Charlotte Joko Beck

American Zen teacher, 1917–2011. She was an opera singer in her younger years, married a Hollywood screenwriter, raised four children, divorced, and at fifty came to Zen through Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles. She was the first woman to receive Dharma transmission in his lineage. She founded the Zen Center of San Diego, where she taught quietly until her death. She was famous for refusing the exotic trappings of Zen — incense, robes, Japanese terminology — in favor of close, almost therapy-like attention to ordinary emotional life. Anger, jealousy, panic, neediness: she would not let students leap over them. She made them sit inside them, naming the bodily sensations, until the reactive story dissolved. Core teaching: there are no special states. Everyday life is the practice. The bare experience of this moment, before the mind labels and complains, is the whole thing. Key works: *Everyday Zen*, *Nothing Special: Living Zen*, *Ordinary Wonder*.