Zen Peacemakers

Scholarships are available
contact us at retreats@zenpeacemakers.org

CORE TRAININGS

The Three Tenets with Sensei Jim Daikan Bastien
Monday, November 16th
7:00-8:00 PM EST

Bernie Glassman articulated the Three Tenets of Zen Peacemakers early in its evolution. These three simple, profound vows or commitments can also be taken as a complete practice for our lives.

Not-Knowing: I will embody Not-Knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas.
Bearing Witness: I will bear witness, opening my heart to the joy and suffering of life.
Loving Action: I will take loving action arising out of Not-Knowing and Bearing Witness.

Through the Three Tenets, we can practice and manifest our true selves in every situation and with everything that arises. This is a lifelong practice—one we never complete. During this hour-long session, Sensei Daikan will present and describe the Three Tenets, followed by time for questions.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS SERIES

Aging: Renewing the Mystery
A Monthly Gathering with Roshi Eve Marko
2nd Tuesday of each Month

Aging: Renewing the Mystery is a monthly Zoom gathering investigating themes and issues many of us face as we get older. Topics include forgiveness, fear of dependence, illness and death, simplicity, regret, loneliness, the changing faces of love, and others that come from participants.

We are also offering an “Aging Council” the 4th Wednesday of each Month.
Open to everyone.

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

COUNCIL

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council during our Bearing Witness retreats almost every day.

In Council, we come together in a small group in a profound way. We each listen and speak from the heart, encountering and experiencing one another gently and with awareness. We are not solving problems, debating issues, or making plans. We are making a healing space for each of us to hear and be heard, see and be seen.

UPCOMING COUNCILS (click on title to learn more & register)

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe
Nov 2nd: Mental Health Professionals & Caregivers with Dr. Iris Dotan Katz
Nov 14th AEDT: The Way of Council with Aus-NZ Peacemaker Council
Nov 20th: Women Only Council

A PRAYER FOR PEACE

Hello Family!

Our dear Lakota relative, Violet Catches, invites Zen Peacemakers from all around the world to join on the Fourth Friday of each month at 1:00 pm US Eastern Time, to offer prayers for peace. Participants will be encouraged to offer prayers from their faith tradition, culture, and in their language.

In peace & gratitude-

Michel Engu Dobbs

Fourth Fridays at 1:00pm EDT
Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89008592778

MEDIA LIBRARY

New Peacemaker Circle Videos

A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets:
A Conversation with Red Pine

In this Peacemaker Circle on October 7th, translator and author Bill Porter (Red Pine) recounts how he began studying Chinese after receiving a Columbia fellowship, struggled through intensive coursework, and was influenced by a monk in New York Chinatown and later monastic life in Taiwan.

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

Renowned poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield joined Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe earlier this fall in September for a Peacemaker Circle on art-making, activism, and compassion, including readings of her poems.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS AFFILIATES

NEW AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Our mission is to awaken, liberate, and protect all beings.

What we do: Mountain Cloud Zen Center is a lay Sanbo Zen practice community dedicated to awakening, liberation, and reducing suffering through Zen practice and compassionate engagement with the world. Founded in 1985, the Center offers zazen, teachings, sesshin, community practice, and programs that integrate contemplative practice with social and ecological responsibility. Its recent Ecodharma Residency brings Buddhist practice and the Three Tenets—Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action—into direct relationship with environmental and social crises, while land stewardship workshops put these principles into practice through care for local trees, soils, trails, and ecosystems. Across its programs, Mountain Cloud emphasizes loosening fixed identities, deepening connection with others and the natural world, and allowing skillful action to arise from attentive, compassionate presence.

Where we are: Santa Fe, United States, and online.

Learn more at mountaincloud.org

Zen Peacemakers is a network of independent organizations on five continents dedicated to realizing our oneness and relieving suffering through contemplative social action. Together, our collective commitment to interconnectedness and compassion ripples outward far beyond ourselves, transcending all boundaries and transforming lives.

TAKING ACTION

The Earth sustains all life. Caring for her is caring for ourselves.

With the Three Tenets, we respond:

Not-Knowing: Meeting the climate crisis without rushing to easy answers.
Bearing Witness: Spending time in threatened places and feeling their truth.
Taking Action: Joining efforts in conservation, regeneration, and climate justice.

Daily Practice: Walk gently, reduce waste, honor the land beneath your feet.

Get Involved: Volunteer with reforestation, clean water, or climate advocacy groups.

Learn more here: https://zenpeacemakers.org/taking-action-home/taking-action-environment

✨ Explore the Taking Action initiative — discover how you can serve, connect, and be inspired by the work already unfolding in your communities.
👉 Explore More

❤️ Your gift helps bring the Three Tenets to life.
👉 Donate Here

ZAZEN

Experience a connection with your personal landscape through the transformative power of online meditation sessions with Zen Peacemakers. Whether you're part of a local sangha or other spiritual community, we invite you to join us in this virtual space where we can gather across geographies and time zones.

Join us for these online meditation sessions and experience the profound benefits of collective mindfulness. Zen Peacemakers are here to support you on this transformative journey.

Monday - Friday
10:00 - 10:40 am US Eastern
MORE INFO HERE

HAIKU

Monthly Haiku Page
Please participate in our Haiku Poetry Challenge

OFFERING

The Bernie Koans

Edited by: Ken Byalin, Francisco "Paco" Lugovina, Christopher Panos

‘It’s just my opinion, man’, as Bernie would say. We all have our opinions about Roshi Bernie Glassman. To some of us, he is the stern head monk at Zen Center of LA; to others, he is the socially engaged Buddhist who built up the Greyston Bakery and Foundation. To others he is the founder of Zen Peacemakers International and the instigator of bearing witness plunges on the city streets and at Auschwitz and to others he is the clown, the founder of the Order of Disorder. He is all of these and more. As the stories in the book show, he is Bernie, the mensch, who spent his life feeding the hungry ghosts of society and teaching that Zen is to realize the oneness and interconnectedness of life.

-Gerry Shishin Wick, grateful Dharma brother and disciple of Roshi Bernie

Thank you for reading this week's Zen Peacemakers newsletter.

We look forward to connecting at upcoming events, on social media, and via email.

With gratitude,

The Zen Peacemakers Team

Footsteps of everyone: bearing witness to humanity

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:02:33 GMT

What keeps us feeling separate from each other?
What keeps us thinking that we know the right way?
What keeps us from seeing our unity?
– Bernie Glassman, Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace

In just three weeks, Peacemakers from all walks of life will gather in Oświęcim, Poland for our Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nov 15-21. We go for the same reasons now as we did at the first retreat 30 years ago: to bear witness to humanity.

If you are considering joining us, we heartily encourage you. If you have been before, we invite you to come again. There is still time to register and make travel arrangements.

