This 8-week Zen meditation course is focused specifically on helping you become more grounded and centered in your life and on guiding you into looking deeply at who you really are. We’ll be covering a variety of Zen practices excellent for increasing energy and vitality, as well as for strengthening overall resiliency. This course also places a particularly strong emphasis on investigating who you really are, on genuine insight, what the Zen tradition has been firmly grounded in for centuries. The practices covered in this course come from the Japanese Rinzai Zen tradition. This course is geared towards anyone interested in discovering a deeper basis to their life and also for anyone interested in learning time-tested grounding practices and energy cultivation. Topics:
Plan to meditate for 25-30 minutes each day!
Over the 6 weeks we’ll be exploring a variety of topics including:
Stress and how to work with it
Emotional pain and how to work with it
Mental and physical benefits of meditation
Living at a level of elevated function
Impermanence
Understanding the stages of insight – knowing who you really are
Meditation techniques we cover include:
Mindfulness of the breath
Fusho – the unborn mind
Meditating with a koan (a question or paradoxical statement used to point to the true nature of reality)
Healing with the soft-ointment method
Cultivating the energy in your belly (“hara”) and legs
I did really like the Zen Health and Well-being Course, this is in the same vein.
A statement of intention
I undertake for the duration of my meditation course to faithfully practice to the best of my ability for 30 minutes a day. I will do my best to practice all of the subsidiary exercises. I make this undertaking through my own free will.
Week 1: Breath Meditation
saturday light meditation without journaling
sunday meditating in the woods, no journal
monday meditating in the woods, no journal,
2022-10-13 Thu 16:12 Meditating before Grounding and Insight Course
broadly speaking, two categories of meditation: concentration and insight meditation. Narrow zoom lens (concentration) v. wide-angle lens (insight). we focus on the wide-angle
clinging/attachment likened to a rope-burn. useful metaphor.
external mindfulness -> vivacity, liveliness, full-life-ness, opennesss internal mindfulness -> kensho, satori, awakening, self-understanding, wisdom, prajna
developing insight happens through cultivating focus & attention and pointing that at ourselves.
Week 2: Stress & the Unborn Mind
Stress
Dr Hans Selye stress theory: stress is a response to stressors
key is to learn how to work with stress positively
stress is unhelpful if it becomes our "default mode" -- meditation practice, presence of mind, helps one to listen to the body & stress responses. practing flow/unstickiness, lessens stress negative responses, (pathways toward stream-entry?)
presence in stress is find if flow can maintain in each moment, not clinging/tanha to the stress or stressor
moving slowly from fixation to flowing
my aversion last week caused by momentum of ongoing stickiness/clinging? slow release/unwinding may occur over the weeks
child-like oneness with the world -> individualized adult-ness -> reintegration of one-ness in now-ness
Fusho Practice
Abiding in presence, flow, sitting quietly in the stream.
Daizan writes in Practical Zen: "The only task is to observe when you begin to identify with or attach to any of these born things. When you recognise this is happening, immediately you are resting again in the Unborn."
Notes from Forest City Zen: The Unborn Mind
References
Bankei gives an idea of how the unborn mind functions with this quote,
The Unborn manifests itself in the thought, “I want to see” or “I want to hear” not being born … The reason I say it's in the “Unborn” that you see and hear in this way is because the mind doesn't give “birth” to any thought or inclination to see or hear.
[1The Unborn: Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, Norman Waddell]
What we see from this quote is that the unborn mind deals with the immediate sensory input, before thoughts about the direct experience arise. Consider when you eat something like ice-cream. You immediately have some sensation of taste. You don't have to try to taste. If you have a meditation practice, you might notice that this sensory input sets off a chain of events. There is the taste, then there is identification of the taste, then there is an evaluation of “good” or “bad”, then, of course, the final stage, of thinking “I want more” or “I don't want more”. The mind that just tastes without adding anything extra to the immediate experience is the unborn mind of Bankei.
What are "born things"?
Not a literal, human birth, but the birth of discrimination, or fabrication, the perpetuation of the Skandhas. The Heart Sutra speaks towards the born-nature of things as "empty of self-existence".
Another important piece of the puzzle is that “birth” is one of the 12 links in the teaching of dependent origination which provides a model of how suffering arises from experience as a function of time. In this teaching suffering is “born” after a series of mental events. If you do not want to suffer, prevent it from being born as a mental state. The teaching on dependent origination suggests ways to do this.
What good is the unborn mind?
What good is this immediate unborn mind? This mind is free of suffering. Having an experience of unborn mind, let's us know we aren't trapped in the fabricated reified or “born” mind of words and concepts. This confirms what the Buddha taught in the Khuddaka Nikaya sutta quoted above. By having an experience of the unborn, we know the “born” as artifice.
How do we practice this unborn mind?
When our mind wanders off in zazen, we simply bring it back to our intended practice. Bringing ourselves back to our intended practice has 3 parts: First, we become aware that we have drifted off, second, we decide to return to our intended practice, third, we return to our intended practice. The first part is the really important part. We don't waste time or energy reprimanding ourselves for drifting off