Deep Streams Zen Institute has offered programs that emphasize lay Zen practice and its relevance to everyday living since 1988. We are now located in Studio City, CA.
Beginners as well as seasoned meditators are welcome and practice opportunities include public meditation meetings, classes, retreats and intensive study with Joseph Bobrow Roshi. Deep Streams is a socially engaged organization with roots in the extended community. To this end, we have developed our Institute, focusing on interdisciplinary education that brings together contemporary psychotherapy with Buddhist principles and practice. Integrative workshops and seminars explore the interplay of mindfulness, psychotherapy and Buddhism in transforming trauma. Community programs allow us to distill the best from Buddhism and Western psychology to help people and build peace in the world. Deep Streams has served incarcerated youth and it’s non-denominational community service, the Coming Home Projecthas brought together the best from east and west to provide nationally acclaimed, evidence-based healing programs for returning veterans and their families and caregivers.
Our intention from the beginning has been to build cultures of peace as we apply the fruits of psychotherapeutic and Buddhist practice for the benefit of the wider community: for personal and social change, and professional development.
Deep Streams is a non-profit 501(C)(3) organization governed by a Board of Directors. We welcome your contributions and donations are tax deductible. We also invite you to volunteer as we can use assistance in a number of different areas and projects.
An Integrative Vision
In our engineered and privileged world, we risk having consumption and technological progress substitute for connection and fulfillment. The rush for more and better, bigger and faster, drives us. It may soon become possible to literally have every thing we want - financial fortunes, engineered children, even a life span without illness and limit - yet still be left wanting. Many others, meanwhile, are struggling to simply survive. No wonder questions are being asked with increased urgency: What is a good life? A life of meaning, connection and vitality? Is contentment possible? Has this quality of living become an endangered species? The practice of meditation is one way of protecting our humanity in an increasingly de-humanized world. In concert with contemporary healing practices such as psychotherapy, it offers practical approaches to creating and living a life of meaning and fulfillment. These streams are complementary paths of aliveness that help us touch the extraordinariness of ordinary life and deepen our capacity to integrate and embody it in daily living. Each helps us face our life and death such that we develop self-knowledge that is not hubris, strength that is not domination, acceptance that is not resignation, equanimity that is not complacency, vitality that is not mania, and compassion that is not co-dependency. Each tradition helps us, in different ways, to plumb the depths of our lives, transmute hidden obstacles, and liberate ourselves from narrowness and fixed views that prevent us from awakening and sharing the fruits in the widening contexts of life in which we exist: from the personal, interpersonal and organizational, to the socio-cultural and ecological. Western depth psychology and psychotherapy can help meditators and teachers learn directly about emotional growth and derailment in the personal and interpersonal fields, conscious and unconscious, while clients and psychotherapists can benefit from the ancient resources of meditation practice. There is also a meditative dimension intrinsic to psychotherapy, and an unfolding psychological process distinctive to meditation practice. Without collapsing the differences, each path can help the other learn more about itself, and, through mutual dialogue, be enriched. There is a reservoir of creative potential here that has not yet been tapped. Deep Streams endeavors to bring this potential to life, and help us make use of our precious ordinary lives of suffering and joy to grow, create, and help one another.