Big Mind Big Heart San Francisco workshop with Genpo Roshi

July 3, 8:41 PMSF Divination & Spirituality ExaminerHolly Alexander

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It’s Sunday morning, 10:00 a.m. in Salt Lake City. Crossing the threshold of the Zen Center door, I enter the foyer, greeted by a sea of shoes. Taking mine off, I quietly climb the steps leading to a room filled with seekers. Aspirants are sitting silently in lotus position on zafus spread across the floor. Finding my place, I join them.

At 10:15, the bell rings and we enter the designated period of meditation. Coming together to be. Genpo Roshi takes his seat. In the stillness, my mind chatters, occasionally leaving itself. A motorcycle screams by on the street out front. Birds sing. A cough comes from one corner of the room, a sniffle in the middle. The wind blows through the old bones of the building’s windows. A cell phone vibrates.

Fifteen minutes pass, another sound of the bell, readjustment on our cushions and Genpo Roshi begins to speak, leading the group in a Big Mind Big Heart experience. Each time I engage in this process with myself, Roshi and the others in the room, I come away with more clarity, insight and further understanding about my nature and experience as a human being.

As stated on his website, Roshi is an American Zen Master trained in traditional Japanese Zen Buddhism. Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi taught for several years in the traditional style, using meditation and Koan study to help students have a personal realization and direct experience of the fundamental insights of the Buddha; the experiences of oneness, impermanence, interdependence and the true nature of cause and effect or karma. Over many years of teaching in North America and Europe, helping hundreds of students, he wasn't completely satisfied. His basic great trust in the inherent Buddha nature of people drove him to study and experiment, developing new tools and more skillful means to help bring students to their own profound experience of Kensho or Satori, the state of pure oneness from which much wisdom flows.

Big Mind Big Heart is the name he has given to a new way to discover, experience and appreciate one’s life. According to Roshi, it’s also a good way of working out the kinks, the stuck places, and the unhealthy patterns that keep us down. “Life is complex, and the inner self is an exquisite network of the psychological and the spiritual. Understanding it well naturally leads one to a better life.”

“The Big Mind Big Heart approach to life is a method of self-investigation and analysis that is straightforward and effective, and working with it will open your heart and mind to a new appreciation of the fullness and richness of life,” Roshi says. “It’s a new combination of tools, a blend of Western psychology and science, and the Eastern traditions passed on to us, developed for the express purpose of helping us to better understand the mind and the nature of human life.”

If you are interested in exploring the deep inner parts of yourself, how your mind, emotions and ideas operate together, as well as experiencing the Universe in a new and different way, take a few minutes and check out Big Mind Big Heart. Roshi will be in San Francisco to share his revolutionary new Zen teaching system on August 8-9 at the Hotel Nikko 222 Mason St. He’s offering the workshop for $297 (early registration, after July 15th, $397), half of what the workshop is normally offered for.