Every bearing witness retreat is different, every experience unique. We create it together, letting go of fixed ideas and opening our hearts to the reality of life. We then carry this forward in ways we cannot predict: into our homes and relationships, into our communities, and into the world wherever compassion, connectedness and loving action is needed.

In Footsteps of Everyone, three recent attendees, Geoff, Wiebs, and Mary, share their experiences with bearing witness:

Photo by Peter Cunningham

Footsteps of Everyone

People think Auschwitz is about death.
A week later, they speak about life.
A prayer shawl. Winter boots. A warm wind on the cheek.
Small, stubborn signs of humanity.

written and edited by Ewa Orczykowska and Mary O’Connor, based on personal interviews.

> Read the Full Article in the Peacemakers Journal

Auschwitz is a place of great suffering. And great healing.

We invite you to join us. All are welcome.

Geoff Shoun O’Keeffe
Executive Director
Zen Peacemakers

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

We realize travel at this time can be costly and challenging. Scholarships are available, and those in the Zen Peacemaker Order are eligible for reduced tuition to attend. We can also provide guidance for inviting support from your community by raising a mala. Please contact us with any questions at retreats@zenpeacemakers.org

Shoes plundered by the German guards from Jews arriving at the concentration camp. Auschwitz Memorial Museum / Photo by William Warby

Bearing Witness participants walking to the Selection Site where guards would choose who would be sent to the barracks or to the gas chambers

Unfinished Vow: A Conversation with Roshi Joan Halifax

Zen Peacemakers — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:20:14 GMT

"Human life inevitably includes confusion, contradiction, harm, and error. What matters is whether we are willing to acknowledge when we have lost the thread, take responsibility, make repair where possible, and realign ourselves with what is deepest and truest… and to try, in whatever ways one can, to respond to the suffering of the world."
— Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD.

Roshi Joan is a Buddhist teacher, social activist, anthropologist, author, and Founder and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center. A successor of Bernie Glassman and Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, she is a pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. Her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on socially engaged Buddhism.

Register through the link below to join us online for this Peacemaker Circle which will include Q&A and discussion. All are welcome.

Unfinished Vow:
A Conversation with Roshi Joan Halifax

Peacemakers Circle
Wednesday, November 18th, 2026
12:00pm - 1:30pm EST

Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D. is a Buddhist teacher, Founder and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a social activist, author, and in her early years was an anthropologist at Columbia University (1964-68) and University of Miami School of Medicine (1970-72).

She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions and medical centers around the world and is the recipient of numerous awards, and honors, including the Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Leadership in Health Care by HealthCare Chaplaincy and an Honorary DSc from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center with dying cancer patients. Roshi Joan has continued to work with dying people and their families, and to teach health care professionals and family caregivers the psycho-social, ethical and spiritual aspects of care of the dying. She is Director of the Project on Being with Dying, and Founder of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is also founder of the Nomads Clinic in Nepal.

Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); The Fruitful Darkness, A Journey Through Buddhist Practice; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Wisdom in the Presence of Death; Standing at the Edge:Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet; Sophie Learns to Be Brave; and her latest work, In a Moment, In a Breath. She has been involved with the Mind and Life Institute since its inception and is founder of the Varela International Symposium.

For more about Roshi Joan’s life and work, please visit her website: joanhalifax.org.

Letting Go into Oneness

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:56:27 GMT

photo by Raed Karswani

After great pain a formal feeling comes —

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

After great pain a formal feeling comes —
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions — was it He that bore?
And yesterday — or centuries before?

The feet mechanical go round
A wooden way
Of ground or air or Ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect
The snow —
First chill, then stupor, then
The letting go.

~ Emily Dickinson

RETREATS

In just a few weeks, Zen Peacemakers from all walks of life will gather at the site of the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. We go for the same reasons now as we did at the first retreat: to bear witness to humanity.

Registration closes soon!
Join us in bearing witness this November.

Zen Peacemakers Auschwitz-Birkenau
Bearing Witness Retreat

November 15 - 21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Scholarships are available
contact us at retreats@zenpeacemakers.org

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Reflections of an Interspiritual Contemplative Christian
with Stephen Hatch
Wednesday, October 21st
12:00 - 1:30 US Eastern

In this talk, Stephen Hatch, a practitioner of Christian Mysticism for 45 years, reflects on his multi-faceted spiritual journey.

His path began with a Baptist upbringing, led to training with Father Thomas Keating and an identification with the wisdom of Christian Mysticism, and then to embracing Protestant Mysticism, including the Quaker heritage of the Pennsylvania Brintons on his mother’s side. He has developed a Nature-based Contemplative Christianity, which he calls Wilderness Mysticism.

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Bernie Glassman Memorial: “Bernie on the Street”
Saturday, October 31st
12:00-1:30 EST

A Panel Discussion with Sensei Jorge Koho Mello, Sensei Mikko Ijäs, Sensei Joshin Byrnes, and Jürgen Lembke.

All are welcome to join us in remembering Bernie and reflecting on this living practice of bearing witness.

PANELISTS

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Bearing Witness to Oneness: Cops, Convicts and Council
Wednesday, November 4th
12:00 - 1:30 PM US Eastern

Beyond Us & Them Executive Director Jared Seide will be joined by Lyndon Barber and Mitch Highley for this conversation, each of whom came to this work through council itself — Lyndon after a seventeen-year career with the Los Angeles Police Department, Mitch from inside Ironwood State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence. Together they embody council's capacity to shift perspective beyond us and them. Join us for honest stories and open conversation.

CORE TRAININGS

The Three Tenets with Sensei Jim Daikan Bastien
Monday, November 16th
7:00-8:00 PM EST

Bernie Glassman articulated the Three Tenets of Zen Peacemakers early in its evolution. These three simple, profound vows or commitments can also be taken as a complete practice for our lives.

Not-Knowing: I will embody Not-Knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas.
Bearing Witness: I will bear witness, opening my heart to the joy and suffering of life.
Loving Action: I will take loving action arising out of Not-Knowing and Bearing Witness.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS SERIES

Aging: Renewing the Mystery
A Monthly Gathering with Roshi Eve Marko
2nd Tuesday of each Month

We are also offering an “Aging Council” the 4th Wednesday of each Month.
Open to everyone.

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

COUNCIL

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council during our Bearing Witness retreats almost every day.

UPCOMING COUNCILS (click on title to learn more & register)

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe
Nov 2nd: Mental Health Professionals & Caregivers with Dr. Iris Dotan Katz
Nov 7th AEDT: The Way of Council with Aus-NZ Peacemaker Council
Nov 20th: Women Only Council

A PRAYER FOR PEACE

Hello Family!

