The Beginners Course

The Zen Beginners Course will be taught again this year starting on Jan 31, 2026. Yep, it’s pretty much around the corner. This course is designed for people that are new to Zen and want an understanding of the practice. But is also a good reminder of the foundations of the practice for seasoned practitioners.

There is a small fee to attend the course to cover the costs of advertising and the work put into it. Updates for this will be posted on the website when they becomes available.

The Weekly Podcast

This has not fizzled out. This is something I do in my spare time which I’ve had very little of this year. I do have the audio for all talks that were given by Lotus Vu. It does takes me anywhere from 2 to 4 hours to edit and publish each one. So I’m hoping in the near future I will have the time to start tackling these again. I do plan to publish all the talks that Lotus has give to the Sangha each Saturday. Stay tuned…

Retreats

For our senior members that are able to attend there are two retreat intensives that are planned for this year. The winter one will be hosted in Saskatchewan and the summer one in Ontario. Lotus Vu will be the teacher for both of these.

Since our Sangha is made completely of lay practitioners these retreats allow them to leaving the hustle and bustle of life for a short period of time and solely focus on the Zen practice. These are called an intensive for a reason but are an incredible way for re-enforcing and deepening the Zen practice.

The Up and Coming Year

The challenges facing us are going to be hard for many to say the least. We hope that we can some light, how ever little that may be, to everyone that we can. We hope that all sentient being may be able to find peace and contentment within whatever they may be facing.

The Zen Master Jingqing asked one of his disciples:
What's that sound outside?

Disciple:
That's the sound of rain.

Jingqing:
All beings are upside-down; They lose themselves in the pursuit of things.

Disciple:
How should I feel?

Jingqing:
I am the sound of the rain!

We’re not expecting a big turn out so this sitting will be over Zoom only. As always, everyone is welcome to join us.

We wish everyone the very best over the holidays as we start bringing another year to an end.

The course can be attended in-person at the Knox-Metropolitan United Church (Regina, SK, Canada) or online via Zoom.

To register for the event click here.

After a day of setup up and configuring the server here’s how it is currently looking:

• Every member will a have their own private personal calendar and address book. Each calendar also has todo lists and notes available with them.
• Every member will also have a shared Saturday Sitting calendar. Beyond the Saturday sittings this calendar should also include any events available to all members of the Sangha and maybe even significant Buddhist dates… I’m sure we’ll figure out what we want in it as time goes on. This will also include todo lists and notes that will be shared among all of the members.
• For the Kensho Groupies there will be a third shared calendar with the Sunday koan study schedule also with it’s own todo lists and notes.

I know most email clients support caldav and carddav out of the box. Anything Apple definitely does. Android can be a bit of a hit or miss here. There’s DAVx⁵ for those Android phones that don’t support it. Once we get rolling I may just create accounts one at a time so I can help with setup as needed and hopefully also create a page on the website with this help for future reference.

There will also be address books for each member but unfortunately the software doesn’t support shared address books. The software is free, open source and easy to install so I don’t think we can complain about this ;). One other down side is that users are unable to change their passwords without administration help. I should be able to code something up in the future to fix that.

One final note

While I set all this up, I also looked into the Google search console was figured out why Google wasn’t indexing our site. I believe I got this fixed and should know the results of this in a couple of days.

Okay I’m sure you are wondering who we are. The covid pandemic changed a lot of our lives and our sangha has been no exception. Currently, for the most part, we are still recognized as the Regina Zen Sangha centered in Regina, Saskatchewan. But now our members are spread across Canada from West to East coast with our meetings being a combination of in person and online.

Clear Way Zen is a rebranding of our sangha that better reflects how we’ve changed over the past few years and this will be our new home. Although it’s very plain at the moment, we will be working hard to bring our new website to life.

Our sangha is non-profit organization and completely relies on our member’s and people’s generosity. Because of this generosity we are now able to host our website ourselves and other IT services in the future. Instead of relying on free services we hope to a have more dynamic and interactive site for those interested in the practice.

Namaste