Zen practice for grief, care, and renewal.
Brooklyn Zen Center gathers talks, guided meditation, and ceremony-centered teaching from a lived Zen practice community. Its recent episodes move between spring birdsong, parental grief, metta practice, precepts, healing, and the steady work of liberation.
PRESS PLAY
Brooklyn Zen Center is a feed of dharma talks, guided meditation, and community practice offered from a Zen Buddhist setting. It sounds close to the room. First-time visitors are welcomed, children are noticed, doors open to birdsong, and formal teachings arise alongside weather, grief, and ordinary hesitation. The result is intimate without becoming casual. Recent episodes center care as a serious spiritual discipline. Sarah Dōjin Emerson returns often to the difficulty of staying open: joy and heartbreak, rage and tenderness, renewal and pain all allowed to appear together. That balance gives the show much of its force. It does not treat Zen as escape. Practice is presented as a way of meeting bodies, nervous systems, inherited conditioning, loss, and the hard work of relationship. Parenting and caregiving receive particular attention. One parent-focused talk names grief as part of accompanying people through change; another guided meditation builds metta from the felt memory of unrestrained love. The language can be plain and vulnerable, then suddenly precise. Jukai, Sashin, precepts, zazen, heart-mind, and way-seeking mind talks are explained from inside the life of the community, not as abstract vocabulary. Ceremony has weight. So does preparation: sewing, study, retreat, and the gathered attention that leads into receiving precepts. The feed also carries a clear social awareness, with explicit welcomes around identity, age, access, and who is absent from the room. Its spirituality is relational. People influence one another, carry difficult conditioning, and still practice turning toward what has been received. The show suits listeners who want Buddhist teaching with emotional range, embodied detail, and communal texture. It is contemplative, but awake to the world outside the zendo.
Made for: For listeners drawn to Zen Buddhist teaching that stays close to lived experience, family life, ceremony, and emotional honesty. It especially suits people interested in caregiving, grief, metta, precepts, and embodied practice.
What sets it apart: Brooklyn Zen Center stands apart through its blend of formal Zen practice and tender, room-level immediacy. The talks move from ceremony and doctrine to birdsong, parenting, accessibility, and heartbreak without losing their contemplative center.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A retreat reflection where Mara's arrows become flower petals and compassion starts with regard.
This episode frames non-duality through the odd intimacy of connection, where past and present feel threaded together and mountains, retreat, and self keep trading positions.
Generous Buddhist conversations without the rush.
Tova Green gives a Dharma talk on welcoming all experiences without pushing anything away.
Ian Kidō Case discusses the meaning and practice of practice period in Zen Buddhism, focusing on its origins and how it is observed at Brooklyn Zen Center.
Ryan Lee Wong introduces a poetry reading at Brooklyn Zen Center the day after the 2024 election, welcoming all emotions and reflecting on the purpose of literature in times of uncertainty.
A Zen teacher at Brooklyn Zen Center delivers a talk on Rohatsu Day 4, exploring Buddha nature through personal reflections and traditional stories.
Jeffrey, head student at Brooklyn Zen Center, delivers a Dharma talk on healing and community after the election.
Charlie Korin Pokorny’s Brooklyn Zen Center talk centers on Soto Zen practice, awakening, and the 10th-century Chinese koan “the fire child comes seeking fire.” The koan’s repeated question about “the self of this student” becomes a meditation on separation, suffering, and the limits of conceptual explanations.
A Dharma talk at Brooklyn Zen Center on cultivating joy alongside pain and heartbreak as a form of resilience.
Sarah Dōjin Emerson reflects on the sensory experience of spring as a metaphor for spiritual renewal and the dharma of retreat.
Charlie Korin Pokorny discusses the upcoming Jukai ceremony and the Sashin practice leading to receiving the Buddhist precepts.
A guided meditation session introducing foundational metta practice for parents and caregivers, focusing on cultivating unconditioned love as an anchor.
A dharma talk exploring the role of grief in parenting and caregiving, emphasizing the need to grieve constant change and loss.
Sarah Dōjin Emerson, a priest and dharma teacher at Brooklyn Zen Center, argues that Zen practice can help people learn connection and unlearn the “delusion of separation.” She links interoception—the capacity to notice inner experience—to empathy, and describes meditation as attention to the body, nervous system, memories, and senses.
At Brooklyn Zen Center on January 17, 2026, Sarah Dōjin Emerson asks why Soto Zen practice says “all beings” while acknowledging limits such as an inaccessible old building.
Brooklyn Zen Center’s January 10, 2026 Dharma talk uses Zen death poems to examine mortality, impermanence, and spiritual practice.
Sarah Dōjin Emerson's Rohatsu 2025 Dharma Talk #4 treats every moment of Zazen as connected to all beings and the Buddha's awakening.
Sarah Dōjin Emerson welcomes the sangha back from break and guides a meditation on getting comfortable and bringing awareness into the body for liberation.
Jefre Cantu, a priest at Brooklyn Zen Center, gives a Dharma talk during a 90-day practice period focused on healing, expressing gratitude and sharing insights from a morning Zaza instruction with children.