About Us

Flint first came to Minnesota in March of 2017 to offer a retreat style workshop on Waking Up and Growing Up, integrating his experience and training in the Hakomi method and Internal Family Systems.  This first retreat was offered by MN Trauma Project, a 501(c)3 organization offering trainings for mental health professionals.  Additional retreats took place in Fall 2017, Fall 2018, and Fall 2019.  With each retreat, small groups of attendees continued to meet afterwards for meditation, reflection, and connection and the retreats gradually shifted from a focus on therapy and mindfulness to Zen Buddhist practice.  This coalesced into a unified, regularly meeting community beginning in 2020.  

As the pandemic settled onto the world in 2020, the group shifted online, meeting on Zoom for Zazen and relational practice.  These bi-weekly gatherings became a refuge for a growing community, offering an opportunity to deepen our Zen practice and spiritual friendship.  We continued to host online retreats with Flint between 2020-2023 and returned to an annual hybrid retreat in 2022.  We completed our first community Precepts course in 2022.

We are a community of like-minded, like-hearted individuals who have found that the practices of Zen Buddhism support and deepen our capacity to skillfully and compassionately meet everyday life and people.  While many within this community are currently or historically engaged in the helping professions, that is neither a requirement or an expectation.  Indeed the varied roles that we hold or have held professionally all benefit from our practice of sitting, meeting what arises, and determining what action or response appropriately follows.  

As a community, we are committed to what our teacher, Flint Sparks, describes as Waking Up and Growing Up, two complementary and essential paths to full human maturity and freedom from unnecessary suffering.

Here's a breakdown of what he means by each:

Waking Up: This refers to spiritual maturity or awakening. It's about gaining insight into the true nature of reality, transcending limited perspectives, and recognizing our interconnectedness. In a Buddhist context, it involves practices like mindfulness and meditation to directly experience the present moment, observe the mind without judgment, and release attachment to ego-driven desires and perceptions that cause suffering. It's about seeing things as they are, without the filters of our conditioned minds.

Growing Up: This refers to psychological maturity and emotional development. It involves building healthy emotional and relational skills, developing a strong sense of self, and integrating past experiences in a way that allows for greater personal effectiveness and compassion. This includes addressing psychological "blocks to love," understanding our conditioned patterns, and cultivating qualities like empathy, self-awareness, and responsible action in our relationships and in the world.

Flint emphasizes that these two paths are not separate but rather form a "double-helix" of human maturity. He believes that true well-being and liberation come from skillfully weaving together both spiritual insights (waking up) and psychological development (growing up). You can't truly "wake up" without also "growing up" in your emotional and relational capacities, and vice versa. 

As our guiding teacher, Flint integrates his extensive background in both Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy, highlighting how these two areas support and deepen one another.  Awakening Together Zen Community is committed to this pursuit of spiritual wakefulness and psychological maturation for the benefit of all beings.