Offering traditional Buddhist meditation instruction and practice guidance.
Stephen Mugen Snyder, Sensei began practicing meditation in 1976. Since then, he has studied Buddhism extensively-investigating and engaging in Zen, Tibetan, Theravada, and Western nondual traditions. Stephen was authorized to teach in 2007 by the Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw, a Burmese meditation master and scholar. In 2022, Stephen was authorized as a Zen teacher in the Maezumi Roshi/Glassman Roshi lineage of both the Soto and Rinzai schools of Buddhism.
Stephen’s resonant and warmhearted teaching style engages students around the globe through in-person and online retreats, as well as one-on-one coaching. He encourages students to turn toward their true nature and, with realization of their true nature, embody their true identity. Stephen is the author of four books, including Demystifying Awakening, and Buddha’s Heart. He co-authored Practicing the Jhānas, exploring meditation as presented by Pa Auk Sayadaw.
@@stephensnyderdharma I thought it was your name sensei, and I thought it was her work too! 😁 I had online shodo lessons with her during the pandemic and I consider her one of my teachers and main influences, even though I can’t have lessons with her atm. On a different note, I would have loved to go to your course here in London a few months ago, but I had other commitments booked prior to finding about your visit. I practice with Dogen Sangha, in the Nishijima roshi’s lineage. I really hope you’ll come back soon!
@@IvanMeloBudo I agree the calligraphy looks amazing. Hopefully we will practice together in the future. You can always check out one of my online offerings.
This was wonderful. Thank you. I feel like I’ve had contact with metta through early experiences in a Christian faith. I struggle to understand how to do this as a practice though. The “may I be…” statements have never worked for me to conjure up the feeling I know I’ve experienced before in moments of deep prayer
Wonderful. Glad to hear it. You may also want to check out my Innate Goodness meditation videos. Innate Goodness meditation is metta for oneself without the support phrases.
Stephen Synder 🙏 In the contexts of modern living, money is not the ultimate but without money, it is all things to worry. As long as an individual is alive, with a body & mind - hence dissatisfaction, suffering or dukka is unavoidable. Because the body & mind is subject to growth, ageing, sickness and finally death. However One's True (Self) Nature is unborn, beyond life & death, is NOT subject to Cause & Effect or Causation. It is formless, boundless, timeless, spaceless, self existing and eternal sovereign. 😊🙏🙇♂️🌷
Attachment to rites and rituals is a strange one on first glance, but once you consider the context it makes much more sense. Back in that day, the dominant religion was Brahmanism, which was characterized by priests, the Brahmans, who would do very exact rituals in order to bring about some sort of desired result. The overriding concern with these rituals was doing them *exactly* as they were supposed to be done. The belief was that the gods and spirits are obligated to give a desired result if the ritual is performed correctly. So, if you wanted rain but rain didn't happen, the belief was that the Brahman didn't do the ritual correctly. Thus, what "attachment to rites and rituals" means, in today's language, is something more like, "attachment to algorithmic results" or "attachment to the belief that precision in details is what brings results." And put this way, it's really really clear just how ubiquitous and counterproductive this attachment is!
Sensei Stephen Snyder🙏 When an individual clings onto a sense of a separate self in body-mind, there is a sense of 'someone' is doing something and takes ownership of that doing or happening. Hence Subject-Object conundrum arises to cause delusion, which is one of the root causes of dissatisfaction or suffering. When the sense of the separate self is vanquished, 'no one' is there actually doing anything. Things unfold, happen and to happen naturally by themselves. There is neither a doer nor a non-doer, thus there is neither sufferer nor enjoyer in the Teachings of Non-duality. 😊🙏🙇♂️🌷
Your question highlights the importance of working with a lineage transmitted Zen/ Chan teacher who has completed formal koan study themselves with a lineage transmitted teacher.
@@stephensnyderdharma So you can't answer the question? The answers is very straight forward. Should be simple to give an answer. What guarantee do you have that the teacher who completed his formal study is fully awake? And the teacher is not only trained in the theory. As in intellectualizing the awakening.
@@stephensnyderdharma Ahh I see. You are one of those fools then who think that as long as you say the words, then you are Self-realized. Plenty of your type around buddy. Easily recognizable by this type of nonsense.
