FAQs

Things You Might Not Have Known

You can begin Zen Compassionate Care training with no previous meditation experience.

Because this nine months of training focuses first on providing volunteers with the basics of Western Zen awareness practice, it can be an opening to the experience of a whole new way of viewing your life and your role as a volunteer serving others.

Zen Compassionate Care offers one of the most intense Western Zen awareness training programs available outside of a monastery setting.

If you have been following a Zen awareness practice path or have had a long-term meditation practice, this can be the way for you to take a step into deeper spiritual work. The nine month commitment includes weekly training meetings, meditation practice and one-on-one guidance sessions as well as 3 full-day and 3 half-day workshops focused on the tools of compassionate awareness practice and how it applies to providing listening support to others.

The weekly meeting time for ZCC volunteer training is determined by those who are selected for the program.
In the first year we started with a Friday afternoon time and then shifted it part-way through to Friday evenings, trying to keep our regular meetings at a time most convenient to all.

Zen Compassionate Care provides over 125 hours of training over the course of 9 months.
This is far more than most volunteer training programs because our first focus is on supporting volunteers in developing their own sense of compassion and acceptance for all that arises within them. It is this open-hearted compassion that we then extend out to others.

Western Zen is not a religion and does not require you to believe in any doctrine or abandon your current religious or spiritual practices.
Our practice is focused on bringing conscious awareness to how our mind works; the impact of our conditioned responses to life; how we increase our struggle in life through the assumptions and projections we carry; and how pervasive our internal voices of judgment can be. The general guidelines for this Western Zen practice are; Believe nothing. Question everything. And Take nothing personally.

All that is required is willingness.

This is an intense form of spiritual and personal training. There must be the willingness to be open to the basic framework of the training, and to one’s own deepest heart. You will find a compassionate welcome and deep honoring of your person in sharing this journey with a ZCC volunteer training group.

Financial issues are not a barrier to anyone who enters this training.

While you are asked to pay an initial fee of $75.00 for your notebook and to underwrite part of the training program expense. The rest is up to you. We ask those in ZCC volunteer training to donate to the program being guided by personal ability and a sense of gratitude for what they gain through this experience.

You are welcome to participate in the ZCC Volunteer Training even if you are not sure that you will have time to begin your volunteer service in 2009.

This training is transforming. It will certainly find expression throughout your life. You will be included in the Reflection Groups for ZCC Volunteers whether or not you are currently assigned as a volunteer. Several of our current ZCC training graduates are applying what they have gained to their careers as nurses and counselors.

Zen Compassionate Care

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