Nothing Between You and Love: Zen Wisdom for Troubled Times

Dr. Habib sits down with Zen teacher, author, and spiritual director Busshō Lahn for a deeply timely conversation about awakening, truth, and what it means to live from love in a world marked by suffering.

Raised within the Catholic tradition and later drawn into Zen practice, Busshō shares how a single spiritual seed can grow into a life of “multiple belongings.” Together, he and Dr. Habib explore the mystical heart shared across traditions — a place where differences soften and love becomes the center.

But this conversation moves beyond personal spirituality into urgent territory. As communities grapple with violence, fear, and collective grief, Busshō invites us into a challenging yet transformative question: Where is the war inside of me?

Rather than meeting fire with fire, he suggests that authentic spiritual practice calls us toward radical honesty — the courage to name our anger, face our wounds, and recognize even the shadow within ourselves. From that clarity emerges a love strong enough to say both yes to humanity and no to harm.

Listeners will discover:

• Why the goal of spiritual practice is to leave “nothing between you and love”
• How contemplation prepares us for compassionate action
• The hidden miracle within ordinary life
• What it means to awaken during times of societal upheaval
• How truth-telling becomes a path to freedom

This episode is an invitation — not to escape the world — but to meet it with a wiser, braver, more spacious heart.

If you’ve ever wondered how inner transformation can shape outer change, this conversation is for you.

Transcript

 Beyond Names: Spirituality for Anyone and Everyone

YouTube Channel: Beyond Names with Dr. Habib Boerger

YouTube handle: @BeyondNamesPodcast

Episode: 34

Host: Dr. Habib Boerger

Conversation Partner: Busshō Lahn

Title: Nothing Between You and Love: Zen Wisdom for Troubled Times

Description: Dr. Habib sits down with Zen teacher, author, and spiritual director Busshō Lahn for a deeply timely conversation about awakening, truth, and what it means to live from love in a world marked by suffering.

Raised within the Catholic tradition and later drawn into Zen practice, Busshō shares how a single spiritual seed can grow into a life of “multiple belongings.” Together, he and Dr. Habib explore the mystical heart shared across traditions — a place where differences soften and love becomes the center.

But this conversation moves beyond personal spirituality into urgent territory. As communities grapple with violence, fear, and collective grief, Busshō invites us into a challenging yet transformative question: Where is the war inside of me?

Rather than meeting fire with fire, he suggests that authentic spiritual practice calls us toward radical honesty — the courage to name our anger, face our wounds, and recognize even the shadow within ourselves. From that clarity emerges a love strong enough to say both yes to humanity and no to harm.

Listeners will discover:

• Why the goal of spiritual practice is to leave “nothing between you and love”
• How contemplation prepares us for compassionate action
• The hidden miracle within ordinary life
• What it means to awaken during times of societal upheaval
• How truth-telling becomes a path to freedom

This episode is an invitation — not to escape the world — but to meet it with a wiser, braver, more spacious heart.

If you’ve ever wondered how inner transformation can shape outer change, this conversation is for you.

Transcript:

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Welcome to Beyond Names, I'm Dr. Habib. This is a space for spiritual seekers and soulful misfits, for the curious and the committed, for those grounded in a tradition, and for those who aren't sure what they believe.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Whether you call the divine God, Yahweh, Allah, Elohim, Brahman, Great Spirit, Higher Power, or you're still searching for language that fits, or you're spiritual but not religious, or non-theistic, or have no tradition, in all cases, you are welcome here.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Together, we'll explore the intersection of spirituality and daily life, the wisdom of many traditions, and the ways we return to our true selves, to our source, to the light that each of us carry within.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm so glad you're here. Let's begin with introduction of our conversation partner for this episode, Reverend Busshō Lahn.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Busshō Lahn is a Zen student and teacher, and the guiding teacher of Flying Cloud Zen. He's also a popular speaker, retreat leader, spiritual director, and was a senior staff priest at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center for over a decade.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Busshō is also the author of Singing and Dancing Are the Voice of the Law, and his latest book, What about the World: Zen Activism in a Time of Fire, should be coming out this fall.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To learn more about Busshō and his work, please visit www.flyingcloudzen.org.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Busshō, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Busshō: Oh, thank you very much for inviting me to be here, Dr. Habib. It is a joy.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, would you start us off by telling us a bit about your spiritual story.

Busshō: My spiritual story. That is the place to start.

Busshō: Well, I will confess to you, and to, all of the wonderful listeners, I did exactly zero prep for this conversation, and I did that on purpose. Yes, on purpose! 

Busshō: I thought, oh, that'll be a little more, a little more organic, a little more natural. 

Busshō: And what I love about the way you've worded the question is it allows me to look at the parts of my life that I imagine are spiritual, and the parts of my life that I might imagine are not. Like, when did my spiritual life begin...?

Busshō: Is that in some way, separate from my human life? Are those the same thing? Are they different things?

Busshō: But I think it's pretty typical for all of us to kind of imagine, oh, at some point in my life, I had an apprehension of myself as a spiritual being, and then I had an experience or experiences that began to form me, and at some point, I chose to kind of follow, very consciously choose to follow that impulse and express that in my life.

Busshō: And that's absolutely the case for me.

Busshō: The very short, polite, conversational version would be, I'm from the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul, here in Minnie, Minnesota. I've lived here most of my life, almost the entirety of my life, and so, like a lot of, kind of stereotypical Midwesterners, I was raised Catholic growing up, it was kind of Catholic and Lutheran. 

Busshō: Those were… that was sort of…interfaith dialogue would be, you know, at the four-way stop, if the two of you take turns waving each other through. That was essentially interfaith, at least to my very limited apprehension as a kid.

Busshō: And so I think I really was very much formed by the Catholic imagination, the way Catholicism views mystery, ritual, for those listening today who have a sense of how Catholicism embodies the ritual aspect of worship, how they understand Scripture, how they relate to Scripture.

Busshō: They have their own kind of style, basically.

Busshō: You know, a kind of Catholic style. It's a giant umbrella, I realize I'm referencing here, but Midwestern Catholicism was my upbringing.

Busshō: And, I had exactly zero interfaith experience. I mean, very literally none up until probably…I bet I was 13 or 14, maybe, before I went to church with my best friend.

Busshō: We had a sleepover, and I went to church with him, and he was a Baptist!

Busshō: So there's interfaith.

