Seiza Meditation
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| Miki and me in the Cambridge Unitarian Church, Sept. 2023 |
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 free spirituality or free-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.
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, below, you’ll find an embedded video. Following that, you will find a few other, Seiza-related links that you might
find helpful.
Firstly, here’s an short video of Miki Nakura teaching the basics of Seiza Meditation in the Cambridge Unitarian Church:
Thirdly, here’s a link to a pdf handout in which Miki Nakura introduces the basics of Seiza
These are free virtual live sessions which anyone in the world can join.
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