The Melbourne Zen Group is based in Brunswick East, Melbourne, Australia. Our weekly meditation meetings are open to both members and non-members.
Autumn sesshin with Susan Murphy Roshi
and Kirk Fisher Roshi
Saturday 4 May to
Saturday 11 May 2024
Maitripa Centre, Healesville
This sesshin is fully booked.
Our True Home
The steady, curious, relaxed mind that gradually gets to know itself ever more clearly in Zen practice is sometimes termed ‘refuge’. The word may seem to imply a withdrawal from the exacting moments of life, just as a meditation ‘retreat’ may seem to imply backing off from a too-difficult world.
Not so!
Rather than establishing a place set safely apart from the world, refuge (literally meaning ‘fly back’) is the practice of continually returning to a more finely relaxed state of open awareness right in the midst of exactly whatever is happening.
Sesshin opens a deeply warm and companionable silence and stillness that lets an anxious heart gradually soften into simply embracing just what is happening, minus all opinions about it. This is the mind of always coming home, more fully complete with reality – and finding reality seamless with mind itself. A perfect fit.
Keizan called this able and trustworthy state of mind that is touched, settled, and openly conveyed in sesshin: “empty and intelligent, alert and undazzled.” Surely this is ground from which we can dare to love our uncertain and sometimes desperately painful world, on behalf of all the many beings who so generously extend and share it with us. And in embracing it, begin to help in healing it.
These seven days of Autumn sesshin in the beautiful Yarra Ranges are the rare chance to come fully home to right where you are; to place your feet more firmly on the Way; and to deeply savour every moment of being here. Don’t miss it!
Melbourne Zen Group 
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