Busshō: Can you imagine? Two different flavors of Christianity that are… that are a little different, and being really puzzled by, boy, when do they get to the Eucharist part. How come there's no incense? How come, you know, the dude isn't even wearing robes? I don't understand how this is church.

Busshō: Cause this is different for me, right?

Busshō: What are we… what are we doing here? I don't… I don't know what to do.

Busshō: And then we can fast forward to, like a lot of teens, especially late teens, I was pretty actively disinterested, you know?

Busshō: A seed had been planted, but I wasn't aware.

Busshō: That a spiritual seed had been planted in me, and… I wasn't interested in church, obviously, I'd rather do anything but church, and I'd rather do anything that, involved not being kind of the parental template of what was the person I was encouraged to become, that sort of off-the-rack teenage rebellion, so I'm going to pitch all that. I was very actively disinterested in anything like that.

Busshō: But what happened was, my younger sister, she's 4 years younger than I, choose to go to a Catholic college, which is something I would have considered at one point. If you're a Catholic family, it would make sense that Catholic education is on the… at least on the list of possibilities.

Busshō: She chose the Catholic college and, ended up taking a class during her sophomore year that was offered by the music professor. 

Busshō: And at the Catholic college, most of the courses were taught by… not exclusively, but most were taught by nuns or monks.

Busshō: A female college right down the road from the male college, and they'd cross-pollinated taking classes at each other's campuses.

Busshō: So, the music professor there taught a class, called “Zen Meditation and The Question of Time,” which is an awesome name for a class.

Busshō: That's such a cool… right, that's such a cool… I still don't know what that's about, who cares? But that's such a cool name for a class. 

Busshō: And he was… as a musician, he was a classical pianist. Brilliant pianist, actually, he specialized in Beethoven. Musicians look at time in kind of a curious way, sometimes.

Busshō: And, this particular monk had for many, many years, I think several decades, been a Zen practitioner.

Busshō: And so he had learned, you know, Zen Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, has a kind of particularly odd way of talking about time. The way they talk about time is really trippy, and it kind of syncs up a little bit with how I experienced time as a musician.

Busshō: I'm paraphrasing, and I'm putting words in his mouth that I probably shouldn't. Nevertheless, he basically just taught them just sit. That was the class.

Busshō: He basically just taught them meditation, and so for a whole month, they sat for 3-4 hours a day, and….

Busshō: Anyway, at the end of the class, at the end of the class, he gave them the text.

Busshō: At the end of the class, because it was record… the college policy was, you know, the university policy was every class has to have an accompanying text. This is quite a long time ago, right? Like 1990, probably.

Busshō: And he was wise enough to go, oh god, if I give him a book on the first day, those poor kids are going to read it, and we don't want that, because what we're trying to talk about here is meditation, and anything I put in their head, they're just going to have to pull back out again, it's just going to get in the way.

Busshō: So smart enough to leave the text to the last day. On your way out, take a text, read it, or don't.

Busshō: She did read it. She had had a fascinating experience of meditating for a month, and she shared with me her text.

Busshō: And so that was my first, honest-to-God, Habib, that was my first experience of any faith expression or religion outside of the Catholicism that I was raised with.

Busshō: And, as you'd probably guess, and a lot of… a lot of our listeners today would probably guess, the difference between Midwestern Catholicism and Zen Buddhism, these are, like, different planets. They're, like, absolutely, almost diametrically, opposite, to the extent the Spirit has an opposite.

Busshō: And I was so fascinated by it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Busshō: And I didn't expect to be.

Busshō: And I got a little cranky that I was fascinated by it, because I don't want to… I don't want to start doing, like, religion now, man. I've already got rid of that, you know? But the book would not leave me alone, and I started… I started pulling at the Zen thread, essentially.

Busshō: And ever since I kind of have grown... the path for me has kind of grown into being a path of multiple belongings.

Busshō: It didn't take… the path of Zen didn't take me further and further away from Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic expressions, it actually, in my case at least, brought me back to understanding, seeing, and experiencing those expressions just in a different way.

Busshō: And realizing the seed that had been planted when I was very young, in fact, was… it's the same seed. It just happens to have a Catholic leaf, and a Zen leaf, and a, you know, Rumi loving leaf, and a blah blah blah blah leaf, and you kind of go, oh, I get it, I'm a spiritual being growing. 

Busshō: Ever since then, it's been a little bit of a dance, and... The last thing I'll say here to speak to this question is because of the time in which I live and the area in which I live, there's a lot of interest now in contemplative practice, meditative practice, mindfulness practice in the secular world.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Busshō: And so, when I was on staff, and practicing at Minnesota Zen Center, which, like, I was there for almost 20 years, we would frequently get calls or emails to the admin saying, hey, we have a group, can you host us and teach us about meditation? Or hey, can you send someone out and teach us about meditation?

Busshō: We're like, oh, we're a Zen temple, you must be interested in Zen. And they're like, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, we want to know about… right, they were wanting a secular. 

Busshō: And so, what I'm describing to you is I ended up kind of almost having to develop, a language for what I understood to be spiritual practice, but put into contemplative language, so I would teach it at a business, or at a school, right, or at a church, we're going to… we're going to keep this secular, and then I could kind of have to shift gears and talk about it in terms of Zen Buddhism, and then I could kind of shift gears.

Busshō: I was asked to lead a bunch of retreats in a Christian setting. How do we talk about this same thing using the Christian myths and metaphors and iconography and language?

Busshō: So, the very practical skill set of how do you talk about the same thing using different language ended up for me being, at least not consciously intentional, but it ended up being kind of a braiding together of… well, your spiritual identity has got more than one strand, and it was… I'm really, really grateful for that.

Busshō: There was a broadening. I think any of us who do interfaith work realize there's a broadening of the heart that goes along with that, and the ability to see our home tradition from inside of it, but also to be able to see our home tradition from out… outside of it.

Busshō: And there's a great beauty there for me, so that's a long answer to your question, but…raised Catholic, discovered Zen, it wouldn't leave me alone, and now I'm… now I'm stuck.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You're stuck. 

Busshō: I'm stuck.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And yet… It must feel…it must feel at home ... right?

Busshō: Absolutely.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Busshō: 100%. I don't, because I'm a spiritual director, like yourself, you know, I meet with people one-to-one. I talk about their spiritual journey.

Busshō: Almost inevitably, that ends up being a conversation about suffering and love.

Busshō: You know, those are the great motivators of the spiritual, you know, impulse, suffering and love.

Busshō: But, I…talk with folks a lot, and I'm even asked a lot about, like, these things can't coexist in your head the way you're describing. These are different things.