In peace & gratitude-

Michel Engu Dobbs

Fourth Fridays at 1:00pm EDT
Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89008592778

MEDIA LIBRARY

New Peacemaker Circle Videos

A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets:
A Conversation with Red Pine

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

ZEN PEACEMAKERS AFFILIATES

NEW AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Our mission is to awaken, liberate, and protect all beings.

Where we are: Santa Fe, United States, and online.

Learn more at mountaincloud.org

TAKING ACTION

The Earth sustains all life. Caring for her is caring for ourselves.

With the Three Tenets, we respond:

Not-Knowing: Meeting the climate crisis without rushing to easy answers.
Bearing Witness: Spending time in threatened places and feeling their truth.
Taking Action: Joining efforts in conservation, regeneration, and climate justice.

Daily Practice: Walk gently, reduce waste, honor the land beneath your feet.

Get Involved: Volunteer with reforestation, clean water, or climate advocacy groups.

Learn more here: https://zenpeacemakers.org/taking-action-home/taking-action-environment

✨ Explore the Taking Action initiative — discover how you can serve, connect, and be inspired by the work already unfolding in your communities.
👉 Explore More

❤️ Your gift helps bring the Three Tenets to life.
👉 Donate Here

ZAZEN

Join us for these online meditation sessions and experience the profound benefits of collective mindfulness. Zen Peacemakers are here to support you on this transformative journey.

Monday - Friday
10:00 - 10:40 am US Eastern
MORE INFO HERE

HAIKU

Monthly Haiku Page
Please participate in our Haiku Poetry Challenge

OFFERING

The Bernie Koans

Edited by: Ken Byalin, Francisco "Paco" Lugovina, Christopher Panos

Thank you for reading this week's Zen Peacemakers newsletter.

We look forward to connecting at upcoming events, on social media, and via email.

With gratitude,

The Zen Peacemakers Team

Living with mysteries

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:11:23 GMT

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

~ Mary Oliver
Evidence, 2009

RETREATS

In just over one month, Zen Peacemakers from all walks of life will gather at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We go for the same reasons now as we did at the first retreat 30 years ago: to bear witness to humanity.

Registration closes soon.
Join us in bearing witness this November.

Zen Peacemakers Auschwitz-Birkenau
Bearing Witness Retreat

November 15 - 21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

WATCH THE CONVERSATION HERE

Scholarships are available
contact us at retreats@zenpeacemakers.org

ZEN PEACEMAKERS MEDIA LIBRARY

New Peacemaker Circle Video

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

Renowned poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield joined Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe in September for a conversation about art-making, activism, and compassion, including readings of her poems.

The recording is now available in our Media Library

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Reflections of an Interspiritual Contemplative Christian
with Stephen Hatch
Wednesday, October 21st
12:00 - 1:30 US Eastern

In this talk, Stephen Hatch, a practitioner of Christian Mysticism for 45 years, reflects on his multi-faceted spiritual journey.

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Bernie Glassman Memorial: “Bernie on the Street”
Saturday, October 31st
12:00-1:30 US Eastern

A Panel Discussion with Sensei Jorge Koho Mello, Sensei Mikko Ijäs, Sensei Joshin Byrnes, and Jürgen Lembke.

All are welcome to join us in remembering Bernie and reflecting on this living practice of bearing witness.

PANELISTS

CORE TRAININGS

Introduction to the Way of Council with Ken Byalin
Monday, October 19th
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EDT

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council nearly every day during our Bearing Witness Retreats.

In Council, we come together in a small group in a profound way. We create a shared liminal space that is safe, confidential, and perhaps sacred. We each listen and speak from the heart, encountering and experiencing one another gently and with awareness.

We are not solving problems, debating issues, or making plans. We are making a healing space for each of us to hear and be heard, see and be seen. In this introduction, we will briefly present the history of Council, explain the guidelines we use, and then experience a short Council session together.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS SERIES

Aging: Renewing the Mystery
A Monthly Gathering with Roshi Eve Marko
2nd Tuesday of each Month

Aging: Renewing the Mystery will be a monthly Zoom gathering investigating themes and issues many of us face as we get older. Topics will include forgiveness, fear of dependence, illness and death, simplicity, regret, loneliness, the changing faces of love, and others that come from participants.

We are also offering an “Aging Council” the 4th Wednesday of each Month.
Open to everyone.

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

COUNCIL

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council during our Bearing Witness retreats almost every day.

UPCOMING COUNCILS (click on title to learn more & register)

Oct 16th: Women Only Council
Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe
Nov 2nd: Mental Health Professionals & Caregivers with Dr. Iris Dotan Katz

A PRAYER FOR PEACE

Hello Family!

In peace & gratitude-

Michel Engu Dobbs

Fourth Fridays at 1:00pm EDT
Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89008592778

ZEN PEACEMAKERS AFFILIATES

NEW AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Our mission is to awaken, liberate, and protect all beings.

Where we are: Santa Fe, United States, and online.

Learn more at mountaincloud.org

TAKING ACTION

The Earth sustains all life. Caring for her is caring for ourselves.

With the Three Tenets, we respond:

Not-Knowing: Meeting the climate crisis without rushing to easy answers.
Bearing Witness: Spending time in threatened places and feeling their truth.
Taking Action: Joining efforts in conservation, regeneration, and climate justice.

Daily Practice: Walk gently, reduce waste, honor the land beneath your feet.

Get Involved: Volunteer with reforestation, clean water, or climate advocacy groups.

Learn more here: https://zenpeacemakers.org/taking-action-home/taking-action-environment

✨ Explore the Taking Action initiative — discover how you can serve, connect, and be inspired by the work already unfolding in your communities.
👉 Explore More

❤️ Your gift helps bring the Three Tenets to life.
👉 Donate Here

ZAZEN

Join us for these online meditation sessions and experience the profound benefits of collective mindfulness. Zen Peacemakers are here to support you on this transformative journey.

Monday - Friday
10:00 - 10:40 am US Eastern
MORE INFO HERE

HAIKU

Monthly Haiku Page
Please participate in our Haiku Poetry Challenge

OFFERING

The Bernie Koans

Edited by: Ken Byalin, Francisco "Paco" Lugovina, Christopher Panos

Thank you for reading this week's Zen Peacemakers newsletter.

We look forward to connecting at upcoming events, on social media, and via email.

With gratitude,

The Zen Peacemakers Team

The scene before us

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:08:43 GMT

Photo by Alice Kotlyarenko

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A clean patch of ground after it rains
an ancient pine half-covered with moss
such scenes appear before us all
but what we do with them isn't the same

Stonehouse (Shíwū), Poem 99
The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse
Translated by Red Pine (Bill Porter)

Join Zen Peacemakers for a Peacemaker Circle with Renowned Translator Red Pine Wednesday, Oct 7th

The Long Conversation:
A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets with Red Pine
Wednesday, October 7th
12:00 - 1:30PM US EASTERN

Bill Porter, known to many readers as Red Pine, is an American translator, writer, and longtime student of Chinese poetry, Buddhism, and Daoism. In this Peacemakers Circle, Bill will share stories from his long conversation with Zen hermit Stonehouse, Han-shan of Cold Mountain, and other mountain poets whose words have traveled across time.

