About Nathan Jishin Michon

I was raised in the Catholic tradition and went through a decade of Catholic school. I was the little kid always asking the priest strange questions with undying curiosity about the world. When young, I experienced a number of mystical experiences that ultimately sparked his intrigue in meditation and exploring religions. After reading some books on Buddhism, it wasn’t like a broke away from that Catholic background. Rather, it was more like a realization that I had always been interpreting Catholicism in a very Buddhist way – like I had been Buddhist all along. So I can’t really call it a conversion experience. I also remained very spiritually, practicing and learning with mystics and contemplatives from many of the world’s meditation traditions: Hindus, Sikhs, Sufis, Christians, and various Indigenous traditions.

My primary practices, though, were within Buddhist traditions. I began in Zen, and practicing around 7 years, staying in numerous Zen and Chan monasteries. However, I then moved to the Thai Forest tradition, a Theravada school with more open-ended and flexible forms of meditation practice.  While this form of Buddhism has remained the base of my practice, I combine it with the many of the elements from Shingon (a 1200 year old Japanese Vajrayana school). I love the variety of contemplative practices available in both these traditions and find they complement each other well in my personal practice. I ultimately ordained within the Shingon tradition.

As pictured above, one category of Shingon ceremonies is called “goma” (from the Sanskrit homa). The fire within the goma ceremony represents the burning away of cravings, aversions, and ignorance in both ourselves and the world. Although the goma practices came to Japan from India, some of them combined with indigenous Japanese mountain spirituality (Shugendō). All Shingon priests learn at least a base form of goma, but it is my hope to learn some of these specialized forms of goma and help preserve them for future generations.