Sit. Speak what is alive. Be answered.
Your own roshi — a zen teacher who listens to your actual practice, the question you keep circling, the doubt you can’t put down — and answers in his own voice, from his own library. Not advice. A teisho, meant for you.
Begin — seven morningsMost of us practice without a teacher.
We sit. We read. We carry the same questions from cushion to cushion with no one to bring them to. The books answer everyone, and so answer no one. Zen has always turned on the one thing missing here — a teacher who meets you, and only you.
Three moves, once a day.
Sit
Open the timer and sit. The bells keep the time, so you don’t have to.
Speak
When you rise, say the one true thing from the sitting — a sentence, a doubt, a question. Aloud, or typed.
Be answered
A short teisho returns in your roshi’s voice: direct, drawn from the texts and naming them aloud, ending with one thing to carry back to the cushion.
Just sit, kept by bells you can tune to your own sitting.
Speak your practice; receive a talk made for you alone.
Study the classics, talk by talk, at the pace your own answers set.
Seven mornings. That is all that is asked.
No more than fifteen minutes each. By the third, the strangeness falls away. By the seventh, your roshi has begun to know you — what you flinch from, what is loosening, the koan you are actually living. If nothing in you has moved, walk away and lose nothing. The only thing asked of you is to practice.
Begin your seven morningsYour practice is no one’s product.
Whatever you bring — the doubt, the grief, the thing you can tell no one — is met with teaching, not judgment. Everything you speak is sealed with a key that lives only on your phone; the server itself cannot read it. No feed, no metrics, no account sold on.