The Branching Streams Conference is a gathering that happens about every two years. Branching Streams is a network of Suzuki Roshi lineage sanghas of which All Beings Zen is a part. Our Guiding Dharma Teacher and Senior Priest, Inryu Ponce-Barger, and Koryu Naomi had the privilege of attending the recent Branching Streams conference in-person on April 25-28 in Austin, TX. There were approximately 40 practitioners from the Suzuki Roshi lineage from Vancouver, BC, Germany, and many places in between. The conference was held at the Ancient Yoga Center, a retreat center situated on a 230-acre Hindu temple and ashram.
We practiced zazen in the mornings and evenings, with brief accompanying ceremonies, attended workshops, and connected with new and long-time friends in the larger sangha. In addition to new friendships we learned practical sangha administration ideas from each other, for example how other sanghas are approaching hybrid zendos and conducting outreach with young sangha members. We also did some spontaneous hiking!
Here’s a brief overview of the workshops from this year’s Branching Streams conference:
- Healing Circles: During the first morning of the conference, we did a 2-hour small group activity called Healing Circles, a deep-listening practice based on compassionately bearing witness and experiencing our interconnectedness. It uses the basic-yet-powerful human tools of social support, sharing time, and humbly being present together creating a spirit of acceptance to explore suffering, uncertainty, and finding meaning to promote healing and a sense of community.
- Poetry Workshop with Naomi Shihab Nye: Naomi Shihab Nye, a prolific awarded American poet, creative writing educator, and bright shining light of a human being, led us in a poetry workshop. She said, “We live in a poem,” and then read aloud some text (instructions for using the retreat center bathroom) that transformed our perspective of the ordinary as extraordinary. She presented many simple but powerful poetry compositions and guided us through scribbled poetry drafts. To learn more about Naomi Shibah Nye, this interview from On Being conveys her warmth, kindness, and her message that poetry loves us.
- Work that Reconnects: Based on the life’s work of Joanna Macy, Stephanie Kaza, Environmental Studies Professor Emerita of the University of Vermont and Lay Entrusted teacher, led us through the four steps that were aligned with Buddhist practice which were: Coming From Gratitude, Honoring our Pain for the World, Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes, and Going Forth.
There’s so much more to share, but to sum it up: the Branching Streams conference conveyed the power of good spiritual friends, that spiritual friends are the whole of our practice, here in our sangha, and reaching across the globe. And we cannot do this bodhisattva work without each other and the friendships that sustain us.
