About
Tim Burkett began Zen practice in 1964 with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and was ordained as a Zen priest in 1978 by Dainin Katagiri Roshi. He has served as guiding teacher at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, founded by Katagiri, for fifteen years. Burkett is also a psychologist and retired CEO of People Incorporated, a mental health nonprofit. He has published two books: Nothing Holy About It, which combines teachings from his teachers with guidance on living without limiting concepts, and Zen in the Age of Anxiety, which addresses sources of anxiety in contemporary life and the cultivation of a peaceful heart.
Teaching focus
Burkett's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Burkett teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Burkett's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Tim Burkett appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Burkett has chosen to share there. Tim began Zen practice in 1964 with his first teacher, Suzuki Roshi. He was ordained as a Zen priest in 1978 by Katagiri Roshi, who was Suzuki’s assistant prior to Suzuki’s death. Tim has been guiding teacher at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, founded by Katagiri Roshi, for the last 15 years. He is also a psychologist and retired CEO of People Incorporated, a large non-profit agency that supports people in need of mental health support. In his first book, Nothing Holy About It, Tim intersperses stories about his teachers with his own guidance about living a life unburdened by limiting ideas and concepts. In his second book, Zen in the Age of Anxiety: Wisdom for our Modern Lives, he helps the reader do two things: 1) identify the causes of mental and emotional anxiety epidemic in today’s world; 2) walk the path of a peaceful heart, a path that leads though the center of the anxiety we’re desperate to escape. That body of work places Burkett inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Burkett's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Burkett contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Burkett's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Burkett's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Burkett teaches in the Soto Zen lineage as a priest within that container. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Burkett's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Burkett at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms held alongside teaching focused on contemplative care for the dying, grief, and serious illness. Many of these programs draw on Upaya's Being with Dying curriculum and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians. There's room for personal experience and difficult emotion, held inside the container of practice rather than processed away. The schedule is recognizable as Zen: sittings, walking, meals, talks, and time for questions. Quiet is taken seriously. Most participants leave with both a steadier practice and a more honest relationship with mortality.
