Good to have you here with Young Urban Zen.

Um, and we hope that you come back.

This is one of our more vibrant groups that we have at San Francisco Zen Center.

And, uh, the...

If you want to know the topic ahead of time or even the speaker ahead of time, you can join the WhatsApp group, uh, when that'll be announced.

And, um, also there's an email group and, uh, many ways you can stay in contact with, um, uh, the cohort here.

[laughs]

You ever feel that way? How that your truth changes? Because truth in the moment feels like truth with a capital T, but in many cases, you need it to germinate and unpack a little bit and spread out before you can see, like, what's actually going on.

So I don't know if you feel, if you can unpack that a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, well, uh, growing up in a family that was very, um, um, conservative Christian, um, in kind of a unique non-denominational church called the Worldwide Church of God.

They held a lot to respect for the Jewish faith and the Old Testament law.

They kind of viewed a lot of their theology through the lens of the Jews have the understanding of the law, but somehow they miss the Savior.

And so that would be maybe a very reductive way of talking about that church.

And how does that differ from the other forms of Buddhism that maybe came before or even since?

Like, what's going on here?

the way that they're impacting me and the other people.

And then when I look inside, why do I care? Well, there's some lack in here.

I want a different gift.

So how do we show up and start turning over and working with, I vow not to take what is not given? Well, just like in many spiritual practices or in even recovery practices, whether it be NA or AA or any of those sorts of things, Al-Anon.

Like in AA, they have this, you know, we deal with a lot of, there's even recovery meetings that are different temples, and they have 12 steps for recovery of alcoholism.

And 11 and a half of them have nothing to do with alcohol.

I

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Good evening, everyone.

Good to have you here.

And welcome to 2026, a new year.

It just seems strange to say that year, 2026.

I don't know if you've written that yet and thought, wow, how many years have gone by whenever you saw that.

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