Seiza Meditation
At
the end of September 2023 my friend, dharma-friend, and Seiza
meditation teacher, Miki Nakura, visited Cambridge both to lead a Seiza
(静坐 — literally, “quiet sitting”) meditation session at the Cambridge
Unitarian Church and to conduct my Kikyoshiki service.
For those who are puzzled about why this style of meditation was being
taught in a Unitarian setting, it’s helpful to know that Seiza
meditation was the preferred form of meditation practised by the
Japanese Unitarian movement thanks to the great twentieth-century
advocate of a creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality or religion (自由宗教 jiyū shūkyō), Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei (1881-1988).
Imaoka-sensei personally knew and studied with the founder of Seiza meditation, Okada Torajiro-sensei (1872-1920), and
he continued to practise Seiza meditation for the remainder of his life. Indeed, as
he often said, it was his own primary religious/spiritual practice.
As a PDF Half-letter (ANSI A) file with an introduction by Miki Nakura called “Now, just sit quietly! — Seiza Quiet-sitting meditation”
Anyway, we both thought it would be a good thing to record the teaching sections of the session and put them up on YouTube to give as many people as possible the opportunity to benefit from them. That’s now been done and so, at the end of this page, you’ll find an embedded video. However, before you get to that, here are a few other Seiza-related links you might find helpful.
The first few links are to various PDF formats (American and British) of a new translation of Kobayashi Nobuko-sensei’s booklet called “Seiza — Quiet-sitting for Beginners”: |
| Miki and me in the Cambridge Unitarian Church, Sept. 2023 |
As a PDF Half-letter (ANSI A) file in consecutive page order
As a PDF Half-letter (ANSI A) file ready to print as a booklet
As a PDF A5 file in consecutive page order
And now, as promised, here’s a short video of Miki Nakura teaching the basics of Seiza Meditation in the Cambridge Unitarian Church:
Miki Nakura holds weekly Seiza sessions on ZOOM (link below) every
month, mostly Tuesdays, from Noon to 1 PM (New York Time) and Saturdays,
from 8 AM to 9 AM (New York Time), but to check the current schedule, please contact him at:
Passcode: 552956
These are free virtual live sessions which anyone in the world can join.
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