Deep Winding Streams

Newsletter for Feb. 2025

Joseph Bobrow

 

I thought it would be a good idea for me to tell the story of Deep Streams Zen Institute; to provide a little history and bring us up to today.  I conclude with information about our legal structure for those who didn’t attend my talk on January 6.

I began to teach Zen in San Francisco in the late 80’s: a small group, in my apartment. By the late 90’s we had a vibrant, active, committed group that met in a run-down church in Haight Ashbury that we’d fixed up and rented on a regular basis. We were an unincorporated zen group.

In 2000 we applied to the IRS to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit religious (Zen) organization. In 2005, after five years and much back and forth, including educating the IRS about Zen, our application was approved.

I wanted to obtain nonprofit status so we could partner with other nonprofits and educational and government institutions in the wider cultural commons; to apply for grants, develop formal collaborations, and create interdisciplinary models for alleviating suffering; and then to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of these practices for transforming traumatic anguish.

In 2000, we began with a series of experiential workshops on the interplay of western psychology and Zen. They were well received and we decided to create integrative residential retreats for health providers to provide a deeper experience. They too were very well received. Then we did some consulting in the juvie and probation departments, introducing meditation for the first time. Integrated with innovative mentoring groups we developed, the changes in the teens were soon visible.

Then, in 2007, I heard about a donor-advised fund through the California Community Foundation specially directed toward nonprofit programs providing help for returning Iraq and Afghanistan service members and veterans. We snuck in under the wire, receiving the smallest of the grants, but a very large one for us. We began to develop five-day integrative residential retreats (called Coming Home Project) for these shamefully underserved and suffering folks: returning service members and veterans, their entire families, and their caregivers The programs blossomed and became the most effective and most trusted reintegration program in the country, including in the VA and the military. We served two thousand people, flying them in and covering all their costs. The changes were astonishing. We did research and published it in a peer reviewed journal.

During this time, from 2008-2012, we were well resourced, with a lean but superb infrastructure crew including office manager, bookkeeper, accountant, and lawyer when needed. This enabled us to efficiently run large programs. All the primary  institutional players sent hundreds of their patients and staff our way, and when they witnessed the results, they promised we’d become the default reintegration program for all returning troops and families. These promises did not come to fruition and after two years of submitting dozens proposals and pounding the pavement in Congress, the VA, the Pentagon, and large corporations, we had to close our Coming Home doors.

Needless to say, it was devastating, given the positive transformations so many were experiencing. I decided to write a book, Waking Up From War, so our approach, and its values and roots, would be available to others. I felt a sense of affirmation when the Dalai Lama wrote the book’s foreword. I moved to Santa Barbara and began to teach at Pacifica Graduate School, hoping to be able to spread the things we had learned about war trauma and other traumas. Alas, administrative changes scuttled this. We did develop a sangha in Ventura, with Larry, who at the time lived there, a stalwart member. Seven years ago, I came to Los Angeles, where I’ve been since. I, through Deep Streams, began to offer integrative workshops and consulting groups on Zen and psychoanalysis. Out of these groups evolved Deep Streams Sangha, a place to practice Zen and to be available for those who wanted to practice Zen.

In 2008 we were an institute, doing living research, creating integrative models, practicing with them, and disseminating our results. We were a corporation (nonprofit) with  all the support and infrastructure that goes with that. Since 2014, we haven’t been. Yet we’ve still had to do all the administrative work required. I have been the one doing it, and not very well.

As a result, the Board met and decided that we no longer need to be a nonprofit religious (Zen) organization and decided to dissolve Deep Streams Zen Institute, the religious corporation. We don’t have near the infrastructure necessary to effectively run a corporation. We no longer need what an institute, a 501(c)(3) religious corporation, provides: donations and grants that are tax deductible, the ability to apply for grants and other funding directly from other institutions, partnering formally one institution with another.

The Board decided that being an unincorporated Zen organization is more in alignment with how we operate today, and better suits the infrastructure we have. An unincorporated religious (Zen) association is a group of people who come together for a religious purpose without forming a legal entity; it is not a legal entity separate from its members. Members can make personal gifts to one another or toward a program, but there are no donations, which imply tax deductibility.

Programs—Zazen, dokusan, and social gatherings—continue. It’s been a long and winding road this Deep Stream has taken. Twenty five years. The average lifespan of a nonprofit corporation is between 6-10 years, so we haven’t done badly. The legal structure changes, but the purpose and the practice continues and the Deep Streams flow on, each drop never the same.