Our Community

Awakening Together is a hybrid Zen practice community.  While our in-person gatherings take place in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, our virtual and hybrid gatherings are open and attended by people from across multiple time zones and locations.  

Our Guiding Teacher is Flint Sparks.

What is a Zen Community (Sangha)?

"What makes Awakening Together a sangha? It’s having and maintaining these essentials: a Practice, a Path, and a Vow. To be sangha there must be an essential practice, a path that we’re following together, and a vow that guides it. As a Zen sangha in which I serve as your primary Guiding Teacher, the essential practice is zazen. The path is the Buddha’s path of awakening and wakefulness—the eightfold path certainly, but the whole of the path of wisdom and compassion of the Buddha and of the Zen ancestors. And the Bodhisattva Vow is the fundamental vow of the Mahayana Buddhist and Zen tradition in which I’m trained and teach.

We do this in Community. Turning toward one another, we are transformed and so the world is transformed. Through our practice, path, and vow, sangha is cultivated when there is concern and care for each other’s welfare, when we can be vulnerable and still know that we belong. This is the ground from which belonging can develop and transformation can occur. Belonging is an art. This skillful way of relating creates conditions for capacities to blossom and allows more to become possible as people engage communally with compassion and discernment.

This all weaves together as taking refuge in Buddha, taking refuge in Dharma, taking refuge in Sangha. This is Zen as a Relational practice—for indeed there is no such thing as Zen practice that’s not relational. That’s all it is. It is fully embodied and in relationship to all things and all beings all the time.

Offer your best in service of one another, in all that you do, and see how it goes,  keeping the Dharma central."

Flint Sparks - ATZC Guiding Teacher