VIRTUAL DOJO

I’m highlighting another type of tool besides your breath and posture – it gets described as “concentration,” “awareness,” or “our senses.” Usually, we give far less instruction in this area than about breath and posture, letting people discover for themselves, which can take years.

Somehow I knew that living in the world of my head wasn’t the correct way to live as a human being. No one told me that. I just knew. This led me to seek out zazen (Zen meditation) and Zen training with our school.

The objective of practicing okyo is to change the way you vibrate. If you change the way you vibrate, you can change the way others and your environment vibrate as well.

Together we experienced a sesshin with a 'pioneer' feel, where nature whipped, dripped and crept around and through us. It was elemental.

We find kiai is more like a fresh mountain spring than a protected water reservoir. Time expands and contracts depending on our state of mind.

The reason that the Virtual Dojo can function as a Zen dojo is because the human body is the real Zen dojo.

I realized that it was a way I had been searching for without even knowing it.

During spring keishin in April, we experimented for the second time with using hexagrams as a tool for intensive Zen training. We’re sharing some of the results to give you a flavor of our collective experience.

We train because we remember our interconnectedness and take responsibility for tuning this body and whatever we’re sending out into the world.

With the support of the group, we all pushed beyond our limitations. For myself, I can report going beyond fatigue to a place of light and love and life.

“When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”

The Virtual Dojo that arises from moment to moment is dependent on students being their own fierce jikis and supporting others to do the same.

Like Zen women of thousands of years ago, we sat zazen after waking up in our own beds, before and after making our families’ meals and attending to our children and pets. Our training became our daily life and our daily life became a way of practice.

Heather Meikyo Scobie Roshi tells her story about the Chosei Zen Virtual Dojo.

This online sesshin brought depth to my felt experience of the universe being freshly created moment by moment. With a meditation cushion, internet-enabled laptop, and the roof over my head, I created a dojo and a sangha, and they created me.

In Zen, you train alone. And that has been true long before we had the self-isolation needed during a pandemic.