Dharma Talk and Book Signing — Zen in the Age of Anxiety: Wisdom for Navigating Our Modern Lives

Saturday, September 15, 10 am – noon
City Center, 300 Page Street, SF

Tim will offer the Saturday morning Dharma talk at 10:15 am in the City Center Buddha Hall, followed by Q&A and a book signing in the dining room.

Wrestling with fear doesn’t have to be a negative experience. This book offers an approach to life that unlocks a new way of thinking and being in the world, one that leads directly through the center of the anxieties we seek to avoid. Written in the style of an owner’s manual, a guide to being human, Burkett focuses on areas of pain and anxiety as they tend to manifest for modern people: feelings of unworthiness and issues surrounding sex, money, failure, and even death. Providing wisdom from Zen (channeled through his many experiences as a psychotherapist) and using language and metaphors from popular culture, he takes anxiety and teaches us to turn those fears into the building blocks of a fulfilling life.

Tim Burkett began practicing Zen Buddhism in San Francisco in 1964 with the renowned teacher Shunryu Suzuki (author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). Tim is the former CEO of the largest non-profit in Minnesota for individuals with mental illness. He is a psychologist, a Zen Buddhist priest, and the Guiding Teacher of Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. He and his wife, Linda, have two grown children and two grandchildren.

With an artless simplicity born of deeply integrated and compassionate wisdom, Tim Burkett speaks to the beginner’s mind in each one of us. —Cynthia Bourgeault, author of The Heart of Centering Prayer

I gained so much from reading Timâ’s book, especially about how to hold and handle my own anxieties. Here is an encouraging handbook on how Buddhist values and practices can increase our sense of connectedness and foster inner—and outer—peace. I especially liked Tim’s “Nine Keys” that can open any of us to healing powers in life events and in ourselves, too.—David Richo, author of The Five Things We Cannot Change and How to Be an Adult in Relationships

This is a book imbued with love and wisdom, full of passages of fluid prose, woven in with carefully chosen Zen stories, poetry, and relevant research findings. It includes clear explanations of the power of diligent meditation practice to transform our various human difficulties into clear seeing, equanimity, and ease, followed by practical exercises about how to go about this work. This is a book about the substance and beauty of Zen practice, a book I will happily read and recommend to my own students. —Jan Chozen Bays, author of Mindful Eating and How to Train a Wild Elephant