We don’t want to turn away now: by Shingetsu Laura O’Loughlin (03/16/2025)

Selected quotes: "Meditation is not about taming anything. It's about trusting. Trusting our bodies, trusting our breaths, trusting our minds, just trusting everything. And that releases tension. And when we do that we create the conditions to be able to see, or have the dharma reveal itself in the sitting."  "Tension is karma in the form of the body." "Something comes into our environment, and our body is fine with it, but our minds, or our histories, our experiences resist it. There’s almost like a body inside a body, or an egoic body, or a body that tenses. And then the energy gets blocked or dulled—this is when we talk about ignorance—we can’t quite take our experience in... This is what we also notice in zazen too." "The good news is that the body’s tension is useful for us. (...) Those tensions that we’re opening up to, the body is trying to show us things that need to be healed or transformed. It’s trying to thaw us so we can feel the sunshine of spring.” "And when we allow the world to touch us, we can hold what it feels like to be in somebody else’s experience." "We don't want to turn away now." Recorded on March 16, 2025 at Millerton Zendo, NY. The BZC Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. You can donate to Brooklyn Zen Center at brooklynzen.org under ‘Giving.’ Thank you for your generosity!