Every Sunday morning, a small group gathers at a tiny house in downtown Anchorage. Inside, they sit down, cross-legged, facing the wall. They stay totally still, except for their breathing. And they stay silent for the next 90 minutes.
They’re here to practice zazen, a form of Buddhist meditation. Compared to other types of meditation, zazen is pretty bare-bones — it’s just sitting and following your breath. And, crucially, you can’t do it alone. You need a community.
Judith Koshin Haggar was one of the Anchorage Zen Community’s founding members. She saw an ad for a meditation group in the Yellow Pages, and when she attended her first session, she knew she was in the right place.
“I went and — here are my people,” she said. “Here are people looking for the same things that I'm looking for.”
That was nearly 40 years ago. They still meet every Sunday to just sit, to be silent together. Haggar said keeping the group together over the years was no small feat.
“We’re sort of the Wolverine of small Zen communities,” she said, “because we've just been able to hang on and be here through all these different changes.”
When the group started in 1986, it was the first organized Zen center in Anchorage. They started out practicing in someone’s living room, and spent years moving between different locations. They meditated in a mall and someone’s garage — in the winter.
“I remember crunching through the snow in all of my winter gear and getting the heat up and sitting there for the first sitting period for 40 minutes before we didn't see our breath anymore,” Haggar said.
Practicing in Alaska poses other unique challenges. Haggar said members come and go, and it’s hard to get teachers to move up here, and even harder to get them to stay. But Haggar thinks weathering all these changes only strengthened the Zen Community.
“You do gain resilience, you know? And no teacher was sitting there saying, well, they didn't show up. We had to do it because it was coming from in here,” she said, pointing to her heart.
Now, they have a permanent home, or zendo, in downtown Anchorage. Their priest moved away a few years ago, so he teaches on Zoom or recorded videos that they play on a TV in the zendo. It’s a small group — only about 15 people total. Some attend Sunday service on Zoom, but most members still choose to practice in person.
One of those members is Zoe Lowery, who started meditating with the group a few years ago. After the pandemic, she was looking for a way to manage her anxiety and to be with other people again.
Lowery said practicing zazen sounded pretty simple at first. You sit still, in silence. Thoughts pop up and, without judgement, you let them go. But she said that’s easier said than done.
“Our brains are designed to constantly come up with thoughts,” Lowery said. “And so to constantly kind of stop that process and notice it — which is what we do in meditation — is a little bit resisting our biology, and that's a really hard thing to do.”
Lowery said that’s why practicing with other people is so important. It holds you accountable, because you can’t just get up and start doing something else.
Haggar said it also builds community and connection — not despite the silence, but because of it.
“You get to know people in a way that you don't know other people,” she said. “In that silence, you can hear sighing, you can sense movement, you can tell if people are struggling.”
At the very end of service on a recent Sunday, there was a little bit of talking. Members discussed how to carry Zen into their everyday lives, from big life changes to the more mundane. For Susan Dent, that includes grocery shopping.
“That's where mindfulness comes in,” Dent said during the discussion. “Even at Costco, my challenging area.”
Then they left. But they’ll be back next week, which, Lowery said, is the most important part.
“We're going to go out, and we're going to get lost in what we're doing,” she said. “And that's fine, because on Sundays, we come back, and we remember, and we try again.”
So, she said, they’ll keep gathering in the zendo — as always, in silence.
