The Five Poisons — Drifting Mountain Zen

SANGHA AWAKENING TO ITSELF

Collective Realization Through Relationship

OCTOBER

24th · 31st

NOVEMBER

7th · 14th · 21st

Saturdays · 10:30 AM — 12:00 PM

Mountain Time

A FIVE WEEK ONLINE INQUIRY WITH

MARY ELLEN SEIEN ROSHI &

CHARLOTTE JIGEN SENSEI

This final series brings the first full cycle of Deep Sangha Work to completion. Over the course of the year, we have moved together through the Five Poisons, Core Fear and Core Contraction, and now Sangha Awakening to Itself.

In this series, we begin with jealousy, the final poison in our exploration. Jealousy contains and reveals all the other poisons in different ways: greed, anger, ignorance, and pride. It also brings us directly into relationship, where our core fears and deepest patterns of separation appear.

Rather than examining these patterns only as individual experiences, we will explore how they arise in us and within the Sangha itself.

Our relationships become the field of practice. Reactivity, projections, difference, and vulnerability are not separate from awakening. They become the very material through which awakening occurs.

As we bring awareness to what happens between us, space opens. The Sangha begins to realize not only its shared conditioning, but also its true nature. This is collective realization through relationship: awakening together in the midst of our actual human lives.

This is not an idealized vision of community. It is Deep Sangha Work: meeting ourselves and one another, and discovering what becomes possible when awakening is no longer seen as an individual matter alone.

These two first series have been a powerful and deeply inspiring process. Yet we also feel that we have only scratched the surface.

This kind of exploration as a group is new to us all. Together, we have been learning not only to recognize our individual patterns, but also to see how they arise and manifest between us - and, most powerfully, to realize the universal nature of our conditioning, revealing the unity within our differences.

The work will continue in the new year. We will open the process to new groups while also creating opportunities for those who have completed the first cycle to deepen their practice.

Tuition $375

Enrollment Limited to 10 participants

What People Are Saying

“This series was rich and meaningful from the very start. The gentle opening-built trust, and the skilled facilitation encouraged genuine participation.

I loved the clarification that ignorance is the fundamental mistake from which the other poisons become magnified. Attraction and aversion become greed and anger from the mistaken sense of me, my and mine.

Kamie B.

“Facilitation was brilliant. Really appreciated how everyone was not just encouraged but expected to participate. Felt like a transformative conversation, a solitary “big mind” working together. The open mike could have been messy, but due to the size of the group, or the quality of the participants, or just plain magic, it worked really well.”

Dan C.

“The Series was powerful and eye-opening. Exploring ignorance in depth gave me clarity, and hearing others’ experiences made me feel connected. I left with a deeper awareness of how anger and greed operate — both in myself and in the world — and a renewed sense of how to meet them with practice.”