Hi everyone,

I recently came across an article on Lion Roar on "Uncover Your Natural Awareness" by Diana Winston. This led me to her book on "The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness". Diana discusses in her book the spectrum of awareness, including focused awareness, flexible awareness, and natural awareness. Natural awareness is a type of meditation where there is no anchor, and there is open, spacious awareness. This description resonates with my understanding of Zazen.

Diana Winston was trained in the Therevadin tradition and in the past, she did a lot of classical mindfulness (e.g focusing on the breath) and Vipassana. However, she struggled with focused awareness for many years and discovered that natural or open awareness gave her more serenity and equanimity. Now she teaches natural awareness as a technique. One of my concerns regarding her technique is that it is similar to secular mindfulness where it is completely devoid of Buddhist teachings. Another key difference between her description and Jundo's zazen is Jundo often emphasises the importance of every moment of zazen is complete in itself with nothing lacking. Nevertheless, I believe natural awareness can help people to achieve calm in a turbulent world and that is no small feat.

So my question for the Sangha is secular natural awareness similar to Zazen? I have attached a copy of her article below.
http://resources.magappzine.com/feed...aa6df7e38.html

Gassho
Van

SAT