Busshō: You… how do you wrestle with the… you can't be Christian, or Buddhist, or secular all at the same time.

Busshō: They experience, I think, from the outside, at least conceptually...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Busshō: It's easy to imagine that those are different ways of being, or different belief systems that are somehow opposed. Right, or in opposition to one another, and…

Busshō: I have absolutely none of that experience at all.

Busshō: So, you're exactly right, they… They all feel at home in a very… in a very deep sense, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh, that's beautiful. That's very beautiful.

Busshō: Cool.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's interesting that your experience is growing up Catholic-Christian and then ending up Zen Buddhist.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And my experience was growing up in Central U.S, right? I also, I mean, Central, lower down a little bit, you know, but I grew up Protestant Christian and then, of course, ended up a Muslim Sufi.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And it's like, it's so amazing that we get from where we started to where we are, and that it feels like home.

Busshō: Yeah…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Busshō: You know exactly the feeling I'm…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I do.

Busshō: I’m describing.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I do, and… I will say that the… I love this image of braiding together.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And there's a part of me that is 100% with you in that. Like, I feel like I have a foot in all of the Abrahamic faiths, even though I'm not following, you know, like, I don't follow Christianity, I don't identify as being Christian, but I feel like I very much…I feel like I strongly have a connection to Christianity, and I would say the same thing for Judaism. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But what really, like, brought me to the sense of home was… and I've said this on previous podcasts, but we haven't personally talked about this, was when I… I heard a Sufi sheikh say, “If a Muslim, or a person who is Christian, or a person who is Jewish knows their religion, they know that there's only one religion, and that's the religion of love, and peace, and mercy, and justice, and freedom for all without separation.”

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And when I heard that, I was like… it was like something clicked in my heart in a way that just hadn't clicked before.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so I started doing the practices that he recommended doing.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then I found that when I was on the prayer rug, or when I was doing these practices associated with Islamic Sufism, that I felt at home in a way that I had never experienced before. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So it was this combination of feeling like truth in a way that I hadn't felt before, and feeling at home in a way that I hadn't felt before.

Busshō: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I love… I love that you're… that you said all feel that you're at home with all, that all of them feel like home, so…

Busshō: Very much so. And every word, every word there of your example, I can absolutely relate to.

Busshō: And I really do think there's…

Busshō: We haven't said the word mystic yet, but I know, kind of, there's this idea that at the center of each tradition is essentially a mystical --

Busshō: I have reservations about that word, because it's very easily… it can very easily be reduced to some sort of magical sort of thing, but I think at the center of our traditions, we have people who have had really profoundly transformative experiences that are, by definition, impossible to put into the dualism symbolism language.

Busshō: And so, we have the Moses, and the Jesus of Nazarezes, and the Muhammads, peace be upon him, and the Rumi's.

Busshō: And that's the idea of, like, if you go all the way into your expression, whatever your expression, if you go all the way in, you kind of move past it at the same time to the place that you described so beautifully of, oh, all points meet here. Oh, I see how all… 

Busshō: You know, that… the image given to me by, Huston Smith, was originally called Religions of Man, and now I think it's called The World Religions, one of those earlier, really, really good contempl… comparative religions books was the hub of the wheel.

Busshō: You know, and the further out along the axis toward the edge you get, the more different and more disparate those faiths are. You know, they can even… they really can almost appear as opposites, especially in a fundamental sense. 

Busshō: But the further in you go, the more you're like, oh, this is, you know…. So, it's a little reductive.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It’s about love the further in.

Busshō: It's about love further in, and then you get all the different ways of… yeah, exactly that. So there's something really… so no wonder it makes sense that I'm still at the same table, but maybe just shifting seats at the table, like, oh, this is the chair that fits, this one fits, yes, yes, same table, we're all still sitting around, it's all good, but this is the one that works for me, thank you, thank you. Yeah, 100%.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, beautiful. So, I'm curious about your book, about Singing and Dancing are the Voice of the Law. You mentioned that at least part of it speaks to spiritual experience.

Busshō: Yeah!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Is that something that you want to...?

Busshō: A little bit, I will. I'll read you a little bit. Yeah, Singing, so Singing and Dancing are The Voice of the Law is the title, which is a long… a long title.

Busshō: I was surprised. It was the publisher's idea. I want to give credit where credit is due. My suggestion was something else, and he said, no, no, I like your manuscript, but your title is terrible.

Busshō: How dare you? How dare you improve my brilliant title, which I now, of course, forget entirely.

Busshō: He was right. Singing and dancing is the voice of the law is the line from a famous Zen teaching poem called “The Song,” “The Song of Zazen.” And, it's a gorgeous, gorgeous poem. The whole book is…

Busshō: Essentially, I'm using the poem as a jumping off point, to talk about different aspects of spiritual practice, contemplative practice, and because I'm a Zen guy, I do that mostly through Zen metaphor, but, I wrote it very consciously with the publisher's encouragement for people who are spiritual seekers, and not people who already are Zen people, who have already chosen a lane.

Busshō: If that makes sense, he's like, just write it, write it for people who are curious about their lives, and you get to use, you know, Zen stories and metaphor, because that's your language, but, you know, I want you to… I want you to really write it for people who are curious and seeking.

Busshō: So, yeah, that came out a few years ago.

Busshō: And so what I will read for you, is about a page and a half, toward the beginning.

Busshō: I put this story in, and I'm only offering it today because it's an example in my own life of, what we would traditionally call a spiritual experience.

Busshō: Even I have… I can even have an ever-so-slight hesitation in my…in my mind about using that term again, because it sort of implies there are spiritual experiences, and then there are not spiritual experiences.

Busshō: I think, conventionally speaking, we get to say that's true, because it's convenient to say that.

Busshō: But I also… I'm sure this has been your experience as well. It's…It's mundane and every day if I'm not paying attention. If I'm looking at the surface, this is just an average thing. But anything I'm looking at deeply, I mean, immediately be… becomes infinite, of course it does.

Busshō: And so, you know, going to the grocery store yesterday was just going to the grocery store.

Busshō: And that's more about the kind of attention I'm paying to it, as opposed to…I just went on a pilgrimage, you know, to the co-op. 

Busshō: And I saw, you know, you break down that 45 minutes of your life and go, it was all there.

Busshō: Every feeling was there, every sight was there, sounds, smells, like, the miracle of that, you know, the infinity of that.

