One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive—March

This format splits the difference between a full residential sesshin and solo home practice. You're following Zen Mountain Monastery's actual retreat schedule via livestream—their bells ring, their periods align—but you sit in your own space. That matters: you get the container and rhythm of a formal retreat without leaving home, which is either ideal or a compromise depending on what you need.

Optional Zoom meetings with teachers throughout the week are the connective tissue. In a silent sesshin you might have one dokusan meeting. Here you get structured contact points, though the nature of that exchange is different over video than in person.

The "home practice intensive" framing is honest about what this is: not a retreat in the traditional sense (which assumes removal from ordinary life) but a structured week where you commit to following a sesshin schedule from home. Wake early, sit the periods they sit, eat when they eat the signal. The flexibility is built in—you're not locked in a zendo—but the form holds you.

Soto Zen emphasizes shikantaza, or just-sitting: zazen without a specific object of focus, posture and breath as the primary instruction. This lineage tends toward gentler pacing than Rinzai or Sanbo Zen, which rely more heavily on koans and intensive teacher meetings.