March 27, 2025
For the 4th and final week of Brooklyn Zen Center’s annual Membership Drive, we shine a light on Sara Lamm, a sangha member at Boundless Mind Temple!
Name: Sara Lamm (she/her)
Member Since: July 2024
Place of Practice: Boundless Mind Temple
Favorite BZC Program: Three-day sesshins
BZC Roles: I volunteer to bake, set up, and provide childcare when I can
Fun Fact: I was on a podcast once with Melissa Etheridge; the topic was sperm donation (I found out when I was 29 that I was donor conceived…)
My Story:
This is a photo of me in a spot on Long Island where I have a tradition of cold plunging. There are no jellyfish in winter and I am always amazed that the very waters I linger in when it’s warm, greet me just the same when the temperature’s dropped. The sky is still vast, the rocks still ancient.
Cold swimming is a brisk teacher: how quickly can I release the temptation to pick and choose? Can I encounter the intensity and still relax? Can I draw so close to my breath that I release the part of me that simply doesn’t want to be there? And, once I do, what is on the other side?
Cormorants! Seaweed! Salt! Miracles!
I shouldn’t stay in past my physical limits, of course, but between the moment I get out of the water and this moment, what else is here? The whole body, alive and tingling.
Last fall, I swam in Watershed’s chilly quarry pond during BZC’s upstate retreat with Dr. Paula Arai. We had spent the morning immersed in and inspired by her vivid stories of nuns and laywomen in Japan—mothers, wives, daughters, teachers, and scholars who employed “fierce creativity and subtle wisdom” in lives dedicated to the relief of suffering. By midday, complex emotion had arisen as we contemplated the question: “What would it be like now if nuns had been the ones who established Zen in the West?” The invitation to imagine, collectively, what rituals, practices, and narratives would honor and liberate all embodied beings had also opened the space to be with the tight pain of exclusion, erasure, and silencing. I felt a stunning kind of grief, sharp and many generations in the making.
So, I made my way into the cold water. There, supported by the rustle of bright, fall leaves, the kindness of afternoon sun, and the fiercely creative ancestors themselves, something within me gave way to possibilities that were just starting to shimmer. Most healing of all: two other sangha members had arrived at the quarry pond, set down their towels, and slipped into the water too.
—Sara Lamm
Support BZC’s Spring Membership Drive by signing up for a new membership, upgrading the value of your existing one, and promoting what it means to be a member to your friends!