Busshō: And so, I'm just buying myself a little insurance, I know that we were talking about spiritual experience is really just about paying attention, but…

Busshō: This is, This is from the very beginning. Let's see what I think about this. I haven't read this in a long time, so I'll probably have all sorts of edits I'll want to make.

By December… by December 2010, I had heard my Zen teacher, Tim Burkett, give many Dharma talks, probably hundreds at that point. But this particular talk shot through me like an arrow. Completely unexpected searing, transformative, inexplicable. I'm not sure why my heart was so blessedly available that morning, but as he spoke, the hair on the back of my neck raised. An almost-fear response to his volume and passion and message. I became suddenly and acutely aware that I was in public. I wanted to run, and I wanted to cry, but I felt I could do neither. The urge to run and the urge to cry are two very common responses to hearing something true. And I had both at once. Tim was talking about a painting. Six Persimmons by Muqi [which is the painting that the publisher chose for the cover of the book. It's kind of cool, some people might even recognize that it's a relatively famous painting. It's also famous in Zen circles for being kind of an expression, like, this is an expression of Dharma.] So he was talking about 6 persimmons as a Zen Buddhist expression, significant because of its ordinariness. No ethereal realms, no lofty gods or goddesses, no heavens or hells, just this ordinary fruit, this ordinary moment, this ordinary life. He had a printed copy of the painting with him that he held up as a visual aid. Tim then talked about how quickly something becomes a convention. How quickly we kill something by copying, analyzing, imitating, judging. And then the spontaneity of life can be killed. When that happens, he said, tear it up. He held his copy of Mucci's painting out at arm's length and tore it in half. The sound of paper being ripped apart flew into me like a flock of restless crows bent on rearranging all of my internal furniture. It's hard to say why this particular teaching, a version of which I had heard countless times before ripped me open so profoundly that day. But right then, it wasn't the point. The point was that I was at a Zen Center, something that felt deeply right. There was something right about what I was experiencing. I was on the right track. I had no idea about the size of the project then. In fact, I still don't. But I can tell you that the crazy love crows hidden in that sheet of paper weren't planning anything as tame as rearranging my furniture. If your spiritual life doesn't have at least a little vein of fear running through it, and awe in the face of the size of all of this, then maybe you need to look just a little deeper because the goal of any real spiritual practice is not to rearrange your internal furniture, but to achieve better traffic flow, it's to tear your house down completely so that there is nothing between you and love.

Busshō: So, thank you for your indulgence there.

Busshō: But… I think… when… we explore our own lives and we ask ourselves, which I… which I do sometimes with direct ease when I'm working with people, with students, like, kind of give me your spiritual bio, you know, give me your spiritual bio, and they usually start as I did, like, oh, I was raised, you know, Lutheran, and I'm from blah-ba-di-blah, and, you know, and then my wife and I got married, and I da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and then I took on this different practice.

Busshō: We're raising our kids, we're trying to figure out, you know, kind of the surface level, which is cool. Good place to start.

Busshō: And I say, yeah, okay, so what were those first spiritual impulses? What was the first time you remember being aware of yourself? Something a little larger, you know?

Busshō: Inevitably, what people end up sharing, whether they were aware of it at the time, is some sort of just… I just got bigger in that moment.

Busshō: It always feels to me like the heart cracked open and they apprehended something that they previously hadn't.

Busshō: And we can talk about that as being truth, or some sort of cosmic download or something, or it can be just a moment of finding myself, or a person finding themselves being inexplicably kind in a setting where you'd thought, like, oh man, I really should have responded with fury, and yet I found myself reaching my hand out, or I found myself crying and I knew it wasn't just about the movie that I was watching, or something, you know, and there's just all of a sudden something arrests you, that aesthetic arrest of spirit when, you know, you can feel as a matter being, as a human being, like, I'm right at the edge of my capacity.

Busshō: Something much, much, much bigger is happening, and I'm at the edge of what I can apprehend, and it's showing up as fear, or wanting to cry, or run, or grab all of it, or… kind of takes us into that place.

Busshō: And so, even though this experience wasn't actually a super dramatic one, sitting in a Zendo with, you know, 50 other people listening to some guy, blah blah blah blah, tearing a piece of paper in half.

Busshō: It was a dramatic talk, I do remember it quite well, but that was much more about my availability that day, right? You know? That was… I was able to experience that in a deeper way just because of where I happened to be, kind of a…a happy, holy accident. 

Busshō: So, so, I love, I love the idea that the trip to the co-op can be that.

Busshō: The walk around the lake can be that, getting the mail can be that, and the invitation to all of us all the time is, where's the miracle here? Where's the depth of this?

Busshō: It's not like eternity is later, it's right here, so…

Busshō: I love the way that puts the onus on us, and it also gives us, I think, the agency to you know, dig deeply enough so that we can find that in our everyday life.

Busshō: Pretty cool.

Busshō: Pretty cool.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I want to come back to that last line. I'm going to… I think I got it right, but something along the lines of the spiritual experience, or the goal of spiritual experience, is the tearing your house down completely until there is nothing left between you and love.

Busshō: Yeah, that's probably close.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Paraphrasing of that last sentence that you… that you read. And then you transition from that into talking about where's the miracle in the everyday? Like, where's the miracle in the experience of going to the bank, or getting on the bus, or walking into the grocery store, and...

Busshō: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...and releasing the barriers between you and love in those everyday moments, those mundane moments.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I… if I may, I'd like to… I'd like to transition to… the… It's not everyday moments. I feel like we are in a time where…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: As a Minnesotan, I don't need to tell you this, but you know, on January 7th, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by ICE in Minneapolis. Renee was a poet, she was a mother of three. She was described as a helper, a legal observer, and she was shot when she was in her car.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And not long after, January 24th, 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti and forgive me if I'm not saying his name correctly, was shot multiple times, and killed by Customs and Border Patrol agents, again, in Minneapolis. Alex was an intensive care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So we're living in a time where I think that we're especially challenged to let go of anything between us and love in the everyday, because the everyday has become horrific on a scale that I think is weighing heavily on our… our hearts.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I'm wondering if you have, as a Minnesotan, as a spiritual director, as a Buddhist reverend, is that the right...?

Busshō: Yeah, priests, we call them priests. I'm not sure why we call them that, but that is what we call them.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Okay, as a Buddhist priest...

Busshō: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Do you have any… anything that comes to your heart that you would like to share in relation to, you know, what your own personal experience is, what you know that people in your community are experiencing, what the nation is experiencing, and how we bridge together this being… this endeavor through spirituality to be who we truly are, to be who we are in our essence, to be pure light, to be pure love, un-barriered love and being in the world today?

