“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.

"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.