Summary: Episode Description: Sean Murphy leads two lucid guided meditations on "stepping through the door," into focused stillness on the one hand (concentration) and into unbounded, egoless expanse on the other (insight). He offers tips for noticing this quiet expanse in any state of mind. It's perhaps analogous to shifting the gaze onto negative space, or noticing the pervasive silence that gives separate sounds their very shape: "since I'm aware of this upset/anxiety/anger, that means a much larger field is also here." Sean then asks probing questions about the several felt qualities of this background -- qualities pretty much opposite to the seeming qualities of what's in the foreground -- so that a clear picture of the thing will let us step through the door again that much more readily. Bio: Sean Murphy lives in Taos, New Mexico, with his wife Tania Casselle, a freelance journalist, travel author and fiction writer. His third novel, The Time of New Weather, was released in April 2008, and was named best novel in the 2009 National Federation of Press Women’s Awards, as well as in the NM Press Women’s awards. Sean is an MFA graduate in writing from The Naropa Institute, the Buddhist-inspired university founded by Poet Allen Ginsberg and Tibetan Lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He’s had 20+ years of formal Zen training, first under the direction of Taizan Maezumi Roshi of the Zen Center of Los Angeles and then with John Daido Loori Roshi of Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York. He now studies with Gerry Shishin Wick Roshi of the Great Mountain Zen Center in Colorado. Sean teaches creative writing, meditation, and literature for the University of New Mexico in Taos, as well as SMU-in-Taos campus at Ft. Burgwin and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
