Chester Street Zen Training, 21st July

 

In our Zen Training circle on Sunday we studied a tool for including all aspects of our life in practice, called the Five Buddha Families.  They're sometimes used in the Zen Peacemakers as a way of reflecting on our engagement with life - Spirituality, Study, Livelihood, Social Action, and Integration/Celebration.  Originally they developed in Indian aand Tibetan Buddhism, where they are used as a very rich model of how our psyche operates moment by moment.

As usual, a fantastic meal was shared together outdoors at the end!

Rumi Reflection Group in Chester

 

The Rumi Reflection Group in Chester finished our exploration of the translation Love's Ripening by Helminski and Rizwani this week, and we'll be moving on to Rumi: Bridge to the Soul, by Coleman Barks next week.  The plan is to cycle through lots of different translations of Rumi so we can hear him in different voices.  We're using Rumi as a starting point for exploring our own lives, so hopefully this will encourage us to hear the diversity in our own voices too.

From somewhere beyond myself

grace radiates into my heart.

Somewhere a Candle illumines this whole world.

Who am I? Just the candlestick holder.

Rumi

Chester Zen Peacemaker Circle

 

Our Great Heart activities in Chester have been developing using the structure of the Zen Peacemaker Circles, with the aim of creating a network of people coming together to explore the "Three Tenets" of the Zen Peacemakers - Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Loving Action.  We're continuing also to explore both Zen and the spirit of Rumi as found in his poems, linking in to the training we've done together for several years in the Leicester meetings.  In Chester we now have three fortnightly meetings:  a "Street Zen Training", where we study, meditate and share a meal outdoors on the streets of Chester; a "Rumi Reflection Group", where we meet in a cafe and discuss one of his poems; and a "Mindfulness and Metta Class" where someone leads practice of two traditional Buddhist meditations.

Everyone is welcome, we are a very diverse group of all ages, genders, nationalities and backgrounds.  Come! Come!

Leicester Great Heart Circle - Rumi and Zen Meditation With Sufi Flavours

What is meditation ?  Sri Sri Ravi Shankar describes it as : “A mind in the present-moment.  A mind without agitation. A mind that becomes no-mind.  A mind that has no hesitation and no anticipation. A mind that has come back to its source.”

The Leicester Great Heart Circle is an established group that meets monthly to practice Zen meditation with a Sufi flavour, to share experiences and to celebrate our interbeing through a shared meal. It is inspired by the Great Heart of the Sufi poet Rumi. The evening is suitable for all regardless of background or experience.

First Thursday of Every Month,  7.30-10.00 pm, Suggested Donation- £5

Unitarian Chapel, City Centre,

45, East Bond Street,

Leicester LE1 4SX

No Meeting In July 2013

For More Information Contact

greatheartzendo@gmail.com

Leicester Great Heart Circle June 2013

Walking quietly in the garden of Great Meeting as the sun sets ............

Only Breath  by Rumi    

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist , sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not a entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless , a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

(Coleman Barks)

Not this, nor that, not this, neti neti
Looking for One, it is not this, it is not that, la ilaha, la ilaha, there is no one to be found
amongst all this diversity, but there is one, ila allahu

Rumi Reflection Group, Chester

Woman is a ray of God -
she is not merely created,
she is Creative

Rumi

The Rumi Reflection Group is meeting one afternoon a fortnight, taking a poem by Rumi and refecting on what it might mean in our own experience.  This week we were looking at the chapter 'Feminine and Divine' from Kabir Helminski's translation "Love's Ripening".  By coincidence, a member of the group came to say goodbye, she's going home to Italy after studying in Chester for a year - she gave us the painting above which she'd just made today!

Leicester - Great Heart Circle May 2013

A photograph of the magnolia tree in the garden of Great Meeting in Leicester, after our initial meditation we walked silently on the paths in the garden amongst the spring flowers and the fading light of early evening.  

Our topic for discussion was an article in the Guardian newspaper about the recent visit of Jon Kabat-Zinn to the UK and his talks with the NHS and with the Government. Jon teaches mindfulness, his approach is presented as the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme. He says in the article that he wanted to translate the Buddha's central insight,mindfulness, into a language that anyone could grasp. He has stopped calling himself a Buddhist; this is about being human, he says.  Jon also says that even if mindfulness is used by bankers and by soldiers to improve their professional skills, he says, it will also nurture the innate compassion of their humanity. Needless to say we had plenty to talk about in our discussion !

We also started to talk about Enneagrams if you wondered what it was, an interesting topic in itself.

The Enneagram of Personality (or simply the Enneagram, from the Greek words ennea [nine] and gramma [something written or drawn]) is a model of human personality which is principally used as a typology of nine interconnected personality types.