@@stephensnyderdharma (To paraphrase the Teachings); That which is "absolute" neither recognises nor not recognises itself. In its suchness of its nature, there is neither seer nor the seen in it. Thus it knows and knows not - it is All-knowing. 😊🙏🙇♂️🌷
Thank you ... Gently honest with ourselves ... And, looking forward to reading the book you have recently written on the eight levels of consciousness.
Thank you Sensei. The fear trajectory described is not exaggerated. The deep peace, utterly clear, pure content less contentment of Stillness is the balm to heal the wound. So appreciating your concise, first-hand experience and knowledge that shines through. Thank you for taking the time.
It’s common in zen parlance to refer to Mu as “the sharpest sword” because of its unparalleled ability to cut through delusion and to awaken the mind to its original, empty nature. My question is, is there something inherent about “mu”, some inner generative force that is unique to it, or would any single, nonsensical syllable focused upon intensely in zazen (as a “red hot iron ball swallowed”) to the point of absolute single mindedness have equal power (to mu) in cracking open the mind and revealing the empty nature of self and world? I’m intensely curious about this. Thank you in advance for your response.
There is a reason this koan has been passed down through the generations, across cultures, and continues to be relevant. The answer to your question is only discovered by taking up mu and learning through your own direct experience.
Very true. The Egoic Personality Structure is trying to avoid peace. I believe that is exactly what is happening here in USA, over the last days and months.
Just as a heads up, Castaneda has been thoroughly debunked as a fraud with dubious integrity. Most of his stuff is western occult concepts repackaged with Native American veneer. The most thorough presentation of this debunking that I’m aware of is ‘The Don Juan Papers’ by Richard de Mille, but there are many sources. One of his professors even found his sign-in into the UCLA library on a date that he was supposedly out in the desert with Don Juan. Obviously this doesn’t make his work valueless, but a teacher proven to be as lacking in integrity as he was is not a teacher at all in my opinion. Look into his “witches” and how he treated women. Very sad indeed.
I really appreciate this one, and your work more broadly. It’s really clarifying. I’ve noticed the importance of meditation in part through suffering from OCD. OCD is driven by fear, the need for control, and anxiety about uncertainty. All of these things are addressed directly by Buddhist practice. Without this suffering, the desire to engage in meditation practice might not have been there for me (even tho it’s by far the most important thing I’ve ever learned how to do). Funny how that works! :)
I thought one had to be an anagami or arahant to experience nirodha samapatti? Or is this a different cessation? For dhamma and faith followers streamentry doesn’t even require jhana. What am I missing here?
Although I am not a Buddhist scholar, my understanding is that nirodha samapatti is referring to the ability to enter the Absolute realm (the Ninth jhana), the Source, and have Cessation arise after mastering all eight jhanas. This is but one way to open to Cessation. It is the rare practitioner who can enter Cessation from the eight jhana access concentration. One can also open to Cessation through a guided meditation from a potent teacher or through following the passing away of phenomena (dharmas) using impermanence as a practice.
I really appreciate your explanation of the position of shikantaza as a practice with respect to contemplation...whether that is koen or other sacred scripture where words are a particular gateway to that which "transcends the murmur of syllable and sound" ibalso find resting in the hara or the heart which might seem at first to be an object of attention allows for me a greater energy for awake/alert while softening effort. Thank you both for this.
3 components are: 1. a deep experience of the absence of self 2. nondual unity/love experience including pure awareness 3. recognition that this is my true identity Question: do these realizations typically occur separately or as part of a single experience?
