‘To celebrate the BRC’s 40th birthday, we will do nothing special and we will do it together.’
This was the beginning of the pre-lockdown write-up for the BRC August 2020 Stoep Zen retreat.
Since then our world has changed and our practice is to change with it. We will still do nothing special together but now we will do so in our kitchens, lounges, and bedrooms, in our robes, pyjamas, long-johns and slippers.
This is still Zen as the practice of friendship, but now we can broaden our idea of what this means to us. So, we will explore the intimacy of being geographically remote, the intimacy of meeting on screen, the intimacy of just listening, and the intimacy of turning off our screens and finding our seat. We will look at how to sit upright in an upside-down world.
All of the talks will take place via Zoom – some of this will be audio-visual while some may be audio only. The talks may also include chanting and guided meditation instruction.
Meditations outside the Zoom sessions are done by yourself individually, should you choose to participate, but they still form part of the group’s shared activity (and Antony and Margie will be sitting in the Poplar Grove zendo at those times).
Saturday 8 August 2020 | Register
09:00 – 10:30 Zoom talk and meditation
11:00 – 11:30 Meditation (offline)
12:00 – 12:30 Meditation (offline)
Sunday 9 August 2020 | Register
08:00 – 08:30 Meditation (offline)
09:00 – 09:45 Zoom Talk
10:00 – 10:30 Meditation (offline)
11:00 – 11:30 Meditation (offline)
12:00 – 12:30 Meditation (offline)
Monday 10 August 2020 | Register
08:00 – 08:30 Meditation (offline)
09:00 – 09:45 Zoom Talk
10:00 – 10:30 Meditation (offline)
11:00 – 11:30 Meditation (offline)
12:00 – 12:30 Meditation (offline)
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Antony Osler was the first meditation teacher at the BRC in the early 1980’s. He spent some years as a Zen monk with Joshu Sasaki Roshi and later received inka from Zen master Dae Gak of Furnace Mountain. A legal arbitrator in his professional life, he has published three popular books on living a Zen life in South Africa:
Stoep Zen,
Zen Dust and Mzansi Zen (Jacana Media). In 2016, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal of the University of Free State for exceptional services to the country. He lives with his family on a farm in the Karoo where he sits on the stoep, meditates in an old shearing shed and holds Zen retreats with his wife, Margie.
Margie Osler is a teacher in the lineage of Furnace Mountain. She leads Zen retreats jointly with her husband, Antony, and runs regular workshops for abused and traumatized children.