RETREATS

Register now to join us in Poland in November!

Zen Peacemakers Auschwitz-Birkenau
Bearing Witness Retreat

November 15 - 21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Scholarships are available

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Reflections of an Interspiritual Contemplative Christian
with Stephen Hatch
Wednesday, October 21st
12:00 - 1:30 US Eastern

In this talk, Stephen Hatch, a practitioner of Christian Mysticism for 45 years, reflects on his multi-faceted spiritual journey.

CORE TRAININGS

Introduction to the Way of Council with Ken Byalin
Monday, October 19th
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EDT

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council nearly every day during our Bearing Witness Retreats.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS SERIES

Aging: Renewing the Mystery
A Monthly Gathering with Roshi Eve Marko
2nd Tuesday of each Month

We are also offering an “Aging Council” the 4th Wednesday of each Month.
Open to everyone.

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

COUNCIL

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council during our Bearing Witness retreats almost every day.

UPCOMING COUNCILS (click on title to learn more & register)

Oct 16th: Women Only Council
Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe
Nov 2nd: Mental Health Professionals & Caregivers with Dr. Iris Dotan Katz

A PRAYER FOR PEACE

Hello Family!

In peace & gratitude-

Michel Engu Dobbs

Fourth Fridays at 1:00pm EDT
Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89008592778

ZEN PEACEMAKERS AFFILIATES

NEW AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Our mission is to awaken, liberate, and protect all beings.

Where we are: Santa Fe, United States, and online.

Learn more at mountaincloud.org

TAKING ACTION

The Earth sustains all life. Caring for her is caring for ourselves.

With the Three Tenets, we respond:

Not-Knowing: Meeting the climate crisis without rushing to easy answers.
Bearing Witness: Spending time in threatened places and feeling their truth.
Taking Action: Joining efforts in conservation, regeneration, and climate justice.

Daily Practice: Walk gently, reduce waste, honor the land beneath your feet.

Get Involved: Volunteer with reforestation, clean water, or climate advocacy groups.

Learn more here: https://zenpeacemakers.org/taking-action-home/taking-action-environment

✨ Explore the Taking Action initiative — discover how you can serve, connect, and be inspired by the work already unfolding in your communities.
👉 Explore More

❤️ Your gift helps bring the Three Tenets to life.
👉 Donate Here

ZAZEN

Join us for these online meditation sessions and experience the profound benefits of collective mindfulness. Zen Peacemakers are here to support you on this transformative journey.

Monday - Friday
10:00 - 10:40 am US Eastern
MORE INFO HERE

HAIKU

Monthly Haiku Page
Please participate in our Haiku Poetry Challenge

OFFERING

The Bernie Koans

Edited by: Ken Byalin, Francisco "Paco" Lugovina, Christopher Panos

Thank you for reading this week's Zen Peacemakers newsletter.

We look forward to connecting at upcoming events, on social media, and via email.

With gratitude,

The Zen Peacemakers Team

Because of you, Zen Peacemakers continues to thrive

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:02:11 GMT

Dear Peacemakers,

Because of you, our Fall Fundraiser was a success, and Zen Peacemakers’ community, programs, retreats, and trainings continue to thrive. Your generosity has strengthened the foundation that keeps our offerings free, accessible, and transformative for people around the world.

Every gift, large or small, helps us bring people together across continents, nurture loving communities, and create spaces where presence, courage, and connection can flourish.

As Peacemakers, our practice of compassion ripples outward far beyond ourselves, touching many others and inspiring people to take action. None of this would be possible without you.

We invite you to continue on this path with us — join in a bearing witness retreat, participate in an online program, council, or core training, or connect with others in our Peacemaker Circles, and experience firsthand the impact your support makes in action.

Upcoming Peacemaker Circles and Core Trainings:

Red Pine: A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets Oct 7th
Core Training: Introduction to The Way of Council Oct 18th
Core Training: The Three Tenets Nov 16th
Peacemaker Circle with Roshi Joan Halifax Nov 18th
Peacemaker Circle with Jeff Bridges Dec 11th

VIEW ALL EVENTS HERE

Thank you for standing with us, for believing in this work, and for being part of a community of Peacemakers dedicated to living compassion in action.

With deep gratitude,

Geoff O’Keeffe and the Zen Peacemakers Team

(PS If you haven’t had the opportunity to contribute yet and are called and able, you can donate here or become a supporting member at anytime)

Support Our Work Today
Zen Peacemakers is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
All gifts are tax-deductible in the US.

zenpeacemakers.org

Listen! Attention!

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:51:26 GMT

BEARING WITNESS

“When we bear witness to Auschwitz, at that moment there is no separation between us and the people who died. There is also no separation between us and the people who killed…

It is not an act of will, it is an act of letting go.

What we let go of is the concept of the person we think we are. It’s why we start from unknowing. Only then can we become all the voices of the universe — those that suffer, those that inflict suffering, and those that stand idly by. For we are all these people.

Listen! Attention! Bear witness!”

— Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Our annual Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau is less than two months away.

Join us!

Scholarships are available,
and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Zen Peacemakers Auschwitz-Birkenau
Bearing Witness Retreat

November 15 - 21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

support the retreat and diversity of those attending through scholarships by donating here

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Join Zen Peacemakers
for a Peacemaker Circle with poet Jane Hirshfield Tuesday, September 29th

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield
Today! Tuesday, September 29th
1:00 PM US EASTERN

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

I was a Zen monk who didn’t know Zen
so I chose the woods for the years I had left
a robe made of patches over my body
a belt of bamboo around my waist
mountains and streams explain Bodhidharma’s meaning
flower smiles and birdsongs reveal the hidden key
sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock
after midnight cloudless nights when the moon fills the sky

— Stonehouse (Shih-wu), translated by Red Pine.

Join Zen Peacemakers on Wednesday, Oct 7th for a Peacemaker Circle with Red Pine

The Long Conversation:
A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets with Red Pine
Wednesday, October 7th
12:00 - 1:30PM US EASTERN

Bill Porter, known to many readers as Red Pine, describes translation as a conversation with the dead — a phrase that also became the title of a documentary about his life and work.

Every poem is a person who once stood somewhere, saw something, and wrote it down. The translator’s task is to come close enough to hear them, then let them speak.

In this Peacemakers Circle, Bill will share from that long conversation: the Zen hermit Stonehouse, the eccentric Han-shan of Cold Mountain, and other poets he has spent decades translating and accompanying. Each poem carries its own story — the poet’s life, the mountain where it was written, and the difficult, intimate work of carrying its meaning into English. Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe will host, with time for questions and conversation.

