Special Offering

Refuge and Restoration: Community Practice for Earth Activists (Sept 19-21)

Recurrent

Location
Boundless Mind Temple
326 Clinton Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
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Description

September 19-21, 2025
Facilitated by Rev. Sarah Dojin Emerson, Marga Laube, and Alayo Bascome

Friday 6–8 PM | Boundless Mind Temple
Saturday 9 AM–6PM | Boundless Mind Temple
Sunday 7:30 AM in Prospect Park (or at Temple if weather doesn’t permit) | Closing by 9 AM
BYO lunch for Saturday or plan to step out during our break—there are options nearby.

Application deadline extended to September 14 – Apply here
Suggested Donation: $50-$300 sliding scale
No one turned away for lack of funds!

Join Rev. Sarah Dojin Emerson, Marga Laube, and Alayo Bascome for a weekend retreat combining Zen Buddhist practice with Earth activism, offering spiritual tools for sustained engagement with environmental challenges. Designed for people who do direct environmental activism, this soulful gathering includes meditation, ritual, community support, and culminates in a traditional Jizo ceremony in Prospect Park during the autumn equinox and Climate Week.

We’re entering a time of unimaginable losses, including the possible end of human life on Earth. If we hope to change this, we have to reckon with the fact that whatever we’re doing now isn’t working, since we’re still headed for the cliff, and something is preventing most people from engaging with the emergency, despite all the warnings. It’s possible that an important part of that something is a fear, conscious or unconscious, of the sorrow to come. How will we bear this grief? And won’t grieving make it harder for us to act? But I’m wondering if it is not grief that weakens us, but all we do to avoid it. Perhaps we need, instead, to include it. Grieving won’t keep us from acting, but it will change how we do so, in ways that make a great difference.”

-Joan Sutherland, Zen teacher

from “Here at the End of the World” Lion’s Roar

  • How do we care for ourselves while responding compassionately to suffering in the world?

  • How do we maintain our own health and well-being as we focus on caring for the Earth?

  • How can activists tend to their own grief and receive support in community?

Many committed activists devote themselves so thoroughly to the causes they believe in that tending to their personal and spiritual needs is often overlooked or undervalued. However, there are many spiritual practices that can support activists in their sustained and committed engagement.

While it’s known for its monastic training, from its roots, Zen Buddhist practice has also been centered on offering training and practices for people to move uprightly into the world to respond to suffering with skillfulness and deep intention. It is intended to offer support for people “in the marketplace” who want to address personal and collective suffering.

Join us this fall at the Brooklyn Zen Center for a soulful weekend of Earth activist community tending, Zen Buddhist and Earth-based practice and ritual, and spiritual self care.

Our time together will culminate in a centuries-old Earth based grief ritual in Prospect Park (weather permitting) called the Jizo ceremony – an entreaty for protection of Jizo bodhisattva, whose Sanskrit name translates as the “Earth Womb” bodhisattva.

This weekend retreat directly precedes Climate Week, and contains the Autumn Equinox, as well as a New Moon and partial Solar Eclipse. Come gather in community for refuge and restoration during this significant turning of the seasons.

This event is being offered on a donation basis. Application to attend the event is required.

Application deadline extended to September 14 – Apply here
Suggested Donation: $50-$300 sliding scale
No one turned away for lack of funds!

Instructors

Alayo Bascome (they/them) is a Community Healer, licensed Psychotherapist, and EcoChaplain-in-training with the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. The Bodhisattva path first revealed itself to them in 2006, in the form of a raft that helped them navigate the asphyxiating waters of debilitating chronic illness and emotional turmoil. Since then, they have dedicated their professional life to helping individuals, communities, and the broader Living Earth to move through the challenges that beset them on their own life paths. As well as to heal and grow beyond the toxic socio-historical legacies that we've inherited. Alayo is the founder of Alchemical Kinnections Integrative Therapy. They live in New Jersey, where they have the honor of raising their two ‘tween-aged children, and three murine friends "Cassia", "Sesame," and "Sage".

As counseling astrologer for over twenty years, Marga Laube has supported thousands of people across the threshold of their transformation. Through an animist, kincentric lens, she translates the language of Earth and the planets into stories that fuel our renewal. Assisting individuals and communities through their evolution is her life’s calling, and also the subject of her book, Agents of Evolution: An Astrological Guide for Transformative Times. 
Marga lives with her partner in Miami, FL, maintaining a contemplative lifestyle and listening to the natural world in a land strongly affected by the climate crisis. In recent years she has been called to work with individuals and communities experiencing grief and sudden transition due to climate change. She is currently training to serve as a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain.

Sarah Dōjin Emerson’s formal practice in Soto Zen began in 1996. She lived and trained at Tassajara Zen Mountain center and other sites of the San Francisco Zen Center from 1997-2007. She received Dharma Transmission from Abbott Konjin Gaelyn Godwin of the Houston Zen Center in 2015. She has a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies, and has worked in the fields of mental health and pastoral care with children and adults. She experiences Bodhisattva Zen practice as deeply supportive to inquiring into, challenging and transforming systems of oppression, particularly racial inequities and the harm they cause within convert Buddhist sanghas, and in U.S. society generally. Sarah has also worked for many years in grief support- clinically, ritually and in community- specializing in child loss. She lives with her partner, Charlie Pokorny (who is also a Soto Zen Buddhist priest), their children (who are her most profound and constant teachers) and numerous pets in Brooklyn, NY.

Fee
Suggested Donation: $50-$300 sliding scale (You will be sent a donation form after your application has been accepted)
Questions?
info@brooklynzen.org
We are in an historical building which is not wheelchair accessible. There are two flights of stairs leading to the center, located on the second floor. Chairs, benches, and extra support cushions are available. If you have any additional questions about accessibility, please contact us at info@brooklynzen.org.
Refuge and Restoration: Community Practice for Earth Activists (Sept 19-21)
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