Peacemaker Circles UK

We held our monthly 'Great Heart Circle' for training in meditation tonight. We were a small circle, braving the wild winds and the rain! For a change we were downstairs in the Unitarian meeting rooms instead of the garden room, and it was great: nestled in the depths of the building with the wind howling outside. We talked about joy in life and practice, and how it links to "raising the bodhi mind" in traditional zen language, and about different kinds of practice in different zen communities. Several people have experienced close deaths of family and friends recently, so this was a point of sharing too. We had guided meditation, silent sitting zen meditation, and a shared sacred meal again...

Last week the international Zen Peacemakers held a Bearing Witness retreat in the former Nazi camp of Auschwitz Birkenau. It is the 15th year of holding the retreat, and this year we came together as 95 people from all over the world- UK, Israel, USA, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Sweden, Brazil, Canada, Holland, France, and including a group of 20 young adults aged 16-23 from many countries, with everyone coming from many different religious and cultural backgrounds. On Monday we visited Auschwitz I, the first camp established in the Polish town of Oswiecim by the Nazis. It's now a museum with exhibits tracing the history of the concentration camp, with a film showing footage of the prisoners just after release. The next four days were spent in Birkenau, the death camp built just outside Oswiecim to gas hundreds of thousands of victims - mostly Jews - and work many more hundreds of thousands to death in conditions of indescribable deprivation. Birkenau is a ...