What Is Zazen?

Za is Japanese for sitting, and Zen means meditation. Zazen meditation is about having a wide open awareness, noticing all aspects of your experience without excluding anything or judging any part of it to be good or bad. By cultivating this non-critical "floodlight" of awareness, we start to see through the illusion of a separate, isolated self - "me" looking at the world, and instead are able to step directly into the natural, unrestricted flow of reality.

Transcript

I've been asked the question, What is Zazen? My name is Mark Curran-Westmackett, And I'm a Zen teacher with Zenways Zangok, Based in London, The UK. So what is Zazen? Za is a Japanese word that literally means sitting. Zen. Well, So Zen is a bit of a complicated word. Zen is a Japanese word. It traces its roots back to China, To the word chán. And a Chinese way of saying the Indian word, Dhyana. So dhyana became chan became zen now dhyana is a Sanskrit word which probably most closely means meditation and it probably would have been the word the Buddha used for meditation. But. . . It's come to mean really what you find when you do meditate and a particular kind of meditation. So we've got meditation, Which is about narrowing in. You could say like a laser beam meditation where you kind of exclude off other things, All extraneous thoughts and sensations and feelings. And you really zoom in on one thing. Maybe it's a sound or the breath, Or maybe you're looking at a candle flame and you're just really, Really focusing on that exclusion, Everything else. So that's not really the Zen of Zhaozhen. Zazen is about the opposite type, Instead of laser beams, More like a floodlight kind of meditation, Where you open your attention as wide as possible, And to allow all of experience, All that is arising to come in, To be noticed, To be seen, To be acknowledged, And doing your best not to hold on to it. Or label it or judge it to be good or bad. We just simply allow whatever is arising to come in, To be seen, And then to be let go of, To dissolve. So this is really Zazen. Now when we do this, Of a time. Sitting is a very conducive posture to this. Like if we're lying down, That's great, But it's sometimes a little bit sleepy. It can bring us off to sleep. And if we're standing up, That also works absolutely fine, But it's just a little bit more effortful. So setting is the preferred option. It's kind of medium. Effort right so we can be quite relaxed. And the more you do it, The more relaxed you can get in a sitting posture. But you still are upright and that helps things to stay awake. So we're doing sitting meditation with this open, Wide gaze. Awareness, Allowing things that can't go, Doing our best not to edit them, Doing our best not to judge anything to be good or bad. And when we do that, We're looking directly at experience, At our truth, Our reality, And our relationship to it. And when we start looking over a period of time, And over, You know, Repeatedly at our experience, We start to see what it's made of. The idea of me being a separate, Isolated individual. Becomes. Something which isn't the reality, Right? We start to see through this illusion of a separate self. We start to see through this fact that I feel separate from the world, That it's me against the world. The world's out there, It's always going to be bigger than me and I have to protect myself against it. It just becomes not real, You know, We see that it's not reality. We see through this illusion of a separate, Isolated self. Then we can. . . Enter into what the Buddha called the flow or the stream. We stop being stuck, Separate. Being that's all about protecting ourselves and we can let go into the flow of life. The flow of all things, This continuous, Impermanent flux of reality. So it's about letting go of all the things that keep us stuck so that we can become free, We can flow with life. That's really what Zazen is all about.