Busshō: Oof.

Busshō: Well, that's… that's, unfortunately, that's a very fair question.

Busshō: Oh, dear, yeah, the... I'll offer what I can, but I think it probably makes sense to… I think it makes… I think it makes sense to just speak as a human heart. You know, I… I can't… I don't know that there's something on behalf of a nation or a people or a tradition that I have to… that I have to say.

Busshō: I understand all of our faith traditions have at their core, you've already said it really, really eloquently, a sense of mercy, love, understanding, forgiveness. We know that. Buddhism is no different.

Busshō: The principles of ahimsa are non-harming, non-violence is at the core of the tradition, I can say that.

Busshō: And, what I'm seeing in my community here is really no different than what I'm seeing in my own heart, which is, kind of a kaleidoscope almost of, really powerful emotion, really powerful emotion, because there's… it's so… the experience of being in the Minneapolis area, which is where I am, I'm right in the metro, here.

Busshō: It is so dense, there's obvious anger. Of course, there's the…just the… the shocking… the shocking nature of these murders, the obvious injustice at the, just blatant injustice of it brings up the horror, and then the anger, and the rage that comes with that. Makes so much sense.

Busshō: When I breathe with that for a little while, it doesn't take long for, at least in my experience, for me to start to feel there's so much fear right underneath.

Busshō: There's so much fear, it just makes sense. There's a terror at the face of what's happening, and what that means. What does that mean for me personally? What does that mean for my family? What does that mean for my community? What does that mean for my state? What does that mean for my country? Are we the bad guys? You know, these start becoming really, really, really big questions.

Busshō: They can turn into really, really large questions, existential questions for spiritual seekers, like, what's the nature of human life? Are we good at the core? What's going on here? Is this our true nature that I see acted out? Or is the true nature of the broken heart that responds to what I see being acted out? What… you see where I'm going, like, oh my goodness, right?

Busshō: So, huge amount of fear underneath that, I can feel a huge amount of my own hurt.

Busshō: Much of it happening now, because this is a city I've lived in for a long, long time, these are people that I know. Alex Pretti was a co-worker of my sister's.

Busshō: That's like, this isn't an abstract thing.

Busshō: I saw the video of his body being moved through the corridors there of the hospital and all the people standing at attention, and I thought, I've been…I've been in that hallway. I've been right there, visiting my sister, you know, at work at the hospital.

Busshō: And so, it's very, very personal, and a lot of the hurt that I'm feeling is watching something in real time.

Busshō: And, my own personal practice, this is a lot of the Buddhist training is, and in what way is my conditioned nature, my karma, the things that have happened to me, my own personal history, also being awakened?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Busshō: You know, when I'm encountering a bully of some kind, it's going to remind me of every other time that I've been bullied.

Busshō: And so, you can feel my, like, boy, Busshō's big emotional reaction has a lot to do with what's happening right now in the real world, but there's also… he's carrying with him, you know, in his heart, in his body, in the cells of his being, all of his memories around that, you know, and think, geez, there's a lot going on, and there's so much… there's so much intensity. 

Busshō: So… So what I'm seeing in my community is all of that. People are really wanting to talk about it. They want to talk about their anger, they want to talk about their… their fear. They want to talk about their hurt.

Busshō: They also… because of the place in which we are at, right now is the 30th of January in the year 2026. This may change… I'm saying that because this may change radically in the next day or even a week, because it's changing so quickly. 

Busshō: But right now, the way, in general, Minneapolis has been responding to this has been admirable.

Busshō: Really beautiful people all across the country are… Wow, there hasn't been violence, they're not shooting back, there isn't fire for fire, there's been creativity, there's been compassion, there's been community making, there's been candlelight vigils, there's been singing and dancing.

Busshō: And you think, oh, this isn't… You can feel there's just a… there's a center of gravity there, you know, that something is coming in, and instead of just meeting that fire with more fire, you can feel there's just ever so slightly a little bit of a larger… and we felt this with George Floyd some years back here in Minneapolis.

Busshō: The names you mentioned, obviously, are fresh in our mind.

Busshō: Why Minneapolis keeps being the place, I don't know. I don't know about that.

Busshō: But I also have a lot of hope because of the resiliency of the community, and there's a tremendous amount of hope, and there's a tremendous amount of optimism as a result.

Busshō: So, when I'm saying kaleidoscope, it is a little bit like, you know, holding that thing up to the light and going, wow, now it's red, now it's blue, now it's green, now it's all of the above, now it's none of the above.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Busshō: So, to kind of put more of a point on that, the… the difficult…and, I'll admit, not popular practice for me, for me, is… where can I… where's the war inside of me? Where's the war inside of me?

Busshō: I know it's outside. Easy to find the conflict, the injustice, cruelty, I can see that in the world.

Busshō: You're absolutely right, in naming what's happening right now is, at least for us in this country, historically unprecedented at least during most of the lives of most of us who are listening to this, like, we've never seen this before.

Busshō: There's an identity shift happening, right?

Busshō: And at the same time, all of us, especially those of us who are studies, study, students of religion, go, oh, man, this is just the story of humanity, there's nothing new here.

Busshō: This is just the Mad Emperor, and dealing with human cruelty, and our religious expressions and our spiritual aspirations are responses to that. 

Busshō: There's really no difference. You know?

Busshō: So I know there's something universal happening, but the reason I say what I'm about to say isn't popular is… 

Busshō: You said something that I think is absolutely true.

Busshō: I think all of us know is absolutely true, which is my deepest nature is the light. My deepest nature is the light. That's what I am. Deepest identity. Buddha nature, we call it sometimes in my tradition.

Busshō: Buddha nature, tathāgatagarbha, the womb of Buddha, is what we actually are.

Busshō: And so when I begin to… really start to…feel and live into that being a truth, not just a… a comforting idea, but an actual truth, what I understand about the impulse of the light is it shines and it reaches out into the dark.

Busshō: That’s what it does.

Busshō: And so immediately, I become curious, as a spiritual being, about the nature of my human experience. Right?

Busshō: We're spiritual beings having a human experience, and so, wow, I notice my… 

Busshō: In my tradition ... actually my Christian upbringing did a good job of doing this too, but certainly the First Noble Truth of Buddhism -- suffering is our nature, and greed, hate, and ignorance are the fuel for that fire, you know?

