Learn to Meditate NYC

Get beginning instruction in Zen meditation, available each week by donation

Are you interested in learning how to meditate?

Meditation can help bring gentle awareness to all our daily encounters and activities. By quieting the mind’s defensive reactivity and connecting with our felt experience, zazen meditation can make us more patient, tolerant and compassionate.

The Zen Center of NYC—located in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn since 2000—has offered countless seekers a way into their own meditation practice, as well as a place to continue the journey. We offer beginning lessons in meditation each week as part of our Sunday morning program.

These days you can find just about any style of meditation in New York City. What we offer is a direct approach that is simple and straightforward while staying connected to the roots of tradition.

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What is Zazen?

Zazen is the form of meditation at the very heart of Zen practice. In fact, Zen is known as the “meditation school” of Buddhism. Basically, zazen is the study of the self. The great Master Dogen said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to recognize the unity of the self and the ten thousand things. Upon his own enlightenment, Buddha was in seated meditation; Zen practice returns to the same seated meditation again and again.

Instructions in Meditation

For 2,500 years that meditation has continued, from generation to generation; it’s the most important thing that has been passed on. It spread from India to China, to Japan, to other parts of Asia, and then finally to the West. It’s a very simple practice. It’s very easy to describe and very easy to follow. But like all other practices, we have to engage it on a consistent basis if we want to discover its power and depth.

Beginning Meditation in Brooklyn

Zen Center of New York City: Fire Lotus Temple is a refuge for spiritual practitioners in New York City. With a regular schedule of morning and evening zazen, Saturday workshops and meditation intensives, a Sunday Morning Program, and residential opportunities, you’ll find support and inspiration for practicing at home and at work in one of the most dynamic cities in the world.

Learn To Meditate