Friends Without Benefits (Sangha) w/ Gyokei Yokoyama

Angel City Zen Center - Beginners Only Podcast

“It's brave of them to let people just step in and screw up. But it's not about how well you do, or whether you want to do it - we have a task and each person embodies it. If we’re getting anything here, it’s that authenticity.” - Gyokei Yokoyama

They say you don’t choose your family, and in Zen we don’t pick our sanghas. Gyokei discusses what it means to practice with a sangha, why it can be the trickiest and most rewarding of the big three jewels (Buddha, Dharma, & Sangha), and the kind of authentic bonding that only happens when we don’t get to choose who we sit next to in the zendo. In a culture of transactional communities, what are we getting out of this one? How can we tell the difference between being taken advantage of in a community, versus doing our part to a greater whole? And how do we run a successful operation when the operating plan is to let people screw it up? Find out here.