Busshō: Everything is on fire, everything is on fire. The fire sermons, just look at the fire, look at the suffering, it's everywhere.

Busshō: I begin to be curious about the suffering.

Busshō: And I really do move toward, I can see how, when I am hurt and I get scared, my anger, my righteous anger can become self-righteous anger.

Busshō: I can imagine myself being that ICE guy. Wow, I can find that energy in me, too. Wow.

Busshō: It's relatively easy for my ego to go, oh, I'm Renee Good, oh, I'm Alex Pretti. Correct.

Busshō: It's not so popular for my ego -- this is kind of what I was saying about, like, tearing the house down, is…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Busshō: ...it's pretty hard for me to go, I'm also the ICE guy.

Busshō: And to be capable of such an act of hatred, such an act of violence, all of us know, oh, there's a deeply wounded soul there.

Busshō: And we all do know anger, and we all do know fear, and we all do know, we all have that… I'm going to lash out and solve the problem.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Busshō: I go, there it is, that isn't so abstract. Busshō, you better cross your legs. Sit on your, you know, sit on your cushion, face the wall, and go, hey, what is that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Busshō: In a really tender way, because that isn't, like, something that I need to exorcise and rip out of me as a bad thing. In my tradition, it's more of, oh, that's always going to come from an unhealed wound.

Busshō: Of course! Oh my god, I get it. If all… if the only resource you have available to you is…rage of… rageful action, oh, you're not resourced at all. There's no… something hasn't been healed, something hasn't been seen, something hasn't been held. Something hasn't been loved.

Busshō: So, you've got some loving to do. And yes, of course that's going to show up out in the world. 

Busshō: It's going to… it's going to inform the decisions I make to light a candle, or go to a vigil, or go to a march, or who I'm going to donate money to, how I'm going to live my life, how I'm going to treat my neighbors, who I'm going to give refuge to, all that kind of stuff.

Busshō: As I mentioned to you before we started recording here, the whole state is in a… that's a statewide strike. We're not… we're not shopping, not going out, not going to work, not going to school, the whole thing is shut down today.

Busshō: And so that's one of the ways I can… like, I'm going to demonstrate the state of my heart by doing something that feels kind and passive and nonviolent as resistance, but the internal work that I really am, as a spiritual aspirant, required to do is, I got to find that ICE agent inside of me.

Busshō: I have to, have to, have to own that piece. There's a wounding there, there's an old… Right? There's an old belief, there's probably all sorts of pain in there that absolutely needs my…needs my love, and so it stops being external and abstract, and starts being internal and deeply personal when it becomes a contemplative, a contemplative act.

Busshō: So that's kind of the point of… and that's how… that's how my community, the community I'm part of, has been largely starting off as, I'm… here's the stuff I'm experiencing around what's happening in the outside, and then, alright, let's do our practice. Together, let's do our practice. Let's do our meditation.

Busshō: Is that… in some way, speaking to…? There's so many ways we could have gone with this. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, sure. No, every way…It's perfect, yeah. I appreciate it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I appreciate the… One of the things that I'm… I appreciate the honesty as to complete the sentence, and one of the things that I've just been sitting with personally is…that… I noticed this in my self, and in my fellow human brothers and sisters that it's not always easy to be honest with ourselves.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And it seems to me, in my personal experience, I don't know that I had the ability, to be honest with myself, without the experience that I had after embarking on my spiritual journey. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It was as if the practices that I was doing and my spiritual experience and my faith experience strengthened my mind, and strengthened my heart, and gave me a strength with which I could then begin to be honest with myself.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… And I think that perhaps I'm not the only one with…

Busshō: You are absolutely not the only one!

Busshō: Yeah…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's not a… it just seems like, as I look around at myself and others, like, that's not a skill set that a lot of us are like, yeah, this is… the first thing I'm putting at the top of my resume is the ability to be honest with myself.

Busshō: We do not like it!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And yet…

Busshō: Yeah!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ... in this, what you're saying, is that it is more important than ever to be honest with ourselves, in order to do the real work, both individually and communally.

Busshō: That’s perfectly put.

Busshō: And I honestly think, let's go back to our house… house metaphor, I don't want to beat it to death, but…the house metaphor that I chose in that part of the book that I read, it's an old one, there's a couple of examples in Buddha scripture where the house is used as a metaphor for the ego self, just the persona of the normal person, right? We're friendly, we like our egos. Egos are good. Egos are good.

Busshō: But we also recognize they're also a construct, right? There isn't… that isn't the actual identity, this is just the construct. 

Busshō: So the idea of leaving the house, you know, when I was talking about, you go on the pilgrimage, you leave the house, and so we have the idea of leaving the palace and the myth of the Buddha. I have to leave the thing that I imagine that I am, the thing that I imagine keeps me safe, the story I imagine I have about me.

Busshō: And I have to leave, and there's a chosen position there of vulnerability.

Busshō: It's like I'm choosing. I'm choosing to see something much deeper, and this might be really, really scary for me. 

Busshō: And so, in a sense, meditation is, and this is the way it was taught to me, is I sit down, and I light my candle, and I light my incense, and I do my bows, and I set the timer, and then, okay, off we go, here we go, half hour, or 40 minutes, or however long the meditation is, I'm going to leave the house.

Busshō: But leaving the house isn't a disidentification. I mean, on one level, I'll correct myself there, yes, I am not the house, I'm the person who goes into it and goes out of it, and goes into it and goes out of it, correct. 

Busshō: But at the same time understanding, oh, this is how the house was built. Oh, this is why he built it that way. Oh, I get it.

Busshō: Can you feel there's, like, a friendly making there? It's not a disavowal of I am not greedy, I am not hateful, I am not like, oh, come on, come on, come on, come on, no, no, no, no, no.

Busshō: All of us get scared, and it shows up as anger. All of us get hurt, and it shows up this way, that's okay, you can pull those things in. 

Busshō: So, my sense is, exactly, individually, for me to go, oh, that's why I built the house that way. I needed to.

Busshō: That feels… there's, like, a lot of forgiveness there of, oh, that's why I did that thing even if it was really unskillful.

Busshō: Really unskillful.

Busshō: Oh, but I see how at that stage, at that time in my life, I get why I did that. I understand. That was my best game. My A game when I was 13 was to da-da-da-da, and you look back and go, man, that was just mean. You bullied that kid, right? Or you punch the neighbor, or you said the racist slur, or you told the homophobic joke, you didn't even know, but you were a 12-year-old, and this was the best you had, and you can look back now and go, oh, it's because I was so scared, and I didn't see, and I didn't know.