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Reflections of an Interspiritual Contemplative Christian
with Stephen Hatch
Wednesday, October 21st
12:00 - 1:30 US Eastern

In this talk, Stephen Hatch, a practitioner of Christian Mysticism for 45 years, reflects on his multi-faceted spiritual journey.

CORE TRAININGS

Introduction to the Way of Council with Ken Byalin
Monday, October 19th
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EDT

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council nearly every day during our Bearing Witness Retreats.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS SERIES

Aging: Renewing the Mystery
A Monthly Gathering with Roshi Eve Marko
2nd Tuesday of each Month

LEARN MORE HERE

We are also offering an “Aging Council” the 4th Wednesday of each Month.
Open to everyone.

Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

COUNCIL

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council during our Bearing Witness retreats almost every day.

UPCOMING COUNCILS (click on title to learn more & register)

Oct 5th: Mental Health Professionals & Caregivers with Dr. Iris Dotan Katz
Oct 16th: Women Only Council
Oct 28th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

A PRAYER FOR PEACE

Hello Family!

Our dear Lakota relative, Violet Catches, inviteS Zen Peacemakers from all around the world to join on the Fourth Friday of each month at 1:00 pm US Eastern Time, to offer prayers for peace. Participants will be encouraged to offer prayers from their faith tradition, culture, and in their language.

In peace & gratitude-

Michel Engu Dobbs

Fourth Fridays at 1:00pm EDT
Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89008592778

Zen Peacemakers Affiliate

NEW AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Our mission is to awaken, liberate, and protect all beings.

Zen Peacemakers is a network of independent organizations on five continents. Each of them came to this work on their own path; introducing them is how the network becomes visible to itself.

What they do: Mountain Cloud Zen Center is a lay Sanbo Zen practice community dedicated to awakening, liberation, and reducing suffering through Zen practice and compassionate engagement with the world. Founded in 1985, the Center offers zazen, teachings, sesshin, community practice, and programs that integrate contemplative practice with social and ecological responsibility. Its recent Ecodharma Residency brings Buddhist practice and the Three Tenets—Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action—into direct relationship with environmental and social crises, while land stewardship workshops put these principles into practice through care for local trees, soils, trails, and ecosystems. Across its programs, Mountain Cloud emphasizes loosening fixed identities, deepening connection with others and the natural world, and allowing skillful action to arise from attentive, compassionate presence.

Where: Santa Fe, United States, and online.
mountaincloud.org

TAKING ACTION

The Earth sustains all life. Caring for her is caring for ourselves.

With the Three Tenets, we respond:

Not-Knowing: Meeting the climate crisis without rushing to easy answers.
Bearing Witness: Spending time in threatened places and feeling their truth.
Taking Action: Joining efforts in conservation, regeneration, and climate justice.

Daily Practice: Walk gently, reduce waste, honor the land beneath your feet.

Get Involved: Volunteer with reforestation, clean water, or climate advocacy groups.

Learn more here: https://zenpeacemakers.org/taking-action-home/taking-action-environment

✨ Explore the Taking Action initiative — discover how you can serve, connect, and be inspired by the work already unfolding in your communities.
👉 Explore More

❤️ Your gift helps bring the Three Tenets to life.
👉 Donate Here

ZAZEN

Experience a connection with your personal landscape through the transformative power of online meditation sessions with the Zen Peacemakers. Whether you're part of a local sangha or other spiritual community, we invite you to join us in this virtual space where we can gather across geographies and time zones.

Join us for these online meditation sessions and experience the profound benefits of collective mindfulness. The Zen Peacemakers are here to support you on this transformative journey.

Monday - Friday
10:00 - 10:40 am US Eastern
MORE INFO HERE

HAIKU

Monthly Haiku Page
Please participate in our Haiku Poetry Challenge

OFFERING

The Bernie Koans

Edited by: Ken Byalin, Francisco "Paco" Lugovina, Christopher Panos

Thank you for reading this week's Zen Peacemakers newsletter.

We look forward to connecting at upcoming events, on social media, and via email.

With gratitude,

The Zen Peacemakers Team

Why Jane Hirshfield Began Practicing Zen

Zen Peacemakers — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:05:22 GMT

Jane Hirshfield’s first poem was published in The Nation in 1973, shortly after graduating from Princeton University as part of its first class to include freshman women. She then put aside her writing for nearly eight years to study at San Francisco Zen Center, included three years as a monastic at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Buddhist Soto Zen monastery in America.

Of her decision to enter into Zen practice, Hirshfield once said “I felt that I’d never make much of a poet if I didn’t know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being.”

She shared more about her deep relationship with meditation in Noelle Oxenhandler’s 2023 Lion’s Roar article The Zen of Jane Hirshfield:

I just wanted to sit zazen, to follow the schedule, to plumb the question that had drawn me to practice in the first place: What does it mean to lead a human life?
…There’s nowhere more peripheral than a zendo. You’re sitting in the semidarkness, facing a wall. The practice of Soto Zen is shikantaza, just sitting. And it’s wordless — no koans, no verbal noting. You’re present, attending with your whole body and mind. And gradually you become permeable. You feel no distinction between what’s inside and outside the skin, and that unboundaried awareness reaches out in all directions, to all beings.”

In reflecting on the difference between writing and meditating, she said,

Both involve an intense listening. But they are different forms of listening. It’s as though you’re a deep-dish telescope pointed in different directions.
In poetry, you move from listening into a collaboration with arriving language—its rhythms, images, and associations. I’ll often hear the music of a poem before I find the words. In meditation, you move from that listening into life. Your life, felt as inseparable from the world’s life, is the expression of your practice…
Nothing new comes if we remain in a fixed position.

In a 2006 interview on Zen and the Art of Poetry, she called her time in formal Zen training “the diamond at the center of my life. Whoever I now am came out of that experience.”

That said, Hirshfield prefers not to be labeled a Buddhist poet. “I am a human poet, that’s all,” she told Spirituality & Health in 2013.

“Labels just get in the way. The fundamental wildness and mystery of existence slip every leash we try to put on them, and both meditation practice and the writing of poems are leash-slipping acts.”

Join Zen Peacemakers this Tuesday, September 29th for a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

Tuesday, September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm US Eastern

Realizing the Oneness and Interconnectedness of All Life

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:20:51 GMT

Bearing Witness participants at Birkenau Ash Pond

Dear friends, if you are considering attending the Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau, now is the time to register and make your travel plans. Join us!

Read the full article in the Peacemaker Journal

“When we bear witness to Auschwitz, at that moment there is no separation between us and the people who died. There is also no separation between us and the people who killed.