in example,,, during a near death experience,,, often times,, all of that is experienced at once,,, for myself,,, it was a combination and sequential of holy Shit/ wow moments that changed my world forever,,,,
@@ZenCloudsMeditation thank you for your very helpful responses. I would love to get your feedback on my own personal experiences. I had a striking unity/love experience where all I could see was perfection wherever I looked. It felt like everything was love solidified in the form of matter and all of us were still living in the garden of Eden. The original sin that kicked us out was merely allowing ourselves to have somehow forgotten or getting talked out of realizing the true situation and therefore believing that we had been kicked out. My absence of self experience occurred while watching the scenery go by while riding in a car. I realized that the experience was of watching the world go by without having constructed a “self” that was doing the watching and I was reminded of the Bahiya Sutta. The experience was like being in a flow state or getting lost in a book. It made me realize that my sense of self comes and goes. For example, make a mistake in front of a crowd and the feeling of self becomes very strong. The realization made me focus on and trust my sensory experience much more than my thoughts, which is the opposite of my previous life experience. I had an intellectual understanding of emptiness from reading examples like King Milinda’s chariot and Theseus’s ship, so I knew that I couldn’t find a self when I searched for one in the five aggregates, but now I saw that even the felt sense of self was transient rather than a fixed, unchanging thing. I’d always had a type A personality, but these realizations changed me into being much more relaxed and much slower to getting upset or angry, as I saw that getting upset about the state of the universe didn’t make sense and wasn’t helpful. You can still recognize things that could be better and do something about them, but getting upset has no value. Also, other people are also a bunch of processes already set in motion (and many if not all of those processes were not chosen by the people) instead of “selves” making conscious decisions about their actions. So getting upset at them is like getting mad at a tree for falling on your house. The tree didn’t make that choice. The experience of my true identity is much more difficult for me to explain. If I had to describe my true identity, I guess I would say that I’m an ever-changing set of sometimes conflicting processes set in motion by nature and nurture (causes and conditions). My identity subjectively feels like my current awareness overlaid with memories that influence my preferences, but I don’t feel the senses of striving and desire for control anywhere nearly as strongly as I used to. I like the analogy of an eddy in a river. The eddy exists due to the motion of the water, but it can’t exist apart from that motion. So really I feel like I’m the universe in motion using the atoms of this body. Libet’s experiments and the subsequent reproductions of the effect show that our conscious minds have the feeling of making choices about half a second after our subconscious has already made the decision. So really, I feel like a consciousness that was put into a bodily avatar in order to have an earthly experience. It’s like I’m living the experience of a character in a story, but I frequently forget and get caught up in the experience. It seems like everything that happens, happens out of love (though sometimes an unskillful form of love, like desire). I now feel unconditional love for everyone (including myself) because I see the same awareness plus processes in every person, so I feel a deep affinity for them.
@just_me_melanie Apologies. That is very frustrating. This channel isn't monetized and those ads are completely controlled by RU-vid. Once the channel grows enough to hit certain RU-vid benchmarks, then RU-vid unlocks features that will give us more control over reducing/eliminating some of the ads. Hopefully this will happen in the next couple of months. In the meantime, many of these meditations are also available on the Insight Timer app.
my Son hanged himself 4 Weeks ago in the forest... I showed him ALL those "techniques" no way to reach him... Anxiety racing to panic can be suicidal unstoppable Life is difficult enough without “panic”
@brianl9419 The full instructions to the meditation are in a book I co-authored titled Practicing the Jhanas. There is a playlist on RU-vid for Four Elements Meditation but the videos may not include all of the instructions quite yet. More videos will be coming.
@Chichi-cy2bb Apologies. This channel isn't monetized and those ads are completely controlled by RU-vid. Once the channel grows enough to hit certain RU-vid benchmarks, then RU-vid unlocks features that will give us more control over reducing/eliminating some of the ads. Hopefully this will happen in the next few months.
Nice to see some Theravada/Zen syncretism. I've always wondered why, if many of the practices of Theravada and Zen were not that dissimilar, one would emphasize the non-dual quality of it while the other did not. To me, as someone with a mere intellectual interest, that suggests that the phenomenology of the states are shaped by the expectations of the traditions. As someone who has studied both, have you seen evidence of the expectations of the tradition informing the experience of the practitioner?
yes. Our expectations can color our experience. The Theravada model or path is usually presented from a dualistic perspective. I am going to do this meditation is the approach. Yet in deep experience, such as jhana, in the Theravada tradition, that is a nondual experience.
Mind Soul God are mythological concepts the body brain is real. There is lower and higher consciousness Higher consciousness is awareness of the myth of Mind Soul God. Lower consciousness is a by product of functional brain.
Now you're referencing those loops, which in some of my musical pieces I do avoid. It's all over the media. We think, for example, of Nationalities in terms of rugby or cricket matches, we fail to see the Evil around us, and we fail to see how we're all in this. Whenever a new dungeon is discovered in Perth, someone in Poland maybe will say "we're better, this doesn't happen here." And they are wrong, of course. The rat kind is in the underground, infesting everything, we common mortals need visas and a whole lot of money to travel everywhere and contemplate the Evil.
