The OzZen Podcast

The divine abodes are loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. These are both fruits of a practice of meditation and can be doorways to the deepening of that practice. In this guided meditation we explore the connection between romantic love and loving kindness. Romantic love hints at the universal love we can experience and embody whether or not we are in love romantically with someone or not.

Both in love songs and romantic poetry we can get a taste of something that is beyond our individual selves, beyond existence in a certain place and time, beyond the usual way we experience life. Universal love can flavour our lives and be flavoured by the qualities of romantic love.

This talk explores the benefits of these often tricky challenges and what Buddhism and relational science offer us in dealing with them. Idealised or romantic love is dualistic and relates to the other, Harmonic love relates with the other. Rather than being in love, we become love.

This session focuses on the meaning of Emptiness in the Pali Buddhist sutras and the Abhidharma philosophy school.

Opening To Love, by Jack Wicks by

Awakened awareness is not about special experiences – it is about recognising the simplest form of conscious experience that is available to everyone. Joko called it “Simple Mind”, Shunryu Suzuki called it “Beginners Mind” or we could simply call it awareness of awareness or “Pure Awareness”.

We could say that the purpose of meditation, both silent and guided, is the process of dis-identifying from the suffering that is generated by identifying as a personal separate self with the flow of impermanent, interdependent phenomena and recognising and returning to our home base of Simple Mind.

By Sono.

This guided meditation offers a chance to gain clarity around our thoughts and emotions. Taking a few deep breaths, we can name our experiences. Then we gain an opportunity to fully experience them without being overwhelmed by them. We can then move on the investigate them if it feels safe to do so. Remembering to nurture ourselves by coming back to the awareness of the breath.

This session gives an introduction to the Buddha’s first discourse on Turning the Wheel of the Dharma. In this discussion we focus on the four truths or practices.

Yogacara part five by

Sono asked me to talk on Gurdjieff and the zen Buddhist precepts.

Gurdjieff didn’t teach on things like the precepts e.g. do not kill, do not steal, do not lie, do not gossip etc. His teaching is about becoming conscious as opposed to the awake-sleep state in which we live almost all the time.

Consciousness will, by its very nature include all the “do nots” and will mean a life lived through our true natures. In awake-sleep we are like machines, automatically reacting to everything according to our individual experiences of life.

In this guided meditation Sono introduces three types of Zazen:

Mindfulness of a mental object;

Mindfulness of the field of all objects; and

Just-Sitting