Whose Voice Is in the Room

Labor Day has come and gone, and with it the last official permission to call it summer. The September issue of Lion’s Roar arrives paired with something rarer: a Pema Chödrön 90th Birthday Edition. Ninety. She has been teaching Americans how to stay — with fear, with groundlessness, with the sharp thing you’d rather flee — for longer than most of this magazine’s readers have been sitting.

An elder still in the room is its own kind of teaching. It’s worth pausing on what it means that a person can spend decades pointing at one thing and keep finding new ways to say it.

Which raises a quieter question about the retreat you might sign up for this month: whose voice will actually be in the room?

Scroll enough listings and you notice how often the teacher line is empty. Sometimes that’s an oversight. More often it’s honest — the center hasn’t decided, or the point isn’t a single teacher but the container itself, the lineage holding you whether or not you can name the person leading kinhin. A six-day silent sesshin doesn’t rise or fall on a marquee name. Both ways of practicing are real. But there’s a specific generosity in knowing exactly who you’ll be sitting under, and this month offers a few.

At Appamada in Austin, Flint Sparks and Nate Smalley lead a two-day silent zazenkai, Sept 25–26. Sparks is a Zen teacher and psychologist — someone who has spent years at the seam between contemplative practice and the places the mind gets stuck. No prior experience required, no cost, Friday evening through Saturday.

Online and free, Fire Lotus Temple hosts Ella Baker on Sept 10 — one period of zazen, then a conversation on identity and emptiness. Baker is a trans dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School, and the framing is careful: not identity as something to transcend, but identity as a lived vehicle for understanding emptiness and acting with compassion. Open to trans, non-binary, and gender-expansive practitioners. The format is modest — sit, then talk — but the particularity of the voice is the whole offering.

For the deep end, Zen Mountain Monastery’s Mountains and Rivers Sesshin runs Sept 21–27, led by a full roster: Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Jody Hojin Kimmel, Ron Hogen Green, Danica Shoan Ankele. Six days, seven to ten hours of zazen daily, noble silence throughout. This is where naming the teachers matters least and most at once — you’ll barely speak to them, but their hands are on the shape of the whole week.

And for something entirely to the side: Green Gulch’s City Center location hosts a three-day butoh immersion with Joanna Rosenfeld, Sept 11–13. Butoh — the slow, deliberately unsettling Japanese dance-theatre form — isn’t zazen, but its attention to the gap between impulse and action rhymes with something in sitting. No dance background required.

The fall practice periods are opening now, the season when several monasteries close to the public and turn inward for months. Tassajara enters its cloistered stretch this month — this year rebuilding the zendo that burned to the ground in March. The community arrives for its most intensive season around the footprint of the hall that held them. They show up anyway.