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.

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 is to a new translation of Kobayashi Nobuko-sensei’s booklet called “Seiza — Quiet-sitting for Beginners”  and here, we make it available to you in a variety of PDF forms which you can download by clicking on the following links: 

As a PDF A5 file in consecutive page order

As a PDF A5 file ready to print as a booklet

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

Miki and me in the Cambridge Unitarian Church, Sept. 2023
Secondly, here’s an essay by Miki Nakura about Seiza at the end of which you’ll find a few other helpful links.

Thirdly, here’s a link to a pdf handout in which Miki Nakura introduces the basics of Seiza

Fourthly, here’s a link to a pdf handout in which Miki Nakura introduces the basics of Seiza for those (like me) who practice sitting on a chair

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 Wednesdays, from Noon to 1 PM (New York Time) and Saturdays, from 9 AM to 10 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.

Email Post

Comments

Post a Comment