We ourselves, as individuals, with our identities and ego structure, disappear, and we become the terrified people getting off the trains, the indifferent or brutal guards, the snarling dogs, the doctor who points right or left, the smoke and ash belching from the chimneys.

When we bear witness to Auschwitz, we are nothing but all the elements of Auschwitz.

It is not an act of will, it is an act of letting go. What we let go of is the concept of the person we think we are. It’s why we start from unknowing. Only then can we become all the voices of the universe — those that suffer, those that inflict suffering, and those that stand idly by. For we are all these people. We are the universe.

The famous prayer about oneness, the Sh’ma Yisrael, begins with Listen: Listen, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Not only does oneness begin with listening, but listening also begins with oneness.

And Zen Peacemaker Order’s Buddhist service begins similarly: Attention! Attention! Raising the Mind of Compassion, the Supreme Meal is offered to all the hungry spirits throughout space and time, filling the smallest particle to the largest space.

Listen! Attention! Bear witness!”

— Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Join us.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November to bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together. We invite you to join us.

Learn more and register here

support the retreat and the scholarships for those attending by donating here

Zen Master Bernie Glassman was a world-renowned pioneer in the American Zen Movement. He was a spiritual leader, published author, accomplished academic and social entrepreneur. Roshi Glassman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and he grew up in a Jewish family with a strong socialist orientation. After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, he went to work for McDonnell-Douglas in California in 1960 as an aeronautical engineer, concentrating on interplanetary flights, and obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA in 1970. Roshi Glassman spent decades teaching Zen and working in Socially Engaged Buddhism, founding Zen Peacemakers in 1996 and developing Bearing Witness Retreats. He passed away in Massachusetts USA on November 4th, 2018 from natural causes.

From “Why Bernie Kept Going Back to Auschwitz-Birkenau” article adapted from a blog post written by Zen Peacemaker’s founder Roshi Bernie Tetsugen Glassman.

Keep our Peacemaking Mission Moving Forward

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:44:23 GMT

Dear Peacemakers,

With over 6,300 members and 74 Affiliate organizations, groups, and practice centers throughout the world, Zen Peacemakers continues to grow. We are deeply grateful for the dedication, presence, and care you bring to this community.

This is the legacy Bernie Glassman entrusted to the Zen Peacemakers community: a life and practice rooted in not-knowing, bearing witness, and taking action.

This year, we sat together in places marked by difficult histories, created spaces for honest conversation and connection, and offered programs and trainings that make this work available to people around the world. Peacemakers from all walks of life continue to embody the teachings in ways that are both deeply rooted and continually evolving.

What we create together carries forward in ways we may never see: into homes and relationships, into communities and workplaces, and into the places where compassion, presence, and connection are needed.

Your support makes this possible.

As our Fall Fundraiser comes to a close this week, there’s still time to make a difference. Make a one-time gift or monthly donation today to keep our peacemaking mission moving forward.

Support the work of Zen Peacemakers

We are grateful for everything we have done together so far this year, and for all that continues ahead. From upcoming Peacemaker Circles with Bill Porter/Red Pine, Joan Halifax, and Jeff Bridges, to our annual retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November, there are many more opportunities in the coming months to come together, bear witness, deepen our connections, and carry peacemaking further in the world.

Your generosity ensures that our programs and trainings remain free and accessible to everyone and enables us to offer scholarships for bearing witness retreats, bringing people together to learn, grow, and embody compassion throughout the world. Every contribution, large or small, helps sustain the community and work of peacemakers that stretches across borders and continents.

Click Here to Donate

To everyone who has given, participated, volunteered, gathered, listened, practiced, and carried this work into your own communities, thank you. You are a part of what makes this community what it is.

With deep gratitude,

Geoff O’Keeffe and the Zen Peacemakers Team

Highlights in 2026

The Zen Peacemaker community continues to grow, with over 6,300 members and more than 12,000 newsletter subscribers
Our Affiliate Network now includes 74 organizations, groups, and practice centers around the world
The Native American Bearing Witness Retreat was at capacity this year with over 40 participants and our Lakota hosts camping together in deep relationship with Lakota horse culture, with the land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and with one another.

Upcoming Peacemaker Circles - we hope to see you there!

Jane Hirshfield: Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace Sept 29th
Red Pine: A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets Oct 7th
Roshi Joan Halifax Nov 18th
Jeff Bridges Dec 11th
Peter Coyote Feb 2027

Support Our Work Today
Zen Peacemakers is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
All gifts are tax-deductible in the US.

zenpeacemakers.org

Jane Hirshfield and Poets for Science

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:05:56 GMT

Jane Hirshfield at the Poets for Science “Teach-In” April 20, 2017 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of poetsforscience.org.

“Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.
~ Jane Hirshfield

Our friend, poet Jane Hirshfield, is known for writing about the interconnectedness of life and the crisis of the biosphere with, as Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist, poet, and novelist encouraged, “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” She has been the poet in residence for the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and for a neuroscience program at the University of California, San Francisco, and, in 2019, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As Hirshfield has said, “Poetry and science are allies, not opposites.”

On Earth Day in 2017, in conjunction with the March for Science in Washington DC, she co-founded Poets for Science to support and celebrate scientific discovery and expression with an interactive installation of science poems that’s now traveled to universities, museums, research centers, parks, and festivals across the US.

Hirshfield spoke about Poets for Science and the power of poetry at the Nobel Prize Summit in 2023, a periodic high-level conference hosted by the Nobel Foundation and organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Stockholm Resilience Centre to address critical global challenges.

To those wondering what poetry has to do with scientific facts, she said:

“Reality is foundational. No animal ignoring the actual will long survive. The presence of poetry at the March for Science was about advocating for a feeling — the sense of shared lives, shared fates, shared existence.”

Earlier this week, Hirshfield offered readings along with other poets at a Poetry for Our Planet event hosted by the Climate Museum and American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

And this November, the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University will host the first ever Poets for Science Gathering, “celebrating nearly a decade of public work linking poetry with scientific inquiry.”

What began as a response to scientific censorship has now become a movement, exploring the connections between poetry and science, with calls for poems, international gatherings, and campaigns integrating poetry, science, and social action.

Her poem “Optimism” calls our attention to this very resilience, creativity and persistence. To, as Maria Popova wrote, “the improbable and inhospitable environments in which life, against all odds, persists — the raw optimism of nature.”Nothing is fixed or finite, even in the midst of seemingly impossible situations.

OPTIMISM
by Jane Hirshfield
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow,
whose foam returns over and over to the same shape,
but the sinuous tenacity of a tree:
finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs —
all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)

Join Zen Peacemakers on Tuesday, September 29th for a Peacemaker Circle with poet Jane Hirshfield

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm US Eastern

Join Poet Jane Hirshfield and Geoff Shoun O’ Keeffe for a dialogue about art-making and activism, the ways that creative heart-mind increases compassion, and the perennial question of meeting the difficult with tenderness, humility, and courage.

