About
Mary Mocine is the Abbess at Clear Water Zendo in Vallejo, California. She trained at the San Francisco Zen Center, including residencies at Tassajara, Green Gulch, and City Center. She was ordained by Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1994 and received Dharma Transmission in 2006. She also trained in Japan. Clear Water Zendo was established in 2000 and offers daily practice, classes, and retreats. Mocine's teaching emphasizes body awareness. She leads a dharma group for lawyers, drawing on her prior legal background.
Teaching focus
Mocine's core teaching draws on shikantaza (just sitting), breath-counting, koan introspection. The frame is the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, but the language stays plain. Mocine doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include zazen, samu, and sangha. None of those get presented as abstract ideas. They're worked into the body, into ethics, into how a practitioner shows up in family life or at work, so that the dharma stops feeling like a separate compartment. There's a steady invitation in the talks to keep practice human-sized. Sit when you can, return when you've drifted, and trust that small consistent attention does more over the years than dramatic breakthroughs. Format-wise, Mocine teaches in in-person, retreat, online, and the tone moves easily between guided sittings, dharma talks, and Q&A. Questions tend to get answered the way they were asked, without being reframed into something cleaner. That alone tells you a lot about how the room feels.
Background
Mary Mocine is the Abbess at Clear Water Zendo in Vallejo, California. She trained at the San Francisco Zen Center, including residencies at Tassajara, Green Gulch, and City Center. She was ordained by Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1994 and received Dharma Transmission in 2006. She also trained in Japan. Clear Water Zendo was established in 2000 and offers daily practice, classes, and retreats. Mocine's teaching emphasizes body awareness. She leads a dharma group for lawyers, drawing on her prior legal background. Mary Mocine is the Abbess at Clear Water Zendo in Vallejo, California. She trained at the San Francisco Zen Center, including time at Tassajara, Green Gulch and City Center. Mary was ordained by Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1994 and received Dharma Transmission in 2006. She has also trained in Japan. Mary's teaching emphasizes the awareness of the body. She is also a fan of Dudeism. Clear Water, aka the Vallejo Zen Center, was established in January of 2000. There are daily practice, classes and retreats at the Center. Mary also leads a dharma group for lawyers as she was a lawyer many years ago. She speaks the language of that kind of practice as well. Mocine teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, and the recurring concerns of Mocine's teaching, ethical foundation, steady attention, and the slow softening of habitual reactivity, echo the older texts without sounding distant from a 21st-century practitioner's life. What stands out across Mocine's talks isn't a single technique but a steadying tone. Practice is treated as something built slowly, in ordinary life, with care. There's room for the difficulties practitioners actually bring into the room, grief, restlessness, the body's complaints, family obligations, and the encouragement is consistent without being pushy.
Lineage
Mocine teaches within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Mocine talks about practice, with steady reference to the older Buddhist vocabulary while keeping the door open for people who've never read a sutra. Whether that framing lands as monastic or lay depends on the specific talk, but the consistent thread is care for the form without letting the form become the point.
What to expect
Sitting with Mocine, you can expect grounded instruction in shikantaza (just sitting), with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. On retreat the structure follows a classical rhythm of sittings, walking practice, and dharma talks, with silence held between sessions. Online sessions tend to keep the same shape, shorter sits, a talk, and time for Q&A, in a format that's accessible from home. The teaching voice is steady. Mocine won't push you past your edge, and there's a clear preference for slow, sustainable practice over breakthrough chasing. Bring a notebook if you like, or don't. Either way, you'll be met where you are.
