Genpo Roshi developed the Big Mind Process by bringing together his Zen practice and teaching with insights from Voice Dialogue, created by Hal and Sidra Stone.
Voice Dialogue offers a way to give distinct aspects of ourselves their own voice. Genpo Roshi recognized that this approach could also help people directly experience the nondual awareness to which Zen points.
The Big Mind Process makes this exploration accessible through guided dialogue, inviting people to discover both their many human perspectives and their boundless nature.
An opening happens suddenly. Embodying it continues through practice, relationship, and the willingness to keep learning.
The Big Mind Process grew from Genpo Roshi’s exploration of awakening and what it means to embody that realization as a human being.
Following his profound, spontaneous awakening in February 1971, Genpo Roshi undertook intensive solitary practice. He first attended a sesshin with Taizan Maezumi Roshi and Kōryū Roshi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles in March 1972, then returned to his cabin. His period of largely solitary practice continued until June 1972.
In December 1983, Genpo Roshi met Hal Stone, who became an important influence on his work. Hal and Sidra Stone developed Voice Dialogue together—a method with roots in Jungian psychology that gives the different aspects of ourselves an opportunity to speak and be heard. After 2011, Genpo Roshi also had the opportunity to meet and work with Sidra Stone.
Drawing on his Zen practice and teaching, and particularly on his work with Hal, Genpo Roshi developed the Big Mind Process to help people explore their many human voices and directly recognize their boundless nature.
The result is an invitation to discover Big Mind and Big Heart, and to bring wisdom and compassion into everyday life.
Carl Jung explored the psyche as a living multiplicity, including unconscious patterns he called complexes and symbolic forms he called archetypes.
His work emphasized becoming conscious of aspects of ourselves that we overlook, reject, or project onto others. He called the process of becoming more whole “individuation.”
This psychological background helped inform the development of Hal and Sidra Stone’s Voice Dialogue, which offers a direct way to explore and speak from our different inner selves.
Hal and Sidra Stone developed Voice Dialogue as a way to explore the different selves within us.
Rather than speaking about a self, we are invited to speak directly as it. The Protector, the Controller, the Inner Critic, and the Vulnerable Child can each express their concerns, needs, and experience.
Listening to these selves helps us recognize both the parts that ordinarily run our lives and those we have pushed aside.
Central to this work is the Aware Ego Process: developing the capacity to stand between opposing selves, appreciate each, and choose more consciously.
Genpo Roshi’s work with Hal Stone, whom he met in December 1983, became an important influence on the eventual development of the Big Mind Process. After 2011, he also had the opportunity to meet and work with Sidra Stone.
Genpo Roshi’s path began with his spontaneous awakening in February 1971, before he entered formal Zen training.
From June 1971 to June 1972, he lived largely in solitude, traveling for part of that time but spending most of it in a cabin. During this period, he sat five to seven hours a day.
In March 1972, he attended a sesshin with Kōryū Roshi and Taizan Maezumi Roshi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, then returned to the cabin.
During that retreat, Tetsugen Bernie Glassman, later known as Glassman Roshi, gave him beginning instruction. Genpo Roshi immediately felt a deep connection with him and recognized the clarity and awakening he expressed. Bernie became a central influence in his life and a profound reason he chose to continue his training at ZCLA.
His sustained solitary practice provided a strong foundation for formal Zen training. Through zazen, koan study, and daily life with his teachers and community, he continued to deepen and integrate his realization.
He received Dharma transmission from Maezumi Roshi in 1980 and Inka from Bernie Glassman Roshi in 1996.
His awakening, solitary practice, and years of training and teaching informed his exploration of how to help others recognize their true nature and embody it in everyday life.
This became the Zen foundation of the Big Mind Process.
Genpo Roshi met Hal Stone in December 1983. His exploration of Voice Dialogue became an important influence alongside his continuing Zen practice and teaching.
In 1999, these streams came together in the development of the Big Mind Process.
The invitation was simple: could the method of speaking directly as our different human selves also help us speak from—and directly recognize—Big Mind and Big Heart?
Participants were invited to speak as Big Mind, discovering for themselves the boundless awareness to which Zen points. Speaking as Big Heart opened an exploration of compassion that includes all beings.
This brought a contemporary form of guided dialogue into the service of awakening, followed by the continuing work of integrating that realization into everyday life.
The Big Mind Process welcomes people with many years of practice and those encountering this work for the first time.
Through guided dialogue, participants can explore their different inner voices, recognize perspectives they have overlooked, and experience the boundless awareness of Big Mind and the compassion of Big Heart.
Preparation unfolds gradually. Realization itself—the opening, the insight, the awakening—is sudden and spontaneous.
As Dōgen writes:
“When you realize buddha-dharma, you do not think, ‘This is realization just as I expected.’”
—Only a Buddha and a Buddha, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Ed Brown
Realization reaches beyond our ideas of what awakening will be. Integration and embodiment follow as we learn to express that realization in everyday life.
As this work deepens, we cultivate the capacity to include opposing perspectives, respond more consciously, and bring greater clarity and care to our relationships and decisions.
For those drawn to formal Zen training, Big Mind can accompany and enrich that practice. It also offers an accessible doorway for people from other traditions or no religious tradition.
Big Mind · Big Heart continues to evolve through practice, teaching, and the experience of those who participate.
Sudden realization opens the way. Integration and embodiment continue as we meet the circumstances of our lives, recognize what we have overlooked, and learn from one another.
Teachers and practitioners bring their own experience and understanding to this work. Its vitality depends on remaining open to discovery, correction, and growth.
The invitation continues: awaken to your true nature, embrace the fullness of being human, and express wisdom and compassion for the benefit of all beings.
