With intention and awareness,
Zen Center North Shore
offers refuge to all.
Zen Center Mission Statement
(ratified in 2021)
With intention and awareness, Zen Center North Shore offers refuge to all. Through the practices of zazen, self-care, and creativity, we build trust, love, and compassion for ourselves and others.
We engage and affirm our humanity and honor the intersectionality of our identities and experiences. We shape our community through reflection and actions, moving towards a more racially just world rooted in the consciousness of the nature that surrounds us.
About Zen Center
The Zen Center was established in 2012 to make the teachings and practice of zazen freely accessible to a a diverse population across the North Shore of Boston and regionally throughout New England. After two years in residence at St Andrew's Episcopal Church in Marblehead, we secured a dedicated space for practice in Beverly where we have continued to offer ongoing opportunities for the study and practice of Soto Zen Buddhism. For the length of the pandemic, we moved our entire practice schedule to the Zoom platform and are now beginning to transition back into physical space through a variety of partnerships with local entities.
The foundation of the Zen Center is built on the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha's teachings. Our primary practice is zazen - just sitting. We sit zazen to express our true nature, bright and awake. We offer a sanctuary to those who wish to find connection, purpose, and equanimity in the midst of our busy, complex human lives.
Under the leadership of Myozen Joan Amaral, a dharma heir in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center, we offer the teachings of Soto Zen, as expressed by Suzuki Roshi and transmitted by Eihei Dogen, back to Shakyamuni Buddha.
Founder and Guiding Teacher
Myozen Joan Amaral moved to the Boston area in 2012 from San Francisco Zen Center to establish the Marblehead Zen Center. In 2014 the Zen Center relocated to Beverly and in 2016 changed our name to Zen Center North Shore.
Joan is a dharma heir of Zenkei Blanche Hartman in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi. Her interest in zazen grew out of a background in modern dance and she continues to be interested in the ways that movement and the cultivation of energy can support the practice of stillness.
Joan trained at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery for six years. While in residency at San Francisco Zen Center, she formed a dharma group – Dharma en Español – devoted to studying Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind in Spanish (Mente Zen, Mente de Principiante), in order to provide the opportunity for native Spanish speakers to hear the dharma in their own language. While in San Francisco, she led meditation classes at the County Jail where she also provided one-on-one spiritual counseling for prisoners.
She is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and also completed the chaplaincy program at the Sati Center in Redwood City, CA, where she studied with Gil Fronsdal, Paul Haller, and Jennifer Block.
Her primary focus as a Zen priest, meditation teacher, sangha leader, and community activist, is on the dynamic relationship between formal practice and everyday, messy human life. In recent times she has been exploring the relationship of zazen and social justice, self-care, and creativity as a path of true happiness.
