You Can’t Fall Off The Path – August 2020

All your paths are superintended, you have always been on the Path. You can’t fall off it. Everything is conspiring to lead you home to experience your true nature. Everything you are doing now, including all the mess-ups and screw-ups and mistakes are exactly the right thing for you to learn what you need to know to move along your path. All the causes and conditions of your unique life have brought you to this moment. And given your particular set of causes and conditions you have always done your best.

– Ven. Sandra Jishu Holmes, Co-Founder of the Zen Peacemaker Order

Join us – Ando Jaune Evans and Joshin Byrnes – explore the origins, intertwining lineages, and evolving practice of Zen in America. Through personal stories and readings from sacred texts, they will journey through decades of their experience as students, ordained priests and, now, transmitted teachers as they have moved along this true path. Transmitted from East to West, our historical Zen roots from monastic practice have now blossomed into vibrant residential centers where women and men practice side by side, Bodhisattva-in-the-world householder practice, and bearing-witness street retreats bringing us face to face with suffering from which we cannot turn away.  In our time together, participants will also share their journey to practice, what inspires us to return over and over again to the practice of breathing and sitting, how do we envision practice on the path toward your true nature – the path you have always been on, the path that has brought all of us to this moment, the path from which we cannot fall.

Saturday August 15
12:30 – 3pm Eastern Time
By zoom

Ando Jaune Evans was originally ordained as a priest in the White Plum Lineage by Tetsugen Bernie Glassman and Taizan Maezumi Roshi in 1983 at the Zen Community of New York. She is now a priest and senior teacher in the Bay Area Everyday Zen Sangha in the Shunryu Suzuki Branching Streams lineage of Norman Fischer. She received Dharma Transmission in 2019 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

As the lead teacher of the Heart of Compassion Zen Sangha in Point Reyes, California, Jaune practices and studies at the intersections of traditional and contemporary spiritual life. She engages with other Zen teachers and sanghas in meeting the challenges of racial, gender, socio-economic and climate injustice.

She works as the Executive Director of Tamalpais Trust, a philanthropic foundation which supports and helps to protect Indigenous Peoples’ sacred lands and waters, cultural and human rights, gender empowerment and global justice alliance-building. She serves on the Board of Directors of Commonweal (www.commonweal.org), the leadership team of Healing Circles Global (www.healingcirclesglobal.org), and is an Advisor to both the Board of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and Mesa Refuge Writer’s Refuge.

Joshin Byrnes is a Zen priest and teacher in the White Plum lineage of Maezumi Roshi and Bernie Glassman Roshi and is a dharma successor of Roshi Joan Halifax. He founded Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community in 2017.

Joshin envisioned that Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community would be a hub of socially engaged Zen practice grounded in the Zen Peacemaker tradition and the practices of Not Knowing, Bearing Witness and Healing Action. To that end, the residents of Bread Loaf Mountain Zen host a free cafe in Rutland, VT. Also, BLMZC has created the Infinite Circle training program at BLMZC The Infinite Circle program is a plunge into bearing witness to poverty in our communities and service to those who live in the economic margins. Joshin maintains a core practice of bearing witness to homelessness by offering street retreats in cities around the country.

Professionally, Joshin has spent much of his career working for social change nonprofits in the areas of AIDS and HIV prevention, child welfare, and community based philanthropy.

Joshin is partnered with Bernie Schlager, and together they have three children and many grandchildren, which are a great joy.