Welcome to Melbourne Zen Meditation (MZM).

MZM runs regular meditation meetings in different formats. Whether you are new to meditation or have had prior experience, you are warmly invited to join us. Our aim is to create opportunities for meditators from all walks of life to come and sit together, and to develop and maintain an ongoing meditation practice. Consistent with Zen, MZM is not about fixed beliefs and certainly has no interest in trying to convert anyone to any particular belief system.

Currently MZM offers the following range of meeting formats: Our meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays 7.30-9pm combine guided and silent meditation, as well as a short talk and/or discussion relevant to meditation practice. On Mondays 8-9.30pm, we have more formal Zen practice meetings, comprised only of Zazen (silent sitting meditation) and Kinhin (walking meditation). On the 1st Monday of each month, the Zen practice meetings are extended into "mini-Sesshin" which continue through until midnight for meditators who may wish to stay on and sit more Zazen periods.

MZM also offers a 5-week meditation course, run several times each year (the next course will be held around November 2010). The 5-week course is suitable for new meditators and those with prior meditation experience. It is designed to help participants to meditate simply and well, and to develop a regular practice.

Our usual meeting venue is in High Street, Glen Iris. (Occasionally some related activities, such as public talks, meditation retreats, etc, may also be held in other locations, including outside of Melbourne). For further practical information about MZM, please follow the "Learn more about us" link below.

MZM meetings focus on actual meditation, rather than on lengthy discussions about it. Many people do come to meditation with hopes of finding stress relief and health benefits, and there is now an extensive body of research to confirm that regular meditation will predictably give rise to such benefits. However often it is our fixation and impatience around our expectations which stands in the way of meditating simply and well.

Regardless of what motivation makes you start to meditate, meditation itself becomes a practice of letting go. To emphasize this, the Japanese Zen master Kodo Sawaki Roshi often proclaimed that Zen meditation is "good for nothing". Sawaki took issue not with Zen meditation (he kept sitting for many hours every day), but rather with people's expectations of personal gain.

Zen meditation, also known as Zazen, is the practice of just sitting. This makes for a very simple and uncomplicated approach. Basically you just sit with a straight posture and maintain awareness of whatever you are experiencing - without getting caught up in assessing it, comparing it, or trying to change it. You start with where you are, and at the end you are also where you are.

The practice of Zen meditation is not about imposing calmness, stillness, or any other fixed state, but simply about cultivating non-judgmental awareness. It is similar to applying "mindfulness", which has become a popular expression, but is also widely misunderstood - for example when people start acting excessively slowly and self-consciously in the name of "being mindful".

Cultivating non-judgmental awareness of whatever it is that we are experiencing - now, and now, and now - means we start to let go into the present, whereby calmness and stillness start to arise effortlessly as side-effects.

Sounds simple? Well, it is. Meditation is one of the simplest ways to be. But it has become burdened by our very ideas and expectations regarding its benefits. This means that many new meditators start by trying too hard in an effort to achieve something, and then give up for thinking it is too hard when their immediate experience does not match their expectations.

Actually Zazen is as simple as just sitting and as ordinary as brushing teeth. Most of us have no problem brushing our teeth with reasonable regularity and discipline, yet without much fuss or immediate expectations. Just like tooth-brushing, Zen meditation is a matter of regular habit, much more than of any special skill or technique.

Zen meditation is a choice, and not a forced activity or performance or competition. If you choose to take up Zen meditation, there is no question that you will be perfectly capable of it. The real issue is not whether you will succeed in "experiencing meditation", but rather whether you may be willing to accept your meditation experience just as it is.

Being one with your meditation is to be one with your present experience. Being one with your present experience is to become one with yourself. And being one with yourself is actually to start losing our ideas about who you are. Whatever benefits that may arise through meditatitation, they will come not from trying to change or control our lives, but from sitting wholeheartedly and letting go - here and now.

Sawaki Roshi: "Hey what are you gawking at? Don't you see its about you!"

Hoping to see you soon!
Seikan
MZM

Links: zen.org.au - mzm facebook - meditationhow - antaiji - do no harm - gawler foundation - melbourne zen hospice -