Busshō: Can you feel that the goal isn't like I'm going to hate that kid and vow to never be that kid, it's more of, oh, sweetheart, I get it.

Busshō: And where I'm going with this is, on a national level, ultimately, on a species level, but for right now, we'll just talk about what's happening in our country is to go there is a growing pain you can feel.

Busshō: Like, we're right up against the edge of it's time to evolve and move past an old identity that we've… we've outgrown. We have to outgrow. This house just doesn't fit anymore. We have to go…Oh, wow, there's a lot here we didn't see.

Busshō: The story we told did what it needed to do for who we were then, but we're actually big enough now, we're brave enough now, we're loving enough now to go, wow, we have hurt ourselves, we have hurt others, I get it, I can name it, like you said, oh, I can name that.

Busshō: And I absolutely agree with what you said, Habib, which is… when I have some experience, whether that's sitting with somebody who is a loving being, a priest, a spiritual director, a really good therapist, right? 

Busshō: Or even experiencing the truth of Scripture in a really deep way of going, oh, you're light, sweetheart, you've always been light, everything is light. Don't worry about it, you're okay. We're going to have an adventure now for a few decades, it's going to be a ride. It's going to hurt, it's going to be a ride, but it's okay. It's okay. You're safe, everything's… it's, you know, all shall be well, right? 

Busshō: I think unless we have that, it's way, way, way… almost not possible, certainly way too scary, to be able to be honest and go, oh my god, I've got greed within me, I have hate within me, I have ignorance within me, I've got misunderstandings, I've been cruel, I've been this, I've been that.

Busshō: Because we imagine we're discussing ourselves. I've just had the courage to tell Dr. Habib and all of his listeners, I'm a bad person. No, no, no, no, no, we're not saying that at all. We're saying, I've been telling him, oh, I've acted from places of woundedness.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. 

Busshō: From my humanity, that's… this is my human nature, right? So you go, oh, of course. 

Busshō: So I'm with you. I think part of why we sit, in my tradition, but part of why people might meet with Dr. Habib is, if I'm in the presence of somebody, whoever that person is, and they represent to me, and I can have an experience of unconditional, unconditional acceptance, actual love, those places in me aren't quite so scary to go into, you know?

Busshō: They're just… they're honestly not. 

Busshō: So there's… there is a wisdom to the eye-opening model of – oh, it is scary to wake up from the dream. And at the same time, ahhh, love compels us to do it, and it's okay, we're safer than we think.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm…

Busshō: Telling the truth -- yeah, it's scary for one part of us, but then the other part of us just rejoices, and it's so nice. There's a little bit of a both-and there.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Busshō: At least for me, that's how I've experienced it.

Busshō: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I like that. My wife and I, of course, have been talking to some degree about what's going on in our world today, and… and specific… in the world, as well as in our own country, here in the United States, and…what you just said in terms of awakening, that's one of the things that I have said using similar language is that it seems that what's happening is that there is an unveiling that's taking place and we are being invited to look at our individual and collective identity more closely and to look at who we are in truth, in an outer way, but look at who we are in terms of our outer actions, and the consequence of those actions, but also to look at our truth in an inner way.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You know, and that's the invitation that I hear you speaking to, is, in order to be engaged in the outer world in a way that spiritual aspirants would like to be engaged is… this is to accept the invitation that we are being presented by world events to engage in inner honesty and inner contemplation and inner action to… to remove all of those things between us and love on the inner.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You know, between us and love for the wounded 12-year-old, or the wounded 13-year-old, or the wounded 5-year-old, and… that, in that way, then we can be engaged in the outer, very much as you described what's happening in the community, in a way that removes the barriers between the individual and the collective love.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And you're… so I'm very heartened to hear these stories of the vigils, the stories of dancing, the stories of… the… of community coming together in…in its common expression, or communal expression of the pain, but also communal expression, it sounds to me like, of support and love for each other.

Busshō: Exactly.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I know that you say that you're…

Busshō: Go ahead.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I was just going to say, I know that you said that your upcoming book is on the topic of contemplation and action, and drawing that connection between what we're doing on the inner and what we… how we engage in the world on the outer.

Busshō: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Any closing thoughts to wrap up, or any final words of…?

Busshō: Yeah, it's exactly that. Again, I think you're just describing it so well.

Busshō: The... I mean, having… and again, I'm just kind of filtering in my head here before I speak.

Busshō: The places that… there are just some places that all traditions land. There are just some things that all traditions are just in the very same… same place on, and a relationship with truth, like, love shows up as truth, right?

Busshō: You should come to… To know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Busshō: That the naming of… the naming of something has a great power, there's just a great power in going, oh, anger is arising in me. 

Busshō: That doesn't mean anything about me, that's not what I am.

Busshō: I'm the experiencer of that. That's an experience, but it's not an identity.

Busshō: And it all of a sudden then becomes safe to go, oh, like, I'm hearing the sound of traffic, because that's what's happening outside. That's not who I am, it's just something that's showing up.

Busshō: You know? And so as to tell the truth of, oh, I can feel the rage in me, oh, I can feel the anger in me, oh, I've got old hurt in me, oh, I can see how I'm struggling, oh, I can see how I'm confused about what love looks like right now, should I march?

Busshō: Should I not march?

Busshō: What do I do? I'm so scared, you know?

Busshō: Even just the truth of, just say the word, I'm so scared.

Busshō: I'm so confused. I know I'm giving words to an experience that I am having. That's not me, that's just something that's showing up.

Busshō: I'm the knower of my anger, I am not my anger. I'm the knower of sound of the crow that I'm hearing outside my window right now. I am not the crow. I am not the sound.

Busshō: But the… the… what I tried to write to in… in the… in the book that should… we're hoping is published this fall, What About the World is…a phrase from a very old, and pretty famous, at least to me, Zen Koan, a teaching, a teaching story. A koan is a teaching story from China, probably 1500 years old, or something like that.

Busshō: Where someone's been off… they've left the monastery, and they've gone off into the world, and they've come back after a certain amount of time, and they're talking to their teacher, and saying, yep, I've been out into the world, and the teacher's like, well, how's the world? What's going on out there? You know?

Busshō: There's a lot! There's a lot going on out there.

Busshō: I'm paraphrasing entirely. There's a lot going on out there. Oof! Not all easy.

