The OzZen Podcast

This talk is continuing our conversation about nonduality. One of the core dualities we are trained into is subject and object duality. The theme of this talk – recognising our essential self as awareness – and some of the experiential exercises are taken from a book called “Standing as Awareness” by the nondual philosopher Greg Goode. Last month I spoke about the Koan of the goose in the bottle....

This guided meditation leads us into the non-duality of Simply Being through the gateless gate of silence.

This talk, based on an old koan, continues our exploration of psychological or mind-generated suffering and the ending of this suffering through seeing how psychological suffering is always synonymous with getting caught in conventional duality of “me” and “not me” and not seeing from the alternative perspective of unbounded awareness. Here is the old koan. Lu Geng asked Nanquan: If someone puts a...

This talk continues with the theme suffering and the ending of suffering. It introduces two complementary practices for ending suffering: self-inquiry and nonseparation.

In our OzZen sangha, when receiving the precepts, recipients also give a Jukai talk, reflecting on their experience of studying the precepts in the monthly study group over the past year. Recipients are encouraged to personalise their experiences.

Tonight, we will discuss the practice of “taking refuge” as it relates to the question of suffering and the ending of suffering. During discussion I want us to clarify the difference between psychological suffering and what we might describe as our natural emotional responses that arise from being creatures who become attached to each other. I don’t think that grief should necessarily be problemat...

How do we find constancy amid constant change? When we let go of attachment to form: attachment and aversion, we find our freedom in the formless field of benefaction.

If we are attached to form: body, feelings, perceptions, personality, as night follows day, we are going to suffer. Liberation from suffering is found through the gateway into the formless.

The middle way practice of non-attachment to desire is not to give-in to desire or to repress desire. We allow desire to naturally arise and pass away, without clinging. Sometimes can do this and sometimes we can’t. Yet this is our practice.

Like a weed, suffering seems to grow regularly and crosses our paths frequently. Often it is mildly annoying and occasionally it becomes troublesome and painful. Although suffering is inevitable, it is possible to activate the seeds of awareness by practicing the first eight of the Buddha’s foundations of mindfulness. Here we prime the ground for suffering to be transformed. Developing the art of...

Bodhidarma sat facing the wall. The second patriarch [Shenguang, later called Huike], standing in the snow, cut off his arm and said, “Your disciple’s mind is not yet at peace. I beg you, Master, give it rest.” Bodhidharma said, “Bring your mind to me; I will put it to rest.” The patriarch said, “I have searched for the mind but have never been able to find it.” Bodhidharma said, “I have finished...

“Each moment, Life as it is, the only Teacher”. In our tradition, we regularly acknowledge “Life” as it is as being our only teacher, but how often do we really appreciate how astonishing it is to be alive? This guided meditation is all about awakening to this wonder of being alive and truly appreciating our life, just as it is, here and now.

Core Beliefs and the Self-Centred Dream by

We can only truly be open and loving when we are truly kind to ourselves. Here we explore some ways of bringing an inner smile into our lives and to observe how being compassionate brings happiness to both ourselves and others.

In this talk I return to the question, what is enlightenment? I begin with a working definition of enlightenment as a developmental process rather than a one-off event (or series of events). I then explore two primary lines of development: “know thyself” and “returning home” or “original OK-ness”.

In this meditation Rhys leads us through an exploration of sitting with suffering because, as Rhys states, this is a lot of what sitting is. For all of us, for a fair bit of the time, this is what we’ll be doing when we practice Zazen: we’ll be sitting with some form of suffering, of discomfort, of dis-ease. Sometimes this suffering will be gross and obvious, like physical pain or emotional upset....

This meditation focuses on the dance between being a separate self, bounded by the body, occupying a particular space-time point, and a self completely interdependent, depending on our environment, and our relationships. Dancing between the two, we hold these two seemingly paradoxical positions with love and compassion.

In this second enchanting, guided meditation, Pingala explores again the mysterious heights and depths of the presence of mountains.

This meditation starts with a reading of the Wild Swans at Coole by WB Yeats as an introduction to the contemplation of “mujo” or impermanence. We then segue into a contemplation of finding our way home in the world.

In this talk I share some understandings of enlightenment that have in the context ongoing dialogue with Joko Beck through her books and Barry Magid as my teacher. I begin my discussing two common curative fantasies of what enlightenment is. I then share one understanding of enlightenment that is found in both Joko Beck and Barry Magid - what I will call our Original OK-ness – the sense of being a...

This guided meditation directs our attention to the quality of our attention to our experience. How our attention is uncovering reality. Zazen is a kind of experiential research into our experience of self and world that can be shared with others to arrive at common understandings. Attention can be understood as a form of taking care of ourselves and our world.

In this talk I introduce the proposal that we all must discover what enlightenment means to us. Like the historical Buddha, we must be a lamp unto ourselves, not accepting any authority other than the authority of our own experience refined in the context of dialogue with dharma friends.

Most people, whether long-term meditators or not, engage in some kind of judgemental, negative, self-talk. We may not even be fully conscious of how we criticise ourselves and reject certain parts of ourselves. We are so used to doing it that we may not even know we are doing it. Sometimes it can be loud and sometimes very quiet and ubiquitous in the background of our psyche. This meditation is an...

In this enchanting guided meditation, Pingala invites us to experience ourselves as a Mountain.

Whatever you experience may be looked at more deeply by acknowledging the feeling tone. Is it pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? Contact with the world through our senses generates a sensation. Just noticing without judging, this tonality really influences our life. Can we feel both pleasant and unpleasant at the same time? Does Neutral have a negative bias? Do feeling tones linger after the experie...