Deep Sangha Work
An Inquiry into The Five Poisons, Core Fear, and Sangha Awakening.
Deep Sangha Work – Offered through Kanzeon
Practicing alone can take you far. At a certain point, practice needs to include relationship. This work brings awareness into how we live and relate to ourselves, one another, and the world.
What This Is
This is a small group practice where meditation and relationship meet. In interaction, our automatic reactions to life – patterns, defenses, and habits in how we relate – become more visible than they do in solitary practice. Instead of avoiding this, we work directly with it.
How We Practice
Each meeting includes meditation (zazen), the Big Mind process, and group sharing connected to the session’s theme. We learn and deepen through shared exploration and listening. We discover new aspects of ourselves and begin to see that we are not alone in what we often carry in silence.
We also begin to notice the immediate sense of experience, what feels pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and how quickly reactivity can arise from there. The focus is to explore our experience and stay present with what we feel and see, even when it is uncomfortable.
What This Work Supports
Over time, this practice supports greater awareness in relationship, less automatic reactivity, more space and the ability to stay present in difficulty. It allows for a more conscious and grounded way of being with our self and others.
Who This Is For
This is for you if you have a meditation practice and feel stuck, or if you want to work more directly with patterns as they show up in real-life situations. It is for those who are open to practicing in a group setting and are interested in a more direct and embodied form of practice.
Practical Details
This work takes place in small groups, either as ongoing practice or in short series formats.
The upcoming module, beginning June 20, 2026, is currently full. If you feel drawn to this work, you are very welcome to join the waiting list for future groups. To be notified about upcoming groups, contact: cjuul@me.com
The Five Poisons program is offered through Kanzeon Inc., a nonprofit organization.
Three Sequential Series:
The Five Poisons
This offering unfolds across three series during the year. Each series consists of five modules, building progressively from individual pattern recognition to collective realization of the Three Treasures.
Participants commit to one series at a time, while understanding the bigger picture.
The first series has recently been completed, and the next series is already underway beginning June 20, 2026. Additional groups will be announced.
A Different Kind of Inquiry
This is not therapy. It is a form of shared inquiry and practice.
The work is grounded in direct experience, curiosity, and compassion. Rather than analyzing or fixing, we learn to see clearly what is here. Over time, the sense of separation between inner and outer life begins to dissolve.
It is also an experiment:
What happens when a group commits to waking up together?
Date & Time
Series II : Saturdays June 20, 27, July 4, 11, 18 at 9:30AM PT
Series III : TBD
90 minutes per session
Cost
$375 for each 5-week series
Location
Online (Zoom)
Facilitator
Seien Roshi & Jigen Sensei
Who This Is For
This offering is for Zen or Buddhist practitioners who feel called to explore this territory with:
- Honesty
- Steadiness
- Emotional and relational maturity
- Respect for both psychological depth and awakening practice
Because of the nature of the work, participation is limited to 10 people.
Format
- Online
- Five modules per workshop
- 90 minutes per session
- Saturday mornings at 9:30AM pacific time.
- Workshops are offered sequentially across the year
What other people have said about the workshops:
The Hidden Gem in Suffering
“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.”
“The workshop 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.”
“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 and mine, mine, mine.”