3 or 5 Day Zen Meditation Intensive
24 – 29 September 2024
Boschrivier Farm, Stanford, WC.
There are many ways of describing a Blossom. The unique experiences of practicing meditators see their own blossoming, each in accord with their vast interior landscape.
We live in many landscapes: emotional landscape, psychological, intellectual, artistic and spiritual landscapes. Most of us are concerned and engaged with a highly active, fast paced outer-landscape. What does your outer-landscape look like? How do you identify with it? What parts of it are you attracted to, and what aspects are you avoiding?
What you are experiencing is a projection in the mirror of your ego mind-scape.
During Sesshin, we employ the 2500 year old Buddhist technology of zen meditation (zazen), for you to enter and study the relationship between your outer- and inner-landscape, and witness how each is informing and mirroring the other.
“There is a blossoming oneness between these two worlds in an harmonious dance of an eternal Spring.”
Your outer-landscape has emerged, essentially out of Mother Earth. Less obvious, is how our inner-landscape is of the same essential source. In Sesshin we study the self, the ‘filter’, which has come between this essential inner, and projected outer scape. This filter – the interpreter – is how you identify with the image of yourself: your persona or ego personality which has been moulded over generations by societal and familial conditioning.
Because a filter separates and divides, most of our pain and suffering occurs when our inner- and outer-landscapes are separated by your ego-mind filter.
Extended periods of zazen as experienced in Sesshin, afford you the presence and focus to immerse yourself in reacquainting with your inner-landscape, beyond your persona. The inner terrain invites you to pass through this conditioning to realize that the filter, or the veil of your personality, has separated you from bliss – your true nature. Like an endless film reel it filters out light and sound to curate a specific sort of illusionary Reality TV show seen on the screen of our minds.
The Zen Root of true reality, is that the “outer” landscape is not separate from the “inner” landscape. There is but one landscape. As you begin to harmonise with this one landscape through your meditation practice you open your filter, separate less out, and begin to experience increasing joy and peace. You begin to come home, to your true Root as you Blossom in an Eternal Spring of everyday life.