Busshō: What are you doing about the world, teacher? Because I can see you're… he catches him in this conversation, he's planting rice. What are you doing about the world?

Busshō: It's a pretty good question.

Busshō: And that feels like a perennial question, right?

Busshō: What… what are you doing about the world? We know that disappearing to the mountaintop or disappearing to the monastery isn't the end game.

Busshō: Might be part of refining, it might be part of training, it might be part of learning, but that's not the end game, you know?

Busshō: And the teacher gives back then the question, you know, what are you doing about the world, teacher? And he says, well, what do you call the world?

Busshō: Like, where are you drawing the line?

Busshō: And that's the jumping-off point for me. I spend a lot of time working with that koan in the book, but it's exactly what you've described is…if I'm going to set a loving boundary, and love does do that -- No. Like, Minneapolis is saying, no, no, this cannot happen, no -- in order for that no to come from a place of love that embraces the humanity of the person doing the action, but says no to the action, there's got to be an awful lot of clarity in the mind and the heart of the person saying, no, I'm saying yes to you as a person, and I'm saying no to the thing you're doing.

Busshō: It just takes an awful lot of inner work to get very clear about, here's what I am saying yes to, and here's what I am saying no to, you know?

Busshō: And so, for me, practice, spiritual practice at the beginning, mostly meditation. Meditation, meditation, meditation.

Busshō: But at some point, my teacher realized, as all good teachers do, Yeah, there's more than just that. You're going to need to do… I think, like all aspirants, there's an awful lot of shadow. We can call it shadow work.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Or the inner work of, you know, you are all of the rings of your tree, you're not just this outer ring that's wearing a robe and looks… sitting in full lotus!

Busshō: That looks so nice! Look at you, sitting in full lotus, wearing your robe! Very, very nice! You're also all of these other rings, so let's start to go in, in and down, in and down.

Busshō: I was asked to do that, and I have for a long, long time, and I was encouraged, of course, to study Scripture, study the Koans, to study the records. At some point, my teacher said, okay, that's enough Zen, it's time for Rumi.

Busshō: You're like, it's time for you to start studying other masters.

Busshō: You know, I need you to leave the confines of Zen. We're called upon. It's like, you got to go beyond Buddha, you got to be able to find this everywhere, you know? That's part of the deal, right?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Busshō: And then finally, I was encouraged, okay, exercise. Exercise.

Busshō: Like, resistance. I want you to experience the resistance of gravity. I want you to experience the resistance of weight. I want you to experience the resistance of a body that's tired, and you encourage it from within it in a loving place to keep going.

Busshō: I want you to feel in your body the difference between -- well, it's just uncomfortable, but okay and when you're actually hurting -- because I don't want… no one's hurting themselves here, but I want you to feel, as all of us do, like, there are resistances within us on a physical level, on an emotional level, on an ego level, like, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, but I want you to experience… it's okay to not want to…and still do it, you're safe, you're safe.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mmmm.

Busshō: So, my point is, what I kind of thought I was signing up for around spiritual practice, wasn't in nearly as small of a box as I imagined. I thought it happened at the temple, and I thought it happened between the bells, and I thought it happened only when the candle was lit and the incense was burning, and now I'm discovering oh, it's multi-faceted, it's multi-faith by definition, because we're all spiritual beings having a human experience, and it has political ramifications, and it has social ramifications, and it shows up in my marriage, and it shows up with my students, and it shows up…

Busshō: And isn't it wonderful?

Busshō: Honestly, at the end, to be able to bless all of it, I know that's the aspiration, to shine on all of it.

Busshō: Yeah… I think I… Did I answer your question? I forgot what the question was.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I think so. I was… you were making the connection between contemplation and action.

Busshō: Ahhh! There!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You talked about the koan that is the foundation for the title for your book, and how you worked on that in the book, and… yes.

Busshō: I'll be darned.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I love the points of commonality in hearing, you know, in my own tradition, there's a…there's a saying, and I'm not going to remember it well, but the gist of it is, is that you can be on your deathbed and know that you are going out, and you can know that this is the end, you know, that all of humanity is about to be wiped out. But if you have a seed, and you can plant it, plant the seed anyway.

Busshō: Yeah, there you go.

Busshō: I love it! We have the same… we have the same teaching! The koan is, you've fallen over the edge of a cliff, and you're hanging on by a root, and the root is pulling out, and below you, as you look down, there is a whole bunch of tigers all swarming, waiting to eat you. You've got 4 seconds left, tops, and there's a strawberry. There's a strawberry growing out of the side of the cliff. What do you do?

Busshō: You eat the strawberry.

Busshō: This is it!

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Eat the strawberry, plant the seed.

Busshō: Plant the seed, say yes. Say yes to all of it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And say to… yes to all the different leaves.

Busshō: Yeah, 100%.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To circle back to the metaphor that you were using earlier.

Busshō: It's all good, right? It's all good. What else could it be?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Come to embrace all of the… all of those different leaves with the love that comes from within and shines forth.

Busshō: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Busshō, thank you for a great conversation.

Busshō: Yeah…

Busshō: I so appreciate, I so appreciate this time. I really appreciate talking with you, and, I so appreciate the…the, what I trust is the aspiration and the curiosity and the impulse and the hearts and minds of all the folks who follow you, who are watching along or listening along. 

Busshō: There's a reason we're curious. Right? About this dimension of our life, there's some part of us that so wants to go home, remember, you know, what we really, really are, and so, to the degree that there's something here that can in any way fan that flame or encourage that light, that's the blessing. That's absolutely the blessing.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. So thank you for your part in helping us live with authenticity and truth, and love, so…

Busshō: You are most welcome, right back at you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you to all listeners for joining us on Beyond Names. Before we go, if you would pause briefly and take one breath to reflect on what stays with you from this conversation with Busshō.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you grow in compassion, clarity, and courage.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you find your way again and again back home to yourself, back home to the divine, however you name it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If today's conversation spoke to you, please like, share, and comment on this episode, and please follow and subscribe to Beyond Names.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I would like to offer free spiritual direction sessions to anyone directly impacted by the events in Minnesota -- so, activists, faith leaders, immigrants, BIPOC persons, concerned allies, and others.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Spiritual direction can be a safe space to catch our breath in the midst of horrific circumstances.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It can be a place to be heard and to be held.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And tend to deepen our connection to the resources that can sustain us in such times.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So to make an appointment with me, please visit https://www.habibboerger.com/. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Until next time, may you be light.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you consciously participate in growing your light, and may you share your light.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Peace be with you.