Peacemaker Circles UK

We held the North of England Zen Peacemaker Circle meeting on Saturday, from 10.30am till 6.30pm. The venue was Steve Suleyman Hart's lovely house in Rothwell, outside Leeds. The loose theme for the day was "Bearing Witness". We began with a checking-in circle, and then Kim led us in a little Nembutsu chanting- Namo Amida Bu. Then Steve led a guided relaxation/metta meditation following on from the one he did at the last circle... soften/allow/love. We then read together a section from Roshi Joan Halifax's book "Being With Dying", and explored an exercise together where we look with innocent child-like eyes at the person sitting opposite us and imagine their own child-like innocence present at the same time as their current state. We discussed the exercise in depth afterwards. We had a shared lunch together- Tom made soup with a pumpkin from his mum's garden. Then we did a 30 minute exercise in Silent Sitting meditation led by Zang. We began in sil...

We held the monthly Great Heart Circle for meditation last Thursday, once again in the Unitarian Great Meeting House in the city centre. After our usual guided relaxation and meditation on kindness, we studied and discussed the Zen Peacemakers' Precepts together. These are the 16 traditional Refuges and Precepts transmitted by the Japanese Soto and Rinzai lineages, together with the "Five Commitments" agreed at the last World Parliament of Religions. The discussion included the nature of precepts, why have them at all; the question of why they're usually worded in the negative "I will refrain from... " etc; and how we feel about implementing them in our daily lives. We concluded with a period of silent Zazen meditation, and a shared meal.