> LEARN MORE ABOUT POETS FOR SCIENCE

To be someone who listens

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:49:36 GMT

“The Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz is grounded in the three tenets articulated by Roshi Bernie Glassman: not-knowing, bearing witness, and loving action.

Not-knowing means arriving without fixed ideas, without the armor of certainty. Bernie used to say it is like entering as a child, with every bone, every cell, every hair of your body open to what is actually there...

From that open ground, bearing witness becomes possible. A dissolving of the distance between the one who looks and what is looked at... I let it enter me. I do not protect myself from it.

And from bearing witness, loving action arises. The action is not something we bring to the retreat. It is something the retreat gives birth to…

The ground of that place still speaks.

As long as I am able, I want to be someone who listens…”

— Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder

Dear friends, our annual Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau is just two months away.

Register now and make your travel plans to join us!

Scholarships are available,
and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Zen Peacemakers Auschwitz-Birkenau
Bearing Witness Retreat

November 15 - 21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

support the retreat and diversity of those attending through scholarships by donating here

Rebus

By Jane Hirshfield

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)

Join Zen Peacemakers on Tuesday, September 29th for a Peacemaker Circle with poet Jane Hirshfield

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield
Tuesday, September 29th
1:00 PM US EASTERN

Both Zen and art-making are practices of transformation. They broaden seeing, soften understanding, and expand the field of our actions and speech. Join Poet Jane Hirshfield and Geoff Shoun O’ Keeffe for a dialogue about art-making and activism, the ways that creative heart-mind increases compassion, and the perennial question of meeting the difficult with tenderness, humility, and courage.

Jane will also read some of her poems and there will be time for question and answer with the group as a whole.

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, known as one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for the biosphere and recognized as writing some of the most important poetry in the world today. Her award-winning work through collections poems, essays, newspapers and literary journals has been translated into over fifteen languages.

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

How the Buddhist Sangha Organized Itself to Support Ukraine
Tuesday, September 23rd
12:00 PM US EASTERN

The presentation will involve a story about how we as a Buddhist community gathered spontaneously out of fury and compassion from the very first days of war told by a few active members, by Ukrainian volunteers through short videos, and from a Ukrainian singer whose town, Kherson, is almost destroyed.

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

The Long Conversation:
A Life Translating China’s Mountain Poets, with Red Pine
Wednesday October 7th
12:00 PM US EASTERN

Bill Porter, known to many readers as Red Pine, describes translation as a conversation with the dead — a phrase that also became the title of a documentary about his life and work. Every poem is a person who once stood somewhere, saw something, and wrote it down. The translator’s task is to come close enough to hear them, then let them speak.

PEACEMAKERS CIRCLE

Reflections of an Interspiritual Contemplative Christian
with Stephen Hatch
Wednesday, October 21st
12:00 - 1:30 US Eastern

In this talk, Stephen Hatch, a practitioner of Christian Mysticism for 45 years, reflects on his multi-faceted spiritual journey.

ZEN PEACEMAKERS SERIES

Aging: Renewing the Mystery
A Monthly Gathering with Roshi Eve Marko
2nd Tuesday of each Month

More Information Here

We are also offering an “Aging Council” the 4th Tuesday of each Month.
Open to everyone.

Sept 22nd: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

COUNCIL

Council is one of our most important core Zen Peacemaker practices. We share Council during our Bearing Witness retreats almost every day.

UPCOMING COUNCILS (click on title to learn more & register)

Oct 5th: Mental Health Professionals & Caregivers with Dr. Iris Dotan Katz
Oct 16th: Women Only Council
Oct 27th: Peacemakers Council - Aging Council with Geoff Shōun O’Keeffe

A PRAYER FOR PEACE

Hello Family!

Our dear Lakota relative, Violet Catches, would like to invite Zen Peacemakers from all around the world to join on the Fourth Friday of the month at 1:00 pm US Eastern Time, to offer prayers for peace. Participants will be encouraged to offer prayers from their faith tradition, culture, and in their language.

In peace & gratitude-

Michel Engu Dobbs

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89008592778

Zen Peacemakers Affiliate

NEW AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Cloud Zen Center

Our mission is to awaken, liberate, and protect all beings.

Zen Peacemakers is a network of independent organizations on five continents. Each of them came to this work on their own path; introducing them is how the network becomes visible to itself.

Where: Santa Fe, United States, and online.
mountaincloud.org

TAKING ACTION

The Earth sustains all life. Caring for her is caring for ourselves.

With the Three Tenets, we respond:

Not-Knowing: Meeting the climate crisis without rushing to easy answers.
Bearing Witness: Spending time in threatened places and feeling their truth.
Taking Action: Joining efforts in conservation, regeneration, and climate justice.

Daily Practice: Walk gently, reduce waste, honor the land beneath your feet.

Get Involved: Volunteer with reforestation, clean water, or climate advocacy groups.

Learn more here: https://zenpeacemakers.org/taking-action-home/taking-action-environment

✨ Explore the Taking Action initiative — discover how you can serve, connect, and be inspired by the work already unfolding in your communities.
👉 Explore More

❤️ Your gift helps bring the Three Tenets to life.
👉 Donate Here

ZAZEN

Join us for these online meditation sessions and experience the profound benefits of collective mindfulness. The Zen Peacemakers are here to support you on this transformative journey.

Monday - Friday
10:00 - 10:40 am US Eastern
MORE INFO HERE

HAIKU

Monthly Haiku Page
Please participate in our Haiku Poetry Challenge

OFFERING

The Bernie Koans

Edited by: Ken Byalin, Francisco "Paco" Lugovina, Christopher Panos

Thank you for reading this week's Zen Peacemakers newsletter.

We look forward to connecting at upcoming events, on social media, and via email.

With gratitude,

The Zen Peacemakers Team

Not-knowing, Bearing Witness, and the Jewish heart of a Zen practice

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:26:16 GMT

Our Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz
is just two months away. Join us!

Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder is returning for the fourth year as ‘rabbi-in-residence’ at the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November.

In this article, first published in Boulder Jewish News, she shares her experience with the Three Tenets — Not-knowing, Bearing Witness, Taking Action — at the heart of our approach to peacemaking.

Candlelight Vigil at Birkenau Ash Pond

“The place where you stand is holy ground.”
— Exodus 3:5

Each November for the past three years, I make my way back to Poland as the rabbi-in-residence at the annual Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with people from around the world, Mozambique to Finland, Prague to Seattle, Jewish descendants of the Shoah, Buddhists, Christians, people of no tradition at all, children and grandchildren of German perpetrators, we gather on that ground and simply walk and sit as we connect with this place. We do not debate history. We do not explain or fix. We bear witness.

