This is where we invite you, the Sangha members, to contribute your short articles on your experiences, ideas or readings that you feel will interest others. Send these direct to Sarah Kokai Thwaites, or via the contact page. Posts will be linked and publicised in general mailings, Facebook and Twitter. Comments may be made on the StoneWater Zen Facebook page or via Sarah Thwaites if you don't use social media.

Manu Daishin Bazzano – The Affect Therapy Manifesto

Manu Daishin Bazzano Sensei, one of our teachers within Stonewater Zen Sangha, has a new book out. “Psychotherapy has lost its way. It is no longer involved with individual, socio-political, and spiritual transformation. It has bent over backwards to the demands of neoliberal ideology, a warped worldview that sees humans as cogs in the wheels […]

Jeremy Ryōkan Woodcock Sensei – Finding Ourselves in Deep Waters: Buddhism. Psychotherapy and the Contemporary World

Jeremy Ryōkan Woodcock Sensei, one of our teachers within Stonewater Zen Sangha, has a new book out. It is published by Mud Pie Books, a small specialist Buddhist publisher in Oxford in the UK, and also available on Amazon: https://mudpiebooks.com/books-authors/finding-ourselves-in-deep-waters/ “This book offers a transformative set of metaphors that invite the curious general reader, psychotherapists […]

Byron Seido Adams – What Matters Most to Me in My Practice

When I look at my practice these days, what feels most important to me is very simple: Authentic experience. In my life, that’s the thread that keeps everything honest. I first came to practice about six years ago, when the thought of losing a parent shook something loose in me. It wasn’t dramatic, but it […]

Gordon Gaho Tyrall – What Feels Important About Practice

I came to Zen, and Buddhism generally, through reading. I came across Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard when it came out in the 1970s. I’d never heard of Zen, but I was intrigued, and then read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones—another cult classic. Then more and more reading. Then I went for a long trip […]

Ed Howard – Contemplation Within Activity

In August 2000, I completed a short retreat at the Eiheiji monastery. At the time, I was caught between two paths. One was to remain in Japan, where I’d been teaching English for five years, and follow a monastic route. The other was to return to the UK and fulfil a promise I had made […]

Manu Daishin Bazzano Sensei – Notes on Receiving Dharma Transmission on March 15th, 2026

In the daffodil days, as a harsh western wind beats on our transient frames, On the Ides of March, as the world burns with renewed aggression and new layers of senselessness, a flower blooms in the heartmind of the ten thousand things, indigestible flower of the Dharma, seeded through 80-100 generations, witnessed by cancer cells […]

Buddha Sees Everything

We have been contacted by Ciska Shizuka Matthes, who started her Zen pracrice with Genpo Roshi’s Kanzeon Sangha in the 1990s, about a book she has recently published about her Zen training in Japen. We are sharing the information here in case of interest to you. She says “Last year, I published the translation of […]

Guro Shoshin Huby – These Old Zen Masters: a rant and a reflection.

Soto, Rinzai, accuracy of aim and ways to desperation – By Guro Shoshin, Annoyed of Norway Zen lore goes back 1000s of years and reaches into the realm of myth. It is full of tales of wonder and mystery that are beautiful, puzzling, provoking and poetic. But then some of it can be unbelievably and downright […]

Stuart Gendai Hollyoak – A Dragon’s Lair

In the open air, it was difficult to hear Manu’s instructions clearly. Together, some 15 or 20 of us, barefoot on a field in unseasonably warm weather, followed his direction to become unfamiliar, estranged even, from our bodies. We unlearned how to move our limbs and how to hoist ourselves up against gravity. We moved […]

Manu Bazzano – Soul Kitchen

Shake the dust off your feet, don’t look back. Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack Bob Dylan, Pressing On One October morning in 2005, I sat in a café in Salt Lake City with my good friend, the Zen priest and Jungian analyst Stephen Proskauer. I was in Utah for a […]