One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive—December

Zen Mountain Monastery's home practice intensive bridges a common gap: the pull of a formal sesshin's discipline without the ability to leave home for a week. You'll join their live webcast feeds of zazen periods, talks, and schedule checkpoints—so the practice runs in real time with the monastery's five-day sesshin—while you sit in your own space and meet your own obligations.

This isn't a recorded course you can do whenever. It's live, synchronous practice: when ZMM rings the bell for morning zazen, you sit. When they have a talk, you listen. The structure of a traditional sesshin—repeated sitting periods, sometimes dokusan—translates as closely as possible online. The trade-off is obvious: no physical presence with a teacher, no oryoki meals in the zendo, no embodied silence with others. What you get instead is a real-time container that holds its shape across five days, which for many home practitioners is the hard part.

The monastery suggests a $10 donation, though the retreat is offered on a dana basis—you pay what you can. You'll need a reliable internet connection and a quiet space to sit. Expect to join live feeds at set times; the exact schedule will be listed on the signup page.