People ask me, quizzically and sometimes with consternation in their eyes: Why do you keep going back? It is a fair question and one I do not fully understand myself. I was born into a family with a mother and grandparents who survived while other family members perished in this camp. My mother and her parents were the fortunate ones who walked out of Birkenau. That ground holds my blood, my name, my history. And yet I return not only to mourn. . . I return to practice.

The Bearing Witness retreat is grounded in the three tenets articulated by Roshi Bernie Glassman, the Brooklyn-born Zen teacher and social activist who founded the Zen Peacemakers Order in 1996. Their guiding principles are: not-knowing, bearing witness, and loving action. These tenets move in sequence, but they are not truly separate ~ each one flows into and holds the others.

Not-knowing means arriving without fixed ideas, without the armor of certainty.

Bernie used to say it is like entering as a child, with every bone, every cell, every hair of your body open to what is actually there. At Auschwitz, this means resisting the temptation to already know what one may feel, to make meaning, and to shape words to attach to the experience. It means letting the place land on you before you begin to interpret it or as we like to say, “we are there to listen to the soil.”

From that open ground, bearing witness becomes possible.

Not testimony, not performance, but a dissolving of the distance between the one who looks and what is looked at. When I sit on the frozen ground at Birkenau, reading and hearing names spoken aloud, I am not observing history. I am, for a moment, inside it. The crumbling barracks, the rusted wire, the absence that hums through every inch of this place. . . I let it enter me. I do not protect myself from it.

And from bearing witness, loving action arises.

Not planned or prescribed, but emerging naturally from genuine presence. Sometimes it is tears. Sometimes it is kaddish. Sometimes it is a conversation with a German participant whose relatives were Nazis that neither of us could have scripted. The action is not something we bring to the retreat. It is something the retreat gives birth to.

Makeshift altar at Crematorium I at Auschwitz

As a daughter of survivors, I grew up with a grief that had no edges. It was not spoken of directly; it lived in my mother’s silences, in what was not said at the dinner table, in the stories that stopped abruptly before the hardest parts could be revealed. This is the nature of intergenerational trauma. It does not end with the generation that endured it. It migrates. It settles in the bodies of children who were never there. When I first stood at Auschwitz-Birkenau as an adult, I felt something I had not expected: recognition. Not of a place I had visited, but of a place I had somehow already been carrying. The retreat has taught me that this inheritance is not only a wound, it is also a form of memory that the body shields on behalf of those who could not speak. Going back is a way of honoring what my mother and her parents survived. It is a way of saying: I have not looked away.

The Hebrew word teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but its root is simply shuv ~ to return. It is the same root in hashivenu: return us. Return us to You Oh Mystery, return us to ourselves, return us to what we know to be true. Teshuvah is not about punishment. It is about the courage to turn back toward what matters and aligning with my truth~ the truth that is contained in all parts of me.

Each time I return to Auschwitz, I am doing teshuvah in the most literal sense. I am turning back toward the ground of my mother’s and grandparents’ survival. I am practicing the not-knowing that Bernie taught, arriving without answers, open to whatever arises. And I am bearing witness in the deepest Jewish sense of the word: eid, witness, the one who was present and does not forget.

Friends and members in my community wonder about a rabbi sitting at a Zen retreat.

I understand the question. But what I have found, year after year, is that this practice has deepened my Judaism rather than displaced it. Sitting in silence on that frozen ground, chanting Kaddish with Christians and Buddhists and people who have never entered a synagogue — I have felt the full force of our obligation to memory, to witness, to zachor~ to remember.

Bernie himself was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. The three tenets he gave the world were not separate from his heritage. They were, I believe, another expression of who he was and what he came into the world to be.

Not-knowing is the beginning of awe. Bearing witness is the work of every Jew who reads names aloud on Yom HaShoah. And loving action? Is this not tikkun olam? The Zen frame gave me new language for something Judaism has always asked of us.

That is why I return.

Not only for my mother, or my grandparents, or the six million. I return because of this practice: arriving open-minded and open-hearted and staying present allows action to arise from love as a form of prayer.

The ground of that place still speaks.

As long as I am able, I want to be someone who listens as a way to remember.

— Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder

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Rabbi Eva and Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all faith traditions and walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November to bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together.

We invite you to join us!

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

and/or support the retreat and the diversity of those attending by donating to support retreat costs and scholarships here

Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder is a spiritual leader and artist, designing transformative learning, lifecycle and ritual opportunities to provide seekers with joyful and creative approaches to Judaism. R’ Eva retired as the Rabbi of The Shul of NY and most recently, as ‘Rosh Hashpa’ah, head of Spiritual Direction for the ALEPH Ordination Program, supporting the spiritual development of the seminary students and faculty. She is an alumna of CLAL’s trans-denominational Rabbis Without Borders and the IJS Clergy Leadership Program, she is also a teacher of Jewish Mindfulness Meditation, Mussar, Wise Eldering and the Jewish Studio Process, integrating the expressive arts into her rabbinate. R’ Eva maintains a private practice as a mashpiah, a Jewish spiritual director.
She is honored to return for the fourth year as the rabbi-in-residence at the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Your gift inspires action and spreads peace

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:09:07 GMT

Dear Peacemakers,

We are in the final stretch of our Fall Fundraiser, and with just a short time left, we are reaching out with gratitude and with an invitation. Your support is what makes all of our work possible.

This year, our community has grown in powerful ways, and your collective generosity has amplified that impact. Through online trainings connecting participants across continents and in-person retreats where barriers dissolve and healing begins, our community has created spaces where people face suffering with open hearts, nurture compassion in the face of division, and take meaningful action together.

Each circle, each retreat, and each program has been made possible because of people like you choosing to give, and through your support, the reach and influence of our community continues to grow.

Your gift today helps us inspire others in our community, through our programs, circles, and events, to take action rooted in the Three Tenets of Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action, as Bernie Glassman taught.

The intention is that these actions be caring, serving everyone and everything in the situation, including oneself, and ripple outward to spread peace and compassion far beyond each gathering.

Click Here to Donate

If you’ve been considering a contribution, now is the time. Your generosity ensures that our shared vision continues to flourish: a world where compassion, justice, and peace are not just ideals, but lived values in communities everywhere.

Thank you for walking this path with us.

With appreciation,
Geoff O’Keeffe and the Zen Peacemakers Team

Support Our Work Today
Zen Peacemakers is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
All gifts are tax-deductible in the US.

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The broom is in your hand

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:36:32 GMT

The End and the Beginning (excerpt)
Wisława Szymborska

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The End and the Beginning
Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

…

Someone, broom in ha…

Krishna Das on Going Beyond Fear

Zen Peacemakers — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:46:26 GMT

Dear friends, our annual Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau is just over two months away. Join us!