Pat Enkyo O'Hara

Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara is a Soto Zen Priest and Zen Teacher in the White Plum lineage. She received priest ordination from Taizan Maezumi Roshi and dharma transmission from Bernie Tetsugen Glassman. She is the founder and abbot of the Village Zendo in New York City.

Joan Halifax

Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Zen priest and anthropologist who has served on the faculty of Columbia University and the University of Miami School of Medicine. For the past thirty years she has worked with dying people and has lectured on the subject of death and dying at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, and many other academic institutions. In 1990, she founded Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist study and social action center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1994, she founded the Project on Being with Dying, which has trained hundreds of healthcare professionals in the contemplative care of dying people.

"Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara’s Most Intimate is exactly that: deeply forthright in its wisdom and fully at home in the body of her direct experience. Filled with precise instruction and insight, informed by the rigor of Roshi’s years of dedicated practice and service, her authentic voice speaks boldly and without compromise on these pages." —Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

"Warm-hearted, clear, precise, and deeply loving, Most Intimate beckons newcomers and old-timers alike back to the cushion of their own lives to live them with awareness and appreciation. Roshi Enkyo’s voice is deeply personal and her teachings deceptively simple, for they manage to address our strongest needs for relationship, joy, confidence, and freedom from fear." —Tetsugen Bernie Glassman, author of Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters

"We often think of Zen as a practice of stillness, and this book shows us the other half of mature spiritual practice: intimacy and expression. This is the kind of Zen that is loyal to both the monastery and the streets, and so the lessons here are vibrantly appropriate for this new century of dharma. Roshi Enkyo O’Hara’s voice is alive, bright, and welcoming." —Michael Stone, author of Awake in the World and Yoga for a World Out of Balance